433. Question Time: Epstein’s Inner Circle, Ukraine’s Zelensky Backlash, and Destroying the Addiction Economy

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2:03Welcome to the rest of the party's question time with me, Asda Campbell. And me, Katie Kaye. And Katie, thank you for being here. As I said on the main episode yesterday, we shoot his absent without leave or on leave without permission, just disappeared, vanished to the end of the year, wandering somewhere vaguely around Columbia. I know where somewhere in Columbia, he will be back, fear not next week, but in the meantime, it's great to have Katie. Epstein, you said yesterday that Epstein has been dominant in the American media and clearly been breaking through and Australia as well. Jennifer, as a member from Adelaide, what is the likelihood that Trump will be impeached over Epstein?

2:40Would this be an opportunity for Vance to make a move to assume the presidency? I'm guessing not. Yeah, I think the chances of him being impeached at all, even if, first of all, the Democrats would have to take back the House in the midterm elections next year because at the moment they don't control the House so they can't do anything about an impeachment process. There's a whole load of things that various Democrats have muttered about trying to impeach Donald Trump, particularly around corruption and money issues. But the chances of him being impeached over Jeffrey Epstein, I think, are pretty slim.

3:10The reporting is from the Wall Street Journal that Donald Trump's name is mentioned in the mysterious Jeffrey Epstein files, whatever they may be. But that doesn't necessarily mean he was doing anything particularly nefarious with Jeffrey Epstein. It just means that Jeffrey Epstein had his contact or they were parted together, all of which we already know. So I think the chances of him being impeached are pretty slim around that. I think JD is going to play, we spoke about this on the podcast yesterday and David from a spoken about this with you and your interview, Alistair, around JD Vance. JD is going to keep Donald Trump very close for as long as he needs him, which is probably going to be right up until the primary process, even through the primary process.

3:53Because even if Donald Trump is not running in 2028, he's going to be a very big figure in the election process. He still has people who adore him, millions of Americans who adore him. And so I don't think JD is going to move against Trump in any way and particularly not over Epstein. If you're hoping that this is the way this ends, I don't think that's the right ending for this story. Can I just ask you something? So Rory and I talked about this last week and I had a few people say, hold on a Trump and Epstein were unbelievably close, unbelievably close for quite a long time. There's little edge thing we'll be doing that Trump wouldn't necessarily have known about.

4:29And you read on the rest of his politics, US last week, you read some of the testimony and I'm not, to be honest, I had not read it. It was interviews with some of the children that had been abused by Epstein. And it was pretty, I don't even know the word, it was like, oh my god, this is even worse than I thought. Do you think there is a desperation in Trump for the full story of Epstein not to come out? I think anyone who had an association with Trump and remember, you know, Vera Wang, the amazing fashion designers allegedly has sent one of those letters to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday as well.

5:11I mean, there is a whole host of people which now, given what the public knows, Jeffrey Epstein was doing at the time, don't want any kind of association. Don't want their names to be linked. Both Democrats and Republicans, Bill Clinton has often been associated with Jeffrey Epstein. They don't want their names coming out. They don't want this to go anywhere. And I think the reason I read that out on the podcast last week is I think there's a tendency with the Epstein story to see this in political terms. You know, will he be impeached? Could JD Vance move? Yeah, exactly. And when we do that, we ignore the voices of these victims.

5:50I read through that testimony. God is making me almost tear up again thinking about it, Alistair. It's so chilling because it's so clinical. And the way he moved on these girls and deliberately seemed to go for 14 -year -old girls, many of whom had already been abused. We then told when they became 18, they were too old. Orgolaine Maxwell stopped calling them and the understanding was that they were too old at the age of 18. It's not just that these girls suffered then. Every time this story comes back again, they have to relive that trauma of abuse, the guilt, the embarrassment, the shame, the fear that comes with that.

6:29And I think it's that story actually in a way that is the important political story as well, because this was a really awful thing that Epstein did. And therefore, anyone who knew what he was doing tolerated what he was doing, even if they didn't do it themselves, they're complicit in this unbelievably awful series of rapes of children. Yeah. Well, I'm going to make an executive decision here, Katty. I think we should play into this part of this podcast for those who don't necessarily listen to Trip to US, what you read out last week, because it was a riff, it's quite a difficult listen, but listen to Katty from last week's Trip to US.

7:11Okay, so this is the questioner is Maureen Komet, who was the prosecutor for the prosecution in the trial of Gilaean Maxwell. Now, Jane, I want to ask you, did there come a time in your life when you met someone named Jeffrey Epstein? Yes. What year was that? 1994. Did there come a time in your life when you had sexual contact with Jeffrey Epstein? Yes. How old were you when that first happened? 14 years old. There's another bit I want to read you from another witness to. And this is when a young girl is brought to Jeffrey Epstein's house. When you walked into the kitchen, what happened? We were greeted by Miss Maxwell.

7:50Did Mr. Epstein touch you during your first massage? No. After that ended, what happened next? I was paid. In total, approximately how many times did you go over to Mr. Epstein's house to give him massages? Over a hundred. About how often did you go over to his house to provide those massages? Two or three times a week. About how old were you the first time you went over to his house? 14. And about how old were you the last time you went to his house? 18. When you interacted with Maxwell, what if any conversations did you have with her about your family? About my upbringing and things that were going on at the time?

8:32What did you tell Maxwell? That my mom was an alcoholic and I had been molested and just random personal things. I remember telling her that I'd been raped and molested by my grandfather starting at the age of four. After you told Maxwell you were 14, did she continue to call you to share your massage appointments with Jeffrey Epstein? Yes. 14. During how many of the massages you gave Jeffrey Epstein, did he masturbate? Every single time. 14. During how many of the massages you gave Jeffrey Epstein, did he touch your breasts every time? 14. During how many of the massages you gave Jeffrey Epstein, did he touch your buttocks every time?

9:1114. Were there ever massages you provided Jeffrey Epstein when nothing sexual happened? No. Something sexual happened every single time. Why did you stop going to Jeffrey Epstein's house? Because I became too old. How old were you? 18. That kind of in many ways speaks for itself, but let me just put something back to you. You made a point somewhere, I can't remember where I saw you say this, but Donald Trump has not once said anything that I would define as being empathetic. About the victims. The only person he has been nice about in this entire thing, Epstein is now a sort of terrible person.

9:54He always knew as a terrible person. Nothing to do with me go away. Is Gilein Maxwell? No, I know Gilein pretty well from my days on the mirror. If I've written my entire page in the new world this week about my knowledge or that insight into Gilein, who I always thought was a lot more, I always found a very funny, very engaging, but there was something deeply sad about her as well. If you just said to me back then she'd become the sort of madden to the notorious sex traffic. I said, no, no, that's not her. But if you just said to me, she'll become attached to a very, very powerful man who moves in mysterious circles and lives a life where fact is a bit stranger than fiction, I could have seen it because that was her dad.

10:40I don't want to go psycho babble, but I think if you've got a father like Robert Maxwell, it's going to be quite hard to come out sort of unscathed. But what does he say about Trump that he's even now quite openly talking about the fact that he does have the power to pardon her? Could he get away with that? Listen to that testimony, right? That is from Gilein Maxwell's trial and she is clearly the conduit of these girls. She's the recruiter of these girls and the idea that she might be pardoned, I think you would have uproar. He did say up in Scotland this week that he had the power. It was something that he could potentially do and it is weird.

11:17It's almost unprecedented, according to constitutional lawyers that I've spoken to for somebody senior from the Department of Justice who has a political appointee to go to a prisoner to have kind of post trial discussions and it looks like they're trying to get something from Gilein Maxwell in exchange for some sort of, you know, commutation or lessening of her sentence or something. So it all looks very fishy. But when you hear that testimony and you are reminded of the role she played in destroying the lives of these girls, I do think you'd have real pushback from evangelical questions around the country.

11:54I know they've been in the Trump camp. They've tolerated an awful lot. They did a Faustian bargain. But look at the whole Epstein saga. The Epstein saga is being kept in the front pages, not by Democrats but by Maga, right? And it would play into the idea of powerful people, defending powerful people, just for ending Peter Files. The world is run by Peter Files. It's the ultimate conspiracy theory. And if she's pardoned that plays into the conspiracy theory. Okay. Now, Katty, you're on instead of a week for this week, but it coincides with me receiving this question last week from a lady called Kira Bergman.

12:30She's the chief executive of rape crisis England and Wales. There is a link clearly to what we've just been discussing about. This is specifically about England and Wales. Despite repeated strategies, says Kira, successive governments have failed to reduce violence against women and girls in a meaningful way. The current government pledged to have violence against women and girls in a decade. But its strategy has been delayed and key funding decisions like the 53 million investment in the drive perpetrator program were made without consultation with questionable evidence of impact. Meanwhile, rape crisis centers are closing.

13:03Services of marginalized survivors are underfunded and the response to rape remains deeply inadequate. Why do you think governments continue to fail on this issue? What would a serious effective strategy to reduce violence against women and girls look like? How can politicians, especially male politicians, help drive real change? And Kira actually said that she wanted me and Rory to talk about this because she felt male politicians felt they couldn't really engage in this issue in a way that women can. But you first, and then I'll have a few thoughts on my own. You should answer this because it's a very UK specific question when it comes to funding and policy and what's being done.

13:38But I will say that one thing I'm noticing in the States is that there is a pushback against women and women's issues. At its easiest, it's around DEI issues. But it's happened in the last few months and the progress of that from kind of well, women have just been appointed because of DEI. We should clamp down on DEI and I've had lots of my friends who work in this space say there's no funding for it anymore. You can't really talk about it anymore. You can't really talk about equity issues in the workplace anymore. And the sort of steps from that to violence against women and increasing violence against women, I could see that happening.

14:17And I think it is something that women generally are afraid of. And I think it's true. It's something that male politicians feel very squeamish about talking about. And I wish we could pull them into the conversation much more because we would all be better off if men joined us in this conversation. I do agree with that. And of course, you know, my daughter Grace who is a comedian and talks about sex a lot, writes about sex a lot. And she had an experience of rape in America a few years ago now and she wrote a piece about it. And she, in that piece, which obviously, you know, was a very, very difficult read on all sorts of levels for her parents.

14:53But one of the points that came through to me was that she and I spoke to her friends about this as well. The idea of reporting it to the police is just like they don't even think about it. And one of the points that Kira made to me is that the conviction rate on rape, we hover somewhere between 1 and 2%. Whereas there is more, probably not adequate, and the services aren't good enough. But domestic violence that we think of as, you know, a man knocks a woman about and the woman goes off to try to find a refuge. We men can kind of handle that. Rape, it gets to a different sort of level. And maybe we don't want to be part of the debate.

15:38When, as you say, we have to, not least because governments are going to have to address this. And so just to give some of the stats around, this is the England and Wales 709 ,000 women raped each year. That's one in 30. So most of us will know somebody raped or sexually assaulted. The waiting time, and this is at a time when Brian Levison, the judge, retired judges, just in a report about Crown Court trials and the massive, massive backlog that there is. So we're talking about an average of at least two years to get to court. Currently almost 12 ,000 waiting. The answer to Kira, you know, she knows about this a lot, lot more than I do.

16:24But I think that when we talk about having a strategy, that has to mean something. There has to be a strategy that says, this is the scale of the problem. These are the kind of measures that we think we want to be able to address it. But one of them has to be that women feel much, and men by the way, men who get raped tend not to report. It was they say, the police don't understand. So I think it's about understanding is then about us understanding that we think the services are there. Actually, the women you talk to are working this area. The services are disintegrating in part because we're not prepared to talk about this.

17:02And also without getting too political, I couldn't help noticing. We're a year on from the South Port riots that followed the murder of those three little girls. And I saw thing that two out of five of those who were convicted of violence were known to the authorities for domestic violence. I'm not saying, by the way, domestic violence is an exclusively right wing thing. I am saying this is a way bigger problem than we sometimes like to admit. Yeah. And it's one of those subjects, whether it's domestic violence or rape, I thought those figures that are great producing team put in there about how one of the things that women say, and we heard this during me too, I does make me think of the Epstein story, is the embarrassment and the shame that women face when they've been sexually abused or raped, and that they carry that guilt with them for years, somehow they feel they were at fault or they were too weak or they should have fended this off or they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

18:02And when they go to the police very often, what these women say in the States and here in the UK is my understanding is that that increases their mental health stress because the police treatment is not sensitive enough and is not open enough to what they are feeling and what they've gone through. And the thing that Grace said about her, she had this even from her own circles online of people say, well, hold on a minute, if you're going to talk so much about sex and you're going to do comedy shows about sex, it's almost like saying, well, you can have to expect a bit of this. It's like the old judges used to say, well, if you're going to wear a miniscule.

18:42If you're going to wear a short skirt, it's your fault. Because boys will be boys. Another stateless relevant to this, which Kira from the rape crisis, said to me, an average of two women each week, murdered by men. And yet women and children really struggle to find a refuge. And of course, we had a very, I don't know if you saw this, Katty, you were probably in the States at the time, we had a big case recently where the controlling husband of a woman who was in a refuge, tricked her into revealing where she was and he found her and he killed her. So there you are, Kira. Thank you for that. That is a very, very, very heavy subject.

19:17But I think it's one that Kira is right that men do need to talk about. We'll come back to it with Rory another time. Shall I read the next one? Yeah. Okay. This one comes from Viv Thelton. Why did the European Union withhold $1 .5 billion in aid to Ukraine? And how does this reflect the EU stance on President Zelensky's recent domestic policy decisions? Why don't you explain, Alistair? What happened and why? Well, the reason that they've said they're withholding it, I suspect that given the way he's reacted in recent days, it will not necessarily be seen through is because Zelensky, who has, you know, I said in the main podcast yesterday, and I was introducing this, I think has been an extraordinary leader and has barely put a foot wrong.

20:01But I think he did put a foot wrong with this. Essentially what happened was that they brought in a new law in the Ukrainian parliament to relieve to big anti -corruption agencies of their independence and put them under the control of the prosecutor general, who was appointed by the president. It led to the first really big protests. It led to a couple of days where the Ukrainian government was very defensive and say no, no, no, this is because these guys have been infiltrated by the Russians and doubted that people didn't really buy that. It may be true, but people were not willing to buy it.

20:34There were more protests and eventually not least under pressure from the European Union and others, Zelensky reversed this and reversed it pretty quickly. So I think he was aware that this was a bad bad move. And one of the things that this has brought out much more into the public is that there are people who've been close to Zelensky in the past, including a former Deputy Prime Minister, including somebody in his own team, who were under investigation and have been under investigation by these bodies for corruption. So bad move to do in the first place, good move to reverse it, and probably damage undone, but with a bit of a tarnish still there.

21:15Yeah, that's what I'd heard from UK officials who follow this, that it could be that it was just getting too close to Zelensky. And that was why he felt he should push ahead with these moves, but something that clearly annoyed not just the Europeans, by the way, but a lot of American senators, including Republican senators who want to see corruption stamped out in Ukraine. Okay, let's take a quick break and then we're going to come back for more questions. I'm David Orlishogga. And I'm Sarah Churchwell. Together we're the hosts of Journey Through Time, where we explore the darkest steps of history through the eyes of the people who live through it.

21:50Today we're going to tell you about our new series on the Great Fire of London, one of the great pivotal events of the 17th century, one of the most important events in all of English and British history. It began at a bakery on pudding lane and quickly turned into a catastrophe. It consumed 13 ,000 houses in decimated London and caused 10 billion pounds worth of damage in today's money. It even burned down the iconic St. Paul's Cathedral. The city was already devastated by the great plague, but rumors of foreign invasion led mobs to attack innocent foreigners on the streets. In this episode we'll explore the chilling consequences of rumors, of fake news, of xenophobia, problems that clearly are not unique to today.

22:34From desperate attempts to save their homes and belongings, to the struggle to assign blame, which turned deadly, this is the story of the fire as it was lived through by the people on the ground and the lasting impacts that left on the city. We've got a short clip at the end of this episode.

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24:05Welcome back to the RESTYSPOLE. It's question time with me at last Campbell. Me Kat, okay. Now, Ruin, I had a discussion a few weeks ago about health, the health service and prevention rather than cure. And I dropped into the conversation that, you know, well, we do seem to have this sort of fondness for things that damage is like alcohol, like crap food and whatever you have. And a guy called Joe Woof, amazing name, W -W -F got in touch. And Tommy, he was writing a book and the question goes as follows. Considering your idea of a public health fund, I'd have said that maybe it should be a public health fund where we actually get these food companies and drink companies, they have to make contributions as well.

24:48How do we stop treating addiction as just an individual fault? Instead, how do we break down this addictive environment by limiting how products are sold and advertised? Surely we need alternative forces, like youth clubs, community spaces that help people connect and thrive, especially the young, rather than just offering more support to quit or more education. And Joe Woof's point is that, and this is the book he's writing about, is called the Addiction Economy, that alcohol, fast food, junk food is designed to make us addicted to us. And this is what he is going to be writing about. So listen, you live in the capital of the globe.

25:27I'd love to say America is the capital of global junk food, where the president who loves it as well. We do have a Secretary of Health. Now, in Bobby Kennedy, Jr., who is actually trying to diminish the amount of addictive properties that are in junk food, has been pretty successful in moves to take out, for example, break. I don't know if you've ever had fruit loops. If you have the pleasure of a bowl of fruit loops for breakfast, actually, they're in the South of France, there's not perhaps something that's available. They are bright neon colored little circles, purple, orange, yellow, green, and they're basically pure sugar and food dye.