In late 2009, as civil complaints alleging Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of underage girls were mounting, George Rush, the long-running Daily News gossip columnist, was preparing a story on one of the latest Jane Doe lawsuits filed against the billionaire financier. The legal documents contained allegations that hadn’t yet been reported, and Rush was keen on nudging them into the public domain. He drew up a list of questions and sent them to Howard Rubenstein, who was Epstein’s publicist at the time. Rush’s reporting resulted in a call from Epstein himself to Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman, who had been a business partner of Epstein’s a few years earlier. The enigmatic and press-shy tycoon was offering Zuckerman something rare: an interview for the Daily News. But when Epstein got on the phone with Rush, Epstein said he could only speak off the record, on the advice of his lawyers. The whole 22-minute conversation sounded to Rush like a bunch of spin.

“It was just kind of this self-serving rationale for how he had been tormented by the lawyers for these girls, whom he characterized as these preexisting prostitutes and strippers who’d already been indoctrinated into the sex world,” Rush told me, describing the interview only in general terms because, even 10 years later, it’s still off the record. “You got the sense that he could adopt many masks. He played up his working-class roots on Coney Island, and how he understood that this was a good story that sold newspapers, and how everybody hates a rich guy. He basically said, I get why this is a good story for you, but I think a better story would be how these con artist lawyers are abusing the legal system.”

Rush said his Epstein chat was “almost useless,” though it “did give me a window into him. He briefly acknowledged getting himself into this mess. But he showed little remorse and no pity for his victims. He was mostly concerned with keeping Ghislaine Maxwell, his alleged henchwoman, out of the story.” Nonetheless, the interview landed Rush in a Judy Miller–style First Amendment battle with an attorney for one of Epstein’s accusers. The attorney, Brad Edwards, went to court to try to compel Rush to turn over the recording on the basis that it contained potentially incriminating evidence. (A judge agreed, but fate intervened on Rush’s behalf when Edwards’s client settled.)

Rush still has that recording, and he’s been thinking about it in recent days as Epstein has become, arguably, the biggest story in America. For Rush and many others who crossed paths with Epstein when he was a prominent figure on the Manhattan media circuit, Epstein’s July 8 federal sex-crimes indictment is especially stunning. “It’s a day that, frankly, I wasn’t sure I’d ever see,” said Rush. “He’s sort of like a Nazi who fled to South America. He was living in peace, like Dr. Mengele in Paraguay, literally on his own island. I think he got too relaxed. It just seemed like he had gotten away with so much, and that the world had moved on.”

For a while, it did very much seem like the world had moved on. But then came #MeToo, followed by last year’s incredibly damning Miami Herald investigation. It not only shed new light—lots and lots of really bright light—on Epstein’s alleged history of fondling and manipulating teenage girls, but it also put Donald Trump’s labor secretary, Alex Acosta, in the hot seat for a sweetheart plea deal that he cut with the infamous Palm Beach resident as a U.S. Attorney back in 2007: 13 months in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail, with a private security detail and daily work release, in return for an admission that Epstein solicited minors for prostitution. (Trump, who has his own history with Epstein, had himself been keeping close tabs on the long-simmering Epstein scandal, back when the National Enquirer was doing fresh coverage in 2015, as my colleague Emily Jane Fox reported. Epstein has pleaded not guilty to the new charges, which include sex trafficking.)