How Epstein used sex as a weapon

I’ve been watching the fourth season of Industry, the HBO show. It began by following the lives and relationships of young people in the finance industry in London but has gradually expanded into politics and power more generally. The writers – Mickey Down and Konrad Kay – have been partially inspired by real life events; the character of Yasmin Kara-Hanani is the child of a publishing magnate who disappears from a yacht named after his daughter, a parallel recognisable to anyone familiar with Ghislaine Maxwell’s background.

In this season, they clearly draw upon both the Wirecard scandal and Jeffrey Epstein as inspiration, particularly in regard to the use of compromising sexual videos being used to extort influential people, something Epstein has long been rumoured to have done.

There is no direct proof currently in the public domain that Epstein blackmailed others, though he had spycams throughout his properties. But a number of his victims have expressed their certainty that he filmed encounters in his homes in order to have bargaining power. Howard Lutnick, the US commerce secretary who had his own controversial ties to Epstein, has called him “the greatest blackmailer ever”.

The WSJ also reported that Epstein attempted to extort Bill Gates over an extramarital affair and Epstein himself told aNew York Times reporter in 2018 that he had incriminating evidence of others engaging in illicit activity.

There are two pertinent lines in Industry: “The threat of exposure is more valuable than exposure itself,” and the possibility of something existing is “almost as bad as it existing”. Epstein was seen as someone who was capable of blackmail, who was without moral scruples, who was already known for his opaque business practices. His ascent to uber-wealth was unclear, both murky and mythologised, well before his notoriety with underage girls; in a 2003 Vanity Fair piece titled “The Talented Mr Epstein” sources refer to “bounty hunting”, “illegal operations” and “insider trading”.

One line in the Vanity Fair article stayed with me – “no one really seems to know him or his history completely or what his arsenal actually consists of”(emphasis added). I began to think about his armoury, which consisted of nefarious business practices and the proffering of gifts and money and probably threats. I thought how, for Epstein, sex was a weapon that he wielded, and how he used sex and women as both a tool for and signifier of power.

I began to think about my work, what sex means to rich men and the similarities that Epstein’s abuses had with other times and places in history. I came to realise that the way he operated was nothing new.

Suggested Reading

Andrew’s reckoning belongs to the survivors

Zoë Grünewald

When I worked in full-service erotic massage parlours, it was quite common for men to come in with a colleague or a client, someone who they were wooing into a deal and were taking on a round of entertainment, someone who they would treat to sex with a desirable woman. I was often the final delicacy of the evening.

A paid-sex-on-premises venue was a location for male fraternisation and business deals, just like a golf course. Perhaps it was also a place for the sounding out of shared values and a shared bond, something slightly untoward that showed their willingness to get into it with each other, to trust and be vulnerable, a tester and taster for their more extensive business relationship.

In Mad Men, one of the characters talks about “mutually assured destruction” when two men run into each other at a brothel, both cheating on their wives. There is something in that. Once, on a boat in Sydney Harbour with another working girl and her sugar daddy, her client threw a tantrum because the other man present – who he had booked me for without asking – didn’t want to fuck me. This meant the other man was now standing in judgement on him for both cheating on his wife and for booking what he thought were underage girls (we weren’t, both twenty-two at the time, but we looked it). The delicacy he had proffered was rejected, yes, but also suddenly he was alone and exposed in his behaviour, and at risk of repercussions. He ended up fucking me himself, begrudgingly: “can’t let Maddy go to waste”.

In Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s filings against Ghislaine Maxwell, the documents say that Epstein lent her, along with other young girls, to other people to “ingratiate himself with them for business, personal, political and financial gain”. This made me think not only of my experience as a sex worker, but also the way women have been used by powerful men in the past, especially in harems (an Arabic loan word which I use more broadly to denote a separate household for concubines across various cultures, not only Muslim).

Epstein’s set-up had many crossovers with harems; he granted favours with women, in the same way concubines were once gifted to other men. He had a combination of women there by choice and coercion, in the same way concubines consisted of both free women and slaves. He had a clear hierarchy of women governed by Maxwell, in the same way a harem had a hierarchy of women within it, the more powerful initiating and governing and sometimes subjugating those beneath them.

His preference for and use of migrant women, who are disempowered by their lack of citizenship, is also an echo of concubinage, when often foreign women were “aliens” without status by virtue of their nationality or ethnicity. His penchant for underage girls was surely also driven by the fact that younger women are lacking in status and power and are more vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation. Giuffre claimed that three twelve-year-old French girls were once sent to him as a birthday present. It sounds like something straight out of a 16th century imperial palace.

Suggested Reading

Given Giuffre was also “required” to service other “adult male peers” on Epstein’s request, one can see that women – whether underage or not – were used both to bestow and receive favours. I wonder if Epstein saw, and perhaps even would’ve been pleased by, this comparison to harems, given that an Amazon receipt for a book titled SlaveCraft: Roadmap for Erotic Servitude was found among his possessions.

Like in a harem, the sheer number of women he had access to was a display of (supposed) sexual prowess, wealth, status and power. Young and beautiful women were simply another possession to show off, in amongst all the other trappings of wealth. They could be lent to people, just as his private jet was, and they left people indebted to him – and, often more than indebted. They were pregnable to him.

It is no coincidence that many of the women he was known to engage with publicly were models (as opposed to the underage girls he engaged with privately). Firstly, beautiful women and specifically models, have an allure and status in their own right. In an episode of Sex and the City, Carrie describes “modelizers”, as men who are like womanizers but worse; a modelizer says to camera “why fuck the girl in the skirt when you can fuck the girl in the ad for the skirt?” It’s about making your conquests known, showing off to society, a boast and demonstration of your ability to pull. To get this woman your dick must be this big or your pockets that deep. You must have power in some form.

Secondly, models are ripe for exploitation. Modelling as an industry is fairly modern, and has a lot in common with the sex industry, as it is full of nubile women who often cross borders to make more money and can be coerced into predatory contracts with agencies. Models are often viewed as sexually available to men, and maybe to some rich men they are glorified sex workers.

Donald Trump and Jean-Luc Brunel, both infamous for their interest in young women and connection with Epstein, were each affiliated with the modelling industry, the former through founding Trump Model Management and judging Elite’s Look of the Year competition, and the latter through running the Karin models agency. Brunel definitely used his position to source women to prey upon and sleep with. Epstein was known to assist migrant women with their visas and education, their position more leverage to him.

Alejandro Sanchez Berrocal, researcher and doctor of philosophy at the Compultense University of Madrid, says that it is not so much about hedonism as impunity. “What distinguishes these powerful individuals is not that they can do anything, but they can do it without consequences, or with the ability to buy silence, exert pressure, or destroy reputations. Transgression functions as a status marker.”