Speaker 1: Everyone. Sorry, impromptu little recording here. I couldn't let this
Speaker 1: one go. I saw this article. We started in chats.
Speaker 1: We started tearing it apart and looking at parts of it,
Speaker 1: and I had to put it out there for everyone
Speaker 1: to see. So Rolling Stone has an article and the
Speaker 1: title is I grew up with Jeffrey Epstein. Our neighborhood
Speaker 1: held Dark Secrets. A remembrance of Seagate, Brooklyn in the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, by Gabrielle Glancy. What I believe the purpose
Speaker 1: of this article is is too well, let's get into it,
Speaker 1: all right. I'll start reading here. There we go. There
Speaker 1: was danger outside the gate. We understood that you could
Speaker 1: see it precariously balanced on the very tip of Coney Island. Seagate,
Speaker 1: where I was raised, as surrounded by water on three
Speaker 1: sides and divided from the rest of the world by
Speaker 1: a two story chain link fence. The fence, broken up
Speaker 1: only by two actual gates manned by guards, stretches three
Speaker 1: quarters of a mile long thirty seventh Street from New
Speaker 1: York Harbor on the north side to the Atlantic Ocean
Speaker 1: on the south. On our side of the fence, tree
Speaker 1: lined streets. The closer you get to the ocean the
Speaker 1: bigger the houses from the beach of via the Aarrenzano Bridge.
Speaker 1: In the eighteen nineties, the Vanderbilts, Dodges and Morgans built
Speaker 1: houses here. In fact, some of the houses on the
Speaker 1: beach were forty room mansions before they got divided up
Speaker 1: during the depression. It was a private beach escaped for
Speaker 1: the rich. You can understand why they fenced a neighborhood
Speaker 1: off on the other side of the fence where today
Speaker 1: stand residential high rises were slums. In fact, Seagate was
Speaker 1: an island on an island. Growing up in the sixties,
Speaker 1: the place was like one big playground. From the parachute
Speaker 1: jump on Coney Island, the symbol of my childhood, you
Speaker 1: could probably see the Statue of Liberty. The amusement park
Speaker 1: ride Brooklyn's Eiffel Tower was itself a kind of poor
Speaker 1: man's Statue of Liberty. It represented the idea that wherever
Speaker 1: you were, you could have a bigger view of where
Speaker 1: you could end up. My mother and I lived with
Speaker 1: my grandparents in the last house before you got to
Speaker 1: the fence. We had a view from our kitchen window
Speaker 1: through chain link of abandoned cars boarded up tenements, garbage,
Speaker 1: old bicycle frames that have been picked clean, still locked
Speaker 1: to a pole. In those days, the neighborhood kids had
Speaker 1: the run of the place. We went outside as soon
Speaker 1: as we got up and didn't come home until dinner.
Speaker 1: There was a catwalk to narrow even if in a bicycle,
Speaker 1: that we kids called the path, which ran between our
Speaker 1: house and the fence. The older boys often parked their
Speaker 1: bikes and our driveway, took the path and came back
Speaker 1: to pick their bikes up. She's basically painting the picture
Speaker 1: of a as close to idyllic kind of neighborhood that
Speaker 1: you can get when it comes when you're in a city,
Speaker 1: when you're in an I mean, it's an outer borough,
Speaker 1: but it's still the city considered the city. To me,
Speaker 1: the city is Manhattan, but you know it's still part
Speaker 1: of the city. The path was maybe three feet wide,
Speaker 1: broken cement overhung in places by my grandmother's private hedge,
Speaker 1: a privet hedge whose tiny white blossoms carried the scent
Speaker 1: of my Brooklyn childhood. Half in shadow, half in sun.
Speaker 1: The path provided a back route in the neighborhood, which
Speaker 1: we simply referred to as the Gate, perhaps because it
Speaker 1: ran behind our house along thirty seventh and unseemly Street.
Speaker 1: The path held the mystery in a danger. At some point,
Speaker 1: someone cut a hole in the chain link. In the
Speaker 1: chain link there, I remember seeing kids and sometimes even
Speaker 1: grown men slipping through to avoid the guards at the gates.
Speaker 1: My grandmother warned me to stay away from there, and
Speaker 1: yet the opening was only four feet from our house.
Speaker 1: Since our street was a dead end, it created a
Speaker 1: perfect diamond for the boys in the neighborhood to play stickball.
Speaker 1: I knew many of them by sight, even those five
Speaker 1: or six years older than me, because my grandfather set
Speaker 1: us up with a stickball resale business when I was four.
Speaker 1: Quote over the fence was a home run, which meant
Speaker 1: many pale pink Spaldine balls ended up on our roof.
Speaker 1: My grandfather sold them back to the boys for five
Speaker 1: cents less than what they had originally paid for them,
Speaker 1: and passed the money to me. I'm not gonna even
Speaker 1: comment at this point. I mean, that's not the point
Speaker 1: of this. I have vivid memories on warm summer evenings
Speaker 1: of my grandfather pulling out the ladder and placing it
Speaker 1: against the side of the house, untucking his white start
Speaker 1: shirt and climbing up. I stood at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the ladder and watched. It seemed like magic. After a
Speaker 1: few minutes, as if he had been collecting eggs, he
Speaker 1: came down with a shirt tail apron full of spaldines.
Speaker 1: There is a picture of her grandfather seemingly changing just
Speaker 1: jumping right into the subject of the title of the article.
Speaker 1: Following the release of the Epstein files in January, I
Speaker 1: began to notice a lot of posts about him on
Speaker 1: the I grew Up in Seagate facebook group. Someone posted
Speaker 1: a class picture with Epstein standing in the back row
Speaker 1: among a bunch of awkward looking preteen teens at Mark
Speaker 1: Twain Junior High where my mother taught English during the
Speaker 1: years he was a student there. The person who posted
Speaker 1: the photo bragged about attending Epstein's Bob Mitzvah and claimed
Speaker 1: that Epstein had grown up in Seagate. I took a
Speaker 1: screenshot of the kid whose head was circled in red
Speaker 1: magic marker, and saved it to my phone so I
Speaker 1: could take a closer look. That's Jeffrey Epstein. I couldn't
Speaker 1: believe it. I recognized him Epstein. I thought he had
Speaker 1: been one of our stickball clients. Dizzy and I shot
Speaker 1: a question at Google where exactly did Jeffrey Epstein grow up?
Speaker 1: And Boila, I had before me the exact addresses in
Speaker 1: Seagate where the Epstein's had lived. As it turned out,
Speaker 1: I grew up on the same street at the same
Speaker 1: time as Jeffrey Epstein. That's not a metaphor, it's a fact.
Speaker 1: I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's true. Seagate, Coney Island. Quote.
Speaker 1: You're not going to believe this, end quote. I said
Speaker 1: to my cousins when I revealed to them what my
Speaker 1: Google search had turned up. I then took the opportunity
Speaker 1: to ask them each in turn if my grandfather had
Speaker 1: molested them as he had me. It just seemed like
Speaker 1: the right moment to bring it up after all these years,
Speaker 1: because suddenly the whole world was talking about pedophilia. Not really,
Speaker 1: my oldest cousin, Josie said, but he was weird. My
Speaker 1: cousins had lived on the other side of the fence
Speaker 1: in Coney Island. They did not live with my grandparents
Speaker 1: in Seagate as my mother and I did. Quote. You know,
Speaker 1: Grandpa was a foreman for Fred Trump when he was
Speaker 1: building Trump village, don't you, Josie said. One day when
Speaker 1: I was there, Donnie came over. How old were you,
Speaker 1: I asked. She thought for a minute, about eleven, she answered.
Speaker 1: My cousin Josie and Donald Trump are exactly the same age.
Speaker 1: I was my grandparent's youngest grandchild by fourteen years, and
Speaker 1: Josie was the oldest. I have to say I was
Speaker 1: shocked by the idea of Donald Trump and his father
Speaker 1: standing in our living room and didn't really believe her.
Speaker 1: As if this wasn't enough, she added, and of course,
Speaker 1: you know the mafia runs Seagate. Incredulous. I reported the
Speaker 1: contents of this conversation back to my best friend from childhood,
Speaker 1: Molly Howard. Listen to this, Molly called to her husband,
Speaker 1: Gabby says, Josie says, Seagate was run by the mafia.
Speaker 1: Isn't that crazy? Everyone knows that I heard Howard shirt
Speaker 1: back from the other room. Like us, Howard had also
Speaker 1: grown up in Seagate. When the Epstein story broke, the
Speaker 1: pieces both came together and fell apart from me. I
Speaker 1: began to think about proximity and coincidence. A few years before,
Speaker 1: when I was living on the West Coast, I had
Speaker 1: tried to write about the murder of two teenage girls
Speaker 1: who were allegedly being sex trafficked by the police and
Speaker 1: the house next door to ours when a bullet came
Speaker 1: through my window. As Mary Carr says in her introduction
Speaker 1: to The Liars Club, quote when fortunate hands, when fortune
Speaker 1: hands you such characters, why bother to make stuff up? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean you have to ask that in the mirror, lady.
Speaker 1: Following the Epstein revelation, I interviewed one of the now
Speaker 1: grown up kids on our block in Seagate, Paula, who
Speaker 1: told me she had reason to believe my grandfather molested
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Epstein. So you can see what this. The narrative
Speaker 1: here is Jeffrey Epstein was molested. YadA, YadA. It's not
Speaker 1: his fault ya da yah. Yeah. I mean, it's just
Speaker 1: but I have to keep going. Quote, there were seven
Speaker 1: pedophiles on our street alone, Paula said. A neighbor named Litsky,
Speaker 1: she said, was fucking both boys and girls. Okay, think
Speaker 1: about this. I don't know. I'm assuming most of the
Speaker 1: people who listen to this are younger than me. I
Speaker 1: mean I have to assume it because I'm old. If
Speaker 1: people knew that there was a pedophile in your neighborhood.
Speaker 1: What would have happened to that person? I'm not even
Speaker 1: saying vigilante justice. Someone would have called the cops, right,
Speaker 1: someone would have gone. If you grew up in the
Speaker 1: kind of neighborhood I did you know, they probably would
Speaker 1: have ended up A bunch of fathers would have probably
Speaker 1: tooken them up, taken them up to the tallest building,
Speaker 1: the roof of the tallest build. There were seven pedophiles
Speaker 1: on our street alone. Now we know historically that these
Speaker 1: they exaggerate. We know this, so the questions are endless
Speaker 1: with This is the purpose of this to if you're
Speaker 1: trying to excuse what Jeffrey Epstein did, you're going to
Speaker 1: make it seem like the Jewish neighborhood had seven pedophiles
Speaker 1: on one street. I'm let me repeat this again. Quote
Speaker 1: there were seven pedophiles on our street alone. End quote.
Speaker 1: Paula said a neighbor named Litsky, she said, quote was
Speaker 1: fucking both boys and girls. End quote. Quote did your
Speaker 1: grandfather molest Jeffrey Epstein too? End quote? She mused, I
Speaker 1: don't know for sure, but I wouldn't doubt it. Absurd
Speaker 1: as it may be, and kind of shocking. I realized
Speaker 1: that I would not be surprised. I must credit my
Speaker 1: beloved mother for this paradox, as well for the many
Speaker 1: other secrets and contradictions that filled our lives. Quote I'm
Speaker 1: shocked but not surprised was my mother's mantra. I'm pausing because,
Speaker 1: all right, like me, she too had been molested by
Speaker 1: my grandfather, her father, and yet she seemed to find
Speaker 1: her decision to assign us to the same bed when
Speaker 1: I was a child neither shocking nor surprising. Perhaps she
Speaker 1: would not even have considered it a decision. Was the
Speaker 1: arrangement which rendered me and my grandfather bedfellows a coincidence?
Speaker 1: It seems she had bequeathed him to me. Whatever the reasons,
Speaker 1: my grandfather and I were relegated to a pickle green
Speaker 1: pullout couch in the living room of the tiny house
Speaker 1: my grandfather had built up against the fence in Seagate,
Speaker 1: Coney Island, where he rubbed himself against me every night
Speaker 1: until I was seven and aged out of his affection.
Speaker 1: I never thought to question any of this. It felt normal,
Speaker 1: though slightly I don't know, sour like milk on the
Speaker 1: turn What rolling stone ran this? Then there's a picture
Speaker 1: of Jeffrey Epstein as a child with a with an
Speaker 1: accordion around his neck, a little guitar in his hand,
Speaker 1: and a what the hell do they call those things?
Speaker 1: The candelabra thing? Fuck, I can't remembe. I'm so blown
Speaker 1: away by this. All right, I'm gonna continue. I wasn't
Speaker 1: the first to sleep with my grandfather or on the
Speaker 1: green pull out couch, which, ironically later I also inherited.
Speaker 1: Apparently my grandmother had kicked my grandfather out of their
Speaker 1: bedroom as long ago as nineteen nineteen, the year their
Speaker 1: first child was born, when they were barely twenty. That
Speaker 1: was a rough year all the way around. You may
Speaker 1: recall it was a year of the black Black Sox scandal.
Speaker 1: I thought that was nineteen eighteen and the Spanish flew.
Speaker 1: I'm probably wrong, just a few years after my grandparents
Speaker 1: had come through Ellis Island from Eastern Europe. Oh, such
Speaker 1: a blessing, Such a blessing. All my cousins recalled the
Speaker 1: chicken coops my grandfather used to build in the living
Speaker 1: room out of bed sheets and chairs. He must have
Speaker 1: missed his pigeons from back home. There, in the dark
Speaker 1: of the makeshift coops, my grandfather built a secret island
Speaker 1: where he played his games with us. How my grandfather
Speaker 1: could afford to buy a plot of land in the
Speaker 1: gated community of Seagate in the nineteen thirties and build
Speaker 1: three rowhouses in a synagogue on our street is as
Speaker 1: mysterious as where the guy went every day. There's no mystery,
Speaker 1: no fucking no one moved here from another country. Broke
Speaker 1: worked night and day for five years, and then bought
Speaker 1: up half of Hartford, fucking Connecticut. Can we stop with
Speaker 1: that fucking bullshit? Dressed in a three piece suit, hat
Speaker 1: and overcoat even in summer, he left in the morning
Speaker 1: and didn't come home until well after dark. My mother
Speaker 1: always reminded us that Pop had friends in high places,
Speaker 1: and that he referred to the local judges by their
Speaker 1: first names. I realize now that an economic divide determined
Speaker 1: where stickball was played. You wouldn't be batting balls like
Speaker 1: that in a part of Seagate where the Vanderbilts lived. Indeed,
Speaker 1: because our house was the low of the low, the
Speaker 1: farthest from the beach, the closest to the fence, we
Speaker 1: became the stickball capital in the neighborhood, And because we
Speaker 1: owned our house and my grandfather had built it, we
Speaker 1: had at least a little bit of cachet in the
Speaker 1: neighborhood where there was a clear division between the rich
Speaker 1: and the poor. The Epstein's, on the other hand, runs
Speaker 1: at a second floor apartment at the end of the street,
Speaker 1: and a house that, like many of the old mansions,
Speaker 1: had been divided up and turned into rentals. That as
Speaker 1: an adult Jeffrey Epstein surrounded himself with the richest people
Speaker 1: in the world is probably not an accident. I have wondered,
Speaker 1: in light of all that has come out about him,
Speaker 1: if Jeffrey Epstein felt on the poor side of that
Speaker 1: great divide and sought to right that wrong, he may
Speaker 1: even have felt that some division or isolation in his
Speaker 1: own home. The genius son of a gardener and school
Speaker 1: aid genius. Huh have you seen the way he wrote?
Speaker 1: Apparently he skipped two grades, was a music prodigy and
Speaker 1: something of a math whiz okay, and that way Jeffrey
Speaker 1: Epstein lived on an island, on an island, on an island.
Speaker 1: It is no wonder he bought an island for himself
Speaker 1: when he had the means to do so, he was
Speaker 1: used to living on one. This is absolutely incredible. This
Speaker 1: is this may be the most insane article ever written,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to finish it before it gets taken down.
Speaker 1: That he used sexual exploitation as some sort of bargaining
Speaker 1: chip for that piece of the puzzle. There must have
Speaker 1: been other factors at play. Was one of those factors
Speaker 1: my grandfather and my grandfather molest Jeffreystein, as it seems
Speaker 1: he did many of the other kids in the neighborhood.
Speaker 1: He might as well have. He might as well have.
Speaker 1: I know I said that it was not a metaphor
Speaker 1: that I grew up on the same street as Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 1: I suppose I have contradicted myself. Indeed, if it wasn't
Speaker 1: my grandfather who molested Jeffrey Epstein, someone must have literally
Speaker 1: or metaphorically, there must have been forces around him and
Speaker 1: inside of him that added up to his breaking bad
Speaker 1: was Seagate a hotbed for pedophiles, a breeding ground, as
Speaker 1: it were, probably no more than most places. History and
Speaker 1: especially current events has shown us that exploitation by rich,
Speaker 1: powerful and privilege it is everywhere. Not long ago I
Speaker 1: came upon a book review that had run in The
Speaker 1: New York Times in the nineties. The article was titled
Speaker 1: we have met the Pedophiles and they are us. New
Speaker 1: York's Times, owned by never Mind. I didn't understand it
Speaker 1: at first, but I understand it now. When it comes
Speaker 1: to pedophilia, you don't have to look that far to
Speaker 1: find it. If you want to know for whom the
Speaker 1: bell tolls, it tolls for thee. It is not alarming,
Speaker 1: pun intended normal though it was for me that my
Speaker 1: mother's open mouth kiss was what woke me up every
Speaker 1: morning to get up for school. When I was twelve,
Speaker 1: I locked my lips, both to keep out my mother
Speaker 1: and to keep in the family secret that had and
Speaker 1: passed from her lips to mine. I only half knew
Speaker 1: how strange all this was when I was a kid. Really,
Speaker 1: it wasn't until the Epstein scandal broke that I began
Speaker 1: to see all the pieces of my childhood fit together.
Speaker 1: I have often wished these last months that I could
Speaker 1: tell my mother about Epstein. He grew up on our street, Mom,
Speaker 1: I would say, he grew up on our street, Mom,
Speaker 1: I would say, given the family, the neighborhood, the government,
Speaker 1: the culture, and the world in which we live. I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure I know how she would respond, nodding, hands ahead.
Speaker 1: I'm shocked, but not surprised. I always felt proud to
Speaker 1: say I grew up in seagate. I see now, though,
Speaker 1: that whenever there's an inside the gate and an outside,
Speaker 1: there will be secrets and danger on both sides of
Speaker 1: the fence. Going through my mother's effects, recently, I discovered
Speaker 1: the last thing she scribbled into her writing journal. The
Speaker 1: words were barely legible because she was ninety two when
Speaker 1: she wrote them, and had a tremor. A single sentence
Speaker 1: on the top of the blank page in an otherwise
Speaker 1: empty spiral notebook, sexual abuse by my father. Since I
Speaker 1: am the last of our tribe, I am the only
Speaker 1: one left to tell the story. The names of all
Speaker 1: participants in this story have been changed to protect their privacy.
Speaker 1: Gabrielle Glancy is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work
Speaker 1: has appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and
Speaker 1: The American Poetry Review. She has just completed a memoir
Speaker 1: entitled You Win all Right. I Mean, look, sometimes I
Speaker 1: I pretend to be exasperated by the stuff I'm reading
Speaker 1: and what I'm responding to. I admit it. Everything you're
Speaker 1: hearing me, any noise you hear me is completely involuntary,
Speaker 1: is I don't I don't understand why this was written,
Speaker 1: and if it was written for the purpose, I think
Speaker 1: it was written to try to exonerate Jeffrey Epstein for
Speaker 1: what he did. Why would you what? Why would you
Speaker 1: say that your neighborhood was filled with people of your
Speaker 1: ethnic background and there was like seven pedophiles on your
Speaker 1: block that were openly engaged and nothing is being done
Speaker 1: about it? And what does it say about a culture
Speaker 1: that's so insular that they would allow it to keep happening?
Speaker 1: And why would you want that culture anywhere near yours?
Speaker 1: I don't know what else to say. I guess it's
Speaker 1: just a matter of is this the typical Yeah, this
Speaker 1: didn't happen. Yes, some of it happen. It's over exaggerated.
Speaker 1: But why in the hell, if it's a lie, would
Speaker 1: someone use this lie where you're trying to exonerate one
Speaker 1: of your co ethnics by demonizing all of your co
Speaker 1: ethnics in the neighborhood you grew up in. I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: All I know is if there was one open that
Speaker 1: everyone knew, Hey, that guy is fucking boys and girls.
Speaker 1: A guy would have been thrown off of a fucking roof.
Speaker 1: I remember one time the apartment building I grew up
Speaker 1: in had a had a ground floor apartment, but it
Speaker 1: had a street level apartment. So to get to the
Speaker 1: apartments in the building, you had to walk upstairs and
Speaker 1: you had to be buzzed in. But there was also
Speaker 1: a door on the front of the building which was
Speaker 1: a street level apartment. I remember one time a guy
Speaker 1: just walked into the neighborhood. No one knew who he was,
Speaker 1: no one recognized him. I was there, and I must
Speaker 1: have been twelve or thirteen years old, and this guy,
Speaker 1: just because the people who lived there would leave the door,
Speaker 1: you know, wide open during the day because you know it.
Speaker 1: We're you know, this neighborhood. We protect it, We protect
Speaker 1: each other and keep it safe as best we can.
Speaker 1: Guy walked in, probably ten feet into the apartment, looked
Speaker 1: around and headed up. I grew up on a hill,
Speaker 1: and he started walking up the hill. I knocked on
Speaker 1: the door. I cannot remember the name of the guy
Speaker 1: who lived there. It's a very long time ago. He
Speaker 1: grabbed the golf club, chased the guy down and beat
Speaker 1: him with a golf club to the point where he
Speaker 1: compound fractured his arm. That's for looking around somebody's apartment.
Speaker 1: Now imagine somebody molesting that guy's kid. I know I
Speaker 1: don't do these very often, but I mean, I just
Speaker 1: I couldn't pass it up. It's just reading the This
Speaker 1: is the most I'm going to be thinking about this
Speaker 1: for I don't know how long. But thank you for
Speaker 1: your interest, thank you for listening, and I'll link to
Speaker 1: the article. I'll do it through archive because I have
Speaker 1: a feeling I can't see this article staying up. If
Speaker 1: this we we have graduated out of clown world and
Speaker 1: into something completely beyond that. If they decide they're and
Speaker 1: keep this article up, take care. Thank you,