The Epstein Question

The Gateway Pundit has been breaking bombshell reports about Jeffrey Epstein ever since the FBI and DOJ offered their own bombshell report a few days ago. The result is that much of America, myself included, have been thinking of Mr. Epstein, how he died, and how he lived.

Here are the central questions, and the now official answers:

1. Did Epstein commit suicide? The DOJ and FBI say yes.

2. Did Epstein, a convicted serial abuser of underage girls, offer those girls to his powerful friends, making them culpable in his crimes? The official answer is unclear on this point. According to Axios, which published the official memo, the FBI/DOJ did not “uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

3. Did Epstein blackmail prominent individuals? The FBI/DOJ say that “There was no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.”

All of these questions are at odds with widely held expectations among the public, including among the very officials who released the above-referenced memo: Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. The result is a shocking clash within each person who trusted Patel and Bongino to uncover the “truth”, but do not believe what has been uncovered is the truth. Who do you trust, your much admired heroes, or your lying eyes?

I fall into the category of MAGA-supporting people who has long assumed Epstein was murdered and that his fancy lifestyle was subsidized, not by blackmail, but by governments using him as a honey trap to exert leverage over wealthy and powerful individuals. Because I am aware of this bias, and also because I don’t want to change my positive opinion of Patel and Bongino without due consideration, I decided to take a fresh look at the competing claims.

First off, blackmail doesn’t make sense to me as a source of income for Epstein. At least, not for his level of wealth. Blackmail can earn what seems like significant money to people living on a middle class salary, but it isn’t going to generate billions of dollars. Long before it hit that level, blackmail is more likely to generate a mob hit than payment.

Second, a “client list” makes no sense either, even if Epstein was a blackmailer. This is because such a list would be both highly incriminating and unnecessary. The blackmail material, in the form of knowledge, documents or tapes, is all the blackmailer would need.

If Epstein did anything approximating blackmail or extortion, I imagine it would work something like this:

• Invite target to isolated location

• Compromise target with harem of barely underage girls

• Record the interaction on tape

• In conversation, without ever mentioning compromising tape or knowledge, engage target in conversation to either extract useful information or to persuade the target into a course of action. This method would assume the target realizes that Epstein has knowledge that could cause harm, or is appreciative of the favors he has received and will comply out of simple graciousness.

Further, it seems to me that if Epstein ever did disclose the tapes to the targets, his own life would immediately be in danger. This is because the people in his circle would be capable of dealing with the danger, regardless of cost or risk. On this basis, I think it would be much less risky for Epstein to keep the existence of such tapes secret, assuming they exist.

I have read non-fiction books about Israeli and US spies, the fees they received from each respective government, and how they were treated by their handlers. In all these books, I have never read of anyone being handled like Epstein, nor given the kind of money he had. For example, take a look at the excellent book Swordfish, by David McClintick. Most often, the lifetime earnings from these types of activities, at best, are in the low millions, but more often amount to an average wage of between $70,000-$100,000 a year.

Epstein’s wealth is purportedly due to his skills as an investor. Unlike blackmail or spying, financial investments are precisely the type of activity most commonly associated with the billionaire status Epstein enjoyed.

The most likely scenario from my revised perspective is this:
Epstein earned his money in the way he said he did, through investments. Maybe some were shady, maybe not, but the majority of his money likely came from this. The amount he could have earned as a blackmailer, regardless of the wealth of the victim, would be minimal compared to what he already had, and insufficient to take the serious risk of blackmail.

Epstein did take advantage of underage girls, and enlisted Ghislaine Maxwell to procure victims for him. He was rightly prosecuted for this. Unfortunately for the victims, they were paid by Epstein, making them vulnerable to an aggressive defense that would paint them as complicit in their own abuse.

These girls did accompany Epstein and at least some of his guests to his various properties. It is possible, even likely, that some of these guests took advantage of the girls as well. On these occasions, not that it was right, but I can picture them thinking this was normal in the context of the loose standards of Hollywood and high society. If this happened, they committed at least one of the same crimes Epstein did (statutory rape) and should be prosecuted. However, a prosecutor might balk because they were paid.

Last, I see no reason to believe that every person who visited the island was making out with underage girls. He had staff flown in, and at least some celebrities were there to entertain other guests.

I have never seen a “wild Hollywood party” with my own eyes, but when I lived there, was told about a few by firsthand witnesses. At one of those parties, if the reports I heard were accurate, anything Epstein was accused of and more occurs. Not only that, but in full view of all the other guests. Meaning, if someone wanted to compromise people like that, they wouldn’t need Epstein. All they’d need is an invite to one of those show business parties.

Epstein’s Death

The coroner’s report tells us that Epstein committed suicide by hanging himself with a bed sheet tied to a bunk in his cell. It notes that his hyoid (a bone in the neck) and thyroid cartilage were fractured, both of which are more common in stranglings than suicide.

As a former university lecturer who taught anatomy to undergraduate students, I have some knowledge of this. The hyoid bone is fairly well-protected by both the thyroid cartilage and the mandible. That is, in a hanging, the thyroid is more likely to be caught by the rope (or bed sheet) than the hyoid. In a frontal strangling, the attacker’s thumbs are quite likely going to dig into the hyoid and cause a fracture.

The key to this are the words “unlikely” and “uncommon”. It turns out that for men over 60, hyoid fractures are as common as one in every four hangings. Epstein was 66. This means he had about about a 25% chance of breaking his hyoid and thyroid in a hanging. This is even true of a short fall hanging like his, vs. a long fall hanging, such as with a trapdoor, which would increase the likelihood even more. These percentages are not so low as to make the circumstances as reported suspicious. If hyoid fractures happened only once every hundred hangings, I would be much more suspicious. One in four isn’t enough.

The missing minute in the security tape sounds suspicious at first, but the timing of that minute is unusual. It is precisely the full minute before midnight. This suggests some kind of automated process that resets at or just before midnight every night. After questions were raised, Attorney General Pam Bondi explained that the missing minute is the product of such a process. It seems dumb to me that every camera in the entire facility is missing the minute before midnight every day, but that is what she said.

On the face of it, this is a serious defect in the surveillance system. Any inmate aware of this could easily exploit it by paying attention to the time. However, if it is true, and it can be shown that other cameras on other nights have the same defect, it would be difficult to argue that this was a lapse unique to the death of Epstein.

There are other “anomalies” like the ones mentioned earlier, each of which suggests that Epstein was murdered because he had the equivalent of troves of extortive material on high profile victims. All of these have alternative explanations that I can’t dismiss easily.

Epstein’s death is unusual, but it isn’t impossible or even spectacularly unlikely. After looking at everything, I can see a plausible set of reasons for the recent FBI/DOJ memo. I can even see an innocent explanation for Bondi’s claim to have the list “on her desk” and that there were “tens of thousands of hours of child porn” that required review. The “list” she clarified as names of people associated with Epstein, but not necessarily “clients” in the sense of being blackmail victims. The videos apparently do exist, as the memo states, but are downloaded from the Internet, apparently by Epstein, and do not include images of any of the known victims or any of Epstein’s high profile guests.

I’m not sure I’m persuaded that the memo is accurate or truthful, but I can see a number of reasons to think that it is. One of those is that Patel and Bongino were hell bent for leather to unravel that story to reveal how Epstein was murdered and to prosecute his purported clients. For them to attack the problem from that position and come up with this answer takes a lot of courage. They had to know it would be immediately rejected, particularly by their followers.

Of course, if they were lying, it would also take a lot of courage, but for now, I’m willing to give them them the benefit of the doubt until this story is fleshed out with more information.