november11–24, 2019 | newyork 63
WHEN JEFFREY EPSTEIN died on August
10—the two cameras required to be film-
ing him coincidentally and simultane-
ously malfunctioning, the guards required to be
monitoring him coincidentally and simultane-
ously asleep—it was not just the end of some-
thing but the beginning. The prosecution
stopped immediately, as criminal prosecutions
always do when their targets die. But the con-
spiratorial speculation began just as quickly, with
Redditors arguing that the body removed from
the Metropolitan Correctional Center was not, in
fact, Epstein’s. Conspiracy theorists didn’t really
need a body double, not when Epstein’s arrest
had seemed to confirm about half of the QAnon
and Pizzagate conspiracies, which alleged that
the world’s ruling caste was in fact a network of
pedophiles and sex traffickers. Perhaps Epstein
owed his wealth to that sex trafficking; perhaps
he owed it to blackmail payments made by those
he’d lured to his parties and massage parlors,
then filmed (there were rumored to be photo-
graphs, at least); perhaps to the inexplicable sup-
port of a small handful of gullible billionaires,
like Les Wexner, to whom Epstein owed his
$56 million home; perhaps to some set of unsa-
vory oligarchs whose money he’d helped launder
or shelter or, to trust one almost comically naïve
theory, shield beyond the reach of their entitled
children. Perhaps he owed it to some unrevealed
intelligence connection—American, Israeli, Brit-
ish, perhaps all three, or more. His onetime girl-
friend and longtime madame, Ghislaine Max-
well, was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, a
rumored triple agent who died at sea, mysteri-
ously, just as his own mercenary tangle was about
to be revealed.
Not all of these theories were entirely plausi-
ble, but they weren’t all that much less plausible
than the public or official account—that Epstein
had amassed a fortune of hundreds of millions
of dollars simply as a genius investor with no col-
lege degree, no research staff to speak of, and no
meaningful business contacts with anyone else
on Wall Street. The internet has gone to town on
much less than this in times much less distrust-
ful of the powers that be.
John F. Kennedy’s death ripped a hole through
the fabric of trustworthy, gray-flannel-suit reality.
If anything, Epstein’s seemed to sew such a rip
back up—his arrest had given us just a glimpse
of a world it seemed we were never supposed to
see, and his death closed it off to anything but
speculation, which now will never end.
—DAVID WALLACE-WELLS
Jeffrey Epstein
Will Be Our JFK
