There’s only one hit for “Iowa” in Epstein’s newly available inbox of any interest. I figured Jeffrey Epstein’s 1988 trip to Fairfield, Iowa, would have something to do with the subject line that read, in accordance with email marketing best practices for word count and intrigue, “I beat Bush.” That email from Feb. 3, 2016, was:
Hi Jeffrey,
I got more votes than Jeb Bush got in Iowa, and I only had one congressional district, he had four!! It’s so funny (to me – totally embarrassing to him)!!! Still like Trump ☺ and might be a delegate to the republican convention.
Was in St. Thomas for a couple days – did call this island, but never heard back. Went scuba diving off St. Jeff and it was beautiful. Would be totally funny (to me at least) if you put a big fake shark or statute under the water where divers go….
Love ya,
[Redacted]
The sender was redacted, but there was a clue to their identity in the “From” field. The tail of a character could be seen dangling out the bottom of the black box. I needed to know if one of our state’s politicians was close enough to Epstein for such a sign-off. This glimpse of a character sent me down a rabbit hole of who may or may not be our redacted email sender.
Thankfully, the email was set in Calibri, the default Microsoft typeface. Looking at the Calibri characters that extend below the baseline, the tail belonged to either a “y” or a comma. A little drag-and-drop Photoshop work confirmed it belonged to a “y.” Since a comma would also be seen dangling, the name had to be in first/last order.
Instead of focusing solely on the Iowa rogues gallery, I checked out Epstein’s political contributions during the same time period. One contribution from April 24, 2014, to the Committee to Elect Gwendolyn Beck to Congress seemed promising. The “y” in “Gwendolyn” landed in a juicy vicinity.
Beck received 5,420 votes in her losing effort to represent Virginia’s 8th District in the U.S. House — a distant third in the race but still better than Bush’s 5,238 in the 2016 Iowa Caucus. As for the “Love ya” sign-off, Beck can be seen on Getty Images at Mar-a-Lago in 1995, with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and again in 2000 with Epstein, Prince Andrew and the then-Melania Knauss. Not to mention other alleged activities.
Obviously, I can’t see whatever’s covered up by that black box. So many things could be under there! But what I can say is that, “Gwendolyn Beck” does drag-and-drop just about perfectly over it.
Because of this recent bit of sleuthing, Little Big Screen is falling down a rabbit hole of streaming movies that may or may not be about the life and death of Jeffrey Epstein.
Winter Kills (1979)
Directed by William Richert
Of the classic all-American conspiracy thrillers in the ’70s paranoid golden age, Winter Kills is the one goose chase wild enough to reach the cartoonish depths of today’s stupid ghouls. Everything is Super Size®, from cast (Jeff Bridges, John Huston, Anthony Perkins, Toshiro Mifune, Elizabeth Taylor) to crew (Robert Boyle, who’d been Alfred Hitchcock’s production designer on North by Northwest and The Birds; Vilmos Zsigmond, who’d just shot Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Deer Hunter), plot (details ripped from the still-warm shreds of JFK assassination headlines) to tone (Huston’s big, bad daddy attempts to manipulate Bridge’s Hubba Bubba gumshoe while wearing only a robe and bright-red briefs).
And you know there are truths within the goofs, because rumor has it that Ted Kennedy tried to put the kibosh on it.
Stream it on Tubi. Rent it on Apple TV and Prime Video.
Manhattan (1979)
Directed by Woody Allen
Manhattan, a film forever read as the gross confession of its director, writer and star, Woody Allen, can also be considered a cursed text for its unshakable parallels to the early life of Allen’s pal, Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was a nobody until Donald Barr, the headmaster at the Dalton School — the all-girl prep school where Manhattan was set and shot — handed the credentialless two-time college dropout a teaching position in 1974. (Epstein begins and ends with the Barr family: Donald’s son, William, personally investigated Epstein’s death as the U.S Attorney General in 2019.) Epstein was dismissed by Barr’s replacement in 1976, the same year Babi Christina Engelhard, a 16-year-old student at Dalton, started a seven-year relationship with Allen that she believes to be just one of the inspirations for the relationship between Allen’s stand-in and the Mariel Hemingway character in Manhattan.
Engelhard was heartbroken to see the relationship from Allen’s POV. “I cried through most of the movie, the dawning of realization slowly settling in as my greatest fears crept to the surface,” she wrote in a manuscript of her unpublished memoir. “How could he have felt this way? How was our partnership not something more than just a fling?”
Stream it on Prime Video and Tubi. Rent it on Apple TV.
Bastards (2013)
Directed by Claire Denis
Claire Denis, who it must be mentioned took the New French Extremity to the gnarliest and gushiest of extremities with Trouble Every Day, gets truly nasty with Bastards, a film probably best described by its influences: 1) a news article about a woman found drugged and naked next to a garbage dumpster, 2) William Faulkner’s once-censored use of a corn cob in the novel Sanctuary, and 3) the mid-century noirs of Akira Kurosawa.
If you’re a listener of TrueAnon, the only podcast for Epstein-addled brains, the film’s Tindersticks score, with synthy moods that range from the big-screen minimalism of John Carpenter to the groovy, mopey spell of Portishead, will sink you into a similar head space as the original music written and recorded for the podcast by producer Yung Chomsky.
Stream it on Kanopy. Rent it on Apple TV and Prime Video.
Jade (1995)
Directed by William Friedkin
Speaking of the thud at the bottom of these things, there’s nothing so hollow and heavy as the scene in Eyes Wide Shut where Dr. Bill (Tom Cruise) is handed a letter somehow already printed with his full name. “Give up your inquiries,” it reads. “Which are completely useless.” Jade did it first. Sort of.
Written by Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct, Showgirls), and rewritten by director William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist), the film is a mess of literal masks, metaphorical masks, camcorder blackmail and little pubic-hair trinkets. But just because Jade is best known for either a throwaway joke in 40-Year-Old Virgin or the line of dialogue David Caruso delivers after examining the contents of a mini-fridge doesn’t mean it’s a bad-bad thing.
Rent it on Apple TV and Prime Video.
