Brad Karp may not be a household name, but the powerful, longtime chair of the white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison (known as Paul, Weiss) made headlines last year when he capitulated to demands from the Trump administration without putting up a fight. Paul, Weiss was one of several major law firms targeted by Trump as part of his larger campaign against his perceived political enemies, but it was the first to cave—agreeing to spend $40 million on pro-Trump legal causes, eliminate diversity hiring initiatives, and (although not explicit, it’s reasonable to assume) stop providing legal counsel in opposition to Trump’s agenda and allies.
Karp and Paul, Weiss received significant blowback from the legal community for their bald-faced surrender to Trump. The story seemed to end there—until newly released Epstein files exposed the extent of Karp’s close connections to the notorious sex trafficker. Now observers are left questioning whether Karp’s capitulation might have been a quid pro quo designed to prevent his involvement with Epstein from surfacing. With damning allegations piling up, Karp resigned as chairman of the firm, but remains one of its partners—a decidedly soft landing designed to give the appearance of accountability while allowing all involved to escape real justice. Karp isn’t the first high-profile power player to be exposed by the Epstein revelations and he won’t be the last.
That got us thinking about how extreme wealth is often interchangeable with extreme power—the kind of power that can allow very bad people to do very bad things and get away with it for a very long time.
Most of the reporting around the Epstein files has centered on the salacious and horrific allegations against members of Epstein’s elite inner circle contained in the troves of documents. Yet, there has been little public discussion about what the files reveal about how our “Second Gilded Age,” with its unprecedented concentration of wealth, not only shields perpetrators from accountability but makes their crimes possible in the first place.
For this week’s Closer Look, we won’t recount all of those allegations—you can read up on them yourself—but instead explore the ways the ultra-rich have built a mutually reinforcing system that protects their reputations, rewards complicity with additional wealth, and creates a desperate underclass ripe for exploitation. We’ll close by offering broader reflections on what can be done to rein in the Epstein class, and how we can fix the entire system that enabled bad actors like them to begin with.
What the Epstein Files Tell Us About the Ultra-Rich
While every cross section of humanity has its share of bad actors, the nature of extreme wealth—not the top 1% or even the top 0.1%, think more like the group that refers to themselves as “the four comma club”—creates strong incentives for those bad actors to indulge their very worst vices because they have the means to both pay for illicit goods and experiences and to evade punishment. They also face the ennui and pathologizing effects that come with having more money than one could ever spend on superyachts, private jets, mega-mansions, rare wines, or luxury meals in a hundred lifetimes.
For every bored oligarch and ambitious wannabe, there is a fixer, the man or woman who can make their problems go away or satisfy their direst needs in exchange for money, gossip, proprietary information, access, and power. For hundreds of elites in the United States and around the globe, Jeffrey Epstein became that man. A New York Times investigation published days before the first release of the Epstein files in December revealed how the college dropout-turned-failed teacher used his connections throughout the 1970s and ‘80s to charm his way onto Wall Street, build a roster of high-profile clients and social connections, avoid legal consequences even when he was caught embezzling, and position himself as the Rasputin to an increasingly powerful and wealthy circle of people.
Epstein’s “genius” wasn’t in math or financial markets, but in recognizing how to capitalize on the ways that the ultra-rich help each other maintain and grow their fortunes and insulate themselves from negative consequences. Beyond merely socializing, they give each other advice on how to grow their stock portfolios. They give each other consulting jobs at their various companies. They even help each other’s kids stay on the higher rungs of the socioeconomic ladder by, for example, creating special internships for them to jumpstart their careers.
All of that interconnected favor-swapping, while arguably a routine part of human life, took on a sinister undertone in Epstein’s world. It convinced countless individuals to turn a blind eye—at best—to Epstein’s human trafficking abuses (and at worst, of course, to facilitate and engage in them) in the hopes of, say, getting a son a job on the new Woody Allen flick—as Karp asked Epstein to help him with in 2016—or getting Allen’s daughter into college.
Long after Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida and registered as a sex offender, his network of ultra-rich power players only grew. He could have spent decades in prison for the crime, but instead reached a sweetheart plea deal with prosecutors and spent just 13 months in a local jail, where he was actually allowed to leave during the day to work from home.
President Trump is reportedly mentioned in the Epstein files over a million times, with accusations levied against him of rape, assault, blackmail, gross sexual misconduct, and more. Last summer, the FBI went so far as to compile a summary of tips that they had received from members of the public involving Epstein and Trump.
And yet, just as we said a few weeks ago, Trump and other Epstein associates inside the Trump administration have managed to avoid consequences—so far. At every turn, Trump has used his power and resources to put his allies and Epstein’s enablers in top positions to squash investigations and help his wealthy friends essentially live above the law. You need only look at Trump’s pardon rap sheet to understand this. And the fact that Trump has also not explicitly ruled out pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator—currently serving in a minimum security prison, in violation of the law—should speak for itself.
Even when the ultra-rich can’t manage to escape (light) justice, the Epstein files reveal how they actively help each other to salvage their reputations. Many prominent figures like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York, denied having a relationship with Epstein after he was indicted in 2008. The files not only revealed that to be untrue, but also showed that many of those same people actively tried to help Epstein regain his standing with the public.
In 2011, Sarah Ferguson asked Epstein how he would like her to respond when asked about their relationship on the Oprah Winfrey show. In 2013, British billionaire Richard Branson suggested to Epstein that Bill Gates could vouch for his character to rebuild his image. And Brad Karp himself offered a reassuring legal opinion to Epstein on one of his sexual abuse cases in 2019, despite the fact that Epstein was not a Paul, Weiss client. It beggars belief to suggest that people like Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Elon Musk, Steven Tisch, and others were unaware of what Epstein was doing and orchestrating.
How Extreme Wealth Concentration Ensures a Steady Supply of Victims
As we’ve described, extreme wealth drives demand for child sexual exploitation, but its twin force—poverty and a lack of social investment—provides the supply. This is certainly true of human trafficking globally, but it’s also a homegrown phenomenon in the United States where stagnant wages, regressive taxation, and underfunded/nonexistent social services make children vulnerable to exploitation. Last year, The New York Times reported on a different scandal involving sex with children and a different high-profile politician: former GOP Congressman Matt Gaetz who engaged in the statutory rape of a homeless high school junior saving up to get braces. As the Times noted, “In some cases, the girls or women are physically trapped and unable to escape men who are taking advantage of them. In other cases, the girls or women find themselves at the whims of more powerful men after turning to sex trafficking out of economic need.”
When we look at how extreme wealth is generated—union busting, wage theft, wage suppression, anti-competitive and monopolistic market control, price collusion, regressive tax systems that reward income from wealth over income from work and often fail to tax real economic income at all, inequitable tax enforcement—it becomes clear how deeply intertwined extreme wealth is with Epstein-style abuses. Wealth-hoarding at the very tippy top creates the perfect storm, ensuring a steady stream of economically desperate children are matched to men who can abuse them without consequence.
Conclusion
Perhaps more poignantly than anything else has in the modern era, the Epstein files reveal how extreme concentrations of wealth pose an urgent and dire threat to law and order, justice under the law, and the social trust in the law necessary for a functional society. When the ultra-rich have hoarded so much wealth in the hands of so very few, the public can have little faith in the system to protect them from harm.
This elite circle of abuse is another manifestation of the problem we’re trying to address—the extreme concentration of wealth and power that is destroying our society. Wealth becomes power, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. When people’s wealth extends far past whatever it can buy them, they seek other things that require power to obtain, or escape punishment for obtaining. Do you remember what Patriotic Millionaire Abigail Disney said In October? She spoke to the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund about the ways in which extreme wealth dampens your ability to feel empathy while increasing your sense of entitlement and superiority over others. The revelations surrounding Jeffrey Epstein and his associates support her assertion. Morals and ethics were and continue to be playthings to them. Lying, scheming, cheating, trafficking and abusing minors, and more are all fair game, especially as they know they will likely never face any consequences for their actions.
In the end, the same poor policy choices of our leaders that allowed wealth to concentrate at the top and destabilize our democracy also opened the door for Jeffrey Epstein and a pack of ultra-rich, powerful men to prey on young girls. Their extreme wealth allowed them to abuse children and get away with it, and Epstein and his friends used their extreme wealth to reinforce a political system that creates a whole lot of vulnerable, destitute victims they can exploit.
The public outcry over the Epstein files has been unprecedented. Many figures named in the files have been shunned and ousted from their positions. But social shaming is not enough when it comes to holding the ultra-rich and powerful accountable for their actions and the harm they’ve allegedly caused thousands of women and children. Simply naming them will not change the economic or legal systems that enabled them in the first place. We need to reform our tax and wage systems to ensure that people can’t become as wealthy as Epstein, Trump, and their billionaire friends, who then use their social connections to entrench their wealth for generations and escape justice.
There is nothing wrong with maintaining social connections. It is one of the most essential parts of being a human. But there is something wrong with a small set of extraordinarily wealthy people using their social connections to rig our economy and legal system in their favor to exploit vulnerable people. If we commit ourselves to taxing the rich, paying the people, and spreading the power, we can get ourselves on a course to stop them.