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Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book

You really don’t want to find your name in it. It’s his aspirational list of who a creepy rich pedophile thinks are the important people in his world.

While we await subpoenas and depositions—if they ever come remains to be seen—there is a road map of sorts in the form of Epstein’s so-called “little black book,” 92 pages of names, emails, and phone numbers of people Epstein knew, or wanted to know, but in any event had detailed information about. Wall Street people comprise a significant amount of the entries. “He was a kind of wholesale collector of people, including people he didn’t know,” one of the Wall Street guys in the black book tells me. “I guarantee you that 90% of the people whose names are in his book, he’s not in their book. Many of these people don’t even know him.”

What the book tells us is that Epstein knew, or aspired to know, some of the biggest names on Wall Street and in Washington. Sure there are the Trumps—Donald, Ivana, and Ivanka—and Bill Clinton’s surrogate Doug Band in the book. But once you get past their names, there is the horde of Wall Street executives. The contact book is dated for sure, replete as it is with misspellings and incorrect or superseded phone numbers, emails, and addresses. It remains something of an enigma: What was the book’s purpose? “I don’t think it means anything,” the Wall Street executive continues. “…I didn’t really know Jeffrey. He was like Boo Radley in the corner of the room. After I met him, he became Jeffrey Epstein, he had no interest in me. He knew right out of the box who the players were, the people who would stay out all night, people who had interests in extracurricular objectives, and who the hitters were. That wasn’t me.”

That unnamed Wall Street executive has the words we’re going to hear a lot of in the future: I didn’t know him. He didn’t know me. I don’t think it means anything. Right. Except that it does mean something. It means you were a wealthy plutocrat who came into the orbit of a man who was looking for an angle on rich people everywhere. You are a member of the looter class.

So, also on the list of greedy people we find David Koch, Mike Bloomberg, Steve Forbes, Conrad Black, etc., etc., etc. You don’t need to be a super-brilliant detective to see a pattern in the names.

I am confident that I am not in the book.

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Comments

  1. says

    I am confident that I am not in the book.

    As am I. I’m not saying that I’m morally superior to everyone in the book, but I can say that my moral failings are simply different in kind from those that are common in the book. Epstein wasn’t attracted to people because they were sometimes jerkfaces to rhetorical opponents on the internet. He was attracted to specific kinds of moral failings. While Epstein’s judgements about a person aren’t the same as proof that characteristic X exists within a person, there’s no way that Epstein’s rape career would have lasted as long as it did unless he had some level of talent for deducing (and playing upon) the particular moral failings of different people.

    And since he had a preference for some moral failings over others, then yes. Yes, it does mean something if your name is in the book.

  2. says

    These are not the “little black books” of Deborah Jeane Palfrey and Heidi Fleiss. Being in them won’t just be embarrassing are career killing. Epstein’s list could lead to suicides or attempted flight to evade capture.

    Epstein’s participants likely won’t be the same as Palfrey and Feliss’s clientelle. The men who paid the two “madams” were men with money and wifes who wanted orgasms on the side to “feel naughty without getting caught”, and wouldn’t dare commit violence against the sex workers for fear of consequences. Epstein’s participants almost certainly enjoyed the ability to abuse and rape without anyone knowing.

    There were rumours in the past that some of Jimmy Savile’s “friends” didn’t just rape kids, but that they murdered them too. I wouldn’t put it past Epstein to be a particpant in this (procuring teenage girls and drugs, using boats for the disposal of bodies). The Coast Guard aren’t likely to board a rich white man’s boat to check for corpses or drugged victims.

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/03/haut-de-la-garenne-house-of-horror-investigation-brought-jersey-abuse-to-light

  4. brucegee1962 says

    The book of potential targets is less interesting than the book (or more likely DVDs) of actual dirt on actual people. It’s obvious by now that this guy made his millions mainly through blackmail, so somewhere, in some vault, were the actual goods that he was living off.
    I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to be whatever cop it was who ended up with that trove. I’d have two choices: either become a blackmailer myself, or else publish it as soon as was feasibly possible. What I would NOT do is hang on to it for some eventual public release event. The knowledge that multiple billionaires would want me out of the way means I’d be looking over my shoulder every single day until I went public. I’d know that someone in my department — possibly my boss — would be bought, and that would be it for me.
    So if we haven’t found out yet who his patsies were, my prediction is that we’re never going to.

  5. rrhain says

    If the concept of the book is true, then it’s no different from him looking at the Forbes 100 and him targeting them for grift.

    The difference is that the Forbes 100 was compiled by people simply trying to list the richest people in the world. If all you’re taking is that this list is of rich people, well, Forbes publishes that list every year. We don’t need the salaciousness of Epstein to pay attention to that. The problem with the book and those on it is going to be how to distinguish the people Epstein was trying to get to know from those he actually did. Epstein’s book, I’m certain, was more than just a listing of rich people he had passing interest in.

  7. rydan says

    Unless you have access to this book (and I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don’t) you cannot know for certain that your name is not within it. Especially considering you are well known in your field.

  8. says

    @#7, rydan:

    The contents of the book were allegedly leaked quite a while ago — at the very least, there has been a PDF which is purportedly pictures of the pages in the book available for download from various sources for months.