There were plenty of signs that something wasn’t right with Jeffrey Epstein. Why didn’t anyone say something?
When Jeffrey Epstein said “massage” in the years after he got out of jail in 2009, what did his friends and associates think he meant? Epstein had been convicted in a Florida court of sex crimes with minors in 2008. His method, reported in The New York Times at the time, had been to recruit girls as young as 14 to his home and persuade them to undress and massage him. Then he would force them to have sex and paid them cash.
He was charged with sex crimes again in 2018, this time by the federal government, which accused him of trafficking underage girls in the early 2000s. If he committed crimes in the years between 2009 and his death in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting federal trial in 2019, he was not charged with them. But the Epstein files show that, during that decade, he was both rebuilding and curating his vast, elite social network, while also looking at plans for a new massage room on his private island of Little St. James and choosing marble for his massage room in New York.
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Tessa West, a professor of social psychology at New York University, describes the collective silence around Epstein and his “girls” as “willful inaction.” Even if the guests at Epstein’s table were not engaging in illegal or harmful behavior, some had to have seen red flags, and “they’re doing nothing about it. They’re not saying anything. They’re not discouraging it,” West said. Given what she knows about gender dynamics in her profession, academia, “I am zero surprised by any of this,” she said. Scientists like West offer clues to why and how Epstein’s world functioned to protect him.