Paedophile Jeffrey Epstein's victims speak out in this Netflix docuseries

A disturbing Netflix docuseries on Jeffrey Epstein lends a strong voice to the paedophile's easy victims, writes Dhruv Munjal

Jeffrey Epstein was an enigma. For many years, no one exactly knew what his line of work was, or how he had managed to amass such wealth that he could afford to buy private jets and some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Some of the articles on him, published in the early 2000s, were puff pieces, revealing scant detail and affirming what everyone already knew: that Epstein was among the rich and famous of New York, with a long list of distinguished friends that included Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump and Prince Andrew.
 

Some of those details are still sketchy, but in subsequent years one thing about Epstein has become abundantly clear: that he was, by almost all accounts, the most despicable man American society has known in a while. That is why I approached the new Netflix four-part documentary series on the disgraced and now deceased financier not in the hope of new information but with  curiosity about how the makers would amplify what’s already available on the man. And it’s safe to say that Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich does a fine job of it.

In a filmmaking sense, there’s hardly anything complicated about this: just one disturbing story after another, retold by Epstein’s victims in harrowing detail. They recall how they were first convinced by a friend or an acquaintance to go over to an old man’s house in Palm Beach (Florida) to give him a “massage”. Most of them were just middle-schoolers who were promised a few hundred bucks for their “services”.

 

Michelle Licata, one of the victims, describes she was only 14 and still in braces when she was first invited to Epstein’s mansion, where the billionaire greeted her in a towel and asked her to massage his back. Licata was paid $200 that night, an experience so traumatic that it changed her forever, she reveals. Another victim, Courtney Wild, confesses she provided Epstein with 40 to 60 new girls over the course of three years, earning $200 each time, money she badly needed since her mother was battling addiction and she herself had been temporarily homeless. Shawna Rivera wound up with Epstein for similar reasons: she’d been a runway for two years, her mother was a heavy drug user, and she had seen her father and his girlfriend beat the latter’s son to death in front of her eyes.

Preying on desperate young girls was a pattern with Epstein. An adolescent psychiatrist explains how paedophiles like Epstein have an eye for the vulnerable. Most of Epstein’s victims came from the less privileged side of Palm Beach, otherwise a playground for the uber-rich, and often belonged to troubled families facing financial hardships. Nonetheless, the testimonies make for grim and painful viewing; tales of scarred childhoods and conscience-stricken adult lives.
 

Director Lisa Bryant’s access in terms of victim interviews is terrific, but it is a little baffling to see only one among the presumably hundreds of people Epstein employed at his residences featured in the documentary. Equally conspicuous is the absence of some high-profile women in the Epstein orbit who were known to provide girls to him. But more than anything else, even as the likes of Clinton, Trump and Andrew are given decent screen time, there is little that probes their possible complicity in Epstein’s heinous crimes. How much did they know? Will they ever be held accountable?
 

How you come out of Filthy Rich really depends on what you’re looking for. For the casual watcher largely unacquainted with Epstein’s sickness, the series will shock and disgust, even if there are no jaw-dropping revelations. But if you ever closely followed the guy while he was alive, you’ll probably end up disappointed, craving meatier details and, perhaps, wanting a broader comment on what Epstein’s shenanigans tell us about society in general. Having said that, it lends a voice to the once-voiceless women silenced by Epstein and then repeatedly let down by the American justice system. And that is commendable, no matter what.