Jeffrey Epstein really was a streak of slime

Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself or was he murdered — and frankly who cares? Actually, having watched the four-part Netflix series — Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich — about his secretive, sordid life, I care very much. Sure, his squalid death in jail, apparently from suicide while awaiting trial for numerous sex crimes, was thoroughly deserved. But justice would have been far better served if this noisome creep had spent the rest of his days rotting in prison, deprived for ever of all sexual activity save the involuntary variety provided in the showers whenever he dropped the soap.

I hadn’t expected to respond quite this viscerally to the Epstein tale. Indeed, before I watched the documentary I was inclined to think that perhaps the nefariousness had been overdone. Surely, if he were as guilty as some of his accusers claimed, he would have been put away long ago? And anyway, the relationship between older men with money and power, and younger women with aspirations, has always been more complicated than the #MeToo furore contrived to pretend.

But that was before I learned the unutterable vileness of what Epstein did. His private retreat in the US Virgin Islands, Little Saint James, for example: those young girls who had to service his myriad celebrity guests weren’t willing, lavishly rewarded accomplices but the cheated, betrayed, trapped, put-upon victims of a vicious and sadistic sociopath who actually seemed to get most of his sexual kicks from the knowledge that those poor girls were hating every moment.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this documentary series — based on a book by one of his Palm Beach neighbours, the thriller writer James Patterson — was the near-absence of its main character. We saw footage of him impassively, contemptuously, half-smirkingly batting off questions under interrogation from police investigators —including one about whether he could confirm he had an ‘egg-shaped penis’.