People In The Book
By 
Scott has posted what I intended for the first part of my post this morning. The birthday book makes clear that there’s no way anyone involved in any way could ignore the signs that he was trafficking young women and girls. So here’s the second part.
Yesterday was bracketed in the morning by the NYT’s deep dive into Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship with JP Morgan. The short version is that he was spinning off suspicious behaviors – using lots of cash, starting accounts on behalf of women – that alerted many people at JP Morgan. But he had one major enabler, Jes Staley, who persuaded others to go along with him. We still don’t know where the money came from.
In the evening, we saw the release of the birthday book. A great many people were happy to wish Epstein a very happy birthday and more fucks of children. They knew. When that many people know, someone who only rode on his plane and didn’t fuck children had to know. But that camaraderie certainly would have urged men to join in the fun.
There are a great many names in that book, many without last names, as is the way people sign birthday cards. Epstein knew who they were from the first name, the handwriting, the shared experiences.
Epstein collected people. He wanted to know and be known by people, mostly men, at the top of their professions. He liked scientists. Five of them appear in the birthday book: Gerry Edelman (biology, Nobel), Murray Gell-Mann (physics, Nobel), Stephen Kosslyn (psychology and neuroscience), Martin Nowak (mathematical biology), and Lee Smolin (physics). Others have been mentioned as Epstein associates, including one who has gotten in trouble at several universities for sexually harassing students. Edelman and Gell-Mann have died since then, but the others are still around.
I’m recalling that the early 2000s were a time when other rich people wanted to festoon their parties with scientists and were willing to fund various activities to acquire those scientists. I had a more idealistic view of such things at the time and tried to get into a few of those circles, but they were mostly looking for male ornaments.
A couple of the university-attached groups associated with this culture developed scandals, and I’m vaguely recalling one group associated with a magazine that never showed up with anything publicly wrong, but my sense of it was creepy.
Which all is to say that the early 2000s were a time of pseudo-intellectuality associated with sex and misogyny. It might be worth looking more broadly at that time.