This is from Adam Davidson.
I spent two years working on the Jeffrey Epstein podcast, Broken. I became close with many of his victims and learned a lot of stuff that–for annoying legal reasons–we can’t publish.
That experience has fundamentally reshaped how I see the world.
TL;DR: I knew that rich and powerful men can get away with a lot. I didn’t realize just how much they can get away with and just how much the entire system–courts, journalism, prosecutors–works inadvertently and deliberately, to reinforce their impunity.
I still want to believe that truth and basic moral decency are potent in our society.
But I do find that an increasingly hard to justify position.
I think we all know that, say, Bills Gates and Clinton probably were up to no good.
At the very best, they knowingly spent time with and casted their halo on a man they knew was a serial rapist of children. (Though hard to believe it ended there).
Yet they are given heroic treatment every week in the media, paying no price.
I can’t look at Johnny Depp, the Queen’s Jubillee, etc etc etc without thinking: wow, it’s good to be a rich and powerful white guy.
I know, I know that a lot of you knew all this and told us all this and we (definitely including me) didn’t listen.
It’s embarrassing that I was in my late 40s before I fully took it all in.
More than embarrassing, it’s shameful.
I am sorry.
the one, meager, thing I can do is continue to bear witness and hope that repeating my realizations over and over makes it easier for others like me–white dude journalists, I guess–to see what is obvious to so many others.
The easiest lesson is this:
Jeffrey Epstein is not some outlier, some freak who is now dead and best forgotten. He represents something essential in all of our systems of authority–law, courts, higher education, nonprofits, media, etc–that is there right now, today!
When I think of the unbelievably brave women, like Virginia Giuffre and Marijke Chartouni and so many others who were dismissed, slut-shamed, etc., while cowards and evildoers were lauded, I feel like something deep is broken in the world I live in.
I say all this a few weeks before Ghislaine Maxwell is sentenced and the world will likely put aside the Epstein story forever, some weird set of crimes that two awful people committed.
The bad guys won. They pulled it off.
They raped children or sat by and watched others do so.
They used their elite connections and access to power.
The weird thing is we all know what they did and we don’t seem to care.