“A Collector of People”

Jeffrey Epstein, the New York Times—and those eyes, those eyes.

The New York Times has published new photos and descriptions of the contents of Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, albeit without explaining how they were obtained. A commenter asks lead author David Enrich the obvious questions: “How was all this information obtained? Why is it available now? Can you please report on your reporting process?”

Enrich says in his reply, “I'm afraid there's not a whole lot I can say because of the need to protect sources.”

That’s not good enough. The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics provides these guidelines for confidential sourcing:

“Consider sources’ motives before promising anonymity. Reserve anonymity for sources who may face danger, retribution or other harm, and have information that cannot be obtained elsewhere. Explain why anonymity was granted.” (emphasis mine)

The Code of Ethics is, regrettably, often ignored. But journalists normally say something about how their information was obtained, even if it’s only something like “based on new information from a confidential source ...” I was struck right away by the absence of such language in this article.

This was striking, too, for different reasons:

“Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel, and his wife noted the great diversity of guests. ‘There is no limit to your curiosity,’ they wrote in their message, which was compiled with others in January 2016. ‘You are like a closed book to many of them but you know everything about everyone.’”

That will raise some eyebrows, given the unproven but long-standing rumors that Epstein was an agent for Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad. Then there’s this:

“In their typed letter, Mr. Barak and his wife, Nili Priel, hailed Mr. Epstein as “A COLLECTOR OF PEOPLE.”

There are still a lot of missing pieces to this puzzle.

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The Times article also mentions Epstein’s collection of prosthetic eyeballs. That was the hook for Jeffrey Epstein’s Eyes, which I wrote for Counterpunch in August 2019. Here are some excerpts:

Jeffrey Epstein’s Eyes

Jeffrey Epstein had a collection of eyeballs on his wall. They were originally “made for injured soldiers,” we’re told, which presumably means they were artificial. Each was individually framed and mounted in his entranceway. We’re not told whether any soldiers had the chance to use them first.

The eyeballs make sense, because Epstein was a watcher. He watched the young girls whose lives he shattered. His depravity was of a deeply visual nature. His young victims tended to be thin, athletic, and blonde, white in skin and easily imagined in white tennis outfits. That fits with our dominant culture’s visual vocabulary of innocence and purity, a vision Epstein methodically defiled, over and over. For no reason, except that’s how he got off.

Epstein’s sexual practices have been described in detail elsewhere, and so won’t be here. But it’s safe to say that he put himself in a passive role. He was more observer than participant, at least at first, forcing the girls to perform for him – in more ways than one – the ritual enactment of their own degradation.

Epstein was a watcher, but he wasn’t the only one.

He was a collector, too. He collected images, with a carefully curated library of CD-ROMs showing the girls in various states of submission to male desire. There were “hundreds, if not thousands” of such images, we are told.

Did other men appear in those pictures? Nobody seems to know. We do know he collected names, but we’re not sure whose. There are reports of notebooks with lists of powerful men and their sexual preferences. Sometimes people spoke of Epstein’s “little black book,” an archaic phrase with overtones of conquest, dominance, and capture. Such books were said to contain the names of a man’s past assignations. Women were pinioned in their like butterflies, preserved in ink and memory with an entomologist’s precision.

(A meaningless coincidence, I know, that paper notebooks are said to be “bound.”)

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Epstein, we’re told, sought the “transhumanist” power to impregnate twenty women in a laboratory. That seems like a bum rap for transhumanism. What he was, mostly, was a creepy businessman on the make. His story was a weird mashup of Horace Greeley-like American boosterism and child pornography, with a touch of sci-fi thrown in for good measure.

Go Westworld, young man.

Yet he died childless, at least as far as we know, having neither conceived nor raised another human being within the bonds of intimacy and affection.

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Calling him a monster is too easy. Epstein was human, a node in the social system we all share, a thin vibrating antenna picking up stray signals on the American frequency. They were the signals of lust, of greed, of the desire to own and manipulate and break other humans.

There are other signals around us, of course, but the ones Epstein caught overwhelm all the others. They’re like border radio stations in the 20^th-century, those megawatt bandit broadcasts that poured out the gospel-inflected sound of salvation turned to sin. Once they had your attention, they sold you phony medicines that were supposed to cure you but left you as sick as before. Maybe sicker.

There have always been Jeffrey Epsteins, of course, each a bespoke creature tailored for his place and time. In ancient Egypt, medieval Venice, the California mining camps of 1849, the back alleys of Mumbai … these creatures have always been among us, in every moment. But this creature was made for ours.

What was Epstein thinking and feeling in his last moments? Did he weep? If so, for whom? What went through his mind before it was finally extinguished, like a cigarette crushed in a china cup? Did he picture himself having a drink on his veranda? Did he have a “Rosebud” moment, like Orson Welles in Citizen Kane? For some reason, I picture a silly song from his childhood – something like “You Can’t Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd,” by Roger Miller – popping into his head in those final moments.

(“But you can be happy,” the song continues, “if you’ve a mind to.”)

Was Epstein murdered, or did he die by neglect? We know that his prison was a hellhole, but it would be foolish not to wonder. We may never know. There are many ways to kill someone, from the black-gloved stranger with a garrote to the corrupt guard who takes a few hundred bucks and is told to take a long break.

Or maybe they just screwed up. That happens, too. Whatever took place that night, Epstein’s gone and we’re still here, feasting on each other. And they’re still reaping what remains. From the shores of Gaza to the Silicon Valley, eyeballs are captured. Day and night, the reaping goes on.

One thing we know for sure: Epstein died because procedures weren’t followed. He should have been checked every 30 minutes by guards, we’re told, and wasn’t. He was, in the words of the New York Times, “not closely monitored.”

Jeffrey Epstein was a spy, in a society of spies. He was a collector, in a collector’s economy. He was a watcher, and he died while nobody was watching.