32 THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
a top executive had overruled the com-
pliance team.) According to the Times’
sources, the reason, remarkably, was not
the amount of money Epstein had but
how much the bank valued his relation-
ships—the friends and associates whose
business he might steer its way. The
Wall Street Journal reported that when
Highbridge was sold to JP Morgan, in
2004, Epstein received a fifteen-mil-
lion-dollar fee from Highbridge, appar-
ently for making an introduction. The
bank didn’t extricate itself until 2013;
after that, Epstein moved to Deutsche
Bank, which kept him on as a client
until this summer.
Tolerance of Epstein, in other words,
wasn’t simply a matter of bystanders fo-
cussing only on the dollar amount and
not seeing the rest. He often suggested
that he was involved in complex for-
eign-currency trades, big plays with an
intellectual aspect. In reality, he may have
just been the guy who gets a cut. But
what currency he was actually trading
in—charisma, loyalty, insight, tax schemes,
or even, as he reportedly insinuated,
secrets—is a matter for further inquiry.
The financial accounting doesn’t add up.
Indeed, the day before Epstein’s death,
Wexner released a statement saying that,
in trying to disentangle his finances
from Epstein’s, after the plea deal, he’d
concluded that Epstein had “misappro-
priated vast sums of money” belonging
to him. It would have been helpful if
Wexner had made that discovery pub-
lic years ago. Instead, Epstein quietly
compensated him with a transfer of
funds—from a supposedly charitable
foundation that he had set up and from
another entity that he controlled—to
the Wexner family’s foundation. (The
proper use of charitable foundations is
another issue that the Epstein case raises;
they are not supposed to be vehicles for
obscuring the true nature of transactions.)
Epstein had long deployed philanthropy
TORCHDEPT.
BACKSTORY
P
eople familiar with Meat Loaf ’s sem-
inal 1977 album, “Bat Out of Hell,”
whose cover art features a long-haired
man on a horse-skulled motorcycle, flying
up through a graveyard, into a flame-
red sky, under the gaze of an enormous
bat, will remember one song’s distinc-
tive come-on. “On a hot summer night,
would you offer your throat to the wolf
with the red roses?” a man asks. A provoc-
ative dialogue ensues. In “Bat Out of
Hell: The Musical,” now at City Cen-
ter, after runs in the U.K. and Toronto,
the question functions as a riddle, asked
repeatedly by the show’s hero, Strat,
played by Andrew Polec, on his search
for love in the post-apocalyptic city of
Obsidian, where he lives with his street
gang, the Lost, sometime after the chem-
ical wars. The question is a stumper.
Even when it’s posed on the Meat Loaf
album, Polec said the other day, “you’re
like, ‘What is this? Like, why? And whose
voice is that?’” That last question, at least,
is easily answered. “It’s Jim,” Polec said.
SpongeBob Musical.” “I was, like, ‘I love
SpongeBob! SpongeBob is my life!’” h e
said. “I brought this to the audition.” He
held up a child-size SpongeBob back-
pack. Auditioners were asked to bring an
instrument, so he’d brought a large red
drum. “I bombed,” he said. Before he left,
another actor said, “There’s a ‘Bat Out
of Hell’ audition down the street.”
Polec was incredulous. “Meat Loaf ’s
‘Bat Out of Hell’?” he asked.
“No,” the actor said. “Some Jim guy.”
Polec knew all about the Jim guy: “Bat
Out of Hell” was also his life. He raced
to Pearl Studios, near Thirty-fifth Street,
trying not to bump pedestrians with his
drum. He retraced that journey now, mak-
ing his way down Eighth Avenue in his
SpongeBob backpack and talking about
his love of Meat Loaf. Polec discovered
“Bat Out of Hell” as a teen-age athlete,
after a bicycle accident ended his lacrosse
career. (Steep hill, blind turn, desire to
“keep going fast.” “I Supermanned,” he
said.) As he recovered from a severe head
injury, his parents played seventies rock
to cheer him up. Hearing “Paradise by
the Dashboard Light,” Meat Loaf ’s teen-
lust epic, on themes of baseball, parking,
and regret, Polec was thunderstruck.
“Meat Loaf is like an athlete of the voice, ”
he said. He focussed his energy in a rock-
and-roll direction. Leads in high-school
to burnish his reputation. But he also
encouraged speculation about his ties
to powerful people. He sold the idea
that he had a way in and up that was
outside normal channels; it is dispirit-
ing to realize how many influential peo-
ple seemed to find that appealing.
Meanwhile, Epstein’s victims were
trapped in a nightmare. Last week, doc-
uments were unsealed in a defamation
suit that Virginia Giuffre had filed in
2015 against Ghislaine Maxwell, whose
relationship with Epstein is somewhat
opaque, and who Giuffre alleges aided
him in abusing her. Maxwell settled the
suit and has denied any wrongdoing, but
others have made similar allegations.
Prosecutors have pledged that, despite
Epstein’s death, they will pursue any ac-
complices or co-conspirators. There will,
doubtless, be more to learn, from more
women. Epstein is absent, but his crimes
should be clear to see. They always were.
—Amy Davidson Sorkin
Jim Steinman, seventy-one, is the
songwriter behind “Bat Out of Hell”
and its two sequels, which together have
sold some hundred million copies, and
the musical, which also includes hits
that he wrote for Air Supply and Ce-
line Dion. (Hellfire, it turns out, tran-
sitions seamlessly to “Making Love Out
of Nothing at All.”) Polec has starred
in the show since it began, in 2017. As
Strat, wide-eyed and belting out rock
anthems with ease, he prances shirtless
in leather pants, falls in love with Raven
(Christina Bennington), rattles her pow-
erful parents (Bradley Dean and Lena
Hall), stands on a chopper, kneels under
a Mylar-glitter snowfall, smears stage
blood on his torso, and gets crucificto-
rious with a mike cord. Superfans have
tattoos of the Lost gang’s symbol and
of Polec himself. The day before the
New York première, as an image of him
writhed across a Times Square jum-
botron, Polec revisited the spot where
his “Bat” journey began: a building on
West Forty-third Street, formerly home
to a casting agency and now a WeWork.
Polec, thirty, is willowy and muscular,
with a puff of blond hair, blue eyes, and
the cosmic wonder of the angel in “Bar-
barella.” He wore all black: boots, skinny
jeans, T-shirt, bolero hat. In 2015, as an
unknown, he auditioned there for “The
