Description
Douglas Murray guest hosting Piers Morgan Uncensored is joined by investigative journalist Vicky Ward, the author of War Against the Jews, and Jeffrey Epstein’s former lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, and physicist and podcaster, Eric Weinstein.
Alan Dershowitz, Epstein’s former lawyer, has been named in the released documents. However, he asserts that the woman who accused him has since admitted to the possibility of mistaken identity and dropped the charges. Dershowitz acknowledges his association with Epstein, which began through an introduction by Lady Rothschild due to Epstein’s contributions to Harvard. Dershowitz supports the full release of all documents to allow individuals to defend themselves against accusations and shed light on the truth.
Vicky Ward recalls her encounters with the manipulative Epstein, revealing that he went to great lengths to ensure certain revelations were kept out of a 2003 article, even resorting to threats. Despite the intimidation, Ward persisted in her reporting, uncovering inconsistencies in Epstein’s financial claims. However, she believes the recently released documents still fail to explain why influential figures like Bill Clinton and Leslie Wexner associated with Epstein, beyond the presence of underage women.
Physicist and podcaster Eric Weinstein, who met Epstein over 20 years ago, describes him as a strange and intriguing individual. During their meeting, Epstein exhibited bizarre behaviour, such as using an American flag as a tablecloth, bringing a braless woman to a financial meeting, and displaying a keen interest in post-Einsteinian physics. Weinstein found Epstein to be a construct, a person who appeared to be a financier but lacked the characteristics of one. The physicist’s encounter left him feeling as though he had met someone who didn’t conform to societal norms.
Transcript
00:00:00
Douglas Murray: Simply claiming something is a conspiracy theory doesn’t necessarily make it false. Not anymore. And the more that comes out about Epstein, including still very mysterious circumstances surrounding his death in custody, means that I’m willing to at least consider alternative narratives other than the one being fed to us through official channels. Now, joining me now is the author and investigative journalist, Vicky Ward, the author of War Against the Jews, and Jeffrey Epstein’s former lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, and the man I mentioned in my monologue, physicist and podcaster Eric Weinstein. Thank you all so much for being with me, uh, tonight. First of all, uh, Vicky Ward, if I may, you wrote, uh, uh… were commissioned to write, uh, an incredibly important article way back in 2003 a- about, uh, Jeffrey Epstein. It was called The Talented Mr. Epstein, and you’ve since said that there were significant efforts to sort of keep some of your revelations out. What exactly happened there?
00:01:08
Vicky Ward: Well, you know, what happened there was Jeffrey Epstein. Um, you know, he was an extraordinary manipulator, not just of, uh, young, vulnerable women, but of rich, powerful men. And, you know, uh, what happened in my reporting was that, uh, you know, I still don’t know all of the details, but I had, uh, the on-the-record allegations of, uh, two sisters, two women. Um, and, you know, those, those allegations were cut from, uh, my story and, you know, Jeffrey Epstein had gone to great lengths to meet with then edity- editor of, uh, Vanity Fair. Um, and at the same time, you know, Jeffrey Ep- Jeffrey Epstein was a formidable person, uh, to write about. You know, he, he threatened me. I was pregnant with my children, and he told me that he- if he didn’t like what I wrote, he would, uh, have a witch doctor place a curse on my unborn children. He told me he’d found out where I was giving birth. Uh, you know, I, I, I add this didn’t stop me from reporting the absolute, uh, best that I could, and I did debunk some of the claims he made about his own financial professional life. Um, but I… You know, the whole thing was, Douglas, a nightmare.
00:02:31
Douglas Murray: Hmm. Can I ask you also, Vicky, just quickly, um, were there any of the names that were released today which surprised you?
00:02:39
Vicky Ward: No. I didn’t know about, um, David Copperfield, and I don’t think I’d read, um, about Stephen Hawking. But no, they didn’t, they didn’t surprise me. I mean, you know, I’ve been covering this story for over two decades, so I was very familiar with a lot of this. I mean, what it just did was solidify a picture by putting specific names and places. But I think that unfortunately the documents still don’t show a different part of Jeffrey Epstein’s life, which is the manipulation of the powerful people. It was, it was a horrific portrait of, uh, this horrific sexual subculture in his homes, but it didn’t explain why people like Bill Clinton, um, and massive philanthropists like Leslie Wexner, why they wanted to be around this man. And I’m sure your other guests are gonna have a lot of insight into that because, uh, it wasn’t because he had a whole group of, of underage women around him.
00:03:47
Douglas Murray: Um, thank you, Vicky. Can I just come next to Alan Dershowitz? Um, thank you so much, Professor Dershowitz, for being with us. Um, first of all, of course, you were Epstein’s lawyer at one point, and you’re also named in these, uh, released documents today. How do you respond to this?
00:04:03
Alan Dershowitz: Well, first of all, the woman who accused me has now admitted that she may have confused me with someone else, may have been a case of mistaken, uh, identity and she’s, uh, dropped all of her legal charges. I first met Jeffrey Epstein, I was introduced to him by the Lady Rothschild. Um, and, uh, um, she asked me to meet him because he was a major contributor to Harvard, and, uh, I agreed to meet with him and went to some seminars that he conducted at Harvard with the president of Harvard, with, uh, major, major academic, uh, uh, figures. But, uh, from the day I met Jeffrey Epstein till the day he died, I have had sexual contact with one woman and one woman only, my wife. And so I was one of those who wanted these papers to be released. My disappointment is that only some have been released. I want everything to be released because they will confirm the fact that I did nothing wrong, and they would also shed light on other people who have been, uh, accused, some truthfully, some, uh, false- some falsely. But, um-
00:05:01
Douglas Murray: Well-
00:05:01
Alan Dershowitz: … the key point is that, uh, w- we can’t have just partial, uh, releases of material. In many of these cases, the accusation is there but the rebuttal is not there or the disproof is not there, so for the public to form a valid judgment, uh, you need a full release. I don’t need that because in my case, the woman who accused me has admitted that she may have mistaken me for someone else. But I think others may very well need the full evidence to be exculpated and to prove… But some don’t want it-
00:05:34
Douglas Murray: Well-
00:05:34
Alan Dershowitz: … because they may very well-
00:05:36
Douglas Murray: On that very m- m- just very quickly, I mean, President Clinton is mentioned more than 50 times in these documents, and he maintains he never visited, uh, Epstein’s island. Uh, Donald Trump’s also mentioned in there. But, uh, should… Do you think politicians and others should explain their exact links with Jeffrey Epstein?
00:05:54
Alan Dershowitz: Yeah. For exa- I’ll give you a story. I was having dinner, this is a name-dropping story, with Caroline Kennedy, the former- … president’s daughter and her husband and Bill Clinton and another couple, and the phone rang. This was on Martha’s Vineyard. And the Secret s- He was president. The Secret Service gave him the phone. He went away and walked for about 15 minutes, had a vibrant conversation, I didn’t hear it, and then he came back with the phone and saying, “Alan, somebody wants to say hello to you.” And he handed me the phone. It was Jeffrey Epstein. So, uh, this was way before any accusations or anything was suggested about Epstein, but obviously Clinton and Epstein-
00:06:28
Douglas Murray: Mm
00:06:28
Alan Dershowitz: … had a, had a friendship. And in most cases, in my example, my friendship totally terminated the day the accusations came out. I did serve as his lawyer, but never again socialized with him once I had heard these accusations. I think that’s probably true of some people. In other cases, people continued to have a friendship with him even after he served his sentence in prison, and they do have some explaining to do-
00:06:51
Douglas Murray: Yeah
00:06:51
Alan Dershowitz: … but that doesn’t prove guilt.
00:06:53
Douglas Murray: Let, let-
00:06:53
Alan Dershowitz: It proves just bad-
00:06:54
Douglas Murray: Let, let me bring in Eric Weinstein, who’s been patiently waiting in LA. Uh, Eric, we, uh, we heard earlier a bit of, uh, your description of Jeffrey Epstein. You met him once more than 20 years ago. Can you just quickly, briefly recap your, what your impression was?
00:07:11
Eric Weinstein: Uh, simply that, um, he, uh, was introduced to me, um, uh, uh, in a financial context. I was, uh, interested in investment in a so-called, uh, carry trade in foreign exchange. He didn’t seem to have any interest in that. Uh, he said that he was a, uh, currency trader. Uh, there was no obvious evidence that he was a currency trader. He didn’t speak like one. Um, and he seemed to be very interested, as per the, uh, previous comment about Stephen Hawking, um, in my work on what might be called post-Einsteinian physics. In particular, if you check out his sponsorship of a conference that he held in the Virgin Islands called Confronting Gravity, um, he was very interested in, um, science. This obviously is an area with potential military applications. It’s, uh … He was a very strange person from beginning to end.
00:08:12
Douglas Murray: When you-
00:08:12
Eric Weinstein: I don’t really believe-
00:08:13
Douglas Murray: When you say-
00:08:14
Eric Weinstein: … you could meet this person and come-
00:08:14
Douglas Murray: When you say that, that he was a strange person, I mean, describe some of the things that were odd in that first meeting, that meet- that one meeting you had.
00:08:22
Eric Weinstein: Um, sure. Uh, I don’t hear anyone mention the fact that he used an American flag as a tablecloth, making his dinner table look like both a coffin and a trap for you to stain the flag of your own country. Uh, he brought in a woman who, um, I think he introduced as an heiress, uh, who was braless, that he bounced on his, uh, leg at a financial meeting, uh, in an attempt to create a distraction. Uh, the whole thing was completely surreal from beginning to end. I think one thing that you can learn about this is that he created an incredibly, uh, intriguing world. There was no hint… I think this was, like, 20- 2003, 2004, so this is before he gets into trouble in Florida.
00:09:06
Douglas Murray: Mm.
00:09:07
Eric Weinstein: Um, and, you know, the whole thing was like a scene out of a movie, and you both wanted to be nowhere close and to know everything about it. And I walked out of there, called my wife and said, uh, “I just met a human being who does not appear to be a normal human being. He appears to be a construct. Somebody appears to have constructed something that looks like a financier, but if you scratch the surface, doesn’t behave like one, doesn’t seem to know a lot about science, although he’s very interested in science.” Nothing made any sense. Up was down, left was right, black was white.
00:09:39
Douglas Murray: Well, w- we’re, we’re gonna have to take a short break, but I want to keep all three of you here because I want to get back after the break into this really crucial question of who Jeffrey Epstein actually might have been. Who do we think he was? We’ll be talking about that and much more after the break. [upbeat music] Welcome back to Uncensored. Still with me today are author and investigative journalist Vicky Ward, author of The War Against the Jews, and Jeffrey Epstein’s former defense lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, and the physicist Eric Weinstein. Let me just very quickly, Eric, I just wanted to ask you quickly, uh, what you were saying before the break, w- what is the a- actual allegation you’re making? Who do you think Jeffrey Epstein actually was?
00:10:23
Eric Weinstein: I don’t know. That’s a great question. Um, but I knew that he wasn’t who he said he was almost from the instant I started speaking to him. Um, if I had to make a guess, and you’re calling for speculation, I would say that he really belonged to, uh, what is almost certainly the covert operations community, and, um, that he, uh, did not appear to have a prime broker. Nobody seemed to have traded with him. Nobody, uh, seems to ask questions, uh, around him. So it’s very suspicious that we don’t, for example, ask for a Form 13F. If he was a major hedge fund trader, uh, it’s almost impossible to move through the markets without leaving a wake. Uh, if you have to speculate, I would say that he probably belonged to covert operations, uh, for one or more, um, n- nations, and that what we’re looking at is a very strange… You can shake your head, Alan, but it’s also the case that I don’t necessarily believe that you stopped associating with him personally, uh, at the time of his, um, con- conviction in Florida, because, uh, I think there are pictures of you at the, um, Program for Revolutionary Dynamics, uh, socializing with Pinker, Trivers. I don’t know. You tell me-
00:11:38
Douglas Murray: Well, I’m gonna have to go back to Alan Dershowitz on that. Alan Dershowitz, how do you respond?
00:11:42
Alan Dershowitz: Well, well be- well before that. Uh, no, uh, he was not a member of any intelligence agencies. I’m, I’m quite sure of that. Um, and, uh, he was not a hedge fund guy. In fact, once, this is a… You never wanna tell humorous stories about Jeffrey Epstein, but he once said to me he wanted to sue a newspaper- Uh, for defamation. I said, “Why, did they call you a pedophile?” He said, “No, they called me a hedge fund guy.” Uh, he was very upset at being called a hedge fund guy. Um, I, I don’t know what his financial business was, but I can be relatively certain he was not an asset for the Mossad.
00:12:16
Douglas Murray: C- can I just ask why-
00:12:17
Alan Dershowitz: This is the first time I know him, and I asked him
00:12:17
Douglas Murray: … Alan Dershowitz, can I just ask why you’re so certain about this? Because it, it does seem to have been an intelligence-gathering operation of some kind, or a kompromat situation, or a blackmail situation. Something like that, surely.
00:12:28
Alan Dershowitz: It’s possible, but I s- never saw any evidence of that. He was a guy from Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Coney Island. He was very curious. He wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. He didn’t know as much about science as he thought he did. But I can tell you that people like Steven Pinker, and people like, uh, Stephen Gould, and people like, uh, um, the president of Harvard thought he asked good questions during the seminars that we all attended. Those seminars, I never attended a seminar after, um, I represented him. My relationship did terminate. I continued to take his phone calls after that. Look, I don’t know who Jeffrey Epstein is. He was very, very s- I didn’t even wanna meet him initially, but, uh, Lady Rothschild insisted. And then some people at Harvard said they wanted me to put together some people to attend, uh, seminars of his.
00:13:18
Douglas Murray: Uh-huh.
00:13:18
Alan Dershowitz: And I did that. And, um, and, and we learned a lot.
00:13:21
Douglas Murray: Vi-
00:13:21
Alan Dershowitz: I met people at Harvard-
00:13:22
Douglas Murray: Uh-huh
00:13:22
Alan Dershowitz: … that I had never known, even been on the faculty for 50 years. Men and women.
00:13:27
Douglas Murray: Vicky Ward-
00:13:28
Alan Dershowitz: Uh, he-
00:13:28
Douglas Murray: L- l- let me just come back to Vicky Ward quickly. Uh, you’ve been waiting patiently. But, um, I mean, a man who apparently boasted to associates that he had compromising material, film footage and others, of important individuals. Uh, a- and that’s not the normal way in which anyone behaves, is it?
00:13:49
Vicky Ward: Right, Douglas. So, I mean, one thing we did learn in the papers that came out last night is that, you know, he did, acco- in some of the depositions, ask the women who claim that they were sent out to men to give them very detailed descriptions of what had happened so that he could use it to blackmail them. Um, I’ve never seen that spelled out-
00:14:09
Douglas Murray: Mm
00:14:09
Vicky Ward: … quite so specifically before. And then to your point about, you know, the question, who was Jeffrey Epstein? Here’s what we do know that is not speculative. He did know the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. He did know Mohammed bin Zayed, the ruler of the, uh, United Arab Emirates. Uh, he did know very well Ehud Barak, the former prime minister, uh, of Israel. The, pictures of all of these men. He, there’s a picture of him, uh, uh, I think, I believe with the Pope. There was a picture, uh, uh, y- you, picture of him, all sorts of world-
00:14:51
Alan Dershowitz: Right
00:14:51
Vicky Ward: … leaders. And, and we know that even after he got out of jail in 2010, you know, um, he, he was clever enough to use the connections he had with the academics, with the p- the former president of Harvard, with these other world leaders to draw in other billionaires, like Bill Gates. He understood how very rich, powerful people around the world connect with each other. He understood what very rich, powerful people want from each other. He understood how to connect the plutocracy and the elite. Does that mean he was an asset? I don’t… You know, there is, there is speculation, but it, it is… He, he certainly was a manipulator of the 0.001%.
00:15:45
Douglas Murray: Um, uh, uh-
00:15:46
Alan Dershowitz: He, uh-
00:15:46
Douglas Murray: … Eric Weinstein, quickly, just coming back to you, if I may quickly. Um, uh, I think a name that quite a lot of people have been rather surprised to see on this list, for perhaps several reasons, is Professor, the late Professor Stephen Hawking. Uh, uh, what on Earth are we meant to make of this?
00:16:02
Eric Weinstein: Well, I mean, there’s two separate things. One is that, uh, the state of physics, uh, is bizarre in that, um, it’s one of the most consequential things you could possibly study for military purposes. Um, and at the same time, it has been sort of more or less run into the ground. Um, so Stephen Hawking was, uh, of interest probably for the same reason that, uh, Jeffrey Epstein was much more interested in talking to me about, um, post-Einsteinian gravity than he was in talking about carry trades. And what, what Professor Dershowitz says is very strange to me, because he advertised to me that he was a currency trader, uh, running a massive, uh, hedge fund out of the Lazard House in New York on Madison Avenue. And I dropped off documents there. So something is really not gelling. And one of the really interesting things would be to have very extensive discussions, uh, to try to figure out who this person is, because the pers- person who presented himself to me was much more like the person who presented himself to Vicky than the person who presented himself to Alan Dershowitz. Now, what I would say is that he had-
00:17:12
Alan Dershowitz: Agreed
00:17:12
Eric Weinstein: … also extensive, uh, contacts apparently with the Harvard Mathematics department, both through Benedict Gross and through, uh, Martin Nowak. Um, h- Harvard is all through this story. And as we are learning, Harvard is a very strange place. Uh, I was there for about 20 years. Uh, it is sort of an extension of the US government in an unacknowledged capacity. And it has… The only university to really have the power to effectively change the narrative of academics, in particular very consequential fields. Now, the other thing about Stephen Hawking that you should just know is you should probably do a search on the words San Bernardino- And Stephen Hawking. Uh, it was not, uh, a secret that, uh, Professor Ha- Hawking had a very healthy appetite for life, and that this is not a new revelation, nor is the fact that he was associated with Jeffrey Epstein, uh, a new revelation. So that there’s something very peculiar about the way in which we are forgetting a tremendous amount. I would also recommend looking up the name Craig Spence if the, uh, suggestion that this sounds like a completely insane idea, that he was connected to intelligence. Uh, Craig Spence is the antecedent, uh, apparently of Jeffrey Epstein. It’s just very strange that all these things-
00:18:29
Douglas Murray: Wow
00:18:29
Eric Weinstein: … made the papers. There’s extensive documentation on the internet. We pretend-
00:18:32
Douglas Murray: Let me-
00:18:32
Eric Weinstein: … that we don’t know.
00:18:33
Douglas Murray: Let me… Just go quickly, Alan Dershowitz, I can see you want to come back in.
00:18:37
Alan Dershowitz: Well, of course he knew Stephen Hawking, as there are newspaper reports about Stephen Hawking having come to a conference on his island where he had conferences. So far, not a single one of the names that have come out, uh, has surprised me. I had heard all of it, uh, before. But as the judge in the Second Circuit, Cabranes, once said, “If there’s an accusation made in court papers, it’s to be less believed than an accusation made to the media. Because if the accusation is made to the media and it’s false, you can sue for defamation. Whereas if the accusation is made in court papers, there’s a privilege.” And so the judge said, “Look skeptically at accusations made in court papers.” Look, I want everything out. I want all the theories out there, all the documents. Let the public decide. There are people who-
00:19:24
Douglas Murray: The deal w-
00:19:24
Alan Dershowitz: … don’t want things. They have things to hide. But for people like me who have nothing to hide, who are not in any way embarrassed about any of these revelations, ’cause we know we did nothing wrong, we’re the ones who want all these papers out, all these documents out. And I’m hoping the judge will now release everything, every single document.
00:19:43
Douglas Murray: Um, fi-
00:19:43
Eric Weinstein: Alan, I find that very interesting.
00:19:45
Douglas Murray: Go ahead, Eric, quickly.
00:19:46
Eric Weinstein: Because in part-
00:19:47
Douglas Murray: Yeah.
00:19:47
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, one of the things that I find very intriguing is that Jeffrey Epstein appeared to know all sorts of things about me that were not public, and, uh, seem to require almost a periscope into my life. In particular, scientific, uh, things about me that, uh, probably flowed through the Harvard department that I was, uh, where, from which I took my PhD. I don’t think that you’re grasping how strong the circumstantial case is that this person was somehow, uh, attached to intelligence, and may have benefited from things like, uh, state secret privilege, uh, and other forms of exotica in the law.
00:20:26
Douglas Murray: Let me finish with just asking a very quick but pretty important question-
00:20:29
Eric Weinstein: Sure
00:20:29
Douglas Murray: … of each of you one by one, if you may. Uh, just very quickly. Of course, the other thing that makes the whole thing bizarre is the manner of his death. Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself? Vicky?
00:20:41
Vicky Ward: I think that whatever happened, uh, he had help. He, it didn’t happen just by himself.
00:20:48
Douglas Murray: Alan Dershowitz?
00:20:50
Alan Dershowitz: I have the same view. I think he probably killed himself, probably paid off guards to close the TV and other things. But I don’t exclude the possibility that there may have been, uh, third, third parties involved.
00:21:04
Douglas Murray: And-
00:21:04
Alan Dershowitz: I, I’m not sure. That’s why I want a complete, everything coming out. Enough speculation, enough inference. Let’s get to the facts.
00:21:12
Douglas Murray: And Eric Weinstein?
00:21:14
Eric Weinstein: If I had to speculate, I would say that I’ve never met a person less likely to terminate his own life from embarrassment than Jeffrey Epstein. I would put him first on the list of a person who would be undaunted by being worldwide known as a sex offender.
00:21:28
Alan Dershowitz: It wouldn’t be embar-
00:21:28
Douglas Murray: Thank you very mu- thank you very much-
00:21:31
Alan Dershowitz: It-
00:21:31
Douglas Murray: … uh, Vicky Ward in New York, Alan Dershowitz in Delaware, and Eric Weinstein in LA. It’s a great pleasure to have you all on. Thank you.
