The documents in the case

Note that New’s email is from November 2018. I did a database search on how many stories were out there at the time about Jeffrey Epstein. My first search was limited to the 18 months prior to this email being sent, and looked for any story that included Epstein’s name and the word “disgraced.” It came up with more than 10,000 results.

Despite the time constraint I had put on the search, many of these stories were more than 20 years old. The British tabloid press published dozens of stories in 2007 alone about Epstein’s relationship to the former Prince Andrew. Closer to home, I found countless documents like this one, from the November 15, 2017 edition of the New York Times:

Re “David Boies’s Egregious Involvement With Harvey Weinstein” (Op-Ed, nytimes.com, Nov. 9):

Having read the article by Prof. Deborah L. Rhode criticizing the lawyer David Boies, I doubt that she has any firsthand experience with how Mr. Boies deals with rape and abuse victims.

I do, because I am one. When I was in the depths of despair from having been trafficked by very powerful, wealthy people, I was unable to find anyone who would take my abuse seriously. Mr. Boies heard me and came to my rescue. He examined my experiences, sorted out the factual wheat from the confusing chaff, and filed my case. Everything he and his colleagues did was the very opposite of intimidation or silencing.

They have protected me right from the beginning, as it was fear of being harmed that kept me from coming forward many years ago. For the first time in 10 years I finally feel safe because of David Boies and his colleagues.

What’s more, his firm did not charge me legal fees. Like many other victims he represents, I will be forever grateful to him for bringing the abuse I suffered to the attention of the courts and the public.

SARAH RANSOME, BARCELONA, SPAIN

The writer is the plaintiff in Jane Doe 43 v. Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Sarah Kellen, Lesley Groff and Natalya Malyshev.

I recommend reading Deborah Rhode’s article about David Boies’s disgraceful and unethical conduct in the Harvey Weinstein case, as a reminder of how pervasive this sort of moral rot was and is, although it’s nice that he decided to help out Ms. Ransome in the context of the Epstein litigation.

That Jeffrey Epstein had pimped countless underage girls was a matter of extremely copious public record at the time that Larry Summers and Elisa New were trying to flatter and cajole some more money out of him. Here it’s worth remembering that:

*Harvard had at that time an endowment worth many tens of billions of dollars, despite Summers’s egregious mishandling of it when he was Harvard’s president.

*In November 2018, Summers and New both knew very large numbers of extremely rich people who were not as a matter of public record sex traffickers of underage girls.

*In November of 2018, when New wrote an email recommending that a sex trafficker of underage girls read Lolita for his edification, in an attempt to flatter him for the purposes of getting him to give her money, the MeToo movement was a pervasive nationwide phenomenon. MeToo went viral in October 2017, when the rape allegations against Harvey Weinstein inspired the actress Alyssa Milano to post a tweet asking women to use that hashtag to discuss their experiences with sexual assault and abuse.

The Epstein case throws into sharp relief the extent to which, among other things, money mania has utterly corrupted what a couple of generations ago C. Wright Mills identified as “the power elite” in America. I wonder what Larry Summers and Elisa New would say if they were to be asked whether or not Harvard as an institution, and they as individuals, don’t already have so much money that it wasn’t really worth groveling before a sex trafficker of underage girls to try to get just a little bit more?

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which havehag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.

JM Keynes, 1930

. . . Karen aka Cassandra of Texas:

The Epstein case is about so much more than just getting Trump. These emails demonstrate the corruption that extended throughout our ‘Betters’ for decades. These were the people who kept telling me that my VISA balance was a sign of moral degeneracy, because GOOD PEOPLE never had debts other than a low-rate mortgage. I was struggling at work because I was lazy, not because the entire economic system was leaning at an ‘abandon ship under admiralty rules’ angle toward billionaires. If people just worked really hard at math-related jobs, never spent any money on themselves, never did drugs, had sex, or drank more than one glass of wine with dinner on Saturday night, then they would be economically secure. If I owed money it was entirely my fault, as was everything else wrong in my life.

While I was blaming myself for everything from a disorderly living room to chronic debt to gum disease, my Betters were raping girls young enough to be my children and aiding money laundering for terrorists.

Guillotines are too good for these people.