Richard Henriques, a former High Court judge, has just concluded his review of Scotland Yard’s handling of the allegations made by Carl Beech, who was recently sentenced to 18 years for falsely accusing a number of senior figures of abusing children.
That’s not to suggest paedophile rings don’t exist, but you need to be careful about the way such allegations can be made to appear instantly substantial by the manner and speed of their promulgation.
It went big on ‘Pizzagate’, the bogus 2016 conspiracy theory spread by white supremacists proposing that the Democratic Party was concealing child abuse by senior officials. The internet believes in the existence of VIP paedophile rings. Who were the ‘potential co-conspirators’ granted immunity under the Florida plea bargain? All the named parties have denied the allegations, but the question of ‘Jeffrey’s friends’ is now at the heart of the case. One of his alleged victims, Virginia Giuffre, said she was told to keep quiet at that time by one of Epstein’s friends, but she didn’t: she filed a motion not only naming Epstein as her abuser but claiming she’d also been told to have sex with his friends Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz. Twelve years ago, in an operation lasting 14 months – Operation Leap Year – the FBI found evidence of 34 underage girls solicited by Epstein, but the billionaire’s lawyers, led by Alan Dershowitz, argued that ‘Mr Epstein never targeted minors.’ According to a recent New Yorker profile of Dershowitz, the deal he successfully struck with prosecutors in Miami, which allowed Epstein to avoid federal charges if he admitted to two counts of soliciting, one of them with a minor, had an additional ‘provision granting immunity to “any potential co-conspirators” and … was made without informing Epstein’s accusers, a violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act’. Evidence has been piling up that Epstein was a man who used his money to enslave girls and rape them or traffic them to his friends. The agents opened the door with a crowbar and, according to federal prosecutors who spoke to the New York Times, ‘seized photographs of nude underage girls’. In the entrance hall, rows of prosthetic eyeballs are fixed to the wall. With a stone satyr over the fifteen-foot front door and forty rooms over seven floors, the decor was of the Gothic Quagmire school: according to the FBI agents who raided it at the beginning of July, it contains among other weirdnesses a photo-montage of Epstein standing in a prison surrounded by warders and barbed wire, and a life-sized doll hanging from a chandelier. ‘It was the sort of apartment the mere thought of which ignites flames of greed and covetousness under people all over New York and, for that matter, all over the world,’ Wolfe wrote.Įpstein’s house on East 71st Street, which was said to be the biggest of its kind in the city, was as creepy as its owner. Wolfe’s ‘Master of the Universe’ – who could be Jeffrey Epstein – soon brings ignominy to his marble halls, but he never commits the basic crime of not knowing how wonderful his Upper East Side spread is. A mahogany elevator went to the sitting room of his 14th-floor apartment, much as it does to Sherman McCoy’s in The Bonfire of the Vanities. T om Wolfe lived round the corner from the Metropolitan Museum, at 21 East 79th Street, between Fifth and Madison.
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