Title: Why Epstein's Associates Looked the Other Way [MUSIC - They Might Be Giants: The Brian Lehrer Show Theme]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We've got more coverage of the war coming up, but we've decided that's not all we will do today. Right now, as the Jeffrey Epstein revelations continue to emerge, and as some people involved are clearly relieved that the war is taking that out of the main headlines, we're going to talk now to Lisa Miller, domestic correspondent for the Well section of The New York Times, who wrote what, to my eye, was a very trenchant analysis about how people rationalized their ongoing relationships with Epstein. Her article that's now two weeks old, and I've been wanting to have her on ever since it came out, is called The Price of Admission to Epstein's World: Silence. Lisa, thanks for coming on with us.

Lisa Miller: So happy to be here, Brian. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: I'm just going to jump in with an example from your article. You wrote, "At least some of Epstein's friends knew what he meant when he said 'massage'. In 2010, in an email to Boris Nikolic, then the science advisor to the Gates Foundation, Epstein said he was finishing one, a 'massage'. Nikolic responded with, 'Happy ending, I hope,' punctuating his note with a winking emoji. Epstein replied, 'I'm too impatient. Happy beginning.'" Nikolic did not respond to your request for comment, but what do you take from that exchange?

Lisa Miller: Obviously, Nikolic knew what else Epstein was up to when he said massage. Remember, at that point, I think that note was written in 2011. At that point, Epstein was already a convicted sex offender. He had already spent time in jail. He was a sex offender in New York and in Florida. His technique was to recruit girls, at that point, as young as 14, to his house for massages, and then he would force them to undress and have sex with him. Massage was his selection--

Brian Lehrer: Euphemism?

Lisa Miller: His euphemism. It was his euphemism for what he liked to do sexually. He also liked massages, and he blurred it all together, but when he said massage, it was clear that some of his friends at least knew what he was talking about.

Brian Lehrer: Here's another one from your article, and you put this all together so well with so many specifics, when in 2017, you're right, Deepak Chopra complained of a "crazy day." Epstein replied, "I'm in Florida, but would like to send two girls." Then you contrast that with Chopra in a statement earlier this month saying, "I am deeply saddened by the suffering of the victims in this case." Again, you're getting at the contradiction between how people seem to be willing to participate with him in whatever way then, or at least give a wink at what he was doing, if not more than that, and now express these deep regrets. How do you make sense of it?

Lisa Miller: That was the question that I wanted to wrestle with in this piece. I talked to a lot of social scientists about this. How do you talk to yourself? Why are you talking to yourself in this way? Why is a person allowing themselves to maintain a close relationship with somebody whom they know has had misguided, at least, and criminal, at most, past, and who is winking and nodding about sex in a way that is pretty obvious in lots of cases? The answer is he had something they wanted, in almost every case. He had money, he had power. He had access to other power.

If you wanted association with young women, you could get one, it seems. If you just wanted to be at his dinner table and meet the other people who were at his dinner table, you had to, in some sense, look away from what else was going on. Because according to accounts in the files, those young women, whom he called assistants and students, were in the room at the dinner table, on the plane traveling with him. There are accounts of young women being with him in entourage everywhere. There were assistants booking multiple rooms for him wherever he went.

When you're Epstein, among powerful people who also have assistants and advisors and the hangers-on, the ripple effects of that knowledge are very, very wide. There was this silent complicity among everybody who associated with him. I don't know, obviously, but--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, but you quote experts who have interesting theories. Dutch social psychologist Gerben van Kleef, who studied how rule breakers actually accumulate power within groups. You apply his research to Epstein as someone's willingness to violate norms to be openly transgressive, criminal, in this case, could actually become a source of status rather than a disqualification, or NYU social psychologist Tessa West, who uses the phrase "willful inaction to describe what Epstein's guests were doing." Columbia psychologist Michael Slepian, who makes the counterintuitive point that shared secrets actually make wrongdoing easier to live with, not harder. What? Can you go into that one a little bit?

Lisa Miller: Slepian studies secrets. He said that one of the things about secrets is that they work like glue. They keep the in-group in, because you're all sharing a secret that can't get out. Inside that group, it becomes-- it's like much of the term, open secret, right? Inside the group, it's an open secret, and that normalizes it for everybody. Everybody is looking away. Talking about it like Epstein has extravagant, outre tastes. He's living some kind of avant-garde dream, genius life that he himself is brave or honest enough to live. There are a lot of people who are writing to Epstein and commending him on his bravery and honesty in living the way he lives. It's like a collusion of admiration and secrecy in the in-group.

Brian Lehrer: Another example from your article, Bill Gates, who has recently called his relationship with Epstein a "big mistake," but you have this 2011 note from him, yes, from Gates about Epstein, and all it said was, "His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing, although it would not work for me." Why does a Bill Gates, why does a Deepak Chopra, world-renowned, need anything from Jeffrey Epstein, knowing what they know?

Lisa Miller: I think he gave people what they wanted. I think my theory, private theory, personal theory, is that he was good at perceiving what the powerful people in his circles wanted or needed, whether it was women or attention or money. When you look at, for example, the emails between Epstein and Larry Summers, who-- It was like Summers wanted girlfriend advice, and Epstein really indulged him in that. It made Summers feel naughty, I'm speculating. Epstein enabled that. There's a section of the piece later on where Epstein is telling his friends and associates that now that they've shared their secrets, these secrets, they have a mutual debt.

There is an undertone of threat there, like, "Now I know this stuff about you, and now you know this stuff about me, and we are now in it together." His command, his demand for secrecy, was both explicit and super implicit, but constant.

Brian Lehrer: One of the best articles I've read on the enablers and how they wound up in the positions they were in voluntarily. Questions that Lisa Miller, domestic correspondent for the Well section of The New York Times, tackled in her piece, The Price of Admission to Epstein's World: Silence. Thank you so much for sharing some of it with us.

Lisa Miller: So happy to be here. Thank you.

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