Original subtitles

-Okay.

-Okay.

-Say again.

-This man.

-Yeah. I've heard the name in Germany. Yeah.

-Uh, I didn't meet him personally or anything,

but, of course, I've heard a lot about him.

-Money corruption, scandal.

-He was...

a sexual predator?

-I heard that he, you know...I don't know.

-Something about his island and revolving, like, kids.

-Unsavory activities, to say the least.

-Bad news, basically.

-He was in prison, and then he died.

A little bit mysterious. -Terrible.

Did he? Well, yeah. I mean, I don't think he hung --

I don't think he would kill himself, that's all.

-I do not think Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.

-No.

-I -- Do you not believe he killed himself?

-Nobody thinks that he committed suicide.

-He was connected to the most powerful people in the world.

Just kills himself out of nowhere like that?

-The Clintons.

-People like Bill Clinton, Bill Gates.

-Prince Andrew. -Prince Andrew.

-Donald Trump.

-A ton of political figures.

-A lot of celebrities.

-I think that the death of Jeffrey Epstein

is the biggest conspiracy theory

that literally everyone holds in common.

-♪ When Jeffrey Epstein died ♪

♪ I was in Times Square ♪

♪ But I hear in the cell ♪

♪ Bill and Hillary were there ♪

-The morning Jeffrey Epstein died,

it was just everywhere.

-Pedophile and fake billionaire Jeffrey Epstein

was found dead in his jail cell.

-The disgraced millionaire financier was being held

without bail on child sex trafficking charges.

-Outrage grows tonight.

Why wasn't anyone watching Epstein in jail?

How was he allowed to take his own life?

-Tonight, Jeffrey Epstein's attorneys

questioning whether his death was a suicide,

saying they are not satisfied with the ruling.

-His death overtook all of the social media platforms

and the conspiracy theories were moments behind.

-The three of you told me you voted for the president in 2016,

your supporters of his.

Why do you like him so much?

And what policies stand out to you that you support?

-Well, I would say mainly just the no nonsense policies,

and especially since Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself.

That's awesome. Yeah.

-I believe the phrase began as a rejoinder

to what happened with Epstein.

But then it became, as a meme, something very different,

which is your own expression of being anti-mainstream media.

And I think it's important that we understand

it wasn't just an indictment of American media,

it was an indictment of how the American elite --

left, right or center --

were culpable for this.

-The appeal on both sides of the political spectrum

was that Jeffrey Epstein was killed

in order to maintain secrets.

Liberal corners were saying

that there was something nefarious afoot

with the Trump administration.

Conservative corners of the internet were linking it

to the so-called Clinton body count conspiracy theory.

And then there's a third little camp of conspiracy theory

that the royal family might be interested in keeping secret,

whatever, things Jeffrey Epstein might know.

Whichever camp you belong to,

you have this special understanding that...

he didn't kill himself, you know the real deal.

He was assassinated.

-And until they release the flight logs,

you, the mainstream media,

Hollywood, are all pedophiles to me.

-It's the kind of conspiracy theory

that is just so of this moment.

It has this just very wide-spread, broad appeal.

-But I still stand by something doesn't fit here.

It just doesn't make sense that the highest profile prisoner

in America, you know, someone forgot to guard him.

-I just spent the night having dinner

with two corrections officials

who know that place as intimately as I do,

and they can't figure out

how this could possibly have happened.

-It gets at everything going on

in American culture and politics.

I immediately realized

that this was going to be a conspiracy theory

that was gonna be around for a very long time.

-Americans don't know what to believe these days

regarding the death of pedophile financier

Jeffrey Epstein.

According to a new poll by Emerson College,

the American people are divided.

-I think that Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories

are so attractive because there is so much

that truly is hard to swallow about his death.

There were a lot of things that are hard to believe.

-There was speculation that he was on suicide watch

then that he was removed from suicide watch.

-We have been told that certainly there

would be cameras.

-It's another development

that sure to drive conspiracy theories nuts.

-Both cameras trained on the door of Jeffrey Epstein's cell

did not work that night, famously.

- The New York Times is reporting

the two staff members guarding Epstein's jail unit

fell asleep and failed to check on him.

-Epstein was also supposed to be housed with a cellmate

and not left alone. -This is just

one coincidence too many.

-The immediate reaction was he didn't kill himself.

I don't even think it started as a meme.

I think it just started as a appraisal, as a reaction.

It was certainly my first reaction.

I mean, I remember turning to my husband and saying, you know,

"Oh, God, he didn't kill himself,"

you know, like, come on.

-We didn't get any great

investigative reporting around

what had happened in the jail that would substantiate,

one way or another, that he had truly committed suicide.

I do remember watching "CNN," "MSNBC," and "Fox News,"

and there was some skepticism,

but online it was like bizarro world.

In the absence of objective evidence,

we're left with what the media told us.

And one set of the media was telling us to have doubt

and to not trust what was being said.

-What's going on behind the scenes

is somebody could sneak somebody in to kill somebody

if that's what happened.

-You know, folks want the truth,

and that's an understandable objective.

So naturally, um, they're going to try

to make sense of the world that they live in.

-Fuck, I should have fucking tented my fingers

the entire time.

-Do you -- Just do it now. -I can do it. Can I do it now?

-Do whatever you want now.

-Is this good?

Welcome to the TrueAnon podcast,

where we explore the intersections between the CIA,

global pedophilia cabals, Jeffrey Epstein,

private islands, and the Clinton crime family.

-Crooked Hillary, baby. -Exactly.

Everything that we talk about here

is, uh, allegedly...

the truth.

True anon is a political true crime podcast.

-We sometimes call ourselves

and our listeners little gumshoes.

We are unlicensed private detectives, right?

-Yeah, we're unlicensed private detectives.

-There are no raw marks on the ends...

-Yeah. -...of the noose.

-No, it... -This was not ripped.

-No. -It's like a clean hem.

-Yeah, yeah. Exactly. -So where the fuck is this from?

-Oh, where's the scissors?

We try to take in a variety of sources.

Um, you know, some reputable ones that we trust,

some reputable ones that we maybe don't trust.

Uh, disreputable ones, gossip.

Basically, anywhere we can get information,

then try to essentially figure out

from that what might be true.

-Jeffrey Epstein is the perfect character

for conspiracy theory.

He is really almost tailor-made.

-I think one of the big questions

with the Jeffrey Epstein story is,

how did he get away with something that he seemed to be

so openly doing for so long,

and not only without any legal repercussions,

but without even any social repercussions?

-The Epstein case is classic tabloid fodder.

I mean, it has everything -- it has spies,

it has the Mafia, it has sex crimes.

It has the world's most famous and powerful people.

When we discuss this story, people are so focused

on how he died

that they don't look as much at how he lived.

Oh, my God, no.

My name is Julie K. Brown.

I'm an investigative reporter with the Miami Herald,

and I reopened the Jeffrey Epstein case in 2016.

Jeffrey Epstein grew up on Coney Island

and he was a prodigy.

He knew how to pick up music very well,

he was very good in math.

So he ended up going to a very prestigious school,

and he ended up going to college briefly

before dropping out and getting a job at Dalton,

which is a very elite school in New York.

We know that at the time that he was hired, Donald Barr,

the father of the former attorney general,

William Barr, was the headmaster at the school.

So we believe that he hired Jeffrey,

even though Jeffrey really didn't have the credentials

to teach there, but Barron was an eccentric.

I mean, he wrote very strange

science fiction books, for example.

Jeffrey Epstein was very popular with the students there.

He tried to act like he was sort of this cool guy.

Went to a couple of the parties

with the students, apparently.

Epstein really used Dalton

as a way to connect with other wealthy people,

the parents of the students.

And through one of these connections,

he met Moe Greenberg, who worked at Bear Stearns

and eventually offered Jeffrey a job at Bear Stearns.

He once bragged that he didn't take anybody as a client

unless they were supremely wealthy,

like in the billion dollar range.

You know, it's kind of mysterious in a way,

because the only client that we knew he had was Les Wexner,

who was the CEO of The Limited and Victoria's Secret.

And that's really the only client.

So it sort of makes you wonder,

you know, how could he have this much power and influence

with just having one client?

Jeffrey Epstein's initial, uh, property was in New York,

it was a huge townhouse -- like nine stories --

and he put in security cameras all over, outside and inside.

In fact, we heard from a couple of people

that he even had cameras in the bathroom.

So he had the whole place wired.

And of course, he had a lot of powerful people

come and go from there.

He also had properties in New Mexico -- a ranch --

and he had a property in Palm Beach --

a mansion just off the water.

And he had another property which was on a remote island

in the Caribbean called Little Saint James.

-That's where had is, you know, Island Temple,

which was a very freakish entity,

allegedly with underground tunnels and strange symbols.

Totally normal. Everyone -- Everyone's got one of those.

-He would fly his wealthy

and well-connected friends around the world.

-When Bill Clinton organized a week long tour

of Africa in 2002,

Jeff gave him a ride in his personal 727.

And took actors Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker along for the trip.

-The Lolita Express is a really disgusting name

for a private plane that Jeffrey Epstein owned.

-Both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton

had flown on the plane.

-Jeffrey Epstein knew how to cultivate the right people

to get him the connections that he wanted.

And one of the people that helped Jeffrey Epstein

in social circles in New York was Ghislaine Maxwell.

-Ghislaine Maxwell is a woman from England

whose father was a sort of Murdochian media magnate.

-Have you yourself ever been compromised or in a position

where you thought you were going to be?

-No, I have not ever been compromised.

But I have, on two occasions in Moscow,

had my telephone number tapped.

-Robert Maxwell died under mysterious circumstances.

-The millionaire newspaper publisher

Robert Maxwell is dead.

He disappeared overboard from his private yacht

early this morning while cruising off the Canary Islands.

-Mr. Maxwell had apparently left

for a few days' holiday on his yacht last Thursday

for a break away from the affairs of his media empire

and a row over allegations which he denied

that he was an agent of the Israeli secret service.

-Robert Maxwell was up to a lot of bad things.

There are allegations of arms trading and money laundering.

-The exact circumstances of how he died may never be known.

-I can't believe that Maxwell committed suicide

because he was a fighter.

-Tonight, as the Lady Ghislaine lay at berth,

the gathering of Robert Maxwell's family

was completed with the arrival of the daughter

after whom he had named his fateful yacht.

-After his death, it was found that he had raided

all the companies' pension funds,

so he had kind of left the family in a lurch

at the time that he allegedly drowned.

And Jeffrey Epstein knew her father,

and they had become acquainted.

And at that time,

she started leaning a lot on Jeffrey Epstein.

-They were an item for a number of years,

although they seem to have a sort of open relationship.

And then, later, they had

a sort of nebulous, kind of partner,

but also employee/employer relationship.

She was really Jeffrey Epstein's sort of entrée

into high society.

-Ghislaine Maxwell introduced Jeffrey Epstein

to a whole new circle of people,

very powerful people, political people,

such as Bill Clinton, Donald Trump.

There were a number of other billionaires

that he started, you know, being acquainted with.

And so, you know, Ghislaine was key to that.

We suspect that it was Ghislaine Maxwell

who started the whole pyramid scheme of girls

that he had coming in and out of his mansion.

When most people think of Palm Beach,

they think of these beautiful giant mansions on the water,

very wealthy area, tree-lined streets.

But a lot of the victims that he ended up recruiting

were victims who lived on the other side

of Palm Beach County in West Palm Beach,

which is quite different than the mansion on the ocean.

Some of these girls, in fact, lived in trailer parks.

Some of them were living out of motels.

You know, he managed to find the kind of girls that,

you know, if they had said anything to anybody,

his feeling was nobody would really believe them

because they were basically, in his mind, anyway, trash.

These were young girls

that he was inviting to give him massages.

Some of them had never had any kind of a sexual experience

at all before.

And when they started recoiling at what he was doing,

he would just say, "Well, that's okay.

You don't have to do this ever again.

Just bring me your friends."

He would pay them $100 to $200

each time they brought him a friend,

and then he would pay the friend,

you know, who he molested.

And so he had this revolving door of young girls

coming in and out of the house.

The Palm Beach Police Department

started investigating tips that they had received.

One of them involved a 14-year-old girl

who had said that she was sexually molested.

They opened an investigation into, you know,

whether he was assaulting younger girls

on a regular basis.

It was the same story from almost every victim.

Initially, the prosecutors wanted to throw the book at him.

They had at least a dozen or more victims who they knew

and who said they would cooperate.

Epstein was hiring all these high-powered attorneys --

Alan Dershowitz, Jay Lefkowitz, Kenneth Starr --

people who were well-known in Washington.

Alex Acosta, the US prosecutor in Miami,

had also worked

at this same firm

that Jay Lefkowitz and Kenneth Starr worked at,

which was Kirkland & Ellis.

So these were all

a web of people that knew each other through legal circles

and were somewhat friendly with each other.

So he carefully chose all these people for a reason

and for their connections and their influence,

and how they were going to help him get the deal of a lifetime.

Ultimately, they gave it back to Alex Acosta

and told him, "This is your baby.

You're going to have to decide

how this is going to be prosecuted."

And with that, Alex Acosta decided,

of course, they're not going to prosecute him federally.

"What we're going to do is we'll waive this indictment.

We'll waive these federal charges

as long as he pleads to this charge in state court."

In mid-2007,

they were going to charge Jeffrey Epstein with something.

It was just a matter of,

"What are we going to charge him with?"

They had an indictment that listed all his crimes,

which they would then show to Jeffrey Epstein's lawyers.

Jeffrey Epstein's lawyers would take the -- the indictment

on -- that listed all the charges,

and they would go, "Nope,

we're not going to charge him with this. Nope."

They would literally just cross out.

"We're not going to plead to this."

So then it would go back to the prosecutors,

and the prosecutors would send them another one that said,

"Okay, what about this charge? What about...?"

I mean, it was almost comical.

Epstein, in essence, through his lawyers,

started dictating himself

what the terms of the deal was

that he was going to plead to,

which is unheard of, right?

Who lets a guy who committed a crime

decide what he's going to plead to?

And they finally settled on very weak charges,

which was solicitation of a minor,

which ended up being a charge

that he would be able to serve in the county jail

instead of going to Florida prison,

which would have been quite different.

-I think, in regards to Jeffrey Epstein's first arrest,

I think it's a really good illustration

of how there's at least a two-tiered system

of justice in the country.

If you have enough money, if you have enough connections,

if your name's big enough,

and kind of no matter what you do,

you can slide by and get a sentence that would

make the most hardened prison abolitionist blush.

I mean, Jeffrey Epstein got time off from jail --

like, he only had to spend some of the day at jail.

And he was actually, like, you know,

allowed to go to work in an office building

that the police didn't enter and just stood outside in front of.

-Well, a Palm Beach billionaire

is getting his first taste of freedom in over a year.

-Epstein served 13 months of an 18-month sentence.

-It speaks to such larger questions

that people have about the nature of power,

about the nature of influence,

about how those two things get wielded behind the scenes.

-After Trump was elected,

he nominated Alex Acosta

to be his labor secretary.

So I thought at the time that this, you know,

when, in his confirmation hearing,

they would be grilling him over this.

-Has a sterling record of public service

to our state and country -- you'll learn about that today.

-I can tell you that Alex is a man of character,

a man who takes very seriously fidelity to the law,

fidelity to the Constitution,

and a man who has a passion for justice.

-Congratulations, Mr. Acosta, on your nomination.

As you know, we're in a big, huge national debate

over what to do with health care.

-As it turned out,

he was barely asked any questions about it.

It was like it was lost to history.

This man who let their predator off the hook,

you know, with basically a slap on the wrist,

is now going to be in charge of an agency

that essentially has oversight

of human-trafficking and child-labor laws.

-Members will be sub-- may submit...

-I'm Annette Witheridge, I'm a freelance journalist,

and I worked in New York City, covering America

for the British newspapers, mainly like the Daily Mail,

the News of the World, The Times, The Sun.

You name it -- I worked for it in Britain.

And over the years,

I would be asked to write stories about Prince Andrew,

I was asked to write stories about Ghislaine Maxwell,

and then, from there, I started to write stories

about Jeffrey Epstein.

And, occasionally, all three characters

would come together in one story.

So, in 2010, I got a phone call from the News of the World,

and they said, "Annette,

we understand Prince Andrew's in -- in New York.

And we don't know where he is. Can you try and find him?"

And I thought, well, the best place to look

is Ghislaine Maxwell.

Ghislaine and Andrew had known each other for,

you know, decades.

So I went to Ghislaine's house --

no Prince Andrew.

We gave up on that about 10:00 at night.

And I was thinking, "Where on earth could Andrew be?"

So then I thought Jeffrey Epstein.

As I walked towards Epstein's place,

I suddenly saw, like, men talking into their cufflinks,

i.e. secret service types.

And of course they all had British accents.

It was the Royal Protection squad,

so I then barreled back down the other end of the road,

called Jae Donnelly, the photographer,

and said, "Got him."

And we waited, and we waited, and we waited.

We saw an old man.

and a young woman, who I can --

thought was perhaps, you know, this old man's caregiver,

and then was intrigued when they went into the Epstein house,

and it was Woody Allen and his wife.

And it's like -- crikey!

You know, it was like --

We'd also discovered by then we'd run into --

would you believe -- Bill Cosby,

who lived across the other side of the road?

It was like, this is one weird road.

We sat there all day on the Saturday.

No signs of Prince Andrew, but it was horrific --

the amount of young girls

that were going in and out of that house.

Sunday morning, we were back there again at 8:00 a.m.

We managed to move our car

right outside the Epstein house.

Now, we were not hiding. You couldn't hide.

I knew there were security guards outside

for Prince Andrew.

They most certainly knew I was outside,

and Jeffrey Epstein's people presumably knew we were outside.

I was sitting in the passenger seat,

and I had the window slightly open,

and I heard one of the British Protection squad officers say,

"What happens if they go walkabout?"

And literally, seconds later, the door opened,

and there were Andrew and Epstein.

I said, "Oh!" And it all happened in a complete rush.

Jae and I jumped out of the car,

I jumped into the pa-- into the driver's seat,

and we took off after them.

They turned right onto 5th Avenue

against the traffic,

so I had to turn left.

Jae just jumped out with his cameras

and went running after them into Central Park.

He then, you know, climbed over a wall

a bit further up, up some rocks,

and took these amazing pictures of Epstein and Andrew

in deep conversation.

I couldn't believe it when he showed me these pictures.

They were just perfect.

What on earth was he doing,

staying with Jeffrey Epstein, who was a convicted pedophile?

It was a jolly good picture,

and it was a story that wrote itself.

We now know he was asking Epstein

if he could help with some money for his ex-wife.

It just seemed strange 'cause it's --

Epstein has a 50-room mansion.

It's the biggest private residence in Manhattan.

Surely, there was a room somewhere

they could talk privately.

But, no, they went outside to talk in the park.

I think it suited Epstein very much.

Epstein was trying to rehabilitate himself

after going to prison.

If the Queen's son can forgive Jeffrey Epstein,

obviously, polite society in Manhattan can.

-They went to so many parties.

They went to places like Chelsea Clinton's wedding.

You know, you can see Ghislaine lurking in the background

like some sort of perverse "Where's Waldo?" --

you know, in all of these pictures

of recent world history.

And really, after his indictment,

it should have been center stage,

but, instead, he was just reintegrated into high society.

-The scheme that Jeffrey had

and, you -- you know, with all the people that he knew

and the fact that he always had these young women and girls

around him, you know, constantly --

it was almost as if everybody knew about it and accepted.

-So one of the dinners, there was Katie Couric,

who, at that point, was one of the top TV news anchors.

-And Katie, Emily S. wants to know the strangest part

of going to a dinner party at Jeffrey Epstein's house.

-Yeah, I know. -Oh, that's -- Wow.

-So, that's -- that's a long story --

that's in my book. Yeah.

-George Stephanopoulos, another top TV news anchor.

Chelsea Handler, very famous comedian.

Woody Allen -- people like that.

It ultimately leaked out

that these people had all been entertained

with Prince Andrew at Epstein's house.

I think it probably leaked out

because Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine wanted it to leak out.

-I don't think the general public really was aware of him,

but everybody in the journalism world

knew about Jeffrey Epstein,

and his story wasn't a new story.

There were pieces of it that were covered extensively

throughout the past decade.

-I think most of the coverage was sort of like --

it was very tabloid,

whether it was on, like, Gawker or Jezebel,

but even earlier than that,

in the Post.

-There's a template

that the news media follows,

you know, where they present him as a philanthropist,

as a Gatsby-like figure,

as this kind of mysterious billionaire,

and no one knows quite where he gets his money,

but he's so much fun.

-I think the media failed to cover

much of the Jeffrey Epstein case from the beginning

and covered up, either through omission or purposefully,

a lot of his crimes.

-The Amy Robach thing with Epstein, right?

You know, where her interviews with Epstein victims

didn't get published.

-I've had the story for three years.

Then the Palace found out

that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew

and threatened us a million different ways.

-Vicky Ward is one of the reporters.

She worked for Vanity Fair,

who talked about how her Epstein piece --

was either heavily censored,

or it was killed.

-He and Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair editor,

had a private conversation,

after which the -- the -- the women

were removed from the story.

-A lot of times, it wasn't him

silencing the journalists,

for example, it was their editors.

So maybe the question is, why were journalists' editors

and then their publishers silencing their journalists

from -- from writing pieces about him?

That seems to be a bigger question.

And I think if someone looked into that

and got those answers, that would maybe tell us

more about how Jeffrey Epstein operated.

-I think it's disgusting that they decided

to just sit on that information, which they had all of this time.

It's immoral on a human level, but it also, you know,

stopped the story, I think,

from taking on the kind of life that it should have.

-So, the picture was taken the second weekend of December.

We assumed it would run straightaway.

It didn't, and it was like -- a bit disappointed

'cause it was an easy, easy story to get in the paper.

Anyway, it didn't run the next week,

and it didn't run the next week.

And it was like, what?

Christmas came and went.

It finally ran in February, the last week of February 2011,

so a good six weeks later.

I think there was some pressure

from the Palace on the editors of the News of the World

to not run the picture.

I don't know that for a fact because I wasn't there,

but it just seemed so strange.

It was several weeks before the story ran.

It didn't even run on the front page.

And I think it was something like,

"The Prince & the Paedophile."

What we didn't know then was that another reporter

from another newspaper,

Sharon Churcher of the Mail on Sunday,

had spent two years tracking down Virginia Roberts.

Virginia Roberts was one of the Epstein girls

who had actually launched legal action against him.

Sharon, who's very tenacious,

eventually tracked down Virginia to Australia,

where she's married, she has children.

And Virginia, at that point, did not want to talk.

When Virginia discovered there was a picture

of Andrew and Epstein together, she was so furious,

she made the call to the Mail on Sunday

and said, "Okay, I'm ready to talk now."

And then spoke of her relationship with Prince Andrew.

And, you know, obviously the allegations

were that she had been, you know,

sex-trafficked to Britain,

made to sleep with Prince Andrew at Ghislaine Maxwell's house,

and she had the photographs to prove it.

There's a picture of Andrew with his arm literally on her waist.

She was very young. She was 17 at the time.

Ghislaine Maxwell is laughing in the background.

-When you find out somebody is a central figure

in a global child-trafficking/rape network,

you of course wonder what else they're capable of.

You know, this network appears to have been engaged

in mass blackmailing of powerful officials.

How they blackmailed people is the question

that everybody wants to know.

Epstein was after power and control,

and what I would like to know --

Because I don't think Epstein was the mastermind of this.

I think he was working kind of as a mercenary

for a number of powerful entities.

I think various governments

were using the information that he found.

You know, he was someone who could sell them

blackmail material and make an enormous amount of money.

Many people know about Epstein's black book,

which was unearthed by Nick Bryant.

-The so-called black book is not a black book.

It really is a phone kind of directory.

And it was a list of all of Epstein's contacts.

There were some famous people on there.

There were a lot of phone numbers on there

for Donald Trump.

-Alex Acosta had said straight out, you know,

"He belongs to intelligence," without specifying

to whose intelligence Epstein belonged.

So, as for how the blackmail operation works,

you know, I think what most people assume

is that these individuals who have been accused of rape

did rape underage girls, were likely filmed doing

so without their knowledge.

-Housekeepers at his properties said he had --

every room was taped, wired for sound.

There were video cameras everywhere.

In other words, if somebody like Prince Andrew

happened to be sleeping with Virginia Roberts,

then, somewhere, it would be on camera.

It would have been secretly recorded.

-You know, having that kind of material

can allow you to control a person a great deal,

because, you know, this is the universal taboo.

You know, people do not accept child abuse and child rape.

-And, yet, after all the police raids of his properties

and all the people who were presumably coming

in and out of those properties,

none of those tapes have appeared anywhere.

That, to me, is one of the biggest mysteries,

is where are those tapes?

- Save our children! - Save our children!

-Epstein did not kill himself.

-Epstein's death couldn't have happened at a crazier time

unless it was about a year later.

I think if it had happened in, like, summer of 2020,

the world might have exploded.

There was really heightened tensions, especially in 2019.

You know, you had years of kind of conspiracy theories,

both on the right wing with QAnon stuff,

and then a lot of Democrats with, like, the Russiagate

and all this, like, you know, "Trump is a secret agent."

It was large swaths of our country

that had kind of lost their shit.

And in the midst of all of this comes, like,

this person whose fingerprints are on really, like,

major events and people and institutions

in the past, you know, 30, 40 years.

-Our country and our elites are living literally

using the blood of children to fuel their fire,

their everything.

-Elite circles, access to power, money,

bad deeds involving sex crimes.

His biography sort of hit on a lot of the sorts of things

that conspiracy theories need to thrive.

-A conspiracy is a plot by usually a group of

wealthy or powerful figures to carry out

an act against the public good without the public's knowledge.

The United States is no stranger to conspiracy culture,

because we have had a large number of actual conspiracies --

Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9/11, January 6th.

When the pieces of the puzzle are missing,

people will attempt to put them together on their own,

which is then referred to, in a pejorative way,

as a conspiracy theory.

And I don't think that there's any shame in having a theory

about a conspiracy if you are pursuing it in good faith

and if you are doing so with evidence and facts.

Where it becomes a problem

is when you see people like, for example,

Alex Jones using what I call weaponized conspiracy theories,

where they were putting forth propaganda and threats and lies,

and they're doing it under this veneer of conspiracy theory.

-The story that's been the biggest thing on the Internet

is a rabbit hole that is horrifying to go down.

I've covered Pizzagate. We have covered it.

We are covering it.

And all I know is God help us. We're in the hands of pure evil.

-Over the years, there became this idea

that in the basement of Comet Ping Pong Pizza

was a sadistic dungeon frequented by Hillary Clinton

and the Democrats

who, you know, would torture children

and harvest their hormones.

Children are a very particular target because children

are something that many of us know are defenseless.

Many people from the Internet are showing up

and taking pictures, and one man decides

to show up with a gun.

-Fake news, real gunfire.

A North Carolina man arrested in

a D.C. pizza shop after brandishing a gun,

telling police he was there to

investigate a conspiracy theory called Pizzagate.

-It discharges while he's in the restaurant,

and he's saying, "Show me the basement."

And there is no basement.

And so he had become fully deluded

that he himself could rescue these children.

-Save our children!

-QAnon takes on a very similar set of criteria around, again,

"It's the Democrats again.

They're harming children."

-We are Q!

-When I was looking at the discourse around Epstein,

it really fit into this conspiracy position

of QAnon folks that we finally had the proof

that the Democrats were pedophiles and Satanists.

And what was interesting about it, though, to me,

is how easy it was for them to deflect Trump

and say, "Well, Trump was there too, but he wasn't doing this.

But Bill Clinton -- he's the real monster."

-They don't talk about how Trump was accused of rape

by a 13-year-old girl,

by a woman who was stolen, procured by Epstein,

and forced into sexual slavery when she was 13.

But they bring up that Bill Clinton went on

Epstein's plane.

-Flight logs put Bill Clinton on pedophile billionaire's sex jet.

-Look, what we've heard about in this Epstein case

are Democrats.

We hear about Bill Clinton.

Everybody says, "Oh, no, Bill was never on the plane,"

except he's on the manifest 26 times.

-The truth of this story is the sexual abuse

doesn't discriminate based on political party.

There were people on both sides, on all sides, really,

of the political spectrum who were connected to this

and who were involved in this.

This was about power.

-The primary thing about Jeffrey Epstein and his case

is that he was guilty of doing

exactly what so many of these conspiracy theories

say wealthy, elite people do,

which is engaging in sex with underage people.

But he was not a sort of major, you know, cultural icon.

But then, with those Miami Herald stories,

he just sort of blew up.

-I felt that, for too long, it hadn't --

Nobody had dug into it the way I thought that perhaps I could.

When I first pitched the story to my editor,

I said, "I'm going to tell the story of the women.

Their story hasn't really been told."

And he realized, you know, to his credit,

that that was something that was worth looking into.

But, still, you know, it wasn't something

that he looked at as a project.

It was going to be, like, a quick-hit kind of story

where we would find a couple of the victims,

they would say, you know, "This is horrible,"

and that would be the end of the story.

But as I dug into it, I knew that there was

a much more powerful story.

I came to realize that there were a lot of people

that didn't want to talk about it

and that there were a number of other people

who were involved in the case

that just never spoke to the media before.

And I felt like there wasn't any coverage

of exactly how this decision to give him this sweetheart deal

affected the girls at the time who were,

you know, sexually assaulted by him

and how it affected their lives.

Nobody had ever really looked at that.

For one thing, we didn't know who the victims were

because they were all listed as Jane Does

in all the court documents.

So part of what I set out to do

was to find out who all these girls were.

And that was probably the most time-consuming part

of the project.

I started the project before any of the MeToo movement

was even in existence,

but by the time my project published,

we had already had the Harvey Weinstein case.

We had already had the Larry Nassar case.

There are a lot of similarities with other cases

that we know about now,

where the predators would not only choose victims

that he felt were vulnerable

and victims that perhaps the media wouldn't believe

and try to even disparage their character

and their credibility, but he would also make sure that

the publication knew that they better, you know,

dot their, you know, I's and cross their T's,

because he was standing right by with a lawyer to sue them.

And so I was quite mindful of this when I was working on

the project at the Miami Herald.

The day that the story came out was a big relief.

You know, I thought, "Okay, that's it.

I can go home, finally get some sleep."

And turned off my computer, and I thought, "That's it."

I could see on the screen in the newsroom

where we list our stories and which stories are doing well

and which stories are sort of at the bottom,

and my story had been at the bottom.

And then, all of a sudden, someone in the newsroom said,

"You better look at this," because, sure enough,

the board went all the way to the top,

and it was just going crazy.

So they said, "You better turn on your computer."

And I turned it on.

I was getting all these followers on Twitter.

I had just opened my Twitter account.

All of a sudden, I had thousands of followers,

and my phone was ringing off the hook.

-And now to that bombshell report shining new light

on a controversial plea deal.

-This is remarkable new reporting from Julie K. Brown.

-He committed these alleged crimes many years ago,

but Herald reporter Julie K. Brown

brought this back, brought this back to the forefront

by interviewing many of the alleged victims.

-Several telling their stories publicly for the first time.

One tells the Herald, this is about justice

not just for them, but for "other victims who aren't

Olympic athletes or Hollywood stars."

-What was surprising in those pieces

wasn't so much the details as it was

that someone was actually investigating it,

someone at least caring to,

you know, speak for all of these young girls.

-I had to try to get people to trust me to talk to me,

and many of those people hadn't talked before

because they were afraid that, quite frankly,

newspaper wouldn't print the story.

They felt that -- after all these years,

that Mr. Epstein and others had quieted this story,

you know, had successfully kept it secret.

I heard from the victims that were in the piece.

They all called me, you know, crying and saying, "Thank you."

You know, it was a very emotional time,

because we had worked so hard on it.

-After the Miami Herald revisited the Epstein case,

Jeffrey Epstein sort of re-entered

the social consciousness, political consciousness,

and started showing up in misinformation online.

-The Jeffrey Epstein case

gave the QAnon movement some legitimacy.

And the problem is, they were then

making a lot of other claims,

you know, Trump is the Messiah, the Democrats eat baby blood

for adrenochrome that makes them live forever,

you know, all sorts of things that don't have any

basis in reality,

along with these claims that do have basis in reality.

And when people see, "Well, QAnon was ahead of the story,

they actually, you know, brought this to the fore early,"

they begin to review those other claims and think,

"Well, maybe that's true, too."

-Jeffrey Epstein is the grain of truth

that sort of lends credibility to larger

and more difficult-to-believe conspiracy theories, like QAnon.

So, he had been sort of becoming more prevalent

in what we were seeing going around on social media.

And then, after he was arrested in July 2019,

that's when, you know, there were a number of claims

just started kind of going wild.

-My story published the week after Thanksgiving.

Unbeknownst to me at the time,

in the Southern District in New York,

couple of prosecutors who saw the story

went into the U.S. Attorney's office in New York

and said, "Look at this story. We need to take up that case."

And then all of a sudden, on July 6th,

boom, he was in jail.

-A day of reckoning for a wealthy,

well-connected alleged child predator.

-Billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein

has been arrested.

He was taken into custody overnight

at a New Jersey airport.

-When federal agents raided the Manhattan mansion

of financier Jeffrey Epstein,

they say they found hundreds,

if not thousands, of female nude photographs,

many of the photos allegedly showing underage girls.

-Today, we announce the unsealing of

sex-trafficking charges against Jeffrey Epstein.

And while the charged conduct is from a number of years ago,

it is still profoundly important to the many alleged victims,

now young women.

They deserve their day in court.

We are proud to be standing up for them

by bringing this indictment.

-I started crying, um,

because it put me back into that place where I didn't want to be,

but it was actually great to see him in that seat.

-Epstein's arrest came as a surprise

to many who have followed his case.

-The whole story changed.

I remember I was sitting in a deli,

you know, going over my notes, and somebody said,

"You better look up at the TV," and there was Acosta resigning.

-It would be selfish for me to stay in this position

and continue talking about a case that's 12 years old

rather than about the amazing economy we have right now.

And so I submitted my resignation to the President,

effective seven days from today.

-I never thought, you know, that that would ever happen.

I never thought that he would be arrested.

-The surprising part was that Jeffrey Epstein was arrested,

not that he was being implicated in all these crimes.

It was like, "Wait a second. That's not supposed to happen.

You know, people get away with these things."

Well, and then, you know -- and then we know what happened.

-Jeffrey was sent to the Metropolitan Correctional Center

in Lower Manhattan.

He was booked, fingerprinted,

put in a jumpsuit just like any other inmate.

So he started doing exactly what he did back in 2008,

hiring lawyer after lawyer for him to go,

you know, out of his cell

and to be sitting with his lawyers all day.

-I was the first lawyer on the ground here

in New York to meet Epstein.

I met him in the lawyer visiting rooms,

and he -- he was disoriented and disheveled,

having just been removed from the plane.

I explained who I was.

I've represented some very high-profile clients

at the trial level and also, of course, on appeal.

The first really high-profile case I had was John Gotti Jr.

I handled the post-trial motion

based on jury misconduct for El Chapo,

represented Matt Gaetz's campaign

in the recent investigation for alleged sexual improprieties.

-The Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan,

this is a -- sort of a notorious prison.

-It's a very barbaric place. No heat in the winter,

swelteringly hot in the summer, overcrowded.

Theoretically, almost everybody in the MCC is --

is presumed innocent because they're awaiting trial,

and yet the conditions are --

I called it, at one point, an American gulag.

They're Siberia-like conditions,

and people think that's hyperbole,

but if you do this job, you know, it's not hyperbole.

The conditions of confinement were punitive for people

who hadn't been convicted of a crime.

-There had been many,

many notorious inmates in that prison at the time.

Uh, El Chapo was there, waiting trial on drug charges.

-It's a facility that's filled with every alleged criminal

under the sun, from the most violent drug dealers, killers.

So for a guy like Epstein to be put into that environment,

he's a sitting duck in there for people

who want to shake him down or -- or do things to him.

It was the fog of war, so to speak,

so things were moving quickly.

And you, as the defense lawyer, are trying to slow things down.

That's what I was doing -- taking a breath,

explaining to him calmly what was going on.

-Jeffrey Epstein's lawyers put together this bail package.

They said that they would put a lot of money down,

that they would agree that he could be incarcerated

at his home in Manhattan,

and he would hire his own security team.

He would agree to be on camera, if necessary.

I mean, it was this whole elaborate package

in order to convince the judge to let him out on bail.

And ultimately, what happened was, the judge rejected it,

in part because some of the victims

appeared at the bail hearing and pleaded with the judge,

"Please don't let him out. I'm afraid for my safety."

Jeffrey Epstein was kept behind bars at that point.

When he got out of prison in Palm Beach,

he, you know, had a mural painted at his home in Manhattan

showing the courtyard area of the jail.

He told people that the reason why he had that painted

was to remind him

that he never wanted to go back to this situation again.

And here he was, you know, his worst nightmare

was that this was going to come back

and he was going to have to finally,

you know, pay the price for what he had done.

He was put in a cell with another inmate,

and of all the people that they could pick for him to room with,

it was this beefy, almost steroid-looking former cop.

-Nicholas Tartaglione was a massive,

physical beast of a cop.

He retired in order to deal drugs,

and that led him into executing four men

in full view of his neighbor,

which got him arrested and thrown into jail.

-Dirty cop Popeye. -Yeah.

-His muscles are so big. His head is small.

-Fucking huge.

-Breaking news -- financier Jeffrey Epstein

was taken to the infirmary after he was found injured

in his New York City jail cell.

Law enforcement is investigating.

-Shortly after being roomed together,

Epstein ended up in the infirmary

with some bruises around his neck.

-According to a source,

officials believe Epstein attempted suicide

earlier this week.

He was found on the floor crying,

semi-lucid, and depressed, we're told.

-They were never really clear on it.

They sort of mentioned that it was a suicide attempt,

but then, when we looked at the records later,

they then sort of erased it from his files.

They didn't tell us, "Well, what is this?

Was -- Did somebody beat him up?

Did the cop beat him up? Did he try to commit suicide?"

-At first, was a suicide attempt,

but then he blamed on --

Nicholas Tartaglione strangling him.

Tartaglione, for his part,

claims that he saved Jeffrey Epstein's life

and was kind of trying to insert

that into some of his court stuff to maybe be like,

"Hey, I ain't so bad a guy after all."

I mean, I can't say one way

or the other what actually happened.

I mean, a body like that, you know,

you kind of want to use it, but...

-He could've used it for good or evil.

We don't know. And you don't know

which, I think, is which in that situation.

-Yeah. Because is it more moral

to save Jeffrey Epstein from dying...?

-Or... -You answer that.

You know what I'm saying? -Yeah.

We all have to answer that.

-We all have to answer that.

-So, after, you know, the alleged attempted suicide,

they put him under suicide watch for only like --

I think it was less than 24 hours.

When he returned from suicide watch, he went into the cell,

and it's noted that the inmate that was supposed to be in there

was not in there. He had been to court.

And initially, they thought he was going to come back,

but as it turned out, the inmate never returned.

So Jeffrey was in that cell by himself.

If you know the guy was suicidal at one point,

you'd have to have somebody

assigned there to keep an eye on him,

knowing that this is your most notorious prisoner,

yet, you know, we know now that they failed.

They went into his cell, and they found him

on the floor of his cell,

allegedly with a piece of material

that was fashioned into a noose.

This was some of the sheets that they had,

and he was unconscious.

So they immediately called for EMTs,

and they transported him to the hospital,

where he was pronounced dead.

-I won't soon forget the day that I found out that he died.

It was a Saturday, and I was doing what I do

on Saturdays, which is riding my bike.

And on that particular day, I was going on a group ride.

-I had gone on vacation. I had finished my book.

There's a chapter about Epstein in it,

and I was very exhausted emotionally from doing that.

I needed a break off of the Internet.

-On August 9th, the courts began dumping

all these documents into the court record.

I never even changed out of my nightclothes.

I spent all day poring through these documents,

preparing the story that revealed all these details

about their sex-trafficking operation.

I was scheduled to do an interview on NPR,

and I was speaking to Michael Ryder,

the police chief, about the interview.

And as I was speaking to him, my phone buzzed.

-I was in Nebraska, and I had stopped at this gas station,

and I decided to turn on my phone

and see if anything had happened that day.

And, you know, the first thing I was hit with was on Twitter,

just everyone writing to me, you know,

that Jeffrey Epstein was dead.

-My phone started blowing up,

and it was reporters calling me for comments.

I didn't know anything about what had happened,

so I said, "I can't confirm or deny anything."

And, uh, we started on the ride.

I was in my own state of shock.

Riding a bike can be very meditative.

You have muscle memory in the legs,

and the mind can go elsewhere.

And I started working it over and working it over in my head.

Took about an hour for it to hit me,

and I stopped before the George Washington Bridge,

and I said, "I gotta -- I gotta get off the ride

and -- and see what's going on."

-So the first thing I did after that is,

I called the victims.

I knew that they were gonna be just stunned,

at the very least. I got ahold of a couple of them,

and, you know, it was a lot of emotion there,

you know, knowing that they finally were so close

to holding him accountable and putting him in jail,

and now he was gone.

-And I just remember, I was in this gas station,

like, all over the ceiling.

It was like the design of the gas station.

There was this over and over, it just kept saying,

"You are nowhere, you are nowhere."

And I was just staring at that and thinking how he was dead,

and this was the end of accountability.

This was the end of all these cases.

This is the end of the pursuit of justice for the victims.

And now my vacation was over.

And it was just like, "All right. Well, I'm --

I'm back. I'm back in America.

I'm back in Jeffrey Epstein's America."

-I was in bed, and my girlfriend came in

and woke me up and was like, "Uh, Jeffrey Epstein's dead."

I immediately called Liz.

-I was like, "You've got to be kidding me.

Are you serious? Come on, come on."

-Yeah. -"Really? Come on."

-Yeah. I was just like, "What? No way is he dead.

In jail?"

-Well, I think the manner in which he died was shocking,

but that kind of trickled out as the days and months

and what ended up being years went on.

-Oh. Yeah.

Can you see it?

My name is Larry Celona.

I'm a police reporter for The New York Post.

We were the first ones to put a story up online

that he had committed suicide.

I've covered every major crime story in the metropolitan area

for the last 30-plus years.

I mean, literally thousands.

-What a lot of people sort of saw as a funny coincidence

was the fact that one of his articles

is featured fairly prominently in "Eyes Wide Shut," the movie.

-I received a phone call

from somebody from Warner Bros. asking me

if I'd be interested in working on a movie project

with Stanley Kubrick.

There's a 10-second scene.

Tom Cruise opens The New York Post.

He reads a story about someone dying of a drug overdose

and says, "By Larry Celona."

Some people like to compare

"Eyes Wide Shut" and Jeffrey Epstein.

The story focuses on a secret society.

They -- They go to some mansion.

Seems like they're rich, bored people who are, you know,

looking for different, uh, ways to have sex.

If you say a single word to anyone

about what you have seen,

there will be the most dire consequences for you

and your family.

-Actually, Stanley Kubrick died

days before the film was released.

And I was the first person to write

that Stanley Kubrick died.

I wrote about Stanley Kubrick's, like, last night,

how he was home with friends and laughing,

and they were sort of asking, like, how I could know all this.

When Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide,

and since I broke that story, how the same person would write

about Stanley Kubrick's death to write about Jeffrey Epstein's,

people were questioning if I was real.

Maybe some society that's just putting out

stories under my name.

But there was a lot of stuff on the Internet,

uh, asking those questions.

So, this is the front-page story from August 11, 2019.

"Suicide scandal." "Outrage as Jeffrey Epstein

'kills self' after sex files exposed."

And then, the inside story is our exclusive that we had.

"Perv Epstein is found hanged."

As soon as we put the story online,

the number of hits, it was going through the roof.

I don't remember what the final number was,

but I think the editor said the next day,

at that time, it was a record, uh, number of hits for a story.

There were people that -- that very first day

who did not believe

that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide.

-This is a suspected suicide,

and it just smells fishy to so many people.

-The timing is so suspicious.

-The 66-year-old was supposed to be checked on

by guards every 30 minutes, and that did not happen.

-We are now learning of serious irregularities at this facility

that are deeply concerning

and demand a thorough investigation.

-They treated it immediately like a suicide.

Even if it turned out not to be a crime,

even if it did turn out to be a suicide,

you still have to gather the evidence

the same way as you would,

as if it was, you know, a crime or a suspicious death.

I've seen a lot of prison deaths.

I've investigated a lot of them,

and I do see a lot of this in the prisons.

Deaths, they absolutely don't make sense because, you know,

they're not suicides, because they are homicides,

because they somehow arranged for an accident to happen.

So it's not uncommon.

There's no camera, you know? The guards fell asleep.

If you have an inmate that's already tried to commit suicide,

would you give them all those sheets?

There were so many sheets in there.

All those details just made it

more confusing or more unbelievable.

It's almost, you know, pathetic how every single excuse

is always the same when an inmate dies.

And this was really no different,

except he happened to be the most notorious inmate

in the country at that time, so you would think

that they would come up with better material.

I think the public is pretty smart.

You know, they can put the pieces together, too.

And I think that they looked

at all the things that I just mentioned,

and they realized that the whole -- that it was improbable.

-There are still some people who don't believe

that he committed suicide.

They believe he was killed. They --

There -- There are a lot of people,

including his brother.

-Epstein's brother, Mark, is speaking out,

telling the Miami Herald that his brother was innocent

and did not commit suicide. Mark Epstein then went on

to reinvigorate the suicide/murder debate,

saying, "Jeffrey knew a lot of stuff about a lot of people."

-Mark did not believe that he committed suicide,

so he hired an outside doctor, uh, Dr. Michael Baden.

-At the autopsy, on day one,

there were findings that were unusual for suicidal

hanging and more consistent

with ligature homicidal strangulation,

because there are multiple --

three fractures in the hyoid bone,

the thyroid cartilage, that are very unusual for suicide

and more, uh, indicative of strangulation --

homicidal strangulation.

-Epstein didn't use the full weight of his body

to hang himself.

What he did was, he kneeled.

So by kneeling and pushing himself forward,

the noose would have gone up like this.

When you hang yourself,

the -- the injury that you will have to your neck

would be up here like this.

And with Epstein, it was down here.

You know, as Baden pointed out,

the noose that they found didn't appear to be cut.

The picture of it almost looks like they planted it there

because it's like, perfect, you know?

And if you look at the pictures of Epstein's body,

there was a lot of blood around here.

-But Dr. Michael Baden is known to always

go against what the original findings

were by the medical examiner.

He's basically --

Seems like he tells the family

or whoever hires him what they want to hear.

-Look, in my job, you can get an expert

to say anything if you pay them.

Baden is a serious guy. He -- uh, yes, he gets to be --

he gets paid to give opinions as an expert witness in many cases,

so you have to take that into consideration.

But he's not gonna put his reputation out there

and -- and make up some nonsense to -- just to generate a fee.

He's a -- he's a -- a forensic scientist.

-After the suicide, there was a -- an internal investigation.

-Bill Barr broke his silence on Epstein this week.

He called Epstein's death "a perfect storm of screw-ups."

Interesting.

-It wasn't whether Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.

It was an investigation into who did what wrong.

"Why didn't you check on him every 30 minutes?"

So it was sort of a detailing of the people at the prison

and the mistakes they made.

As I'm sitting here right now, we don't know

if the FBI ever investigated his death.

-They did a thorough investigation,

but, I mean, it was pretty basic on --

on the reason why it happened.

Sometimes the obvious answer is the right answer.

I mean, it could just be that these guards,

uh, you know, were overworked

and just were taking shortcuts doing their job.

I mean, that's a lot more plausible than, you know,

some rich, famous person hiring somebody to walk into a prison

and choke him without anybody else seeing him.

I mean, but anything I say is not going to change their minds.

-A lot of people who had dismissed

this as the terrain

of "conspiracy theorists" or crazy people were like,

"Whoa. You know, this is something real."

If he died in prison with the security guards asleep

with no video, given his notoriety,

that clearly something was at play,

which is something that I also think is true.

I do not think he killed himself.

I'm not saying I know what happened.

No one knows what happens. That's the entire point of this.

If you don't believe he killed himself,

you're then left with the question of,

assuming you believe he's dead, who killed him?

That is the easy conspiracy theory to weaponize.

-Then you want somebody who's gonna get up every day --

-Hey, Hillary, why did your husband visit Epstein island

26 times?!

-Remember seeing the hashtag #ClintonBodyCount

as the first hashtag around Epstein's death.

It was very clear from the beginning that people

were alleging that Clintons had Epstein murdered in prison

so that more information about them wouldn't come out.

So, I remember watching the video from Terrence Williams

that was later retweeted by Trump.

-Because of the President,

millions of people have now read conservative

comedian Terrence Williams's ridiculous tweet

claiming the Clintons were behind the death.

-You know, he's a high-value target

for all kinds of different people.

So Clinton wasn't the only ones

that we would imagine might have had a hand in killing him.

-It's an analogue on the other side.

The left would say, "And Trump, who had social ties

to Jeffrey Epstein...," and the suggestion there

is that, in an effort to keep from coming out

any sort of dark secrets, they have him killed.

-The questions that people were asking about,

"Well, what happened?" were legitimate.

The assumption that it must have been a hit fell wildly afield

from what we actually knew.

-I think they should get another hobby, you know?

Uh...do something more with their lives.

But, hey, as far as the people

who did the legitimate investigation are concerned,

he committed suicide.

I'm not the only person who said he committed suicide.

Somebody has to be the first. I'm glad it was me.

-"Photos show Jeffrey Epstein

as he's wheeled into downtown hospital,"

by Larry Celona, Eileen A.J. Connolly,

and Emily Saul.

One of the big things was that his nose wasn't big --

No, it was his ears. It was his ears.

People were like, "His ears are different."

-It was the ears and the nose. They went right

into those things. -Well, that's kind of

the only parts of him you can see.

Yeah. -I always called that theory

the "Freaky Friday" body-double theory.

-Yeah. -Which was what people believed

that they had switched out this body for...

-Roger... -...Tony Rodham.

-Yes.

-Hillary Rodham Clinton's brother,

who had died, I believe,

like two months prior to Jeffrey Epstein.

-So they would have had to keep his ass on ice...

-Yeah. -...knowing that Epstein

was gonna get arrested.

-No funeral, no cremation. -No funeral, nothing.

-Body solid. -Full ice.

-Switch them out.

-In the summer. Which never made sense to me

'cause, like, I was always, like,

"Well, why wouldn't they just not arrest him?"

Jeffrey Epstein died during the first, like,

month of the show.

There was just a ton of information

coming out really quickly,

and I think a lot of people liked the show

because we were sort of able to synthesize a lot of that stuff

and -- and explain it in kind of like normal terms to people.

The Post, you know, somehow notes in this article that,

yes, uh, Epstein's hyoid bone was broken,

and that usually appears in homicides,

not suicides, which, you know, it would really help us

if we could learn that there was no possibility

of homicide there, right? -Well, what's funny is,

it says, "It was not immediately clear

why some video footage outside Epstein's cell

is too flawed for investigators to use,

or what is visible in the usable footage."

Yeah, I -- okay. "It's not immediately clear"?

I think it's pretty clear.

-I think people understand that the way media works

is, like, it relies on sponsors, it relies on advertisers,

and then often, in individual reporters' cases,

it relies on personal connections

that they might have with the subjects they cover.

The issue of, like, access journalism

is where you like -- you probably won't be

as honest with your audience as you normally would,

because you want to maintain a good relationship

with the people that you're covering.

-I think the media has let the American people down,

but I also think most people cannot be in the media.

Even if you're an awesome journalist,

even if you're a great writer,

great investigative reporter, you're locked out.

Who can be in it? The children of the wealthy.

And so when the children of the wealthy dominate an industry,

or at least, um, play a large role in it,

they're not going to want to report on the wealthy.

You know, those are their parents

or their parents' friends.

If you're outside of that world, you notice it.

This is a very, very insular world,

and I don't think they realize how strange

this looks to ordinary people

that, like, most of us don't know celebrities,

and we don't know powerful politicians,

and we don't even know people in media.

And I say, I think that's been a problem.

-People's understandable questions and doubt

about the narrative of what happened in the MCC

are a kind of -- a way for them

to articulate what their larger questions

about Jeffrey Epstein's relationship with people

in power, like, really is.

And so in some ways, I think that the --

the questions about his death or his suicide

or his not suicide, whatever may have happened,

are really more of a kind of placeholder

for a lot of those larger questions that most people feel,

you know, are -- are maybe much harder to ask.

-You had to ask yourself,

"How is he having allegedly access

to all these very, very important people?"

I've met a lot of people like this who are exceptional,

and not everybody is close to centers of power

like he's supposed to be.

And I don't believe for one second that,

um, offering sexualized massages with young girls

is the reason he had that access.

To me, it suggests that there is some other way

that he had influence, and in my own personal opinion,

I am receptive to the possibility

that he was an operative for foreign governments.

-Why reach out to Epstein?

You have all the resources in the world.

You could meet with anyone you wanted to.

Why are you seeking out a pedophile?

Why are you seeking out a child trafficker?

-Tonight, Ghislaine Maxwell has now been sentenced to 20 years

in prison after her conviction for grooming underage girls

for Jeffrey Epstein. -Before she was sentenced,

Maxwell addressed the court for the first time,

saying meeting Epstein was the greatest regret of her life.

-I think the fact that Epstein and Maxwell

are no longer out in the world

does not mean that what they've done has stopped.

There, I think, very likely is still

a rape/child-trafficking network

being used to blackmail powerful figures.

-Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison, and a lot of people want to know

if she's going to turn in powerful people.

-I don't know. I haven't really been

following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly.

-Any comments on the alleged -- allegations of your connection

with Jeffrey Epstein? -Oh, please.

-Virginia Roberts... -Yeah.

-...has made allegations against you.

She described dancing with you...

-No. -...and you profusely sweating

and that she went on to have a bath, possibly --

There's a -- There's a slight problem with -- with --

with -- with -- with the sweating,

which is that I don't sweat.

-When it's tied to world leaders,

it has real security implications,

and people, I think, are owed that information.

And the absolute uniform silence about it, I think,

is profoundly disturbing.

-I think it's a shame that a lot of people's real

and understandable questions about this case

and about what actually happened in that jail cell

got kind of memed into Etsy sweatshirts

and Christmas ornaments at Urban Outfitters,

and kind of a right-wing rallying cry

for pretty much, like, cynical opportunists.

-There also tends to be this,

um, kind of mentality within the mainstream media

of insisting that everything is actually fine,

that things can never be as bad as they seem,

even if they're bad right in your face.

There was an actual pedophile trafficking ring happening.

The media went from ignoring Epstein entirely

to this glut of articles that came out,

where many admitted that they knew all along

that this was happening.

-Epstein was hiding in plain sight.

We all knew about him. We all knew what he was doing.

-What we're dealing with now on the Internet,

in terms of anti-media movements,

is so important to understand, though,

because this is the public saying, "We're not gonna

just trust the mouthpieces of mainstream media

to say whatever it is

you want them to parrot back to you."

-Hillary, I have to ask you a question

that has been plaguing me for a while.

-How did you kill Jeffrey Epstein?

-Do you think Epstein killed himself?

Sincerely. -I don't know.

I-I will say that, you know, he was a fixture in Palm Beach.

-I believe that he was, uh, murdered.

-I do think that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.

There has been an inspectors general report.

There was the autopsy. It's been explained.

-No, I don't think Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.

You know, I really don't think that he was able

to do that kind of damage to himself.

He may have wanted to die and possibly, um,

hired somebody, for example.

But I don't think that he was capable

of breaking three bones in his neck

by kneeling from his bunk.

And I don't think he had,

as he admitted to his own psychiatrist at the prison,

he didn't have the courage to do that.

I mean, this was a guy that had everything done for him,

you know, down to practically having his shoes

tied by his butlers.

-If you're going from the top of the mountain, uh,

to the subbasement, that's a pretty big comedown.

And how that would affect somebody in his situation

is something that is beyond me.

It wouldn't surprise me if he killed himself.

It would not surprise me

if there were some other cause for his death.

-The old saying is true -- "Loose lips sink ships."

And I just don't know, um,

anyone that would have the discipline not to say,

"Well, I killed Epstein."

So, in this case, I do believe the evidence.

I do believe the story.

I must trust what is the most likely outcome.

-Let's just say it was a suicide.

Why not just say, "Here's how it happened.

Here's how we found him. Here's what the guards said."

But the fact that nobody is saying anything indicates to me

that there's something not right.

-This is an ugly black mark on the Bureau of Prisons,

and I'll give them the credit

for subsequently closing the MCC,

which is the only good thing, really,

to come out of Epstein's death.

-Epstein killed himself on August 10, 2019,

and here it is, five years later,

and we're still dealing with it.

-It's the gift that keeps on giving.

There will always be an Epstein story on a slow news day,

and the tentacles that it has just don't seem to recede.

-I'm not surprised we continue

to talk about "Epstein didn't kill himself,"

because what's so important about a meme

is what it does once it transforms

into meaning something more than its creation.

Meme wars are so important online,

and we dismiss them because they're, you know, often jokes,

their irony, their disinformation.

But usually within even the most grotesque meme wars,

there is some kind of kernel of truth

or some kind of understanding that something is still amiss.

-The women.

The women sometimes keep me up at night.

You know, what they went through, you know?

You know, I had to -- to some degree,

I -- I had to feel it, too.

You know, of course, I can't feel it as deeply as they did.

You know, they had their whole lives ahead of them.

And, uh...

people just look the other way, you know?

And destroyed so many lives.

The public deserves the truth.

The victims certainly deserve the truth.

It might not happen in my lifetime,

but I do think that the truth always comes out.