Some things changed. While surprisingly few others dropped him, the Clinton’s did, an irony of the present tabloid interest in Epstein’s old address book with its many Clinton contacts. And his sex offender status has transformed him from libertine playboy to sex offender in tabloid parlance. While he has regularly entertained PR proposals aimed at his public rehabilitation, until Friends prodded him, and until this recent renewed tabloid fever, Epstein had concluded that he was perfectly satisfied living behind high walls and in his own exclusive club. Even the recent Dershowitz-Prince Andrew chapter seems like a parallel disturbance rather than something that 1s actually affecting him. His friends are as loyal as one could only hope for . In speaking to quite a few, without exception they stand behind their trust and like a christain chorus, all say , if you only knew the real story. but Jeffrey has not made any public statements But true or not, the story has taken on a life of its own, with the US and British tabloid press continuing, so far unsuccessfully, to search for a smoking gun connecting Clinton to underage girls, which could have—many obviously hope—the effect of derailing the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. It is a curious attribute of his character that, other than perhaps being more circumspect about what legal advice to follow, Epstein would have done little differently. (When I suggested recently to Epstein that one obvious way to blunt the animus bearing down on him would be to get married, he said he’d rather go back to jail.) His life, living it as he wants, seems to him to be an extraordinary accomplishment. Being on the wrong side of a groups morality, custom, politics, the media, that’s just a bit of bad luck. And it is perhaps this attitude of his that irks his critics the most. Although he has spent more than a year in jail and paid out what may be as much as $20 million, he yet seems somehow to have not been damaged as they would pr