Sometimes conspiracies turn out to be true. It’s just that instead of using obscure coded language of walnut sauce and pies, it’s very directly, I’m trying to hook up with this hot lady. Jeffrey, what’s your advice? Well, we are here to talk Epstein files. Molly, you just came back from D.C., where you were at a press conference of Epstein survivors on Tuesday. And we’re taping this on Wednesday morning. So I wanted to talk to you about where the Epstein saga sits in the broader arc of #MeToo and the movement that has stumbled along the way, and what it says that three of the four Republicans who broke ranks with Trump were all women. Before we get into the broader context, let’s talk about the press event that you went to. It sounds like it was quite a scene. So I think it’s worth pulling back and looking at Tuesday. Tuesday was a day that for Donald Trump was like right out of Macbeth. He was – we saw a president who had successfully gotten away with a lot of stuff. All of a sudden, Jeffrey Epstein, like Banquo’s ghost, comes back. These files weed their way through. Trump is hanging out with Mohammed bin Salman, doing a press conference in his golden, his golden Oval Office. And at the same time, these women are doing a press conference right outside of the Cannon building. And you have this ghost of a story that has come back once again. And now the discharge petition goes right through the House that same day, and it goes to the Senate and it passes the Senate. And it is just a very Shakespearean moment of a problem that Donald Trump had. And we don’t know how big a problem. We don’t really know what’s in those files. So he certainly behaves like someone who does not want those files to be released. And it comes back to him, it’s just a very cinematic and also morally important and atrocious moment. Yeah I mean, one of the things that’s really striking about this whole saga, I mean, this has been going on now for two decades. Jeffrey Epstein first kind of gets into legal trouble just about 20 years ago. He does a little bit of time. Very soft time. And this was all before the #MeToo movement started, right or the #MeToo movement, I should say, became a big public phenomenon with the exposure and ultimately the downfall of Harvey Weinstein, thanks to reporting by some of our colleagues. And, the scope and scale of the Epstein crisis coming at a moment when it seems as though there is this MeToo has gone too far that it was being applied that men weren’t being allowed to be men. So it’s been really interesting to see the way that this whole case is unfolded and the politics around it have unfolded, how have you kind of seen the #MeToo of it all as you’ve watched this happening. Well, so that I mean, that was why I thought we should talk was because I think of you as a very as someone who is also following these rapid cycling of progress, a progress and reversal and progress reversal and progress and reversal. So what I thought the moment I would take away from that press conference was one of the survivors. And I think it’s Annie Farmer talked about how she and her sister had called the F.B.I. under Bush. No, under Clinton, under Clinton, and said, we have this thing we want to report that they had hung up on her. And it was just for me, the sheer magnitude of different administrations, different parties, having been in some way responsible for an F.B.I. that did not take these women seriously. “In 1996, when my sister Maria bravely blew the whistle on this group by reporting to the F.B.I. what Epstein and Maxwell did to both of us, they hung up on the phone on her, and there was no follow up of any kind. Bill Clinton was president. In 2006. The F.B.I. came to us, finally interviewed us and asked us both to be witnesses against Epstein. We were very anxious, but we agreed, and then we didn’t hear back from them due to their infamous sweetheart deal. George W. Bush was president. In 2015, when the D.O.J. was sent FOIA requests for Maria’s F.B.I. files and they were denied, as they have been many times. Barack Obama was president in 2019 when Epstein died in prison due to either negligence or foul play.” Donald Trump was president and she said this thing, which is think of all the people, all the girls who got hurt during the period when we were trying to raise the alarm, I mean, that’s one of the things that has really struck me about the Epstein case and about #MeToo. More generally. A lot of people think about #MeToo as starting with Harvey Weinstein and this, that kind of opened the floodgates. But in fact, #MeToo was first popularized by Tarana Burke, who is, a Black American activist. And it was inspired by the many conversations that she had with teenage girls about the terrible experiences they had with sexual abuse, harassment. And what that really highlights for me is that so much of this conversation about Epstein and about this, vast conspiracy of pedophilia you think about controversies like Pizzagate and all of the kind of QAnon belief that there were Democratic powerful Democratic leaders who were trafficking children out of a pizzeria in Washington. But all of that obscures the fact that sexual exploitation of girls and teenagers in this country is endemic. It happens, surely it happens among power brokers. But I think for most people, their connection to a situation like this is actually something that they’ve witnessed in their own life. And the conspiracy feels more like a conspiracy of silence of powerful men, wherever they happen to find themselves. The powerful man might be the head of a family, or it might be the head of a company or the head of a small of a small business. Your boss at the Taco Bell. There’s a power dynamic there. Exactly and so I think that one of the reasons that I mean, it’s just really striking to me that #MeToo took off once it became clear that this kind of broader societal problem that was just kind of bubbling below the surface starts to be written about at the very top of society. Talking about the big power brokers. And I think there’s something similar happening with Epstein. Where you have and I’m really struck by the fact that the three of the four Republicans who signed on were all women, and two of the three have spoken publicly about their own experiences. In the case of Nancy Mace, of sexual assault and domestic violence for Lauren Boebert. Definitely, definitely domestic violence. And for Marjorie Taylor Greene, I think a sense that in this kind of chauvinistic Washington, she’s being pushed around, she’s getting belittled, she’s told what she can and can’t do. And, I don’t want to read too much into it, but you have to think like, these are women of a certain age who have our age. Yes, our age exactly. Who know what the score is. And have surely seen in their own lives, their own friends, their own communities. Case after case of teenage girls who’ve been exploited or have been pressured into having a relationship with a man who’s too old for them. All those kinds of things that we know all the way up to know horrific sexual childhood sexual abuse. So I think that there’s something about this saga and the role of these three women that is just totally fascinating. It just delves into this thing that connects it to people’s life experience. And it is it’s funny because it’s like, as someone who covers politicians, I have become so cynical of everyone’s motives. And especially over the last decade of Trumpism you just it’s hard to think that these people want what’s best for anyone, really, honestly, but they don’t have some cynical ulterior motive that it’s about preserving their own power or whatever. Exactly especially Marjorie Taylor Greene, who really did say a lot of crazy stuff over the last eight years and has some very odious beliefs. Very yeah. But what I do think is interesting is when I was there could see that these victims felt very connected with Marjorie Taylor Greene. So that’s fascinating. Yeah I mean, you really could see because they’re not faking it. They don’t. And in fact, one of them was like, I voted for Trump, and you’ve betrayed me. Not quite that, but basically that. And so they’re not faking it. And the other thing that I wanted to just mention about the victims is these women. And remember, there are probably hundreds of women. There may be as many, I think. I mean, this was years and years and years of abuse. But these women had not ever been together. So what that first press conference, when the discharge petition got started, they had a real camaraderie and they started talking about reading a list and they talked about it again yesterday. I haven’t seen any reporting about this, but they did, in fact, talk about one of the victims said, Marjorie said she’ll read a list of our names, and representative Jayapal said she would too. So there really is appetite for information. So even if the Trump D.O.J., which really does serve at the pleasure of Donald Trump at this moment, as you can tell from Pam Bondi, just general acquiescence on every point, this list, these names, there really is a feeling these names are getting rad. So there’s a kind of desire to put this out into the world and make it into make it into something that’s like part of the Congressional record. That’s part of the overall sweep of these events. It’s again, just coming back to these three Republican women in Congress. They really were under a tremendous amount of pressure, given the level of pressure that they’re under. It’s remarkable that they held up. But it’s also interesting to me to think about the arc of #MeToo and the arc of how we went from this moment where there was just this tremendous pressure for accountability and then quite quickly, a feeling that it had gone too far, quite quickly. And admittedly the gamut of people who got caught up in me, too, there were truly onerous ogres like Harvey Weinstein or you look at somebody like Kevin Spacey, who was very clearly had a long track record of if not criminal behavior, then very serious harassment against young mal actors over many years. And, and it’s but then as time progresses, and you start it starts to catch up with figures like Al Franken, the Democratic Senator from Minnesota. And former comedian – I guess he’s still a comedian. Aziz Ansari, that was one of the most edge cases that I think turned a lot of people off of me, too. And it’s funny, because I do think you mentioned this earlier, there is this kind of cyclical nature to these things where there’s accountability, there’s a sense that this cannot go on and then there’s a backlash. So where do you think we are in this cycle. Yeah, it’s such a good point. I had for a long time believed that this was the nature modern life and technology and that it was the failing of I don’t know why I had this whole theory in my head that it was a failing of technology, but I actually now think if you think about the book backlash, Susan Faludi’s seminal Bible of the sort of war against feminism. Yep. And you think about the periods. I mean, I actually was rereading it again, Phyllis Schlafly the equal Rights Amendment because I feel like that is I feel like that’s very similar story in a way. The equal Rights Amendment, a piece of legislation that would have guaranteed women equal rights. And the pushback to that in those years where they had passed it through the Congress but couldn’t get it ratified by the states. And there was this concerted effort to by conservative women to show that they didn’t need it. And I feel like there’s this it feels like a similar kind of pushback to movement to push back. I don’t want to be wrong. And I feel like whenever you want to try to predict the future, whenever I predict the future, I’m always wrong. So I don’t want to and my I’m always told that predicting the future is bad podcasting. But that said, now I’ll predict the future. It does feel like an important moment Yeah and I think that what’s crucial is in these moments, they need to be able to connect to the experiences that ordinary people have in their own lives. It’s not just about the shadowy group of financiers and media moguls and elite university professors who have this kind of old boys network who are helping each other out at the highest levels of society. This is something that’s happening in every social context. And all of that is just happening silently. And the women who are experiencing it are like, oh, wait, it’s happening there too. And that, I think, again, to me too, that was the whole origin and momentum of the movement. I want to ask you a question. So I think there’s an element to this, which is privilege and I think that the victims are that a lot of this is about the so. So I’m going to tell very quick story. A friend of mine during me to a friend of mine said, well, no one ever me to me. And I said, you come from a fancy family. Nobody’s going to me, to you because they know your mom. And I wondered if that when you look at these victims. One was picked up at Mar- a Lago for massage these or she was a spa attendant. Virginia Giuffre. Virginia was a 16-year-old spa attendant. at Mar-a-Lago. Like these women were disenfranchised enough so they didn’t have a powerful mom they could call Yeah, yeah. No and I think that that’s a huge part of this story is that and again, this connects back to the ubiquity and just how common this kind of sexual exploitation is of young women, again, not by fancy rich people, although that certainly happens, but by people that are close to them. I mean, I think there have been a number of stories that have come out about how these teenage girls who ended up in, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein’s clutches had had previous experiences of being exploited, again, not by somebody with a private island and a Manhattan townhouse, but by somebody close to them. And that is the painful reality of how these things work. I want to talk a little bit about this question of accountability, because I think there’s been this sense that Trump never ultimately pays a price for what he does. He always manages he’s Teflon Don. He always manages to get away with it. Do you think this time will be different. So it’s funny because if you think about Epstein 2007, it looks like the walls are closing in. And then he signs this non-prosecution agreement with Alex Acosta, 2008. He does a year of like, couture jail, where he’s basically walks in and walks out. He’s doing this. He’s doing that. It’s in Palm Beach. I think that the way it works with a lot of powerful men, I would say people, but it’s really men because even like powerful women, they tend to get held accountable. I’m thinking about Martha Stewart and James Comey. I’m thinking about Martha Stewart. A lot of people would not have gone to jail for what Martha Stewart went to jail for a lot of powerful men. It’s like sometimes the process is imperfect, but eventually it happens. When Trump was out of office, he did end up, adjudicated by E. Jean Carroll. He did end up owing millions of dollars. So I do think that this accountability thing, it happens. Sometimes it takes a couple pushes. So I’m not convinced. I also am not a person who believes like I don’t think the arc I don’t think history, it just stops. I think he keeps going Yeah and it’s kind of gross because the answer to the question of should there be accountability should just be yes rather than who’s it going to hurt. Which side is going to get more hurt by it. But there’s been a lot talk about, well, Epstein, the circles that he ran in this is actually going to this is actually going to affect more Democrats than it is Republicans. I mean, I don’t know about that. But I have a slightly different view, which is that I think it’ll actually be a really good thing if this whole network and constellation of powerful men who are part of this in varying degrees, some of them not criminal, some of them just creepy, some of them just really bad judgment. I think if all of those figures, regardless of what their politics are swept away and pushed into retirement and sent off to live out the last of their days in some kind of shame. That would not necessarily be a bad thing. And I would say it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Like, especially for the Democratic Party you need this renewal. You need new figures who are untouched, who are never part of these awful power games that and networks that they used to play. And I almost think of it as being a little bit like the dividing line between Democrats who oppose the Iraq war and those who voted for it. Again, it’s an imperfect analogy, obviously different situation, but I think that there was something really healthy about that becoming, in effect, a kind of litmus test, to have a clear moral point of view about whether the Iraq War was a huge mistake or not. So, I don’t know. I mean, thinking about accountability lesson like who goes to jail and more in terms of how does our culture and politics shift at the end of this, I don’t know. That feels like a real possibility coming out of this. It’s funny because we’re friends besides being colleagues. And I always think of you as a person who has in their head a moral like moral questions. Who doesn’t. I mean, nobody is perfect, but who in their head is constantly thinking of the moral implications of things, which I hope that’s not. I hope this is not my own fantasy of you, and I too am often I think not because I’m so great, but because I got sober when I was 19. And so I’m always thinking about the moral implications of will this make you feel so bad that ultimately you’ll start drinking it, that kind of thing. And so I do think you have to wonder, after 2007, these people all knew. Like he was on the registered sex offender website because I remember once I found the app and I was looking at it and I pushed Central Park and he came up. So he was on he was like a registered sex offender on the registry who lived not that far from you. Not that far, no. And your kids. And my kids. So And so though, of course, they never would have gone for any of the kids who were like private school kids because they knew that they couldn’t. And that, I think is such an important when we talk about you and I are both I think are very we want to talk about the layers of privilege and wealth and how they because the one thing that Donald Trump, I think, ever said that was a benefit to society was he said the system is rigged and he was. And on about that one thing. I mean, of course, he wanted to rig it more for himself. But about that one thing, he was correct. So I do. But I do think the moral question of if you are. Going to the home of someone who is a registered sex offender the Woody Allen dinner parties like you are Yeah, there’s no denying it that it’s clear that some of the people involved here chose to stay in contact and in warm and affectionate contact with Epstein long after they knew. And that, I think is where the ultimately like the accountability is just going to be kind of undeniable. And I say sweep them all away. Yeah, I do too. I also agree with that point. Bill Clinton’s in there. Bill Clinton was president at in the 90s. And it was a very different time for how we think about powerful men. Yeah, yeah. No, obviously. And our mutual friend Monica Lewinsky has lots to say about that. She really does. So you obviously have had a lot of conversations and talked to a lot of people. And there is this sense that this Epstein saga has split Donald Trump’s coalition in a way that nothing else has. Why do you think that is. What is it about. This particular story that has led to such a profound cleavage. So I think it’s two parts. So one is they were radicalized on Pizzagate in 2016 when Donald Trump was running for office. Wikileaks kept releasing these emails. I actually went back and looked this up Emails from John Podesta to his brother Tony about, pizza. And do he was talking about a walnut sauce. Like, tell me because they’re both big cooks. So these and these emails were interpreted to be child sex trafficking. So this was the very beginning of Trumpism, right before Trump got elected the first time. So I think you had a base that had an origin story that was Donald Trump is going to end a sex trafficking ring. Then fast forward QAnon 2020. He’s making overtures towards QAnon when he’s running for reelection. He’s saying the storm is coming. Qanon again, a follow up of Pizzagate. There is a cabal of sex trafficking, powerful men and that Trump is going to bring them down. Here we are. Fast forward we are in 2025. There is actually it’s not really I mean, yeah, it’s a cabal. There’s a cabal of powerful men. There’s a ringleader. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine. But there clearly are many people who are many, I think mostly men who are doing this. And so you have a base that’s radicalized on an origin story that turns out to be true Yeah, well, I mean, it’s that classic line. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Sometimes conspiracies turn out to be true. It just that instead of using obscure coded language of walnut sauce and pies very directly. I’m trying to hook up with this hot lady. Jeffrey, what’s your advice. And there is something sad and banal and frankly, kind of tragic about that. And speaking of sad and banal, the other thing I would say, just as an underlying thing I personally would be more gratified if it were like a return of me to that dissected the MAGA movement, if it were women’s rights that came in and did it. But you have to realize also that what’s bubbling below the surface is a movement that has been promised for about 10 years that they were going to Trump was going to make things cheaper and he hasn’t. And in fact, things have gotten more expensive and that he was going to do things bring back coal jobs and bring back manufacturing. And so some of this, I think, is like as much as I in my own belief system, would like it to be that finally the women are winning. There’s also, I think, an underlying dissatisfaction that is stoking the flames. Well, Molly, I think we should leave it there. Thank you so much for talking with me. It was great to see you. It was so great. Thank you for having me.