Opinion piece on Jeffrey Epstein’s cultural symbolism and media portrayal

The world cleanly divides, with Epstein (and friends) behind secure walls—looking out at an angry and uncomprehending world—and the Mail and social media and upholders of new norms, seeing Epstein as a useful and terrible symbol and baying for his blood. He is all bad things rolled into one: the financier whose wealth is a product of abstraction rather than work; a rich middle-age white man who not only parades his wealth and entitlement, but has a Peter Pan complex to boot; an unreconstructed sybarite and feminist nightmare; an insistent Playboy in a correct and prudish world; someone who somehow didn’t get the memo about vast changes in mores and culture. When I suggested recently that one obvious way to blunt the animus is to get married, he said he would rather go back to jail. He is Calvin Harris’s song, It Was Acceptable in the 80s, come to life. And worse, although he has been jailed for 18 months and paid out what may be as much as $20 million, he seems somehow to have gotten away with it too—that worst sin of all. This is all, inevitably, a Gatsby-like story, except with none of the sentimentality or romantic longings accorded Gatsby—or at least that Nick Caraway and Fitzgerald accord him. Gatsby in New York Post and Daily Mail parlance would be a freaky financier too. And that partly is the issue, Jeffrey Epstein story isn’t one for black and white journalists. It’s a complicated story, real but necessarily fictional, a long-running cable series, perhaps, not an ordinary good-bad, right-wrong tale, but a premium one, compelling precisely because it is about all the ambitions and impulses that we are afraid of, not least of all because for many of us they exist within ourselves. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022969