Never mind the pedophilia and rape, what really bothers me about Jeffery Epstein is his fancy crib, as described by journalist Vicky Ward, for Vanity Fair. It is said to be Manhattan’s largest private residence.
Inside, amid the flurry of menservants attired in sober black suits and pristine white gloves, you feel you have stumbled into someone’s private Xanadu. This is no mere rich person’s home, but a high-walled, eclectic, imperious fantasy that seems to have no boundaries. The entrance hall is decorated not with paintings but with row upon row of individually framed eyeballs; these, the owner tells people with relish, were imported from England, where they were made for injured soldiers.
Individually framed eyeballs??? Motherfucker!
Next comes a marble foyer, which does have a painting, in the manner of Jean Dubuffet … but the host coyly refuses to tell visitors who painted it. In any case, guests are like pygmies next to the nearby twice-life-size sculpture of a naked African warrior.
Okay, so, menservants wearing white gloves and a sculpture of a giant naked African? This sounds like some kind of satire, maybe an Evelyn Waugh novel making fun of Colonialists. But no, this is a real person, someone admired by the heads of industry and rulers of nations, Nobel Prize winning scientists and Harvard Professors.
Guests are invited to lunch or dinner at the town house—Epstein usually refers to the former as “tea,” since he likes to eat bite-size morsels and drink copious quantities of Earl Grey.
Earl Grey tea, for fuck sake. But wait.
Tea is served in the “leather room,” so called because of the cordovan-colored fabric on the walls. The chairs are covered in a leopard print, and on the wall hangs a huge, Oriental fantasy of a woman holding an opium pipe and caressing a snarling lionskin.
Now it sounds like a Monty Python skit or a James Bond movie. And it keeps getting better!
Upstairs…the office features a gilded desk (which Epstein tells people belonged to banker J. P. Morgan), 18th-century black lacquered Portuguese cabinets, and a nine-foot ebony Steinway “D” grand. On the desk, a paperback copy of the Marquis de Sade’s The Misfortunes of Virtue was recently spotted. Covering the floor, Epstein has explained, “is the largest Persian rug you’ll ever see in a private home—so big, it must have come from a mosque.”
What a fucking cunt!!! Isn’t this just stupefying? How could people take this cunt seriously? It’s like his whole deal is to personify decadence, in the most obvious and trite way possible. I’m surprised he didn’t insist on speaking French or flaunting a pair of pet leopards wearing diamond necklaces. His lifestyle reminds me of Huysmans’ vision of a depraved aesthete, but without the artistry or novelty.
What a waste of money Jeffrey Epstein is. The grown men who were impressed by this shit deserve to go to jail just on principle. What repulsive fuckers. I hope he was blackmailing all of them and that they are outed with all due fanfare.
While I can’t excuse Epstein’s failure in the pet leopard department, here’s a little flourish that deserves a few points for pretentiousness:
[There is] a stuffed black poodle, standing atop the grand piano. “No decorator would ever tell you to do that,” Epstein brags to visitors. “But I want people to think what it means to stuff a dog.”
Aww, that’s nice.
What do you want for Jeffrey Epstein? Don’t hold back.
