<i>[sparse dramatic music]</i> <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>DAVID: This story really began for us the day in July</i> <i>that Jeffrey Epstein was arrested</i> and criminally charged with sex trafficking of minors. ELLEN: Suddenly, he was someone we were thinking about. One of the big questions was where his money was from. <i>DAVID: This is a college dropout,</i> <i>a former high-school math teacher</i> <i>who had had scant Wall Street experience.</i> <i>How does someone like that</i> come up with hundreds of millions of dollars? <i>ELLEN: And we were tantalized by the fact that</i> he seemed to have influence with a lot of powerful people. <i>DAVID: And these weren’t models and Hollywood people.</i> These are some of the biggest names in business and finance. ELLEN: They were Nobel Prize winners, Wall Street bigwigs. DAVID: The list goes on and on. <i>And we wanted to figure out why people had gravitated to him</i> even after he had become known as a sexual predator. <i>ELLEN: And then in September, our reporters met a man</i> who claimed to have a secret trove of information <i>from Epstein’s properties.</i> <i>DAVID: This is someone who had extraordinary,</i> probably unparalleled inside access to not only Epstein, but Epstein’s digital archive. <i>ELLEN: If what the informant was saying was true,</i> it had the potential to unlock Jeffrey Epstein’s most important secrets. <i>[dramatic music]</i> <i>♪ ♪</i> - I think that this story is a window into how things work behind... the curtain of wealth and power. And to be honest, it’s a little bit about journalism, too. <i>[sparse suspenseful music]</i> <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>I personally, or as a journalist,</i> <i>do not care who is sleeping with whom.</i> <i>That is not my business.</i> <i>But it is my business</i> <i>to understand what was going on with Jeffrey Epstein,</i> <i>and throughout all of the Epstein story,</i> <i>there was sort of the whiff of blackmail.</i> - And the people who were involved in this just refused to say anything, which—we’re journalists. There’s nothing that piques our curiosity more than a bunch of rich, powerful people saying, “There’s nothing to see here.” <i>So we started digging.</i> <i>ELLEN: We had a lot of reporters sort of working on these related stories,</i> and this sort of brought a bunch of them together. Jacob—you know, to be honest, I don’t remember how Jacob got involved. I don’t actually remember. - Originally, I wasn’t quite part of the team. You know, I work on the Styles desk, which we sometimes joke is the toy department of “The New York Times.” But I kind of couldn’t drop the story. <i>The cast of characters was too dark</i> <i>and, at the same time, too colorful and weird.</i> - But we wouldn’t be here without Jacob. <i>JACOB: I was looking into Jeffrey Epstein’s rise</i> <i>in the 1980s, and I called Stan Pottinger</i> because he was representing victims, and I figured that he might know or have heard some stuff along the way. <i>DAVID: Stan Pottinger is a former official</i> back in the Nixon and Ford presidential administrations. ANCHOR: He is a former assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division. <i>ELLEN: Was a longtime lawyer, famous for dating Gloria Steinem.</i> <i>He was sort of a man around town in New York.</i> - And generally quite well regarded. - You can trust the process. You should come forward and help see that justice is done. - Some of the questions that I was asking him— most, actually— he didn’t know about. So I hung up the phone, and a couple of hours later, he called me back and said, “I think maybe we should meet.” - Pottinger mentions something extremely juicy to Jacob, which is that— “We have an informant.” <i>JACOB: And he said, “I’m working with David Boies,</i> “and we have found this guy who we believe has access “to an enormous amount of information about Jeffrey Epstein.” <i>DAVID: At the time that we first heard from Pottinger</i> about this informant, he and David Boies were two of the most prominent lawyers representing alleged victims of Epstein. [indistinct chatter] <i>EMILY: David Boies is one of the most powerful lawyers</i> <i>in the country today.</i> For a while he was kind of lauded as the modern-day Atticus Finch. <i>DAVID: Litigating some of the country’s most famous cases,</i> <i>whether it’s Bush v. Gore or the Microsoft antitrust case</i> <i>or gay marriage before the Supreme Court.</i> - Marriage equality will be the law throughout this land. - And his reputation had been somewhat tarnished because he represented Harvey Weinstein. <i>DAVID: Boies helped Weinstein hire Black Cube—</i> <i>a firm that worked to manipulate</i> <i>Weinstein’s alleged victims and deceive reporters.</i> <i>The “Times” had worked with Bois’ firm in the past</i> <i>and fired them after learning about this.</i> <i>- B-O-I-E-S.</i> <i>EMILY: For David Boies, the Epstein saga</i> <i>provided him almost, like, a redemption tour.</i> And he’s really been out representing himself <i>as a huge advocate for sex abuse victims.</i> So he’s a really complicated character but also really considered almost like royalty in the American legal community. <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>Jacob was setting up this meeting with the lawyers</i> <i>and the informant.</i> We planned to meet on Saturday morning on September 14th at the Boies Schiller law firm. <i>JACOB: We get there, and we are quickly told</i> <i>that we’re going to drop our phones and our laptops.</i> <i>EMILY: And then we walk in, and we met the informant.</i> I would describe him as this bear of a man. He’s probably, like, two or three times my size. - He wore a blue shirt, and he had flip-flops on. <i>EMILY: And the meeting is off the record,</i> so that means that we can’t talk about it now. <i>But we left feeling pretty excited.</i> <i>JACOB: The informant— he was compelling, actually.</i> There was a calmness about him that day that indicated that he wasn’t desperate. <i>EMILY: And so we walk up to “The New York Times” building,</i> and I get an email that says, “Are you free?” It’s from the informant. And right away I respond and say, “Yes,” period. And then he says, “Where can we meet?” <i>DAVID: The secret source is reaching out to us directly.</i> That is gold. It means that the source wants an unchaperoned setting. <i>JACOB: We quickly moved to a Chinese restaurant.</i> <i>In the middle of the day, it tends to be empty,</i> <i>and indeed it was.</i> To our right was a group of women who were snipping string beans. <i>EMILY: It’s, like, this giant mound in the middle of the table,</i> <i>and they’re just kind of snipping off the ends of these green beans.</i> <i>JACOB: But other than that, there was almost no one in the restaurant.</i> [door bells jingle] <i>He got there a few minutes after we did, and he sat down.</i> <i>He, you know, took off his messenger bag, and...</i> <i>he hadn’t gotten a pedicure, you know?</i> I mean, he’s a big guy. He looked the part. <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>EMILY: One of the first things that he says is,</i> <i>“I don’t like lawyers.”</i> <i>And he’s really ready to have a real conversation.</i> <i>JACOB: We are told to call him Patrick Kessler.</i> <i>We are told that this is a pseudonym</i> <i>because he lives this clandestine life.</i> - What he also tells us is that he was one of the early creators of this messaging system that allowed people to send very encrypted, very secure messages, and that’s actually how he was connected to Jeffrey Epstein. <i>JACOB: He claimed to have gone to work for Epstein</i> <i>after Epstein got out of jail in 2009,</i> <i>and he claimed that Epstein had a surveillance system.</i> - He says that Jeffrey Epstein wanted to use his system to store vast amounts of surveillance footage, <i>and he said Epstein had four cameras running in each of the bedrooms.</i> <i>JACOB: He said that the cameras were recording all the time—</i> in New York, in Palm Beach, in London. <i>EMILY: So there would be thousands upon thousands</i> <i>of hours of footage.</i> <i>And he pulled out his phone,</i> <i>and he started to kind of scroll through</i> <i>some different pictures that he said were stills</i> <i>from the video footage.</i> <i>There were images of people receiving oral sex.</i> <i>There were images of people having sex.</i> <i>And he said that within some of that video data</i> were powerful, prominent men abusing young women. <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>But then he told us something else,</i> <i>and this was about the lawyers.</i> <i>JACOB: He said, “What do you think of David Boies?”</i> And then he began to kind of express reservations. <i>EMILY: What Patrick told us is that he had information</i> about a number of very powerful men but that the lawyers told him to stick to only two. - Because those were the only people that they wanted out at that time. - He thought that they were motivated by money. <i>JACOB: At the end of the meeting, the way that we left it</i> <i>was that he would keep talking to the lawyers,</i> but we would also talk to him separately. <i>DAVID: We had spent months thinking about,</i> “Was there a blackmail scheme that Epstein was using? Was there secret video surveillance?” And here we have a guy who comes more or less out of the woodwork and says not only was there, but, “I have it.” <i>JACOB: After we left the first meeting,</i> <i>I was certainly skeptical in some ways,</i> <i>but it was plausible</i> that hidden-camera systems would exist, you know? When the raid on Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion happened, <i>there were all these wires from the walls.</i> <i>It seemed like computers</i> <i>and perhaps cameras had been removed.</i> <i>EMILY: I’ve also been speaking with this woman named Maria Farmer,</i> <i>who said that she was abused by Jeffrey Epstein.</i> Maria said that Jeffrey took her to this room that she described kind of as a surveillance room that has a number of screens displaying what went on in his property. <i>He told her that he was using this</i> to keep track of everything that went on in his house, that he was keeping it in case he needed it someday. <i>JACOB: Jeffrey Epstein had also told “The New York Times”</i> that he had a lot of information about powerful people. <i>And so there was this implication, even from him,</i> that if you messed with him, he could damage you. <i>[suspenseful music]</i> <i>ELLEN: Of course, it sounds very salacious.</i> But the truth is, we were trying to answer a question, which was, “What did Jeffrey Epstein have on all these powerful, powerful, wealthy men?” [phone dings] <i>EMILY: So that Monday,</i> <i>Patrick says that there’s more that he wants to talk about</i> but that we need to talk in person. <i>DAVID: He had said he was going to be in Washington</i> and planned to have some meetings on Capitol Hill, and that just scared the shit out of us. <i>It was guaranteed to leak instantly.</i> <i>EMILY: Jacob and I kind of arranged to go to D.C.,</i> and we also pull in another reporter. - They ask him if they can introduce, like, a third person. - We just said, “You’ll like her. We feel you will like her.” And indeed he did. - And he’s like, “Hi, Harriet,” <i>‘cause on my Twitter bio, it says,</i> “Being a reporter was the closest I could get to being Harriet the Spy.” He was like, “You know what? You and I are gonna get along.” <i>We decide we’re gonna meet in a hotel.</i> <i>[suspenseful music]</i> - He kind of barreled through the door once again... <i>♪ ♪</i> And kind of plopped down once again. <i>He had the same messenger bag. He had the same shirt.</i> <i>He had, I think, the same pants</i> <i>and definitely the same flip-flops</i> and definitely no pedicure. <i>JESSICA: He almost immediately pulls out</i> this big bottle of unopened Japanese whiskey... <i>Hibiki Harmony, I think it was.</i> <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>We wanted to understand what he had.</i> We wanted to get as much documentation as possible at that meeting. <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>EMILY: One of the first things that he says to us</i> is that the lawyers were hatching a plan. - And he starts describing the specifics of their plan. - The thing that blows our minds really quickly is the degree of detail that he goes into about the plan to orchestrate what, to him, feels like a blackmail scheme. <i>JESSICA: And he pulls out this retention agreement</i> <i>that he had gotten.</i> <i>JACOB: It’s, like, a dozen points.</i> <i>It’s a completely detailed contract.</i> <i>EMILY: What he said is that Stan Pottinger</i> had identified four very, very, very rich men. <i>JESSICA: All of whom Patrick says he has on tape,</i> <i>and they’re gonna go to these four men,</i> present them with this footage, and say... - “We have video of you. We have photographs of you. “And if you pay this enormous amount of money, we will make this problem go away.” <i>JESSICA: Stan Pottinger called this list of wealthy men</i> their “hot list.” <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>The sums that Patrick said they were demanding</i> <i>were astronomical.</i> - He said that the lawyers would take a 40% cut. - A fraction of that going to Patrick Kessler <i>and the remainder going into a foundation</i> <i>that they were setting up to benefit abused women.</i> <i>EMILY: If true, this not only could crack open</i> <i>the Epstein story,</i> <i>but it also might expose</i> <i>how two of America’s most prominent lawyers</i> <i>were talking about plans</i> that would keep evidence of abuse secret. <i>[dramatic music]</i> <i>JESSICA: The meeting didn’t end</i> <i>after Patrick outlined the plan by the lawyers.</i> <i>It was really only the beginning,</i> because he starts telling us a lot more about who he is. <i>He explains that he was abused as a child</i> <i>by a Bible-school teacher.</i> - He said that that’s really motivated him to hold people who are abusers of children to account. - This became kind of his cause. <i>JESSICA: He said that he found a community</i> <i>of likeminded hackers,</i> many of whom had also been abused as children. <i>DAVID: He said that their mission was to identify</i> and track down sexual predators. <i>He painted this kind of sad</i> but very shady picture of himself. <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>JESSICA: Patrick claims to have</i> <i>hundreds of thousands of hours of footage,</i> but we wanted proof that what he said he had was real. And so he says that he’s going to get it to us. <i>EMILY: He tells us that he isn’t just there representing himself,</i> that he’s there representing a team... <i>and that they’re all in agreement</i> <i>that they’ll deliver this information</i> to “The New York Times.” - He’s vague on the details. - They will do this through physical servers, that they’ve decided that’s the most secure method. - And it may take up to two weeks. - That we’ll have a certain number of months with this information, and then it all will be posted online. <i>Essentially, he’s saying,</i> “Get ready. There’s gonna be something delivered. It’s gonna be good.” As journalists, we’re trained to be skeptical, and one of the, like, old adages is, like, you have to even fact-check what your mom says. <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>JESSICA: We look into three things</i> <i>that Patrick had told us about himself.</i> One of them is, he says that he was an early investor in this coffee company. <i>He has a sticker from the coffee company</i> <i>on his laptop.</i> Turns out that there is no investor matching that description that has ever been involved in the coffee company. - Patrick also showed us a secret CIA document <i>that he had access to.</i> Later that night, I got on the train and looked it up, <i>and it came right up in Google.</i> Didn’t seem so secret. - Patrick had said that he had been connected to Jeffrey Epstein through John McAfee, <i>who is the antivirus software pioneer.</i> - This, like, reclusive, very strange businessperson who’s in hiding. <i>We eventually get in touch with him,</i> <i>and says that he’ll only speak on Skype.</i> And we’re both sitting there, and he’s in what I can only describe as, like, a tin, like, hut. <i>We ask him whether he’s introduced anyone to Epstein,</i> <i>and he refuses to confirm or deny.</i> - You never know whether someone has information or not. I remember I said to someone, I think it was Enrich, “This is no better than 50/50.” <i>[mysterious music]</i> So the question became, how were we gonna get the information <i>directly from Patrick?</i> <i>EMILY: He wants to meet with us again</i> so that he can give us the tools or the keys that we need to be able to unlock this information that will be encrypted. - So, on October 1st, we all go down to meet Patrick. <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>JACOB: At the Barrow Street Alehouse.</i> <i>He again wore the same outfit.</i> <i>He plopped down in his seat,</i> <i>and he drank a lot, and he talked a lot.</i> <i>He kept telling stories and—</i> It was like he didn’t want things to end. <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>JESSICA: He tells us this is the last time that we’re gonna see him,</i> and he will no longer have this burden of the Epstein story on his shoulders. <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>So he’s like, “I’m giving you the journal.</i> <i>“I’m giving you the cheat sheet.</i> “I’m giving you the hundreds of thousands of hours of surveillance footage.” - And in it would be a thumb drive that we would use to communicate with his colleague named Weep. <i>Weep would give us a code</i> <i>that would allow us to decrypt the files,</i> but, Patrick warned, these files will self-destruct <i>if more than one computer</i> is plugged into the servers at any given time. <i>JESSICA: And he does tell us some details</i> <i>about how these servers are gonna be delivered.</i> <i>EMILY: He says that in two days...</i> - This very small person named Steven... <i>EMILY: Will deliver 12 boxes to “The New York Times.”</i> He says that Steven has been on a boat <i>from Iceland with these boxes.</i> <i>JESSICA: Steven’s entire job on this journey</i> was to make sure that the servers didn’t overheat. - It could be ready a little bit early, but it’ll definitely be ready by Thursday. <i>♪ ♪</i> - I mean, it was a little more elaborate than I would have expected, but... it was all set up. - [sighs] It was just too— It was <i>too</i> too. It was too, like... <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>DAVID: I helped get “The New York Times” ready</i> <i>for the delivery of these boxes.</i> <i>EMILY: There’s a room in “The New York Times”</i> <i>that doesn’t have windows— it’s locked.</i> <i>ELLEN: With computers not attached to our systems, ready...</i> - So that a team of reporters can start going through these many terabytes of files. [thunder rumbling] <i>JACOB: On Thursday morning, I wake up.</i> It’s the day of the drop. [thunder rumbles] - It was cold, it was just buckets of rain pouring. Anyone who waited outside for any length of time was going to get soaked. [rain falling] <i>We had been kind of planning how we were going to—</i> <i>Are we just gonna sit out in the rain waiting for this guy?</i> <i>♪ ♪</i> What kind of van does he have? <i>You can’t really park outside our building.</i> <i>Are we gonna have to, like, hold a parking space for him?</i> <i>We started to think at that level of, like,</i> <i>nitty-gritty logistics.</i> <i>We’re super excited.</i> <i>ELLEN: I was all ready.</i> I wore kind of heavy-duty boots. I was dressed to carry boxes. <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>JESSICA: But...</i> We never get a call from Steven. Instead, we get a message from Patrick that there’s been a fire. <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>DAVID: He said that not only</i> <i>will there be no packages delivered,</i> but the contents of the packages have been destroyed. <i>JACOB: Patrick and his compatriots, they’re gone,</i> <i>they are freaked out, they are leaving.</i> - They’re about to board a flight to Kiev. One of their team members is missing. - This is a really dangerous story... <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>And we will be in touch.</i> - And at this point, a switch had flipped in our brains, and we went from, I think, mostly believing that Patrick was real to thinking that he was a fraud. <i>[laid-back music]</i> <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>You know, it’s funny.</i> <i>I think I more than probably anyone else</i> had bought into this. <i>I had these visions of these boxes arriving...</i> <i>and bringing them upstairs</i> <i>to this secret room we had set up.</i> <i>We had built up a lot of expectations in the newsroom—I had.</i> <i>I take full responsibility for that.</i> <i>I had been going around telling everyone I could.</i> <i>We are about to land literally the world’s greatest scoop.</i> <i>♪ ♪</i> To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. <i>I was crestfallen.</i> <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>JACOB: There were a lot of questions</i> <i>that still remained when the servers didn’t arrive.</i> Was Patrick a complete fabulist? Some of us certainly thought so. Was he working for somebody else? Was he simply out for attention? None of us really knew that. <i>Beyond that,</i> <i>there was the question of what the lawyers were doing</i> <i>and what Patrick was finding out from them.</i> <i>In some way,</i> it was less important whether the lawyers still believed him than what they had really been hoping to get out of what he said he had. <i>[energetic music]</i> <i>DAVID: A few weeks before Patrick said</i> <i>he would be giving us this information,</i> I was on my way to Grand Central to get a train home, when David Boies called me. <i>He said their goal was to receive</i> <i>all this information from Patrick</i> <i>and that they were going to present it to people</i> and that, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to reach a settlement?” <i>These secret settlements have become very controversial</i> <i>because they tend to bury patterns of sexual misconduct.</i> <i>David Boies is a very sophisticated guy.</i> <i>He’s talked to the media probably thousands of times in his career,</i> <i>so why on earth is he coming to me</i> <i>and speaking openly and on the record about his plans?</i> <i>[suspenseful music]</i> <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>A little more than a week</i> <i>after my call with David Boies,</i> I got a call from Stan Pottinger. <i>And he said, “we would like to meet you at the Harvard Club.”</i> <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>I got there at 4:00 on the nose.</i> <i>Pottinger led be back</i> <i>through this very ornate dining room</i> <i>with antlered animals on the walls,</i> <i>oil paintings of old men.</i> <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>Boies and Pottinger had a seat in the back,</i> <i>and they spelled out very clearly</i> what role they wanted the New York Times to play. <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>What they proposed was that once they got their hands</i> <i>on all of Patrick Kessler’s materials,</i> <i>they would give it all to us with one condition...</i> they would retain veto power over whom we named and how we named them and when, <i>because a lot of those people would be people</i> <i>they were going to engage in settlement talks with.</i> And so us writing about that would destroy the leverage, which, by the way, is a set of conditions we would never in a million years accept. - Boies was completely open about it and completely up front about a plan that, to us, sounded highly unusual. <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>DAVID: Before long, we were joined by another guest.</i> Of all people, Bob Weinstein, the brother of Harvey Weinstein, kind of bounds over to our table. <i>♪ ♪</i> They are just laughing up a storm. They’re literally slapping each other on the back. And I’m sitting to myself just thinking, “What on earth is going on here? “This is not a normal Friday afternoon for me. I’ve never seen anything like this.” At one point, I introduce myself to Bob Weinstein, who I’ve never met, and I said, “I’m a New York Times reporter.” And he looks at me, and he says, just very kind of full of himself and self-confident, <i>“Ask me anything.”</i> I said, “Okay, uh, how’s your brother doing?” <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>ELLEN: The conversation with Boies</i> was a very important puzzle piece <i>in constructing the picture of what happened,</i> <i>but we needed something</i> to help us document exactly what the plan was. And we had a little bit of a hint of what that could be. <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>EMILY: At the Barrow Street Alehouse,</i> <i>Patrick had shown us screenshots of messages</i> <i>with Stan Pottinger, the lawyer.</i> <i>JESSICA: I decide to reach back out to Patrick,</i> and eventually he agrees that he will get me these messages. <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>DAVID: It’s getting to be evening,</i> <i>and we’re all preparing to go home,</i> when all of a sudden, her phone starts buzzing. [cell phone chiming] - I have been sent a bunch of text messages <i>between Pottinger and Patrick.</i> [cell phone chiming] <i>The hot list text message,</i> <i>the text message about the contours of the plan.</i> <i>There’s a couple of text messages</i> <i>that are really interesting.</i> <i>[Jessica reading]</i> <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>[Emily reading]</i> <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>DAVID: What these messages show is the lawyers discussing plans</i> in which they would go to the men who appeared in the videos and try to get legal settlements or other money out of them. The way they would do that was basically saying, “We have this damning evidence of you. <i>“If you don’t cough up a bunch of money,</i> these could become public.” <i>[suspenseful music]</i> <i>DAVID: Now comes arguably the trickiest part of this,</i> <i>which is that we have great doubts</i> <i>about Patrick’s identity</i> <i>and the veracity of what he’s spent the last two months telling us.</i> <i>But in this case, it’s a crucial piece</i> because this is a man who, whatever his motivations, whatever his backstory, has managed to enlist David Boies and Stan Pottinger in something that is now much bigger than Patrick. <i>So it seems like we’ve got to do, like, a bunch of things, right?</i> JESSICA: We have made plans for Patrick to meet us in Baltimore. I said, “I’ve secured a promise that we will obscure your face in the shoot.” <i>He said that he insisted on anonymity</i> because he claimed that his life would be in danger if his real identity was known. We need to do two main things— we need to go over every aspect of this story so that there are no surprises, ‘cause this may very well be the last time we get access to him. And then we need to have a real confrontation with him to try to learn his identity. - So what are odds that he shows up? - If he says he’s gonna show up, he’ll show up. <i>CREW MEMBER: Patrick, we’re all set.</i> <i>PATRICK: I’m sure you are.</i> I’m glad. [sighs] - I may be naive, but why can’t you tell us who you are? - I—because it affects so many other people. Put yourself in my position and tell me that you would tell me what your name is. - If you want to make good on your genuine feeling for the work we’re trying to do, the best way for you to do that is to, like, to be honest with us about who you are. - Oh, that’s not gonna happen. [laughs] It’s a great spiel. I appreciate it. - I mean, it’s an honest spiel, and when we do know something— the things we’ve tried to check out, those things haven’t checked out. - When we met, you had a sticker of a coffee company on your laptop, and you told us that you had been an investor in that company. So we called them, and we said, “Does anybody matching your description, were they ever an investor?” - No, and that investment is null completely. They have paid back in coffee. - How big? Like, how much money did you put in? - I have no idea. EMILY: The copies of the servers were destroyed. - Mm. - But what happened to the original? - Oh, I still have those. EMILY: You still have those? - Certainly. Yeah, I would never take the only copy anywhere. That makes no sense. EMILY: Where are those now? - In a place. - There is a huge question as to whether you have what you say you have, right? - I completely agree. - And you look like potentially an unreliable narrator, and in this case, we can’t even say that we are aware that this footage exists. - Sure. - But this story is the story we have, and it’s a story we care about right now, and it’s a story that we think is really important because it speaks to the system that continues to bury information. - Well, let’s back up quickly, all right? - Yeah. - And go through a couple of things. A, it doesn’t matter. - What do you mean it doesn’t matter? - And I am not saying this is true, because the fact is that I do have this information. But let’s imagine that I don’t. It doesn’t affect the story. The story is about the lawyers and how they tried to manipulate the system, so it doesn’t matter what the factual information is. <i>♪ ♪</i> DAVID: I personally think this guy is full of shit. ELLEN: I have to say I think I agree. JESSICA: Totally. I mean, we’re treating him because of how many times what he’s said has just not checked out. We are not relying on him for any details except for the text messages, which we are getting comment on. <i>EMILY: We presented Patrick</i> with a number of different pieces of information <i>that hadn’t checked out,</i> <i>and for each of those pieces of information,</i> Patrick told us a new story, and that didn’t check out either. <i>♪ ♪</i> JESSICA: What can you give me? One single thing about you that’s true? One thing. <i>PATRICK: I-I-I did invest in a coffee company.</i> <i>[laughs] There you go.</i> <i>And I know that you think that that’s bullshit, but it’s not.</i> JESSICA: The story is gonna say that in our estimation, you have behaved like a con man and a liar, and that’s just because every single thing I try to verify goes up in smoke. It’s like vapor. <i>PATRICK: Mm, I’m sorry you feel that way,</i> <i>and I wish there was something I could do about it,</i> <i>but right now there’s nothing I can do.</i> JESSICA: Okay, okay. <i>PATRICK: All right? </i>JESSICA: Yep. <i>PATRICK: Thank you, Silver. </i>JESSICA: Bye. [indistinct chatter] <i>[pensive music]</i> <i>DAVID: The biggest and most important thing we still have to do</i> <i>is talk to David Boies and Stan Pottinger</i> about what we found. BOIES: Hi. DAVID: Hey. BOIES: Good to see you. DAVID: Likewise. Come on in. In one of the hypotheticals that Pottinger laid out if you take his words at face value, <i>there simply is no client.</i> <i>This is simply a way</i> to make a problem go away for a very rich man, <i>but it does nothing at all</i> <i>to expose the institutional systemic wrongdoing</i> that many of their clients say they want to be attacking. BOIES: My firm—one of our... pro bono areas of concentration has been representing and advocating for abused and disadvantaged women and children. By the time we got to September of 2019, Epstein’s arrested, he’s died. The press is now paying attention to this. We spent, you know, three and a half, four, five years when nobody was interested in this case and, um, what Patrick offered, if he were real, is something that would move that process forward very fast. It would have been a game changer. DAVID: Yeah. - I mean, it confirmed what we had believed and what I had been saying for years, which is that the scope and scale of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation was unparalleled. We had somewhat different interests. His interest was get everything out there. - Yeah. - Our interest was we want it all to get out, but we don’t necessarily want it all to get out immediately. - Yeah. BOIES: The whole point that we have as lawyers is that if we have information that’s related to our clients, we want to be sure that we use it in the way that’s most effective for our clients. JESSICA: Mm-hmm. - Is there any way he might’ve gotten the impression before the meeting with Emily and Jacob that you and Stan wanted him to only focus on two names? - I don’t—no. DAVID: Okay. - Look, there’s no way he could have gotten the impression before that meeting that we were trying to censor him. - I think maybe this would be a good moment to show you some things. BOIES: Sure, sure. - Yeah. - You’d mentioned that you’d seen some of the text messages between Stan— - Well, I-I’m— What I’m aware of is Stan’s description of them to me. JESSICA: Ah, okay. Here. DAVID: We have them. Maybe that will help kind of clarify some things. - To be frank, they— - Yeah. - This suggests to me some inconsistencies in what we’ve been talking about, but let’s go through them because we want to hear your thoughts. - [stammering] Before— Don’t—don’t do that, okay? I mean, don’t start talking about inconsistencies like that, because I don’t think there’s any inconsistency here. - Okay, well, but you haven’t read these. - No, but there can’t be any inconsistency with what I’ve told you. DAVID: Well, maybe— - No, but listen to me, all right? Because what I’ve told you is what I did. There can’t be any inconsistency between what I told you and what’s in here ‘cause I didn’t do this. - So maybe let’s just go through some of this so we can just talk this out. So this is Stan laying out where you guys are gonna meet with Emily and Jacob. - Right. - And it says, “I will meet you there at 8:00 a.m. “At 10:00, we will meet there with two reporters. “Not a long meeting. “You will be there simply to give cred to the source of info and certain subjects will be off-limits.” So we had just asked you previously if there’s any way Patrick might’ve gotten the impression that you guys were telling him to limit the information shared, and you said, no, there is not a way that he could’ve gotten the impression. - And that— DAVID: So that strikes me as inconsistent. - No, no, well, I had had one conversation with him, and there was no way that he could’ve gotten that from that conversation. DAVID: Okay. BOIES: I didn’t realize that there were text messages that had preceded that meeting. - So we next get to this page. - This is Stan talking? DAVID: Yes. JESSICA: Yes. - What is he responding to? - Patrick asked, “How would this work?” And Stan explains it. He lays out two hypotheticals. One is what he calls a standard model. - The second one I’m most interested in. BOIES: Yeah. - Because I’ve never seen anything like it before. DAVID: He says, “No client is actually involved in this structure.” You said earlier that there would be— in any of these scenarios, there would be a client, and I’m curious how you square that with Stan saying, “No client is actually involved in this structure.” - Well, what he’s laying it out to Patrick is a hypothetical, and I can tell you that it’s a hypothetical that nobody ever did. This is somebody... who, the more I go through this stuff, looks to me here like he’s trying to set Stan up. DAVID: We’re eager for your interpretation of what the words on the page mean. - Are there text messages in between these two pages? - I don’t know. BOIES: Okay. DAVID: We’re not trying to build a legal case here. We’re not trying to convince a jury. - No, I— - But listen. We’re trying to understand if there’s a way to interpret this other than the way that it looks to us. - And what I’m saying is that these aren’t my text messages, okay? - These are all the words of Stan Pottinger, who... - No, but— - Was working with you. - Yes, but—but— No, well, you keep saying that. Um... DAVID: That’s what you said. - [stammering] Yes. Um, uh, but you keep implying that he’s working with me on this. - Well, yeah, because we discussed this at the Harvard Club. - We did not discuss this at the Harvard Club. DAVID: Not in this level of detail, David, but we discussed— - We did not discuss this at the Harvard Club. - Not in anything remotely resembling this detail but we very clearly discussed the plans to set up a foundation to have it get funded by abusers, and this is laying out in, I think, fairly clear detail the mechanics by which you guys were proposing to do that. And so, again, I’m interested— please tell me how I’m wrong. - Well, for one thing you keep saying, “You guys.” I didn’t write this text, and I haven’t had a chance to talk to Stan about what he meant by it. - Patrick was uncomfortable with that because of what it would mean for the videos. He thought that it was essentially a way of burying the videos. BOIES: If you’re bringing a settlement to somebody who you’ve got a claim against, they don’t know what the evidence is until you show it to them. Once it’s public, everybody knows about it. - And what’s the problem with that? - Well, your leverage is gone. You don’t have the ability to provide them with the information in the settlement that allows them to think they’re getting something. DAVID: What would they be getting? - What they’d be getting is peace. People want to avoid litigation. They want to avoid the risks and uncertainties of going to a jury trial. - They often want to avoid damaging information like videos becoming public. - And they also want to avoid damaging information, no question about it. I think that although some of the language that I think Stan used was a little loose here, I think that if what he meant was that we want to control the information for the benefit of our clients, I think that is legitimate. <i>♪ ♪</i> <i>JESSICA: These kind of agreements are certainly not illegal,</i> <i>but David Boies has criticized them</i> <i>as a form of rich man’s justice.</i> <i>In this case, it seems like he and Stan Pottinger</i> <i>are discussing reaching those same kinds of settlements.</i> At this point, we need to talk to the only person who knows what was meant by those messages, and that’s Stan Pottinger. <i>[phone line trilling]</i> - Stan, it’s Jacob. I’m here with David and Emily. <i>STAN: Hello, folks.</i> - We had Stan’s words on paper, but that doesn’t mean we knew Stan’s intent, and that’s what we wanted to find out. <i>STAN: A settlement is a legal term that happens only, only,</i> <i>when you have a lawsuit</i> <i>and you have a client or a proposed client</i> <i>who credibly says, “I have been wronged,</i> <i>and here’s the guy who wronged me,”</i> <i>and then you go to the lawyer for the other side and say,</i> <i>“How do you want to deal with this?</i> <i>Should we litigate it? Should we settle it?”</i> - Stan, I want to ask you about the hypothetical number two that you laid out on October 3rd. <i>STAN: [stammering] I will.</i> EMILY: And what you say in that hypothetical is, “We as lawyers approach a potential defendant about a violation—” <i>STAN: Stop right there.</i> <i>“About a violation.”</i> <i>An allegation that a girl client of ours has been abused.</i> <i>Keep going.</i> - And the defendant says, “Don’t sue, I prefer to retain your firm “not to sue and to make a contribution to a nonprofit as part of the retainer.” <i>STAN: Correct.</i> - “No client is actually involved in this structure.” <i>STAN: Stop right there.</i> <i>I made a mistake, and I left out a word.</i> <i>After the word “client,”</i> <i>I should’ve typed with my thumbs, “lawsuit,”</i> <i>“no client lawsuit is actually involved,” but go ahead.</i> DAVID: That’s a pretty big omission, Stan. EMILY: Yeah, yeah. <i>STAN: I corrected that the next day, but keep going.</i> DAVID: So who’s the client in that situation, Stan? - Yeah, can you just explain to us what was going on there? ‘Cause... [stammering] It doesn’t necessarily align with what you just were telling us. <i>STAN: I think it was exactly what I was telling you, and here’s why.</i> <i>I went to a lawyer who structures these, and I said,</i> <i>“Is it possible to do— is it possible and ethical?”</i> <i>And he said, “Yes, it happens all the time.”</i> EMILY: How does that work if you’re also representing the women or the girls who said that they’ve been abused by those same men— potentially the men on the hot list? <i>STAN: [stammers] </i>- How does that work? <i>STAN: [stammering]</i> <i>The person who was violated is given...</i> <i>her damages.</i> - So then you’re representing both the victim and her abuser? <i>STAN: [laughing] No.</i> <i>You represent the victim,</i> <i>and then after this is settled,</i> <i>you represent the wrongdoer if he says,</i> <i>“I want you to be my lawyer going forward.”</i> - You would go from representing a victim of abuse to representing the person who perpetrated that abuse? That feels good to you? <i>STAN: No, it’s not— it’s not real.</i> <i>It has nothing to do</i> <i>with what would actually be done at all.</i> <i>I didn’t owe Patrick 100% honesty.</i> <i>The hypothetical two, which is hypothetical,</i> <i>was done strictly to try to get him to send us the servers.</i> DAVID: You said you were misleading him deliberately to get the servers, and I’m wondering if it’s common practice for you or for lawyers in general to deliberately mislead potential witnesses. <i>STAN: I have no idea. Do you?</i> EMILY: Well, have you done this before? <i>STAN: Never.</i> EMILY: So why now? <i>STAN: To get the servers.</i> - So you’re willing to do anything to get it? <i>STAN: [scoffs] No, I would not do anything to get it.</i> <i>That’s... really quite strange.</i> - So where do you draw the line? <i>STAN: Where do you?</i> DAVID: What would happen in this settlement that you’re discussing? What happens to the underlying video? <i>[dramatic music]</i> <i>STAN: I don’t know. I have to think about that.</i> - Does it become public? <i>STAN: I don’t want to speculate about that since we never did it.</i> - Seems like they’re paying in part to make these videos go away. <i>STAN: Oh, well, I would think so. Wouldn’t you?</i> - I would think so, yes. <i>STAN: I would think so,</i> <i>but I’m not gonna speculate what they would do with the video.</i> <i>All right, thank you very, very much.</i> EMILY: Yeah, thanks for your time. If there’s anything more. JACOB: Thank you. - Thanks, Stan. <i>STAN: Okay, bye-bye. </i>EMILY: Bye. JACOB: Bye. <i>♪ ♪</i> We’ve spent the past three months in this weird twilight zone where nothing is as it seems. Facts change, people change their stories, people are lying, people are manipulating each other. - We still don’t know who Patrick Kessler is. We are no closer to proving whether Jeffrey Epstein had a blackmail operation, and we don’t know exactly what the lawyers would’ve done had this information come through. - But the story is a glimpse into how big-money clients and big-money law solve problems. - What Patrick helped us see was that these lawyers, the ones that are hailed as champions of women, participate in a system that does allow evidence of wrongdoing to just never see the light of day. - It just makes you wonder, like, what are the effects of all of these secrets? What is the impact of a conspiracy of silence? And what secrets do powerful people have about each other, and what does that allow them to get away with?