Cozy bedfellows: The New York Times and Jeffrey Epstein

Saturday 1/31/26

I'm going to say it was very obvious to just about everyone with a portion and/or remnant of a brain back in 2017--and way before that--that Jeffrey Epstein was one evil guy. It was, after all, in 2008 that he went to prison for procuring a child for prostitution. Procuring a child for prostitution. Should I say it a third time? Procuring a child for prostitution.

Most people in publishing are evil. It takes me aback how naive people in general are when it comes to how things work the way they do and why they do. It's never merit. Unless we're talking sports, where the playing field is necessarily level, but nowhere else. And nowhere less than in publishing.

No one wins awards, gets that book deal, is hyped, any of it, because of their ability and the quality of what they produced. It just doesn't work that way. At any level of publishing. The level of the Pulitzer--soon we'll talk about latest fiction winner, Percival Everett, both his writing and the person he is--or the level of a short-short in the Indiana Review.

Here's something from the Epstein files that should be of no surprise whatsoever, but probably is to people who don't know how this works. It's an email from someone at The New York Times to Jeffrey Epstein, in 2017 (in other words, when it had been known for eleven years, that at the very least, Jeffrey Epstein procured children for prostitution), about the The New York Times Magazine's food issue, with its theme of The Art of the Dinner Party. Art, mind you. What important literature we have here. What compelling nonfiction. What substance. What value. Some great writers doing great things. Clearly this takes brilliance. It isn't just something written by hooked up people of the incestuous publishing system for an audience, as such, of performative post-humans with more money than taste, brains, or a clue as to what's important (or worth spending a second of your life on) and what is utterly superfluous. Did the bigot that is New York Times Magazine editor Willy Staley have a hand in this? Probably. After all, he commissioned that brilliant New York Times Magazine feature--or, rather, hooked up someone just like him--about gum chewing and why chewing gum--the actual chewing of gum--is such an important, life-changing activity/pursuit.

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00709454.pdf

A New York Times editor sent that above email to Epstein. (And isn't it just the additional creepy cherry on the creepiest of sundaes that Epstein had the word "vacation" in his gmail address? The thing about broad-faced evil is that as plain as it is, there are still devils getting off in the details to freeze your blood, if you're someone on whom details aren't lost, rare though such a person now is in our society.)

Think about that. It's like seeking approval from a pedophile, who you knew was a pedophile, who everyone knew was a pedophile, and a rapist, a seller of children into prostitution, and so much more that's just vile, evil...more than vile and evil, isn't it? Wanting to keep him in the loop. On account that he was deemed by a typical New York Times editor--because most of these people in publishing are exactly alike--important. Someone whose favor should be courted. Someone to please. To treat as a VIP. A guy who doesn't even work there or do work for the paper, but rather because he was Jeffrey Epstein, and evil people tend not to have any problem with other evil people, and in this case, as in many, will look to please them.

You'll see good buddy Lorin Stein in those Epstein files, too, and referred to as a good buddy. That's the actual language. "My buddy Lorin Stein."

Basically, everyone is filthy. Filthier than dirt. Than a pig in a monsoon. It's whether they've managed to hide it or not.

You need to be friends with these people of publishing, you need to be like them, you need to be one of them, in order for them to let you pass, to advance you, move you up, commend you, hype you, feature you, promote you, publish you, grant you, position you, award you, get that village working on your behalf (because that's what it takes: the village), include you. Otherwise, they are indifferent to you or against you. The greater and more legitimate (given how illegitimate most of these people are) they perceive you to be, the more they'll be against you. The tighter the arms of the circle of incestuous evil will be locked.

Allison Wright, publisher and executive editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, once joked to me about Lorin Stein and how she knew and everyone knew what he was up to, ha ha ha ha. Like this was funny. Ha ha ha ha ha. She positively hated me. Because I was the opposite of her, in terms of ability and character. That's how it works here. But Stein doing what he did? She acted like that was his divine right as one of the members of the royalty. Ha ha ha, it's just Lorin bein' Lorin ha ha ha ha. Which is quite the attitude for a woman, considering. But that's less of a woman and more of a ghoul.

(Speaking of Trump-adjacent things and the VQR so you can get an idea of how proximate all of this is: The VQR's former publisher, Jon Parrish Peede, someone I know very well and about whom we'll talk later, was appointed by Donald Trump as the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities; the people at the VQR who are above Wright now, Paul Reyes and Siva Vaidhyanathan, are even bigger shit bags than Peede; we'll do both of them up right in these pages; and the person before Peede, Ted "Don't Call Me Killer" Genoways, bullied his managing editor who went down to the old water tower and blew his brains out; and wait until you learn how Genoways, after he left the VQR, told departing VQR editor Ralph Eubanks how he, Eubanks, could get the VQR to pay him severance after his contract wasn't renewed by basically saying to Eubanks, "They think I got someone to kill themselves back when I worked there, and they paid me severance, and you're a Black guy, so say that to them and play that race card and they'll have to pay you"; but this will all keep.)

And Lorin, if you're reading this--or you, Sadie Stein, wife of Lorin Stein/current New York Times Book Review editor (who we also find in the Epstein files), with your big hand in everything: I know you don't have fiction slots at The Paris Review or book deals at FSG to trade for sex as in the days of yore, but try not to commit any sexual crimes today and then just keep building up that streak. You can do it, big man.