Dear Editor,
Last month, bestselling author James Patterson received a National Humanities Medal for being “one of the most successful American authors of our time.” His bestselling “true crime thriller” Filthy Rich was published in 2016. It came to my attention recently, after its main character, Jeffrey Epstein, was found dead in a jail cell in New York City while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges.
The book relates a set of events that began in South Florida in February 2005 and ended in October 2016 when the book went to press. But true stories have nebulous beginnings, and they never end with their telling. Although Jeffrey Epstein died five months ago, in August, this saga is very much ongoing.
Co-authored, like many of Patterson’s books, this one with investigative reporters John Connolly and Tim Malloy, Filthy Rich is a page-turner, like all of his previous books. No wonder he holds the Guinness World Record for “the most #1 New York Times bestsellers.” The book is 281 pages of raw, often raunchy, but authentic investigative material, police reports, interviews, and declarations; all of this interweaved with enticing prose, and served in very short chapters, for the most part. This is not a stock review of Filthy Rich, just a rambling reaction to it.
Reportedly, while Epstein was being investigated for allegations that he was sexually abusing underage girls, before he signed any agreement with the prosecutor’s office a journalist suggested to him that his “situation was like the Icarus story, someone who flies too close to the sun.” To which Epstein responded with a question: “Did Icarus like massages?” Indeed, all of the underage girls involved in the Epstein affair had declared that they were paid for providing him massages, massages that he caused to veer – to turn into contacts of a sexual nature. Was Epstein boasting as Patterson surmises?
Greek mythology is a kind of religion that, like all religions, fuels the imagination. It posits the existence of an unbridgeable chasm that separates the eternal lives of gods from the mortal lives of human beings. Icarus disobeyed the wise council of his father (Daedalus) who had crafted wings for both of them so that they could fly away from Crete where King Minos was detaining them. But once aloft, Icarus ignored his father’s warning not to fly too high or too low. He flew too close to the sun whose hot rays melted the wax on his wings. Icarus fell to his death in the sea. We do not know why he failed to heed the warning of his father. The myth informs that Daedalus flew on to Sicily, alone and heartbroken.
If Epstein is an Icarus figure, the Crown Heights’ neighborhood of Brooklyn where he grew up in the ’60s is Crete. The brilliant mind and other “gifts” Epstein got from his parents and developed through his own efforts are the wings that enabled him to fly out of Brooklyn onto rarefied heights; not to our Paradise Heights, but to those of New York City’s elite. There, as a teacher, a math whiz of sorts, a banker and a shrewd financier, he amassed a fortune while mingling with the movers and shakers of Manhattan and the world.
March 2005: President G.W. Bush is stealthily pursuing the politics of his father, President H.W. Bush, an ex-director of the CIA, and of President Clinton after him. This is the same hidden agenda that President Obama will champion later. Their politics is a new utopia: a “New World Order,” global in nature and borderless. A month earlier, in February, YouTube went online on the Internet. When Jeffrey Epstein is in Florida, he stays at his ($12 million plus) West Palm Beach residence, two miles north of Donald Trump’s ($140 million plus) Mar-a-Lago estate.
Epstein is a globetrotter par excellence, a Prince among the filthy rich and powerful. He flies around the world in his private Boeing 727, the “Lolita Express.” His ($48 million plus) “home” is on East 71st Street in Manhattan. When in Europe, his home base is the modest ($7million plus) apartment he owns on Avenue Foch. And when he feels like partying in the tropics, he flies to Little Saint James ($23 million plus), the island he owns near St. Thomas.
In 2007, Epstein, who was under investigation for over two years is now accused of illicit contact with underage girls. He retains a dream team of attorneys (Alan Dershowitz, Jay Lefkowitz, Kenneth Starr and others) to defend him, and to discredit the prosecutors and the girls involved – his alleged victims. Years later, on March 20, 2011, US Attorney, Alexander Acosta will explain in a long written statement (included as chapter 55 of Filthy Rich) that his team of prosecutors did the very best it could against the Epstein’s dream team.
The US attorney’s office reached a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) with Epstein’s defense, one that included several non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), secret information that was withheld from the alleged victims and their lawyers. Epstein agreed to pay a settlement to dozens of accusers, but he pleaded guilty to one single count of soliciting a minor. He was condemned to 18 months in jail, but served 13 months at home “working.” He was also declared a sex offender, and ordered to register as such wherever he spends time. But there is, seemingly, no proof that he registered in the US Virgin Islands, or in New York City where he stayed later, and was photographed in the company of friends, among whom Prince Andrew. Money talks, indeed!
Filthy Rich does not explain how Epstein became so wealthy, or why he may have done what he was convicted of doing to underage girls. The authors interviewed a clinical psychologist (Anna Salter) who “studies child sex offenders professionally.” She has “never met Epstein, but she’s followed his case closely ...” Is Epstein a “narcissist?” Is he a “born psychopath,” a remorseless individual? Dr. Salter and the authors of this book have no answer to these crucial questions (p. 221-223).
In June 2008, before he reported to the Palm Beach County jail, in a comment to a journalist, Epstein appeared to liken himself to Gulliver shipwrecked among the Lilliputians: “Gulliver’s playfulness has unintended consequences.” He added: “That is what happens with wealth. There were unexpected burdens as well as benefits.” He also stated: “Your body can be confined, but not your mind.” And he declared: “I am not blameless (p. 190-191).”
The desire for wealth, money power, is second to one only: sexual desire, sexual drive. Tremendous wealth and an unceasing desire for underage girls is a most explosive mixture in contemporary western society. It seems that in Jeffrey Epstein, these two desires raged unchecked. It would appear that for all his genius, he was unable or unwilling to manage them effectively.
There are many questions left unanswered in Filthy Rich and in the ongoing Epstein saga. But there is, at least, one thing of which we can be certain: like in the myth of Icarus, Jeffrey Epstein has fallen into the sea – the bottomless sea of infinity where all billionaires and paupers go, where they remain for eternity.
As for us, we have made it to these last days in December 2019; for this we must be grateful. Happy New Year!
Gérard M. Hunt
