A couple of weeks ago, the annual DealBook Summit got under way in New York. It’s a series of public talks billed as conversations with “the world’s most consequential people”, and is part of that circuit of live events in which the worst people on Earth gather on stage to address the second-worst people on Earth, their paying audience. Hosted by Andrew Ross Sorkin, the conference was a characteristically starry affair, but in a lineup that included Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and “changemaker” Halle Berry, it was Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel and a former associate of Jeffrey Epstein, who really caught the eye.
My first thought about Barak’s appearance was: Larry Summers must be spitting. Summers, the former president of Harvard and another Epstein associate, was very much not on stage at the DealBook Summit, nor is he anywhere else in polite society right now. One can only imagine how bitter he must be feeling about the variance in fortunes of the men – and occasional woman – with known connections to Epstein. Of this list, two are dead (Marvin Minsky and Jean-Luc Brunel), one is in jail (Ghislaine Maxwell) and one has lost his house, his title and his invitation to the family Christmas (Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor). But for the rest of the prominent associates, email correspondents, birthday-card signatories, grant recipients and dinner companions of the late convicted paedophile – all of whom insist that, while in Epstein’s orbit, they remained in total ignorance as to the man’s true nature – the cancellation fairy’s aim has been predictably inconsistent and wide.
At the top of this list is the US president, Donald Trump, who has survived multiple sex scandals and will probably survive this one, although it has given him a great deal more trouble than anything involving E Jean Carroll or Stormy Daniels. Epstein, with whom Trump socialised, represents a different level of threat to the president not only because of the scale of his crimes, but also because the word “paedophile” is a bipartisan trigger just as severe on the right as on the left. Glancing at the other boldface names, what remains curious is that, despite all the protestations of shame, regret and commitment to a period of reflection, a great many of Epstein’s old pals and associates remain at the centre of US public life.
This strikes me partly as a question of practicality. As with the banks during the 2008 financial crisis, Epstein’s cohort list is simply too big to fail. If you started cancelling everyone who remained in contact with Epstein after 2008 – when he pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from a minor – you would be left with a US in which the only people you could book on a conference panel would be Melinda Gates, Dick Van Dyke and Madonna (I would be strongly in favour of this). In fact, given the apparently irresistible reach of the convicted sex offender, it might be quicker to list prominent people who didn’t go to dinner or exchange convivial bon mots over email with him than to trudge through the long list of those who did.
Still, let’s give it a go. Bill Gates, very much in contact with Epstein from 2011, has suffered no apparent ill effects from the association. No one expects anything of Steve Bannon, so he’s fine, despite exchanging hundreds of texts and emails with Epstein right up to the year of his death. Ditto Martin Nowak, the professor of maths and biology who was placed under sanctions by Harvard for two years after the extent of his personal and financial association with Epstein was revealed, but has since had all his privileges restored.
The theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, an Epstein friend and correspondent, left his post at Arizona State University in 2018 after being accused of sexual misconduct (he denied the claims), but that seems to have been separate from his association with Epstein. It was Krauss, you may recall, who joked in an email to the late sex offender that they should set up a “men of the world conference” to rival the women’s empowerment circuit and feature the likes of Kevin Spacey, Bill Clinton, Al Franken and Woody Allen – a joke which would land harder if that lineup weren’t indistinguishable from the world as it currently is. (Just ask Johnny Depp.)
Anyway, Woody Allen! An occasional dining companion of Epstein’s who showed up in the latest Epstein photo dump relaxing with him over coffee and on set, and who recently said of the man: “He couldn’t have been nicer.” One feels that even Epstein could’ve learned something from Allen’s world-class shamelessness, and perhaps he did.
And still among these men the most brazen escaper surely has to be Michael Wolff, the journalist who offered Epstein PR advice while recording more than 100 hours of interviews with him. Wolff has not only escaped unscathed but has successfully leveraged the association by claiming unique insight into Epstein in his endless podcast and social-media appearances. In a recent podcast interview, Tina Brown referred to Wolff as Epstein’s “consigliere” and made the valid point that if the journalist Olivia Nuzzi was fired for inappropriate closeness to her subject, RFK Jr, why has Wolff escaped censure for kissing up to Epstein in the most flagrant and repulsive way?
Oh well. Back to the DealBook Summit, where Barak – a man who continued a correspondence with Epstein right up to his second arrest in 2019 – did not go entirely unpunished. Before the roundtable discussion got under way, the panel’s host, Nicholas Kristof, had an awkward duty to dispatch. “You are mentioned repeatedly in those emails as a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein,” said Kristof. “So I just want to ask you very bluntly: did Epstein ever traffic a woman or a girl to you?” Barak smiled slightly. “No, never. I now deeply regret having any association with him.” And the conversation moved on to more important things.
