When Jeffrey Epstein was the world’s leading expert on getting away with it

“Women are on the upswing to power,” Jeffrey Epstein wrote in October 2017 to a friend. “Their methods I might not agree with but I recognize the weapons are limited.”

The friend was Kathryn Ruemmler, a prominent attorney and former White House Counsel to Barack Obama whose close relationship with Epstein is now one of many under renewed scrutiny. The email exchange happened during the dawn of what would become the MeToo movement, when numerous powerful and some less-powerful men were accused of sexual abuse and harassment. In hindsight, the cultural reckoning created by MeToo was short-lived; many of the men accused went back to their original prominence, and some were even elected president of the United States. But at the time, it seemed that the movement might shake a lot of important men loose from their pedestals. And a lot of people—the accused themselves, lawyers, journalists, various curious gawkers—wanted to talk to the man who knew more about sexual abuse cases, and getting out from under them, than anyone else in their orbit: Epstein.

The extent of Epstein’s involvement and interest in other men’s alleged sexual abuse cases—and the advice and lavish sympathy he was given about his own legal issues by his many famous friends—is further revealed in the newest dump of some three million pages of Epstein emails, released on January 30 by Donald Trump’s version of the Justice Department. In keeping with past releases, the new documents are heavily redacted, highly repetitive, and chaotically organized, meaning the full scope of what’s within it is just becoming clear.

But they show that Epstein seems to have immediately been captivated by 2017’s emerging MeToo movement, perhaps, as a malevolent sex criminal himself, understanding it better than the general public. In late October of that year, he sent around a recent New York Times story about his friend, film producer Harvey Weinstein, who the paper reported had paid numerous sexual assault accusers to stay quiet. (This was, of course, exactly what Epstein himself had done for many years.)