Nicholas Confessore

I've spent months now thinking about and reporting on the network of power that allowed Jeffrey Epstein to operate.

It was vast.

Many men and women were culpable.

But the case of Casey Wasserman focuses us on this question.

How do we decide when somebody is part of that system of power?

Is it anyone who had dinner with him after his first arrest?

Is it anybody who ever met him ever?

How about someone who spent time with him before the public even knew about his crimes?

These are the questions that we're all trying to assess.

Look, there's a vacuum at the heart of this whole affair, which is that the principal person responsible for all of it has been dead for almost seven years.

Right.

He's gone.

He can't explain anything.

He can't connect any dots.

He can't be tried.

We cannot put him through the system of justice that we normally have to deal with this kind of thing.

And what we're left with is a scandal that is like light arriving from a distant star years after the fact.

The after images of his life and his network and his connections in the past.

And a lot of the people who are implicated in some way in his system of power and abuse are

did not do anything illegal.