I Am in the Epstein File

I’m in the Epstein File.

My father always told me, “Everyone has something to hide. The miracle of mankind is that, despite that, most otherwise live decent lives.”

He knew of what he spoke. He spent much of his life working on the Dark Side. A poor kid, he rode the rails as a young teen, worked as a sideshow carney, dropped hundreds of bombs on Germany, hunted Reds in Hollywood, was a counter-intelligence interrogator in Germany at the beginning of the Cold War, and worked as a criminal investigator at NASA during the Apollo years. There was no form of human sin, depravity or guilt he hadn’t seen.

During my time as an investigative reporter exposing institutional corruption, radical criminal gangs, and even one case of treason in Silicon Valley, I spent my own brief time on the dark side.

As a result, like my father before me, I’ve done my best to see good in people – but I’m never surprised when a person’s long-hidden moral rot is exposed. So, when Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes were exposed to the public, I was only surprised by the extent of his network. That he was wealthy with a shady past, a pimp and pervert, was hardly unique. Nor was the willingness of famous and powerful people to look past his criminal record to enjoy his favors.

Even when the photos of Prince Andrew with an underage girl appeared and everyone clutched their pearls in shock, I wasn’t surprised. I just assumed that Randy Andy, like centuries of British nobles before him, was merely exercising the Royal Prerogative of sporting with young girls. How many teenage village girls were deflowered and abandoned by degenerate middle-aged rakes with titles – and then ruined? British literature is full of such stories. Kings did it too. Richard II married a 7-year-old; Catherine Howard may have been as young as 15 when she married 49-year-old Henry the Eighth, and, conveniently forgotten, Diana was 19 when she was betrothed to 31-year-old Prince Charles.

When Epstein was found hanging in his cell on Rikers Island, I wasn’t surprised. He had every reason to kill himself. But there were also a lot of powerful people who had every reason to have him murdered to keep their own secrets hidden. I wasn’t surprised to read the other day that at least forty powerful people had paid for Ghislaine Maxwell’s silence on their own behavior on Epstein’s Island, at his ranch, and at his Manhattan brownstone.

I thought then that the story might lose momentum and fade away. But it gained a second life as activists, conspiracy theorists and some elected officials gave it new life with the rise of the ‘Release all of the Epstein Files!’ movement. Much of it was driven by people increasingly frustrated by their failure to bring Donald Trump to justice – only to have the files instead expose dozens of their own leaders and cultural icons, most notably a popular ex-President and First Lady. Who can forget Epstein’s painting of the former, looking fetching, in his little blue dress? Be careful what you wish for.

Then, as more Epstein files appeared, I wasn’t surprised to see some very powerful figures I knew well. I’m not going to give you their names, but you can likely guess by the fact that I’ve covered tech for nearly a half-century. One of those named even had dinner at my house. [My sole, twice removed, connection to the whole sordid story was a long drive from London to Oxford with another Maxwell sister who tried to convince me that her and Ghislaine’s controversial father, Robert, had actually been murdered by the Mossad.]

A few days ago, when a giant new tranche of Epstein’s papers was released, I didn’t even read the news story. I had long since lost interest. I assumed the cover-ups had already been made, butts were well-covered, felonies buried, political attacks exhausted and political careers resurrected, divorces settled, the victims forever scarred and with their own terrible secrets to live past.

Then, last Saturday night, while I was in my library working on a new book, I heard a burst of laughter from my den. My two adult sons, 30 and 34, had gotten together to watch YouTube videos and play online games. I assumed they had just seen something funny.

They had. They both rushed into the library with big grins. “Dad,” announced my youngest, “You’re famous! You’re in the Epstein files.”

“That’s impossible,” I replied.

It seems my older son had followed the new documents release, decided to use the U.S government search function . . . and for fun, looked up, among other names, “Michael S. Malone.”

And there I was. It turned out to be two of my bylined articles. One was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from 2012 entitled “The Next American Boom” – it apparently had been sent from a Norwegian diplomat (!) to Epstein as an FYI; the other was a very long profile of mathematician Stephen Wolfram from my days running Forbes ASAP (maybe Epstein was searching for a new famous person to target).

The three of us had a laugh at my new notoriety – and then went back to what we were doing. But that night it struck me that being in the official government files of a notorious pedophile was a close thing to immortality. Was it now my fate, after all of my biographical information, my thousands of articles, and my score of books had faded away into oblivion, that this would be the only record of my existence? Will my descendants, researching their ancestry, type in my name...and the only entry they see will be: See the Epstein Files.