Mr. Weisberg is the former editor of Slate and a founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries.
It’s tempting to think of Jeffrey Epstein as an isolated aberration — a depraved man who was protected for too long by his wealth and privilege. In fact, he represents a recurring type. You might call this type the dark connector.
The dark connector is not necessarily a criminal, though he (or occasionally she) is inevitably a kind of predator. Sitting outside ordinary morality is part of what makes him valuable. The dark connector’s role is to make it easier for people of standing to move between their public obligations and their private desires without too much friction.
The dark connector is useful because he offers solutions that do not officially exist, ways of arranging things that institutions cannot sanction but that rich and successful people still want. The power he acquires by providing assistance is informal. It depends on personal trust, mutual compromise and the unspoken understanding that everyone involved has something to hide as well as something to gain.
The best way to understand how Mr. Epstein functioned as a dark connector is through Jmail, a simulation of his email inbox that lets users experience his slimy, typo-filled workflow. This searchable database — created by Riley Walz, a software engineer, and Luke Igel, an A.I. developer — performs the civic service of turning the Justice Department’s abridged and chaotic release of its investigatory files into a navigable archive. It’s illuminating and unsettling to contemplate the world from the dead creep’s perspective.
For those looking for proof that Mr. Epstein was a blackmailer or a financial crook or the operator of a pedophile ring, the emails are disappointing. They don’t quite prove him to have been any of those things. He was a sexual abuser who used his wealth to victimize women and girls on an industrial scale.
But the more subtle picture that emerges after some time trawling through his inbox — and once you start dipping in, it’s hard to stop — is that of a social broker. A college dropout with a gift for bullshiting on many topics, he made himself into a gateway between important people and the many kinds of better-kept-quiet help they wanted — with their tax bills, their sleazy romantic adventures, jobs for their kids and their social ambitions.
The closest thing to a professional role Mr. Epstein played was financial guru. Leon Black, a private equity billionaire with access to every reputable lawyer money can buy, nonetheless paid Mr. Epstein $170 million for what was described as estate and tax advice and that may have also covered helping Mr. Black intimidate and buy off former mistresses. (Mr. Black’s lawyers have said that Mr. Black was not aware of Mr. Epstein’s sex trafficking or of his paying any women on Mr. Black’s behalf.)
As a financial adviser, Mr. Epstein purported to know tricks unavailable to ordinary professionals. Mr. Black, for his part, seemed to relish the idea of a financial life conducted through a private channel unavailable to lesser mortals. Mr. Epstein not only helped him maximize the wealth of his descendants but also created the gratifying illusion of access to a special set of rules, administered by an outlaw savant with no compliance department.
Mr. Epstein’s second and more notorious role was that of wingman and sex scout. Whether in his townhouse or on visits to M.I.T., he surrounded himself with young Russian and Eastern European women who either were models or looked like models. There are at least five women named Dasha referred to in his messages, and at one point his executive assistant had to ask which Dasha he had invited to stay in his Paris apartment.
To powerful but socially awkward men, the Dashas were dazzling. They adorned his parties and dinners, and perhaps they might be interested in Jeff’s intellectually very impressive friends? To these men, Mr. Epstein was the roguish pickup artist living in a transactional world where everything was for sale. That wasn’t their normal world. But with him, you could temporarily drop the exhausting pretense of virtue.
For some of his friends and associates, Mr. Epstein’s taste for younger women was an inside joke. As Donald Trump told New York magazine in 2002: “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
A third role he played was all-purpose benefactor. Jeff was the guy who invited you to a small dinner with the former Israeli prime minister. Jeff could get your son a job on Woody Allen’s next film. Jeff could help get your daughter into Bard (though how hard is that?). Jeff could get Leon Black and Bill Gates to make seven-figure donations to your academic institution. Jeff might give you the money to buy a rare, $56,000 Patek Philippe watch. Jeff invited you to his Caribbean island. Jeff gave you a ride on his plane.
Ah, the plane. Somewhere, a cultural anthropologist must be studying private air travel as a signifier among the tribes of the globalized elite. To bring someone aboard a private flight is a recognition of his status and an invitation for him to admire yours. It confers a feeling of belonging to a class whose members are too important to wait in lines, fasten seatbelts or proceed through customs. Even in this rarefied world, there are distinctions. Jeff’s plane was no ordinary C.E.O.’s jet, a Gulfstream or a Bombardier. It was a Boeing 727, outfitted for an outer-borough sultan, with velour sofas, a bar, a theater and a stateroom.
Ultimately, the email messages suggest that Mr. Epstein performed a social function that went beyond being a mere favor bank. Mr. Epstein was the host with the fascinating circle of friends, whose dinner parties crossed the Harvard faculty lounge with Page Six. Steven Pinker, meet Soon-Yi Previn. Steve Bannon, meet Noam Chomsky. Steve Tisch, meet Dasha … ? You had to be highly secure in your own status — Tina Brown and others who refused his invitations stand out in this respect — to recognize Mr. Epstein’s mingles as disgusting rather than enticing.
Every society that sustains a sharp divide between its professed standards and its lived arrangements will produce people whose business is managing it.
An obvious analogue to Mr. Epstein as dark connector is Roy Cohn. Mr. Cohn’s daily commerce during the Cold War era was in menace and gossip rather than flattery and philanthropy, but he played a similar role in high society, and in New York society in particular. He too had a “secret” that was widely known: He was gay. (Mr. Cohn would later die of AIDS, but claimed to have liver cancer.) He, too, held court at his Upper East Side townhouse, where you both did and didn’t want to sneak upstairs and peek behind the closed doors — Mr. Cohn always surrounded himself with young men. And like Mr. Epstein, Mr. Cohn turned his proximity to power into a kind of theater, relishing the performance of being the man who could make his friends’ problems magically disappear.
What was hard to understand about Mr. Cohn wasn’t his viciousness, but the range of friends who basked in his notoriety. His circle mixed politicians, mob figures and famous journalists. At his parties you might meet Barbara Walters, Andy Warhol, S.I. Newhouse and Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno. The presence of establishment names alongside nightclub impresarios and thuggish clients reflected not just the attraction of the gutter but also the sense of election into a celebrity elite unconcerned with morality. Mr. Trump was clearly desperate for a way into it. The 2024 film “The Apprentice” brilliantly imagines the young Mr. Trump’s fascination with Mr. Cohn’s world, in which power was everything, the system was eminently corruptible, and the truth was an irrelevancy. That was Mr. Epstein’s vision as well.
Both men were opportunistic students of others’ weaknesses. Working as chief counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare, Mr. Cohn learned that ambition and fear create levers. In post-Cold War America, Mr. Epstein understood that money, vanity and sexual desire do the same. Each built networks around his understanding of human vulnerability. That’s what distinguishes them from ordinary fixers or social climbers. The dark connector thrives on the illusion that he is the only one who knows how things really work, and he uses that illusion to bring powerful people into his confidence.
Finding examples of this type in literature and history makes for a slightly morbid parlor game. Meyer Wolfsheim, the bootlegger who bridges high society and organized crime in “The Great Gatsby”? Mr. Tulkinghorn, the coldhearted keeper of aristocratic secrets in “Bleak House”? Anthony Trollope’s work is filled with dark connectors like Mr. Slope, the manipulative chaplain in “Barchester Towers.” “Game of Thrones” fans say that Littlefinger fits the role to a T. Such figures often prosper by managing the reputations and vulnerabilities of their social superiors. Access to other people’s secrets gives them power and makes them indispensable.
Grigori Rasputin belongs to the same lineage. A Siberian peasant turned mystic hanger-on to the Russian imperial court, Rasputin insinuated himself into the Romanovs’ inner circle by presenting himself as a healer of the young Prince Alexei’s hemophilia. Whether through coincidence, hypnosis or the simple effect of forbidding medical treatment that did more harm than good (namely aspirin, which inhibits blood clotting), Rasputin had a unique ability to relieve the boy’s suffering. That put Czarina Alexandra in his thrall and delivered him unbounded political power.
Every society has its obsessions. Rasputin, the mad monk who walked barefoot through the snow, spoke to the Russian court’s fascination with spiritual extremism. Mr. Cohn had an analogous kind of tainted allure in an era that saw Communism as its greatest threat. You might say that Mr. Epstein had a similar kind of appeal for an elite culture preoccupied with money and sex.
The dark connector cultivates an aura of special access. He thrives on impatience with process and on the perennial belief of the powerful that their problems are too singular to be handled by ordinary means. He thrives as long as he is useful but is discarded quickly once he turns into a liability. At that point, networks built over a lifetime of flattery and manipulation evaporate overnight. None of Mr. Epstein’s friends tried to visit him in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the jail in Manhattan where he spent his last days. After his death, it turned out that he had no actual friends at all.
If you want to find other dark connectors, consider elites that proclaim one set of values while living by another, such as in Restoration France or Hollywood during its golden age. The dark-connector type is always found around royal courts and late-stage empires. Talleyrand, the exquisitely adaptable survivor of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, perfected the art of being invaluable to successive regimes by knowing everyone’s secrets. His image was that of the great diplomat and statesman. His reality was that of a corrupt politician who grew immensely rich on foreign bribes.
In Hollywood, the studio system’s press agents and gossip columnists professionalized the role, bridging the gap between the carefully curated public personas of stars and the private lives that might have ruined them. The powerful columnists Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper and Walter Winchell buried inconvenient truths for those who cooperated with them. The secrets were most often sexual — closeted homosexuality, abortions and affairs. But like Mr. Cohn, the gossips had the power to destroy careers with accusations of left-wing sympathy.
Dark connectors naturally attract their own networking sycophants. Steve Bannon and Michael Wolff both won Mr. Epstein’s trust by representing themselves as traitors to the global elite. As fellow insider/outsiders, they could help him navigate the treacherous path to full social acceptance. It’s notable that both now claim the same defense: They were double agents for the morality police, seducing a villain to eventually expose him.
What ultimately makes Mr. Epstein a significant figure is not his personal pathology but what his career says about the culture that found him useful. The philanthropists of the Gilded Age, the Rockefellers and Carnegies, were institution builders who sought immortality by endowing universities and libraries that would survive them. Some of the philanthro-capitalists who turn up in the Epstein emails evince less concern for their posthumous legacies than for living like gods.
Mr. Epstein flourished as an enabler for the men in his orbit, a master of the informal workaround who could help reconcile their private desires with public appearances. (To date, none of these men have been accused of any crimes.) He embodied their fantasies of hedonism without concern for respectability. As Mr. Gates, who visited Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in 2011, wrote to his colleagues: “His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing, although it would not work for me.” A spokesman said he was referring to the décor.
Jacob Weisberg is the former editor of Slate and a founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries. His book on the failure of institutions during President Trump’s second term will be published in September.
