THEODORE DALRYMPLE ON JEFFREY EPSTEIN’S WEB:

My guess about the late Mr. Epstein’s taste for orgies is that it was only partially sexual in origin. After all, a man in his situation could have paid for any amount of sex, of any kind, in private. What he really enjoyed (I surmise) is corrupting others—and not just others, but prominent and powerful others. He enjoyed being, or playing, Mephistopheles, quite apart from any sexual gratification he may have had on the way.

He was born into a modest family and pursued no glorious academic career. Clearly he was of high intelligence and very ambitious. One might have thought that his achievement of great riches (by whatever means obtained or accumulated) would have assuaged any feelings of inferiority that he felt vis-à-vis those who had succeeded via family connection or the conventional academic route, but it is a curious thing about great success from humble beginnings that it does not always, or perhaps even generally, extinguish the flames of resentment, but rather fans them. In these circumstances, to prove that the great ones whose ranks the parvenu has joined are actually no better than he—that underneath their polished exterior and behind their inherited or academic distinction there is still a person of crude and basic appetites—is a joy and a relief. To implicate them in his own depravity gives him a certain power over them: the power of equal standing. Never again will they be able to consider themselves his superior. His apparent generosity toward them is in reality no such thing; it is, rather, the establishment of the relationship of a blackmailer to his victim, of a spider to a fly. They are caught in his web.

As Lee Smith wrote in October of 2017, when Harvey Weinstein became a household name, “You know the old joke about Washington: That it’s Hollywood for ugly people…But it turns out that the joke works in the opposite direction: Hollywood is for ugly people, too. That was Harvey Weinstein’s essential insight, and how he managed to combine the worlds of politics, entertainment, and media. They’re all repulsive—and I know they’re disgusting or else they wouldn’t be courting, of all people, me.”