Jeffrey Epstein is this eccentric billionaire who broke news a few months back when it was discovered he kept a harem of teenage sex slaves tending to the extensive collection of vibrators and dildos and lighting the vagina-shaped candles littered throughout his Palm Beach Estate, and today's New York Magazine has a story brimming with nauseating details: he had an egg-shaped penis (and egg-sized? the story doesn't say; we call self-censorship!) He had an 18-year-old assistant set him up with 14-year-old girls! (Or something; there were fourteen year olds, and 21-year-olds; lots of girls, lots of massages, ew ew ew.) He thinks he did nothing wrong! Say all his pals, "It's kind of interesting because he thinks he did nothing wrong!" There's Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff saying, well, see, the only problem is that having this sort of Hugh Hefner lifestyle is kinda outdated these days...There's Alan Dershowitz, dredging up slutty shit deets from the girls' MySpace pages! There's Jeffrey's defense: I just like massages! I made a donation to some fund that gives away free massages! It's an anti-Semitic conspiracy! Then there's the creepy fact that when the first known victim came to police to tell her story, they produced a picture of Epstein on the police lineup, but no one is sure how it got there. And then there's the really chilling part:
Not that he is likely to admit that he did anything wrong. Throughout his ordeal, Epstein maintained the air that there was nothing sordid about his actions. His wealth seems to have endowed him with utter shamelessness, the emperor's new clothes with an erection. Even Alan Greenspan has lately raised the moral questions brought on by the gap between the rich and poor: The poor will begin to feel that the social contract was not made in good faith. Epstein's friends say that on this matter, he has a philosophical position. "Fundamentally," Wolff says, "it's about math. That on a macro level it inevitably happens that the rich get richer. And then at some level the rich get richer on a geometric basis. Jeffrey's point is that this whole issue is—it's just mathematics at this point. This is the nature of a successful economy. The more successful the economy is, and that would be the goal of everybody, a successful economy, the greater the discrepancy actually is." There is no better place to observe how Epstein's mathematics work than Palm Beach. The only signs of life are crews of Spanish-speaking laborers on teetering ladders clipping the high hedges, not far from Bulgari and Valentino and Tiffany. It is a few miles on the other side of the bridge to where the girls came from, the shabby sprawl of West Palm Beach, with trailer parks, boys crouched on motor scooters, and pickup trucks under sun tents. Haley Robson's house is on an unpaved road by an irrigation ditch. An attractive blonde in her forties answers the door wearing pistachio Capri pants, and promptly slams it. "We have absolutely no comment about the Epstein case."
Anyway, I'm not sure what's so disturbing about this. I mean, duh, rich men think they are entitled to sex with whomever because they are rich. A lot of guys think they are entitled to sex with whomever they want, and they're not even rich. There's also a lot in this case that reminds me of Dov Charney, and the way that he is so insistent all the time that he is just so normal, and then the way that other dudes who know Dov Charney talk about Dov Charney as if he is sorta normal, and then this letter that came over the transom last night:
Spotted at the American Apparel Flea Market at the Downtown LA factory this afternoon—a very bearded Dov Charney, personally supervising what boxes went where(i.e., large sizes at the far end, almost out of sight). Also, he handed me a pair of leggings and told me he thought they would "hug my body nicely". He then told some of my friends and I that we should definitely consider applying for jobs at the AA store. All I could think about was your I Work Retail piece, and I spent the rest of the day feeling gross, with the occasional flashes of flattered, which in turn made me feel even more gross.
Um, time to take a shower! And also, don't read into that!
