KILLED - Episode 7: The Pedophile

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

New York assigns a piece meant to vindicate convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein?!Featuring the fact checker who killed the story, Alex Yablon.To submit your KILLED story, visit www.KILLEDStories.com.

This story about Jeffrey Epstein by Michael Wolfe began just like any other story at New York magazine. The beginning of the issue cycle, the editors send out the lineup for what they've decided is going in the magazine. stories that are done, basically, that are pretty much drafted and perhaps even gone through a round of edits or two by the time the editors decide, okay, we're going to put this in the next issue. You know, we got the line up and there was going to be a story in it by Michael Wolfe about Jeffrey Epstein. You know, it didn't strike me as anything odd at first. You know, Michael Wolfe is a very successful journalist.

When I finally talked to Michael about the story, he told me that he had made an arrangement with Epstein to secure Epstein's cooperation with the story. That included an agreement that Epstein himself was going to be the sole point of contact for fact checking. Now, this is very unusual. Usually, writers are only too happy for fact checkers to kind of go above and beyond and to look for any way they can to confirm the details and to get creative if they have to. Michael didn't want that.

From Justine Harmon and Audio Chuck, this is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Episode 7 The Patophile Most Kills The kind that find their way into movies and TV shows are the result of outside pressure. Someone powerful gets wind of an impending story and does everything in their power to shut it down. But sometimes a kill comes from inside the house. Just ask Alex Yablon. So my name is Alex Yablon.

I'm a freelance journalist. I write about politics and policy, but a lifetime ago I was a fact checker at New York magazine. I started at New York magazine in 2012 and... Okay, so maybe not a lifetime ago. Like a decade ago. Oh, 2015. Alex was a fact checker at New York, the decorated and percusious local magazine that routinely

mines the zeitgeist for journalistic gold. You may recall that great little bit in Sex in the City when Carrie Bradshaw appears on the cover of New York with the headline, single and fabulous, question mark. The ECO-Yogi slumlords of Brooklyn. Anna Delvie. What's you wearing? You look poor. The mass popularity of BDE. I was just thinking like, heard about this BDE.

Yeah, you can thank New York Magazine for all of that. Miranda, can we sue them or something? For what, mispunctuation? A magazine that takes as many risks as New York relies on its fact checkers. At New York Magazine, the way it works is that the fact checker only comes in basically at the end of the editorial process of putting a feature together. Only when the editors have actually decided that a piece is going to go into a given print issue, do they hand the text to the fact checker? It's expected to be done in the course of a few days, perhaps a week, it's already been

through edits, there's already art being picked out. There's a pretty standard way that it goes. The reporter will give you the latest draft of the story and any kind of backup that is to say interview transcripts or clips that they used or records from courts or public agencies that they may have used. And you re-report the story, you know, you kind of go through each line of the story and say, okay, what is the piece of evidence that backs up the claim? Did the author give it to me? This is what the author gave me actually support the claim in a given line. And you know, if not, we'll

have to do a bit more digging, maybe make some phone calls to outside experts or to the people that they interviewed and sort of double check that the way that, you know, a given quote or a fact and a piece is portrayed in the author's voice actually, you know, is backed up by their sources. Riders have a love-hate relationship with fact-checkers. Oh, they can be too literal, too lacking in imagination, but they can also save your ass. Killed relies on an incredible one for this show. Thank God for you, Barbara. Then if there are any lingering questions or lines that seem to be established as incorrect, then you have a meeting with the editor and the writer where you go through every single

change that you think needs to be made. And oftentimes, either that's a matter of inserting the correct fact or cutting the wrong fact or just as often fudging the sentence so that you don't have to make more work for yourself by nailing down some detail that ultimately isn't that important. There are definitely writers who I felt were not appreciative of the fact checking. There are definitely fact checkers who would go overboard

in scrutinizing lines that were clearly fine, but generally I found most writers were pretty grateful for fact-checking and most writers were pretty careful and did back up their work pretty thoroughly. It's a push and pull, a sacred dance that relies on both parties sharing a single objective, getting published. It can also get vaguely hostile. All of a sudden everyone's very serious sending bitchy emails that start per my previous email.

There was one time when, you know, I was fact checking a story that mentioned some earnings numbers for a media company, and there was this figure in the story, and I was tearing my hair out, trying to figure out where this figure had come from, and then I finally went to the author, and he said, oh, I just kind of made it up and figured you'd figure out what the correct thing was. The thorniest thing I ever encountered was, you know, I thought that a political writer had used a quote from a public figure out of context and they told me to stay in my lane. So that was the testiest it ever got between me and an author, but you know, even that author ended up doing what I asked them to do.

But things hadn't always gone Alex's way. Months earlier, he'd been assigned another delicate piece about a New York City teenager who played the stock market and won big. The story, which was number 12 on the magazine's annual Reasons to Love New York, was titled, Because the Stivocent Senior Made Millions Picking Stocks. His hedge fund opens as soon as he turns 18. Turns out, a bank ledger provided to Alex, backing up the teen's millionaire status, had been forged. The whole thing was made up.

The self-described teen tycoon admits it's all a sham. He made it all up. People want stories, they want them fast, but they also want them right. And there's tension between getting it up there quickly and getting it up there correctly. The stakes are high for fact checkers. And like goalies, people really only notice them

when they fuck up. Still, when Alex learned that he'd been assigned to check Michael Wolfe's story about a financier with a checkered past, he was open to it. This was the job. He was a fact checker at New York magazine and they trusted him specifically with the tricky pieces. I had never worked with Michael before this story, but he had published stories with the magazine during my time there. I'd never heard of any particular fact issues with his work before. The story, it was magazine feature length. I'm not sure exactly how long, but it would have been in the range of, say, five to eight

thousand words. It was a sizable piece. The reporting basically looked at Jeffrey Epstein's life after his conviction for solicitation. Jeffrey Epstein went to jail just before 10 this morning. He agreed to serve a total of 18 months in a poll. And the remarkable degree in those intervening eight years, to which Epstein had been able to basically live life as if nothing had really happened, as if he wasn't to convicted sex offender.

Epstein will have to register as a sexual offender. It's a designation you'll have to keep for the rest of his life. The piece claimed that the rich and powerful were still, even after Epstein had been convicted, you know, was widely known to have unsavory personal habits, predatory sexual habits. He was still part of the same social scene, basically. This is Kilt, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Back in 2015, even though Jeffrey Epstein was a punitive billionaire and a convicted sex offender, he wasn't exactly a household name either.

Miami Herald reporter Julie Cape Brown wouldn't even begin to pry the lid off the extent of his sexual abuse and predation for another year. And it had been eight years since the arrest. Epstein had laid low, avoided public spaces, and the sharp corners of the facts had rounded. At this point, knowledge of his proclivities and his affection for underage girls was all kind of part of his reputation as an inscrutable New York money man.

You know, this was before Kiersten Gillibrand had come out during the run up to the 2016 presidential primary saying that Bill Clinton should have resigned over his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, not because he perjured himself, but because it's completely inappropriate for the most powerful man in America to cultivate a sexual relationship with an intern. And not out of a kind of socially conservative idea of you shouldn't cheat on your wife,

but more from a progressive point of view that you shouldn't make professional advancement for women conditional on being sexually available to powerful men. This is happening before the Miami Herald stories about Epstein's plea deal, and a lot of additional reporting about him came out. The extraordinary depths of Epstein's predation was not quite known widely at the time. He was, I think, known to be a sleaze, but the idea that like a guy who got

really rich in business and finance was into young blondes for a long time. That was a part of what you get for being a success in America, the women on your arm. Everyone had heard the stories of Epstein flying to his private island on his private jet, the low-lita express that he was shady, creepy, something about liking young girls. You know, there were raised eyebrows certainly about just how many women he surrounded himself with, just how young they were, but I don't think it was understood at the time that it was like an assembly line of recruiting these women and trafficking them. There were obviously some people I think who knew about this, but it kind of had the ring

of conspiracy theory. It all makes for a pretty interesting story, doesn't it? And Michael Wolfe had been granted access to Epstein's mansion in Manhattan on the Upper East Side, where he hung out basically for a few days and said who came and went. Now there's nothing, nothing necessarily wrong, and in fact, perhaps it could be journalistically very valuable to do a story about the fact that Epstein faced, you know, no social sanctioned for his behavior. New York Magazine does a lot of stories about letting the reader kind of vicariously enter those elite spaces of Manhattan society.

They often do it with an eye towards the somewhat salacious. New York Magazine is not, you know, pro-publica. It's an entertainment product. The entertainment is, in often, the behavior of the 1% of the kind of the Manhattan elite. So in a lot of ways, it seemed like a totally natural New York Magazine story. It was the perfect Michael Wolfe piece.

The journalist had built his career on being hard-scrabble, connected, and at times an overly knowing narrator. Hunter S. Thompson went Gonzo, Tom Wolfe had his new journalism, and Michael Wolfe, well, he ingratiated, he embedded, and he delivered the goods. And then, a fact-checker like Alex made sure it was ready to publish. A big part of the fact checking process is also going through the story with a lawyer to make sure that it's not going to get the magazine sued. And a big part of that process is making sure that anybody who is mentioned in the story,

especially anybody who is mentioned in a way that suggests that they may have been doing something unsavory or possibly illegal, is contacted before publication and asked for comment. Michael Wolfe basically said, you can't do that. Jeffrey Epstein will only cooperate with us if we don't do that and we take his word for it that all these rich and powerful people are still hanging out with him.

And you know, I don't have some abiding interest in like protecting the reputations of these rich and powerful people that he says were visiting Jeffrey Epstein, but I didn't want the magazine to get sued, and it's, you know, if you say that some billionaire or finance executive or powerful politician is hanging out with a convicted sex offender socially, that's the kind of thing that will get you a very scary letter from their lawyer if you haven't asked them for comment. Journalistically, there's a question of what exactly we were doing with this story. Were we trying to hold these people to account? For the fact that, you know, they basically didn't care that this guy was a sexual predator?

Were we demonstrating that, wow, Jeffrey Epstein must be that brilliant, if these people still keep hanging out with him even after he was convicted of soliciting minors for sex. My feeling was the story got a little bit too cute about that. They tried to kind of have its cake and eat it too. You can't just kind of wink and nod in these things. You have, you know, if you're gonna say, so and so billionaire hangs out with a convicted sex offender, you have to call them as a journalist and say, hey, why are you doing this?

You know, like it, it's, otherwise, it's just like party reporting, basically. Epstein, new Michael will very well well and I don't think he would have agreed to participate this fully in a profile that was going to make him look bad. You know, I learned after the fact that at one point Epstein Wolff and Harvey Weinstein had actually made an attempt to buy New York magazine together. That's correct. In 2003, when the company that owned New York

was looking to unload the magazine, Wolf Epstein and a group of investors bid 44 million to buy the magazine. They were unsuccessful, but still. You know, that's the kind of thing that should give a journalist pause. Should I be profiling someone with whom I've tried to do business? The question arose like, you know, just how close were Epstein and Michael Wolfe?

Was he really looking at this critically? I mean, it's not like he didn't mention, you know, what was known at the time about Epstein's criminal record, but, you know, it's the kind of thing where out of an abundance of caution and propriety, one might say, you know, it's not gonna look good if I do this story. You know, journalism is not like, say, law.

It's a pretty informal profession in a lot of ways, and there aren't, like, rules dictating exactly when a journalist is supposed to recuse themselves from a story. What was very strange about the story was that it was being put together under Jeffrey Epstein's, basically under his direction. Wolf told us that the conditions of Epstein's cooperation meant that we could not contact the people Wolf said came to Epstein's house while Wolf was reporting the story. And Wolf had no transcripts of this, he had no photographs, he had no other documentation, it was just supposed to be his eyewitness account, and Jeffrey Epstein say so. Wolf told me that Epstein was to be the only source for all fact inquiries

that immediately set off alarm bells in my head and I went to our lawyer, the New York magazine media lawyer, and they said that is absolutely not acceptable. You cannot do that. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Bolstered by the feedback from New York's lawyers. You cannot do that. Anyone who is mentioned in this story must be contacted for comment. Alex knew what he had to do. He'd been burned before. He made it all up. It's all a sham. But this was different. This time, he wasn't relying on someone else to tell him what was true. He'd re-report the story and the the very first step, before confirming whether the salmon

was poached or broiled, was getting in touch with a high profile, and high net worth, individuals who appeared in the piece. So we started drawing up plans, which grew to include basically everyone in the fact-checking department to contact the many, many people in this story who were mentioned to still socializing with Epstein to ask them for comment. And so as we started getting ready to do this and kind of realizing that this was going to be a mammoth undertaking, if there were transcripts of these conversations, if there were photographs, it would have been one thing to sort of send a heads up, but there wasn't any of that. So we would have to send, you know, somewhat substantive fact questions.

As opposed to just saying, hi, you know, we have a recording of you going into Jeffrey Epstein's house and saying, X, Y, and Z, is there anything you'd like to add as comment? We would have to ask them, you know, did you say this? Did you say that? Why did you go to Jeffrey Epstein's townhome? If there isn't additional backup, you know, documentary backup to go on, that process can take a while,

if you're waiting for a response. And like I said, the fact checker is only brought in when the clock is ticking on publication. Hey, Mr. Senator, is it true that you were having coffee with f***ing and f***ing that Mr. Epstein's brown stone on Thursday the 30th? What's that? Sure, I'll hold. How hard could it be?

It was very clear that there was no way that we were going to be able to do this by the time the issue would need to close. Also, it was not clear in my recollection that Michael was okay with us doing this because it was clearly going to violate the agreement that he made with Epstein. So, at the last minute, it was cut and I believe they put in a photo portfolio, which is just a much lower burden for fact checking than a story about the rich and powerful hanging out with a sexual predator. This is the only story that I have ever had killed out of fact-checking concerns. And had you heard of it happening any other time at the magazine? Yes.

They had talked to us about this possibility and to not be scared about if we felt like it needed to happen. The issue was that a condition was put on us that we could not ask people for comment. You know, that is a thing that you do at the very end of a story. You do wait until quite late in the process to ask people for comment because you don't want to give them enough time to kind of push back on you and obfuscate. The issue is when there's so many people and they are so rich and litigious and you are alleging that they hung out with a convicted sex offender. If they were, that should be reported.

It absolutely should be reported, but you have to really dot your eyes and cross your teeth when you're reporting on something like that because it can come back on the magazine very badly. It can come back on the writer very badly. You have to be prepared when you're reporting on the rich and powerful. Killed emailed with Michael Wolfe, who wrote, I've written for New York Magazine for 25 years, writing 200 pieces or more, and don't recollect even one being killed.

End quote. At first, I took this to be a patent denial that the piece ever existed, but it's likely more a matter of semantics. New York magazine responded via spokesperson, who clarified, In 2015, Michael Wolfe and New York magazine explored publishing a piece on Jeffrey Epstein using material Michael had gathered during his own reporting. It was not commissioned by the magazine. In the end, we mutually agreed not to pursue the project.

It was never a traditional assignment for the magazine, and no fee was paid. When killed, when back to Wolfer comment, he responded, quote, I believe the magazine may have seen some material I was working on. Of Alex, he says, My impression is that he is wildly exaggerating his importance at New York magazine, and knowledge about my conversations and relationship with my editors there. I do not recall if I ever had an exchange with this fact-checker.

It is perfectly possible that I did, and possible that he may have seen early-stage material that did not move forward. Killed spoke with three other members of the editorial team who remember Alex being assigned to fact check the piece and having various difficulties with it. Killed also reviewed an email exchange from 2015 in which Alex mentions the Epstein Wolf arrangement specifically.

In the years that followed, Michael Wolfe has continued to write stories that shaped the cultural narrative about elite and powerful men. When fire and fury, his inside look at Trump's White House came out in 2018. Countless media outlets criticized his reporting practices. There are a lot of little errors. There's a lot of them. One page had three in one. Some of them may be copy edits, small factual errors,

but it adds up. Even SNL got in on the fun, with a bespectacled Fred Armason playing an incredulous wolf. Michael, there's been several errors pointed out in this book already. Do you take responsibility for those? Look, you read it, right? Yeah, of course. Then you liked it. You had fun. right? Yeah, of course. And you liked it.

You had fun. Well, what's the problem? You got the gist, so shut up. You know, even the stuff that's not true, it's true. He got this sort of astonishing level of access to the West Wing, and was just kind of sit in the West Wing. It was chaotic as it was. No one stopped to think like, hey, why is this, you know, gossipy New York journalist

just hanging out for, you know, weeks at a time saying what's happening inside the White House? That doesn't normally happen. Questions did arise that like, did he ever identify himself as reporting while he was there rather than, you know, perhaps being there socially. And in 2021, in the book Two Famous, a collection of essays pulled from decades of his writing for places like the Hollywood reporter, Vanity Fair, and even New York, will finally publish his Fly in the Wall account of Epstein, only after the disgraced financier died in prison.

The chapter, titled The Last Days of Jeffrey Epstein, gives a picture of the billionaire's last ditch attempt at image rehabilitation in early 2019. The circumstances have certainly gotten more dire since 2015, but the temperature inside Epstein HQ is somehow the same. There are girls answering the door. There's on-demand caviar and hand rolls. There are famous people and off-colored jokes about Epstein's victims and suicide and Steve Van and sex life. It all seems like some sort of sick, twisted satire.

In the draft of the story on Epstein that I saw, that's basically what he did. A lot of it ultimately rested on Michael Wolf saying, well I was there and I say this happened. And that doesn't mean that this stuff didn't happen. But ultimately how much you believe the story depends on how much you believe Michael Wolfe. In the end, I don't know that there was anything actually factually incorrect about it. you