The release last week of 20,000 pages of emails between Jeffrey Epstein and a high-profile collection of friends and associates offered a revealing look at the network of status and influence the late sex offender had at his disposal. For some readers — Noam Chomsky fanboys, for instance — they were a chance to seek assurance that their fave wasn’t tied to Epstein in that way. For others, they confirmed that people already known to be sleazy and unethical (journalist Michael Wolff, former U.S. Treasury Secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers) were, indeed, sleazy and unethical.
But for one young New York Times writer, the tranche of emails was a wistful reminder that, in the good old days, nobody would ever have spilled about any of it.
“Epstein emails reveal a lost New York: The disgraced financier’s recently released documents are steeped in a clubby world that is all but gone” was the headline for a piece in the Styles section of The New York Times. Though the headline was later changed to “Epstein emails reveal a bygone elite,” the crux of the piece was no less a yearning remembrance of a time when associating with someone known for preying on adolescent girls was barely remarkable, much less potentially reputation-damaging. Actually commenting on that predation? Gauche.
The people who are most vocal about pining for the past tend to be white conservatives whose beliefs in a “better” time comport with that time’s social, sexual and economic inequities.
If that wasn’t the intent of its author, you wouldn’t know it by the florid prose. To wit: “The emails are like a portal back to a lost Manhattan power scene. Mr. Epstein’s inbox was larded with boldface names — many of them now faded or forgotten — that once meant everything to status-obsessed New Yorkers . . . As the emails stretch through the years, they show how that protected realm vanished into the mists of time, pulled under by the rising forces of the internet and the #MeToo movement.”
In another moony passage, the piece reminisces about parties and restaurants frequented by the power-media set, recalling the social triumph of getting a table at Italian eatery Rao’s and noting that Epstein was invited to the 25th anniversary party for The New York Observer: “The guest list included Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein. You’ve probably heard about what happened with them.”
The author of these words wasn’t part of this rarefied scene at the time, most likely because he was in elementary school at the time. Nevertheless, Shawn McCreesh seems to hanker not just for the status and intrigue of publishing’s pre-internet era but for the access to a world that conferred an aura of privileged untouchability on those in its highest echelons. (Though honestly, the former assistant to Maureen Dowd and “lead writer” for Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign doesn’t seem to lack that.)
Nostalgia for a time you’ve never known, dubbed “anemoia” by the “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,” is often a feeling that one was born in the wrong era. The people who are most vocal about pining for the past tend to be white conservatives whose beliefs in a “better” time comport with that time’s social, sexual and economic inequities; recall how many 20 and 30-something men, in the 2010s, thought Don Draper was the coolest guy on TV, and apparently still do. I’m not saying that McCreesh’s longing for this New York is the result of bigotry, or is downplaying the seriousness of Epstein’s crimes like Megyn Kelly did. But using Epstein’s emails as a pretext to glorify the flush, heady times before Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer were held accountable for rape and sexual assault does suggest he’s miffed that they ended prematurely.
In his recent history “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty that Reshaped America,” Michael M. Grynbaum writes of the late 1980s and 1990s: “Increasingly, the American zeitgeist was produced, packaged, choreographed and marketed by the forces of Condé Nast.” He quotes an Observer writer’s assessment of publishing’s new guard as “a contemporary elite whose position in the food chain is determined not by bloodlines but by blood, sweat, tears and a big bank account.” Those who attended the Observer’s 25th birthday party mentioned by McCreesh prioritized tribalism over petty grievance; tribalism is what kept the sailing smooth and the would-be whistleblowers mum.
Epstein has benefited posthumously from this blinkered politesse, particularly via The New York Times, which, while reporting dutifully on Epstein’s crimes, has also hand-waved and downplayed them repeatedly. In a 2019 piece titled “The day Jeffrey Epstein told me he had dirt on powerful people,” published shortly after the smirking, silver-haired creep was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell, James B. Stewart wrote of his experience interviewing Epstein at his massive townhouse. “The overriding impression I took away from our roughly 90-minute conversation was that Mr. Epstein knew an astonishing number of rich, famous and powerful people, and had photos to prove it. He also claimed to know a great deal about these people, some of it potentially damaging or embarrassing.”
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Yet another, titled “Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan lair” and published last August, inventoried the art, literature and decor in the mansion Stewart had visited. There were a few pointed glances at paintings of naked women in the massage room and a first edition of “Lolita” that confirms Epstein absolutely mistook Humbert Humbert for the book’s hero. But mostly the piece focused on how many famous people just had a swell time there; as Stewart wrote, “The mansion served as both a personal hideaway and a salon where he could hold court with accomplished intellectuals, scientists and financiers.” (In a typewritten letter included in the piece, repeat guest Woody Allen mused about being “well served — often it’s by some professional houseman but just as often by several young women who remind one of Castle Dracula where Lugosi has three young female vampires who service the place.”)
Had this “Yeah, he was a pervert, but the man knew how to create ambiance!” piece been published in, say, 2017, it wouldn’t have been great, but it would have at least been less egregious. Publishing it in fall 2025 and using the term “lair” (code for “extremely cool, covetable and private living space” since forever) is an inexplicable yet deliberate choice to glamorize a person whose heinous acts ruined hundreds of lives. After everything that’s now known about the scope of Epstein’s crimes — including the number of girls he abused, the revelation that he sought out girls from poorer areas with troubled home lives and the energy defense lawyers spent derailing investigations that could have locked him up years earlier — the conclusion seems to be that having money and taste simply outweighs being a rapist responsible for hundreds of stolen childhoods.
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For survivors of abuse and sex trafficking, this is not a novel insight. Crime author James Patterson was stunned by how little attention was paid to his book “Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal that Undid Him, and All the Justice that Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein” when it was published in 2016. Along with the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown (who wrote a blockbuster series about the lenient plea deal Epstein scored thanks to future Trump cabinet member Alexander Acosta), Patterson was one of the few reporters who wanted to make sure that his writing on Epstein centered the victims. Talking to Rolling Stone’s E.J. Dickson years later, he marveled at the indifference shown by prominent media outlets. “Nobody really thought it was a story . . . And I’m like, ‘Are you shi*ting me? This thing hasn’t really been covered. Epstein’s on the loose in New York. How can you say it’s not a story?’”
The conclusion seems to be that having money and taste simply outweighs being a rapist responsible for hundreds of stolen childhoods.
The answer is that New York media had decided long ago that it wasn’t, and wasn’t about to let an outsider (even one who lived down the street from Epstein in Palm Beach) suggest otherwise. Even before that, very little stuck to Epstein. In Netflix’s 2020 docuseries adaptation of “Filthy Rich,” Epstein’s former boss at investment bank Bear Stearns recalled his reluctance to fire Epstein even after he committed an SEC violation: “Do I want to play God and throw him in the street? Maybe destroy his potential?” (The specter of lost potential is commonly invoked in rape and sexual assault cases to justify absurdly light sentences handed to young, white men with bright futures.)
Epstein was among a group, including Weinstein and Wolff, who bid to buy New York Magazine in 2003; Wolff told the late New York Times columnist David Carr that their new magazine would provide “incredible, undreamed-of access to the kind of circles that it should be a part of.” The sale didn’t go through. If it had, it’s likely that even the mildest bad press about Epstein would have been quashed. (“The Fantasist,” a 2007 exposé in the magazine, begins with no ambiguity: “Jeffrey Epstein is under indictment for sex crimes in Palm Beach, Florida.” Its author describes telling Epstein and his PR person that his frame for the piece is “the Icarus story, someone who flies too close to the sun.” Epstein responds “Did Icarus like massages?”)
In connecting Jeffrey Epstein to the heyday of excess and impunity enjoyed by media titans past, and in invoking #MeToo as a kind of buzzkill, McCreesh’s lament for legacy media’s celebrated decadence echoes the misgivings of those who wrung their hands over the changes in workplace policy spotlighted at the time. With behavior once brushed off suddenly spotlighted, worries that accountability could stifle creative industries, along with bad-faith challenges like, “Oh, so you can’t even compliment women now?” greeted a new era in which everyone was expected to do their jobs professionally with an affronted hostility. (Which has brought us to the golden age, apparently, of women ruining the workplace.)
Was New York City once a lot more glamorous? As someone who grew up there: Correct. But the world that McCreesh conjures so thirstily in his piece benefited very few people. And perhaps that’s the point: McCreesh is confident he would have been among them, and he’s probably right. Maybe it’ll cheer him to know more people than ever are the collateral damage of the “protected realm” of elites who decide what constitutes news, or progress, or “a story.” Maybe their gatekeeping power has been dulled by social change, their once-uncontested clout diffused by new technology. #MeToo felled a small handful of media power brokers and even that was considered going too far. But the wheels of elite society are still greased by secrets and silences, and its members are happy to overlook the machinery’s unsightly guts.
