More NBA names in the Epstein files
Leonsis, Wasserman, Ressler, Tisch, Karp, and Eva Dubin's NBA connection
It’s too soon to say what the most important lessons are from the Epstein files. The reach and scope are hard to fathom. There are confident assessments that it’s all about sexual assault and trafficking. Or money laundering and the mob. Or right-wing politics. But also intelligence, kompromat, Putin, Israel, the CIA. But for sure crypto is totally central. And Harvard. And murder.
Anyone who says, at this stage, that Epstein is all about X I suspect of trying to distract from Y or Z. You’d have to have a real agenda to dig through this and say it’s not Russia or not Israel or not intelligence.
My best guess is that a key throughline, when the dust has settled, will be finance. What gets funded? What political effort, what non-profit, what venture, what fund, what bank? Why this one and not that one?
Things run by Epstein’s friends have incredible success raising money.
Epstein’s group, which very credibly involves Russia, Israel, a large collection of former Drexel Burnham Lambert guys, the UAE, the Saudis, and many others, is real and broad. And a surprising number of the key players appear in fact, to be pedophiles. QAnon was a bunch of suckers; spectacularly wrong in Comet Pizza and a million other things. But there’s a certain horse sense in the broad conclusion that pedos secretly control a weirdly large chunk of the world.
The files have a zillion names, not even close to all of them are guilty of anything. Lists of trustees at schools a friend of Epstein’s wanted to get his kid into, people co-investing in some deal, drivers, pilots, people attending movie screenings … clearly, blatantly, being mentioned in the files is not the same as being guilty of anything.
Several billionaires have been making that point.
But there are different ways to be mentioned.
If you just appeared innocently in the files, fine.
But if you emailed him weird cryptic stuff about girls, sorry pal, we gotta take a closer look, in no small part because–feels weird just saying this–we need to understand if you were entrapped by a criminal mob and maybe even take orders from them to this day.
It’s real honest work to separate those two bullet points. All kinds of billionaires are saying they are in favor of those kinds of investigations, to which I say: fund it. We won’t have real sunshine in there until the stories are carefully told publicly, which is journalism. All kinds of badass journalists are on the market.
Gleaning wisdom from this hellscape is a struggle of thinking fast and slow. The presence of child victims, the suggestion of murder, the arrogance of billionaires all makes it easy to grow rageful and looking for someone to blame. That’s real and appropriate.
But that fast thinking is a giant favor to the clever devils who intentionally made their financial and political crimes super complex to throw off the scent. Not only can people easily get bored exposing money laundering, but it specifically thrives because we do. Merely making something complex is enough to keep it out of headlines. It works as long as all our reactions are knee-jerk.
I’ve talked in the past about the training manual the CIA has long used for intelligence analysts, which has insight that’s confirmed in dozens of other books. To tease the clearest possible version of the truth out of a confusing landscape, you must quiet your own personal emotional bias. Superforecasting finds similarly.
And so, with some difficulty, I try to read these Epstein documents calmly. Non-partisan. Diaphragmatic breathing. Not hoping to find this or that person guilty, but instead trying to glean the most enduring insights, whatever they may be.
So with all that in mind, I’m going to tell you just a few things that I’ve run across in these early days.
NFL
Roger Goodell says it’s too soon to even know whether or not the NFL wants to investigate Giants co-owner Steve Tisch, who most certainly emailed with Epstein about young women Tisch met in person. From my point of view, that’s a weak position for the NFL to take–so disinterested in helping society get to the bottom of this. It’s so disinterested in protecting women or having a world where rich men don’t do whatever they want.
And there’s something else, which I learned from Malcolm Gladwell when we went running together around the time of the Penn State sexual abuse scandal. At that time, as I recall, the NCAA was deciding how to punish Penn State. And Malcolm’s good idea, as I recall it, was essentially that we’re talking about serious crimes. In some cases, felonies. The NCAA wishes it had dominion over such things. But alas, they’re basically people who market sports. Why would they decide the punishment for such serious things as sexual abuse? I don’t know who Steve Tisch met, but it’s not out of the question that person was trafficked from overseas by very bad people. The emails establish that the women he met were from overseas, and in one case alarmed by the age difference. Roger Goodell is not my pick to spearhead anything around that. The NFL’s independent investigation into this, if it even happens, won’t mean a damn thing to me or the truth.
To which Roger Goodell would say oh Henry, that’s unfair. We’d hire a top independent law firm to do that investigation. And I’d reply oh, like the firm you hired to investigate the Miami Dolphins sexual harassment case in 2014?
That firm is Paul Weiss. I have read dozens of interviews between Epstein and Paul Weiss chairperson Brad Karp. He thanked Epstein for an “unforgettable” dinner. When Epstein invited Brad Karp to a Woody Allen screening, Karp asked if he could bring his daughter. When Epstein was courting estate work from Josh Harris, he suggested reaching out to Karp for a reference. Karp’s in the files nearly 600 times. And that’s hardly the only firm where Epstein had powerful friends. So no, I’m not excited about the integrity of an investigation from that lineage.
Brad Karp resigned from Paul Weiss on Wednesday.
Ted Leonsis
I haven’t mentioned Ted Leonsis before, but he’s been on my radar because he was involved in John Brockman’s Edge organization, literary events around the founding of Silicon Valley, that it later emerged were financed by Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein’s on camera at the 1999 dinner, as is Joichi Ito who later resigned from the MIT Media Lab because of his Epstein connections. Paul Allen, Blazers billionaire, was also reportedly an attendee, along with Elon Musk and a who’s who of Silicon Valley. It’s very credible that a lot of the names from academia and tech associated with Epstein these days first associated with him through Edge.
Leonsis owns the Wizards through Monumental Sports and Entertainment. Steve Jobs’ ex-wife Laurene Powell Jobs bought a stake in Monumental in 2017 and sold it in 2025. One of the richest people on the planet, she appears to have her own connections to Ghislaine Maxwell.
