Sleeping With The Fishes

“Men forget themselves too quickly, and a mercy is often the first thing revoked.” Esi Edugyan, Washington Black

Jeffrey Epstein sleeps with the fishes. It’s like something out of a Hollywood movie or an episode of the Blacklist. The accused financier commits suicide in his jail cell, despite being a suicide risk. How? How did he do it? With what? In the coming days and weeks conspiracy theories will sprout like toadstools. Wouldn’t surprise me at all if the far right media machine claims that Hillary Clinton slipped into Epstein’s cell and plunged a hypodermic needle filled with an untraceable neurotoxin (provided to her by Vladimir Putin) into his carotid artery. If Hillary could operate a pedophilia racket out of a pizza parlor, she certainly could off Jeffrey Epstein. 

Nor would it surprise me if some low-level jailer takes the fall for the failure of the “System.” Many pointed questions should be asked of the people who run the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. Maybe Donald J. Trump’s attorney, William Barr, can get on that. I’m sure Barr will do a thorough job and provide a nice whitewash of this sordid affair. Protecting powerful people is Barr’s speciality. 

Doesn’t Epstein’s demise seem awfully convenient? It’s possible that the dirt the pedophile -- treated with such deference and solicitude by Alex Acosta in Florida -- had on powerful people (even Trump), was so incendiary that the last thing these people wanted was for Epstein to testify in court. It’s also possible that Epstein knew his goose was fully cooked this time around, no way his money and connections could buy his freedom, and was determined to do himself in. Sixty-six years old, facing years in prison, with no possibility of ever again molesting or deflowering an underage girl, maybe such a future was too bleak for Epstein to contemplate.

It’s axiomatic that rich white men in America rarely get the punishment they deserve. Money, family connections, pedigree, buys leniency, second and third and fourth chances, and the benefit of the doubt. Just the natural order in a country built on the protection of private property and white privilege, where money talks and Justice takes a long, lonely walk. 

A heavy stench of rot and decay hangs over America, so thick as to be almost visible. Jeffrey Epstein sleeps with the fishes, his evil erased from this world, but not from the bodies and minds of his victims.