Anand Giridharadas

I started looking at them.

I didn't really have an agenda.

I thought maybe I would write something for my newsletter, the Inc.,

And I thought maybe, you know, maybe there would be something interesting about it.

I start reading them.

And I was watching the news at the time and watching how other people, I always, you know, how are other people telling the story?

What are they finding in it?

And what everybody was kind of focused on, the media was focused on, understandably, was a kind of hunt for a very specific smoking gun, which is like, is Donald Trump a child rapist?

And do these emails reveal that?

Now, I understand as much as anybody why that is an important question.

In a reporting question, I understand based on Donald Trump's character that it's not a question that is, you know, spurious or pointless to look at.

But as I started reading the emails, it seemed to me this is something those of us in the media often do.

We often kind of fixate on like one narrative or one storyline and then everybody is like hurting and competing to answer that.

And the more I read the emails, I was like, I don't think these emails are about that.

it was missing a lot of what I was just reading in the emails.

And so I decided, you know what, I'm going to read all of these emails, which I didn't even know how long it would take me.

It ended up taking me five or six days.

And I'm telling you, like, eight hours a day, like, reading Jeffrey Epstein's emails to and from.

And I didn't know what I was going to do with it at first.

I just started making notes and trying to find patterns as I do.