Epstein Narratology

Merry Christmas and happy holidays

Not finding a credit for this widespread image. Can’t reach the T-shirt company, Picturestees, that was selling it at Halloween.

Everybody loves a good Christmas ghost story, and I don't mean the Dickens of A Christmas Carol, but something a lot darker, the kind of ghost story that offers a real chill without a compensatory sweetness. This one is maybe altogerther too creepy, in fact, especially in the sense that you can easily imagine it's true, though that's unlikely. It's about that postcard that showed up in the Epstein document dump yesterday, purportedly addressed by Jeffrey Epstein shortly before his death to the notorious child molester Larry Nassar, the team doctor of the women's national gymnastics team, who assaulted the young athletes under his care for years before he was finally stopped:

Dear L.N.

As you know by now, I have taken the “short route” home. Good luck! We shared one thing … our love and caring for young ladies and the hope they’d reach their full potential.

Our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to “grab snatch,” whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system.

Life is unfair.

Yours

J. Epstein

Some time after the documents went on line, Department of Justice issued a statement on this one, to the effect that it was conducting an inquiry about its authenticity, about which there were some reasonable doubts: the card had been mailed from Virginia, not from the jail in New York where Epstein was being held, gave an incorrect name for the jail in the return address (it also had the wrong prison for Nassar, who thus never received it), and was processed three days after Epstein died on August 10, 2019.

Also, the authenticity had come into question before: another document in the dump tells how the card was returned to the jail (September 25), and made its way to the FBI investigation of Epstein’s death; nearly a year later, they sent the letter to the lab with a request for a handwriting analysis. The request was posted yesterday, but DOJ hasn’t posted the analysis itself, or the samples of Epstein’s handwriting that had been sent with it. (Indeed, it’s extremely hard to find an example of Epstein’s handwriting; at least, I haven’t succeeded in doing it.)

A couple of hours after that, though, DOJ did post a notice that the card was a fake, for the reasons cited, and because “the writing does not appear to match Jeffrey Epstein’s.”

That’s when I started getting suspicious. They had to look at the analysis, presumably, to determine that; why didn’t they post it? Unless, of course, they were lying, as if Pamela Jo Bondi’s Justice Department would ever do something like that!

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Could it be that Epstein had really written the thing after all? You could explain the anomalies of the mailing by supposing he gave it to one of his visitors, in an envelope (”There’s a postcard in here, and if anything happens to me I need you to put it in the mail,” and the visitor was in Virginia when the news of Epstein’s death came out.

Why would he do such a thing? Why would Larry Nassar need to know his opinion of Donald Trump? I think the first thing would be that it wasn’t actually intended for Nassar at all, but for the thing that ultimately happened to it, bypassing the jailkeepers and getting it into the hands of the federal authorities with whom Epstein was said to have worked as some kind of informant, according to Alex Acosta when he was being quizzed on the infamous Epstein “sweetheart deal” by the Senate over his nomination to be Trump’s secretary of labor, and corroborated in an FBI document obtained by the magazine RadarOnline:

“On 9/11/08, case agent advised writer that Epstein is currently being prosecuted by the State of Florida and is complying with all conditions of his plea with the State of Florida. Epstein has also provided information to the FBI as agreed upon. Case agent advised that no federal prosecution will occur in this matter as long as Epstein continues to uphold his agreement with the State of Florida...”

The aim being, presumably, to finger Trump as a criminal just like him, in spite of his exalted status (this was 2019, and Christopher Wray’s FBI, not KA$H Patel’s, and Epstein might have imagined that it could lead to some action, perhaps anticipating Biden’s 2020 victory) among people with whom he had some kind of trust relationship. For revenge and from spite over how the fool he had patronized and brought into high society had gotten away with it while his own life was entirely over, as he suggests in the card, with that pseudo-Nabokovian word play on grabbing snatch and snatching grub, and perhaps most of all resentment that Trump had failed to rescue him, with his pardon power or however; the obsession with Trump that marks his interviews with Michael Wolff and the emails of his last years, as we now understand, because he was now “our president”.

The style of that little missive is so weird, but it reminds me of something; not Epstein’s slobby emails, but the weird poem, in the form of a dialogue between Trump and Epstein, from the “birthday book” (”We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.” “Yes we do, come to think of it”), in its archness and opacity, not good writing, but consciously pretentious: I never believed Trump wrote that, it was too fancy for him—he did do the crude Sharpie drawing and his signature—but I don’t see why Epstein couldn’t have had a hand in it.

He was in a complex state of mind at the end; despondent and sometimes suicidal—he did try to hang himself with a bedsheet once, injuring his neck—but cunning and in some ways imaginative, working to persuade the psychologists that he was fine, and too much of a “coward” about pain to take his life; the night he died, he persuaded the jailkeepers to let him call his mother (who had been dead for some years; in fact he called his new girlfriend, a dentist). Then he took his life, probably, though who can be sure?

Also, his jail visitors were mostly lawyers but also his brother Mark, who now claims that Jeffrey was murdered on Trump’s orders because he was about to “name names”—could he be the one who mailed the card, under the impression it was saying he expected to be murdered and naming the most important name right there? And definitely carrying out his brother’s last wish either way?

A real visit from a ghost, in any case, in this reappearance, carrying out his plan from beyond the grave. Probably not true, but too good piece of narratology to not print. Se non è vero, è molto ben trovato, if you know what I mean, and if you don’t there’s a link.