The Trump letter makes the birthday book inherently newsworthy. But it is far from the most disturbing or lecherous of the book’s contents. A section titled “Brooklyn” includes recollections of Epstein’s horrible sexual escapades, apparently including making a maid watch people have sex and holding a knife up while telling women to take off their swimsuits on a boat—a story told in the book under the heading “Girls on My Boat.” Given what we know about Epstein’s sex crimes, including his sex crimes against minors, the birthday book is a sickening document. Over its 238 pages, Epstein’s friends, “girlfriends,” and business acquaintances offer lurid tributes to the pedophilic multimillionaire in the form of acrostic poems, drawings, and letters extolling him as “a liver, a lover” and, affectionately, the “Degenerate One.” Individual contributions vary but it is the sheer volume of sexual references and jokes that ends up being most shocking. So much so that I suggest you read the document yourself.
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Sanitizing this document would be wrong, so I’ll be blunt: The Epstein birthday book is full of contributions from wealthy and powerful people who appear fully aware of Epstein’s attraction to “girls.” In fact, they seem to celebrate it and, in some cases, allude winkingly to Epstein’s predatory lifestyle. There is, for example, a seven-page letter attributed to Nathan Myhrvold, a multimillionaire and former Microsoft executive who illustrated his thoughts with graphic photographs of wildlife sex. (Myhrvold did not respond to my request for comment but told The Wall Street Journal that “he didn’t recall the submission and that he is a wildlife photographer who ‘regularly shares photos of and writes about animal behavior.’”)
Wexner, the retail billionaire, apparently wrote a short message that said, “I wanted to get you what you want … so here it is,” and then drew a pair of breasts. Stuart Pivar, a chemist and art collector, apparently wrote a poem to Epstein, part of which declares, “Jeffrey at half a century / with credentials plenipotentiary / though up to no good / whenever he could / has avoided the penitentiary.” Pivar told me in an email that he recalled Maxwell having invited him to contribute to the book even though he and Epstein “were no longer that close.” He also described Epstein as “vastly misunderstood” and a “teenophile” rather than a “pedophile.”