Setting aside all political intrigue and implications… Just what did Jeffrey Epstein do? I understand that he had minors perform sex acts and that he paid them for those acts. I don’t mean to trivialize that at all, but that is not an unusual crime. There are lots of people sitting in jail for that. What makes Epstein different? Was he also running a brothel of minor girls and providing them to wealthy people at a profit? Was this a money-making enterprise for him?
At the very least, he pimped out at least one minor (Virginia Giuffre) to at least one wealthy person (the Andrew Formerly Known as Prince). So human trafficking.
Epstein likely didn’t do much of anything different than thousands of other pimps, if you’re willing to set aside “the political intrigue and implications.”
“Aside from that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”
It could be the size of his whole operation that makes it so awful.
One is terrible enough. But “many” just exacerbates.
And the power players he was accommodating.
I don’t think it was just about money. Having provided the women and girls to rich and powerful men leaves them in debt to him.
So, he just provided underage children for rich men to rape. What’s the big deal with that? Lot’s of human trafficking pimps do that. I mean, they were rich, and they were men. Don’t they deserve a little fun times? (sarcasm, in case it’s not obvious)
Clearly the public interest here is all the powerful people, some pretty disreputable and others seemingly solid citizens, who were his clientele.
Thousands of pedophiles have done their worst. Some elevated it from personal assault on innocents to a business intent on ensnaring the rich and famous in a web of intrigue and sleaze. No surprise Epstein is a tabloid disaster case for a tabloids-come-to-life era.
For sheer audacity and scale, Epstein takes a lot to top.
IANARPUGTWMIOTGF
(I am not a rich person providing underage girl to wealthy men in order to get favors)
but it was access to the movers and shakers (is this term even used anymore) that provided the possiblities of getting other deals and money. Providing parties and minor girls is the obscene equivelent of taking clients out for golf, something that millions of business people do. You don’t charge for pimping out the girls, you get money from access to them.
It’s not that hard to understand what he was guilty of but I suspect what you are really asking is why has he become so notorious.
And the answer to that lies in him being wealthy and having wealthy celebrity friends (one of whom is POTUS) meaning that its all far higher profile than a criminal enterprise involving pimping underage girls would otherwise be. It has caught the public attention and imagination.
The Titanic wasn’t an outstanding marine casualty by almost any objective metric but it’s notorious for reasons that relate to publicity at the time, who was on board etc.
And one of the people on this particular “Titanic” seems to be the current President of the United States.
He had been convicted and served time for sexual abuse and child prostitution.
Then in 2019, busted for child sex trafficking between NY and Florida. As a second/third offender, he’d be facing a good long time in jail. Perhaps he’d cut a deal if he named names? Who knows. They locked him up in the worst shitty jail cell in Manhattan, on suicide watch until he was taken off suicide watch.
Trump’s DOJ released footage of him that “proved” he committed suicide, yet omitted 2 1/2 minutes during which his neck somehow got caught in a sheet and he fell.
Someone(s) wanted him dead, not necessarily just Trump or Andrew. Someone whose name you should not read or hear on FOX, and have not.
Agree with this. Any street corner pimp doing the same thing with the same underage girls, with a bunch of suburban dudes, wouldn’t attract as much attention. It’s not so much what he did (sadly) as much as who was involved (and how hard those people are working to hide it all).
He was an international sex trafficker in underaged girls for years and years, many from Eastern Europe, who black mailed and extorted many rich and famous men. He was a convicted pedophile. His partner in crime Ghislane Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sex trafficking of the same girls.
His first sentence stunk to high heaven. After being convicted and in jail, somehow he was allowed to leave to his private office during the day.
This wasn’t a pretend pedophile ring operating out of a pizza parlor basement run by Hillary Clinton and the Jewish cabal that operates space lasers to flip voting machine switches.
I saw some article where Alex Acosta explained what happened to that sweetheart deal Acosta gave Epstein in 2007. The local Florida police department had him dead to rights with dozens of local high school girls from the poor side of town that he enticed with offers of payment for massage, then assaulted them when they were alone. Some he coerced into recruiting others. (Good Netflix documentary on this)
The Federal prosecutors took over the case from the local DA, and then cut an amazing deal where he plead guilty to 2 minor charges and got day release. Epstein would later tell high society friends who asked about it he’d picked up a girl in a bar who lied about her age.
Acosta says he relied on another attorney in his office who arranged the deal, who told him the case was weak and some of the girls were unreliable witnesses or did not want to talk. It later was reported this attorney was friends with Epstein and had even been on a ski trip with him. Keep in mind, one of Epstein’s powers was collecting a lot of friends in various places who could do him favours.
A much earlier report about Acosta said he (Acosta) reportedly had received phone calls from Washington VIP(s) telling him to go easy on Epstein, and hinting at connections to 3-letter agencies. (There’s also suggestions that Maxwell’s father was a useful friend of Mossad)
Certainly banking record indicate a lot of transactions to Russia and assorted countries in that area, presumably for trafficked girls. Reports from banks about excessive large cash transactions - another red flag - appear to have been ignored.
The batch of emails just released indicate some very highly placed connections, such as intteractions with wealthy Emirates and such - Epstein apparently had a photo of himself with the Saudi crown prince on his desk. He was active in charity circles that got him close to Bill Gates and Bill and Hillary Clinton among others.
Another point was that he apparently had cameras everywhere in his mansions and on his island, and his NYC neighbour, Howard Lutnick, matter-of-fact stated a few weeks ago in an interview that Epstein made much of his riches from blackmail.
So yes, he did the same as many others, but it seems a lot of high society were involved one way or another.
It was the vast cross-border scale of his operation that set him apart. Any pimp can network sex workers in their own town, but Epstein was luring, ensnaring, and transporting his victims across state and international boundaries on a regular basis. He wasn’t just a pimp, he was a predatory trafficker of underage victims at an industrial level.
…. goddamn. 
It’s been years since we had a good Board Buzzphrase.
That name’s been all over the internet for a couple weeks now.
But it is clever and deserves to be kept alive.
This may not relate to OP’s question, but Epstein had HUGE unexplained wealth.
With no special knowledge or talent he became a big “hedge fund” player:
Yet this incompetent trader, exposed as a Ponzi-type criminal, continued to attract investors! Mysterious?
Epstein had recording devices installed in the bedrooms where his friends partied with girls. He’s never been charged with blackmail (or AFAIK with pimping for money) but his biography is at least … suspicious.
Adding to the mysteries (and “conspiracy theories”) is the bio of Ghislaine’s father, who died in suspicious circumstances (Ghislaine said "“He did not commit suicide. That was just not consistent with his character. I think he was murdered”) and was certainly a Mossad asset.
TLDR: How did Epstein get so rich, anyway? (Not from Ghislaine presumably, given huge liens against her father’s estate.)
ETA: The quotes are from Wikipedia. Can someone point me to a tutorial on tags for this website? The tagging seems very “sensitive.”
There’s this, for his initial payday (possibly under the heading “what would you do for a buck”):
Epstein then became a money manager for billionaires including Les Wexner, founder and CEO of L Brands, and Apollo Global Management Chairman Leon Black. Black paid Epstein $158 million for tax and estate planning services, according to the Senate Finance Committee.
An article once related how annoyed executives at Wener’s companies suggested Epstein had an “intimate” relationship with Wexner as the explanation why he got so rich off him. The notorious NYC mansion valued at up to $500M was transferred from Wexner to Epstein for… $0.
…Wexner said in an email to employees at the time that he regretted he ever “crossed paths” with Epstein. “When Mr. Epstein was my personal money manager, he was involved in many aspects of my financial life,” the email stated. “But let me assure you that I was NEVER aware of the illegal activity charged in the indictment.”
So extremely large “consulting” fees for indeterminate work.