Here Are the 3 Most Disturbing Takeaways From Mother Jones’s Interview With Jeffrey Epstein’s Art Advisor

New and unsettling details about the case of Jeffrey Epstein,
and his links to the worlds of art and science, continue to emerge.
On Friday, Mother
Jones published a lengthy, colorful, and unsettling
interview with Epstein’s former art advisor Stuart Pivar, who
says he counted Epstein as his “best pal for decades.”

Now in his late 80s, Pivar has a storied history in the arts and
has often been described using terms like “eccentric” and
“mercurial.” He co-founded the New York Academy of Art with Andy
Warhol in 1982, and also served as Warhol’s art buyer, going on
almost daily shopping trips with the Pop artist to build his
collection. (He wrote about the experience in the 1997 essay
“Shopping With Andy
Warhol.”)

He is also very litigious. Pivar was involved in a spectacular and very
acrimonious lawsuit against the New York Academy in the
1990s. More recently, he has been in the news
for initiating a $200 million
lawsuit against a Philadelphia lawyer, claiming he was tricked
into selling a Brancusi sculpture for less than it was worth. Just
last month, he filed an improbably large $2 billion lawsuit against
Sotheby’s for rejecting his consignment of a group of artworks.

In the interview, Pivar insists that he had no idea of
Epstein’s worst crimes. “He never invited me to the ‘Isle of
Babes,’” he says more than once, referring to the private island
where some of Epstein’s crimes are supposed to have taken place. At
the same time, he also reiterates again and again that his former
friend has been “totally, totally, totally misunderstood,” calling
allegations that Epstein ran a sex ring involving other powerful
men “calumnies and lies,” and repeatedly referring to the
woman and girls making allegations about Epstein
as “trollops.”

Pivar is adamant that Epstein’s predations be understood as a
medical condition, advising his interviewer to read Richard von
Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 treatise on human sexuality, Psychopathia
Sexualis, for insight into the case: “The point is that
Jeffrey was afflicted with a disease,” he said. At moments, he also
seems to share Epstein’s own theory, previously recounted by
James B. Stewart in the
New York Times, that criminalizing sex with teenage
girls is a cultural aberration.

Mother Jones reporter Leland Nally seemingly
cold called Pivar after finding his name in Epstein’s so-called
“black book,” which has been publicly posted online. The result is
a rambling and at times contentious exchange, in which Pivar
repeats himself often, at multiple points questions aloud why he is
still talking to the reporter, and finally threatens the reporter
with legal action and worse. When you strip it to the essentials,
here are the important points from the interview.

1. Pivar definitely witnessed sexual
harassment

Despite his repeated insistence that the media is
sensationalizing and misunderstanding the Epstein case, Pivar’s
description suggests that he was aware that his friend’s behavior
could cross the line into sexual harassment.

At one point, he recounts an incident that took place at
Blumka Gallery, a specialist in medieval,
Renaissance, and Baroque art (the Upper East Side gallery happens
to be located less than four blocks from Epstein’s giant East 71st
Street apartment):

I was a sort of an art consultant, furnishing his numerous
houses, and at one point I took him to a very prominent art dealer
to buy furniture and what have you. I brought along an assistant I
had who was a very attractive young girl, and there we were in
those precincts of art and Renaissance furniture and what have you.
He grabbed her up from behind and lifted her up and squeezed the
hell out of her and she screamed. I said, “Jeffrey put her down!
What are you doing?”

And the three or four of us who were watching were horrified,
and he put her down. He was out of control. Have you ever seen
anyone do a thing like that?

2. He confirms accuser Maria Farmer’s
story

One of Epstein’s first known victims was
Maria Farmer, who met the financier while she was a student at the
New York Academy of Art in 1995. In a long profile published today
in the New York
Times, she describes in detail how she met Epstein at the
New York Academy of Art and began working for him. Later, she says
she was groped and held hostage by Epstein and his accomplice,
Ghislaine Maxwell, while at an estate in Ohio.

Farmer’s younger sister Annie Farmer, then 16, was also lured to
Epstein’s New Mexico ranch where she describes Epstein and
Maxwell’s attempts to seduce her, including an unwanted topless
massage from Maxwell.

The Farmers say that they complained to both authorities and
members of the New York Academy of Art community but saw no action.
In Pivar’s account, it was Maria Farmer’s complaint to him that
caused him to cut ties with his longtime friend, though there is no
suggestion that he acted to report him:

[O]ne day at the flea market there’s Maria Farmer, who I knew
’cause she was a student at the New York Academy of Art, and I
[asked], “What are you doing here?” And she started to tell me
about some terrible thing, too terrible to utter, having to do with
Jeffrey Epstein. And then a minute later, he shows up. And I began
to put two and two together. And I realized that something was
going on, which I didn’t know about. And at that point, I knew that
he had a different life that I was not aware of.

Jeffrey brought her there, and what he did to Maria was
inexcusable, of course. He locked her up, and she couldn’t get
away, and her father had to come and rescue her. That’s a story she
told. And, of course, that’s the least of what she told me. Forget
that, her little sister, for Christ’s sake, the guy actually
brought her to his place and did those kind of things, which, of
course, is inexcusable and that’s the kind of thing which
satyriasists do because they can’t help themselves.

She was a student at the New York Academy of Art. Jeffrey was on
the board of trustees of the New York Academy of Art. That’s how
come he knew her.

Jeffrey used to go to the functions of that institution. She was
there. She was an artist, and Jeffrey used to buy drawings and what
the heck not. My guess is that he was there only for the purpose of
meeting… it wouldn’t surprise me.

3. Epstein’s dark taste in art had a
meaning

Epstein’s unsettling taste in art is by now a well-established
part of the narrative, from his painting of Bill Clinton in
a dress (also purchased at the New York Academy of Art, in
2012) to the mural he commissioned for his home depicting himself
in prison, supposedly to remind himself of where he could end up.
Pivar, a rapacious collector himself whose home decor has been
described as ranging from
Renaissance furniture, to a collection of gemstones he inherited
from Warhol, to human skeletons, provides a kind of clue to the
significance of some of Epstein’s taste.

Notably, both men are fans of alternative theories of science
(Pivar penned the book Lifecode: The Theory of
Biological Self-Organization), though Pivar describes
Epstein as basically scientifically illiterate but eager to impose
his own values on the field. “Jeffrey came into the concept of
thought and science and all with no knowledge whatsoever about
anything,” Pivar says. “He really didn’t know a goddamn thing. I
don’t even believe that he taught math.”

He explains Epstein’s art taste as a similar attachment to
asserting his own independent from existing standards of value:

Jeffrey was amused to have in his house fake art which looked
like real art. Because of the fact that he was putting one over, so
to speak. He thought that he was—how do you describe that? When you
walked into this house, for example, there was a Max Weber or
something like that, and it was a fake. And it amused him that
people didn’t realize that. He was able to furnish his house with
the fake paintings. Jeffrey had a collection of underage Rodins,
for example, because what difference does it make if it’s real or
not real? And if the real one costs nothing and the expensive
one—it doesn’t make a difference. He was amused to put one over on
the world by having fake art. He thought that he was seeing through
the fallacy.

Putting this together with Epstein’s knowing defiance of laws
around sex with minors, it all seems to add up to a statement, to
himself and the world, that he didn’t have to play by the same
rules as everyone else.

The post Here Are the 3 Most Disturbing Takeaways From
Mother Jones’s Interview With Jeffrey Epstein’s Art Advisor
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