Robert Evans and Daniel O'Brien dissect Jeffrey Epstein's rise from a Brooklyn physics teacher to a powerful predator, detailing his 1981 insider trading fine and alleged Ponzi scheme involvement. They expose the "Lolita Express," noting Bill Clinton flew it 11 times with unnamed women, while clarifying that wealth warps the brain like a head injury, desensitizing elites to child exploitation. The hosts distinguish documented abuse of minors from QAnon conspiracies, concluding that extreme power creates a detachment from consequences, enabling a network where social access outweighs moral accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Roald Dahl Spy Secrets00:03:22
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, I was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
Now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
How much away, Wanda?
Right now, I'm about 130.
I'm at 183.
We should race.
No, I want to leave here with my original hips.
On the podcast, The Match Up with Aaliyah, I pair prominent female athletes with unexpected guests.
On a recent episode, I sat down with undisputed boxing champ Clarissa Shields and comedian Wanda Sykes to talk about Wanda's new movie, Undercard, The Art of Trash Talk, and What It Really Means to Be Ladylike.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search the matchup with the Liyah, and listen now.
Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports Network.
Readers, Katie's finalists, Publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on Demand this guy's.
2 a.m.
2 a.m., whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like, wild bats.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, but listen to Las Culturistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hello, gorgeous.
It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditional Ila.
My days of filling up cups at sir may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
Life on the other side of the hill is giving grown-up vibes.
But over here on my podcast, Untraditional Ila, I'm still that Lala you either love or love to hate.
Listen to Untraditionally Lala on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey, everybody, I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
And today, as a guest on my show, I have one of the best people in comedy history, Daniel O'Brien, my once and perhaps future boss, guy who I was the intern for and mentor, all those things.
Daniel.
Yeah, that's quite an intro.
Thank you for all of that.
I will, just so there are no dangling cliffhangers or anything like that, once and future boss.
I don't think I'm ever going to be a boss again for the rest of my life.
Having been a boss and having now not be a boss anymore, it's better this way.
It's way better not being a boss.
It's pretty great.
I mean, I'm talking about more when the civil war gets sparked off and you wind up leading a crude militia in Hell's Kitchen to fight for the liberation of the East Coast from the tyrannical Midwest.
That seems fair.
I think whenever a revolution happens, it seems likely that I'll find myself somewhere in middle management.
Feels right.
Epstein's Burdened Past00:15:46
Well, Dan, speaking of middle management, that's not what we're talking about today, but we are talking about a really famous child molester.
I knew I was going to have my friend and former colleague, expert on many different presidents, author of the book, How to Fight Presidents.
So many exciting people we could have talked about.
And I picked Jeffrey Epstein.
Okay.
Soon to be president.
Soon to be president.
Very closely tied to two presidents at least.
Yeah.
So are you ready?
You ready for this, Dan?
I'm ready.
I got a slight heads up on who the person was, and it was one of those names that I knew very little about, just enough to know that they were bad.
Yeah.
And deliberately chose not to do any research on it so I could be surprised and horrified and hopefully ask you questions that your dumbest listeners will have.
That is what I want from my guests is for them to be surprised and horrified.
So I'm going to get into this story because I didn't know anything about this guy either, other than like, you know, you hear the odd story here and there about him.
You know, he's a creep.
Yeah.
He's way more than just a creep.
So let's strap in and tell this tale.
So on December 4th, 2016, Edgar Madison Welch, a 28-year-old man from Madison, North Carolina, walked into Washington, D.C.'s Comet Ping Pong Pizza Parlor with an AR-15.
He fired three shots into the restaurant as part of a poorly conceived scheme to, in his own words, self-investigate the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.
That conspiracy theory, which had its origins in the 2016 election, states that the Clintons and their longtime supporter, John Podesta, were at the center of a giant child rape and sex slave ring.
Comet Ping Pong was believed to be a nexus point of this international child slave trade.
The theory has evolved and merged with other conspiracy theories and is now part of the orbit of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
There's a general sense among many in the far right that global elites are part of a gigantic, satanic, pedophilic conspiracy.
They are wrong about that, but they aren't 100% wrong about the idea that an alliance of powerful people are having sex with underaged individuals because that totally happened.
And today we're going to talk about the man who's at the nexus of a real, honest-to-God, global child molesting conspiracy.
He has nothing to do with Comet Ping Pong or John Podesta, and his victims were teenagers and not the little kids that the Petogate conspiracy theories tend to focus on.
But yeah, today we're talking about Jeff Epstein.
Okay.
That is that's that's a journey of an introduction there.
Yeah, I yeah, I found a QAnon flyer on my run today this before coming in this morning.
So I've had this conspiracy theory about child molesting global elites on the brain.
Sure.
I mean, that's that's bound to happen.
Yeah.
December 4th, bad date.
Not a good date.
What else happened on December 4th?
Is that a real question?
Yes.
You, me, and 25 of our closest friends and co-workers.
Oh my God.
You're right.
That was December 4th.
I mean, not as bad as the shooting the pizza place thing.
But December 4th, bad date.
No one died in that shooting, so I'm going to say it's bad.
Okay.
We all lost healthcare.
Oh, it's good to laugh now.
It's good to laugh now.
I had forgotten the date because of all of the drinking.
Oh, sure.
So, Jeffrey Edward Epstein was born on January 20th, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York.
Brooklyn?
Brooklyn.
Yeah, not the proudest son of Brooklyn.
His wiki currently describes him as an American financier, science and research philanthropist, and registered sex offender.
Hey.
I have some notes on how Wikipedia orders things.
Sex offender in the middle or first?
I want it first.
I think I want it first.
I think you start with research philanthropist, sex offender, financier, science philanthropist.
Yeah.
That's my order.
I don't want them trying to like pre-make me like him, you know?
Like the sex offender thing, people are going to get, they're not going to like that.
So how can we soften this blow before they get there?
Oh, philanthropist.
That's a broadly good word, right?
Philanthropist and rapist.
So Epstein was raised in Coney Island.
The Guardian describes him coming up in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood.
I'm not sure if that's how you describe Coney Island now, but that's how it was at the time, apparently.
According to a Vanity Fair article I read, he and his family were kind of solidly middle class.
His father worked for the city's parks department.
His parents saw education as the way out for Jeffrey and his brother.
They put him in piano classes at age five.
He was a bright student, graduating from Brooklyn's Lafayette High School with fantastic grades in mathematics and science.
From 1969 to 1971, Cohen started taking college courses at Cooper Union, focusing mostly on physics.
He left for NYU's Corin Institute after that and took classes on the mathematical physiology of the heart.
Epstein was clearly smart and very interested in a variety of obscure scientific and mathematical disciplines.
He never quite found a subject he could focus on for more than a year or two at a time, though, and he left Corin Institute without getting a degree.
So, so far, I'm on board.
So far, pretty good.
Although I questioned his parents because I agree that education being the way out of poverty and into a better life, or one of the ways, but still question, like, you're on that track.
Education is going to save our son.
Let's also throw him in piano lessons like that.
Like, how many famous rich piano players are there?
Still just the three?
Still just Elton John and two guys I can't name.
Yeah, Billy Joel and Maharshi character from Green Book.
I feel bad that I forgot Billy Joel.
You should feel bad.
I unironically love Billy Joel.
No, I mean, so do I, man.
It's a Good Night Saigon's a great-ass song.
You should get him as a guest on this show.
I would love to have Billy Joel as a guest on.
He's antifaw now, if you didn't hear the interview.
Is that really?
Yeah.
He did an interview with Weiss after the Charlottesville march where he was like, I don't understand why more people aren't hitting Nazis.
Oh, fuck yeah, Billy Joel.
Yeah, he's great.
Okay, so in his early 20s, Epstein got a job teaching physics at the Dalton School, a Manhattan private school.
He taught physics and math to the children of the rich and powerful.
A number of fawning articles from before Epstein's crimes were public knowledge gave glowing accounts of his mysterious backstory.
One of those fawning articles was published by New York Magazine in 2002.
Its title, The International Moneyman of Mystery, gets across how Epstein was generally viewed.
Here's how it described his transition from high school teacher to financier.
By most accounts, he was something of a Robin Williams and Dead Poet Society type figure, wowing his high school classes with passionate mathematical riffs.
So impressed was one Wall Street father of a student that he said to Epstein point blank, what are you doing teaching math at Dalton?
You should be working on Wall Street.
Why don't you give my friend Ace Greenberg a call?
So.
What year did you say this was?
This is it's kind of unclear, but it's like 1975, 76 when this has happened.
Okay.
Yeah.
So Ace Greenberg was a senior partner at Bear Stearns, who you may remember from the whole, that time the economy collapsed.
Yeah, yeah.
They were...
Bad time, yeah, yeah.
Pretty big part of that.
Now, Greenberg was a legendary trader in his own right and has long made it clear that the, basically famous for picking out what he described as like hungry and brilliant guys.
So he liked finding like poor, smart people and then giving them jobs and trading because he figured that they do better than like rich kids, which is probably a good strategy.
And it worked out for Epstein.
In 1976, he joined the firm.
He started off as a junior assistant to the floor trader at the American Stock Exchange.
And according to most accounts, his ascent was rapid.
New York Magazine quoted former Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Kane as saying of Epstein, he was not your conventional broker, saying buy IBM or sell Xerox.
Given his mathematical background, we put him in our special products division, where he would advise our wealthier clients on the tax implications of their portfolios.
He would recommend certain tax-advantageous transactions.
He is a very smart guy and has become a very important client for the firm as well.
So, most coverage of Epstein's rise to power and wealth are vague about his time at Bear Stearns.
They just say he rose quickly and then left suddenly a couple of years later to found his own company.
Now, Vanity Fair published a much better article on Epstein in 2003, which did a more thorough job of investigating his backstory.
According to that reporting, his rise at Bear Stearns was literally the opposite of meteoric.
It looks like Epstein was forced out of the company as part of an insider trading scandal in March of 1981.
Several Italian and Swiss investors were found guilty, and the SEC questioned Epstein over the matter.
It's kind of unclear exactly how he's involved, but he resigned one day after the violation occurred.
So yeah, that's the real story of his time in Bear Stearns.
That's good.
I like when crimes sort of line up with my level of understanding them, where everyone is like, we're not exactly, we can't figure out what kind of crime you did, but it's bad and you have to go away now.
Yeah, he did.
We're all certain you're guilty of something with money.
Get out of here.
You did something you shouldn't have.
He had to pay a $2,500 fine.
And it's really unclear to me exactly what he did.
It's one of those things where I've read like three explanations of it.
And I'm like, okay, finance crime.
A lame finance crime.
Okay.
Got it.
Now, for years up until about 2005, the reporting on Epstein mostly focused on his utter brilliance as a financier.
That Vanity Fair article was titled The Talented Mr. Epstein.
The introduction to the New York magazine article was even more fawning.
So this is the introduction to Jeffrey Epstein, International Moneyman of Mystery.
He's pals with a pastel of Nobel Prize-winning scientists, CEOs like Leslie Wexler of Limited, socialite Gasain Maxwell, and even Donald Trump.
But it wasn't until he flew Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, and Chris Tucker to Africa on his private Boeing 727 that the world began to wonder who he is.
So do we need to just by association, do we need to look into Chris Tucker?
There's something we can do.
We might need to look into Chris Tucker.
We definitely need to look into Kevin Spacey.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's like, I know right now that that plane is full of mostly monsters and Chris Tucker.
And so I just, is poor Chris Tucker just some guy who got caught up with some bad people?
Or is he like, this is my crew.
This is we I ride a plane with my buddies and we all do the same terrible stuff.
See, that's one of the terrifying things of the Jeff Epstein story, because no matter who you are, someone you think is awesome has wound up in close proximity to him and it's impossible to know if they did something terrible.
Oh, that's not great.
No, it's really bad.
So no one really seems to know how Epstein went from the guy who got forced out of Bear Stearns for insider trading to the billionaire who flew Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker to Africa as part of a charity in 2002.
We don't really know how that happened.
It's kind of a mystery.
Epstein became famous starting in the 1990s as a man who would only work for rich people whose assets were worth more than a billion dollars.
So he basically jumped right from, or at least his claim is that he jumped right from, you know, Bear Stearns to, I only manage the finances of billionaires and like did that in the space of less than a decade.
And nobody really knows how.
So that's that's the basics of it.
When journalists would write articles about him during this period, they would interview people who would tell stories about unnamed plutocrats worth 500 million or 700 million who'd supposedly reached out to Epstein and gotten turned down for being two small beans.
When asked to...
And also, when you say he went from Bear Stearns to billionaires and no one knows how it happened, this is, I know you're a factual show.
I feel like I can say this.
There's a zero chance that it was for good reasons, right?
There's a zero chance it was for good reasons.
Zero chance that people are just like, he's just the sweetest.
He remembers my kid's birthday.
I kind of feel like that might be the case with anyone who manages the money of billionaires.
Yeah.
Like, I feel like.
No billionaires like, I love my tax guy because he's so fair.
I love my tax guy because he overthrew the government of that one country that I was using as a tax shelter.
He blew up the journalist who wrote the Panama Papers with a car bomb.
Now, when he was reached out to, like asked about how he had sort of turned into the guy who only works for billionaires and made that into a business, Epstein would say stuff like, quote, I was the only person crazy enough or arrogant enough or misplaced enough to make my limit a billion dollars or more.
So he would just claim it as like, I was so bold that it like impressed people and that's why they started giving me their business.
Which is again, it's remarkable how many journalists just ran with this story for like 20 years and were just like, I guess that's what happened.
He was set in the 90s to manage more than $15 billion in assets, which would mean he was taking in close to $100 million a year just in commissions.
He described his job as being like an architect, helping the very wealthy maintain the stability of their portfolio so they would never wind up not rich ever again.
Now, Epstein's claims about how he got to this point are that in 1982, after leaving Bear Stearns, he opened his own company, J. Epstein and Company.
And somehow, despite being new to the industry, he immediately amassed a stable of billionaire clients.
According to New York magazine, quote, there were no roadshows, no whiz-bang marketing demos, just this.
Jeff Epstein was open for business with those $1 billion plus.
I want people to understand the power, the responsibility, and the burden of their money, he said to a colleague at the time.
As a teacher at Dalton, he had witnessed firsthand the troubled attitudes of some of the poor little rich kids under his charge.
At Bayer, he had come to the realization that, counterintuitively, the more money you had, the more anxious you became.
For a middle-class kid from Brooklyn, it just didn't make sense.
Yeah, so podcast listeners can't tell because this is an audio format, but if you're listening at home, my dog is sitting in my lap, and he just did a huge jerk-off motion with his paw for a while at the sound of poor little rich kids and also the burden of lots of money.
The burden of lots of money.
Oh, what a great burden that would be.
The burden of going to the doctor regularly.
Yeah, let me check in with those guys.
You need some help with your burden?
You need someone to lighten that load for you?
I have some suggestions.
Now, the first journalist to actually do a not completely garbage job of writing about Jeffrey Epstein, where they just repeated all of his bullshit and talked about how nice his house was.
And we will talk about his house a little bit.
But the first journalist to actually dig into it was a reporter named Vicki Ward with Vanity Fair.
She actually dug into his finances and found evidence that, for one, Epstein worked with a ton of non-billionaire clients during the 1980s and 90s.
She found a 1989 deposition in which he testified under oath that 80% of his business was not helping billionaires, but helping people find money that had been stolen by fraudulent brokers and lawyers.
They also found a lawsuit against him in 1982, which said that he received $450,000 from a client worth $4.5 million to invest in oil and promptly lost all of it.
You may recognize $4.5 million as less than a billion dollars.
I do recognize that.
Thank you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know.
Math is nobody's strong suit on this podcast.
Yeah.
I run the numbers twice.
Now, Vanity Fair writer Vicki Ward interviewed some people who'd been friends with Epstein since the 1980s.
These people recalled that after his Bear Stearns period, rather than jumping right into billionaire money management, Epstein was a self-described bounty hunter recovering lost and stolen money for a variety of clients.
Money Laundering Schemes00:10:23
He had a license to carry a handgun in New York City, which is a really hard thing to do.
Like the hardest gun-related license to get in this country.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's cool.
You don't get a carry license in New York City unless you're really rich or the governor.
Okay.
Or the really rich governor that it currently, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Now, uh.
Can I just ask what the name of the article that was it, Vicki Lord?
Yeah, her article was the talented Mr. Epstein.
Oh, okay.
It was a play on the talented Mr. Richardson.
Right.
It's continuing the theme of late 90s movies about Jeff Epstein for some reason.
That was the only way to rate a title back then.
Yeah.
I'm looking forward to Epstein in Love, Finn Red Epstein in London.
Epstein 2 When Nature Calls.
Yeah, yeah.
There we go.
That's the story about that flight to Africa.
Bam.
Brought it around.
So it's clear that Epstein's rise to billionaire financier was not as smooth as he presents it.
It's almost impossible to unwrap exactly how Epstein got so rich and precisely what he did, but we do know that either in 1989 or 1986, he started up a friendship with Lex Wexler, the billionaire founder of Victoria's Secret, among other retail companies.
By the time people started writing about Epstein, he managed virtually all of Wexler's money.
Now, most coverage at this time focused on his connection to Wexler as an explanation for how Epstein rose to prominence.
Taken that way, his rise is the story of a brilliant and unorthodox funds manager who proved himself so invaluable to one billionaire that he soon became the go-to money guy of the incredibly rich.
But there is no hard evidence that this is the case either.
Even Epstein's friends at the time, including Tiffany and Company CEO Rosa Monckton, admitted that there was something strange about Jeffrey's background.
So this is what she told Vanity Fair: Quote, He's very enigmatic.
You think you know him, and then you peel off another ring of the onion skin, and there's something else extraordinary underneath.
He never reveals his hand.
He's a classic iceberg.
What you see is not what you get.
So can we talk about the mix?
This can't be an original thought.
When you peel back a layer of an onion, it's more onion.
It is more onion.
It's never a surprise.
It's the same thing.
It's never like you don't peel an onion and it's like there's seeds and fruit in here.
It's just more fucking onion.
Well, Daniel, sometimes you peel back an onion and you find an iceberg.
Okay, yes.
And then behind that iceberg is a different hand of poker.
Right.
Yeah.
This horse is just the tip of the onion.
I get it.
Part of why Epstein was able to remain so enigmatic may have been the fact that he threatened the journalists who wrote about him.
That is at least the allegation made in Vicki Ward's Vanity Fair article.
She notes that a reporter she talked to told her that they were threatened three times during the preparation of a piece.
The threats, quote, were delivered in a jocular tone, but the message was clear: There will be trouble for your family if I don't like the article.
I'm not really sure how you deliver that in a jocular tone.
Yeah.
A slap on the back and a, I'm going to kill your wife.
Your daughter's name's Susan, right?
Weird how I know that.
I'm not trusting.
Look at these pictures of her school.
People who view Epstein as a financial genius tend to say that he was made by Wexler.
Epstein, for his part, is too prideful to give any one person credit for his rise.
He claims he had other rich accounts that he managed before being put in charge of Wexler's fortune.
But Vanity Fair found another Epstein connection that suggests a somewhat less savory jumpstart to his fortune.
Stephen Jude Hoffenberg met Jeffrey Epstein in London at some point in the 1980s.
Hoffenberg was the head of the Towers Financial Corporation, which was, on paper, a collection agency that bought debts people owed to hospitals, banks, and other institutions.
In reality, the company was a gigantic Ponzi scheme.
Hoffenberg used the company funds to pay off early investors and buy himself mansions and homes as well as a small fleet of jet planes.
When Epstein and Hoffenberg met, the former had been running a small consulting company out of his apartment.
He'd just been ousted from Bear Stearns and, in Hoffenberg's words, was getting into trouble.
Hoffenberg hired Epstein on as a consultant.
At the time the Vanity Fair article was published, 2003, it was unclear exactly what Epstein did for Tower Financial.
But what is clear is that the SEC came down on the company hard.
Hoffenberg was charged with running a $450 million Ponzi scheme, one of the largest in American history, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
He has more recently claimed that Epstein was behind the entire Ponzi scheme and was, in fact, the architect of it, but somehow managed to escape prosecution.
But that's only in the last year or two.
Okay.
Seems like he made his money from a pyramid scheme.
Yeah.
Aponzi.
That's fine.
At a certain point, when you're dealing with lots and lots of money and people with no conscience, I can't even understand the crimes that they're doing anymore.
I just like this person took a lot of money from a lot of other people and lied to people.
And there were jets and planes and consulting.
And it was like, okay, yeah, money, money, money, money, crime, crime, crime.
That's fine.
I will never make enough money to either commit one of these schemes or be taken in by one of them.
So I feel I'm protected there, but it's just again, same thing with like Bernie Madoff, where I'm just dimly aware that he did a bad thing, but I can't like, if you put a gun to my head right now, it was like, give me a five-paragraph essay on Bernie Madoff's crimes.
And if this was all, he was just a guy who became a billionaire because he did some insider training and ran a Ponzi scheme and then lied about how he became a billionaire.
He wouldn't be interesting.
But the fact of the matter is that Epstein, there was something else going on in this entire period that may be even.
Are we going to get into this philanthropy now or what?
Yeah, yeah, we're talking philanthropy.
So we're going to talk about Jeffrey Epstein's sexual crimes and how they may be tied to the gigantic and possibly inexhaustible fortune that he still maintains to this day.
But first, it's an ad pivot, Dan.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Some of those.
Fuck all right.
Some of those tasty, tasty ads, which I can promise all our listeners are not Ponzi schemes.
Although I don't know what a Ponzi scheme is.
They could be.
Yeah, they could be.
That feels like a crazy thing to promise your listeners.
You're right.
Yep.
Like, I believe that you spent two weeks reading International Money Man of Mystery and doing lots of research for this episode.
I don't believe that you thoroughly vetted like a belt company that's going to advertise on the podcast.
Let's not attack the belt companies, Daniel.
No, I mean, I don't know what a Ponzi scheme is.
That's all I can say.
Oh boy, this ad pivot has gone off the rails, Dan.
Yeah.
Products!
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
It's financial literacy month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wild Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
Here at the Nick Dick and Paul Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the like the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Lesla proves that.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It's a good one.
I like that saying.
It's an actual Polish saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pippman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you could get your podcast.
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
Early 2000s Sex Crimes00:15:00
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
We're back.
We still don't know what a Ponzi scheme is or what a belt is because I have worn nothing but sweatpants for the last six months.
Sick.
That's true.
Yeah.
Sophie's shaking her head because she has not seen me in another pair of pants.
Every year or so, I find a pair of sweatpants that looks just enough like real pants that I feel like I could get away with wearing them every day.
And then I do.
Yeah.
They don't.
I know everyone knows I'm wearing pajamas, but.
Yeah, I don't think I've seen you in sweatpants.
I've seen you in pajama pants and I've seen like different weird pants.
You got a bunch of weird pants.
I do.
That I find alienating.
Yeah, eccentric pants.
I've had a number of those.
Yeah.
Well, we all go through stages in our lives.
Nope.
You had that whole sleeveless shirt period.
Yeah, it was hot.
It did give me the courage to go Sun's Out Guns out, so I thank you for that, Dan.
Now, let's talk about horrible sex crimes.
Jeff Epstein's sex crimes were not public knowledge until 2005, but he spent the entirety of the early 2000s and probably the 1990s as well committing them, maybe even further back.
We don't really know how far back his crimes go, but I think now is a prudent time to get into some detail about what exactly Jeff Epstein was up to.
The Miami Herald, which published a massive investigation at Epstein just this year, describes his activities as a sort of sexual pyramid scheme.
And I do know what a pyramid scheme is.
Okay, is that not a Ponzi scheme?
I don't think so, Dan, but I don't know.
I didn't do that research.
I know it's shady.
Now, Epstein had a team of helpers, primarily in Palm Springs, but all around the world.
Everywhere he had residences, which included New York City and New Mexico.
These helpers would find young women that they could bring back to one of Jeffrey's various mansions.
And then, well, here's a helpful summary of the scheme by the Washington Post.
Quote, Epstein, with the help from several female assistants, would recruit underage females to travel to his home in Palm Beach to engage in lewd conduct in exchange for money.
Some went there as many as 100 times or more.
Some of the women's conduct was limited to performing a topless or nude massage while Mr. Epstein masturbated himself.
For other women, the conduct escalated to full sexual intercourse.
Now, that's a decent high-level overview, but I want to correct one thing, which is that most of these people were not women.
They were girls.
The majority of them were under 18.
At least that's what it seems.
We don't have, you know, exact evidence, but most of the people that the police and the FBI later talked to were like between 12 and 16 when he started.
Jesus.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, I do think it's important that we bring in some of the human stories of the individual young girls who got caught up in this mess.
The story of Virginia Roberts is a good case study.
Like many of the literal children that Jeffrey Epstein targeted, she had a hard childhood.
At age 11, she'd been molested by a family friend.
By age 12, she was, by her own recollection, smoking weed and skipping school.
By age 14, she was living on the street.
Her family was shit, and she had very little support.
She wound up in the clutches of a 65-year-old sex trafficker named Ron Eppinger.
She was abused and pimped out for months until Eppinger was indicted in 2000.
Virginia traveled back to West Palm Beach and reconnected with her father, who worked as a maintenance man at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago Resort.
He got her a job as a locker room attendant at the spa.
That very summer, 16-year-old Virginia Roberts met Gilsaine Maxwell, a British socialite and heiress to one of Britain's great fortunes.
Gilsain happened to be a longtime friend of Jeffrey Epstein.
Gilsain offered Roberts the opportunity of a lifetime, get paid to learn to become a massage therapist at the home of a wealthy billionaire, Jeffrey Epstein.
That Vanity Fair article about Epstein, written the same year all of this happened, but way before his sexual crimes were public-knowledged, described the relationship between Epstein and Gilsaine Maxwell this way: quote: Epstein is known about town as a man who loves women, lots of them, mostly young.
Model types have been heard saying they are full of gratitude to Epstein for flying them around, and he is a familiar face to many of the Victoria's secret girls.
One young woman recalls being summoned by Gilsaine Maxwell to a concert at Epstein's townhouse, where the women seemed to outnumber the men by far.
These were not women you'd see at Upper Eastside dinners, the woman recalls.
Many seemed foreign and dressed a little bizarrely.
This same guest also attended a cocktail party thrown by Maxwell that Prince Andrew attended, which was filled, she says, with young Russian models.
Some of the guests were horrified, the woman says.
So that's what people knew before the sex crimes were common knowledge.
Jeff Epstein likes really young girls.
There's always a lot of young women at his parties.
Now, in terms of- It's a certain kind of money or status or whatever it is that people can be that public about.
Yeah, he's known for liking women, a lot of them young.
Yeah, a lot of them really young.
Weird.
Like the fact that he is fine with that, A, with that reputation existing.
Yeah.
And B, the people who are saying it, fine with saying it, just like broadcasting this common secret.
Like, I don't even understand people.
Is that it?
I don't understand rich people.
Like, I would not like to have a reputation.
Like, even like if they're like, take the young part out of it.
People were like, oh, Dan, I know.
Here's what he is known for loving women.
No, I'd rather not be known for that.
I'd much rather like Dan.
Oh, yeah, glasses.
Runs a lot.
Glasses and runs a lot.
You don't want to be known for like, yeah, every time I go over to his house, there's a bunch of different strange women in weird outfits hanging around.
Right.
Enough of a reputation that it's the first thing people think of about you is bad to me, but everyone there is fine with it.
I don't know.
And that's part of why this is like a bit of a leap of a conclusion on my part, but this is part of why I suspect all of this stuff, even though everything we have details on of his sex crimes dates back to the early 2000s.
I suspect it goes back to the 90s and probably the 80s, because that's everyone who talked to him in those periods of time or talked about him was like, yeah, he really likes his young ladies hanging around, which is like, okay, so this has been going on for a long time.
Yeah.
And we're, this is, the timeline on this is a little wonky, so we're switching around a little bit, but we're building to something weird here.
So.
Okay.
Cool.
Now, Virginia Roberts, again, 16 at that time.
16.
Yeah.
Started off giving Epstein massages, and those massages inevitably progressed to blowjobs and other sexual stuff that we're not going to cover in detail.
He raped her because the age of consent in Florida is 18.
So any sex that Jeffrey Epstein had with Virginia Roberts was, by definition, rape.
I just want to be very clear about that.
Epstein's pattern was remarkably consistent among the dozens and dozens of girls he abused.
According to the Miami Herald, quote, most of the girls said they arrived by car or taxi and entered the side door where they were led into a kitchen by a female staff assistant named Sarah Kellen, the report said.
A chef might prepare them a meal or offer them cereal.
The girls, most from local schools, would then ascend a staircase off of the kitchen and up to a master bedroom and bath.
They were met by Epstein, clad in a towel.
He would select a lotion from an array lined up on a table, then lie face down on a massage table, instruct the girl to strip partially or fully, and direct them to massage his feet and backside.
Then he would turn over and have them massage his chest, often instructing them to pinch his nipples while he masturbated, according to the police report.
Again, the youngest girls brought in on this were like 12.
So.
Jesus.
Yeah.
Christ.
Yeah.
Photos of the young girls were allegedly taken and displayed around Epstein's home.
At least one victim accused him of penetrating her with his penis after she explicitly said no.
He apologized afterwards and gave her $1,000.
So $200 if he just masturbated him, if he, like, not just statutorily raped you, but other type raped you raped you, he'd give you $1,000.
That's Epstein's price sheet.
Like many of his victims, after her first encounter with Epstein, Virginia was asked to help in essentially feeding more young girls into Epstein's well-oiled rape machine.
Virginia believes she eventually became one of his top recruiters.
Here's what she said later in a court affidavit.
Quote, Epstein and Maxwell also got girls for Epstein's friends and acquaintances.
Epstein specifically told me that the reason for him doing this was so that they would owe him.
They would be in his pocket and he would have something on them.
I understood him to mean that when someone was in his pocket, they owed him favors.
He, Epstein, would tell the girls, hey, I will give you a modeling contract if you go have sex with this man.
So you see what we're building to here a little bit?
Yeah, I'm starting to put the pieces together.
Yeah.
I know a lot of my role as a guest on your show is to is to ask questions and jump in with jokes.
Yeah.
Not really loving the setups.
Not liking the raw materials I'm getting here to spin into comedy gold, bro.
Yeah, it's more like I've given you comedy copper.
And we can keep the rust off of it.
When Virginia Roberts turned 19, she was officially too old for Jeffrey Epstein.
She asked him to fly her to Thailand so that she could take massage training classes and move on with her life.
Now, a man who was actually as smart as Epstein likes to think he is would probably have just given her some of his unlimited money to set this woman with incriminating information about him up in a comfortable new life.
But he only agreed to pay for her trip to Thailand if she'd agree to pick up a teenage Thai girl that he'd basically arranged to buy and import into the United States.
Yeah, Roberts did not do this.
She apparently met a guy while she was in Thailand.
They fell in love and ran away to Australia together.
She kept the paperwork that Epstein had given her, though, including instructions for how to bring this literal child into the United States so he could pass her around to his rich friends, which is, again, some of the mountain of evidence that was collected by the prosecutors when this finally got investigated.
Now, it's impossible, again, for us to know how much of this was going on in the late 80s or the 1990s during Epstein's rise to power and prominence.
But if you assume it goes back a long way, well, a lot of awful things Vanity Fair found that were just sort of baffling at the time make an awful lot of sense now.
Jeffrey Epstein was pimping out children to the rich and powerful.
If he didn't directly profit from that by charging them, it got him favors and access that were crucial to the building of his vast fortune.
Many of the lines from that Vanity Fair article and other articles written about Epstein in the early 2000s sound downright sinister with the knowledge that when they were written, he was actively importing teenagers from foreign countries and recruiting disadvantaged teenagers here in America, raping them himself, and then lending them out to his wealthy, powerful friends.
Quote from the Vanity Fair article.
Some of the businessmen who dine with him at his home include newspaper publisher Mort Zuckerman, banker Louis Ranieri, Revlon chairman Ronald Perlman, real estate tycoon Leon Black, former Microsoft executive Nathan Meyervold, Tom Pritzker of Hyatt Hotels, and real estate personality Donald Trump sometimes seem not all that clear.
The president?
The president?
Weird sex stuff that's probably illegal.
That guy who just fucked a flagland.
And I hate to say this, but I don't think that flag was 18, Dan.
Ah, damn it.
Yeah.
I wish he'd done it to a statue because then we could have had a good statutory rape, Joe.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Just another tragedy of this tragic tale.
It's sorry if I took the wind out of your sales if you were ramping up to something.
Can I ask a question now?
No, no.
Basically, people back then, I don't know, I'm trying not to get too conspiracy theory here because we just don't know that much that's solid before the early 2000s.
But we do know that for decades before it was public knowledge that he was a child rapist, everyone in the finance industry was baffled by how Jeffrey Epstein got his money.
Yeah, here's a quote from New York Magazine: Quote, My belief is that Jeff maintains some sort of money management firm, though you won't get a straight answer from him, says one well-known investor.
He once told me he had 300 people working for him, and I've also heard that he manages Rockefeller money, but one never knows.
It's like looking at the Wizard of Oz, there may be less there than meets the eye.
Or a giant child rape machine, which I think is what was actually there.
I think I can take comfort in the fact that no one will ever about me say we didn't know where he got his money from or what he spent it on because it was like in 2009, I could tell he got a bonus at work because he bought an iPad and that's it.
And then he paid his bills and got groceries.
Everyone can see where all of my money went in the tape-covered Toyota Prius that I drive to Hollywood to record this show.
Can I just ask a question?
Like, I don't know if there's been a study on this or if you have any kind of fringe theory.
The relationship between being rich and powerful and having disgusting sexual tastes.
Is that can you even guess any kind of connection for that?
Like, I don't want to say, oh, billionaires do this because it seems hard for me to buy that maybe Bill Gates is getting on a plane and trying to have sex with a 14-year-old child.
But if there's enough of them that Epstein knows that there is a business in specifically connecting rich people with children, I don't know.
Why does that market exist?
What is the relationship there?
I think for guys.
Speculate wildly.
Yeah, I mean, I think for a guy like Epstein, it's simple enough.
I think he's a predator.
And I think like whether or not he got rich, he would have preyed on people.
But I think maybe for maybe one reason why so many really rich people wind up doing this is because like, I think you could see it starting almost innocuously where just, or not innocuously, but without any sort of predatory behavior on their behalf, just because money and power are so like valuable in our society.
If someone has the ability to get you roles in Hollywood or someone has the ability to get you a job that can set you up for life, then maybe you'll sleep with that person and like not even sort of question it.
So they get used to that sort of thing and it kind of spirals out from there.
Like, oh, I just get whatever I want because I have all this money.
And that goes from like, what I want is having sex with these 20-year-old models to like, they get younger and younger and younger and you just stop like taking account of the ages and stuff.
You assume you're above.
Like, I don't know.
I could see it.
It's so confusing to me as someone who grew up lower middle class and has since gotten more money.
And like, I still don't even fly first class.
That even feels like an extravagance to me.
Wealth and Brain Changes00:04:12
Like the things that I would consider like, oh yeah, I have this amount of money.
So I deserve like a nice meal at a nice restaurant every once in a while.
I can't imagine by some strange twist of fate, we decide comedy is the most important thing in the world.
And then I become a billionaire 10 years from now.
Is a switch going to flip in my brain that like now that I have a billion dollars, you know, I've always wanted to try.
Like, like, how is it that so many billionaires want to have, want to get on a plane and have sex with children with their fucking psychopath predator friend Jeffrey?
Well, I'll say this, and I didn't prepare the information for this podcast, but it's something I've been researching for another project.
There is some scientific evidence on how both wealth and power affect the brain.
And it's been described as similar to a head injury.
So one of the things that happens when you have an elevated position of wealth and power is that you become separated from the consequences of your actions, which leads to an increase in impulsive behavior.
And again, like that increase in impulsive behavior has been compared by the scientists doing the neurological research to some of the things that happen when you have a head injury.
So that's probably part of it is that like you just like you and I have gotten lucky enough that we've gotten like book deals and stuff and jobs that paid us better than we expected to be paid, but we still didn't like fly first class because you look at that and it's like, well, that's $1,200.
I could buy a new laptop and I want that more than I want to be more comfortable for seven hours or whatever.
Someone who has billions of dollars, money's not a thing.
And so like that, it just sort of like, I think it just warps your perspective on everything over time, as does power.
And so like you don't, like, I'm going to guess a lot of these people, this is one of the things where like one of the many things where like the QAnon people and the Pedogate people get it wrong is they assume all these people want to fuck literal children.
I don't think that's it.
And from what I've heard, age never came up with the people that like the kid, the young women that like and the girls that Jeffrey was basically handing out to his friends.
They weren't even checking on the age.
They weren't saying, I want an underage girl.
He was just finding girls he found attractive and handing them off to his rich friends and nobody questioned what age they were because they were usually on his plane or on his island in international waters.
So why would they even ask?
Like, I think that's what it is more than anything is this like knowledge that you'll never be accountable for your actions, whatever they are.
And also because you're so rich and powerful, like nobody asks you.
They just bring you things, right?
Like that's kind of how it is.
It's like at the Oscars, you get a box of fucking iPads or whatever that you don't even give a shit about because it's like, well, it's $30,000 worth of free stuff because that's what everyone gets at the Oscars.
But like, we're all rich.
Nobody cares.
Like, yeah.
It's it's it's a different world.
And it's a world where it's easy to uh accidentally or maybe not accidentally.
Maybe a lot of these people were like, hey, Jeffrey, do you have any 12-year-olds?
I don't know.
I mean, I guess it was probably a mix of the two, depending on who you're talking about.
So hopefully Chris Tucker.
And they weren't all children.
So even if Chris Tucker had sex on Epstein's creepy plane, maybe it was with an adult trying to give Chris Tucker the benefit of the doubt here.
I am too, just because I don't.
Yeah.
I've heard nothing bad about him.
Yeah, exactly.
And that was a charity switch.
So maybe that one was one where he didn't do anything shady, but we will talk about it.
It could have been a case where he got there and did charity.
Yeah.
And was like, Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, why are you guys so disappointed?
We were here for charity.
What did you think was going to happen?
Really bumped.
The champagne was great.
Oh, speaking of champagne, Daniel O'Brien, it's time for an ad break.
And maybe that ad will be for champagne.
And I don't know.
I bet it's fucking Mario Lopez talking to you about weird stuff.
Mario Lopez with his dead eyes.
Can we say that, Sophie?
She's saying we can't talk about Mario Lopez's dead eyes.
Mario Lopez's lively, lust-filled heart.
Ads.
The Epstein Plane Mystery00:14:39
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pitches, it's like, what?
Today, now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate, Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
Here at the Nick Dick and Pole show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the like the president?
You think it's the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Leslie cruise that.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
Wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It's a good one.
I like that saying.
It is an actual Polish saying, it is an actual Polish saying.
Better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you're watching the latest season of the Real House Wise of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
Marcia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man.
They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew.
Pinky has financial issues.
I like the bougie style of Housewives Show.
I think it looks like it's going to be interesting.
On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real House Wise franchise, the drama, the alliances, Emma T. Everybody's talking about as an executive producer in reality television.
I'm not just watching it.
I understand the game.
As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this.
At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment.
To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
We're back and we're talking about how Doritos hasn't wised up yet.
Yeah, I can't understand it.
I mean, I just do it, Doritos.
What the fuck?
I know.
They're rich and wealth warps your perceptions.
How out of touch with the real world the mighty are.
You know, mighty like Doritos.
Back before he got rich, John Dorito probably would have recognized what an opportunity this podcast is.
Oh my God.
Back when we used to call him Johnny D?
Johnny D. Johnny D from up the street.
Holy shit, that guy was down for whatever.
He'd just show up at punk shows with a homemade bag of Doritos and hand them out.
Yeah.
I remember seeing him at Chateau Marmont, and I was like, Johnny D from up the street.
And he was like, it's John now.
I was like, holy shit.
Yeah, that's when the times changed.
Now he won't even give this humble podcast a couple small mid-sized sedans worth of advertising dollars.
Heartbreaking.
Fools.
Fools.
Okay.
So I do want to read one other quote from one of Jeffrey Epstein's famous friends from that New York magazine article back before anyone knew he was a child molester, or at least back before the public knew he was a child molester.
Right.
Quote, if you talk to Donald Trump, a different Epstein emerges.
I've known Jeff for 15 years.
Terrific guy.
Trump booms from a speakerphone.
He's a lot of fun to be with.
It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.
No doubt about it.
Jeffrey enjoys his social life.
The president.
The president of a whole ass country, too.
Yeah, of a whole ass country, talking at a time when we know for a fact Jeff Epstein was essentially pimping out teenagers.
Yeah.
And forgive me again.
When was that interview conducted?
2002.
2002.
Okay.
So even that is strange to me that anyone listening to him when he's like, oh, rumor has it.
He likes women as much as I do and some of them young that no one jumps in to be like, what do you mean by you?
What do you mean, some of them young?
Why would you specify that?
Instead of me just passively writing down what you're saying and be like, he boomed from a speakerphone, just like a single follow-up question of like, how young?
Yeah.
Given our society's focus for like men on being like smooth and good with women, I could see someone being like, oh yeah, Jeffrey, he loves the ladies.
But then like saying not just he loves the ladies, but and they're really young.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just googling like 2002 movies to see what we were talking about or thinking about at the time to see if there was any like teachable moments.
Yeah.
Oh, it's 2002.
Blank movie came out.
And we all learned that it's bad for old men to creep on young women.
That was the message of the first Spider-Man movie, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
More or less.
I don't know.
Donald Trump is not the only president of the United States who spent a lot of time with Jeffrey Epstein.
Bill Clinton spent at least as much time and logged even more flights with Epstein on his private plane, which some have dubbed the Lolita Express.
Epstein's...
Oh, hold on.
Googling to find out if there's another Lolita who's famous, then maybe it was Nick.
Nope, just the one.
Just the one famous Lolita.
Just the one famous Lolita.
Yeah, it's not based on anything.
Just a fun nickname.
Now, Epstein's pilot's logbooks are public domain now, thanks to some of the many, many civil lawsuits around his crimes.
Gawker put together a pretty good write-up over how Slick Willie fits into all of this.
They note that Clinton rode on Epstein's plane at least 11 times between 2002 and 2003.
Okay.
What are the on-paper reasons for riding on Epstein's plane?
Oh.
Is it always going somewhere for charity or is it or it's sure not, Dan?
It's sure not.
Like, what is he telling people?
I'm getting on this plane again.
What is his out-loud reason?
He's not giving an out-loud reason.
So here's what we have.
Quote, in January 2002, for instance, Clinton and his aide Doug Band and Clinton's Secret Service detail are listed on a flight from Japan to Hong Kong with Epstein, Maxwell, Kellen, and two women described only as Janice and Jessica.
One month later, records show Clinton hopped a ride from Miami to Westchester on a flight that included Epstein, Maxwell, Kellen, and a woman described only as one female.
Okay.
Yep.
Now, I should...
Like, no one asked, like, hey, Bill, how was Japan?
What did you get into there?
Any scraps?
I found...
He just flies around on this plane and doesn't explain himself.
He flies around on this plane with Jeffrey Epstein, the two people who are named in multiple court documents as procuring women for Jeff Epstein and the people that he pimped those women out to, or girls out to, sorry, and an unnamed woman.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Seems pretty bad.
Seems pretty bad.
It's like a real bummer, Evans.
Bill Clinton might have done something really bad.
Now, that 2002 New York magazine article we've been quoting from was written because, again, you know, Epstein had just made the news for flying Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, Chris Tucker, and Gail Smith, who wound up on Obama's National Security Council to Africa.
Now, on that 2002 flight, Epstein's guests were all accompanied by Chantae Davis.
She's one of the 27 women listed in Epstein's black book, which also got out through a court case under the heading Massage California.
He had 160 names listed as massage artists in six different locations.
Many of those women were underage.
But for Chris Tucker's sake, Shantae was not.
She was 23 at the time of the flight.
So it is possible that even if some prostitution went down on that flight, it was not necessarily anything terrible.
On that specific flight, when contacted, Shantae did not have much to say.
So it's possible that Chris Tucker, Gail, and Kevin Spacey were just using this plane because Epstein offered it very publicly to help out a charity.
It's possible that if they did have any sex, it was with, you know, an adult prostitute.
But when it comes to the case of Bill Clinton, it's a lot harder to exonerate him because 11 times is a lot of times to fly on Jeffrey Epstein's plane with unnamed women.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's, I mean, I don't even really think we need to navigate Bill Clinton.
He sucks.
Did you do a Bill Clinton episode yet?
No, no, but he sucks.
You should do a Bill Clinton episode.
We'll get to it.
There's a long list.
Now, the one upside to the whole horrible Jeffrey Epstein saga is that he might actually be something we can unite the country behind, because no matter who you are and no matter how you identify politically, someone you admire rode on Jeffrey Epstein's plane and may have raped a trafficked child on it.
Other Epstein-frequent flyers include Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer who regularly defends Trump on TV, defended Epstein in court, and is accused by name of having sex with an underage child prostitute.
Naomi Campbell.
I mean, if you were trying to prove that one of my heroes rode on this plane and you started with Alan Dershowitz?
He was just an A-name, Dan.
Give me a second.
Okay.
Naomi Campbell, the former supermodel and businesswoman.
Former Treasury Secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers.
Steven Pinker, the Canadian popular psychologist and author of such best-selling books as Enlightenment Now and How the Mind Works, and Stephen Hawking.
What?
Yeah, Stephen Hawking.
See, it turns out that Jeffrey Epstein had what the Telegraph called an island of sin.
It's an island he owns in the Virgin Islands, Little St. James, unofficially known to his friends as Little St. Jeff.
Hawking actually traveled there in 2006.
Worse name.
Yeah, it's a terrible name.
And the women who have accused him of sexual trafficking say that a lot of the sexual trafficking happened on that island and that they were passed around on that island.
And Hawking traveled there in 2006, a year after the first allegations against Epstein were made public.
Epstein apparently paid to modify a ship so the 61-year-old physicist could take part in a cruise.
Hawking is pictured on the island with several young but presumably adult women enjoying a barbecue.
So, again, it's really hard to say.
Maybe nothing bad went down with Hawking.
It was really common for Epstein to hang out with physicists.
He put tens of millions of dollars into research projects around the world.
He also hung out and flew with luminaries in the field like Murray Gelman.
He was close to Martin Novak, a mathematical biologist and professor at Harvard University.
Epstein put $20 million into Harvard University, much of it to support Novak's work.
Vanity Fair talked to both of these guys back in 2003.
Quote, when these men describe Epstein, they talk about the energy and curiosity, as well as a love for theoretical physics that they don't ordinarily find in laymen.
Gelman rather sweetly mentions that there are always pretty ladies around when he goes to dinner at Shea Epstein.
So I feel like if Hawking didn't, a lot of famous physicists probably had sex with underage people in Epstein's.
Yeah, and even if Hawking didn't and had no interest in it.
Yeah.
If a couple of punks like you and me know these stories about Epstein, Stephen Hawking probably did.
It was probably in the air at that point, and it's very easy to say or fucking to type, no, I don't want to go on your plane.
You don't have to go on the Lolita Express to Little St. Jeff.
Yeah.
Like it's very easy to not do that.
It sounds so damn you say it that way.
I'm going to do it again tomorrow.
You're not going to get on the Lolita Express to Little St. Jeff tomorrow.
Uh-huh.
Every single day I make that choice.
That's good to know.
That's good to know.
Now, one of the things that's like most common in all of his pre-sex offender interviews is that Epstein would brag about his contributions to science, or at least the contributions of his money to science.
Most of the reporting during the pre-sexual crime allegations period tended to portray him as an eccentric, mysterious genius.
Here's another excerpt from that New York magazine article.
Quote, but it is his covet of scientists that inspires Epstein's true rapture.
Epstein spends $20 million a year on them, encouraging them to engage in whatever kind of cutting-edge research might attract their fancy.
They are, of course, quite lavish in their praise in return.
Gerald Edelman won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1972 and now presides over the Neurosciences Institute at Liyala.
Jeff is so extraordinary in his ability to pick up on quantitative relations, says Edelman.
He came to see us recently.
He is concerned with this basic question.
Is it true that the brain is not a computer?
He is very quick.
I found that really funny for some reason.
Now, as smart as he may be, and that may be pretty smart, Jeffrey Epstein is not as smart as he thinks he is.
It seems like after who knows how many years of going after impoverished girls, foreigners, and previously trafficked kids, Epstein got lazy.
Children of the Night00:05:50
He started targeting more and more girls from local high schools in Palm Beach, Florida.
In 2004, 16-year-old Michelle Lakata still had braces.
She was brought into Jeffrey Epstein's mansion to give him a massage in exchange for a couple of hundred dollars.
He immediately asked her to strip, of course.
According to the Miami Herald, quote, Lakata had never been naked in front of anyone else before, but she did what he said.
Epstein put out a timer, said it for 30 minutes, and started fondling her while he masturbated.
She later recalled, I kept looking at the timer because I didn't want to have this mental image of what he was doing.
He kept trying to put his fingers inside me and told me to pinch his nipples.
He was mostly saying, just do that, harder, harder, and do this.
Eventually, Epstein ejaculated, got up, and went to the shower.
Lakada was sent away, but Epstein's people continued to trawl her high school, Royal Palm Beach High.
Before long, students were talking about, quote, a creepy old guy named Jeffrey who was paying between $200 and $300 apiece for massages that inevitably turned sexual.
Not long after her afternoon with Epstein, the Palm Beach police wound up at Lakata's front door.
They'd started an investigation into Epstein that year, 2005, when a 14-year-old girl, prompted by her parents, alleged that Epstein had molested her in his mansion.
This is what led to the trial that ended with Epstein branded a sex offender and sentenced to more than a year of prison.
The story of that trial, of Epstein's sentence, and of everything that came next, is arguably even more horrifying than what we've discussed today.
But you, the listener, will have to wait until Thursday to hear that in part two of the Epstein saga, Jeffrey Epstein, Pimp to the Powerful.
But first, it's the end of the first episode.
So you got any pluggables you're going to plug?
Oh, yeah.
The only thing that I want to plug relevant to my interests and also this episode is this organization called Children of the Night that I used to volunteer with back in Los Angeles.
It's a privately funded nonprofit organization dedicated to rescuing children and young people from prostitution worldwide.
You can find them at childrenofthenight.org.
If you have some money to kick their way, they will always take it.
Or if you yourself are in danger, they have a 24-hour hotline and you can reach out to them and they will find you and they will save you from your situation if you happen to find yourself in this particular situation.
And if you're not in this situation and you don't have any extra money to spend, but you do happen to live in the Los Angeles area, you could volunteer with Children of the Night through a company called LA Works and just show up there once a week to meet these amazing, wonderful, brilliant survivors and just play games, hear their stories, do arts and crafts, whatever you want.
It's a great organization.
You should do it.
We should support them.
You should.
We all should.
Children of the Night, that's a great plug, Dan.
Yeah.
I pride myself on my plugsmanship, but that was the finest plug of the episode by far.
Oh, thank you.
Well, I feel weird saying you should look up our t-shirts online.
But if you go to TeePublic and look up Behind the Bastards, you can also buy a shirt.
But you should donate your shirt money to Children of the Night.
That's just...
Sorry, Sophie.
All right.
I've been Robert Evans.
This has been Behind the Bastards.
You can find us on social media at BastardsPod, Twitter, and Instagram.
You can find all the sources for this episode on BehindTheBastards.com.
That's all the plugs I got for the end of this episode.
Check back in Thursday where we will have even more horrifying things to tell you.
I love About 40% of you.
You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, the guy was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
How much away, Wanda, right now?
I'm about 130.
I'm at 183.
We should race.
No, I want to leave here with my original hips.
On the podcast, The Match Up with Aaliyah, I pair prominent female athletes with unexpected guests.
On a recent episode, I sat down with undisputed boxing champ Clarissa Shields and comedian Wanda Sykes to talk about Wanda's new movie, Undercard, The Art of Trash Talk, and What It Really Means to Be Ladylike.
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Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire at 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's playing.
2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm watching.
Wild, wild bad.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, but listen to Las Culturalistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, gorgeous.
It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditional Ila.
My days of filling up cups at Sir may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
Life on the other side of the hill is giving grown-up vibes, but over here on my podcast, Untraditional Ila, I'm still that Lala you either love or love to hate.