“In the run-up to the trial, the brothers conducted an elaborate public relations campaign . . . also arranged for payments to influencers and podcasters who made sympathetic social media posts abo...

From a news article about some recently-convicted rapists:

Three brothers who ran a yearslong conspiracy to traffic women and girls for sex were sentenced to 30 years each in prison on Tuesday . . . The brothers, more accustomed to moving around in powerful and wealthy circles in New York and Miami, must now wait to see which federal prison they are sent to. They have also taken steps to try and secure a pardon.

That last link takes you to this story:

Tal, Oren and Alon Alexander, three prominent brothers convicted of running a decades-long sex-trafficking scheme in New York earlier this year, have enlisted the lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz in their apparent pursuit of a pardon from President Trump. They retained him in March 2025, nearly 11 months before their trial began in New York federal court, and since then have paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to financial documents obtained by The New York Times. Those documents include a copy of a check for $250,000, as well as a wire transfer receipt and an invoice from Mr. Dershowitz requesting an additional $250,000. . . .

We can laugh at buffoonish Epstein associates such as Nobel-winner Richard “Axel” Foley and Ted-talk star Dan “Redhead” Ariely, but this seems worse. Convicted sex offenders enlist legal associate of convicted sex offender to solicit a pardon from a convicted sex offender. There is a logic to it, I admit.

Also this:

In the run-up to the trial, the brothers conducted an elaborate public relations campaign . . . the brothers had worked with a Hollywood public relations firm that has been linked to several high-profile smear campaigns. . . . The brothers also arranged for payments to influencers and podcasters who made sympathetic social media posts about the case.

Which reminds me of the intimidation tactics employed by Theranos and Cambridge University to suppress reporting on their frauds, and the too-close-to-home story we discussed yesterday, of some Facebook executives plotting a “Merchants of Doubt”-style smear job on an academic critic of their industry.

As I wrote a few years ago: Yes, this is a credulous age. But this credulity does not occur in a vacuum. What’s stunning is the way in which frauds can stay afloat even after they’ve been exposed. Not that this is new. That Chariots of the Gods guy kept selling books even after it was common knowledge that it was all bogus. I just think we need to keep more of an eye on the active efforts that people take, not just to promote crap, but to attack those who point out the problems.

These are some of the richest and most powerful people in the world and they’re too greedy to respond to criticism in an honest and open way. Which shouldn’t surprise me: They got where they are today by breaking the rules, and they are celebrated and rewarded for it, so why change their behavior now?

They play by their own rules:

P.S. I’ll share one more item, which is unrelated except that I happened to come across it while going through the other files:

it’s an attempt from mathematician Jonathan Farley to tap Epstein for $5 million . . . in a letter dated July 30, 2019, and sent to the disgraced financier care of the Metropolitan Correctional Center. Sorry, Jonathan, you were too late!

P.P.S. The question naturally arises, Why am I posting this? After all, my comparative advantage lies in statistical modeling, causal inference, and social science. There are lots of people out there who can share political outrage-of-the-week stories; I’m hardly needed for that, and in this case I’m not even to serve to usefully amplify the story, given that it was already reported in a newspaper with a circulation in the millions.

As always, my answer is that I give my take on such events because they relate to things that are closer to my core interests.

First off, the story directly reminded me of what I learned yesterday, that it appears that some evil people from a fabulously rich corporation were talking about enlisting my aid in a secret hit job (what our homophobic Stanford friend Niall Ferguson might call “some opposition research on Mr. H”). That annoyed me! The story discussed in the present post is worse, in that they’re doing this on behalf not just of greedy plutocrats but for actual rapists. What I’m saying here is that I saw the article in the newspaper, it connected in my mind to the recent business I’d been thinking about, so I was motivated to express myself.

The other thing is the Jeffrey Epstein connection, here exemplified by Alan Dershowitz (who reportedly is working on getting a pardon for the rapists) and Mark Zuckerberg (who reportedly has fostered a culture at his company of lying and media manipulation). Beyond my own indirect connections to Epstein (my Ph.D. adviser was one of the many Harvard types who flattered the financier in the hope of extracting some money from him), I’m interested in the story as a social scientist and a student of the worst as well as the best in the intellectual and business worlds.

Finally, that Jonathan Farley note was just too good not to share. I’m just picturing the mathematician at his desk, hearing that Epstein is now in jail, and thinking: “Ummmm, I guess this is my last chance . . . if I play my cards right, I can get 5 million dollars and a chair at Oxford. It probably won’t pan out but it can’t hurt to try.” Aaahhhh, but it could hurt!

As always, I laugh because otherwise I would cry.