The release of documents related to the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has proceeded like a bankruptcy – first very slow, and then very fast; 3m items were dropped by the US Justice Department last Friday.
It’s interesting how many figures in public life have maintained they barely knew Epstein at all, since his arrest and death by suicide in 2019. It’s just about plausible from a business associate, I guess; you can imagine those relationships being pretty thin, emotionally speaking, revolving as they were around money.
But can you imagine having lunch, multiple times, with someone you barely know? Would you extend an open invitation to your house, in a chatty email referring to an apparently metaphorical harem, to someone you’d only met in a group setting “such as a charity tennis event”, which is what Richard Branson maintains? I don’t know how happy I’d be, sitting in my dressing gown with someone who I barely knew, as Peter Mandelson did; I guess, if I’d recently travelled on their private plane, that might have been an opportunity to deepen the acquaintanceship.
The strategy for the names contained within these files must be to keep their heads down and hope that someone more famous, or with a more significant role in government, or whose behaviour was more egregious, takes all the heat. In the UK, that’s currently working for everyone, except for the Andrew formerly known as Prince; his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson; and Mandelson, who announced at the weekend that he’d resigned his membership of the Labour party. He did not want to “cause further embarrassment”, he said, which gives rise to the question: how would it be possible for this to be any more embarrassing?
The sheer amount Mandelson can’t remember is astronomical. He can’t put his finger on the date, time or circumstance of his standing in a T-shirt and his Y-fronts, consulting what looks like an iPad (not trying to get all forensic, just saying it’s unlikely to be the 90s), alongside a woman whose face has been redacted. He has no “record or recollection” of payments totalling £55,000 from Epstein in the early 00s, and nothing to add to his 2009 email reminding the unaccountably wealthy man that a £10,000 payment to Mandelson’s now husband, Reinaldo Avila da Silva, should be framed as a loan to avoid declaration as a gift. “Like everyone else, I learned the actual truth about him after his death,” Mandelson told the BBC recently. In fact, that is unlike everyone else, who knew that in 2008 Epstein had pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution.
It is my duty to remind you that being pictured or mentioned in the Epstein files is not an indicator of any wrongdoing – but also, stepping outside that duty, we’re allowed to say that this stuff stinks. A nurse in the NHS isn’t allowed to take a gift worth more than a box of chocolates from a patient, lest public services be vulnerable to corruption. So how does it not absolutely stink, for the then business secretary of the United Kingdom to go to a convicted American criminal for a loan, which he would have had no problem securing from a high street bank?
A photo of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, on all fours over a woman who could be any age (her head is out of shot) but doesn’t look his age, put it that way, absolutely stinks. An email from Sarah Ferguson, saying she needs £20,000 or her landlord will go to the newspapers – in the nauseating semi-euphemistic, semi-chummy, semi-entitled language of the indigent posh, “any brainwaves?” – stinks.
These cash amounts wouldn’t have meant anything to a man worth $578m when he died. Maybe Epstein distributed them out of a surfeit of human generosity, or maybe he thought they engendered relationships that would be valuable to him should his reputation ever be at stake. The bargain-bucket price tag on some consciences is depressing. And everyone, everywhere, still denies “wrongdoing”, but it would be fascinating to hear which bit of this they think is right.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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