By David Futrelle
Stuart Pivar has a bad case of the blabbies, and we’re all the richer for it. Or possibly the poorer; I haven’t decided yet. Today, Mother Jones posted a long, sprawling, and exceedingly surreal interview with the octogenarian art collector/scientist/former best bud of Jeffrey Epstein, a man who clearly doesn’t know when it would be wiser to just shut his yap.
HINT: When you used to be Jeffrey Epstein’s best bud, and a reporter calls to ask for your thoughts on all things Epstein, that’s probably a good time for you to remain silent — especially if you know you have a tendency to ramble on about “16-year-old trollops” and the terrible of burdens of satyriasis (the male version of nymphomania).
The interview is quite a trip, and a long one at that; you shoud probably set aside the rest of the day to read it, leaving plenty of time for you to periodically shake your head in disbelief. Bring some water and a snack.
While Pivar insists that during his best-bud-with-Epstein days he knew nothing about Epstein’s sordid crimes against girls and women, and broke with the serial rapist as soon as he heard the first accusations against him, he nonetheless insists that Epstein had such a constant raging boner that he couldn’t really help himself. And over the course of the long interview, conducted by writer Leland Nally, Pivar reveals that his views on underage sexuality are not completely dissimilar from those of the late Epstein.
Here are the six ickiest, squickiest revelations from this eminently icky, squicky interview.
ONE: Pivar describes Epstein as as someone who was more ill than bad, comparing the dead serial rapist’s alleged “satyriasis” — his perpetual horniness — to … tuberculosis.
“[I]t’s a disease,” Pivar told Mother Jones.
It’s called satyriasis, and Jeffrey was afflicted with that. He couldn’t help himself. …
If he had tuberculosis it wouldn’t be called a perversion, would it? Because he coughed too much?
TWO: He thinks the girls and women that Epstein assaulted and exploited were “trollops” who knew what they were getting into.
Indeed, Pivar is quite fond of the word “trollop,” using it three separate times over the course of the interview, twice following the phrase “16-year-old.”
THREE: Pivar thinks that Epstein’s real problem was that “what he did was quantitative and not qualitative.” That is, what he did to the girls he exploited wasn’t really real rape because they were “complicit” and “complaisant.” The problem was just that he did so darn much of it.
If Jeffrey Epstein was found guilty of fooling around with one 16-year-old trollop, nobody would pay any attention. The trouble is, what he did was quantitative and not qualitative.
What Jeffrey did is nothing in comparison to the rapes and the forceful things, which people did. Jeffrey had to do with a bunch of women who were totally complicit. For years, they went, came there time and time and time again. And if there was only one of them who did it, no one would have noticed—except he made an industry out of it.
FOUR: Pivar insists that he was never invited to Epstein’s “Isle of Babes.” He also insists on calling it the “Isle of Babes,” using the phrase five times in the interview.
FIVE: Pivar apparently has quite a few thoughts about underage sex, though in this interview he somehow managed to stop himself from divulging them all.
[S]exual attraction starts at a very, very young age. When I was 14, I had to deal with a girl who was only 13. And somehow, I remember, it was at summer camp.
Oh Jesus no. Please spare us this 89-year-old’s reminiscences of summer camp sexual experimentation.
And I stopped having to do with her because of the tremendous age gap.
Oh thank god.
Oh wait, he’s still going?
Girls at the age of 12, 13, and 14 have sexual attraction to 14- and 15-year-olds. But it’s not supposed to be that way. And so, all kinds of rules get made. And nature is not allowed to take its course on account of civilization. Jeffrey broke those rules, big time. But what he was pursuing was the kind of, I suppose, sexual urges which would—why am I telling you this stuff for? Leave me alone. Go away.
Oddly, this was not Pivar’s only attempt to stop the interview; he made repeated attempts — only to forget about it a second or two later and go on talking and talking and talking.
SIX: This one isn’t so much icky as just weird, but apparently Epstein’s house was full of forged paintings and other fake art? And Epstein was proud of this?
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. … 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?
I take back what I said about this one not being so icky. Even as a collector of fake art, Epstein apparently couldn’t — well, wouldn’t — stay away from the “underage Rodins.” He probably had a lot of fake Balthuses as well.
Go read the whole interview. You won’t regret it.
Well, to be honest, you probably will regret it. Heck, you probably regret reading this.
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For someone who supposedly didn’t know about Epstein’s rapes while they were happening, he seems to know a lot about them. Another dirty old man.
Hang on, I’m confused. What on earth does the sexual attraction of adolescent girls to adolescent boys have to do with an old man raping them? Or is this creepy old fart one of those who think women and girls ought to be sexless?
@Amy E
I shudder to think what goes on inside this man’s head, but I read that part as the kind of pedophilia apologia where he tries to say that young girls have sexual desires as well and somehow that makes it not rape. Some manospherians seem to think this way as well.
Amy E,
In the mind of a misogynist, any time a girl or woman does any kind of consensual sex act or expresses any interest in sex, she is fair game for anyone male. If she’s not 100% pure an virginal, she is a whore and asking for it.
Thanks both. Ewww.
I’m over halfway through the article and taking a break, but my takeaway so far is that it’s basically “Poor Jeffrey, he had a condition which makes him lust too much, you see? And he had all this money, so there was nothing stopping him from indulging, you see? And maybe if he didn’t have money, he could have learned self-control? Also he’s like a kid with barely any attention span, kind of? But nobody cares about poor, poor, Jeffrey, or the lust condition he suffered, only the fact that he shtupped a few teens who totally must have known what they were getting into, because he wasn’t really that bad of a person, see?” over and over again.
Gah. Might as well finish it in a bit, but this is stupid and terrible.
I’m on vacation, so I’m not going to read this right now. I’ll just shudder at what David has quoted here.
Related, guess which famous computer science dude turned out to be a child rapist?
Marvin Minsky, that’s who.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jeffrey-epstein-sex-trafficking-island-court-records-unsealed
So much of our tech toolkit, and so many of our ideas of the future, were developed by men like this. Gods help us.
I mean at 12 years old I had my first kiss at a summer camp with a girl who was older then I was, and I still thought old men who cat called me or talked to me were creeps. This guy is in another reality if he thinks a preteen girl is gonna want him just because she’s started to have her first sexual feelings and thoughts.
…Okay, done. The rest was mostly Pivar forgetting half of what was said by both himself and the interviewer, even if it was repeated like three times already, then suddenly remembering that this was an interview and getting paranoid about what it might do to his reputation. Whatever. ?
Well I’m creeped the fuck out.
… Okay, done. Is anyone here secretly a saucer man from Mars, or otherwise the owner of a spaceship tucked away somewhere? I’d like a ticket off this rock now, and no doubt so would you. :/
I hate that I kept reading “Pivar” as “Pixar”. D:
Off topic, but there’s a new Contrapoints video about men’s issues. Definitely relevant to this blog.
I really don’t have the spoons to read the ramblings of some senile short-eye. If there’s an afterlife, I hope he rots in hell, all the hells.
Funny how, in actual fact, the girls were always the LAST ones to know it.
Also, nice of him to deflect the horny-jackassery onto the girls instead of acknowledging that it was the horny jackass that MADE “trollops” of them. So original a contention, and not tired and shopworn in the least!
(Dang. I seem to have gotten snark all down the front of me again.)
What the fuck even is a trollop? isn’t that a type of cart of something?
A sex-worker, although being a derogatory term, he’s calling the girls whores.
What’s a trollop?
It’s a girl who has had more sex than Stuart Pivar approves of.
Stuart Pivar was 14? And the girl at summer camp was 13? That sounds . . . nonproblematic.
Wait a minute. Have the media gotten the stories about Jeffrey Epstein all wrong? Was he in fact getting foot massages and such from 65-year-old women? Is society so hard on May-June (and November-December) relationships? If so, then Mother Jones has, as they say in the news biz, buried the lede.
I said it about Dershowitz, and I’ll say it about this guy as well : the more they flail about tryna bury suspicions, the more they guilty.
People who don’t rape kids don’t feel the need to ramble on about their “perfect, perfect sex life” or use words like “satyriasis”. And people who aren’t giant fucking creeps are actually capable of going through a conversation without sounding like a giant fucking creep.
Someone lock up this dude.
Am I the only one who read this waste of carbon’s drivel and immediately pictures him in a barely tied bathrobe, standing on his lawn, flailing his fists and ranting at the neighborhood kids?
If not, I apologize *profusely* for planting that image.
Edited to add: autocorrupt had changed “carbon” to “Carlson.”
I find that oddly appropriate.
Ugh. I couldn’t even finish the article, the interview was so repetitive and nauseating. His main argument seems to be that Epstein was sick, so everyone should feel sorry for him, but it was OK because he had the money to indulge his “sickness” by raping girls in a “polite” way, unlike poor pedophiles. Pivar asks us to believe that Epstein suffered from satyriasis, but all the evidence says he rejoiced in it.
His secondary argument: rape is NBD if it’s just one girl and only gets problematic when it’s “quantitative”. In his eyes, Epstein’s main sin was greed, not rape.
I did enjoy the tidbit that at the dinner parties full of Serious Science Thinkers, Epstein would ask hard-hitting questions like “What is gravity?”, and as soon as the conversation got above his head, he would interrupt with “What’s that got to do with pussy?” Real deep intellect there.
I read the whole thing and it’s just 20 minutes I’m never gonna get back, is all.
I like how all those *other* girls were “trollops”, but when people he personally knew were involved, it was beyond the pale and he cut off ties. Nobody else gets the benefit of the doubt at all. Because Epstein should have controlled himself with Pivar’s acquaintances somehow, but with everyone else, he “couldn’t control himself” because of his “illness.”
What a load of unmitigated crap.
I hope there is a remote chance that this guy reads what he said and realizes what he sounds like. (I know, I know.)
Ugh no thanks, if I want to read the lengthy self-justifications of a pedo I can just read Lolita again, at least that has some literary value.
The way these men are compelled to drone on and on about the shitty things they do would be really useful in stopping them, if only anyone paid attention. Cuz they all tell you flat out that they’re raping kids or drugging women or whatever they get up to. For years even. Some even make movies or do stand up acts based around it ?