An unpublished profile raises questions about Epstein — and journalism

I’ll let you read Wolff on Epstein, in draft form and in his collection, and content myself with writing about Wolff.

And what should producers and consumers of American media, which is already in deep disrepute, think about Wolff, our least reputable face?

By the time a reader pointed out the unpublished Wolff draft to me in the House Oversight emails, I was already working on a column about his continuing profound relevance in the age of Trump, a writer condemned by many of his peers as sloppy and amoral and yet somehow often in the room.

Wolff had already turned up in chummy Epstein emails. His name appears in the House Oversight documents 213 times, according to a database compiled by the Democratic-aligned news organization Courier. Wolff traded gossip with Epstein and offered PR advice. The Wall Street Journal described him as Epstein’s “unofficial consigliere.”

Now he believes that, if anything, too few journalists are playing his game. Why do we know so little about Epstein? Because, according to Wolff, “I’m the only person who was able to get into that house and write an up-close story.”

One of the questions about access journalism is: Have you been bought?

Wolff has a pretty good record of burning the people who somehow continue to invite him to things. His 2010 Murdoch biography infuriated the mogul and prompted a shakeup among the people who had let Wolff in. Fire and Fury was unsparing with his sometime friend Steve Bannon and others in Trump’s orbit. His more recent Trump coverage has included details the White House has denied and nobody else could confirm, and some that have become part of the historical record.

But it’s impossible to deny that in his coverage of Murdoch, of Trump’s circle, and of Epstein he captured scenes and voices that would otherwise have gone unrevealed. His methods — winning access, betraying confidences, refusing to play by commonly-accepted rules, apparently sharing drafts with subjects — also represent much of what sources and ordinary observers find repellent about journalists.

But Wolff has never shown any compunction about biting the hand that feeds him, another unpleasant journalistic qualification. There’s no reason to think, given his record, that he wouldn’t have burned Epstein once he’d filled his notebook.

The harder question the draft profile raises is how access shifts your perspective. In the draft, you get an unsettling glimpse of Epstein through Epstein’s eyes. It’s a profile that, like certain works of fiction — Donna Tartt’s Secret History did this for me — seems to make the reader complicit, nevermind the writer.

Wolff drops out of character once to wonder if he isn’t witnessing “the ultimate feminist nightmare: Men (and a few opportunistic women) continue to come to Epstein’s because — no matter their public bows to modern manners — they simply don’t care that he offends every aspect of reconstructed gender and political sensibilities. In private, it remains a man’s world — a rich man’s world.”

Wolff concludes the 2014 profile like this: “Anyway, I hope I get invited back to Jeffrey’s house soon.”

Wolff is not an idiot, and he’s been taking this sort of criticism, and having this sort of argument, since before I had a byline. He of course knows he played a morally ambiguous role in exchange for access.

For that, he got a first-person view, and hours of tape, of one of our century’s big monsters.

“How do you get inside with these people?” he asked me. “There’s not a lot of mystery: You suck up — and then you spit out!”