What happened
Attorney General William Barr vowed this
week to “get to the bottom” of serial sex
offender Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent suicide
inside a federal jail cell, as members of
Congress demanded answers as to how
the wealthy financier was left alone after
a previous attempt to kill himself. The FBI
opened an investigation into what Barr
called “serious irregularities” at the Bureau
of Prisons–run Metropolitan Correctional
Center in Manhattan. Early reports sug-
gest the two guards overseeing Epstein
slept on their shifts, then falsified logs.
Epstein had been placed on suicide watch
July 23, when abrasions were found on his
neck, then was taken off six days later at the request of his lawyers.
Guards were still supposed to check on him every 30 minutes and
house him with a roommate. But his roommate was transferred
Friday night and not replaced. Hours later, Epstein was found
dead, after apparently using a bedsheet tied to a top bunk to hang
himself. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said Epstein’s “dark secrets” were
“allowed to die with him,” and that “heads must roll.”
In the wake of Epstein’s death, President Trump provoked outrage
when he retweeted a conservative comedian’s allegation that
former President Bill Clinton somehow engineered the hanging be-
cause Epstein “had information” on him. A Clinton spokesperson
said the former president “knows nothing” about Epstein’s crimes
and had not spoken to him in “well over a decade.” Meanwhile,
there were news reports that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell—
a British socialite described as his “procurer”—had boasted of
possessing dirt on “an astonishing number” of rich and famous
people, and even videotaped visitors to his infamous Caribbean
island near St. Thomas. The FBI raided that island this week in
search of evidence. About 80 women and girls, some as young as
14, have accused Epstein of raping or sexually abusing them.
What the editorials said
While Epstein cheated justice with his death, “the investigations
into his crimes, and those of others connected to him, must contin-
ue,” said The New York Times. Nothing short of a full accounting
is required to restore faith in a system that too often tilts “toward
the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable.” The public officials
who have repeatedly failed Epstein’s vic-
tims are “long overdue” for a reckoning.Trump is playing a “dangerous game”
by peddling conspiracy theories, said
the Miami Herald. Not only is the
president—who socialized with Ep-
stein in the 1990s and early 2000s and
publicly called him “a terrific guy”—
undercutting his own Justice Depart-
ment’s investigation into Epstein’s death,
he’s also “exploiting the unending pain”
of Epstein’s victims to deliver another
nonsensical partisan “rant to his base.”What the columnists said
Epstein’s death leaves prosecutors “with one prime target,” said
Marc Fisher in The Washington Post. The Paris-born, Oxford-
educated Ghislaine Maxwell, 57, met Epstein less than a year after
her father, a British publishing tycoon and member of Parliament,
died $4 billion in debt. His victims say she became “the prime
organizer” of his thrice-daily “massages” from underage girls
recruited on the pretext they were auditioning for modeling jobs.
In court documents released just before Epstein’s death, one of
Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, said Maxwell had re-
cruited her and ordered her to have sex with Epstein and numerous
famous friends, including Britain’s Prince Andrew.“It shouldn’t be possible for a hideous monster” like Epstein “to
game the American system of justice,” said Rich Lowry in National
Review.com, but that’s exactly what he did. Again and again, the
wealthy predator enjoyed “advantages and breaks unimaginable
to anyone who didn’t jet around with influential friends.” His
high-priced legal team got him a slap on the wrist for a 2002 guilty
plea—and even just got him removed from suicide watch.What a rare opportunity missed, said David Graham in The
Atlantic.com. Since the 2008 financial crisis, Americans have been
left feeling there are “two sets of rules: one for ordinary Americans
and another for the rich and well connected.” Epstein’s recent ar-
rest “looked like a chance to finally hold rotten elites to account,”
with this pampered child rapist likely to spend the rest of his life
in a jail cell. Instead, “his death represents one final escape from
accountability.”Jeffer
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x,^ NewscomEpstein’s body being loaded onto a vanTHE WEEK August 23, 2019
4 NEWS The main stories...
Epstein’s final escape from justice
It wasn’t all bad QDanny Trejo is used to playing the bad guy, giving villain-
ous turns in movies including From Dusk Till Dawn and Con
Air. But the 75-year-old actor got
a shot at being the hero last week
when he witnessed a collision at a
Los Angeles intersection. One car
flipped over, trapping a baby with
special needs and his grandma
inside. Trejo crawled into the SUV
and pulled the baby to safety with
a bystander’s help. As firefight-
ers freed the driver, Trejo kept her
grandson calm by pretending to be
a superhero. The actor said he was
happy to have been able to help.
“Everything good that’s happened
to me,” he said, is “a direct result
of helping someone else.”QFBI agent Troy Sowers said
he expected nothing more than
“doughnuts and coffee” at his re-
tirement party. So he was stunned
when a special guest showed up:
the baby, now a man, he’d saved
22 years before. Sowers was a
rookie with the Seattle field office
when a newborn was snatched
from a Washington hospital in- The kidnapper was soon
arrested, and Sowers convinced
her to lead him to the baby, who
she’d left next to a dumpster. That
baby, Stewart Rembert, is now a
Marine corporal. “Thank you for
giving me the opportunity to have
a life,” Rembert told Sowers.
QTwo days before her fifth birthday,
Maebh Nesbitt hiked to the top of
the 4,239-foot Big Slide Mountain in
upstate New York and became the
youngest person to summit all 46
high peaks in the Adirondacks. Her
mom and dad, Siobhan and Lee,
are both members of the 46ers’
club, and when Maebh was 3, she
said she also wanted a sticker from
the club. Siobhan told her daughter
she’d have to “climb every peak
and earn it.” And Maebh did just
that, scaling the peaks on her own,
with her parents at her side. “I’m so
proud of her,” said Siobhan. Trejo: Heroic turnIllustration by Fred Harper.
Cover photos from AP, Getty (2)