Still another picture has the filmmaker seated in a private plane next to Larry Summers, the former Harvard president, who was recently revealed to have mined Epstein for dating advice, in a run of poorly punctuated correspondence, as he pursued a protégé.
Another image, released by the House oversight committee Democrats, shows Allen looking up at Epstein who was presumably visiting him on a film set.Credit: House oversight committee Democrats
After those texts and emails were made public, Summers expressed shame around his continued communication with Epstein, which he called “misguided”.
But when asked by a reporter for the British newspaper The Sunday Times, in September, about his relationship with the man who officials say killed himself in a federal detention centre as he faced sex trafficking charges, Allen made no similar gesture toward embarrassment or contrition, calling him instead “a substantial character”. The dinners were full of “illustrious people, college professors, scientists, Nobel laureates – accomplished people who were fun to listen to”, in Allen’s view.
“He told us he’d been in jail and that he had been – I can’t remember the word – but that he’d been falsely put in jail in some way,” Allen said, suggesting a gullibility not often associated with Manhattan’s sophisticate class or, alternately, a sympathy for someone he thought might be a fellow traveller in the world of the wrongfully accused.
“Extorted?” the reporter asked. “Right, extorted,” Allen said. “He told us he was trying to make up for it now by being philanthropic and giving money to cutting-edge scientists and universities. He couldn’t have been nicer.”
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The images suggest that the two men, both children of postwar working-class Brooklyn, were better acquainted than previously believed. They also indicate just how taken the culturally privileged can be with the financially extravagant, felony sentencing be damned.
By his own account, Allen began going to the Epstein house in 2010, two years after Epstein had been sentenced for soliciting sex from teenage girls. What appeared to override any concerns that might have existed about these transgressions was the company, even when the company did not include the faculty of MIT, but rather people like magician David Blaine, who once showed up “swallowing live goldfish and then regurgitating them”.
Transactional relationships take many forms and a way to regard this one perhaps, demands the lens of content.
Over his long career, Allen has made two films – Crimes and Misdemeanours in 1989 and Match Point, 16 years later – about deceitful men who murder women and get away with it. The evasion of consequence has been an enduring source of fascination.
In the end, perhaps Epstein provided Allen with something even more valuable than cachet: potential material.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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