A PARTIAL EXPOSÉ AT BEST
Netflix’s Epstein docuseries honours victims but fails to provide new insights
Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich
Debuts Wednesday, Netflix
The key requirement, it seems, to fully comprehending the sordid tale of Jeffrey Epstein is the ability to remain interested even when it becomes apparent the whole story cannot be told.
Some find fuel in the ongoing outrage of it, on behalf of Epstein’s many alleged victims — young women and teenage girls who have said they were lured into an abusive existence of criminal sexual acts and prostitution.
Others tend to be more intrigued by the boldface names who were, to varying degrees, caught in Epstein’s orbit, including Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and billionaire clothing magnate Les Wexner. Then there are the slipshod circumstances surrounding Epstein’s apparent suicide in August while he was in custody awaiting federal charges of sex trafficking minors.
In Lisa Bryant’s four-part Netflix docuseries, Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, urgency gives way to long stretches of recapping, becoming less-than-riveting stuff.
Nauseating, sure. But in the three episodes I saw for review,
Filthy Rich often plays like a longer, fancier episode of NBC’s Dateline, in which facts that are mostly already known are recounted by victims, investigators, attorneys and journalists, and then arranged in the most logical manner, with an emphasis on the sex crimes and the courage of victims who are speaking out.
It’s possible fresh findings await in that fourth hour. If so, the price of admission is to endure the first three. Has Bryant perhaps located the still-hiding Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and associate, who victims say helped procure young girls and women for him? Then by all means, reveal it.
The series starts off in the early 2000s, when Vanity Fair reporter Vicky Ward was assigned to write a profile of a ubiquitous billionaire investor — Epstein, who kept showing up to all the right parties with all the right people, yet nobody really knew much about him.
As Ward recounts, her reporting on Epstein’s background quickly led to a rumour that he had acted inappropriately with an employee, Maria Farmer, and her younger sister, Annie. An FBI investigation into that in the 1990s had fizzled, but Ward pressed further and tracked down the sisters. Ward’s findings, which were indicative of other allegations yet to come, were edited out of the article.
This becomes Filthy Rich’s recurring theme — how one oddly captivating man lied his way into influence, amassed a dubious fortune and thereby reaped hideous degrees of privilege. Epstein’s galling slipperiness becomes most apparent in the 2008 quashing, by then U.S. District Attorney (and President Trump’s former Labor Secretary) Alexander Acosta, of charges against him for the sex trafficking of minors.
The evidence that prosectors were building in that case, thoroughly recounted here, would probably land anyone else a long prison sentence. Thanks to a high-profile legal team that included Alan Dershowitz, Epstein emerged mostly unscathed, with a bizarre plea deal that granted him and others in his circle unprecedented immunity from future charges. His jail sentence was remarkably light and included the right to leave the jail six days a week.
The only taste we get of Epstein’s demeanour in this and ensuing legal scrapes comes mainly from videotaped depositions for civil suits, in the early 2010s. What we see of him is curiously banal — no hint of the Svengali-like figure others describe.
Bryant and her team briefly trace this phenomenon back to Epstein’s beginnings, first as a teacher in the 1970s at Manhattan’s
elite Dalton School (where he lied about his education credentials), to his unlikely hiring at investment powerhouse Bear Stearns. “One of my important mistakes in my career,” says Michael Tennenbaum, a Bear Stearns executive who hired Epstein — and kept him on even after he found out Epstein’s resumé was bogus.
Filthy Rich loses interest in Epstein’s origins as both a psychopath and a sex offender, and it seems hamstrung (perhaps legally so) in its glancing attempts to define the extent of Epstein’s reach with the VIPs to whom he’s been linked. It assures us that he became essential to his powerful friends, but was it really all just about providing girls to wealthy pervs? Is that what explains the special treatment — perhaps all the way to a death that made it possible for him, at age 66, to escape earthly punishment? Or is it something worse?
While the docuseries makes a solid case that Epstein was gross, there’s a missed opportunity to further probe this story’s most disturbing and lasting aspect: How and why such a person emerges, fails upward for decades, criminally exploits others along the way and continually thrives, while always seeming to elude those who not only seek justice, but also the whole truth.
Without that sort of information, how would we recognize the next Jeffrey Epstein?