Why Epstein's Associates Looked the Other Way

0:00The sun is out, the birds are chirping, and the open road is calling. Bring on the spring at the Honda Spring Event and take that road trip you've been dreaming on. Now's the time to check out the Honda Civic and HRV from Honda, the 2025 Kelly Blue Books KVB.com Best Value Brand. Based on 2025 Consumer Choice Awards from Kelly Blue Books visit KVB.com for more information. Brian Lairr on WNYC and we've got more coverage of the war coming up but we've decided that's not all we will do today. So right now is the Jeffrey Epstein revelations continue to emerge and some people involved are clearly relieved that the war is taking that out of the main headlines. We're going to talk now to Lisa Miller domestic correspondent for the well section of the New

1:05York Times who wrote to my eye was a very trenchant analysis about how people rationalized their ongoing relationships with Epstein, her article that's now two weeks old and I've been wanting to have her on ever since. It came out is called the price of admission to Epstein's world silence. Lisa, thanks for coming on with us. So happy to be here Brian, thank you. I'm just going to jump in with an example from your article. You wrote at least some of Epstein's friends knew what he meant when he said massage. In 2010 in an email to Boris Nikolik then the science advisor to the Gates Foundation Epstein said he was finishing one massage and Nikolik responded with happy ending I hope punctuating his note with a winking emoji and Epstein replied, I'm too impatient, happy beginning. So Nikolik did not respond to your request for comment but what do you take from that exchange?

2:12I mean, obviously Nikolik knew what Epstein was up to when he said massage and remember, you know, at that point, I think that note was written in 2011. At that point, Epstein was already a convicted sex offender. He had already spent time in jail. He was a sex offender in New York and in Florida. His technique was to recruit girls at that point, as young as 14, to his house for massages. And then he would force them to undress and have sex with him. And so massage was his front election, his euphemism. It was his euphemism for what he liked to do sexually. He also liked massages and he blurred it all together. But when he said massage, it was clear that his some of his friends at least knew what he was talking about.

3:17So here's another one from Eurotico and you put this all together so well with so many specifics. When in 2017, you're right, Deepak Chopra complained of a crazy day, Epstein replied, I'm in Florida, but would like to send two girls. And then you contrast that with Chopra in a statement earlier this month saying, I am deeply saddened by the suffering of the victims in this case. Again, you're getting at the contradiction between how people seem to be willing to participate with him in whatever way then, or at least give a wink at what he was doing, if not more than that. And now express these deep regrets. How do you make sense of it? I mean, that was the question that I wanted to sort of wrestle with in this piece. And I talked to a lot of social scientists about this, like how do you talk to yourself?

4:19Why are you talking to yourself in this way? Why are you allowing, why is a person allowing themselves to maintain a close relationship with somebody whom they know has had misguided at least and criminal at most past? And who is winking and nodding about sex in a way that is pretty obvious in lots of cases. And the answer is, like, he had something they wanted in almost every case. He had money, he had power, he had access to other power. And so if you wanted an association with young women, you could get one, it seems. And if you just wanted to be at his dinner table and meet the other people who are at his dinner table,

5:20you had to, in some sense, look away from what else was going on. Because according to accounts in the files, like those young women, when he called the assistants and students, were in the room at the dinner table on the plane, traveling with him, there are accounts of young women being with him in entourage everywhere. There were assistants booking multiple rooms for him wherever he went. And when you're Epstein among powerful people who also have assistants and advisors and hangers on, the ripple effects of that knowledge are very, very wide. And so there was this kind of silent complicity among everybody who associated with him. I mean, I don't know, obviously.

6:22Yeah, but you quote, you know, experts who have interesting theories. Dutch social psychologist, urban van Cleef, who studied how rule-breakers actually accumulate power within groups. You apply his research to Epstein as like someone's willingness to violate norms, to be openly transgressive, criminal in this case, could actually become a source of status rather than a disqualification or NYU social psychologist, Tessa West, who uses the phrase willful in action to describe what Epstein's guests were doing, Columbia psychologist, Michael Slepian, who makes the counterintuitive point that shared secrets actually make wrong doing easier to live with, not harder. What? Can you go into that one a little bit? Well, I mean, you know, Slepian studies secrets. And he said that one of the things about secrets is that they work like glue, like they keep the in-group in because you're all sharing a secret that can't get out.

7:27But inside that group, it becomes sort of, you know, it's like a much less term open secret, right? Inside the group, it's an open secret, and that normalizes it for everybody. And so everybody is sort of looking away and talking about it like Epstein has sort of extravagant utray tastes. He's living some kind of avant-garde dream genius life that he himself is brave or honest enough to, you know, live. And there are a lot of people who are writing to Epstein and sort of commending him on his bravery and honesty in living the way he lives.

8:28So it's like a collusion of admiration and secrecy in the in-group. Another example from your article, Bill Gates, who has recently called his relationship with Epstein, a quote, big mistake, but you have this 2011 note from Gates about Epstein, and all it said was his lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing, although it would not work for me. So why does it break Gates? Why does a Deepak Chopra, world-renowned, need anything from Jeffrey Epstein knowing what they know? I mean, I think he gave people what they wanted. And I think my theory, private theory,

9:29personal theory, is that he was good at perceiving what the powerful people in his circles wanted or needed, whether it was women or attention or money. And when you look at, for example, the emails between Epstein and Larry Summers, who it was like Summers wanted girlfriend advice. And Epstein really indulged him in that, you know? And so it made Summers feel naughty. I'm, you know, I'm speculating Epstein enabled that. And they, and you know, there's a quote later on where there's a section of the piece later on where Epstein is telling his friends and associates that now that they've shared their secrets, these secrets, they are, they have a mutual death. And there is an undertone of threat there, like now I know

10:33this stuff about you. And now you know this stuff about me. And we are now in it together. So his command, his demand, persicracy was both explicit and super implicit but constant. One of the best articles I've read on the enablers and how they wound up in the positions they were in, voluntarily, questions that Lisa Miller, domestic correspondent for the well section of the New York Times, tackled in her piece the price of admission to Epstein's world silence. Thank you so much for sharing some of it with us. So happy to be here. Thank you. Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the kind of content we know the world needs. Since then, New York Public Radio's rigorous journalism has gone on to win a Peabody Award and a Dupont Columbia Award, among others. In addition to this award-winning

11:36reporting, your sponsorship also supports inspiring storytelling and extraordinary music that is free and accessible to all. To get in touch and find out more, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.