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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

This article uses a lot of words but misses an important point which is that Epstein was likely a master of blackmail.

For instance there is the strange story of Leslie Wexler who seemed to let Epstein run his whole life. I can only imagine that Wexler was willingly part of the festivities that Epstein put on and was later blackmailed or was possibly set up unknowingly. Either way as the head of a woman's clothing company Wexler had a lot to lose.

Wexler wasn't the only one, and if Epstein ever needed conspirators that is how he got them.

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This article spends paragraphs claiming it's going to knock down conspiracy theories, then essentially concludes (I think, the writing is interminable) that Epstein was a skilled and systematic blackmailer who worked for the CIA. It doesn't even bother to address the interesting questions of who organized this; what the goals and results were; where the money came from; where the evidence went, etc.

ETA: According to the theory outlined in this post, someone ran a massive blackmail scheme against many of our society's most influential figures with help and backing from the CIA, and then those organizations protected Epstein from prosecution while ensuring that the blackmail evidence was carefully retained and kept out of public view following his death. If even partially true this is the most serious conspiracy theory of our time. Your only interest is in writing a skeptic piece about whether Epstein was murdered?

It's sort of the equivalent of when Noam Chomsky says, "sure, JFK and 9/11 may have been carried out by organized conspirators within the U.S. government, but it doesn't matter and there's no point interrogating it because it makes no difference from a policy perspective." In the cases where it's not outright disinfo it's a psychological defense mechanism, a way of ceding the bare minimum of ground to the conspiracy theorists which is demanded by the mountains of evidence, while still hiving it off from the rest of one's worldview.

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