Anand Giridharadas

It is people like these folks that we are, these are the people deciding upstream.

how you live, what your pay is like, what kind of companies, the quality and timber of the companies you end up working for, what kind of pension you have or don't have, what kind of prices you pay or not, whether you get foreclosed on or not because their bank bets against itself in the run-up to a financial crisis and imperils the whole system.

You are just trying to swim through, and you don't normally get a glimpse of

of how these people talk amongst themselves.

This is a glimpse.

And it turns out to not be particularly brilliant, not be particularly insightful.

They don't know a bunch of stuff that you don't know.

They're literally gliding from jokes about how one of them used to be a pedophile to advice about taking an attorney general job to her requesting a Hermes Apple Watch band as a gift from Epstein.

This is what they're doing as you struggle to just eke out your life.

I want to read you a quote from Virginia Giuffre's book, Nobody's Girl, that gets at this in a really powerful way.

She talks about—she makes an observation—

And this is in the really early days when she's, I think, 15 or 16.

And she is first forced into sex by Epstein, with Epstein, and Julian Maxwell themselves.

And then he starts to, you know, force her to have sex with other men.

And she makes an observation about these other men.

And she writes...

My impression of many of these men is that they didn't know how to pursue women.

Awkward and socially immature, it was as if their big brains were missing the ability to interact with other people.

I don't think this is true about Epstein himself.

I think it is true about some of these other guys, and it's absolutely at the heart of this appeal.