Anand Giridharadas

You see it with a lot of these guys, whether they were involved in sexual activity that Epstein arranged or not, or in the case of Larry Summers, just reaching out to Epstein for dating advice.

You reach out to a convicted pedophile for dating advice about how to sleep with a young Chinese economist as a married man.

I guess because in Larry Summers' mind, Epstein is a guy who knows a lot about sex or something.

It's not a category.

that a lot of these guys are very smart in the area that they're smart in.

I think as Virginia Giuffre wrote, not very deft maybe in other areas and didn't want to have to be deft in those areas.

I think in a lot of that stratospheric world, whether you're a powerful academic or a super rich person, you don't want resistance.

You don't want pushback, right?

These are guys who when they have...

some idea for something they want to do at their university, or some, if they're very rich, some place they want to go, they're not standing in line at the airport.

They're not dealing with meetings and committees.

They're acting on the world.

And I think this extended, as Virginia Giuffre wrote, to their encounters with women.

They didn't want...

adult, sentient, conscious, complex, full women who could talk back to them, who might have thoughts, might have opinions that they would share with them, might have the self-confidence to be another person in the room.

What they seemed drawn to, whether it was consensual or in some cases rape, whether it was underage or overage, they seemed drawn to women who, to quote Virginia Giuffre again, Epstein liked to tell his friends that women were merely a life support system for a vagina.

women whose personhood had been either taken away or was limited through the fear they were living in.

And I think it is, again, revealing about the men to whom this was appealing.

Yeah.

For folks who haven't spent time adjacent to any of these worlds, you might think that these people live in a kind of Great Gatsby fantasy.