Epstein and Empire

Before we get started, I want to take note of the ever-deepening atrocity committed by Israel, with the continued acquiescence of its allies, against the Palestinian people in Gaza. I hope to write more about this shortly, including a deeper dive into the politics of food aid and famine declaration. For now, I’d encourage you to look for places to donate (here’s a Palestinian-led umbrella; World Central Kitchen, and the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund are also reliable).

The tide of (at least liberal) public opinion seems to be belatedly turning, with previously recalcitrant voices from the New York Times editorial page to Barack Obama — and even, in a gesture, the current president — being forced to recognize the atrocities before them. Maybe Democrats are more willing to criticize a murderous ally when the other party is in office. Maybe the duration and scale of the murder finally reached a tipping point. Or maybe people can just read polls. Whatever the cause of the shift, I can’t help but think of my warnings from the start of all this:

Warning: Descriptions and references to sexual assault below

The Jeffrey Epstein saga has been a lot of things: a story of crime and corruption; a massive celebrity scandal; a locked-room mystery; and, to some, the heart of an overarching conspiracy theory that promises to explain the world. In the last few weeks, thanks to the inevitable contradictions of the Trump presidency and relentless reporting by the Wall Street Journal and others about the close (and extremely suspicious) connections between the president and the notorious sexual predator, it has become a political firestorm that is, for the moment at least, tearing the MAGA world apart. 

But buried beneath all that is something else: a far bigger story about our hidden empire, the lies and silences surrounding which have made crimes like Epstein’s — and those of Epstein’s alleged clients and friends — possible.

I got a unique perspective on that material reality last week, when I found myself bobbing off the shore of Little St. James in the U.S. Virgin Islands. That’s right: Your newsletter writer paid an unexpected visit to (well, just off the coast of) the former Epstein Island.

Some background first, for those hazy on the details: Jeff Epstein was a well-connected “New York financier” who was credibly accused of operating a sex trafficking ring that preyed on young girls. He was arrested in 2008 in Florida on individual charges only to be given — by then-federal prosecutor and later Trump Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta — an extremely lenient state-level plea deal that included immunity from all federal charges. Epstein was arrested again in 2019 on charges of sex trafficking minors in Florida and New York, only to be found dead in his Manhattan holding cell before the trial could begin.

The circumstances of Epstein’s death poured gasoline on the already raging conspiracy theories surrounding his case, which included allegations that Epstein was an American or Israeli intelligence agent or asset. His real story also bled seamlessly into the baseless conspiracy theories of Pizzagate and QAnon, which began with (in those cases, wholly unfounded) allegations of child sexual predation by members of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle. Those later fantasies, fed by adherents’ own sexual traumas and a variation on the medieval antisemitic myth known as the blood libel, blew up into the overarching theory that the country (if not the world) was being run by a cabal of cannibal pedophile elites (not exclusively, though all affectively, Jews) — and, critically, that Donald Trump was the messianic figure who would reveal and purge this cabal, replacing it with a more godly (that is, Christian Nationalist) regime.

To proponents of that ideology, the existence of a real-life Jewish banker with documented ties to powerful elites, including Bill Clinton, who died in jail before he could stand trial, seemed too good to be true. That Trump himself was a well-known friend of Jeffrey Epstein’s — with his own slate of accusations against him, a court-adjudicated sexual assault finding, and a documented history of perving on teens¹ — didn’t factor at all. Even Trump’s elevation of Alex Acosta and former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi (who took office after the sweetheart deal, but also did not reopen the investigation into Epstein even as new details were uncovered, many by Miami Herald journalist Julie K. Brown) to cabinet posts did not break the spell.

When Trump returned to office in January, he brought with him a clique of MAGA influencers who had built huge audiences flogging Epstein conspiracy theories, including Kash Patel and Dan Bongino — now the FBI director and deputy director, respectively. It was not until Trump and Bondi refused to release the long-promised “Epstein files,” and began furious dissembling and attacking those asking questions about it, that daylight began to appear between the most Epstein-pilled of the MAGA faithful and the administration.

The most salacious and evocative details of Epstein’s life and crimes center on what is invariably referred to as his (former) private island in the Caribbean. And fair enough: a privately owned tropical isle, visited by some of the most powerful men of our time, where survivors have reported repeated rapes, a formerly golden-domed temple-like structure, and scenes of general debauchery, is the stuff of a Bond supervillain.

But contrary to public imagination, the island is not some distant redoubt way off at sea. Little St. James (or “Little St. Jeff” as Epstein once apparently tried to call it) is part of the well-known, and much-visited U.S. territory of the Virgin Islands, which receives over 2.5 million tourists a year, mostly from the mainland U.S. The 70-square-mile island is just over a mile off St. Thomas, the most populous island of the U.S. territory that also serves as its territorial capital. Little St. James is separated — and, not incidentally, largely shielded from view — from the main island only by the slightly larger and uninhabited Great St. James, which Epstein also bought in 2016, perhaps to keep it undeveloped. All are in turn just under 40 miles from the Puerto Rican mainland, currently the largest offshore U.S. colony in the world.

Today the waters off both islands are regular stops for day-charters and snorklers from St. Thomas and nearby St. John. That is how my family, to my surprise, ended up snorkeling just off the notorious island’s coast during an anniversary day-cruise for my parents last week. Nor were we even the only snorklers there: another day boat and swimmers with foam noodles were relaxing in the waters when we arrived; a third sailboat arrived as we pulled up anchor to head to the next stop. We saw sea turtles, schools of tropical fish, and got good offshore views, but were warned not to climb ashore on the rocky beach. It’s still private property, now owned by billionaire Stephen Deckoff, who plans to turn it into a five-star resort. (Good luck to the PR team with that one.)

Virgin Islanders have been both a key and forgotten part of this story since the beginning. It was the locals who first clocked Epstein’s helicopter shuttling back and forth from Cyril E. King Airport on St. Thomas to his private island, sometimes with young-looking teenagers on board, and Virgin Islanders who dubbed his private Boeing 727-200 the “Lolita Express.” “Everyone knew what was going on,” our boat captain said with a shrug. “He paid folks off, and gave a lot of jobs to people on the islands.” But the islanders — far poorer than the U.S. mainland population and predominantly Black — were ignored for years. It was only when a Florida mother reported to police that her daughter had been exploited at Epstein’s mansion in Palm Beach in 2005 that the veil of silence began to be lifted.

Nor was the location of his island coincidental. The Virgin Islands were some of the first places colonized by Europeans in the so-called New World, spotted by Christopher Columbus’ crew on his second voyage in 1493. The native population was Kalinago (also known as Caribs, for whom the Caribbean is named) and Taíno. According to the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, the first thing Columbus’ crew did after arriving on Santa Cruz — now known as St. Croix, the French translation — was to battle the crew of a Kalinago canoe. (“[The Spaniards’] first recorded fight with natives of the New World,” Morison observed) During the battle, Columbus’ crewmate and childhood friend Michele de Cuneo took prisoner a “very beautiful Carib girl,” whom Columbus allowed him to keep as a slave. Cuneo then brutally raped her in the cabin of one of Columbus’ ships, in an incident he bragged about in his journal.

Thus passed the first rape by a white man on what Columbus would days later dub “the Virgin Islands,”² on the first day of European contact, 470 years before Jeffrey Epstein was born.

In the centuries that followed, the Virgin Islands would follow the trajectory of most of the Caribbean — the enslavement and genocide of their native peoples, their replacement with enslaved captives from Africa, and repeated wars over their control by rival European empires. In 1667, part of the archipelago was seized from Britain by Denmark, who were fighting as allies of the Netherlands during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The Danish would rule over the islands — including St. Thomas, St. John, and, yes, the Little and Great St. Jameses — for the next two and half centuries as a brutal slave colony, where tens of thousands of Africans’ lives would be crushed to wring profits from sugar, rum, and human trafficking.

In 1733, a group of some of those enslaved people (the Danes had unwittingly gathered hundreds of warriors kidnapped from the Akwamu Empire in what is now Ghana and brought them together) rose, torched sugar plantations, and seized control of St. John. In a partial preview of the Haitian revolution decades later, these self-liberated men and women controlled the island for half a year, until the Danes called in French reinforcements from Martinique to crush their rebellion. (Though the Danes and the French were off-and-on enemies, they could always get together to defend their shared interests in slave capitalism.) Denmark-Norway would end its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1803 — not coincidentally at the end of the Haitian Revolution — and finally abolish slavery on their islands in 1848. (Though the Danish governor-general who carried out the abolition on the Virgin Islands was relieved of his position, court-martialed, and found guilty of dereliction of duty for his trouble.³ )

With slavery over and the number of resources left to extract at a minimum, the Danish Virgin Islands fell into a period of neglect and disrepair until the early 20th century. That’s when the United States stepped in. The U.S. had gone on an island invasion and annexation spree — starting with Guantánamo Bay, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, etc., as readers of Gangsters of Capitalism know — and began digging a canal across our seized territory of Panama. Hoping to protect the canal route, keep out European rivals, and secure another spot on our growing Latin American Monopoly board, the U.S. started making a play for the Danish Virgin Islands in 1898.

There were complications (namely, Denmark didn’t want to sell, and the islands weren’t worth taking by force as we had so many other places), but the U.S. entry into World War I renewed U.S. government and military interest. Unhappy with Danish rule and fearing an armed invasion, the local population voted to accept U.S. annexation in 1917. Denmark accepted, in exchange for $25 million in gold, delivered by President Woodrow Wilson’s administration.

As with all our colonies, few in the metropole paid any attention to the history of the islands we were taking over, or the people already living on them. It would take decades for the U.S. to grant its newest Caribbean colony the right to elect its own governor. They were given the opportunity to draft a constitution in 1976, but that remained subject to congressional approval; the U.S. Congress has rejected all such attempts, most recently in 2010, and no constitution has been implemented to this day. People born in the USVI were granted U.S. citizenship by statute starting in 1927. But they still don’t have representation in Congress, nor the right to vote in general elections for president, even though the U.S. government has the final say over all governmental matters in their lives.

With the rise of cruise ships and jet travel, the USVI became a favorite destination for American tourists, eager for a beautiful, exotic destination (like many sites of ethnic cleansing, most of St. John became a national park in the 1950s) that they — by which I mean I — could reach without a passport. Tourists — billionaires and regular folks alike — go to the islands to party, drink, drive, and roam relatively free. On my recent visit, local radio crackled with arguments from Virgin Islanders about the ongoing exploitation of land, housing, and resources by Americans from the mainland.⁴  

But those resentments are seldom shared with visitors, on whose money and goodwill the islanders rely. As one St. Thomasian told the Associated Press about Epstein, the attitude is: “Keep to yourself and do your thing.”

The islands’ colonial status is why Jeffrey Epstein ended up there in the first place. His Financial Trust Company came to St. Thomas in 1996 to take advantage of a tax shelter: By basing his business on a dependent territory, he could reduce his federal taxes by 90 percent while reaping all the advantages of U.S. jurisdiction and the U.S. banking system.

He bought Little St. James in 1998 (it had previously gone through several owners and renters, including Claudia Schiffer). Epstein later made the island his permanent residence — perhaps in an attempt to secure more tax benefits, an attempt to avoid state-level jurisdiction in places like Florida or New York, or both. Epstein — and his former paramour and convicted pimp, Ghislaine Maxwell — thus became two more, though as we’ve seen, perhaps not the most notorious — of the Virgin Islands’ historical colonizers.

Trump’s Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche just completed two days of confidential interviews with Maxwell — an extremely unusual thing for a senior Justice Department official to do, especially with someone who has in the past socialized with the sitting president. Maxwell was granted limited immunity for that interview, and is now asking for full immunity or a pardon — the latter of which Trump has said he wouldn’t rule out. Any such pardon would justifiably provoke outrage. But it would also continue a pattern as old as the islands themselves, where silence and impunity have long been the price of paradise.

1  The philosopher Kate Manne compiled all of that into an intriguing newsletter post this week.

2  The islands were named for the story of “St. Urusla and her 11,000 virgins,” a 4th-century Christian martyr myth. Columbus was either exaggerating or had badly overestimated the number of islands in the archipelago.

3  That conviction was ultimately overturned by the Danish Supreme Court.

4  Housing has in particular been in short supply to locals since the twin hurricanes of 2017, Irma and Maria. Much of the remaining housing that has been rebuilt on St. John, as I understand it, has been converted to AirB&Bs.