The Jeffrey Epstein files peeled back the curtain on an uncomfortable truth about America’s elites, author AAnand Giridharadas says.
Giridharadas told The Daily Beast Podcast that the pedophile took advantage of the government officials, executives, and academics who staked their status on “hyper-connected networks” and turned a blind eye to his crimes rather than jeopardize their standing.
“Everyone is talking about what’s in [the Epstein files]. Here’s what’s not in there. We have all these emails. We have all these people emailing about everything. There’s no breakup emails,” Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, said.
Giridharadas continued, “There’s no one saying, ‘F---, I didn’t know, but I read the story now. You are despicable. Never call me again.’ Not one email that I’ve seen.”
Giridharadas, who has written extensively on the “Epstein class” on his Substack The.Ink, told host Joanna Coles that Epstein’s crimes were “enabled by the silence and complicity and overlooking and looking away of a much larger number of people. And I don’t think you get the former without the latter.”
The best-selling author argued that Epstein exploited a “lack of courage” that he said defines “the age of hyper-connected networks,” where connections in elite circles is the ultimate currency.
“Your wealth is your connections and the density and breadth of your connections to all these other people,” he explained.
Epstein, a well-connected New York financier, served in these circles as a “bridging function,” Giridharadas said, something “very, very valuable” particularly to those elites who are “siloed in particular worlds” but want to move between them more freely.
“To be in that rarefied elite is to have friction removed,” Giridharadas said. Epstein removed friction, so the elites around him looked the other way—too afraid to call him out and risk the very networks that kept them in power, the author explained.
“I think it a lot of what happened in this network has to do with the way courage dissipates, evaporates in an age of networks like ours,” Giridharadas said.
“And so when I look at that inbox, even after people got to know, even after Julie Brown’s heroic reporting in 2018, where no one could say they didn’t know after that, even after he died, that people didn’t have the bravery to break up with him.”
Coles chimed in, “In fact, what you see is the opposite. You have people reaching out.”
The Daily Beast’s chief content officer noted that Epstein associates such as former British ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson and Hollywood publicist Peggy Siegal even came to Epstein’s aid after his 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor.
Epstein remained connected to a who’s who of elites long after his sexual abuse came to light: Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, health influencer Peter Attia, former Prince Andrew, fellow island-owning billionaire Richard Branson, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, former White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler, former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University president Larry Summers, venture capitalist and former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and many others.
On his Substack, Giridharadas detailed mingling with “network-obsessed” elites and recounted resigning from the jury of an MIT Media Lab award funded by Hoffman in 2019 after learning of Epstein’s ties to Hoffman and Ito.
He said what struck him most after sending his resignation email to the other judges was the “silence.”
“Everybody else—including people linked with some of the most prestigious institutions on earth—played ostrich,” Giridharadas wrote.
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