Rudy Giuliani’s in the headlines right now because Sacha Baron Cohen punked him in Borat 2, now streaming on Amazon Prime, and there’s a scene in the film in which Rudy’s in a hotel room with an underage girl posing as a journalist and at one point he sticks his hand down his pants. He’s trying to say that he wasn’t being a perv and that he’s been set up to look like a perv and we can debate all day whether or not he was being a perv but Sacha’s bigger point with this stunt is that… a lot of these men in power, these men who accumulate power in side-rooms and on shady islands, they are often in the company of young girls. And the sick thing is… 

 

We have become used to these stories. 

Which brings us to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Earlier this week a judge ruled that transcripts from a deposition she gave in a defamation suit (she eventually settled with Virginia Roberts Giuffre) could be made public pending redactions. And that’s happening this morning.

 

And for years now people have been waiting to find out what she said, exactly, in her testimony about Epstein’s crimes and also about their network of wealthy influential men who allegedly participated in their sex trafficking operation. One of those men is, of course, the second son of Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Andrew, who has maintained that he never engaged in any of Epstein and Maxwell’s f-cksh-t but Virginia Giuffre alleges otherwise – and she had the photo to support her claims.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers have tried to block the unsealing of the documents, insisting that it would make it more difficult for her to have a fair trial. The Miami Herald and other parties say this is a matter of public interest. So here we are…

What is in there that they don’t want to get out? 

And is Buckingham Palace paying attention? 

For the last couple of months, they’ve enjoyed some relative quiet where Andrew’s concerned, happy to have Prince Harry and Meghan Markle occupying everyone’s attention and probably not at all bothered about all the criticism and online hate that the Sussexes are subject to – even though they weren’t the ones who hung out with a dead rapist pedophile. And also the British tabloids, who devote the same amount of energy to complaining about how many bedrooms Harry and Meghan have in their house to the fact that Prince Andrew was photographed in the presence of two alleged sex traffickers with his arm around one of their alleged victims at the height of their operation…what’s their pivot on this going to be? Get ready for more of that later today and in the coming days, especially if Andrew’s name comes up a lot in these documents.