Cathedral Accountability: Epstein
Takin' a break from CRT and Race. First in a series.
Introduction
I identified with the liberal progressive orthodoxy prior to Epstein’s arrest. Like the vast majority of the public, informed by mainstream news sources, I folded the Epstein accusations into the fringe #Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracies. I hardly took it seriously. His arrest, and the bizarre manner in which the case against him revealed itself, radically changed my perception of media, finance, and the global elite.
Why was it so difficult for us to believe that something akin to the Weinstein case could be actively transpiring in the political sphere? It is now publicly acknowledged, thanks to some brave women from the #MeToo movement, that the Hollywood elites use their social and financial power to engage in sexual abuse. The most jarring aspect of the Weinstein case was how the abuse blatantly existed in plain sight. It was an open secret, the elephant in the room, something only brought to light by those who cared more about the truth than reputation.
Despite public fixation on #MeToo, when those accusations are levied against political figures and their connected political machines, the media remains largely silent. When I mean media, I am referring to legacy media. Legacy media is a general term for the media institutions that predominated prior to the Information Age — newspapers, radio, and most recently cable television. Prior to the advent of social media, whatever was proliferated on say, CNN, MSNBC, WaPo, NY Times, Fox, was largely treated as authoritative truth. There was a left and a right, yes, but not a left truth and a right truth.
Media Partisanship
For most Americans the news was what you read in the paper or see on TV. Now more than 80% of Americans get their news from social media sources, and legacy media is scrambling to retain its relevancy. Take CNN for example, having lost 68% of its regular viewership. It is now rapidly angling itself as an organization biased toward pro-liberal, anti-conservative framing in a last gasp to retain its remaining audience.
Those who have dropped CNN have likely done so because they get their information from somewhere else, and trust that information more. It stands to reason that the remaining viewership of CNN is primarily comprised of the most loyal liberals who support its slanted content with minimal skepticism and enjoy hearing news that validates their political beliefs. CNN, like Fox, will need to appeal to its primary viewership in order to retain both its financial health and public relevance. Fox does not even try to pretend they’re not partisan anymore and neither does CNN.
Say what you will about Fox News, they certainly don’t attempt to hide their bias. Their network viewership is dwindling and they know that slanted reporting will net them the audience they need to survive. They know what their audience wants better than their competition. But CNN has even gone so far as to develop its own “Facts First” campaign in order to defend itself from criticism against its partisanship (created of course, when Trump took office).
As quoted from the above link:
“Launch of the ad campaign suggests that even CNN, which typically portrays itself as the least partisan of the three main cable-news networks, can be politicized. With that in mind, CNN has done three audience surveys this year, says Gollust, and its research shows that its brand remains strong. People who did not like CNN probably still feel that way, perhaps even more strongly, she says. But “the percentage of people who are looking for news and information grew, and they found they like CNN. Our numbers among Democrats and independents have gone up.”
CNN Protects People like Toobin (and a brief introduction to Curtis Yarvin)
Why was Jeffery Toobin readily accepted back into the CNN sphere after MASTURBATING DURING A ZOOM CALL ELECTION SIMULATOR?
“Going forward, Toobin will be back on CNN regularly in his chief legal analyst role, a spokesman confirmed. Toobin said he was "incredibly grateful" to continue working at the network.”
Despite CNN’s previous reporting on the #MeToo movement in all its liberal-progressive moral achievement, they went and protected someone who sexually harassed his coworkers. And the hypocrisy is overwhelming, coming from someone who was an unabashed supporter of the movement.
If any of my readers are familiar with the work of Curtis Yarvin (known pseudonymously online as Mencius Moldbug) then the concept of a prevailing decentralized locus of power, “the Cathedral”, is known. For the uninitiated, it can be understood as a descriptive term for the phenomenon wherein institutions representative of high intellectual/optic prestige behave as one organizational structure, despite lacking a formal centralized connection. CNN is on the same page as Harvard, Yale, MSNBC, and The New York Times. In spite of being separate institutions, they are all organized by a shared ideas system. News stories are interpreted the same way, publications make the same assumption and start with the same premises, and in-group defined “illiberal”, authoritarian, or conservative beliefs are seen as enemies. It’s a short way to describe the way in which academia and journalism have married themselves ideologically (under a liberal progressive framework) and co-opted popular sovereignty.
The professors and journalists have sovereignty because final decisions are entrusted to them and there is no power above them. Only professors can formulate policy—that is, set government strategy; only journalists can hold government accountable—that is, manage government tactics. Strategy plus tactics equals control.
…there is a market for dominant ideas. A dominant idea is an idea that validates the use of power…And there is no market for recessive ideas. A recessive idea is an idea that invalidates power or its use…It is not hard to see why, in the lecture halls and newsrooms, dominant ideas tend to outcompete recessive ideas. A dominant idea is an idea that tends to benefit you and your friends. A dominant idea will be especially popular with your friends and former students in the civil service, because it gives them more work and more power.
Yarvin is a neo-reactionary, and I suspect that the more left-inclined of my readers would regard his work with apprehension. I disagree with many of his prescriptive beliefs; however, his descriptive ones often reveal themselves as accurate and illuminating. In any case, I recommend reading through that essay regardless of your personal ideological affiliation.
Sets of ideas that support bureaucratic expansion within the Cathedral - for example, critical race theory and its consequent production of an ever-expanding diversity officer class, remain popular. Recessive ideas, such as say, the ones espoused by the Intellectual Dark Web — anti-identity politics, anti-critical race theory, are unpopular (at least within the powerful cathedral space). Arguing for these recessive ideas and validating them as truth removes power from the institutions and individuals built up by the theory — no, perhaps our universities shouldn’t spend millions a year staffing a 10 person diversity team.
Using his wording — what if these dominant ideas included the beliefs that certain individuals were redeemable and good, while certain others were not. These redeemable and good individuals comprise members of the dominant tribe, where all the sovereign power in the marketplace for ideas is concentrated (Brahmins in Yarvin’s terms).
In the Brahmin caste, status among both men and women is defined by scholarly achievement, success in an intellectual profession, or position of civic responsibility. The highest-status Brahmins are artists and scientists, but Brahmins can also be doctors or lawyers…An increasing number of young Brahmins consider themselves “activists” and work for “nonprofits” or “NGOs,” lending some credence to the theory that the Brahmins are our ruling or governing caste. Entry into the Brahmin caste is conferred almost entirely by first-tier university admissions, although getting into Harvard doesn’t mean you don’t still need to make something of yourself.
The members of liberal progressive circles are forgiven for their transgressions, continuing to curry favor amongst their own tribe. Pulling a workplace Louis C.K. put Toobin on a “time-out” — the same guy who tried to threaten and bribe his ex-mistress into an abortion is the guy sitting as a talking head on CNN, dishing out legal analyses on the recent Texas abortion law. Yeah, I can believe Toobin is pro-choice.
Why Save Him?
In progressive parlance, if you could hire someone unproblematic, why stick with the old problematic guy? Was it his 27-year career for The New Yorker (pillar cathedral member), his nepotistic connections to legacy media (both of his parents were producers for ABC/CBS), or his ties to the DoJ? There is a selective advantage for certain ideas, as well as for certain people. Parallel to the Toobin scandal, consider this: Why wouldn’t the network Chris Cuomo headlines cover his brother’s sexual misconduct scandal? (Yikes) Completely friendly and uncritical to a political figure leading an American state that holds more power than most countries. How about Chris Cuomo’s sexual assault allegation?
These people aren’t above the personal scandals and financial corruption the Republicans have become known for simply by virtue of their beliefs in minority rights and social welfare. The DNC and the GOP are the same things — money-motivated political machines driven by a Brahmin class cultivated in top universities, and protected by their respective partisan media institutions. The difference is that the DNC is the status quo, and the GOP is their approved opposition. While corporate Democrats and traditional Republicans may not see eye to eye on their on-paper identity politics, they certainly do when it comes to accepting donations from Wall Street.
Think of it this way — many of these people will champion the progressive values of the DNC while taking sexual advantage of anyone they can put under their thumb. And the networks will protect their jobs, the journalists won’t cover their controversies, and the universities will keep producing them! These are a set of people who think that because they perpetuate an ideology of progressive idealism there is no possible way they could be the bad people.
If this is how Toobin can be protected by the cathedral’s tribalism, then what happens to someone who has even more leverage within these circles? Someone who isn’t just protected by the cathedral but is actively supported by a financial elite beyond the power of the academics and the journalists.
The Epstein controversy should be the story that disillusions you from the progressive liberal orthodoxy if you haven’t been already. Only after his arrest and subsequent suicide did cathedral outlets allow for coverage of his case with any consistent attention, and there is a reason for it.
Story Suppression
The scandal itself is a massive web of cathedral actors and their patron financial elite whose relationships span decades. In terms of outlining it, there are multitudes of potential entry points and angles for the story. For the purposes of this article, we will start from the cathedral actors purposefully suppressing this story.
In 2003, Vicky Ward published the article, “The Talented Mr. Epstein” for Vanity Fair, which offered insight into the finances of Jeffery Epstein, who had become just as prolific as he was mysterious in New York high-society. While he refused an exclusive interview for the article, Ward still spent time with him at his home in New York. Through her research, however, she met the two Farmer sisters, Maria and Annie, both of whom would reveal the sexual abuse they experienced at the hands of Epstein. Ward reports that their claims were so disturbing, she vomited (07:48).
Upon direct, in-person pressure put upon Graydon Carter (at the time, the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair) by Epstein, the story on the Farmer sisters would be cut entirely from the article. Now, in the aftermath of his suicide, Carter claims that Ward lacked legal substantiation for Farmers’ claims and stated:
“Vanity Fair takes its legal obligations seriously, especially when the subject is a private person rigorously protected under libel law.”
This claim is disputed by Hollywood Reporter editor-at-large Kim Masters.
Masters’ experience with Graydon Carter describes him as feeling pressured to live up to Tina Brown, the former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair who had subsequently taken on the role of editor-in-chief of The New Yorker.
She was working for Harvey Weinstein (who, like Epstein, made it his business to court or badger the media, as the need arose) so probably there was limited latitude with respect to Hollywood coverage…Meanwhile, he had made a big splash with the Vanity Fair Oscar party and was making lots of friends in the entertainment industry.
A lawyer for the Farmer sisters states that the omission made it more difficult for victims to speak up, as it established the precedent that Epstein had control of the media. Carter claims that he made the decision under threat by Epstein. A bullet was left on his front door step. Then, a dead cat. And yet Ghislane Maxwell was still invited to the 2014 Academy Awards after-party, sponsored by Vanity Fair, and hosted by Graydon Carter.
Deep Media Connections
In the “The Talented Mr. Epstein” , Ward writes,
(Epstein is still close to his two other long-term girlfriends, Paula Heil Fisher, a former associate of his at the brokerage firm Bear Stearns and now an opera producer, and Eva Andersson Dubin, a doctor and onetime model. He tells people that when a relationship is over the girlfriend “moves up, not down,” to friendship status.)
Epstein remains close friends with all of his long-term girlfriends post-breakup. Paula Heil Fisher is an opera producer and former associate at Bear Stearns — who herself, like Epstein, is exceptionally well-connected. She used to be married to real estate developer and philanthropist M. Anthony Fisher (of Fisher Brothers), often together collaborating to produce Broadway shows, such as the original production of Into the Woods.
Her ex-husband passed away, along with his second wife Anne, in a 2003 plane crash that orphaned his 5 children (two from Paula, three from Anne). In the aftermath of that tragedy, mourners of the Fishers included Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Gen. Richard Meyers, both of whom cultivated a close friendship with Fisher through his time as Chairman of the Intrepid Space Museum.
In 1991, he and Paula began buying property in Martha’s Vineyard, and ultimately combined these purchases into a single farm/estate. Sometime in the early 90s, the couple separated, but the property they had bought together would itself have significance. Blue Heron Farm has been a vacation home to both Clinton and his family in 1998, as well as the Obamas, between the years of 2008 to 2011. Ownership of the property was bought by William Van Devender, a timber and paper products executive as well as an active Republican donor in 2005. The Obamas stayed at the Van Devender’s property despite their known opposition to his presidency and their consistent donations to his opponents (the McCain campaign). Other residents of the area include Alan Dershowitz, who met Epstein on the island sometime in 1996 at Lynn Forester de Rothschild’s estate (just a short drive away from the Fisher’s).
The New Yorker cartoonist, and regular contributor to The New York Times, Barry Blitt wrote of his time spent with Epstein in December of 1988. This story was published in Airmail, a newsletter founded by Graydon Carter in 2019. Blitt stayed at the home Epstein rented with Epstein’s ex-girlfriend Eva Dubin, and was introduced to celebrities such as Vera Wang and Morgan Fairchild.
Epstein not only converted my coach tickets to first class; he insisted that I stay in his house in Santa Monica. He told me that he had rented the two-bedroom house near the pier for Eva Andersson, his onetime girlfriend.
Blitt, as Epstein’s plus-one, also attended the wedding of Paula and M. Anthony Fisher held at the New York Academy of Art.
Epstein took me to a number of events at the Academy of Art, including his former girlfriend Paula Fisher’s wedding celebration (which ended in a food fight between Pivar and Barbara Guggenheim).
Blitt writes:
The real shock came 10 years later when I read that Epstein had been arrested in Palm Beach [2006] for soliciting under-age women to perform sexual massages. I knew he liked the company of women but not under-age ones. The women he had introduced me to all had substantial careers: doctors, actresses, art dealers, theater producers, academics, money managers, and filmmakers. I couldn’t conceive that he would consider having sex with under-age girls.
Then just a few years later, Blitt visits him again in 2013, noting:
Epstein said that Nabokov was his favorite writer and he kept a copy of Lolita next to his bed and on his plane.
Blitt chose to cavort with Epstein after his initial Palm Beach arrest and failed to publish any of this information prior to his suicide in 2019.
Eva Andersson-Dubin is the founder of the Dubin Breast Center of the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital (second from right in the photo). She previously donated $50,000 to the Hillary Victory Fund in 2016. The two dated for 11 or so years until her marriage to billionaire hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin in 1994, who only continued to help expand Epstein’s social circle. He, like his wife, is also a generous Democratic Party donor.
Epstein and Dubin had business ties as well. Epstein introduced Dubin to Jes Staley, then a senior executive at JPMorganChase & Co. and now the CEO of Barclays, the big British bank…Dubin also directed some of Epstein’s money, for which Epstein was a fiduciary, to at least two hedge fund managers—Dan Zwirn and Joseph Kusnan—who once worked at Highbridge before starting their own firms.
Worse yet, in an unsealed deposition filed by identified victim Virginia Giuffre, Mr. Dubin is accused of being the first client she was trafficked to.
A Lack of Journalistic Ethics
Vicky Ward’s followed her 2003 article on Epstein with a 2011 puff piece on him, published on her personal blog, STILL omitting the claims against Epstein made by the Farmer sisters. Keep in mind, this was published after his 2005-2008 Palm Beach FBI probe AND his 2009 registration as a sex offender/house arrest.
This is not to say I didn’t hear stories about the girls. I did. But, not knowing quite whom to believe, I concentrated on the intriguing financial mystery instead. But now the women have come back. Not the same ones, different ones. And their stories are bone-chilling. Journalists from England have phoned—and, in one case, flown—to ask me about Epstein and Maxwell. Who is he? And the British, especially, want to know: Who is she? At this point, I am so bored of repeating myself to others—it was, after all, my 2003 Vanity Fair story that really brought him into the limelight—that I have decided to write about this myself.
And yet the piece continues on, without touching any further on the allegations or convictions against him. This is coming from someone who, in the same piece states:
Bizarrely, perhaps, I have gotten to know Jeffrey and Ghislaine far better after my piece than before it.
…And Ghislaine?
Full disclosure: I like her. Most people in New York do. It’s almost impossible not to.
She is always the most interesting, the most vivacious, the most unusual person in any room. I’ve spent hours talking to her about the Third World at a bar until two a.m. She is as passionate as she is knowledgeable. She is curious. She has spent weeks at the bottom of the ocean, literally going deeper than anyone else. She has sent me a DVD of the fish there. Her Rolodex would blow away almost anyone else’s I can think of—probably even Rupert Murdoch’s. She is very well read and can talk about most things for hours. She is passionate about Bill Clinton, with whom she is close friends.
The most damning portion of the article, in terms of her complicity:
I kept running into both of them, separately, at parties. Jeffrey is not a social animal, so he usually has a couple of young women with him who stand two feet behind him, as if serving a monarch. “Do they speak?” I remember asking him once, nodding at his lookalike blondes. He laughed. “Not like you, Vicky,” was his riposte.
…How old were those girls??
The article is only accessible through internet archives, and though this cannot be conclusively verified, it seems that she strategically deleted it (web archives of it end in June 2020). In 2015, she published I Tried to Warn You About Sleazy Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 for The Daily Beast (of which Weinstein connected Tina Brown founded).
…We were getting ready to go to press. And then the bullet came. “Graydon’s taking out the women from the piece,” Doug Stumpf, my editor, told me.
I began to cry. It was so wrong. The family had been so brave. I thought about the mother, her fear of the dark, of the harm she feared might come to her daughters. And then I thought of all the rich, powerful men in suits ready to talk about Epstein’s “great mind.”
“Why?” I asked Graydon. “He’s sensitive about the young women” was his answer. “And we still get to run most of the piece.”
Many years later I know that Graydon made the call that seemed right to him then—and though the episode still deeply rankles me I don’t blame him.…When they’d been released home some months later, I went out to my first party. There was Jeffrey Epstein, sucking a lollipop. “Vicky,” he said, “you look so pretty.”
Yeah, I would delete that 2011 article off of my blog too if I wanted to make myself look like another woman journalist supressed by the patriarchy.
Ward claims that Epstein placed an ominous threat against her unborn children, which spooked her into getting security in the NICU.
My babies were born prematurely, dangerously so; he’d asked which hospital I was giving birth at—and I was so afraid that somehow, with all his connections to the academic and medical community, that he was coming for my little ones that I put security on them in the NICU.
But her babies were born in 2003, so why keep hanging out with these people after? Why write a puff piece on them, glowingly reviewing their characters, just 8 years after having your children threatened by them? Vicky Ward was inarguably friends with Epstein and Maxwell.
Profiting off of Victims
Maria Farmer was interviewed by Page Six in July of 2021. In it, she claims that Vicky Ward’s recent Audible/Discovery+ series, “Chasing Ghislaine” effectively retraumatized the victims in the interest of personal profit, forcing the sisters to file a cease-and-desist letter (of which Ward categorically denies).
“I am horrified. Just leave us alone! Can’t she make money off of other victims? She’s a ‘presstitute’ and vulture … She won’t stop torturing us, and it is hurting so badly. Whenever we hear the name ‘Vicky Ward,’ we cringe,” Farmer told Page Six ahead of Ward’s podcast premiere.
“[Vicky] courted me … begging for this story, and I’m like, ‘I don’t want to die.’ She promised me and my family safety,” Farmer told us. “I told her everything in great detail about what happened. She knew it all. I didn’t tell anyone in that great of detail again for [years].”
“…Farmer, on the other hand, alleges it was Ward’s chummy relationship with Epstein enabler Maxwell that kept her story from being published and claims it put her life in danger.”
Vicky Ward is very much part of the Brahmin class — daughter of a London financier and graduating from the University of Cambridge with a degree in English literature. She, like Jeffery Toobin, is a thoroughbred born into a high pedigree. She orients herself around the woman versus patriarchy narrative that is so popular amongst cathedral spaces. Her Twitter bio? “Journalist working at the intersection of power, money, and corruption.”
While denying all of her own complicity, she actively seeks to blame Graydon Carter (also Brahmin) for all guilt in suppressing the Farmer allegations. To Page Six she is quoted, describing her exploitative podcast as:
“It’s focused on men and male power … The invisible men, who we’re slowly learning more and more about, two years after Epstein’s death,” she said.
She subscribes to the same patriarchy-focused liberal feminism that pervades the rhetoric of the Cathedral and is utilizing that same belief system in order to evade accountability she never thought she would be forced to reconcile with. I can’t possibly be an abuser, I am a brave feminist who was victimized by powerful men too.
“Journalist working at the intersection of power, money, and corruption.” Possibly the funniest redundant expression ever constructed.