The Less Deceived

 I haven't ever really had much to say on this blog about the Jeffrey Epstein affair. It just struck me as the kind of horrible thing that happens, but about which there is not much to say. 

For a long time, I also thought people were probably exaggerating the importance of the scandal. Epstein seemed like a charismatic con artist who had sweet-talked his way into the inner circle of a number of rich and famous men; but that didn't mean the latter were involved in or knew about his crimes. 

The Epstein birthday book did change my mind on a few things. It was undeniably creepy and skin-crawling. And the messages people left in it did in fact unmistakably suggest that most of the people who spent time with him socially were aware of his abuse—if not outright participating in it themselves. 

But still—I suspect I spent less time thinking about Epstein this summer than the rest of the nation did. Certainly, I found I had little to say about it or add to the conversation. 

But something about the Howard Rubin story that broke yesterday hit me on a deeper level than any of the Epstein stuff ever did. 

In case you missed it, federal prosecutors now allege that Rubin—a titan of Wall Street—participated in a years-long pattern of trafficking and extortion of vulnerable women. He allegedly found them, offered them money for sex, drugged them, tortured and raped them, and then used an elaborate architecture of legal threats and intimidation to prevent them from speaking out. 

I don't know why this story hit me in the gut in a way that Epstein didn't. Maybe it's that: if there were just one wealthy financier indicted for running a sex trafficking ring with the help of a female accomplice, one could dismiss it as the grotesque crimes of a single pervert. But if there are two Wall Street millionaires with the same rap sheet; one starts to sense a pattern. 

One starts to worry just how prevalent this kind of behavior actually is. Are we merely glimpsing the tip of the iceberg here? How many of the world's richest and most powerful men are engaged in this kind of predation—in ways we don't even know about? 

On the one hand, then, the Rubin news is shocking. But on the other—it's the most obvious and trite and familiar thing in the world. Power corrupts. People with power will often try to abuse it. They will seek out people who are vulnerable and unequipped to defend themselves. And they will try to use their power to gratify their lusts. 

There's no mystery, then, about Epstein or Rubin. They are doing what the feudal lords and potentates of antiquity or the ancien régime sought to do to the extent they could get away with it. The problem for us to reckon with is—how did they get away with it, for so long—in a society where women and vulnerable people supposedly have legal rights? 

But the mere fact that men like this exist should not, sadly, surprise us, given what we know about human history. 

What's striking about their stories—then—is not really how grotesque or outré their reported crimes are—but how squalid and common and paltry and pathetic they are. Grown men—into middle or old age, even—still thinking that the next gratification of the next base desire—the next ejaculation—is somehow going to fulfill them and bring them peace—and resorting to such elaborate artifices of deception and casuistry to facilitate the gratification of these lusts. 

Back this summer—at the height of the Epstein controversy—John Ganz wrote an essay in which he suggested that Epstein probably did kill himself in prison—just as the government has claimed all along. Why? Because let's be real—he didn't have much to live for. This was a shallow person who organized his entire life around slaking and gratifying the next empty desire. When his lusts encountered the obstacle of prison walls—there was nothing else for him to do. He had no depth to his character or soul, beyond the lure of the next orgasm. 

In which case, we might ask: who was—between him and the victims he lured and abused—the "less deceived" of the two?—to quote a poem by Philip Larkin. 

Of course—as Larkin noted in the poem (about the drugging and raping of a Victorian urchin, who reported her ordeal to Henry Mayhew in his London Labour and the London Poor)—this question does nothing for the victims. "I would not dare / Console you if I could," Larkin writes, addressing the victim of this crime from the distance of a century.

But still—we can say the same of Rubin and Epstein as Larkin says of the anonymous abuser and rapist of the poem: they were deceiving themselves even more than they deceived their innocent victims. 

Even as Rubin's victims—just like the victim in the poem—were allegedly lured, tricked, drugged, raped, and lied to—they were at last "less deceived" than the perpetrator himself—believing that this next atrocity would somehow bring him whatever it was he was seeking; when all the time what he truly was doing—as Larkin puts it—was "stumbling up the breathless stair / To burst into fulfillment's desolate attic."* 

That was probably the attic Epstein found himself in too, when his crimes finally caught up with him. And that is probably why he killed himself.

__

*Larkin explored the same theme in his 1946 novel Jill. "[F]ulfillment or unfulfillment [...] merged and became inseparable. The difference between them vanished," as his protagonist John Kemp discovers at the book's conclusion.