Sex, lies and videotape

Epstein blueprint for compromising political leaders

- by SERENA WYDE

BRITISH-Tunisian writer and specialist in Middle East politics, Soumaya Ghannoushi, talks of what she calls 'the vice network'.

This network is a foreign influence machine that has spent decades refining exactly how to capture the world’s most powerful people.

Built through a triangular system that uses money, politics and sex to exert influence, Jeffrey Epstein was the consummate salesman of this power club.

The myth that Epstein was a rogue actor, a lone predator, has long been exposed. The question we now all want answered is what is the true reach of ‘the vice machine’ running America, and through it, the world.

Ghannoushi articulates how the network of money, politics and sex feed each other, and reinforce the grip on those caught in its web. Epstein, she says, was the magnet that drew in participants from the boardrooms of Texas to Abu Dhabi palaces, because he was the key-holder to rooms normal politicians had no access to. “Rooms where consequences vanished and appetites reigned.”

Ghannoushi continues: “Epstein’s world: the island, the jets, the apartments, was not a playground. It was a trap. A factory of leverage. A catalogue of weaknesses. A one-stop-kompromat shop.