CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Epstein Affair, Again: “What about the Victims?”

Press outside Wood Farm, Sandringham Estate, Norfolk. Feb. 20, 2026. Photo: The author.

A day after the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, brother of King Charles and eighth in line of succession to the British throne, I visited Sandringham. That’s the estate in Norfolk, England, to which Andrew returned after 11 hours in custody at Aylsham police station, some 35 miles distant.

I arrived to see a scrum of about two dozen photographers and a few reporters, standing around, chatting, talking on the phone, fiddling with their gear, trying to stay dry. Three coppers stood together, about 30 feet away, beneath a broad cypress tree, in front of a flint wall surrounding the churchyard of the 14th C. Church of St. Mary Magdlelen.

 “Quite the scene,” I said to the police, needlessly.

“Yes, sir,” said one, with finality. He had a Polish accent and pony-tail not quite tucked beneath his cap.

Undeterred, I continued: “I don’t suppose you generally see so many people here, far from the main gate of Sandringham Estate.”

“No, sir,” said a shorter one, with wide face and grey-blond whiskers. “But considrin’ the strange circ’stance, tis not surprisin’”.

“Are you expecting Andrew to come through the gate today?”

“Not very likely,” said the third, slender, older and grayer, “gi’en the way he was photographed yest’day.”

The officer was referring of course to the remarkable photo taken by Phil Noble of Reuters, showing Andrew slumped in the back of a police cruiser, as he was ferried back to his temporary home at Wood Farm in Sandringham. (He’s due to be moved soon to smaller, damper, Marsh Farm nearby.) The picture was on the front page of every newspaper in Britain (print and online editions) and thousands more abroad. Eddy Frankel, art critic for The Guardian had a field day:

“Those red eyes, like two little portals to hell, are not angry or vicious: they are dazed and overwhelmed. They’re the same eyes you see in the anguished howler of Edward Munch’s The Scream or Gustave Courbet’s Desperate Man.”

Frankel went on extravagantly, comparing the photograph to paintings and graphic art by Francisco Goya, Otto Dix, Francis Bacon and oddly, Juan Carreno de Miranda, a now little-known painter at the 17th court of Charles II, much inferior to his predecessor, Diego Velazquez. Had Mr. Frankel popped the photo of the sinking Andrew into an AI search engine?

Until recently, art history students were trained to memorize thousands of images precisely to perform the task of discovering resemblance. The idea – premised on the mostly correct assumption that art is derived from other art – is that once you recognize the pictorial bases of your target image, you can judge if they share a similar meaning. Like young physicians trained to recognize symptoms, art history students must exercise caution. Just as chest pains could mean a heart attack or indigestion, an image of a man with wide open eyes and folded hands could mean either terror or amazement.

Regardless of how Mr. Frankel came to his judgment of likeness, I think his interpretation is faulty. What we see in Noble’s photograph is not the “shock, pain and horror” found in associated works by Goya, Munch, Bacon, et al. What we see is simply surprise: a son caught pinching money from his father’s wallet; a student spotted cheating on an exam; or a husband discovered by his wife in the arms of another woman. Note the red-eye effect of the camera flash, calling to mind a succession of movie gumshoes (Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep or Jake Gittes in Chinatown) employed by suspicious wives, husbands or fathers to catch and photograph their cheating spouses or errant daughters.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested (though not charged) on suspicion of selling commercial secrets to Jeffrey Epstein (“misconduct in public office). He was spotted and photographed in a police car, returning from Aylsham (a pretty and prosperous village) after being booked, fingerprinted, DNA swabbed, and interrogated. His mug-shot was taken. Andrew had been Prince, Duke of York, and the Queen’s favorite. She appointed him roving, trade ambassador — “Air-Miles Andy”, the tabloids called him. Now he’s just another punter. That’s why he looked so surprised in the photograph.

The Epstein Library, as it’s innocuously titled on the U.S. Department of Justice website, is a miracle of simplicity. Just put in your search term and you’re off to the races. “Trump” has 5,240 results and “Andrew” 18,818. (Some of Trump’s have been excised.) It’s unclear if people with most hits are most implicated in Epstein’s criminality. Chomsky, distressingly, has a whopping 6,322 results, though the vast majority are duplicative or innocuous.

To test the site’s functionality, I decided to search the term “Jew”.  Epstein was Jewish, and so am I. And so were many of Epstein’s friends, patrons, beneficiaries and confidants. They included intellectuals like Chomsky, Larry Summers, Steven Pinker, and the late Stephen Jay Gould. Among his Jewish friends from the financial world were Les Wexner, Leon Black, Ronald Perelman, and Ronald Lauder.

Did the emails and letters reveal some shocking, Jewish penchant for pedophilia? Was there anything Jewish at all, I wanted to know, about Epstein’s gatherings in New York, Paris, Santa Fe or the U.S. Virgin Islands? Did he and his distinguished guests come together for Shabbat dinners, to celebrate Rosh Hashanah or read the Haggadah at Passover? Did they study Yiddish language or literature, read the great Jewish sages, Maimonides and Hillel? Did they form Marx and Freud, or perhaps Saul Bellow and Philip Roth reading groups?  Roth published in 1958, a comic short story called “Epstein” about the Jewish owner of the Epstein Paper Bag Company who contracts syphilis and shames his wife and family. That would have been a good subject for dinner-table discussion.

But no. There was nothing particularly Jewish in the 3,551 search results for the word “Jew.” What there was instead was innumerable news digests supporting the latest Israeli atrocity against Palestinians. There was also a lot of badinage between Epstein, his staff and a few friends (most but not all Jewish) containing every imaginable anti-Semitic cliché or canard. Cheap Jews?  Check. Jewish clannishness? Check. Jews as shadowy, financial puppeteers? Check. Jewish intellectual superiority? Check. Jewish racism? Check.  Here are a few examples:

Roger Schank, a pioneering AI researcher and university professor (now deceased), wrote to........

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