A film about Jeffrey Epstein should aim to help victims, not exonerate Bill Clinton

In Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich it feels as if everyone involved with the case is still trying to do what he did — cover their tracks or disappear.

Former US president Bill Clinton. Picture: AFP

There is a moment in a new Jeffrey Epstein documentary where the billionaire’s IT guy describes a scene around the pedophile’s swimming pool. There’s a man next to one of the lounge chairs, fondling a young girl who’s taken her top off.

“They were engaged in foreplay,” drawls the IT guy, who’d come to Epstein’s private island, Pedophile Island, to fix “Jeffrey’s favourite phone”.

Jeffrey Epstein.

“He was grabbing her, and grinding against her”: he knew at that point, the IT guy says, that the man was Prince Andrew. Only later, he claims, did he realise the girl was Virginia Giuffre, a woman Andrew says he has never met.

On the face of it, it’s no revelation that he did meet her — there are already pictures of sweaty old Andrew slung over Epstein’s sad “towel girl” and sex slave.

But there’s something eerie about Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, which appeared to rave reviews on Netflix last week. Instead of providing revelations, it feels obtuse, inconclusive and slippery; as if everyone involved with the Epstein case is still trying to do what he did, which is cover their tracks or disappear.

For example: the portrayal of Bill Clinton. The show says the former US president came to the island, sure. He was seen “sitting with Epstein on the living room porch area” — here’s a snap of them doing business elsewhere. But unlike others — says Giuffre quickly, in a marvel of sharp editing — “not all the men took part” in Epstein’s vile sex games. Not everyone had massages or fooled around in front of the IT guy. There were two kinds of “friends” of Epstein, the program suggests: the kind who did stuff with the sex slaves and the kind for whom it was just business, and didn’t.

In fact it’s so keen to point out that Clinton fell into the latter category that interviewee after interviewee says they “never saw him doing anything improper”. Nothing at all happened — one woman says, for example — when Epstein took Clinton, Chris Tucker and Kevin Spacey on a trip to Africa in 2002. At which point I thought: but how is that even possible, or likely?

It is so hilarious as to be ludicrous — even if Clinton is totally innocent, Epstein totally wasn’t. Are we meant to think Clinton was so saintly Epstein would drop everything as soon as the former president walked in? You end up feeling like you know less at the end than you did at the beginning.

Ghislaine Maxwell

Then there’s the “revelatory” book that’s coming out on Tuesday. It says Clinton was having an affair with someone “in Epstein’s orbit”, but she was “well over the age of consent”, trills a source. The only reason “why (Clinton) was around Epstein” was to be with Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell!

“Reporters have been missing the point,” say the book’s authors.

But have we? An affair with Ghislaine seems unlikely, and has been vigorously denied by Clinton. Who picks Epstein as an “alibi” anyway? And are we to accept Ghislaine dropped her exciting power-playing perviness with Epstein to indulge in old-fashioned vanilla bonking with boring old Clinton? Do you even get Maxwell without Jeffrey?

It makes my heart go out to the victims, who poured out their stories once more to the Netflix director. Yet again they must have been told they’d get justice, only to end up as pathetic pawns in another big man’s game. It leaves them with zilch, victims a third time, having been abused by Epstein, the justice system and now wheeled out for what feels like a lightly politicised entertainment product, created by James Patterson, a friend of Clinton.

Prince Andrew and Virginia Roberts, now Virginia Giuffre. Picture: Shutterstock

They are obliged to go over stuff yet again without progress, while Clinton is glossed as a hapless jetsetter. Trump, by contrast, looks permanently hound-doggy and evil, and the full blame is parked at the feet of his dismal former labour secretary, Alex Acosta.

It is true that Acosta negotiated Epstein’s shamefully lenient plea deal: the laughable six days a week out of jail, the special meals, the TV room, his cell door left open. If we learnt anything from the show, it was that no one who has any power is interested in seeking real justice — not then and not now.

What’s so shocking is the truth is still easily obtainable; there’s enough evidence to prosecute everyone several times over. Scores of girls came forward; hours and hours of interviews were taped, and then there’s the footage from his properties. Where are those girls? Where are those tapes? And why do Epstein’s female “co-conspirators” continue to enjoy immunity from that same corrupt plea deal? And where, more importantly, is Maxwell? If there’s one person who must have enjoyed a sweetheart deal, it wasn’t dead Jeffrey but his Girl Friday.

The Sunday Times