January 4, 2024 - 12:00pm
No one wants to be associated with Jeffrey Epstein these days. For many years, famous men were happy to attend his parties, accept flights on his private plane and visit his luxurious island. Their names appear in the first tranche of documents released overnight by a New York court, confirming just how well-connected Epstein was before his disgrace. Few of them, however, noticed anything amiss — or if they did, they kept their misgivings to themselves.
Bill Clinton’s spokesman says the former president knew nothing about the financier’s crimes and cut ties with him more than a decade ago. Donald Trump, who was often photographed with Epstein in the 1990s, says he was “not a fan” and distanced himself years ago. Other former associates insist they were entirely unaware of the sex trafficking operation that resulted in the conviction of his former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, two years ago.
Maxwell’s behaviour, which involved identifying and grooming teenage girls for Epstein, is indefensible. Her trial attracted huge publicity, raising questions about how a woman frequently described as a “socialite” could have ended up as her ex-partner’s pimp. But the focus on Maxwell served to deflect attention away from equally pressing questions, such as whether the couple benefited from a culture of silence.
Epstein was often surrounded by teenage girls who flew with him on his private plane, something that hardly counts as normal behaviour. During Maxwell’s trial, Epstein’s former housekeeper described having to pick up and wash sex toys at his mansion in Palm Beach. The newly-released documents confirm that Epstein and Maxwell inhabited a highly sexualised atmosphere, which isn’t in itself new. But the sheer volume of the material, and the detailed versions of allegations already in the public domain, is startling.
So is the previously unheard claim that one of Epstein’s guests, the magician David Copperfield, saw enough to raise his suspicions. According to one of Epstein’s victims, Johanna Sjoberg, Copperfield was at a dinner party at the financier’s house where another young girl was present. He asked Sjoberg “if I was aware that girls were being paid to find other girls”. There is no suggestion that the magician was involved in any wrongdoing but it would be surprising, to say the least, if he was the only one of Epstein’s associates who ever wondered about the set-up.
Indeed, Sjoberg’s testimony paints a picture of so licentious an atmosphere at Epstein’s house in Manhattan that no one blinked when Prince Andrew allegedly put his hand on her breast. The Prince has always denied the claim that another young woman, Virginia Giuffre, was forced to have sex with him but settled a civil case brought by her two years ago. The new documents go a great deal further, claiming that a girl identified only as Jane Doe 3 was told to have sex with Andrew “in an orgy with numerous other under-aged girls” on Epstein’s private island. She was allegedly told by Epstein to “give the Prince whatever he demanded”.
The Epstein case is a scandal, and not just because he and Maxwell got away with abusing girls for so long. It suggests the continuing existence of a culture of impunity, in which it is more convenient to look the other way than challenge a charming man with apparently endless resources. The woman who facilitated Epstein’s offences is quite rightly in prison, but the penalty for unquestioningly accepting his largesse is evidently little more than a few days’ embarrassment.
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.
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SubscribeAbsolutely it must. Funnily enough, “game-changer” is the exact language that the communist Director General of the WHO used in April to describe the pandemic treaty that remains under negotiation, lauding it as a “generational agreement” that could legally oblige its members to obey the diktats of this unelected, unaccountable, stooge to stamp even harder on the face of humanity than they might otherwise be inclined. The very same communist has repeatedly pushed a “One Health” and “whole of government” and “whole of society” approach to the Treaty. The plan is for WHO’s assembly to discuss a draft in May 2023, and to ratify it in May 2024. (Incidentally, each of these meetings will now take place around four to six weeks after an “informal pre-meeting for interested non-State actors in official relations, Member States and the Secretariat” – ie after a closed-doors meeting with Gates and various of his drug-pusher oddball mates for which no minutes will be published) See https://www.thenewera.uk/p/world-hack-operation for more details.
Compare the WHO’s language with the press release for White House paper cited in this article, https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/10/18/the-2022-national-biodefense-strategy-builds-upon-administration-st-priorities-for-pandemic-preparedness/
“The National Biodefense Strategy and Implementation Plan on Countering Biological Threats, Enhancing Pandemic Preparedness, and Achieving Global Health Security provides a whole-of-government framework that organizes how the U.S. Government manages its activities to more effectively assess, prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from biological threats. It builds from a holistic “One Health” approach by interweaving efforts addressing human, animal, plant, and environmental threats throughout.“
It concludes;
“The Biden-Harris Administration firmly believes it is our generational responsibility to translate the bold biodefense and pandemic preparedness vision outlined across our biopreparedness plans into concrete action that will protect the United States and the world. And for that, the WHOSTP continues to commit our expertise, experience, and enthusiasm to work in partnership with the whole of society to achieve these goals together.”
Can you see what it is yet?
Decent people of all political persuasions and walks of life who can see this for what it is need to try and stay calm, try and avoid getting angry, but really start to question what it is our political leaders are doing. Speak to friends and neighbours about it. Speak to your elected representatives – many are likely oblivious to all of it. The pandemic treaty, and the broader crackpot plans, can and must be stopped.
I don’t remember Gates being a Doctor or Scientist.. Just a cunning Narcissist.
Missed the adjective “wealthy”. His investments in vaccine producers paid 20:1. Not bad. His money lobbies nearly every health organization pushing policies that create even more wealth for his erstwhile charity foundation. Thus the billionaires hide from the taxman.
He also stole the DOS operating system which made his initial fortune from his former employer. He is a horrible person whose only notable achievement is to enrich himself through theft and monopolistic business practices. He’s the last person anyone should listen to, unless you’re trying to be an amoral tyrant.
Given that the CDC was absolutely part of the problem, from the “you have to use our test…oh shit, our test is broken, wait, hang on, i know you think you have a test that works, but hang on, shit, hang on,” to the dishonest mask hogwash (we have known for a REALLY long time, on the order of 50 years, that masks are only effective at reducing the aeresolizing of macro-sized particles), the government was contributing to the problem. When infectious disease nerds and virologists started speaking out, and were censored for it…
This plan is the exact opposite of the direction we should be heading. When there is a crisis, you need more divergent opinions and implementations, until one of them demonstrates efficacy.
Sweden and Florida and Texas showed what governing differently can achieve. Washington can’t.
Yes I am sick of the subject but more than that, I feel traumatized by what they did to us. Don’t think I’ll ever get over it, and it has really changed they way I think about other people. A repeat of the last few years is unthinkable.
For saying these things in February 2021, the writer would have been excoriated, banned, suppressed, massively “othered”. Real epidemiologists, as opposed to the bought and paid for species, did, even then, raise concerns about the “pandemic” program, not to mention daring to question the statistics generated by the establishment and their publication by mouthpiece media. Sceptics, with other outliers, do prove invaluable to the preservation of a species. As risk/benefit evidence mounts, one must indeed question the rationale beyond the whole “Branch Covidian” religion as thrust upon the masses. Timor mortis conturbat me was an easy thin end of the wedge, with the masking, lockdowns etc functioning as useful totems for encouraging solidarity and anesthesia. Sadly, those measures weren’t even harmless placebos — the weakening of the general immune system is now inevitably producing a lot of other, potentially more statistically deadly, illnesses. It has been a tragic folly, and as for Biden, as the zombie legislator of sinister interests, has he forgotten the First Rule of Holes? When you see you’re in one, stop digging!
So the WEF depopulation agenda,ridding the world of us ‘useless eaters’ continues apace. People really need to wake up while they still can!
“As scientists work around the clock to produce the new vaccines and drugs, the poor are consigned to misery and starvation.” The real point is to use “pandemics” to transfer wealth from everyone else to those in Bill Gates class. This is not about keeping us safe. It’s about control.
Not just Biden; the UK Gov coincidentally shares this “100 Days Mission” that Gates pushes and wants the G7 to adopt.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/100-days-mission-to-respond-to-future-pandemic-threats
Indeed and it is extremely worrying. I posted above before seeing your post that this speeding up of vaccine production was agreed at the 2021 G7 farce hosted by Johnson in Cornwall.
Everyone should realize by now that Biden is a sock puppet for establishment, business as usual, neoliberal ideas and nobody embodies that more than Gates. This should come as no surprise to anyone.
So odd. We really had ducked a serious pandemic for ~100 years likely because of better sanitation in society and in persons. Personal sanitation of mouth and nose using simple salt solutions can reduce respiratory infections and was commonly used in years past, ignored today.
Then magically a few years back MERS and SARS arrived as zoonotic illnesses but had limited transmissibility and perhaps too lethal to propagate. Then tinkering created some newer versions that may never happen in nature. This has certainly created a new industry, the pandemic industry complex, that perhaps is of little benefit to society.
Preparing for a future unknown pathogen, the next 100 year event, is good business for some. Hopefully we are not trying to speed that pandemic schedule. Zoonotic creations have been faced by humans over a very long time and we have evolved a complicated little understood immune system that copes well. Oddly some claim that gain of function efforts are to ensure we are ready for that rapid vaccine creation using novel, little tested, vaccine creation platforms. We expect that the laboratory GOF work prepares us for a possible zoonotic arrival. Plausible claims that climate change along with encroachment animal/human increase the zoonotic risk. A lab leak then becomes more possible perhaps a good reason not to do GOF with the purpose of rapid vaccine creation. The vaccines we have created recently don’t seem to work that well and may even by harmful to some. Are we blind to that truth?
Shut Up, Put on your mask, go inside, Now!
Gates is a quixotic tyrannical globalist with no more than a dilettante command of the intersection of science and public health. Go home, Bill. We don’t want you on ‘the team’
Bill Gates would also be happy if the world were depopulated.
Well, one thing’s for sure: Joe Biden isn’t capable of writing a plan on how to find the restrooms in the White House, so he sure as heck can’t figure out what to do to handle a pandemic. For that matter, neither can Mr. Omniscient, Bill Gates.
After the experience of Covid, surely a lock down is out of the question – in free societies at least.
The plan to accelerate vaccine productions was agreed at the absurd G7 meeting hosted by Johnson in Cornwall last year. Do you remember that farce? The mask wearing and social distancing only when cameras were focused on them?
We should learn from the Covid pandemic but we should also be prepared for a very different virus, natural or man made. A polarised politics on what to do next time helps no one. Covid is very infectious but lethal only in a quite well defined portion of the population. Suppose the next pandemic is carried asymptomatically in adults but is lethal in children. Would you really not want to be prepared for whatever it took to save their lives?
How would lockdown work then? You would have to separate the children from the adults so where would you put them?
The Chinese simply just took children away from their parents! Cruelty seems endemic in this disastrous not Brave New World!