Mega Edition: The New York Times And Their Less Than Exemplary Epstein Coverage (8/19/26)

The New York Times’ history with Jeffrey Epstein was uneven in a way that became increasingly difficult to ignore as the full scale of the scandal emerged. For years, Epstein moved comfortably through the worlds the Times covered most aggressively: Wall Street, philanthropy, academia, science, politics and New York high society. Yet the newspaper was not the institution that originally broke open the Palm Beach investigation, exposed the extraordinary non-prosecution agreement or forced Epstein’s abuse back into the national conversation. Those breakthroughs came largely from local reporting, survivor litigation and later the Miami Herald’s sustained investigation. Even more strikingly, Times reporter James B. Stewart met with Epstein in 2018, after Epstein was already a registered sex offender, and Epstein boasted to him about possessing damaging information concerning powerful people. Stewart did not publish the details of that encounter until after Epstein’s July 2019 arrest, leaving the Times vulnerable to criticism that one of the country’s most powerful newspapers had gotten remarkably close to an explosive story without fully pursuing it when Epstein was still operating in elite circles. After Epstein’s 2019 arrest, the Times produced substantial reporting on his money, relationships, scientific ambitions, associates and institutional connections, and in later years it continued digging into questions surrounding how he accumulated his fortune and maintained access to powerful people. But the criticism never completely disappeared because the paper’s aggressive post-arrest coverage stood in contrast to how little sustained scrutiny Epstein received during the decades when victims were trying to be heard and his connections were helping normalize him. That tension resurfaced again in 2026 amid criticism of the Times’ handling of figures such as former Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, with detractors arguing that coverage could sometimes become unusually sympathetic when examining elite professionals who had maintained relationships with Epstein after his conviction. The Times therefore became part of a larger media failure surrounding Epstein: not because it never did important reporting, but because much of the hardest scrutiny arrived only after prosecutors, survivors and other journalists had made Epstein impossible for the national press to overlook. to contact me: bobbycapucci@protonmail.com Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-epstein-chronicles--5003294/support.