I read, or looked at, or endured the Jeffrey Epstein birthday book so you don’t have to

Screenshot of page in Epstein birthday book

It’s often the word that isn’t there that means the most. “Why” is that word with the case of the serial pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. I’m sure there are psychological reasons that doctors can come up with to explain pedophilia and where it comes from and why certain adults are prone to sexually abusing underage girls and boys, but that is not my subject here. The “why” I’m interested in doesn’t depend on Epstein as a perpetrator, although he certainly presents an astounding case.

Somewhere in the 238 pages of the Epstein 50^th birthday book assembled by his sometime paramour, all the time co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell is the answer to why the man existed at the level of abuse and celebrity he enjoyed. It’s not in the list of names who contributed their birthday wishes or even in the images we have been treated to ad nauseum since the Wall Street Journal first alerted us to the fact that Donald Trump contributed his own so-called “bawdy” sketch and poem to the Epstein celebration. Although the use of the word “bawdy” by the mainstream media to describe Trump’s page in the birthday book does give us a hint about what was going on with the book itself and the reaction to it some 22 years later.

The word that popped into my head about 60 pages in was puerile. The “book” is divided into sections. The first is “family,” the second, “Brooklyn.” In that section is a letter from someone signing himself “Johnny Boy” who tells some stories from the time of his friendship with Epstein when they were boys. One story is about a trip he and Epstein made to Europe as teenagers, apparently. The details and timeline in many of the reminiscences are hazy and imprecise. In his story, Johnny Boy is celebrating the fact that Epstein met a girl in London and somehow convinced her to return to the States with him. But what that meant to Johnny Boy permeates story after story told by Epstein’s other friends. Epstein “didn’t give a shit.” Epstein “never worried, always confident.” Johnny Boy recalls that Epstein “had to have confidence and a don’t give a shit attitude” to bring the girl from London into their comparatively downscale world in Brooklyn. “It worked!” Johnny Boy exclaims. “You began to realize that you could get away with shit! That chicks and people in general were schmucks! You sensed that you were sharper and more astute than most.”

This passage and others like it in the book recall similar instances of how Epstein got over on the system at various stages of his life. One page features – I hesitate to call it a poem, but I guess that’s what it is – from someone signed “Stuey.” Here are the last two stanzas:

As far as I can detect, Jeffrey seems to select, To express his mood, Terms rude, crude, and lewd, and politically incorrect.

Jeffrey at half a century, With credentials plenipotentiary, Though up to no good, Whenever he could, has avoided the penitentiary.

I hesitate to make too much of this kind of stuff, but when you couple it with a friend whose contribution is photos from an African safari showing large wild animals like lions and zebras fucking…

Puerile. Adolescent. Inane. Fatuous. Juvenile.

All of the above.

Some of the contributions can be read, between the lines if not in outright text, as acknowledgement of Epstein’s tendencies if not crimes.

You have seen no end of reproductions of Trump’s page, and over the last day or so, the page from a Mar a Lago member posing with a blow-up of a check from Trump paying Epstein $22,500 for a “fully depreciated” woman who has clearly aged-out of Epstein’s zone of desires. But there are other examples that to anyone you or I know would be embarrassing and seen as bad taste at the very least. One page features a handwritten message reading, “For the man who has almost everything, but never enough of these!” Below is an image of a woman’s breast pressed against the glass of a Xerox machine which has been “artfully” enhanced with swaths of dabbed and streaked colors. Another page contains a handwritten note saying, “I wanted to get you what you want…so here it is…” with a black-and-white sketch of a woman’s breasts.

Most of these incredibly adolescent memories are from men, but the ones from women are equally disquieting. One woman, whose name is blacked out, recalls going shopping with Epstein at Bloomingdales, “and you proceeded to throw me down on the floor, right in the middle of the shoe dept. and started tickling me and kissing me all over!”

What can you say about something like that? Recalling the incident in such a manner evidences an eagerness to please, certainly, but there is something else much more disturbing. She describes being taken to a lavish party by Epstein and meeting Ace Greenberg, an important investment banker whose name is said to appear elsewhere in the Epstein files. She describes her delight that Epstein can be “so sweet and sentimental” and thanks him for “sharing that part of yourself with me.” It is couched in the knowledge that there is another part of Epstein she is aware of. Her fear is unstated but runs down the page. “I hope I’ve made you proud,” she writes near the end of her handwritten note, mentioning the “adventures and exciting times” they have shared.

She shares some photos. One is of her wearing underwear as she looks for something in a closet. The caption is, “Can’t get a second of privacy with you and a camera around! Ha-ha!” Having gone through 205 pages to get here, the photo and note and message are hard to see as celebratory. The light tone has an undercurrent: What if the man she is allegedly celebrating isn’t kept happy?

It isn’t the fact that you know the Epstein story before you start looking through the birthday book that makes the experience so grim and foreboding. Yes, you can see friends and acquaintances trying to make Epstein happy as they help to “celebrate” his birthday, but it is a stiff cheerfulness. You can’t miss the undercurrent of performance to the whole thing. If you wanted to be around Jeffrey Epstein, especially if you wanted to take part in his largess – go to his parties, fly on his planes, be invited to his island, accept his gifts, and if you were a participant in his crimes, take advantage along with him of the underage girls he provided – you had to be willing to perform as an actor in the false life he lived.

The whole thing was a stage, and his presentation was as much a play as anything on Broadway. Everyone had a role, and your first act in the drama of Jeffrey Epstein was to keep your mouth shut, or there would be consequences.

They kept their mouths shut all the way through the birthday book, his friends and his acquaintances and the women in the book he took advantage of. Even though the birthday book is out there now, the play goes on in Washington D.C., with the entire Republican Party keeping its mouth shut, this time for fear of falling out of favor with Trump, because as it was with Epstein, they know there will be consequences if they don’t.