Epstein Narratology

Not finding a credit for this widespread image. Can't reach the T-shirt company, Picturestees, that was selling it at Halloween.

Everybody loves a good Christmas ghost story, and I don't mean the Dickens of A Christmas Carol, but something a lot darker, the kind of ghost story that offers a real chill without a compensatory sweetness. This one is maybe altogerther too creepy, in fact, especially in the sense that you can easily imagine it's true, though that's unlikely. It's about that postcard that showed up in the Epstein document dump yesterday, purportedly addressed by Jeffrey Epstein shortly before his death to the notorious child molester Larry Nassar, the team doctor of the women's national gymnastics team, who assaulted the young athletes under his care for years before he was finally stopped:

Schlockmeister

Image by Mayday Productions.

As I was telling somebody with reference to the death of Jeffrey Epstein and the immediate batches of conspiracy theories arising around it, I can't stand it when real life starts resembling this schlocky kind of fiction. I'm contented to believe Epstein was ready to die and succeeded because of the ineptness and negligence of his guards, as explained by a couple of members of the fraternity on NBC:

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who resigned his post in May, wrote in a tweet that people who face charges similar to Epstein's are often at a high risk of suicide and that several defendants released on bail in cases in Maryland, where Rosenstein was formerly U.S. attorney, died of suicide.

"Stopping people from harming themselves is difficult," he said.

Jack Donson, a former longtime federal Bureau of Prisons case manager, told NBC News that suicide watch in federal lockup "usually only lasts a few days to week" due to the amount of manpower the 24-hour surveillance entails.

"It requires staff to do overtime shifts" and is "not considered a good use of resources," Donson said. 

It's one of many things they're really bad at https://t.co/D3EU6fXFpY

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 10, 2019

And I don't even care. If anybody thought they were going to silence him, it seems likely they were wrong:

Above His Pay Grade

Four Epstein victims, Twitter/Miami Herald via Women in the World.

I see Alex Acosta didn't do much reverting, during his command performance for Trump yesterday or his resignation today, to that weird little thing he'd told the Trump transition team:

“Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. (Vicki Ward via TPM)

Yesterday he said Justice Department regulations forbade him to talk about it, the Washington Examiner thinks, but I think they may be trying to hard to interpret nonsense:

“So, there has been reporting to that effect. And let me say, there’s been report to a lot of effects in this case. Not just now but over the years. And again, I would, I would hesitate to take this reporting as fact,” Acosta said.... “This was a case that was brought based on the facts,” said Acosta. “And I look at the reporting and others. I can’t address it directly because of our guidelines.”

I'm pleased to report that I instantly thought the story was bullshit: