[Note: Some of this is going to seem dated. Onrushing events keep happening and I keep getting distracted chasing down links (many leading to very good podcasts). The latest distraction is the US bombing Iran with some people calling it Epstein’s war.]

I’ve been on something of an Epstein files bender for a few weeks. Three million documents have been released on a searchable website here. There’s all kinds of fallout. The no longer Prince Andrew has been arrested. There’s lots of high profile resignations around the world like Kathryn Ruemmler of Goldman Sachs, Thomas Pritzker of Hyatt Hotels, former British ambassador Peter Mandelson, Dubai CEO Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, former Harvard president and U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Slovak national security adviser Miroslav Lajčák, chairman of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics Casey Wasserman and Norway ambassador Mona Juul. All have a Wikipedia subheading devoted to Epstein. The Young Turks are on a roll with Epstein links to Israel. There’s a group of Epstein victims who attended a Pam Bondi hearing wearing Epstein Survivor t-shirts. They did a Super Bowl ad. Mark Steyn has noted the high incidence of the word “pizza” (as in Pizzagate) in the Epstein files. School pictures have been canceled due to a photography company being tied to Epstein. Billionaire Epstein associate Les Wexner has students at Ohio State protesting a hospital named for him calling it “Serial Pedophilia Center.” I could, of course, go on and on, but then I’d just run into more distracting links and never finish this post. Might this whole story be getting out of hand?

Anyone who reads my posts on Mann v Steyn will know I’m a big follower and proponent of John Ziegler’s career killing quest to show the world that Jerry Sandusky was innocent. See my pinned tweet thread for more links than you’ll ever have time for (starting with a few good summaries). With his experience on the Penn State scandal and similar cases, he’s also been opining on the Epstein case with similar skepticism. He found an email where Epstein says he thinks Sandusky might’ve been innocent. He’s been asking questions like why aren’t there lawsuits against high profile persons committing abuse and if Ghislaine Maxwell had information about them, why didn’t she use it to make a plea deal? But Ziegler is not the main source of skepticism on the Epstein case. It has its own version of John Ziegler in Michael Tracey. You can watch Ziegler interview him on YouTube.

Michael Tracey is a fairly well established journalist who’s worked for The Young Turks and filled in for Glenn Greenwald. He’s know for taking contrarian positions, particularly on Russiagate. He’s taken a very extensive deep dive into the Epstein case on his Substack, his Twitter/X feed and his YouTube channel. He’s been doing quite a few interviews on talk shows and podcasts. He has some critics among the prominent authors and journalists covering the case and has put considerable effort into trying to get them to debate him with limited results. He contends that a lot of what has been reported and that the public accepts as given is actually mythology. He has proclaimed that the case has been a nightmare for civil liberties.

The emotionally charged word pedophile is often thrown about in any discussion of this case. He claims that there is no evidence that Epstein was a pedophile by a clinical definition of the word; i.e.., that he was sexually attracted to prepubescent children. Tracey wrote an extensive post, coauthored with Matt Taibbi, entitled Was Jeffrey Epstein a “convicted pedophile”? It goes over his 2008 conviction providing a link to his plea hearing transcripts and a massive listing of investigatory records which include pixelated video interviews with all the girls involved. The statutes Epstein pleaded guilty to are “Felony Solicitation of Prostitution” and “Procuring Person Under 18 for Prostitution.” The girl, who they identify, was 17, told Epstein she was 17 and had intercourse with him. The other girls under 18 were told by friends to lie and say they were 18 or they wouldn’t be let in the house. While it’s not reported in this post, he’s discussed on videos how one of the girls was 14 and got into a fight in school which led to her mother finding out and reporting the matter to police.

Tracey has disputed the mostly taken for granted claim that Epstein’s plea was a sweetheart deal. He points out that prostitution is normally a very lightly sentenced crime. It’s often pointed out that he got work release, but he also spent time in solitary confinement. Epstein had to accept the very onerous status as a sex offender. He also agreed to an arrangement where he would provide compensation for civil claims waving the right to challenge. He claims Epstein was pressured into this deal by prosecutors rather than it being something his high priced lawyers extracted out of them. A researcher on X named Jay Beecher has found a 7 page draft that appears to be Epstein himself writing his side of the story.

Tracey claims the case against Ghislaine Maxwell was very week. In this Reason podcast video, he points out how out of a supposed pool of 1000 victims the prosecution choose 4 witnesses and they did not include the most famous one, Virginia Roberts Giuffre from the famous Prince Andrew photo with Ghislaine in the background. He notes that Giuffre made millions from a settlement from the royal family and then made a bunch of claims against Alan Dershowitz which she was forced to recant. He says the judge instructed the jury to exclude any claims of being subjected to illegal sexual activity from 2 of the witnesses. He points out how one got $3 million and another got $1.5 million (tax free) from a settlement fund. He’s found all kinds of vagueness in that 1000 victims number such as it being for people “harmed by Epstein”, which apparently includes family members. Epstein and Maxwell were arrested for “trafficking”. He has a very interesting long post on the expansion of the legal concept of trafficking.

In this YouTube interview at 1:18, he estimates that Epstein liability has become a 600 million to one billion dollar industry. The original compensation fund from Epstein’s estate is $130-140 million. There’s a JP Morgan fund of $240 million, a $90 million fund from Deutschbank and more claims outside the original fund against Epstein’s estate. In this post, he wrote a letter to a judge about the conflict of interest of having two prominent Epstein victim attorneys helping to make redactions in the release of Epstein files.

Epstein’s status looks like it has surpassed Jerry Sandusky’s as the world’s most reviled pedophile. Whenever someone mentions him, it’s sort of mandatory to disparage him in some way. I even sensed a bit of it in Geoff’s post on Epstein’s Bannon interview and in the comments. I suppose I should join in and mention that he clearly did use his wealth to indulge his lust for young women and girls, some of whom were under age. I don’t think it’s clear how far this behavior went. There doesn’t appear to be much evidence for much more. No client list has been found. There’s no hard evidence of coercion or pimping, although there are some claims which should include the huge liability potential in their evaluation. Tracey has noted that Epstein set women up with apartments and subsidized their lifestyle.

This woman was a 22-year-old escort when she first met Jeffrey Epstein — she accepted a free apartment, private plane rides to a luxury island, and other lavish amenities. She basically had her entire life in NYC fully subsidized, without having to work. She acknowledged in a… https://t.co/Ip8Epoq2cD

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) August 23, 2025

In the sordid world of prostitution, hooking up with Epstein was likely one of the better gigs around. Of course, just because there’s no hard evidence now, doesn’t mean that it won’t show up later in some form, perhaps a cache of incriminating video CDs from a storage locker. He also dealt with some sleazy people like, .. Steve Bannon who pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering..

Whatever you want to say about Jeffrey Epstein, one thing that’s hard to deny is that he was a savant at networking. Besides all the high powered politicians and captains of industry, he harbored a lot of relationships with serious intellectuals like famed linguist Noam Chomsky, physicist Lisa Randall, physicist and popular author (and something of a sex pest) Lawrence Krause, geneticist George Church, quantum information scientist Seth Lloyd, computer scientist Scott Aaronson, physicist Mikhail Lukin and more. One that I note is David Gelernter, a Yale computer science professor and victim of the Unabomber. He’s in a bit of hot water for emailing paragraphs to Epstein such as,

Software to be built by 2 people (one is a first-rate local freelancer). I have a perfect editoress in mind: Yale sr, worked at Vogue last summer, runs her own campus mag, art major, completely connected, v small goodlooking blonde.

and this,

Paris fragrance, of course! But seems to me that any Paris group of spring girls is perfumed, just not as vividly as the golden-hearted whores. (Have you read Irving Shaw’s masterpiece “The Girls in their Summer Dresses”?)

and this,

Great. Will get the stuff (not much) out to you later today. (Strolling down the right bank w/ gold dome of the Institut right across the river, medieval spires of the cite in front of you, Louvre to the left & the great nose of the city straight ahead, with French girls dressed & behaving like actual females everywhere, & the occasional Aston or Alfa or Lambo or Zonda streaking past: perfection.)

They’re discussing women in a jocular and titillating way among themselves. Do they have the same right to privacy as .. climate scientists discussing how to avoid FOI requests? The “v small goodlooking blond” and “the occasional Aston or Alfa or Lambo” appear to allude to rich old men and much younger women. Hasn’t that always been a fascination in Western or any culture? There’s Tom T. Hall’s chorus, “Faster horses, younger women, older whisky and more money” and lots of movies like Lola (1969), staring Charles Bronson as a 35 year old dirty book author who has an affaire with a 16 year old school girl. I wonder if anyone ever called him a pedophile?

Michael Tracey is getting a lot more traction than John Ziegler ever did. He’s made it to popular outlets like Prager University. He was recently on an episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored where his earpiece went out while he was being asked whether he was being paid by any Epstein associates by a critic named Tara Palmeri. He eventually answers the question with, “Of course, I’m not being paid by anyone! I’m paid by my readers on Substack, you idiot!” Then Tara tweeted the clip of Tracey’s silent spell without including the part where he responds and gets roundly trashed in the responses (including by me). Other commentators are shifting their positions. Michael Shellenberger made a tweet about how the high incidence of the word “pizza” in the Epstein files might show that there was actually something to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. He then deleted it and made a tweet thread about how he changed his mind about his original perceptions of the Epstein case. He also did a ReasonTV interview about it.

About My Featured Image

Michael Tracey was invited to a press conference of Epstein survivors and congressmen. When he started asking skeptical questions, Marjorie Taylor Greene (of Jewish space lasers fame) ordered security to throw him out. I had Grok Imaging, which is included with my X blue check, make watercolor images of Tracey on video with his avatar in the upper right corner and Greene clutching a pearl necklace. Getting Grok to compose the images the way I wanted them is like working with a severely retarded child who is an artistic savant. I still think Grok missed some of the subtleties in Greene’s very distinctive face.