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One of the things that has been frequently puzzled over as the effluent of the Epstein story flows on, is how a college dropout who thought it was cool to do typos managed to persuade the world’s most powerful into his lair. What, precisely, was the nature of his “genius”? Was it blackmail? Was it the social pyramid scheme of using one big name to reel in another? Nothing has come close to explaining it until, with the latest crop of details from the Epstein files, something has become suddenly clear: that it wasn’t the trafficked girls and women who Jeffrey Epstein groomed. The man’s real talent, if we want to call it that, was in the grooming of his cohort of associates.
This isn’t to say, of course, that the men and occasional woman who threw in their lot with a man we must straight-facedly refer to as “the dead paedophile” weren’t culpable. Nonetheless, if you study the huge amount of Epstein-related material, from the New York Times’s deep dive into his finances to the vast cache of correspondence contained in the files, a picture emerges of a man who did the kind of number on his peers that you would more commonly see directed at victims. While multiple survivor testimonies indicate that Epstein regarded the girls and women he trafficked as of such low consequence he didn’t even need to bother to groom them – per Virginia Giuffre’s account, Epstein raped her the first time they met – all of his resources, via a variety of tactics, went into capturing the allegiances of powerful men.
Let’s look at Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who after his arrest last week has been subject to a sudden relaxing of public inhibitions around describing the man as he actually is. Perhaps you saw the video from 2022, now widely circulating, in which Mountbatten-Windsor’s former protection officer told an Australian news channel that the nickname they had for their royal boss was “the cunt”. With slightly more civility, Labour MP Chris Bryant on Tuesday called Mountbatten-Windsor “rude, arrogant and entitled”, observations that may prove useful in explaining just how Epstein excited such loyalty from the eighth in line to the throne. In Mountbatten-Windsor we see a vain, weak, entitled man living in the shadow of his brother, and whom Epstein may have lured into friendship through a combination of flattery and the performance of power.
Crucial to this approach is the fact that, judging by Epstein’s emails, he was never obsequious, at least not to Mountbatten-Windsor. His tone towards the former prince and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, often borders on rude, ordering them around, barking directions in a sort of parody of a thrusting, dynamic businessman who is there to offer the pair a shot at something they’ve never in all their lives had – real, centre-of-the-machine relevance. “Sarah, could you are [sic] one of your daughters show [redaction] buckingham thanks,” wrote Epstein in an email from 2010 – two years after his first jail sentence – and in which he appears to be asking the former Duchess of York to give someone a tour of Buckingham Palace. (The “Sarah” of the email replied the same day, “of course.”)
Professors at MIT probably care less about relevance than two washed-up former royals, but may, on the other hand, experience lingering insecurities about their status with women. Look at Marvin Minsky, the late MIT professor who, in Giuffre’s memoir, she claimed she was trafficked to on Epstein’s island. In this instance, the power held by Epstein over men such as Minsky may be less about sex than self-image. In Giuffre’s book, she alleged that after a day spent on jetskis and doing regular tourist activities, Minsky got up the juice to ask her for what Epstein had advertised to him as “one of your famous massages”. It’s a terrible passage, not least because, if we believe Giuffre’s account, Minsky is clearly desperately awkward about what he is doing. Epstein allegedly offered this man an opportunity to play out a fantasy version of himself that – Google the guy – is wildly out of line with reality, and, my God, he grabbed it.
This is where the late sex offender excelled: in milking influence and protection from powerful people by identifying and exploiting their weaknesses. As such, he understood something better than anything else: that no matter how different they were in their particulars, these men, masters of the universe all, still fundamentally felt that life had short-changed them; that they were entitled to more than they had. Epstein could help them with that and, judging by how and at what risk they continued to appease him, they loved him for it.
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Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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