Here is what I’ve learned from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal so far: If you are rich, practiced in the art of flattery, generous with favors and connections and donations, give star-studded dinner parties, and offer flights on your private plane, nobody cares if you hired a 14-year-old girl for sex. Even if you went to jail for it—though Alan Dershowitz and future labor secretary Alexander Acosta finagled a deal whereby you didn’t serve your whole sentence and were allowed out during the day and on weekends. Nobody’s going to ask a lot of follow-up questions about your activities in the years since your encounter with the law. It was just the one time! Mistake of judgment!

As Jeffrey Epstein’s very good friend Noam Chomsky (yes, that Noam Chomsky) put it in 2023 when The Wall Street Journal asked him about his extensive contacts with Epstein over many years, “What was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. According to US laws and norms, that yields a clean slate.” (Not exactly—he was, after all, a registered sex offender in two states.) Pay no attention to the flock of pretty young women who surrounded Epstein seemingly everywhere he went, or the Miami Herald’s extensive 2018 reporting on his depredations, or the fact that the private jet that ferried girls and guests to his island in the Caribbean was called the Lolita Express by locals in the Virgin Islands.

I’m sorry, but how stupid are we supposed to be? Here’s a late-middle-aged man who was convicted of soliciting a child and who swans about the academic and financial stratosphere accompanied by very young women. According to a Mother Jones interview with Epstein’s long-standing friend the art collector and industrialist Stuart Pivar, “If the conversation drifted beyond his interests, Epstein was known to interrupt, ‘What does that got to do with pussy?!’” And his friends thought there was nothing to see here? Seriously?

Epstein had no problem attracting famous, brilliant, immensely powerful people into his circle, almost all men. Surely not all of them partook of the sexual services, aka “massages,” on offer. Some wanted money to fuel their projects, or opportunities to schmooze with each other and meet billionaires and other important men like Ehud Barak and Woody Allen and Steve Bannon and Larry Summers and Bill Gates and Bill Clinton and Piss Christ artist Andres Serrano, and many, many top-notch mathematicians, scientists, financiers, and economists. But all of them would have seen the young women, and maybe the very young ones too. And yet it seems no one thought to ask where they came from, who they were, why they were there.

Everyone who hung out with Epstein had more than enough information to ask hard questions about their dear friend Jeffrey and chose not to ask them. Or maybe even to think them. As the Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, who himself left Arizona State University over sexual harassment accusations, told an interviewer in 2011, “As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.… I don’t feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it.” Empirical evidence apparently doesn’t include a conviction for soliciting a minor and lifelong placement on the sex-crimes registry.

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To ask questions about the women, they would have had to see the women as real people, people like their own daughters or students. How does a teenager end up in a mansion or on a private island offering “massages” to middle-aged and elderly men? These are men accustomed to looking beneath the surface and pursuing what is hidden wherever it leads—about science, language, world affairs. But about these women those men evinced a profound incuriosity. They were just the scenery, the help, or as Dominique Strauss-Kahn memorably put it, the “equipment.” In degree but not in kind, they are like the men in Southern France who were invited to rape a drugged Gisele Pelicot, and justified this bizarre situation on the basis that her husband had given permission.

Epstein has come to be known as a pedophile, to the displeasure of Megyn Kelly, who for some reason points out that there’s a difference between a 5-year-old and a 15-year-old. The “well, actually” crowd never tires of arguing that men who have sex with teenagers should properly be called hebephiles and ephebophiles. Besides, as Epstein’s friend the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers told Reuters in 2015, girls grow up fast now. “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous.” But as a letter to the editor in The New York Times pointed out, it’s not as if a girl goes from child to adult on her 18th birthday, even if the law draws a sharp line. These were very young women cast into a sea of sharks. Where is the urge to protect that we are always being told is what being a man is all about?