The Trump-Epstein Files: Look but Don’t Touch
When it comes to reading rooms, New Yorkers are spoiled for choice. There’s the Morgan Library’s Sherman Fairchild Reading Room (for perusing, say, a fifteenth-century Book of Hours). Or the N.Y.P.L.’s Rose Main Reading Room (fluffy clouds on a fifty-foot ceiling). And recently, if you wanted to be near three thousand four hundred and thirty-seven bound volumes of Department of Justice files pertaining to the alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, you could visit the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, in Tribeca.
“All that we ask is that you do not take any of the books off the shelves and look through them,” a receptionist informed a group the other day. The Memorial Reading Room, a temporary installation by the nonprofit Institute for Primary Facts, did not allow visitors to handle the books because D.O.J. redaction errors mean that some victims’ names are visible. (Verified victims could make an appointment and view the files in private.)
Why visit a gallery full of documents you aren’t allowed to read? Sue Bailey, a retired HBO executive with strawberry-blond hair and chunky glasses, was hoping that the physical presence of the files would help her comprehend their import. “You know how they do those illustrations? ‘A stack of a trillion dollars would reach from Earth to the moon.’ I need to see the scale,” Bailey said. She tries to modulate her Epstein fixation in conversations with friends: “I don’t want to bug people too much.” But the case seems to follow her. She described how a maître d’ had recently told her, referring to Epstein’s apparent suicide, “Oh, did you hear that the guard for his cell got paid five thousand bucks like two or three days before it happened?”
Visitors could consult a time line on a wall in the back that enumerated decades of alternately immoral and illegal behavior from Trump and Epstein: “1994: The first known victim,” “1997: Miss Teen USA dressing room,” “2003: Trump’s 50th birthday message to Epstein.” A criminal-justice student named Ariella Quashie, the child of immigrants from Trinidad, said she worried that her parents could be deported. The justice system, she said, is “a huge pool of old white men just making policies.” Of Epstein, she went on, “Reading that he was already arrested for sex trafficking, and that they let him go for sixteen hours of the day—I always feel like the government only cares when it’s too late.”
Downstairs, there were urgings to make the government care more right now: signs with the D.O.J.’s phone number and a brief script for callers demanding the release of more files. Visitors had written messages on index cards tacked to corkboards, with sentiments ranging from the quippy (“GOP—Gang of Pedophiles”) to the sincere (“It breaks my heart”). A buff, bearded man in a backward ball cap that read “trust but verify” lingered by the entrance. “The best thing about living in the U.S. is the predictability of life,” he said—withdrawing the money you deposited in the bank, picking up a rental car you reserved. The government’s failure to punish people like Epstein, he said, put that life style in jeopardy; he expected that we’d see increased black-market activity and even mobs in the streets. A C.I.O. who had once worked on campaigns for George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, the man described himself as currently being “anti-state.” “I don’t believe that a single entity basing authority on monopoly of violence is viable without a lot of harm coming with it,” he said. Could he envision a version of America that would appeal to him? “It is difficult to imagine a good state that stays a good state.”
Next to a memorial to victims, Kristy Calabro, a Staten Islander wearing a jean skirt and platform Chuck Taylors, explained why she had come: “I’m trying to have a nice day with my mom.” Her mother—an MS NOW addict named Angela—was revved up. “Since the beginning of history, men have put their thumb on women. Their pea brains can’t understand that if it wasn’t for a woman, they would not exist,” she said. “That’s the only way they can feel superior, because they certainly aren’t more intelligent, they are not more compassionate—except if you have a son. Your son is the exception.” She had more to say, but there wasn’t time; their next stop was a gluten-free pizza place in the West Village. ♦