brendan halpin

So I was perusing the photos dumped by the Justice Department, and I saw two photos of a man I once worked for, Danny Hillis. (My first job out of college was at Thinking Machines Corporation, the doomed supercomputer manufacturer founded by Hillis, who knew computers, and Sheryl Handler, who knew business. Apparently neither of them was actually very good at what they did because the computers broke all the fuckin’ time and they couldn’t sell them after a while and the whole venture went belly up a few years after I left).

Anyway, I don’t know much about Danny Hillis as a human being. But here he is, fully clothed on a bed on what I assume is Epstein’s plane with a tacky faux fur spread. Hillis wears a puckish, bemused grin.

What a scamp! What boyish charm! What a piece of shit!

Now I don’t know what Danny Hillis did on Epstein’s plane any more than I know what Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Woody Allen, Chris Tucker, Alan Dershowitz, or anybody else did on his plane.

But here’s what I do know—I think we’ve gotten what’s legal and what’s moral confused in this case. Because there is no evidence that has been relased that any of Epstein’s buddies broke any laws, news sources are always careful to say things like, “the fact that these people appear in the Epstein photo dump is not evidence of wrongdoing.” But I think it’s more accurate to say “their appearance in these photos is not evidence that they broke laws.”

Because they did do wrong. Dershowitz has asserted that he got a massage from a young woman of indeterminate age but did not remove his underwear, so it’s all good. Now, again, that may be legally true, but morally? He knew something was very wrong in Epstein’s world, and rather than speaking out, he chose to participate and keep quiet about it. That may be legal, but it’s not moral.

Gates and Clinton assert that they didn’t know, which is, frankly, risible. Did you see the documentary? The pool guy on Epstein’s island knew something was extremely off—he was disgusted by what he inferred was going on and quit. If only some of the most important people in the world had half the moral courage and clarity of a guy who cleans pools in the Virgin Islands.

Epstein traveled with teenage girls and seems to have made no effort to hide their presence from his guests. Getting away with this in front of everyone seemed to be part of the thrill for him. Remember, folks—we’re not held to the “beyond a resonable doubt” standard about people we choose to hang out with. We can stop hanging with people because we have a vague, unproven sense that there’s something off about them.

Gates and Clinton did not choose to stop hanging out with Epstein. Notably, Melinda French formerly Gates absolutely knew something was hinky with this dude and was very unhappy about Bill hanging out with him. But Bill Gates—a man we’ve granted tremendous power over education and public health—chose to hang out with him anyway.

So did everybody else. And so most of these people won’t be prosecuted, can’t be prosecuted, but that doesn’t mean we can’t condemn them as terrible people. Because they are terrible, terrible people. Clinton and Gates in particular had the power to shut the whole enterprise down, to publicly say “yeah, this guy hangs out with a lot of teenage girls and it feels inappropriate and made me uncomfortable.” Or they could have, at the very least, quietly spread the word through their associates, and hangers-on and turned Epstein into a pariah. And they didn’t do it. Instead, they lent him their legitmacy.

And look—when you lend your legitimacy to a monster like Jeffrey Epstein, you don’t get it back. Dershowitz is already pretty much of a pariah, but the same thing needs to happen to all these turds. I will never have the opportunity to turn down an invitation to an event because an Epstein crony like Bill Clinton or Bill Gates or Woody Allen or Mick Jagger will be there, but other people will. And should.

We don’t need to know beyond a reasonable doubt that these men broke the law. We know that they were aware of girls being treated like things and took no action to stop it or dissociate themselves from it. That might not make them legally liable, but it makes them bad people. They should be denounced and treated as such.

(Yes, btw, I know Trump’s justice department is covering up his complicity in the entire Epstein affair, but I don’t believe any reasonable person believes that Trump is anything but an evil predator. So yes, the current info dump is meant to draw our attention to these other guys, but these other guys deserve our contempt as well.)