The Bad People’s Club

Knowing a bad person doesn’t make you a bad person.

Not every bad person shows up wearing a “Eat Sleep Rape Repeat” T-shirt. Some bad people are very good at concealing their turpitude. Some day you might be genuinely surprised to find out someone you know is a bad person; it happens all the time. You might one day find yourself in front of cameras, speaking into microphones: “Gee, he seemed like a nice, normal guy. He kept to himself mostly.”

More commonly, you might be forced, by professional or familial obligations, to associate with a bad person. You don’t refuse to work on a project with Joel because you think Joel is padding his expense account or stealing his colleagues’ lunches from the office refrigerator. You understand Uncle Fred is going to be at Thanksgiving dinner and you make the active choice not to tell him he’s a creepy lech who shouldn’t be allowed around the teenage nieces he’s always trying to cajole onto his lap.

You are a grownup. You can compartmentalize. You can take the nieces aside and brief them on Uncle Fred (though they already know). You can be around bad people without getting hurt or contaminated by their badness.

I’m sure a lot of people had no idea about Jeffrey Epstein, didn’t know he was a bad guy. I’m sure a lot of other people did know—though they may not have known how bad—and decided they could live with his badness because hey, it was good for business.

And I’m sure that there are still others who sought him out specifically because of his especial kind of badness. I’m sure that some of them were into the same sort of badness that he was into.

Jeffrey Epstein was a pimp and a rapist who was involved in the grooming and trafficking of young girls. Maybe some of his fancy friends didn’t know. I bet a lot more of them didn’t care, but that’s only my opinion. I don’t know and neither do you.

So we must always bear in mind that knowing a bad person doesn’t make you a bad person. Accepting a ride on a bad person’s airplane doesn’t make you a bad person. Visiting a bad person’s private island doesn’t make you a bad person.

Exploiting another person for your own pleasure makes you a bad person. Sexually abusing another person makes you a bad person. Countenancing such behavior makes you a bad person.

But the only reason we care about Jeffrey Epstein’s case is because he was rich and powerful and had fancy friends. His crimes are as banal as they are ugly. What fascinates us is the Bond villain aspect, his private island, his rich, politically connected and royal associates—the way the story seems to confirm the paranoid notion of a secret cabal of untouchable billionaires who run the world for their corrupt amusement; the oft-expressed idea that there is a kind of Bad People’s Club with access to secret knowledge running the game.

This probably isn’t true.

Also probably untrue is the theory that Epstein and his girlfriend-cum-madam Ghislaine Maxwell kept a detailed “clients list.” That’s not how pimps do things.

Names have been named because a judge in Florida has ordered the unsealing of documents that were previously filed under seal (to protect the privacy of could-be innocent people) in a civil lawsuit between Maxwell and Virginia Giuffre, an alleged victim of Epstein’s sex trafficking ring. Note we have to say “alleged” here; the reasons are complicated.

Giuffre is one of dozens of women who sued Epstein, accusing him of sexually abusing them when they were underage. Giuffre says soon after she turned 17 she was lured into a job as a spa attendant at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club to work for Epstein as a “masseuse”—a job that involved performing sexual acts.

She claimed that while she was working for Epstein she was pressured into having sex with his friends, including Britain’s Prince Andrew, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell and billionaire Glenn Dubin, among others. (All of these men deny her allegations; Britain’s Royal Family reportedly paid Giuffre about $16 million to settle her lawsuit against Prince Andrew in 2022.)

Maxwell called Giuffre a liar. So in 2015, Giuffre sued her. That case was settled in 2017, and while we don’t know the terms of that settlement, we know Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for her part in the sex trafficking ring.

The Miami Herald sued to unseal the documents in the case, on the grounds the public has a superseding interest in knowing what’s been alleged about Epstein, Maxwell and their rich and powerful friends. A judge agreed. So now more than 100 names have been released; eventually the number could be twice that.

Included are the names of many of Epstein’s accusers, investigators and alleged victims, as well as people with only tangential connections to the case. But a lot of the names belong to Epstein’s fancy friends, influential and well-known men and women who allegedly accepted an invitation from Epstein to travel on his jet and visit his mansions in Palm Beach and the Virgin Islands, where they were introduced to underage girls.

Maybe some or even most of these men who flew with Epstein were unaware that he was a pimp and a rapist. (You will probably want to believe that about some of the names that have come out: Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Michael Jackson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, Stephen Hawking and George Lucas were named in the documents. So were Cate Blanchett, Cameron Diaz, Chris Tucker and Bruce Willis.)

Maybe some of them suspected Epstein of being a pimp and a rapist but didn’t allow themselves to believe it because they didn’t want to do what they knew they had to do, which was (at the very least) distance themselves from their perk-providing pal. On the other hand, I’m sure some of them enjoyed the company of the young women who always seemed to appear whenever funboy Jeff was ready to party.

What everyone will say is that they would like to see the whole mess untangled, with the innocent and naive sorted and the bad people called to account. This almost certainly will not happen, in part because there are epistemological limits. Just because we justifiably believe something that many of the fancy friends of Jeff Epstein knew exactly what he was offering does not mean that we can prove that any particular individual behaved badly.

Knowing a bad person doesn’t make you a bad person.

Keep telling yourself that.