WHEN DO THE RICH GO TO BED?

On the one hand, I have no interest what so every about the lives of the rich and famous who thought that mixing with Jeffrey Epstein was a good thing. On the other hand, it's hard to avoid all the press coverage about this ongoing story. So what's the best balance? 

I decided that reading Virginia Roberts Giufree's autobiography Nobodies Child would give me one important perspective. And it did. Although written with help, her voice reaches out with such clarity after years of abuse and then years of standing up to her abusers. A tough read but if you're up to it, I recommend it.

After that, I needed to find a good analyst recommended by believable sources to make sense of her story. Hamish Macdonald, one of the hosts of Radio National's Global Roaming suggested an interview on the Ezra Klein Show and as I've always found Klein's choice of interviewees interesting, that's where I went. He interviewed Anand Giridharadas a journalist/sociologist of American elites. He’s the author of, among other books, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. And I recommend you spend some time listening to it (on Spotify) or watching it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBnQ6qxoMr8 or if you don't have time, read the transcript via the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-anand-giridharadas.html

In summary, Giriharadas concludes that the rich wanted what Epstein had to offer because they have boring lives and that academics wanted what Epstein had to offer because although they might have been famous, they weren't rich. Virginia Giuffre wrote about 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. 

And then Giriharadas describes them this way:

The elite used to work less hours than the working class. And now they work more.

So this is a group of people who, as it is in Washington, so it is across a lot of this American elite, that they work really hard and their life consists of not making mistakes. It’s conservative, it’s safe, it’s the straight and narrow. And they often lead quite boring lives.

I think a lot of them are in bed by 8:30 p.m., and they’re listening to longevity experts and are on weird diets ——

Scrolling X.

And don’t drink alcohol because they’re trying to do this and that.

So when Epstein came along — again, we talked about exploiting vulnerabilities — he offered these people, as you said so well, a life that maybe at some earlier point they thought would be the endpoint of making a lot of money in finance, but, in fact, they’re just sitting in some house in Connecticut, alone and scrolling X and maybe offering a toxic opinion on something. And this was this entree into something maybe different, maybe something they felt they were owed.

To me, this sense of "ownership" is key. Elites have always had a sense of ownership whether it was the oligarchs in Classical Greece, or the monarchs in Medieval Europe, or Communist leaders of the 20th century, or the Islamic leaders in the contemporary world - men (mainly) who want to own our bodies and our minds. No thank you.