Ezra Klein interviews Anand Giridharadas about Epstein’s social infrastructure

Ezra Klein, The Infrastructure of Jeffrey Epstein’s Power, NYTimes, Feb. 13, 2026.

About Girardharadas:

Anand Giridharadas is a journalist who has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker and many other outlets. He publishes the great newsletter The.Ink and is the author of, among other books, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” which he published in 2018, and the forthcoming “Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle and Belonging in an American City.”

I often think of his work as a kind of sociology of American elites and power, and that has been the perspective he has brought to his coverage of these files. I think it is revelatory and worth hearing.

Here are a few passages from a very long and interesting interview.

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Ezra Klein: You used the word “solidarity” a moment ago for this network. When you look at these communications, there are moments of solidarity.

You wrote, in some ways actually movingly, about Epstein having a talent for friendship. He has a talent for being of use to people. He becomes an adviser to them. You can’t be a great con man without understanding human beings at a very deep level.

But there’s also just an endless transactionalism. An endless trading of information, money, connections, favor, powers — ultimately, women and girls. And what feels oftentimes like it is attracting them to each other is not always what I would think of as solidarity or a fellowship but: What can you do for me?

If you can be the one who finds it for them, that’s real power.

Anand Giridharadas: And it’s different needs, right? The money people may not need money, although they always want more of it. They often want to seem and feel smart. If you have met people in those kinds of worlds — finance people — even if you make a lot of money in it, they’re often very boring people.

I don’t say this as slander. They know it. I’ve had so many conversations with people in this world where there’s an insecurity about how boring they are. So they want something else.

Then there’s a bunch of academics. Academics, I think, really figure in this story in a way that feels surprising. It’s a tough era to be an independent thinker, so the academics want money and access.

Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary asked Epstein, “How is life among the lucrative and louche?” He wanted access to a party scene that’s not available to him. Advertisement

Everybody had something they needed. But his gift, if it can be called that, was understanding and mapping that so well.

* * * * *

There’s this amazing quote from Justin Nelson, Epstein’s personal banker. I’m quoting Nelson from the Times piece: He prepares a memo trumpeting Epstein’s large volume of business with JPMorgan, and noting that despite his status as a sex offender, he was “still clearly well respected and trusted by some of the richest people in the world.” His network is the proof that he is worth dealing with and not beyond the pale. Because if he was, well, then how would he still have this network?

He is revealing how these elites make decisions about trust — that I think are really different from the way folks at home go through the world and make decisions. I think you make character judgments about people, about how honest they have been and therefore will be.

These billionaires, these superelites, these superlawyers are working on a whole different kind of system. Their system has to do, as you say, with how loaded with connections you are in this network, how high your stock is on a given day in this network.

What Epstein figured out was how to game this. He figured out the vulnerability of this entire network, which is that these people are actually not that serious about character. In fact, character may be a liability for some of them, may be an unnecessary source of friction.

These people are actually not that grounded in the evidence of how someone has lived. These people are making very thin-sliced judgments about how central you are in their same networks. Therefore, something as simple — and this is true — as dining at Michael’s here in Midtown can do extraordinary wonders for people in the superelite. 

I think if I had to think about what I have most learned from what is now 13 months of the second Trump term — most learned about this country and the character of this country and the way this country functions right now — perhaps the biggest surprise for me is about the distribution or the paucity of bravery.  

Now most people listening to this will not have heard of the restaurant Michael’s in Midtown, but Michael’s is an example of a restaurant — a perfectly nice restaurant — but also a place where, if you can arrange to have lunch there, you will create an impression among certain people in publishing in New York, certain people who are in network television in New York, certain people in finance in New York — that you are in a certain place.

And on your way in and out, someone might introduce you to this person or that person. I’ve seen this organism flourish. And then these people will just assume you must be fine. They’ll maybe ask you to come in for a meeting to promote your children’s book or whatever it is.

He exploited the facile nature of many of these elites who have the mental skills to be serious people who evaluate character, who look up people’s history, who might, for example, find a conviction for soliciting sex with a minor problematic — but who, in fact, if you dined at Michael’s, if you were at that party, if you were at Davos, if you were at TED, must be all right.

* * * * *

Let me take that as a moment to ask something cautionary. Because as you’re saying, you look at these files, and there are a lot of people named in them. The number of people actually close to him, about whom you can get a lot by reading the files, we’re talking in the low dozens, maybe.

We’re talking about the elites, the power networks, but actually most people didn’t know Jeffrey Epstein. Most elites didn’t have much to do with him. Plenty of people saw him for what he was.

Tina Brown has this great line where she’s invited to a dinner with Epstein, Prince Andrew and Woody Allen. And she responded: What the [expletive] is this — the Pedophiles’ Ball?

Melinda Gates sees him perfectly clearly.

So is Epstein a way you see the elite, or is this a subcategory? It’s not telling us that much about power. It’s telling us something about some set of powerful people, in which — as in any other culture or network — there are going to be people of better and worse judgment, higher and lower character, more and less transactional.

Even in this JPMorgan Chase example I’ve been using, there are people in the bank who are fighting hard to cut ties with him. They lose until it becomes completely untenable for the bank to keep going. But they’re there.

I think that’s right. It’s an important point to dwell on for a second because you could take a narrow view that only the people who are actively involved in crimes of pedophilia here are really this group of people we should focus on, and everything else is a distraction.

You could take the opposite view that this is an indictment of every person with more than $10 million in the bank.

I think both of those are incorrect. I believe in this notion, and I’ve seen it in so many forms over the course of my years of reporting, of what I think about as concentric circles of enablement.

There is no doubt that there is a core group of people who were knowledgeable about, engaged in and shared participation in crimes of pedophilia at the burning heart of this story. That is, obviously, its own circle of hell.

We know from testimony of survivors that it was more people than just him. He was trafficking them to other people. We have some of the names. We don’t have all the names. But that was happening, and that’s the burning heart of this story that can’t be forgotten.

And then there’s what made that possible. Very practically, that means: Who were the other people who didn’t do that but who were aware of it, who facilitated it, for whom it was not a problem, who were not later discouraged by it when deciding whether to let him into something?

Then: What was the circle around that? Universities that maybe knew that Larry Summers was pally with him or that were accepting money and just didn’t stop the thing.

Then you can keep going out from there. Sometimes it’s helpful to shift the metaphor. I think about when I was in India as a reporter for The Times, and you would have a problem of so-called honor killings in rural villages in North India. A young woman dares to have a boyfriend or some kind of dalliance before marriage, and her own father might kill her or men in her family might kill her or people in her village might kill her. It happens a lot.

If you take every instance where that happens, there’s often one guy who committed murder. So one guy.

But I think anybody looking at it would say it took a lot of other things going on to make it possible for that guy to commit the murder — and a lot of other people who didn’t commit murder, who would never commit murder, who were not OK with murder, who maybe opposed the murder — but a lot of people and systems and institutions and values are conspiring to make that murder possible.

So if you shift back to this example, I think if you just had a pedophile in Jeffrey Epstein who wanted to procure 15-year-old girls and rape them, and that was all you had, it would have been very difficult for him. This is not an easy thing to pull off.

It’s not just Kathryn Ruemmler [BTW, who has resigned from Goldman Sachs since this interview took place], who presumably had nothing to do with that burning heart of the story. It’s the fact that today, Kathryn Ruemmler, as you and I speak, is still the chief lawyer at Goldman Sachs. It’s the fact that association is not something — forget one individual — that institutionally, Goldman Sachs does not think today is a problematic association.

The fact that not just some professor at Harvard or some professor at M.I.T. was involved but that those institutions, two of the world’s most august learning institutions, essentially had this guy able to swim through their networks and be central to them. I remember talking to women at the M.I.T. Media Lab who were forced to give tours to Jeffrey Epstein at the Media Lab.

It’s these law firms that, before they were capitulating to Donald Trump, were able to be gamed by, again, not just individuals but entire organizations that were not able to have an appropriate histamine reaction to one of their lawyers being too close to such a depraved person.

Even when there were so many reasons to know he was a problem. Even when Tina Brown knew enough to call him a pedophile.

Even when Donald Trump was giving quotes to New York Magazine saying: Jeffrey Epstein likes them on the younger side.

It was, as you say, a quite small number of people who presumably were involved in the worst crimes. It was a larger number who maybe knew about them and looked the other way. It was a larger number still who maybe were just at parties where things happened.

But eventually, you’re talking about all or many of the most prestigious institutions in this country — universities, corporations, law firms, conferences, down the line.

* * * * *

But this is another kind of currency you see Epstein using a lot with the rich, which is: You might have thought you would get rich and you would have access to all the fun parties and you would be a playboy and you would have girls all over you. And for a lot of them, it didn’t work out that way. And you can come into it, and he will give you entree into this, which, for the people who don’t need more money but who maybe want this, is a kind of power and leverage and transactionalism.

I want to read you a quote from Virginia Giuffre’s book, “Nobody’s Girl,” that gets at this in a really powerful way. She makes an observation. This is in the really early days when she’s, I think 16, and she is first forced into sex by Epstein with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell themselves, and then he starts to force her to have sex with other men. And she makes an observation about these other men. She writes:

My impression of many of these men is that they didn’t know how to pursue women. Awkward and socially immature, it was as if their big brains were missing the ability to interact with other people.

I don’t think this is true about Epstein himself. I think it is true about some of these other guys, and it’s absolutely at the heart of this appeal. You see it with a lot of these guys, whether they were involved in sexual activity that Epstein arranged or not.

Or in the case of Larry Summers, just reaching out to Epstein for dating advice. You reach out to a convicted pedophile for dating advice about how to sleep with a young Chinese economist as a married man, I guess, because in Larry Summers’s mind, Epstein is a guy who knows a lot about sex or something. It’s like he’s in a category.

A lot of these guys are very smart in the area that they’re smart in, and as Virginia Giuffre wrote, maybe not very deft in other areas — and didn’t want to have to be deft in those areas. I think in a lot of that stratospheric world, whether you’re a powerful academic or a superrich person, you don’t want resistance. You don’t want pushback. These are guys who, when they have some idea for something they want to do at their university or, if they’re very rich, some place they want to go, they’re not standing in line at the airport. They’re not dealing with meetings and committees. They’re acting on the world.

I think this extended, as Virginia Giuffre wrote, to their encounters with women. They didn’t want adult, sentient, conscious, complex, full women who could talk back to them, who might have thoughts, might have opinions that they would share with them, might have the self-confidence to be another person in the room.

What they seemed drawn to, whether it was consensual or, in some cases, rape, whether it was underage or overage, they seemed drawn to women who, to quote Virginia Giuffre again: Epstein “liked to tell friends that women were merely ‘a life-support system for a vagina.’” Women whose personhood had been either taken away or was limited through the fear they were living in.

And I think it is, again, revealing about the men to whom this was appealing.

* * * * *

I mean, Jeffrey Epstein is himself a kind of social fact. His power, his wealth, his connections. If he knows all these people, who are you to go against that? Who are you to not get your cut of that?

And I think Trump, at this point, is that on a much larger scale. He’s tremendously corrupt. The way he’s using the White House for profit is completely visible now to the naked eye. Dozens of women have accused him of sexual misconduct. He has bragged about it on tape. He was found liable in a case in court. He acts in ways that obviously you would likely not allow anyone in your life to act. There’s Jan. 6.

But there’s just so much power around him now that it’s like there’s nothing to be done about it. So he just accepts him as a kind of social fact. I mean, he is — he’s the president, and he’s the center of the system itself.

If Trump had fallen apart after 2020, people would have really turned on him. If he had become powerless, all these people, who you know in their hearts kind of hate him — and there are plenty of those still in the Republican Party, there certainly were a couple of years ago — they could have acted on that. But as long as he was the deciding figure in primaries and so on, they all get in line.

And I don’t mean to draw this too tightly, but I always think about it when I look at this note from Trump and Epstein. They do have a similar genius to me, which is the recognition that power is what makes you invincible.

Power can come through many different mechanisms. It could be money, it could be connections, it could be literal political power in Donald Trump’s case. But if you have enough of it, you become functionally immune — or at least immune up until a certain point.

Trump rose in part by weaponizing the mistrust of this kind of power, the sense that you needed a champion to take it apart. But, of course, he’s completely part of it, was best friends or very close friends with this guy at one point, and their suggestive relationship just still sits there completely unexplained, with none of what this message is legible, really.

Even now we don’t know what’s being held back by the Trump Department of Justice, which, I trust that Justice Department as far as I can throw it. It’s all so on point.

It is. I think if I had to think about what I have most learned from what is now 13 months of the second Trump term — most learned about this country and the character of this country and the way this country functions right now — perhaps the biggest surprise for me is about the distribution or the paucity of bravery.

This country is full of people today — and I’m speaking specifically of leaders and elites — with opportunities to form some sort of resistance to the loss of democracy in this country. Our elite, including some of the people we’ve talked about today, is full of people whose grandfathers stormed Normandy and who are lionized in those families and who don’t have the bravery, as the grandchildren of those people, to put out a statement at their law firm.

I mean it’s in the song: “Land of the free, home of the brave.” I think it’s a really important part of American self-conception — bravery, courage.

I think we have found out that it is in really short supply and that people who actually have the things that you would think would make you courageous — I think that if I had Harvard’s endowment at my back, I would be more courageous than Anand sitting here with you right now.

It turns out that’s not what it seemed to do for people. If I owned a law firm, I would think that would make me more courageous. But we found otherwise.

And then you look at these people in Minneapolis whose names no one even knows, except for the two who were shot. And people who, after they were shot, go out again and again and again, and you look at their courage. And it’s incredible that all of these people in academia, in law firms, in corporations — you and I go out enough, we hear these people talk about Donald Trump at parties. They have the same contempt for him that you and I might have. But no courage.