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have—many obviously hope—the effect of derailing the 
Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. 
It is a curious attribute of his character that, other 
than perhaps being more circumspect about what legal 
advice to follow, Epstein would have done little 
differently. (When I suggested recently to Epstein that 
one obvious way to blunt the animus bearing down on 
him would be to get married, he said he'd rather go back 
to jail.) His life, living it as he wants, seems to him to be 
an extraordinary accomplishment. Being on the wrong 
side of morality, custom, politics, feminists, the media, 
that's just a bit of bad luck. 
And it is perhaps this attitude of his that irks his 
critics the most. Although he has spent more than a year 
in jail and paid out what may be as much as $20 million, 
he yet seems somehow to have gotten away with it—
that worst sin of all. He is the unrepentant catchall of 
up-to-the-minute badness: the financier whose wealth is 
a product of Wall Street math rather than work; a rich 
middle-age white man who not only parades his wealth 
and entitlement, but has a Peter Pan complex to boot; an 
insistent playboy (excuse me, pedophile) in a correct 
and prudish world—someone who somehow didn't get 
the memo about vast changes in mores and culture. 
But Epstein's friends—and I think that is, in the 
end, the best word for the powerful people who orbit 
him—are willing to take him as he comes. Epstein is 
their confidant. Not the only nexus of them, but one of 
them. Dr. Epstein. Lay on my couch. As he is 
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everybody's confidant, everybody becomes his 
confidant. This is the back and forth, the power loop. 
His expertise is knowing what other people know. 
Which surely offers a unique sense of confidence that it 
is possible to understand how the world works. And in a 
time of such radical flux and existential instability, 
everybody wants to seek out someone who might have 
some answers or at least make you feel like he does—
even, and maybe especially, the rich. 
In the last days of my interviews with Epstein, he 
was called by a particular world-stage individual, among 
the richest and most powerful—proudly louche 
himself—who, feeling out of his depth in a world of 
crashing oil prices and wild currency fluctuation, had 
come to believe he might benefit from some private 
tutoring. Epstein welcomed him to the club. 
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