Nicholas Confessore

Right.

Or if they arguably did, some of those people might have been hard to prosecute.

Yeah.

You know, I want to separate here clearly.

Like, when I'm reading these files, I see lots of evidence of Epstein's crimes, his trafficking over the years.

But let's take this other bucket, people who were not directly involved in that but had some social relationship with him, perhaps at a time when they should have known better or might have questioned why they were associating with somebody who had been convicted of soliciting a minor and, in fact, are now admitting in many cases, I shouldn't have done that.

And so they're guilty, perhaps, of what we can call a social crime.

We don't really have any agreed-on framework for that.

We don't have, in this country anymore, much of a shared moral framework, a shared understanding for what deserves shame.

And what we're left with, from my point of view, is a kind of tribal revenge politics where you get in trouble for this stuff if your tribe gets mad about it.

But if the other tribe is mad about it, you don't get in trouble.

Yeah.

I find it remarkable, Rachel.

There are emails I've read that

at least outwardly, seem to be for men who are not victims.

And of course, it's hard to know.

But the redactions don't make any sense to me in a lot of cases.

There's obviously a lot of victims' names and details that are being redacted, and that's appropriate.

Of course, in a lot of cases, when you keep digging, you can find a second copy of the same email without the name redacted.

But as you were saying, so much is opaque.