(Democracy Now) Protecting Pedophile Predators: Carole Cadwalladr on Jeffrey Epstein & the Elite’s Veil of Silence
Sid Shniad
Protecting Pedophile Predators: Carole Cadwalladr on Jeffrey Epstein & the Elite’s Veil of Silence
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are accusing the Justice Department of covering up the names of co-conspirators of the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as fallout from the Epstein files grows across the globe. Millions of pages remain unreleased. As many prominent U.S. figures evade accountability following mentions in the Epstein files, a number of European figures have resigned for their relationships with Epstein. “The most extraordinary and worrying thing of what is going on in the United States is the scale of normalization that is happening, in which the press is absolutely a structural part of this,” says Carole Cadwalladr, award-winning investigative journalist. “I have been shocked — deeply, deeply shocked — by the absence of headlines.”
AMY GOODMAN: Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are accusing the Justice Department of covering up the names of co-conspirators of the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as fallout from the Epstein files grows across the globe. Last week, the Department of Justice just released over 3 million pages of files, but many contained major redactions. Millions of more pages remain unreleased.
On Monday, lawmakers were granted access to unredacted versions of the documents. Democratic Congressmember Jamie Raskin spoke out after seeing some of the files.
REP. JAMIE RASKIN: You know, I saw the names of lots of people who were redacted for mysterious or baffling or inscrutable reasons.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: The co-authors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna, held a news conference after viewing some of the files.
REP. RO KHANNA: Our bigger concern is that there’s still a lot that’s redacted. Even in what we’re seeing, we’re seeing redacted versions. I thought we were supposed to see the unredacted versions. And that’s because the documents produced to Justice from the FBI, from other — from the grand jury, was redacted when they got it. So, we kept doing the searches for the unredacted information. It’s the identical redactions that they have. Now, I don’t think that’s nefarious on the career attorneys that were reviewing it, but they obviously haven’t gotten the production, because our law says that the FBI and the original grand jury needs to be unredacted.
REP. THOMAS MASSIE: I mean, what we’re after is the men who Jeffrey Epstein trafficked women to. We want those names published. We’re not out to embarrass people. And the problem is, we went in there hoping to see that in 302 forms. What we found out is those 302 forms were redacted before they got to the DOJ.
AMY GOODMAN: In related news, Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s serving a 20-year sentence, refused to answer lawmakers’ questions in a closed-door virtual deposition before the House Oversight Committee Monday.
JACK EMMER: Have you ever facilitated the sexual abuse of any minor or adult woman by Mr. Epstein?
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: I invoke my Fifth Amendment right to silence.
JACK EMMER: Have you ever participated in the sexual abuse of any minor or adult woman?
GHISLAINE MAXWELL: I invoke my Fifth Amendment right to silence.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: During the hearing, Maxwell’s attorney, David Markus, said Maxwell would speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump.
DAVID MARKUS: If this committee and the American public truly want to hear the unfiltered truth about what happened, there is a straightforward path. Miss Maxwell is prepared to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump. Only she can provide a complete account, and some may not like what they want — what they hear, but the truth matters. For example, both President Trump and President Clinton are innocent of any wrongdoing. Miss Maxwell alone can explain why, and the public is entitled to hear that explanation.
AMY GOODMAN: This all comes as the release of the Epstein files threatens to bring down the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over his decision to appoint Lord Peter Mandelson as U.S. ambassador despite Mandelson’s close ties to Epstein.
We go now to Britain, where we’re joined by Carole Cadwalladr. She is award-winning investigative journalist whose Substack is How to Survive the Broligarchy. She gained international recognition for her exposé on the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal in 2018. Her most recent piece is headlined “We all live in Jeffrey Epstein’s world.” She’s also the co-founder of an independent news outlet called The Nerve, launched with five former Guardian journalists.
Carole, welcome back to Democracy Now! I want to first get your response to Ghislaine Maxwell, the co-conspirator of Epstein, who you call in your piece a “monstrosity,” invoking the Fifth Amendment so she wouldn’t incriminate herself, but saying if Trump granted her clemency, in exchange, she would exonerate him. Can you respond to all of this latest news?
CAROLE CADWALLADR: Thanks, Amy. It’s so good to be back with you.
I mean, I guess what we see with Ghislaine, which is naked transactionalism, the offer of a quid pro quo arrangement with Trump, which is what this was, that is a pattern of behavior which we see all through the email correspondence of Ghislaine, of Jeffrey Epstein, of what’s been laid out there. So I don’t think that should come as any surprise or shock to people. You know, we know that there is a global trade in favors between a billionaire class, between people who are officials of hostile nations, between politicians, between people in Silicon Valley, in Washington, in Westminster, in Israel, across the Middle East. I mean, that’s what these documents have laid bare, is this exchange of favors. So that doesn’t come as any shock.
You know, it’s really good to hear that there are these efforts being made in Washington to unredact the documents. It’s really shocking. I mean, it’s in — one of the most sort of disgusting features, I think, of this data dump is that we can see that these young women have had their names exposed, and yet these men who are clearly involved are being shielded. Obviously, there’s a big question about why.
And I suppose my final point of what these headlines show is that it is absolutely extraordinary that we are seeing this heat and pressure on the British prime minister, who was not an accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein, who is not in the files, and yet there is this, you know, movement for his resignation. And I think if we get to a situation in which the British prime minister is forced out of office, and there is, across the Atlantic, zero pressure, zero consequences for Donald Trump, who, you know, thousands of mentions in the files and a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein for years, I find that just — I mean, it’s just sort of moral obscenity, I would say.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Yeah, so, Carole, there was an Associated Press report over the weekend which was headlined “Epstein revelations have toppled top figures in Europe while US fallout is more muted.” They point out that “A prince, an ambassador, senior diplomats, top politicians. All brought down by the Jeffrey Epstein files. And all in Europe, rather than the United States.” I mean, if you could talk about why you think that’s the case? You’ve also expressed concerns about the fact that your sense is that this story, the Epstein story, has not been sufficiently covered in the U.S. media.
CAROLE CADWALLADR: You know, I’ve been really puzzling over this now for a week, and I’ve been talking to people and trying to sense-check what on Earth is going on. And the only conclusion I can come to is that — and this is extraordinary, because the British press, we have so many structural issues with it; however, I think what we’re seeing in this moment is that we in Europe are still living in some sort of functioning democracy. We are actually still living in societies where we have some norms. And actually what we’re — what we are understanding here is that this is a disgrace beyond disgrace, that pedophilia actually is too far, and that we are having some sort of semblance of accountability in public life.
And I think the most extraordinary and worrying thing of what is going on in the United States is the scale of normalization that is happening, in which the press is absolutely a structural part of this. I have been shocked — deeply, deeply shocked — by the absence of headlines, by the absence of sense-making across the U.S. media that contextualizes what is in these documents, that helps people to process them and to understand them. And I think, you know, there is a sort of self-surrendering, self-censorship which is going on in the United States right now. And that, I find really deeply worrying.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, I don’t think people realize, just to amplify what Nermeen just said about who has gone down around Europe, you have Mona Juul, if that’s how you pronounce her name, J-U-U-L, the Norwegian ambassador to Jordan, who just resigned after reports surfaced Epstein had left $10 million in his will to her — to her children and her husband. Brad Karp, here in the U.S., chair of the prestigious law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, after emails revealed close personal business communications with Epstein, including helping with a job request and socializing. Peter Mandelson not only had to step down from the House of Lords, the British politician resigned from the Labour Party, following the release of the file showing he received $75,000 from Epstein. Of course, this is what could bring down the Prime Minister Keir Starmer, because of his close relationship to Mandelson. The former Slovak foreign minister and national security adviser to the Slovakian prime minister just signed after emails showed him discussing meeting with young women with Epstein in 2018. Joanna Rubinstein, president of Swedish UNHCR, just resigned after it was revealed she visited Epstein’s private island. David Ross, former department chair at School of Visual Arts in New York, just resigned after emails revealed a longtime, supportive friendship with him. Larry Summers, of course, forced out of Harvard, the former U.S. Treasury secretary, announced he’s stepping back from his public commitments, including leaving the OpenAI board. And Morgan McSweeney, chief of staff to the U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and Tim Allan, director of communications for the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, just to name a few. And as you said, Carole, in the United States, we don’t see anything like this, except for the promise of exoneration if Trump grants clemency to Ghislaine Maxwell, who refused to testify.
So, if you could also talk about the whole issue you have raised of the connection between child pornography, the whole issue of, you know, what’s going on on the internet — you’re so famous for exposing Cambridge Analytica — and the pedophilia network, the sex trafficking network that Epstein was at the core of, that has enmeshed so many, though brought almost no one down in the United States?
CAROLE CADWALLADR: Yeah, so, there’s so much going on. There is so much going on in this story. And this is why, you know, I wrote this piece, because I had such problems trying to process what this story is about, because I come at this with really specific journalistic interests and specialisms. You know, I’ve spent a decade now looking at Silicon Valley companies, looking at the men who lead them, looking around their relationship with power, looking at how they have been utterly — they’ve had total impunity in terms of regulation and accountability. I’ve also looked really closely at Russia’s influence across the West, its deliberate strategies to interfere in our politics and elections. I also — Israeli defense and intelligence firms have also been part of this beat, as has Steve Bannon and the far right across Europe. But this has all been part of the stories that I’ve been reporting on for the last decade.
And what the files show, in absolute clarity, in black and white, is that those worlds are all connected. And the thing which blew my mind is that they’re connected through Jeffrey Epstein. He is a through line. It’s not to say there aren’t others. But this is what was the sort of stunning thing for me. And in some ways, you can look at him, and he’s almost like a one-man sort of intelligence service, I would say. So, that is all revealed, and it’s revealed there in detail and complexity. And as a journalist, I just wanted to get to laying down that evidence. It was like there was sort of scoop after scoop in the emails which are in those files.
But at the same time, I think I found I had, like I think a lot of people, particularly a lot of women, a sort of emotional reaction, I think, to what is also in these files, because what it reveals is that there is a billionaire class across the world who are in close communication, who have connections to this criminal network, who also have connections through to these hostile state governments. And there is literally this sort of playground, almost, in which there is this hidden communication, which has now been made visible.
And I think the sense of impunity, that’s sort of the thing for me which really came out of it, and that mirrors what we are seeing in the world right now in these rising authoritarian times, in which strong men rule, and there is this collapse of the rules-based order. And that is what I think that this sort of Jeffrey Epstein almost personifies. We see that through him, and that there is going to be no accountability even for exposed pedophiles and his network. And I think that is a line in the sand.
And what we are seeing is that these women are not getting justice. They’re getting the opposite of justice. Their predators, the offenders, the men who are complicit in this, are being aided and abetted in keeping their identities revealed. And I think that sense that they’re not going to get justice, as the victims of Israel are not going to get justice, as the victims of Russian aggression are not getting justice, and I think that realization that this is the world that we are living in now, that was one of the sort of profound things which affected me from my week of dealing with this material.
And I think the other thing which it really made me think about is, actually, how so much of our society, there is a pediaphiliac — sorry, there is a pediaphiliac — I’m so sorry, I can’t pronounce it. There is this pedophiliac element which crosses hidden, it’s submerged, but it is part of our society. And that is some of these people who are in the files, these Silicon Valley tech bros. It’s their companies which are facilitating that in so many ways. A quarter of the traffic across the internet, you know, a quarter of all searches are for porn. The most popular, numerous search terms are for teens, for barely legal content. We don’t see that. It’s not on the open web that we see. But it is, of course, absolutely there. And I think we have this understandable reluctance and resistance to recognize this current in our culture. And for me, Epstein should be the reckoning, where we are looking at this, where we are forced to look at this. And instead, we see this veil of silence. And yeah, I think that’s really profoundly disturbing. And I think that the U.S. press is not stepping up to the moment. It’s not serving its readers and its viewers. And I think that has huge consequences.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I mean, Carole, that’s an extraordinary and perhaps not very well-known statistic that you just cited, namely that, as you write in your piece, most tech platforms derive a huge percentage of their profits from sexual interest in children. Porn represents 25% of all internet searches, and, according to Pornhub, “teen” is the most searched-for term. So, if you can talk about that? How is it that tech platforms make a profit from the searches of sexual interest in children, and whether you think this Epstein scandal will do anything to change the public discourse about the sexual abuse of teens, including what regulations may be put in place on these tech platforms that enable this?
CAROLE CADWALLADR: I mean, I think sexual interest in teens and access to that material has grown exponentially because of the internet. There is — you know, we know that. The amount of sexual content increases every single day. But it’s more than that, because what we know is that recommender algorithms and systems connect people to this, to this material. So, what might have been a fleeting interest becomes up, you know, next up in people’s feeds. We know that AI’s large language models are being fed on this content across the internet. That is being baked into the future. We know, because it has been reported from internal documents in Instagram, from Instagram, that its recommender system actually connects pedophiles to teenagers.
So, there is a — but, as I say, we sort of draw this veil of respectability over it. We sort of — we don’t like to think about it. It’s not there in the Google searches, that is kind of — you know, it’s not coming up necessarily. I mean, what I found, one of the most helpful things about Twitter under Elon Musk is that he has made this stuff visible. There is sort of disgusting content out there. And that’s why people, you know, left that platform. But that’s — again, it’s not an engagement.
And to go to the, like, “Is there going to be a reckoning?” there is not going to be a reckoning in a culture and a society, which is now America, in which there is a cowardice — I think you have to say that — about the way that this is — this story is being treated in America. There is just not this seriousness being brought to it. And that, I think, is both in the geopolitical consequences of what these documents show. We can see these very, very clear connections between, for example, Russian state officials and Silicon Valley. Like, that is there now, and Epstein is a conduit in that. So, we’re not seeing the geopolitical consequences.
But also, you know, I’ve just been — you know, I’ve been really thinking about it. There has been some excellent journalism, as ever, by journalists and journalistic teams, and I’m sure that they will be doing more. There will be deep dives. And I’m really glad and pleased for that. But I look at the front page of The New York Times today, I look at the front page of The Washington Post today, and there is nothing that spells this story out and its importance. And I feel that is a sort of — there’s this — it’s a lack of an understanding, it feels to me, of what journalism and news media should be about in an element of moral leadership in very, very troubled times.
And, you know, in the middle of this story last week, we saw this absolutely devastating and disgusting, frankly, sacking of 300 journalists at The Washington Post. And as much as that — you know, it’s another devastating blow against the press in the U.S. And for that to happen, I felt, in the middle of this particular news cycle is — you know, it’s devastating in itself; it’s also a symbol of what is happening.
And, you know, I say this as a foreigner sitting in London, and I know it’s very different for people, for U.S. citizens inside the country, but what is happening to your country is so alarming, but yet it is being normalized by its treatment in the — across the media. And I think that, you know, it’s why independent outlets like yourself and, you know, as we can see across the ecosystem, these new insurgent outlets, of which the thing that I’ve set up in the U.K., The Nerve, is part of, are increasingly important, because we’re not massive corporate entities with massive corporate interests who can, I think, be sat on or intimidated by power in the same way. And so, yeah, I find it extraordinary that the press is so cowed in this moment.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Thank you so much, Carole, Carole Cadwalladr, award-winning investigative journalist whose Substack is How to Survive the Broligarchy. She gained international recognition for her exposé on the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal in 2018. Her most recent piece is headlined “We all live in Jeffrey Epstein’s world.” She’s also the co-founder of an independent news outlet called The Nerve, launched with five other former Guardian journalists.
Coming up, we’ll speak to Democratic Congressmember Joaquin Castro and a ProPublica reporter who managed to get inside a detention center in Dilley, Texas, to talk with children being held there. We’ll be back in a minute. Stay with us.