The ladder

On the #MeToo'd men Epstein 'helped'

In Verge, Elizabeth Lopatto unearths a vast anti-woke conspiracy:

The latest tranche of Epstein documents made it obvious. Consider all the “contrarians” and “anti-woke” warriors who show up in the latest dump: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Larry Summers, Steve Bannon, and of course, Donald Trump. With apologies to George Carlin: It’s a big club, and the worst people are in it — because their interests are all aligned. Pushing back on social justice, it turns out, was coordinated.

These men have things in common, but the idea that they own being “contrarian” or “anti-woke,” or even that this is what unites them, is something I will have to be uh contrary about. More precisely, I just don’t buy it. There were plenty of people criticizing “wokeness” in the latter part of the 2010s and onward. Some of them were Trumpy and some were anti-Trump. Some were thinking about #MeToo and others had entirely different beats. Some were team ‘#MeToo didn’t go far enough.’ (If you imagine that your average British feminist in the gender critical/ ‘TERF’ sense thinks that society has been too harsh on men who commit violence against women, you have, as they say, not been paying attention.)

If anything, by the time “anti-woke” entered the lexicon, the big issue was race, not sex, and the proverbial white woman who saw a menacing man around every corner was recast as “Karen.” 2019, when Epstein’s arrest that stuck happened, was already tail end times for #MeToo. Summer 2020 was the start of something else, of various something-elses.

So no, I’m not convinced that the takeaway from the eterna-scandal around Epstein is about “anti-woke” or, for that matter, Bari Weiss. There’s certainly a sense in which, as the controversial NYT headline accurately put it, “Epstein Emails Reveal a Bygone Elite.” But you didn’t exactly have to have been part of a “clubby” underworld to find much about the 2010s objectionable.

What’s interesting in the article is not how the facts are presented, not the story as told, but rather the story the facts themselves tell. And it’s plenty damning… of Epstein. Of other #MeToo’d men he offered ‘help,’ it’s less straightforward.

Lopatto describes Epstein as fixated on #MeToo, and on the #MeToo-ings of other men, and as seeing himself as their savior:

Epstein appeared to be monitoring #MeToo closely, and even, at times, seemed to be the canceled man whisperer. At one point, in an email to the MIT Media Lab’s Ito, he writes, “with all these guys getting busted for harassment , i have moved slightly up on the repuation ladder and have been asked everday for advice etc.” In a 2018 email, Epstein writes, “instead of the friars club , can we do a pariahs club dinnr. woody me moonves wynn charlie matt. louis ck. etc.”

Lopatto presents this as a conspiracy of powerful and evil men. There may be something to this when you’re talking about, like, Trump, or any men who were personally involved in illicit island activities.

But when it came to #MeToo writ large, how do we interpret Epstein’s interest? Is it that all the bad men ganged up together on womankind?

At the risk of repeating myself, a problem with #MeToo was its creation of this nebulous Bad Man category. Misdeeds of all levels of severity, proven and credibly accused and demonstrably false, were all mixed up together. Everything was now to be taken VERY seriously, which backfired and made it so that nothing was. So the problem was a mix of over- and underreach. #MeToo went too far and therefore not far enough.

That was my analysis in abstract terms, a while back. But what Lopatto’s article demonstrates—somewhat contrary to the article’s arguments—is that the exonerating impact this aspect of #MeToo overreach had on the truly terrible men is not something that merely happened. It is something that Jeffrey Epstein, at least, leaned into and tried to make work for him. After all, once there’s a consensus that a bad man is a bad man is a bad man, and really aren’t all men examples of toxic masculinity, then how bad can any one man be?

Consider this anecdote:

Even the relatively minor “Shitty Media Men” list — a spreadsheet anonymously edited with names of men and accusations against them — makes it into Epstein’s emails. Lorin Stein, the disgraced former editor of The Paris Review who resigned after accusations of sexual impropriety, forwarded to Wolff an email from the writer Stephen Elliott, who intended to sue the list’s creator since he didn’t know who’d made the accusations against him. Epstein promises to “help anyway i can.” Elliott sued Moira Donegan, the list’s creator, six weeks later.

Was the list “minor”? It was a pretty big deal at the time, and partly because it was discrediting to the movement. It was this mix of substantive and substantiated and neither, and included, memorably, the accusation that an openly gay man at someone’s work was obnoxious. Maybe he was! But the significance of this where sexual intimidation of women (or indeed of anyone) was concerned was not evident.

As for the passage quoted above, what’s the takeaway? Elliott stated intent to sue Donegan, and then did that thing. Lopatto does not say that Epstein helped with this lawsuit i.e. funded it, but uses the timeline to insinuate something along those lines.

It’s not proven or even outright claimed that Epstein had anything to do with this lawsuit. But let’s say he had! What would this demonstrate? Bad judgment, or desperation, on Elliott’s part, but on Epstein’s? The more #MeToo was associated with baseless accusations, the blurrier the category of #MeToo’d Man becomes, and the less bad Epstein starts to look.

Because the Epstein case itself is an example of #MeToo operating correctly. Norms had changed, and changed thanks to feminist activism, such that men into ‘girls’—as in, pursuing and initiating and forcing sex with minors—were now socially and legally (?) more likely to be viewed as, in effect if not psychiatric precision, pedophiles. It’s not coincidental that 2019 is when he finally went to jail. ‘Men just do things like this, if they can’ stopped being an excuse.

But also? The wide-net-casting of #MeToo gave cover to Epstein. It made him seem like just another poor soul caught up in a wave of neo-puritanism. It allowed him to frame ‘convicted of serious sex crimes against minors’ as part of a sex panic, as versus as, you know, doing bad crimes and facing justice. Lopatto writes that Epstein’s mingling with billionaires “allowed him to launder his reputation,” and maybe it did! But also, so did his associating himself with men who’d been wrongly accused or accused of relative nothingburgers. It made him seem as though he too had been the victim of overreach, when the reality was, an earlier era had underreached and failed to capture him.

And what sort of ‘help’ would Jeffrey Epstein have been, to an unjustly #MeToo’d man? The minute you can toss in and he consorted with EPSTEIN, a man who’d seemed like a lesser #MeToo goes up that “ladder.” It is not in and of itself a crime that Epstein gifted Allen nearly $10k worth of (men’s!) quiet-luxury underwear. It is, however, nauseating.

Prior to these revelations, Allen was ‘just’ the man accused, credibly or not I remain agnostic, of child abuse, and who had undeniably coupled off with the young but of-age child of his then-partner. Larry Summers was ‘just’ the man who’d maligned women’s STEM abilities. Now, they and so many others are part of this category, Epstein’s orbit. In some cases this is because emails themselves bring new facts to light. In others, it’s merely the tinge.

And “tinge” is where sex panic, if that’s even the right phrase for it, can enter into it. We’re back in that blurry realm where various names (names emailed, names merely mentioned in emails) are tainted and it’s not always obvious why, which makes it seem as though both all of them and none of them are at fault. The reality: some.

And no, as I’d like to think is obvious but one never knows, this does not mean that Epstein’s REAL victims were the #MeToo’d men he appears to have manipulated, if only symbolically, to make himself look like less of a creep, less of an aberration. Obviously it was the young girls.

What girls and women need, safety-wise, is not some kind of database of all men who crossed digital paths with one specific dead criminal. It’s for abusers and assaulters, rich and famous or not, to face justice.