The early 1990s ushered in an anomalous period of accountability. This was the era after the Iran-Contra criminals were sentenced but before future Trump attorney general William Barr helped pardon them; when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union soon followed; when dissidents like Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, and Václav Havel went from prisons to presidencies; when America had a war and a recession and both of them came to a seemingly definitive end. This was an actual era of hope and change, and it did not last long.
At the time, I was too young to appreciate the novelty of this reversal of fortune—or to appreciate that political and economic fortunes could be reversed at all. I took global shifts in stride like a preteen Francis Fukuyama, lumping “the USSR” in with “gangster rap” in the category of “things only adults are dumb enough to fear.” My parents had been ridiculous to hide under their desks in the 1950s and 1960s, I thought, waiting for bombs that never dropped and invaders that never came. My main resource on the end of the Cold War may have been the Scorpions’ “Wind of Change” video, but my casual conviction that America was indomitable put me in the mainstream. Adults told me I lived in the last superpower and I believed them. I wondered what it would be like to live in a country torn apart from within, like the USSR, and have your whole life upended. I don’t wonder about that anymore.
Throughout the early 1990s, public intellectuals proclaimed that American-style democracy and capitalism had begun their ceaseless triumph across the globe. Peace and prosperity were not mere aspirations, but the permanent condition of the new world order. The contention that we were on a brand-new geopolitical path, free from age-old travails, was discussed in bestsellers like Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. This idea reflected the doctrine of American exceptionalism that post–Cold War US presidents pushed citizens to embrace. The rest of the world had to fall in line with America because America no longer had a rival of equal might—a position US officials marketed as civic-minded benevolence rather than de facto domination. When I was a teenager, I started reading newspapers like The New York Times, which told me no two countries would ever go to war so long as both of them had a McDonald’s.1
The biggest worry for my generation, I was told, would be how to cope with the dazzling array of options the forthcoming utopia would present. The Silicon Valley gold rush of the late 1990s further boosted the belief that the future was limitless. In 1997, Wired magazine journalists Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden wrote in a popular piece called “The Long Boom”:
We are watching the beginnings of a global economic boom on a scale never experienced before. We have entered a period of sustained growth that could eventually double the world’s economy every dozen years and bring increasing prosperity for—quite literally—billions of people on the planet. We are riding the early waves of a 25-year run of a greatly expanding economy that will do much to solve seemingly intractable problems like poverty and to ease tensions throughout the world. And we’ll do it without blowing the lid off the environment.
If this holds true, historians will look back on our era as an extraordinary moment. They will chronicle the 40-year period from 1980 to 2020 as the key years of a remarkable transformation. In the developed countries of the West, new technology will lead to big productivity increases that will cause high economic growth—actually, waves of technology will continue to roll out through the early part of the 21st century. And then the relentless process of globalization, the opening up of national economies and the integration of markets, will drive the growth through much of the rest of the world. An unprecedented alignment of an ascendant Asia, a revitalized America, and a reintegrated greater Europe—including a recovered Russia—together will create an economic juggernaut that pulls along most other regions of the planet.2
This was a fantasy that became accepted as conventional wisdom—first by elites, and then by the masses, who mortgaged their futures on the assurances of those who had already won. This was the mind-set that set the expectations of my generation, making the impending reality of economic rot and forever wars seem all the more brutal when it arrived. The forty years from 1980 to 2020 were indeed a period of remarkable transformation, just not in the way Wired predicted.
In retrospect, the danger was evident. Lurking behind the dreams of a history-less future was the unsatisfied underclass of the 1990s present, whose inconvenient existence became fodder for new forms of enmity and exploitation. With the Soviet Union no more, political elites deemed America the new problem. Not the America of wealthy men like Trump, who had allegedly been shamed or sentenced into submission, but the America of ordinary people. The America of black Los Angelenos outraged by police brutality; the America of abused women like Tonya Harding and Lorena Bobbitt and Anita Hill who were pilloried on a national scale; the America of mythical child “super-predators”—teenagers like the Central Park Five, whose exoneration can never compensate for the brutality they endured. With no external enemy left to fight, America focused on fighting itself—and exploiting the casualties.
Transformation in media law made new forms of exploitation possible. In 1987, the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, a 1949 policy that had required broadcast networks to present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that was—in the FCC’s view—fair and balanced. Republicans successfully argued that the Fairness Doctrine was an attack on journalistic freedom, and both Reagan and Bush thwarted efforts by Congress to keep the doctrine intact. This repeal happened as 24-hour cable news arrived, and foreign behemoths, like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox, landed in the United States. Fox TV was formed in 1986, one year before the Fairness Doctrine was repealed, and Fox News launched a decade later in 1996. According to New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer, Fox News founder Roger Ailes created the network to ensure Watergate-style accountability would not happen again to a president he supported.3
The Fairness Doctrine was repealed just as television news was being transformed in both pace and purpose. In many respects, the pace became the purpose; the truth, an afterthought. I have no memory of what it was like to watch TV news under the Fairness Doctrine, but it’s hard to fathom the widespread assumption of faith in network integrity required to make “fair and balanced” anything more than a bitter joke. Even when I envision a world in which its precepts are deployed, I imagine it being exploited in cynical “both sides” debates over hard facts, like the existence of climate change, or dehumanizing myths about ethnic groups. (“Are Muslims violent? Are migrants criminal?—We report, you decide!”) But the Fairness Doctrine still has an allure due to its now quaint stipulation that the TV news industry exists to serve ordinary Americans, as opposed to ordinary Americans existing to serve the TV news industry.
The public’s fate as camera fodder was cast in the 1990s, when news met entertainment, never to part, and the infotainment complex of cable media and reality TV was born. Its primary locus was crime: birthed with Cops in 1990, reaching its apex with the OJ Simpson trial in 1994 and 1995, and continuing with this format into the new millennium—as witnessed by the criminal reality TV star currently inhabiting the White House. When there wasn’t crime, cruelty would suffice. Abusive relationships were packaged as entertainment: Amy and Joey, Lorena and John Wayne, Clarence and Anita, OJ and Nicole, Pamela and Tommy, and, capping off the decade, Bill and Monica. At the time, the incessant focus on villains and victims seemed tawdry but not dangerous. After all, America’s big battles had allegedly been won. What was wrong with a circus of pain, when the stakes were so low and the protagonists so low-down that sympathy for the players could be an admission of your own struggle, and disdain a form of self-validation?
You could turn away from the ritualized humiliation, or you could look at it straight on and say, “I would never let that happen to me.” You could tell yourself that later, when something you saw on tabloid TV struck too close to home—a rape or a beating or a breakdown or another hell sold as a commodity; you could repeat this refrain with a fervency to mask your fear. You would know on a gut level that your story would never be viewed with sympathy, because sympathy was for suckers now. Sympathy was a junk bond emotion. Sympathy was reserved for only the most virtuous victims—and even then, they always implied, it must have been the victim’s fault.
Occasionally a great horror would shake Americans out of their smug voyeurism, a tragedy so awful it could not be sold as spectacle—the Oklahoma City bombing, the Columbine massacre—but these were dismissed as anomalies instead of sparks for future flames. Their predecessors—Ruby Ridge and the school shootings that first emerged in the early 1990s—were minimized outside the fringes, where they were immortalized with a cult-like intensity.
The 1990s was a paranoid era, relentlessly unsentimental. Comedies like Seinfeld proudly proclaimed to be about nothing, because nothing was what mattered now. Dramas like The X-Files warned us to trust no one and we agreed with a smirk, unaware that the truth that was out there in the 1990s was more disturbing than the wildest fictional government conspiracies. On daytime TV, talk shows metastasized into showdowns, as hosts like Jerry Springer got ordinary Americans to smack each other down in front of a live studio audience. But it was 24-hour cable news where this cynical view of humanity took on a far more dangerous form. Lurid tales are as old as American media itself, but cable news, which kept birthing new channels, was ceaseless. Cable news made fame for fame’s sake a valid aspiration, even if you were, for example, the houseguest of a murderer.
In the 1990s, to guest star in someone else’s tragedy was regarded as a worthy pursuit, amusing and potentially profitable. You could offer yourself up to the cameras, you could be the prize in a new kind of human game show—as long as you weren’t there to make friends, as long as the monetary payoff outweighed the moral loss, as long as you could live like a caricature. As long as you could adopt the ethos, perfected in 1980s tabloid culture, of Donald Trump.
Where was Donald Trump during the mid-1990s, an era whose tabloid frenzy seemed designed to both reflect and amplify his appeal? In the official story—the one Ivanka and Donald Jr. tell to create the illusion of everyman relatability, the one that he told on the debut of The Apprentice—he was humbled by his humiliation and retreated to a simple life in his golden tower, planning his comeback. He had left Ivana for Marla Maples, a beauty queen from Georgia, who, according to Trump biographer Wayne Barrett, was selected to enhance Trump’s political viability among southerners in preparation for another presidential run.4 Barrett’s claim in his 1992 Trump biography—which was not rereleased until 2016—is in direct contrast to the “Trump is a political neophyte” myth often spread by a credulous mainstream media.
Where was Donald Trump in the summer of 1994? That’s a question that should have been answered well before the election. In June 2016, an anonymous plaintiff, using the pseudonym Katie Johnson and later Jane Doe, filed a lawsuit accusing Trump of raping her when she was thirteen years old—the same age that Ivanka was that year. Jane Doe’s claim was consistent with verifiable facts from the court case against convicted billionaire underage sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, for whom Jane Doe was forced to work. In 2002, Trump told New York magazine that he had known Epstein, a financier with a mysterious past, for fifteen years and thought he was a “terrific guy.”5
The story of Jeffrey Epstein is one that will define our era, and one that may clear up a lot of incongruities if it is ever fully told. But it is also one that was relentlessly suppressed for decades. In July 2019, Epstein was arrested after a series of exposés by Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald prompted more of his victims to come forward. In August 2019, he allegedly hung himself in a Manhattan prison, under circumstances that raise reasonable suspicion that he did not die of suicide but strangulation.6 The guards who were supposed to be watching Epstein both fell asleep when he allegedly killed himself, and no cameras recorded his death.7 Meanwhile, prompted both by the flurry of coverage and by his arrest and death, Epstein’s accusers continue to reveal the horror of his operation. By the end of summer 2019, over eighty women said they were recruited by Epstein and sexually abused or exploited.8
I am updating this chapter one week after Epstein’s mysterious death, with new information confirming my worst suspicions by the hour. I hope that by the time you read it, the women who were brave enough to tell their stories will have seen some justice. I anticipate that what people learn about Epstein in the years to come will have significant geopolitical implications if the full extent of his illicit activity is revealed and accomplices brought to trial. This has never been the case for Epstein or for the circle of elites who sheltered Epstein from repercussions with the understanding that he would return the favor.
Epstein’s life in the underworld of the global elite begins and ends with the family of William Barr, Trump’s attorney general. As a twenty-year-old college dropout, Epstein was hired by Barr’s father, Donald Barr, to teach math at Dalton, the New York private all-girls high school where the elder Barr served as headmaster. Donald Barr, a former OSS officer who had a side gig as a writer of science-fiction books depicting intergalactic sex slaves living under a dictatorship, never explained his decision to hire the unqualified Epstein.9 His son, who joined the CIA one year before Epstein arrived in Dalton, has also offered no explanation. The younger Barr initially recused himself from the case when Epstein was arrested. But after Epstein’s death, he announced that he was launching an extensive federal investigation. Barr’s career of cover-ups (Iran-Contra) and lies (his Mueller Report summary) are detailed in later chapters, but for now, it is worth noting that an investigation conducted with integrity seems unlikely.
Epstein’s obsession with underage girls was evident from the start: while at Dalton, he allegedly had inappropriate relationships with students.10 He left Dalton in 1976 to work at Bear Stearns and then struck out on his own as a financial adviser for clients who were not named—with the exception of Les Wexner, the billionaire CEO of L Brands, which owns Victoria’s Secret and other major companies. In the rare public examinations of Epstein’s finances prior to 2019, Wexner was often listed as Epstein’s closest partner.11 Wexner is a dedicated Zionist activist who has spent a great deal of money seeking to shape global policy toward Israel through what he describes as philanthropic initiatives.12 But for decades, Epstein allegedly controlled much of Wexner’s money after Wexner gave him power of attorney, depositing millions into mysterious “charities” and running his sex-trafficking operation from one of Wexner’s homes.13 After Epstein’s arrest, Wexner accused Epstein of misappropriating his funds.14 For decades, none of the stories on Epstein specified how he made his fortune, saying only that he managed and invested the assets of wealthy clients. In 2019, it was revealed that the main bank Epstein used was Deutsche Bank—the only bank that would lend to Trump after his bankruptcies, the same bank implicated in the Trump Russia scandal.15
By the 1990s, Epstein had become a multimillionaire while never revealing the source of his wealth, resting on the prestige of his networks to launder his reputation. The word “prestige” derives from a Latin word meaning “illusion,” and Epstein media profiles cloaked themselves in it—his social network of powerful CEOs and NGOs, his affiliations with institutions like Harvard and MIT. The question becomes when “prestige” is no longer an illusion but instead a euphemism for a cover-up. The Epstein case previewed the tactics of the Trump administration: strike a dirty deal, seal the documents, and control the only court left, that of public opinion.
Epstein’s first arrest was in 2006, when over forty women came forward with allegations of abuse, many claiming that they were part of a 1990s international underage sex crime ring to service the most rich and powerful men in the world.16 Underage girls were said to have been lured by Epstein’s assistants and forced to perform sexual acts on businessmen, heads of state, and other influential people. Epstein then allegedly kept evidence of the sexual assault as blackmail material.17 Celebrities who flew on Epstein’s jet to the Caribbean island where many of the assaults allegedly took place include Ehud Barak, Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, and Alan Dershowitz, a close friend of Epstein who also served as his attorney. Dershowitz was accused in 2015 of raping a teenage girl procured by Epstein in the 1990s, and in 2019 he was sued by a victim who claimed he aided in the trafficking.18 Dershowitz has denied all allegations, saying he had a “perfect, perfect sex life” and insisting that he kept his underwear on during massages at Epstein’s mansion.19
In 2008, Epstein received a mere eighteen-month sentence for soliciting, molesting, and raping underage girls. The sentence was the result of a strange and disturbing plea deal between Mueller’s FBI, which had received testimony from thirty-six of the victims, and Alexander Acosta, who was then the US Attorney for South Florida and who became Trump’s secretary of labor. (In July 2019, following Epstein’s arrest, Acosta resigned.) For reasons that remain unclear, the US government agreed to grant Epstein immunity from all federal criminal charges, along with four co-conspirators and any unnamed “potential co-conspirators.”20 As of August 2019, the co-conspirators have not been named.21
Epstein’s deal with the FBI halted the broader investigation into the international sex trafficking ring. Epstein was soon set free, where he was welcomed by New York elites who seemed either apathetic to or amused by his arrest. Outlets like The New York Times praised his fine tastes and Ivy League affiliation, playing down the horror and scope of his crimes. In a 2008 article, Epstein compared himself to “Gulliver shipwrecked among the diminutive denizens of Lilliput” and noted that “Gulliver’s playfulness had unintended consequences. That is what happens with wealth. There are unexpected burdens as well as benefits.”22 In response, the New York Times reporter gushed about Epstein’s private jet, neglecting to mention it was literally a vehicle of rape.
A 2011 Daily Beast article describes New York’s elites praising Epstein as a man of wealth and taste and even bringing their children to his home for a Break Fast celebration after Yom Kippur, unconcerned that he was convicted of raping other children.23 Among these elites were future Trump secretary of commerce Wilbur Ross and fellow accused child molester Woody Allen. Almost universally, they mocked and blamed the underage victims, whom they saw as an obstacle to the luxurious life to which they felt Epstein—and they themselves—were entitled. The lone dissenter was a Midwesterner shocked by the cruelty of their culture: “In the Midwest, where I am from, he would be a social pariah,” political activist Lorna Brett Howard, the wife of a CEO invited into Epstein’s social circle, told The Daily Beast. “What I see here is if you have big money or are famous then you get a pass.”
One of the things money could buy Epstein was a publicist, and he chose the same publicist as the Trump and Kushner families: Howard Rubenstein. A 2007 New York magazine profile reveals how New York white-collar criminals protect their own through a complex PR and media apparatus. This apparatus was pioneered by Roy Cohn and polished by Rubenstein, who had represented other Trump and Epstein colleagues like Rupert Murdoch and Adnan Khashoggi. Epstein was “one of us,” the New York profile explicitly says—the “us” including New York media itself. Young women were viewed as incidental and disposable—so long as the aggressor was of the right social class and displayed the right cultural cues. The excerpt from this New York profile below is typical of Epstein coverage, deviating only in that it admits outright that the story was guided by Rubenstein:
Jeffrey Epstein is under indictment for sex crimes in Palm Beach, Florida, and I’d expected that when he came into the office of PR guru Howard Rubenstein, he would be sober and reserved. Quite the opposite. He was sparkling and ingenuous, apologizing for the half-hour lateness with a charming line—“I never realized how many one-way streets and no-right-turns there are in midtown. I finally got out and walked”—and as we went down the corridor to Rubenstein’s office, he asked, “Have you managed to talk to many of my friends?” Epstein had been supplying me the phone numbers of important scientists and financiers and media figures. “Do you understand what an extraordinary group of people they are, what they have accomplished in their fields?”
One of the accusers—a girl of 14—had put his age at 45, not in his fifties, and you could see why. His walk was youthful, and his face was ruddy with health. He had none of the round-shouldered, burdened qualities of middle age. There was nothing in his hands, not a paper, a book, or a phone. Epstein had on his signature outfit: new blue jeans and a powder-blue sweater. “I’ve only ever seen him in jeans,” his friend the publicist Peggy Siegal had reported, saying there was a hint of arrogance in that, Epstein’s signal that he doesn’t have to wear a uniform like the rest of us.
I told Epstein and Rubenstein the sort of story New York wanted to do, and Epstein seemed to find ironic delight in every word. “A secretive genius,” I’d said. “Not secretive, private,” he corrected in his warm Brooklyn accent. “And if I was a genius I wouldn’t be sitting here.”24
It’s hard to read this in 2019 knowing that it took officials over two decades to lock up Epstein—and that he died in prison before his accusers could confront him in court. It’s hard to read it like it’s hard to see Harvey Weinstein and many other Hollywood abusers living large and walking free. It’s hard to read it as someone roughly the same age as Epstein’s victims, a 1990s teenager with my own tales to tell, knowing how my words would be devoured and disbelieved if I ever dared speak. It’s hardest to read it now that my daughter is the same age as Jane Doe, and I can’t tell her that nothing has changed since the 1990s, because things have changed: the alleged rapist of a thirteen-year-old is now the president.
The exploitation of women in 1990s tabloid culture reached its apotheosis under Epstein, and no one covered it in real time. When they covered it after the fact, in the 2000s, it was with amusement and disdain for the victims. When they cover it now, in 2019, it is with the knowledge that the complicity of their profession is part of what enabled Epstein, a convicted pedophile sex trafficker, to cover his tracks.
For those still wondering why holding Epstein accountable is inextricable from holding Donald Trump accountable, I ask again: What was Donald Trump doing in the summer of 1994? Excerpts of “Jane Doe v. Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, complaint in the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York,” give us one possibility:25
7. Plaintiff [Jane Doe] was subject to acts of rape, sexual misconduct, criminal sexual acts, sexual abuse, forcible touching, assault, battery, intentional and reckless infliction of emotional distress, duress, false imprisonment, and threats of death and/or serious bodily injury by the Defendants that took place at several parties during the summer months of 1994. The parties were held by Defendant Epstein at a New York City residence that was being used by Defendant Epstein at 9 E. 71st St. in Manhattan. During this period, Plaintiff was a minor of age 13 and was legally incapable under New York law of consenting to sexual intercourse and the other sexual contacts detailed herein. NY Penal L § 130.05(3)(a). […]
9. Plaintiff was enticed by promises of money and a modeling career to attend a series of parties, with other similarly situated minor females, held at a New York City residence that was being used by Defendant Jeffrey Epstein. At least four of the parties were attended by Defendant Trump. Exhs. A and B. On information and belief, by this time in 1994, Defendant Trump had known Defendant Epstein for seven years (New York, 10/28/02, “‘I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,’ Trump booms from a speakerphone. ‘He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.’”), and knew that Plaintiff was then just 13 years old. Exhs. A and B.
10. Defendant Trump initiated sexual contact with Plaintiff at four different parties. On the fourth and final sexual encounter with Defendant Trump, Defendant Trump tied Plaintiff to a bed, exposed himself to Plaintiff, and then proceeded to forcibly rape Plaintiff. During the course of this savage sexual attack, Plaintiff loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to stop but with no effect. Defendant Trump responded to Plaintiff’s pleas by violently striking Plaintiff in the face with his open hand and screaming that he would do whatever he wanted. Exhs. A and B.
11. Immediately following this rape, Defendant Trump threatened Plaintiff that, were she ever to reveal any of the details of the sexual and physical abuse of her by Defendant Trump, Plaintiff and her family would be physically harmed if not killed.
This court document was made available to reporters multiple times during Trump’s 2016 campaign. Despite Trump’s long-documented history of misogyny, sexual assault, and threats, the press generally avoided the Trump and Epstein allegations, and when they did cover them, they often designated them as irrelevant gossip. One exception was Lisa Bloom, a high-profile attorney who said she was alarmed by the lack of coverage. She wrote in The Huffington Post:
In covering a story, a media outlet is not finding guilt. It is simply reporting the news that a lawsuit has been filed against Mr. Trump, and ideally putting the complaint in context. Unproven allegations are just that—unproven, and should be identified that way. (Mr. Trump’s lawyer says the charges are “categorically untrue, completely fabricated and politically motivated.”) Proof comes later, at trial. But the November election will come well before any trial. And while Mr. Trump is presumed innocent, we are permitted—no, we are obligated—to analyze the case’s viability now.26
Bloom saw the case as viable, particularly given Epstein’s documented crimes and the fact that Jane Doe maintained she had a witness, named in the lawsuit as Tiffany Doe. In fall 2016, Bloom agreed to represent Jane Doe in court. A press conference was scheduled for November 2, 2016, in which Jane Doe was going to tell her story in the same way dozens of other women had told their stories following the release of the Access Hollywood video showing Trump bragging of his history of sexual assault. The “grab ’em by the pussy” video gave credence to claims that were once dismissed. But the press conference never happened. According to Bloom, Bloom and Trump’s alleged victim were both threatened with violence and Bloom’s computer was hacked. Jane Doe, Bloom reported, was terrified into silence, and dropped her lawsuit on November 4, four days before the election.27
The Epstein case, the allegations that Trump raped a thirteen-year-old, and the threats toward those who tried to expose them are a shocking story, the sort of high-profile horror that we should expect to dominate cable news shows and inspire books. But much like other aspects of Trump’s life that cross from the scandalous to the criminal, the media cowered until it was too late. James Patterson, the bestselling novelist, wrote a quick Epstein biography that received almost no press when it was published in fall 2016. It took #MeToo to get Epstein back into the headlines, and then back into the courts—where both the sex trafficking and the deals with the US government to cover it up are being reexamined. But a large portion of his story remains omitted.
Epstein did not run his operation alone. He had an assistant named Ghislaine Maxwell. Ghislaine is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, a wealthy British publisher who died under mysterious circumstances after falling off a yacht in 1991.28 His family, and several biographers, claim he was murdered; the police at the time ruled it an accident. Maxwell was also alleged to be an operative for Mossad.29 His service to the Israeli government began in 1948, when he fought to aid Israel in the War of Independence with a unit from his native Czechoslovakia.30 His role as an alleged Mossad agent was not revealed until 1986, when a former employee of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, Ari Ben-Menashe, identified Maxwell as an agent.31 This accusation was made after Israeli whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu attempted to give documents proving the existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons to British newspapers, including the Daily Mirror, which was owned by Maxwell. Following his offer to the Daily Mirror, Vanunu was kidnapped by Mossad and taken back to Israel, where he was convicted of treason and sentenced to eighteen years in prison.
Robert Maxwell denied the allegations that he was a foreign agent, and much in the manner of Trump and Cohn, fought off critical inquiry into his business and political activities with a combination of excessive litigation and media manipulation. Following his sudden death in November 1991, however, his secrets emerged. While posing as a successful tycoon, Maxwell had privately been running his businesses into the ground and had plundered more than 1.6 billion British pounds from his companies’ pension funds to save his companies from bankruptcy.32
Maxwell was buried in Jerusalem and was given a hero’s funeral attended by high-ranking Israeli government officials, who praised Maxwell’s contributions to Israel while not specifying what they were.33 President Chaim Herzog intoned over his corpse: “He scaled the heights. Kings and barons besieged his doorstep. He was a figure of almost mythological stature.”34 Back in Europe, his sons scrambled to keep his empire afloat. They failed, declaring bankruptcy in 1992, and the business documents that were available, including transactions between unidentified parties running into the hundreds of millions, mystified financial analysts.35 What had Maxwell been doing?
In 2003, journalists Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon revealed why such enormous sums were moved around and unaccounted for: shortly before the end of his life, Maxwell had begun working with the Russian mafia.36 They describe a lifetime of inside dealings between Maxwell, the USSR, and Israel, but one of the most revealing passages involves the criminal Robert Mueller once said he would stop at nothing to indict: Semion Mogilevich. According to the journalists, Maxwell had begun partnering with Mogilevich in money-laundering schemes in order to keep his businesses afloat. In return, Maxwell procured for Mogilevich the item that may have changed the world: his Israeli passport.
When the USSR began easing restrictions on travel for Jewish citizens in the perestroika era, including on emigration to Israel, Mogilevich saw an opportunity. He began shaking down fellow Jews by offering to manage their assets and then stealing from them once they had settled abroad. But major lucre required mobility, and in 1988, he found it in Maxwell’s passport procurement. Mogilevich abused Israel’s “right of return” law to obtain Israeli citizenship and then left Israel to expand his criminal trade around the world—a path that would be replicated by USSR-born mobsters and oligarchs for the next thirty years. (Even in 1988, Maxwell managed to procure Israeli passports for twenty-three Mogilevich associates.)37 Mogilevich settled in Hungary in early 1991 and began extending his reach into Western Europe. As his international criminal empire flourished, the British intelligence service MI5 began to investigate him, and discovered that one of his main businesses was sex trafficking. Thomas writes that it is difficult to believe Maxwell did not know what Mogilevich was doing. He was either complicit in the operation, or terrified of being murdered himself.38
After his death, Ghislaine Maxwell took Robert’s place in international high society, becoming a socialite in New York City. Sometime in the early 1990s, she met Jeffrey Epstein and began working for him as a madam, procuring underage girls from around the world and trapping them in sexual slavery. In 2019, a newly unsealed court document cites an Epstein accountant claiming that Robert Maxwell was the true source of Epstein’s fortune, but does not elaborate on how or when this happened.39
The full story of Mogilevich, the Maxwell family, and how they became connected to fellow sex trafficker Epstein remains a mystery—at least, to the public, due to the refusal of law enforcement officials to discuss it in detail. We know that Robert Maxwell was at the least an acquaintance of Trump in the late 1980s, part of the same corrupt circle of elites.40 They even bought their respective disastrous yachts from the same arms dealer, Adnan Khashoggi. After Epstein was arrested in July 2019, FBI agents raided his home and found that he had multiple passports, including an Austrian passport that listed his residence as Saudi Arabia.41 Later that month, reporter Vicky Ward revealed that when she had interviewed Alex Acosta shortly after Trump was elected, he told her, “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”42 Acosta did not specify to which country’s intelligence Epstein belonged.
Unlike Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell was never convicted for her role in the sex trafficking operation. After striking multiple deals with law enforcement officials, documents discussing her role were sealed, and she is lobbying to keep them that way.43 She remains the target of lawsuits. One victim, Virginia Roberts, who says she was recruited by Ghislaine in 1998 at the age of fifteen, says she was forced to dress as a prepubescent schoolgirl while rich and powerful men, including Dershowitz and Prince Andrew, raped her.44 When Maxwell dispatched Roberts to Thailand to study massage, Roberts escaped to Australia.45 In 2015, she sued both Epstein and Maxwell, and in 2019, she sued Dershowitz. Trump played a role in her case as well. Roberts claims she had been recruited from his Mar-a-Lago club, where Trump had given Maxwell and Epstein unlimited access to teenage and preteen girls, whom they would tell they were recruiting for a modeling or massage agency.46
For years, police claimed that they could not locate Ghislaine Maxwell.47 But after Epstein’s alleged suicide, she was reported to have been living in a mansion in Massachusetts, where, among other things, she visited an elementary school in January 2019.48 (The school realized Maxwell was the accomplice of a child sex trafficker only after the visit.) No effort has yet been made to arrest her, despite her location being made known. The death of Epstein has also prompted associates of Maxwell to come forward, after years of silence, to share insights into her value system. Her friends said she was devoted to Epstein, structuring her appearance to please him by staying rail thin. As one friend put it, “She said, ‘I do it the way Nazis did it with the Jews, the Auschwitz diet. I just don’t eat.’”49 Another friend added: “When I asked what she thought of the underage girls, she looked at me and said, ‘They’re nothing, these girls. They are trash.’”50
As I wrote in the introduction, one of the most disorienting things about the Trump era is the feeling like you are living though a rupture in time: the ceaseless revelations about the past; the mix of chaos and inertia that defines the present; and the uncertain future.
The same names and countries appear again and again: the United States, the United Kingdom, the former USSR, Israel, Saudi Arabia. We see the same disturbing patterns: Epstein is not the only pedophile Trump befriended. Other friends and business associates who allegedly ran or participated in underage trafficking rings include his former business partner Tevfik Arif (who was acquitted of the charges despite significant evidence);51 the modeling agent John Casablancas, for whose company Trump sent teenage Ivanka to work;52 Mueller probe target George Nader, who has been indicted on, and pled not guilty to, multiple counts of underage sex trafficking and child porn;53 Dershowitz, a Trump defender who has denied the allegations; and according to Wayne Barrett, Roy Cohn. This list does not include alleged pedophiles like Roy Moore, whom Trump has defended for political purposes, but is limited to the social and business circle he sought out on his own volition. No reporter has asked Trump about his own preteen rape allegation or why he invited so many pedophiles and sex traffickers into his life—not even after Epstein’s 2019 arrest. And so we are left with a narrative about rape, espionage, and threats; a narrative of missing pieces. One of those pieces is justice.
In the 1990s, history ended with the specter of the wealthiest men in the world raping teenage girls provided by a mafia-affiliated blackmailer. History ended in a sealed file, history ended in a silent scream, history ended with the last man warning you that if you tell anyone, you’d end too.
As the decade wore on, Trump got some nefarious new neighbors. Trump Tower had effectively functioned as a dorm for the Russian mafia since David Bogatin first used it to launder money in 1984, but the collapse of the Soviet Union had allowed criminals from the former USSR to set up operations worldwide—with New York City a key landing place. New York had a new mayor, Rudy Giuliani, whose prosecution of the Italian mafia as U.S. attorney in the 1980s paved the way for the Russian mafia to dominate New York organized crime in the 1990s, and they found real estate particularly attractive. Pre-Giuliani New York is often mourned as the last era when New York was “real,” before it became sanitized by a Disney Store in Times Square or marketed as a playground for wealthy grown-ups through shows like Sex and the City. But underneath the sparkling façade was a new rot, one that eventually grew to encompass the United State as a whole.
In 1992, an influential mobster named Vyacheslav Ivankov moved to Brooklyn, having been freed from a gulag after Mogilevich paid off a Russian judge. According to Red Mafiya, the seminal 2000 book by journalist Robert I. Friedman—who did the most thorough journalism on the Russian mafia before dying unexpectedly at age fifty-one in 2002—Ivankov was met at JFK airport by a fellow mobster holding a suitcase with $1.5 million inside. He went on to consolidate a crime network and launder money through purchased properties, eluding the FBI, who searched for him for years before realizing he had been living in a luxury apartment in Trump Tower the entire time.54
The 1990s were when the term “globalization” came into the popular vernacular, including as a target of protest, most notably in 1999 against the World Trade Organization. Most protesters decried the detrimental effect of globalization on labor both domestically and abroad, as American jobs went to foreign workers who were paid a pittance. They also denounced the rise of income inequality and gentrification, leading to extreme increases in the cost of living in international hubs like New York, San Francisco, and Miami due to the influx of wealthy foreigners driving up rent. Defenders of globalization saw unregulated global markets as a liberating force that went hand in hand with the democratization of former dictatorships that had occurred in the earlier part of the decade.
But what neither side seemed to hold in proper regard was the rise in global organized crime, masked by stately kleptocracies and prestigious corporations employing gangsters in suits and ties.
In a 1995 speech to the United Nations, President Clinton declared international money-laundering a threat to national security.55 Much like a similar proclamation by President Obama, who declared organized crime a “national emergency” in 2011, his denouncement was hollow in practice. Mogilevich, for example, spent 1995 traipsing around Philadelphia and Miami to monitor his illegal ventures, despite being denied a visa by the State Department after being labeled a major threat at congressional hearings. He gave interviews to American media, telling ABC News in 1999 that he had put a hit out on Friedman, and then claimed he was only joking.56 Friedman concluded Red Mafiya with a warning that the infiltration of this new form of globalized organized crime into businesses and governments in Europe, Israel, and the United States was the greatest threat to world democracy, a menace devouring countries from within. It was a warning unheeded when his book was published in 2000, and largely forgotten after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
It was a warning that apparently no one in law enforcement thought extended to Donald Trump—despite Trump’s long history of corruption, bankruptcies, a tower full of Russian mobsters, and desperate need for money. In 1996, Trump visited Moscow with his longtime associate Howard Lorber, who had made a series of business investments in Russia.57 The two were allegedly pursuing a Trump real estate venture, although like Trump’s many other meetings with Russians over four decades, there was never any building or public arrangement to show for it. When Donald Trump Jr. held his now infamous June 2016 meeting with an assortment of money launderers, campaign staffers, oligarch representatives, and Kremlin representatives in Trump Tower, he made a series of secret phone calls. In February 2019, one of the calls was revealed to have been made to Trump’s 1990s buddy Lorber.58 To this day, Lorber’s involvement in Trump’s businesses or in the election is not explained. We are simply supposed to accept the endless reappearance of a cast of characters tied to Russia over multiple decades as an amazing coincidence.
Throughout the late 1990s, Trump rebuilt his business empire in the style of the new criminal elite: blurring the lines between illicit and illegal, polishing the façade with glamour and prestige, and marketing himself as a comeback story of “the new economy.” A prime example are his condo sales. In 2018, BuzzFeed revealed that over a fifth of the condos Trump had purchased and sold since the 1980s were financed through secretive, all-cash transactions that enabled buyers to avoid legal scrutiny.59 As BuzzFeed noted, such transactions are not necessarily illegal but they certainly fit the Treasury characteristics for possible money-laundering.
Among them was Trump Tower International, opened in 1996 with 29 percent of its sales raising the possibility of money-laundering; Trump Parc East and 610 Park Avenue Condominiums, both opened in 1998 and each with 16 percent of sales raising the same issue; and Trump World Tower, opened in 2000 with 10 percent of sales fitting the same pattern.60 One of Trump’s two publicly available tax returns, which was leaked in 2016 by an unknown source, is from 1995 and shows a $916 million loss—activity incongruent with the alleged boom in business.
As I discuss in greater detail in subsequent chapters, the lack of any consequences for Trump’s actions led to a surge in questionable activity over the decade to come. Trump SoHo Hotel, which opened in 2010 in collaboration with mob-connected felon Felix Sater and his business partner Tevfik Arif, had 77 percent of its sales attributed to possible money-laundering.61 In 2010, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, who oversaw the property, were nearly charged with felony fraud in their Trump SoHo dealings. In a 2017 collaboration between ProPublica, The New Yorker, and WNYC, it was revealed that the case was dropped with District Attorney Cyrus Vance overruling his own prosecutors following a meeting with Trump’s attorney, Marc Kasowitz, who had previously donated $25,000 to Vance’s reelection campaign and asked Vance to drop the investigation.62 While Vance had returned the contribution in advance of the meeting, after Vance dropped the case, Trump’s attorney made another large donation and helped raise still more money from others, bringing the total Vance’s campaign received to more than $50,000. Vance, who denied any wrongdoing, was tasked in 2019 to oversee the New York–based charges brought forth by offshoots of the Mueller probe.
By the end of the 1990s, Trump felt confident enough to revert to one of his favorite pastimes: running for president. He reenlisted Roger Stone, the fellow Roy Cohn protégé who had guided his 1988 flirtation with the office and who had been proclaiming Trump would be president since 1985, and set about seeking the nomination of the Reform Party.63 In a gushing September 1999 New York Times article entitled “President? Why Not? Says a Man at the Top,” Trump attributed his interest in the nomination to a poll given to readers of the National Enquirer. The Times article reports: “‘Those are the real people,’ Mr. Trump declared of the Enquirer readers, earnestly laying his hands across his desk. Roger Stone, his paid consultant, who was sitting across the desk, offering Mr. Trump the occasional pointer during the 45-minute interview, added, ‘That is the Trump constituency.’”64
The veracity of the poll is questionable, but there is no doubt that the National Enquirer itself was the Trump constituency. In February 1999, the National Enquirer had been purchased by a new conglomerate which put longtime Trump lackey David Pecker at the helm. Pecker is now known for his “catch and kill” operation to prevent damning stories from reaching the public, a project he conducted with Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. He is also known for his threats toward US opponents of Trump, most notably Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who maintained that Pecker had targeted him in an extortion scheme in possible collaboration with the Saudi government after the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.65
The National Enquirer were very much Trump’s people—powerful elites who make threats and tell lies and market it as populism and hidden truths. What’s perhaps more disturbing, though, is that there was little difference between the coverage given to Trump’s campaign by the National Enquirer, a literal Trump tool from 1999 onward, and The New York Times. The Times made no serious inquiry into finances and asked no hardball questions. “I have been very much an open book. I mean, one thing, people know who I am. While I haven’t been public, I am public,” Trump told the Times interviewer.
In retrospect, “while I haven’t been public, I am public” is an apt assessment of a double life lived in plain sight, a life of crimes that gets glossed over because you can see the sheen. The “tycoon or buffoon” strategy is meant to amuse the public, to make Americans believe he either is as successful as he claims to be—after all, The New York Times vouches for him!—or is such an obvious phony that he could not be capable of pulling off a massive criminal enterprise without repercussions. He is a public figure, you tell yourself—if he is lying, surely someone will call him out. If he is hurting people, surely someone will stop him.
But they don’t. As Trump rose again in the United States, a future political partner was rising abroad, locking himself into the position of power he would occupy for decades. On New Year’s Eve in 1999, Vladimir Putin became president of Russia. At the time, he was underestimated as a threat to world democracy and stability. This was in part due to Western perception of Russia as a weakened state, but Putin has also spent decades employing Western public relations specialists to soften his image as a ruthless KGB agent who had skillfully navigated oligarch turf wars.66 Instead, he sought to be seen as the tough but lawfully elected representative of a fledgling democratic country.
Among those with connections to Putin was Michael Caputo, a longtime GOP operative who worked in Russia for assorted officials and oligarchs throughout the 1990s. (In 2017, Caputo tried to scrub information about these endeavors from the internet.)67 After leaving Russia, Caputo returned to the United States to work at a Florida public relations firm with Stone. In 2015, Caputo, like Stone, became one of Trump’s campaign advisers. He was yet another longtime Trump contact with decades-long ties to shady Russian businessmen involved in the presidential race.
In February 2000, Trump withdrew from his attempt to become the Reform Party candidate after campaigning as a moderate. The nomination instead went to virulent bigot Pat Buchanan, who ended up being an enthusiastic endorser of Trump’s xenophobic 2016 campaign. In 2000, Trump’s campaign seemed like a harmless distraction in an era when presidential candidates debated questions like “How do we spend the enormous government surplus in our booming economy?” and the biggest political crisis was Bill Clinton’s philandering.
In the media, reality TV continued to thrive, moving from daytime and cable networks into prime time, and forming a new genre in the summer of 2000 with the hit series Survivor. Survivor became the template for both the construct and ethos of reality TV over the next decade: strangers trapped together in an unfamiliar setting backstab one another in front of the cameras, with one player dismissed in a humiliating weekly ceremony until only the winner remained.
Mark Burnett, the creator of Survivor, is one of the most successful television producers of the modern era, but he was never able to realize one of his dream projects. Burnett wanted to create a reality TV show featuring Vladimir Putin that would portray the authoritarian leader to Americans in a flattering light. Burnett’s fascination with Putin goes back to at least 2001, when he tried to launch a series called Destination Mir and confirmed to The New York Times that Putin was involved in the project.68 For the next decade and a half, he did not stray from this goal. In 2015, The Hollywood Reporter wrote:
Seeing Russia through its controversial president’s eyes has Burnett so excited, he already has reached out to Putin, 62, a noted outdoorsman and former KGB officer. He says he emphasized his show would be devoid of armies and politics; rather, it would focus on “the humans, the nature, the animals of the nation.” When it is suggested the Russian leader probably would ignore such a request, Burnett, who recently wrapped filming a Ben-Hur remake in Rome, cracks a smile: “How do you know that? I would think I could probably get through to most people.”
So, if he did get through, what was the reaction? Responds Burnett coyly, “No comment.”69
Burnett never got his reality show about Putin off the ground, but he did succeed in increasing the Russian leader’s domination over the United States. In 2004, Burnett launched the project that did more to rehabilitate and popularize Donald Trump than anything: The Apprentice, the popular reality TV series presenting Trump as a successful and likeable businessman and introducing Donald Jr. and Ivanka to everyday Americans. In 2017, Burnett was hired to produce Trump’s inauguration as president, which is being investigated as a mass money-laundering and espionage scheme featuring a variety of Russian mobsters, spies, and oligarchs.70 (There is no suggestion that Burnett was involved in illicit activity in connection with the inauguration.)
In the end, Burnett got his Putin reality TV series after all. We just mistook it for an election.