Do you want to know what it’s like to be collateral damage in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal—to find yourself the subject of uninformed newspaper articles; to have associates fearful of having your name attached to theirs; to be caught in the Epstein whirlwind because years ago you attended a meeting or exchanged a few emails with the man the world now—understandably—sees as the devil incarnate?
On Thursday morning, Bob Kerrey—the 82-year-old former Nebraska senator, then governor, then Democratic presidential candidate—told me exactly what it’s been like, at least for him. Kerrey’s name popped up in the Epstein files because in 2013, he did indeed have a meeting with the pedophile, as well as a few email exchanges in which they discussed further meetings. (He told me he doesn’t recall whether he attended a second meeting.) Beyond that narrow time frame, the two men never interacted.
But because of that meeting—and the ruckus it caused—last Friday Kerrey resigned as chairman of a Nebraska-based clean energy company called Monolith. The press, of course, was all over the story, just like it was all over the Casey Wasserman story, and the J.K. Rowling story, and the many others whose glancing appearance in the Epstein files made them, you know, newsworthy.
“Let me read you this text I got yesterday from The New York Times,” Kerrey said. “Hi, Bob,” the text began. “This is Sonia Rao. Could I get you on the phone for just two minutes, just to give you a chance to defend yourself? I’m writing an article that’s running in the Times today. I would like this article to be fair and not one-sided. Otherwise, we’d have to write it without comment from you, unless you’d like to give a statement.”
