We
Met Jeffrey Epstein over a Hundred Years Ago
By N. Joseph Potts
Published: 2019-09-06
The death in jail of Jeffrey Epstein last month recalls
a very famous death of another jailed Jewish man charged (and convicted and
sentenced) of crimes against a 13-year-old girl in 1913. That case, which
involved only one of many rumored similar victims, involved the lethal abuse of
a factory worker named Mary Phagan by the manager of the factory, 29-year-old
pillar of the Atlanta Jewish community Leo Frank, who, having grown up in
Brooklyn, might have seemed rather a “damn Yankee” to at least some of his neighbors
of 106 years ago. Frank’s victim, unlike any of Epstein’s known victims, was
murdered and, while Frank was tried and convicted and sentenced to death, his
guilt continues to be vigorously contested this more-than-a-century later, by
the successors to the massive and distinctly Jewish campaign to win his
exoneration of the offense.
The two cases, while they have
many and important differences, both involve Jewish men accused of raping[1] underage teenage girls as well as large and
enduring campaigns of national stature to secure the acquittal of the
defendants. In Frank’s 1913 case, America’s (then-smaller, but already
powerful) Jewry mobilized to support his exoneration, stimulated by the notion,
perhaps manufactured among the larger and more-influential Jewry of the
northern United States, that Frank was being discriminated against because he
was a Jew in the South, whose Jewish population was then less-influential than
that of their co-religionists to the north (Frank was, in any case, a “child” of
the North, having grown up in Brooklyn). The establishment of the
Anti-Defamation League in October 1915 is widely credited to the (Jewish)
outrage at Frank’s lynching in August of that year.
Epstein’s case entailed a
“conviction” and a much-diluted “prison sentence” in what now might be called
its first phase, one that might reflect his vastly greater influence (read:
wealth) over the juridical apparatus, and no doubt because no one had been
found murdered. Frank’s case had only one phase (including appeals that went
all the way to a petition to the US Supreme Court), but of course did involve a
murder, one the guilt for which satisfied all the jurors on his case, but has
never satisfied the jury of “public opinion” as mediated by media firmly
controlled by parties sympathetic to, if not Frank’s innocence, then at least
to his ethnic affiliation.
Frank did not have the means
to mount the monumental defense that eventually rose to his succor, but Jewish
moguls of the day such as Albert Lasker saw to it, through vigorous
fund-raising campaigns conducted throughout Jewish communities in the North,
that his justice was indeed the best that money could buy. Epstein had no need
of any such circling of the financial wagons; he was a billionaire in his own
right, but in view of his ability to purchase his defense in the open market,
nonetheless Jewish legal luminaries such as Alan Dershowitz figured large in
the phalanx ultimately mustered to defend him in the 2016 Florida case that led
to his sentence to 13 months’ “confinement” in a minimum-security prison near
his palatial estate in Palm Beach. Some of these lawyers, such as Dershowitz,
stood among those who might have been implicated in the crimes committed by, or
through the connivance of, Epstein.
Among those ensnared in
Epstein’s fiendishly woven net was the United States Attorney for Southern
Florida Alexander Acosta, who arranged for Epstein’s convenient conviction on a
Florida State charge. Later appointed secretary of labor by President Donald
Trump, he subsequently resigned under fire after Epstein was again arrested in
July 2019 by the United States Attorney for Southern New York, the locus of yet
more of the crimes with which Epstein was charged, all of these involving
underage teenage girls.
Epstein’s guilt is not
contested, neither as to the ages of his victims, nor even really as to their
numbers (apparently something in the dozens). Neither Epstein nor any of his
co-conspirators is implicated in any murder. Frank’s guilt, at least of the
murder of Mary Phagan, continues to be very much contested by, among others,
the ubiquitous Alan
Dershowitz–yes, the very same Harvard Law School professor who has for many years now
led the star-studded legal team defending Jeffrey Epstein, the Twenty-First
Century’s answer to Leo Frank. Naturally, the metaphorical child of the Frank
case, the Anti-Defamation League, continues to beat its very loud drum to
advance the cause of Leo Frank’s innocence even to the point, in 1986, of
securing a posthumous pardon from the state of Georgia, issued as an apology
for having failed to protect its notorious inmate at its prison in
Milledgeville in 1915.
Frank’s lynching was the first
and last lynching of a Jew recorded in the annals of American lynching.
American Jewry had, over the two years preceding it, made the case a cause
célèbre, not least in the media, which, even at that early time, were
controlled by Jewish interests not only of ownership, such as Adolph Ochs’s New
York Times, but through the massive and pervasive influence of large-scale
advertisers such as merchandiser Alfred Lasker, whose tentacles reached into
the hearts of virtually every newspaper large and small in the United States.
Lasker, having taken the cause very much to heart, became the unofficial leader
of the campaign in Frank’s behalf, a campaign that may be said to have
continued vigorously today well into its second century.
The Epstein case, unlike the
Frank case, did not become a “Jewish” issue despite the Jewishness of Epstein,
Epstein’s “patron” Les Wexner, Dershowitz and many of Epstein’s other
defenders. Indeed, Epstein did not, as Frank did with some distinction, take
part in Jewish religious affairs beyond hobnobbing with ex-prime ministers of
Israel and the like. But the ethnic commonality among Epstein and other Jewish
men such as Harvey Weinstein and Leon Wieseltier was the subject of a recent
article by ex-Jew
Gilad Atzmon in the Unz Review, volubly countering this non-ethnic
quality of l’affaire Epstein. However, the non-ethnicity of the matter
has seemingly left the ADL out of this reprise of the case that brought it into
existence 104 years ago.
Leo Frank was not, as Jeffrey
Epstein was, rich (although his wife did come from a wealthy family), so he
could not, as Epstein easily did, fund his own high-powered team of defense
lawyers. But Frank did indeed enjoy a powerful defense team easily comparable
to the one marshaled around Epstein. It was funded by Alfred Lasker and a
nationwide fundraising campaign conducted largely through Jewish auspices such
as synagogues and chapters of the B’nai B’rith, of whose Atlanta chapter Frank
was president. Indeed, Frank’s team’s successors have managed within the past
year to establish Georgia’s first Conviction
Integrity Unit, which has taken on local closed cases such as that of convicted murderer
Wayne Williams, along with a posthumous one, that of Leo Frank, with full
exoneration in view. Unlike also-pardoned ADL beneficiary Marc Rich, Leo
Frank’s supporters haven’t made large donations to foundations of American
presidents, but smaller donations to the foundations and political-campaign
funds of Georgia and Fulton County politicians may produce the desired effects
quite handily. No relatives of Leo Frank are to be found among the public
advocates of this campaign, nor any descendent of anyone who knew him.
Relatives of Mary Phagan, however, oppose the initiative.
Assuming, as is widely done,
that Epstein was murdered in jail á la Lee Harvey Oswald, to keep him from
dishing the dirt on many powerful people, Frank’s death at the hands of a lynch
mob that had extracted him from jail would appear to have been committed on
other considerations, notably his Jewishness as continually asserted this past
century or so by the ADL, his supporters, and their latter-day successors such
as Alan Dershowitz.
But that idea also is
contested, notably by the Historical Research Department of the Nation of
Islam, publisher and author of record of The Secret Relationship between
Blacks and Jews Vol. 3, the Leo Frank Case. This work (long since banned by
amazon.com) advances the proposition (pp. 309-330) that the lynch mob was
covertly orchestrated by the same (Jewish) parties who had supported and
defended Frank’s innocence in the two years preceding the lynching. Why would
these same partisans now wish their beneficiary dead?
Because he might confess. He
was alive, in keeping with their wishes, but still incarcerated, very much
against their wishes, if only because there, he might be subject, á la Rudolf
Höss[2] of Holocaust fame, to coercion, or even
inducements, to confess to the crimes of which he was accused. This would
certainly never do. In fact, Frank nearly died in his cell, as Epstein did in
his, after a fellow inmate cut his jugular vein with a butcher knife about one
month after the commutation. Perhaps the would-be murderer was committing a din
rodef[3] murder in behalf of Jewish
paymasters not unlike those said to have commissioned Jeffrey Epstein’s death.
Two months elapsed between
Governor Slaton’s commutation of Frank’s sentence and the lynch mob’s carefully
arranged transits by car of 150 miles over unpaved roads from Marietta to
Milledgeville, where they picked up their hapless victim, and then back again
to Marietta, chosen because it was the hometown of poor Mary Phagan. None of
the (well-known) participants in the lynching was even charged with the murder
of Frank, much less prosecuted.
One wonders if, a hundred or
so years from now, the ADL will secure the exoneration of Jeffrey Epstein.
Yeah. Those girls were all
party-crashing gold diggers. Epstein just got the rap because he was Jewish.
That’s right. Just because he
was a Jew.
[1] As raping is legally defined. In most of the United
States today, the legal age of consent is 18. Sexual relations with a person
younger than that age is called “statutory rape,” intended to cover cases in
which the victim gives her consent.
[2] Höss’s Commandant of Auschwitz (Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 1959), written while he was in jail, is a pillar of today’s
regnant Holocaust narrative.
[3] Din rodef is a Talmudic concept holding that
it is permissible–indeed, required–to kill a person whose continued life
threatens the life, or reputation, of a Jew, or, as in Frank’s case, the Jewish
community en grosse.
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