THE DEVIL YOU KNOW: MICHAEL WOLFF, JEFFREY EPSTEIN, AND THE STORY NOBODY WANTED TO TELL
Truth matters. Facts matter. And sometimes a journalist walks into the room with the devil and takes notes.
Philemon Arthur & The Dung
When you broke all the rules that can be broken
And you have licked your wounds
And it is neither your remorse nor your passion that reigns
Who are you left with then?
Let it be
When a season has ended
Let it be
When my carton is empty
Let it be
Philemon Arthur & The Dung
Let it be
You and me in a song
Try to bury your secrets
All that you don’t want anybody else to know
And it will take years before what you sow can grow
Try to hang on for me
You know that all you can dream can happen
Just like everything that is beautiful can burn
And while nothing happens, you can do nothing
You just have to let it be
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/philemon-arthur-dung-philemon-arthur-dung.html
What Just Landed in My Inbox
An email arrived this week from a Substack called HOWL — written by Michael Wolff, the journalist who wrote Fire and Fury, the book that sold two million copies and allegedly gave the Trump White House collective heart palpitations.
The subject line: I’m Sharing My Epstein Story.
Four days. 25% discount. $5–6 per month. Subscribe now.
That’s the sales pitch. Fine. But underneath the pitch is something actually worth paying attention to.
THE FACTS, NO SPIN
Who is Michael Wolff? A veteran American journalist and media critic. Author of four books on Donald Trump. His Trump titles run from Fire and Fury (2018) through Siege (2019), Landslide (2021), and All or Nothing (2025). He is not universally beloved. He is, however, reliably in the room when things happen.
Who was Jeffrey Epstein? A convicted sex trafficker. A financier who extracted fortunes from billionaires, operated as a sexual blackmailer exploiting powerful men, and has been described — depending on which rabbit hole you’re in — as an intelligence asset, a deep state operator, or the center of multiple overlapping conspiracy theories. He died in a federal detention cell in New York in August 2019. Officially: suicide. Unofficially: the internet has opinions.
What does Wolff actually have? Starting in 2014, Epstein — hoping for rehabilitation after his 2008 imprisonment on sexual abuse charges — began talking to Wolff. The conversations continued sporadically until 2019. Wolff recorded approximately 100 hours of those conversations.
That’s not rumor. That’s not reconstruction. That’s a primary source, on tape, for five years.
What’s Epstein allegedly on tape saying about Trump? In Wolff’s words from his own Instagram, Epstein said of Trump: “We are the same person. I know the secrets.” Wolff has also stated that across their many hours of conversation, Epstein “emphasized the closeness of his relationship to Donald Trump — basically from the late 80’s through to 2004, they were entirely involved in each other’s lives: social lives, business lives, sexual lives.”
What happened when Wolff tried to go public? Lawyers for Melania Trump notified Wolff they intended to sue him for a billion dollars over his comments regarding audio recordings in which Epstein allegedly described his relationship with the president and first lady.
A billion. With a B.
Wolff’s lawyers preemptively filed for a declaratory judgment — which, if successful, would give him subpoena power to call witnesses to prove the veracity of his claims.
You file for declaratory judgment when you want the court to sort out the truth before someone else’s lawyers bury it. It’s a chess move, not a retreat.
The White House’s official response? White House spokesman Steven Cheung said Wolff “is a lying sack of s*** and has been proven to be a fraud” who “routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination.”
A measured, Socratic response. Beautifully nuanced.
How did Wolff first meet Epstein? Around the year 2000, Epstein’s plane ferried a group of New Yorkers — mostly writers and scientists — to the TED conference in Monterey. He was then, in Wolff’s words, “a good looking, hospitable, and totally mysterious fellow with a 757 airplane,” accompanied by women who appeared to be models working as flight attendants.
That plane would later become known as something else entirely.
LAYER 1 — The Obvious Answer
A journalist who spent five years recording a convicted sex trafficker is now releasing those recordings on Substack. He’s being sued to silence him. He’s publishing anyway. It is, by any reasonable standard, a story.
LAYER 2 — What Are We Missing?
The more interesting question is not what did Epstein say — it’s why is this story still not fully told, by anyone?
As Wolff himself notes, an anomaly of the Epstein story is that virtually everyone who had an up-close view of his life has every reason not to share it. To describe their experience — outside of a forced confession — would implicate them. And so everyone becomes part of the cover-up.
This is the structural problem. The people who know the most have the most to lose by speaking. Which means the public record gets filled in by accusers, by speculation, and by people who weren’t actually there. And then the conspiracy theories write themselves, because the silence looks like coordination.
Also worth noting: Wolff has already faced at least one attempt to discredit him via fabricated AI-generated messages, in which a journalist reportedly contacted him claiming he had “groomed” a reader via Signal — using texts that turned out to contain details (like playing piano) that applied to an entirely different Michael Wolff, a jazz musician.
Someone, somewhere, is running interference. Whether that’s coordinated or opportunistic is a question without a public answer.
LAYER 3 — The Question We Should Actually Be Asking
Not: “Is Wolff credible?”
But: “Why does a story this large still depend on one journalist’s Substack subscription drive to reach the public?”
Wolff has stated that the American media climate has become more hesitant and cautious than at any point in his career — that the organizations writers customarily work for have grown reluctant to publish what they know.
That’s the actual story. Not Epstein specifically. But what it means when the infrastructure for accountability — courts, media organizations, regulatory bodies — either can’t or won’t carry the weight of certain stories. And what fills the vacuum when they don’t.
The answer, increasingly, is: individual writers. Substacks. Podcasts. Newsletters landing in inboxes at 10pm.
Which is either democracy’s immune system functioning, or a sign that democracy’s immune system is overwhelmed. Possibly both.
A BRIEF ABSURDIST SKETCH (In the spirit of Brian Cohen addressing the crowd)
CROWD: Tell us the secrets! WOLFF: Look, I’ve got about a hundred hours of tapes— CROWD: A hundred hours! He is the One! WOLFF: I’m not the One, I’m just a journalist who took some notes— CROWD: The journalist says he’s not the One! RANDOM PERSON IN BACK: He must be the One. LAWYERS: We’ll be suing him for a billion dollars. CROWD: A billion! He is the One. WOLFF: ...Subscribe for $5 a month. CROWD: (reaching for wallets)
DEFINITIONS THAT MATTER RIGHT NOW
SLAPP Suit (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation): A legal action filed not necessarily to win, but to exhaust and silence the target through the cost and stress of litigation. Many democracies have laws against them. The United States has them inconsistently, by state.
Declaratory Judgment: A court ruling that establishes the legal rights of parties before a dispute escalates further. In this context, Wolff’s lawyers filing for one is essentially saying: let’s let a judge decide what’s true, in a setting where we can call witnesses.
Primary Source: Information from someone who was directly present. As opposed to hearsay, reconstruction, or someone’s confident tweet. In journalism, it’s the thing everyone claims to have and almost nobody actually does.
WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES?
If the tapes are what Wolff says they are: Legal, political, and historical fallout of a scale that’s genuinely hard to predict. The Trump-Epstein connection is the kind of story that, fully documented, doesn’t go away quietly.
If Wolff is wrong or exaggerating: A billion-dollar lawsuit, professional destruction, and his name becomes a byword for overreach.
If nothing happens either way: The most likely outcome for most of recorded history, in which powerful people are implicated in things and the system finds a way to quietly redistribute the discomfort until everyone is slightly uncomfortable and nobody is accountable. This is sometimes called “the news cycle.”
The optimistic read: Sunlight. The fact that any of this is surfacing at all — through tapes, through Substack, through declaratory judgments — means the story hasn’t been fully buried. Which, given the forces apparently working to bury it, is not nothing.
TRUTH MATTERS.
Not because it’s comfortable. Not because it resolves neatly. But because the alternative — a world where primary sources are silenced, where a billion-dollar threat determines what gets published — is a world where only money speaks.
And money has already been talking for a very long time.
📚 Sources & Further Reading
Michael Wolff’s Substack, HOWL: michaelwolffnyc.substack.com
“This Is My Jeffrey Epstein Story” (Wolff, Mar 19, 2026): Link
“In the Room with Jeffrey Epstein” (Wolff, Nov 24, 2025): Link
“Michael Wolff starts Substack documenting Epstein connection to Trump” — Washington Examiner, Oct 2025: Link
Wolff’s book Too Famous: The Rich, The Powerful, The Wishful, The Notorious, The Damned (2021) — contains his earliest published Epstein material
🪶 Peace, Love and Respect 🌀 🙏
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