Anand Giridharadas

They looked away at financial crises, sometimes some of them helped cause.

They looked away at people dying in a bogus war in Iraq that some of them helped sell.

They looked away at the pain and suffering of climate disasters.

that some of them helped minimize or profit from.

And so when he was convicted and made a plea deal and became a convicted sex offender and tried to return to society after that, he needed a group of people to kind of hoist himself back into the good graces of mankind.

And Jeffrey Epstein, perhaps with the kind of same skills that allowed him to be a predatory grooming figure to a bunch of

young girls and women.

Jeffrey Epstein seized upon a power elite, an American power elite, what Ro Khanna, the congressman from California, has called an Epstein class.

That was perfectly suited to rehabilitate him.

He chose well.

He chose insightfully.

These people are good at nothing if not disregarding American pain.

And a lot of the women, it's really important to pay attention to a lot of these survivors, Virginia Giuffre and others, who have said, don't just let this be a story about sex and trafficking.

They have said this.

This is really a story about power at the highest levels, about money, about impunity.

It shrinks the story, actually.

to make it what a relatively small number of men in this network might have done in the sexual realm and in the abuse realm and in the trafficking realm.

The real context around this, as revealed by these emails, is a group of people who simply don't care about you.

about me, about people outside of their elite network, whose loyalty, as you said, is to each other.

And this is a group of people.