Jim Geraghty of National Review Online assesses the impact of recent revelations involving the Epstein files.
There are those who will argue that releasing all these documents is deeply unfair to famous, wealthy, and powerful men who had friendships with Epstein for a long period of time, but who did not commit any sex crimes alongside him.
From a November 2020 U.S. Department of Justice summary of the long, long investigation into Epstein: “The Palm Beach (Florida) Police Department began investigating Jeffrey Epstein in 2005, after the parents of a 14-year-old girl complained that Epstein had paid her for a massage.”
Perhaps Epstein’s friends and associates didn’t know about that investigation. But by June 30, 2008, they sure as hell should have known that Epstein had “pled guilty to the pending state indictment charging felony solicitation of prostitution and, pursuant to the NPA, to a criminal information charging him with procurement of minors to engage in prostitution.”
We don’t know if a particularly unsavory allegation about billionaire Bill Gates in the latest release of documents is true. But we know that Gates’s friendship with Epstein began in 2011 — three years after the guilty plea! — and continued until at least 2014. If you choose to begin a friendship with a guy who pled guilty to procuring minors to engage in prostitution, you accept the risk of damage to your reputation.
If you found out that one of your friends had pled guilty to “procuring minors to engage in prostitution,” do you think you could or would maintain that friendship? Or do you think you would deliberately lose his number?
Mind you, up until very recently, Bill Gates wanted to be perceived as a trustworthy public authority on matters like climate change, vaccination, early warning systems for detecting communicable diseases, and the allegedly delicious taste of synthetic meat. While hanging around with a predatory creep doesn’t automatically invalidate what Gates says about these other issues, his friendship with Epstein does change the way people look at him, which is why Gates has tried to distance himself from him.
