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In the Review’s March 26 issue, Anne Enright descends into the Epstein archives and, hoping to “capture the feeling of normalized perversion that I sense in his demotic, automated ‘Sorry for all the typos’ tone,” she decides “to spend one day with him, to look at twenty-four hours of his correspondence, and then go offline.”

So Enright scrolls through Epstein’s emails from Tuesday, July 19, 2011, beginning at midnight, when he was at his mansion in New York City writing furiously to contractors at work on his island house, and ending twenty-four hours later at the island house, where he is emailing his staff back in New York about installing a stair runner. In between, Epstein seems never to sleep, instead spending his time writing emails to staff, bankers, friends and family, Ghislaine Maxwell, Soon-Yi Previn, and more. Much of the correspondence is “oddly dull,” although “even the most banal of Epstein’s communications…contain the whole story”: “These bantering, randomly selected emails seem to show that Epstein wasn’t depraved, corrupt, or dodgy some of the time. He was depraved, corrupt, and proud of it all day long.”

Below, alongside Enright’s essay, are five articles from our archives about Epstein, oligarchy, and the depraved lives of the powerful.

Anne Enright
‘The Devil Himself’

Sifting through a single day of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails reveals a surprising amount about the man and his many enablers.

Fintan O’Toole
‘A Guy Who Never Dies’

For Trump, the great problem of the Jeffrey Epstein story is that it is the point at which paranoid fantasy melds into grotesque reality.

—August 12, 2025

Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Mogul of Mystery

“In March 1991 Robert Maxwell arrived in New York aboard his yacht, Lady Ghislaine, named after the daughter he had once neglected and bullied but who had become his loyal helpmate and accompanied him on this trip. He was there to pull off what he presented as his greatest coup yet by buying the New York Daily News. Eight months later the yacht was cruising off the Canary Islands with Maxwell aboard until November 5, when he disappeared. Soon afterward, his floating body was found, leaving a final riddle: Accident, suicide, or murder?”

—October 7, 2021

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Mitchell Abidor
Reading Sade in the Age of Epstein

Reading Sade in the age of #MeToo and Jeffrey Epstein is an uncanny experience, for his novels are also a blueprint for the world of the sexual predators of today.

—February 12, 2020

Tamsin Shaw
The Oligarch Threat

“From time to time, a scandal emerges that gives us a glimpse of this deeply interconnected, secretive realm of power wielded by the ultra-rich.”

—August 27, 2019

Hugh Lloyd-Jones
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

“Caligula was aware that the emperor could now exercise absolute power, and disdained the fiction that the republican constitution still existed.… There can be no doubt of his capricious cruelty.”

—December 6, 1990

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