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I hesitate to post this one, but I'm doing so because it hits a near-perfect intersection of the hobby horses of something like 70% of the regular posters here. It turns out that Dario Amodei's wife is in the Epstein files, after his public conviction for sex offenses.
There's a lot to unpack here.
First, Epstein really was balls-deep in AI research. Marvin Minsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Joscha Bach was in direct communication with Epstein. Elon Musk was in direct communication with Epstein. Eliezar Yudkowsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Noam Chomsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Overall, Epstein's emails are a who's-who of AI research. Prior to this, Amodei had no known links to Epstein, and now he has one at one remove.
While the headline story is salacious and amusing (and probably a targeted hit job on Amodei), I wand to use it as a springboard for a few other topics.
A brief, non-rigorous analysis of the files suggests that AI researchers are over represented in the files after 2011, both in frequency and in message length. A charitable person could argue that it's because the average AI researcher didn't know that Epstein was a convicted sex offender after his public trial and conviction in 2011, but I don't buy that. I was a dumb 20-something in 2011 and I knew about it. It was in the newspapers. It was on the news on the TVs at the gym. These people are allegedly smarter and more plugged-in than I am. Most of them were involved in fundraising that, if done competently, involved a due diligence component. So either they were incompetent, or chose to interact with the publicly convicted sex offender anyway.
I think it's the latter. The AI research community is deeply entwined with both rationalism and Effective Altruism, and the latter is a rehash of utilitarianism with a peculiar utility function. Artificial super intelligence, if correctly formed, presents infinite utility. If that is true, then literally anything can be justified if it moves the future toward that end.
Over the last few decades, utilitarianism really seems to have taken over popular discussions of ethics. Sometimes I wonder if that doesn't represent a failure of ethics in itself. As far as ethical systems go, Utilitarianism is easy to hack. Ignoring second order effects, choosing peculiar utility functions, using unrealistic time scales - it's all wrapped up together.
Moving on from that, I'd always known that bay area tech is pretty incestuous, but I don't think I'd realized how small, insular, and weird it was until recently. Clark having a personal relationship with Eric Schmidt and parlaying that into funding later was a surprise. Is that just how SF business gets done out there?
Overall, I'm not sure what to think about this. It feels like a targeted hit piece. I'm a cynical man, and my gut feeling is that it's a shot at pulling Amodei out of the big chair at Anthropic. I have no proof of that, but the timing relative to their alleged IPO is interesting, and coincidences are hard to believe when the players are all so tightly coupled as they are in the AI industry. If it is true, though, it makes me wonder who could be involved.
I really don't think this is true. In fact, you don't even remember the year correctly. It did have some news coverage but not much and basically nobody cared. The story started to pick up steam with the weird-online-right years later with pizzagate, it became a mainstream right wing talking point during biden but mainstream media continued to mostly avoid it until last year.
Even on google trends you can see that few were interested before he died. Bill Gates for reference.
It's very possible that for those people Epstein was just this guy with access to money that knew everyone. He had served a sentence but he was fully discharged and it was for getting a massage from a girl he might or might not have known to be underage, so whatever.
Ethics its one of the most bullshit branches of philosophy. All ethics needs to conform to your gut feeling of what is right and wrong and since that's not based on any a priori simple rule system they all need to be malleable enough to be made to conform. Outside of completely irrelevant thought experiments they also all end up being homomorph. How about we pretend they were christian? It says in the book of virtues that rape is bad but you also have to forgive, he paid penance, he shows contrition, Mary Magdalene and shit. There you go.
At the end of the day many evangelicals vote for an adulterer who grabs em by the pussy, why? Because there are other considerations, more important things. Ethics needs to be flexible, to bend which ever way. This is a good thing actually. The worst people in the world were the ones that took ethics seriously enough to suppress their gut instinct.
This seems most plausible. However...
I CARED.
I was in high school circa 2007, and I only really had an awareness of it because it happened right near my hometown so it was more featured in local newspapers, which I read voraciously at that age. And I mean the actual, physical paper.
And even then the coverage was rudimentary in terms of explaining what was happening. Dude was allegedly soliciting, possibly banging 16 year olds. In that neck of the woods, occasionally a socialite goes down for that.
So the story about some relatively mysterious, wealthy guy doing pervy old guy stuff wasn't the talk of the town. But me, reading virtually ALL the news about it... noticed the strange circumstances surrounding the situation, including the extremely light-handed sentencing and the odd level of privileges the guy was getting. By 2010, the guy was holding secret meetings at Harvard WHILE ON PROBATION.
And then weird dots that nobody ever actually put together but there was enough out there to put my spidey sense tingling in 2006-2008:
https://archive.is/CATIy
https://web.archive.org/web/20110616194257/http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2006/08/14/m1a_EPSTEIN_0814.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20120514032017/http://www.page2live.com/2007/09/12/lewinsky-prosecutor-joins-defense-of-clinton-crony/
https://web.archive.org/web/20080209131505/http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2008/02/06/0206EPSTEIN.html
Note how almost all of those are under the "local news" category.
The "Original" Epstein list was A journal with the names of the girls he predated that turned up after sentencing.
From a 2006 article:
All of this was open and known in 2006. It wasn't like he died in 2019 and suddenly all his connections to celebs came out. At literally NO POINT during any of this did the man himself ever make any public appearance or plea or otherwise attempt to preserve his reputation IT WAS LIKE HE DID NOT CARE if people thought he was a sexual predator. And as you can see from OP's post, apparently many a prominent person did NOT care... assuming they knew. Google was a thing and fairly popular at the time.
Compare that to the New York Times Article when he got sentenced, and how it skimps on details that were more prominent in the local stories.
Look, I read a lot of mystery books in my youth, lot of Sherlock Holmes, Hardy Boys... Scooby Doo. I could sense there was a lot to this story and also that someone(s) were very interested in keeping it tamped down. On the superficial level this fits a "rich guy escapes legal consequences" narrative alright, but there's a lot of missing pieces or pieces that do not fit. Then 10 years later he dies, Covid happens, Pizzagate, many events occur in rapid succession, oh and Ghislaine Maxwell is found hiding out in New Hampshire with armed, private security and yet still, nobody was able to effectively put together the full picture of exactly WHAT this guy's deal was, and who kept the lid on it. Not even me. Its a question I plan to ask God about should I arrive at the Pearly Gates, even if I'm denied entry I REALLY WANT TO KNOW. And if I'm denied I hopefully can go and ask the guy personally.
In my country, a guy raped 4 girls and sexually violated 1, and his sentence was a 9 month home detention. The guy went on to commit MORE sexual assaults against underage girls just hours after his bail. And this is not a billionaire heir or some politician's son. It's not unusual for serious offences to be sentenced lightly due to messy legal technicalities.
Regarding Epstein, Michael Tracey has multiple write ups on what the investigation was really about, and why prosecutors reached the NPA. Basically, the case carried real evidentiary and legal risks, including problems with victim credibility, the difficulty of proving the newer “trafficking” elements, and the lead detective’s own later testimony that much of the conduct did not meet his definition of prostitution or coercion. In that context, securing a state guilty plea, registration as a sex offender, and a jail term (however work-release-heavy) was not an inexplicable gift. It was a negotiated outcome in a messy, winnable-but-risky case involving a wealthy defendant with top counsel.
Well, there you go. Most real life villains are a lot less smart, calculating and I suppose, more boring than Professor Moriarty. Perhaps it's narrative attractive to treat gaps, coincidences, and preferential treatment as deliberate clues pointing to a hidden master plan. Real life problems are more mundane and ironically more frustrating. Uneven institutional responses, weak or compromised witnesses, and later narrative inflation that rearranges the same facts into something tighter and more cinematic than they ever were.
In Florida, it is, if you're as dead to rights as Epstein looked. We're one of the few state that still executes people with regularity. We recently expanded the death penalty to certain sex crimes against children. This ABSOLUTELY would have included Epstein's charges back in the day.
"Funny" coincidence, in Palm Beach County (i.e. where all this Epstein Drama unfolded) they JUST TODAY arrested the County Clerk of Courts himself for child sexual abuse. I do NOT expect this guy to get off easy despite his prominence and connections.
Happy to place bets on or at least follow up on that outcome.
There's even another high profile case involving an obscenely wealthy defendant that happened sort of around the time the Epstein legal drama unfolded where they happily prosecuted him and secured a conviction despite many legal shenanigans and pulling in elite legal counsel. I also followed that one closely back in the day. His ass is still in prison, although he's getting released in the not-too-distant future. Hmmm.
I posit that even with a 'weak' case, not even getting to the case teed up for trial is pretty odd for Florida, and VERY odd to give him a deal that, in effect, FULLY ACCOMMODATED his ability to keep doing whatever he did to make money.
They also create the exact conditions that would allow a moderately competent, highly connected conspiracy to delay detection and disruption. Just sayin'.
However I don't think the 'real story' is going to be all that cinematic, honestly. I do think money that flowed through him was probably used for some 'interesting' stuff, but his role in it all might be comparatively mundane.
He has no relevant connections, it's 20 years later, and it's a different crime. This guy molested a little kid. All his connections are local and are generally the type of people to drop a connection once the other person has been arrested for child molestation. Epstein had massages with teenagers, and naturally his rich friends did not care.
He's been in prison for 14 years for a car accident. I don't think he'll do it again. Anyway the difference here is that Epstein's investigation went on for a long time because the case was complex and relied on many witnesses. During this time he hired private investigators to discredit the witnesses, and many witnesses recanted or changed their stories. He also had plenty of time to privately investigate the officials investigating him. Despite this, and knowing that a jury trial would be difficult because their evidence was terrible, the government still did not drop the charges. Ultimately, he spent more than enough time in prison for his crimes and stopped doing them afterwards. Regardless, the government lied to him and just 10 years after getting out of prison, reopened the case wherein he killed himself because he knew they would give him life in prison as revenge. Ghislaine Maxwell is sitting in prison for essentially the rest of her life right now for chauffeuring a few girls from point A to point B for Epstein.
Well, it was also MASSIVE in terms of the apparent number of victims and the guy was intentionally elusive. It is entirely possible, though unlikely, that I was personally acquainted with some of the girls involved. They had to scout out when his plane was at the airport and they had the trash pickup company turning over his garbage to the cops as part of the process.
The sheer number of charges they could in theory have brought should have given an appreciable chance of at least a few of them sticking. The federal indictment had like 60.
Point of fact, he never went to prison until 2019, which is part of the oddity here.
From the wiki:
It is really not clear why, in addition to the plea being lenient, he was functionally able to dictate terms to the point his life was minimally interrupted. I know of no precedent to this.
So from my perspective "I notice that I am confused." Whatever secretive talks happened to get to this point (and the fact that they're secretive isn't odd, all plea bargain discussions are kept completely secret) somehow he got virtually everything he could possibly have wanted whilst still technically eating a 'punishment.' I have to imagine the leverage on his side was substantial, far and beyond the prosecution merely having a 'weak' case.
I mean, my opinion is that prosecutors don't like going to trial as a general rule, but they are also accustomed to wielding punishments as a bludgeon to get the defendant to back down.
Or maybe he gave them a full on Saul Goodman speech and rolled Nat 20 on persuasion?
And now we have a comparable case with Diddy, too. They stuck him on two minor counts and gave him 4.5 years. Harvey Weinstein caught 16 years. R. Kelly finally went down for 30. Is that because we're now living in the post #metoo era that enforcement has ramped up, and that's why Epstein got picked up the second time?
Fair tactic in the United States in 2026. It's possible in 2007 that the look of tyranny would have been too embarrassing, so they did not go with the Soviet path of just charging him with every crime they can think of and making him defend himself on 70 counts at a trial where the judge has been picked to gag his attorneys and forbid him from using exculpatory evidence and lines of defense, as is extremely common now.
In his interview with Steve Bannon he discusses how his life was in fact more than minimally interrupted. He was in fact incarcerated and was not allowed to work or take calls. For example, he was inside during the crash of 2008 and could not participate save through a couple of standard collection-calls from the jail. It is not unclear why he was housed in the jail -- he secured it as a part of his plee. It is in fact common and not unprecedented for people who are going to do time who are negotiating to request where they do time. Facilities differ a lot and typically if someone is taking a plea deal for a specific amount of time for a crime that can receive minimal security imprisonment, they in fact try to secure placement at such a facility. Epstein's reason for this was multi-faceted. First off, the good-old idea that sex offenders get killed in jail. Not exactly true in all cases, but every stereotype is based on something. Second, that myth is aggravated in Epstein's case: everyone would have known what he was in for. He was infamous. Third, which he discusses in the interview, his money. He was going to be a target for his money. At the jail he was always asked for money, intimidated for money. Everyone knew he was rich. That is why he worked to secure imprisonment where he did. Why should the government insist on him serving time specifically in state prison? So he can receive more than the agreed-to sentence in the form of beatings, being shived, etc?
You should read this report on the original case and the plea deal.
Especially when in a time and place that values liberty and due process significantly more than now, while also facing an excellent defense team, prosecutors must offer a plea deal that is worth taking. It is not legal for them to tell the judge what to sentence. It is not legal for them to intimidate someone out of their right to a trial. In fact that violates a federal law called conspiracy against rights and it is a felony that is suppose to have a sentence of up to 10 years in federal prison. Many prosecutors and judges may be guilty of this crime today, but in 2008 I'm guessing it was less.
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