The New Yorker:

His correspondence illuminates a rarefied world in which money can seemingly buy—or buy off—virtually anything, and ethical qualms are for the weak-minded.

By John Cassidy

Near the beginning of “The Way We Live Now,” Anthony Trollope’s searing satire of high-society London in the eighteen-seventies, Madame Melmotte, the wife of Augustus Melmotte, a crooked parvenu financier who has burst onto the British social scene, hosts a ball at the couple’s mansion in Grosvenor Square, Mayfair. Despite Melmotte’s checkered past, many members of the London élite accept his invitation to the party, including many aristocrats, a newspaper editor, and Prince George, a member of the British Royal Family. Any reservations the guests may have about Melmotte’s background, which was reputed to include shady deals on the European continent, fall away in the presence of his ostentatious displays of wealth.

Jeffrey Epstein was another financier with a fortune of opaque origin and a grand town house, that he used to entertain well-connected guests, including, notoriously, a member of the British Royal Family, the erstwhile Prince Andrew, who has been stripped of his official title. From 2008, when Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida to soliciting a minor for prostitution, he was a registered sex offender. Yet in the ensuing years, prominent people in business, finance, politics, and academia continued to associate with him. Epstein wasn’t a writer, obviously: his voluminous e-mails and other files, another huge batch of which the Justice Department released on January 30th, are littered with misspellings and grammatical errors. For most of the people identified as associates or correspondents of the financier, there is no suggestion that they were involved in any of his criminal activities. But in the tradition of Trollope and Balzac, the files illuminate, in indelible detail, the ways in which Epstein’s money and connections appeared to count for more than his well-earned reputation as a sexual predator and procurer.

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