Fair play to Bill Gates’s ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, a woman who fronted up to appear on a podcast this week while so many of the men who feature in the latest Epstein files drop found that their diaries had them scheduled to stay hiding under their rocks. Melinda was asked about Jeffrey Epstein, obviously, and executed a very graceful drive-by. “Whatever questions remain there of what I don’t – can’t – even begin to know all of it, those questions are for those people, and for even my ex-husband. They need to answer to those things, not me. And I am so happy to be away from all the muck that was there.” Oof. Yet she also said, more generally: “I think we’re having a reckoning as a society, right?”
Cards on the table, I don’t think we’re having one at all. Look at the headlines, or what’s dominating all the news bulletins. We’re talking about anything but the things that most need to be reckoned with. In the UK, we’re talking round the clock about Peter Mandelson, the one guy in this we at least know wasn’t making sexually abusive use of Epstein’s trafficked women and girls. Even if he did offer Epstein image rehab advice, which, as discussed here in depth on Tuesday, was a foray into the moral abyss. (Again.) But the frenzied and remorseless focus on political fallout – and not the male-on-female debasement that is the entire heart of this story, and always has been – is weird, isn’t it? I had a mirthless laugh at the New Statesman’s cover this week, which characterised the Mandelson affair as “the scandal of the century”. Guys, it’s not even the biggest scandal of the scandal.
