The Names in the Book

There is a moment in every father's life — a small, ordinary moment, perhaps over toast and homework, perhaps in the slow walk from a car to a schoolyard — when the country he lives in stops being an abstraction and becomes, suddenly and irrevocably, the thing his children will inherit. I have arrived at that moment more often than I would like, and never more sharply than in the slow, grinding, public revelation of what the men at the top of our republic did, knew, or refused to know about Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Because to read the names is to understand the country, and to understand the country is to be obliged, finally, to speak.

Let me speak then as a father, which is the office I cannot take off when I leave the house, and as a conservative who still believes that free men in a free market are the surest defense a republic has against tyranny — and let me say plainly: the Epstein matter is not a partisan curiosity. It is a portrait of an American oligarchy that pooled across parties, across borders, across temples and churches and trading floors, and that has now, through the slow grind of disclosure, been forced to sit for its own indictment. The names in the book are not a list of liberals or a list of conservatives, not a list of Christians or a list of Jews, not a list of Americans or a list of foreigners. They are a list of powerful men, and the children they harmed are not asking us to choose sides; they are asking us to choose them.

Consider Donald Trump, who in 2002 told New York magazine, "I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." It is a line one might think the author would, in hindsight, give a great deal to take back; it is a line that sits today, like a fingerprint on a wineglass, in the public record. Consider the bawdy fiftieth-birthday letter the Wall Street Journal reported in July 2025, bearing his signature and the outline of a naked woman, closing with the wish that every day be "another wonderful secret." Consider the Mar-a-Lago years, the parties documented in photographs, the flights, and then, around 2003 or 2004, the break — a break that, by the account of former Mar-a-Lago employees, came when an eighteen-year-old beautician returned from a house call to Epstein and reported what he had done. Consider, then, the question the country has never been allowed to ask cleanly: when did Donald Trump first understand what Jeffrey Epstein was, and what did he do once he understood?

And then, because power protects power, consider the Department of Justice in 2025. Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News in February that the client list was "sitting on my desk right now to review." Five months later, on July 7, her department issued an unsigned memo declaring that there was no client list, no credible evidence of blackmail, and that "no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted." The country was, in effect, told to go home. It would not go home. It took a 427-to-1 vote in the House and a Senate passing the bill by unanimous consent to force the Epstein Files Transparency Act onto the president's desk in November, which he signed because, as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene later put it, by that point it had become a massive political problem. Greene, who broke with the president over precisely this, has said on the record that Trump told her, of the files, "My friends will get hurt. People you know, Marjorie, people at Mar-a-Lago. They're going to get hurt." Whatever one thinks of Greene — and I have my disagreements — the sentence does its work. It names the architecture. The friends. The protection. The hurt.

And what are the names? Leslie Wexner, the founder of L Brands, who in 1991 handed Epstein power of attorney over his fortune and later accused him of misappropriating "vast sums." Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the press baron Robert Maxwell, now serving twenty years for her role in the trafficking. Prince Andrew, who settled with Virginia Giuffre in February 2022 for an undisclosed sum and a charity donation, and who acknowledged in that settlement that "Jeffrey Epstein trafficked countless young girls over many years." Bill Clinton, who flew on Epstein's jet on at least four documented occasions in 2002 and 2003. Bill Gates, whose meetings with Epstein continued, the New York Times has reported, well after Epstein's 2008 conviction. Larry Summers, former Treasury secretary, former Harvard president, whose emails with Epstein from 2013 to 2019 surfaced in the November 2025 release, who has resigned from the OpenAI board, taken leave from Harvard, and now is set to resign his professorship altogether. Joi Ito, who resigned the directorship of the MIT Media Lab in 2019 after admitting he had accepted $525,000 for the lab and $1.2 million more for his private ventures, and after his own staff confirmed that they had taken to calling Epstein "Voldemort" in the corridors. Jean-Luc Brunel, the French modeling-agency proprietor whom Epstein wired roughly a million dollars to launch MC2, found hanged in his cell at the Santé prison in Paris in February 2022. Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, who has admitted meeting Epstein dozens of times, flying on his plane, and staying in an apartment that emails between his wife and Epstein's assistant referred to as "Ehud's apartment" — and whose Israeli security detail was coordinated, building to staff, through Epstein's own people. Alan Dershowitz, named in a 2014 court filing by Giuffre — an allegation she later abandoned in a 2022 dismissal — who has denied wrongdoing.

You will notice what this list is and is not. It is bipartisan. It is transatlantic. It is multi-faith. It is what an oligarchy actually looks like in the late American republic — not a cabal of one tribe, but a guild of access, where billionaires and former heads of state and university presidents and royalty discovered, in one another, the kind of camaraderie that only the very powerful can sustain. To frame this scandal as ethnic, religious, or national is to do the cover-up's work for it: it is to permit half the room to slip out the back while the other half is fed to the mob. The cover-up has never been about one people. It has been about a class.

And the children. We should say it plainly because no one in the press conferences will: girls were trafficked. Some were fourteen, some fifteen, some sixteen. Some had names. Some are dead. Virginia Giuffre is dead. The republic owes them more than memos that conclude no further disclosure is warranted.

I am a father. I will not raise my children in a country that builds its public morality on the unspoken agreement that the rich are different. The free market I believe in is not the freedom of certain men to buy silence; it is the freedom of every citizen, including the smallest, to live without being preyed upon. The conservatism I believe in is not the conservation of a power class; it is the conservation of a covenant — that the law applies, that the strong protect the weak, and that no signature on no birthday book and no friendship at no Mar-a-Lago party and no apartment in no Manhattan high-rise stands above the simple right of a girl to grow up.

Understand what comes next, because everything turns on it. There is one sin a citizen can be forgiven, and one he cannot. It is one thing not to know — to live and work and raise a family without ever learning what was done in those townhouses and on those planes. The world is wide; the days are short; ignorance, sometimes, is the most a republic can afford its people. But to know — to have read the depositions, to have seen the photographs, to have held in your hand the flight logs and the financial records and the unsigned memo declaring that no further disclosure is warranted — to know all of that, and to do nothing, is not ignorance. It is complicity. It is the slow, deliberate signature of a country that has decided, quietly and in our name, that the children were the price of doing business. And once a parent has seen that signature, there is no unseeing it. The question is no longer what was done to those girls. The question is what we, knowing, intend to do now.

I will not sign it. Not as a father. Not as a citizen. Not as a man who still believes a republic is a thing worth keeping. Release the files. All of them. Name the names. Put the men who flew on the plane under oath, and let them answer for themselves in the light. To every parent reading this who has ever held a child and felt the terrible, ordinary weight of the future in your hands — understand that this is not somebody else's outrage. It is yours. It is mine. It is the country we are leaving them. The girls who survived are owed our fury. The ones who did not are owed our reckoning. And every powerful man who knew, and did nothing, has earned his name on the same page as Epstein's — for the record, for the children, and for the simple, unsoftened truth that ignorance is one country and consent is another, and we have lived too long, and too comfortably, in the wrong one.