Among the strange threads running through the Epstein files is a simple obsession Little rascals.
The connection first drew attention this week, when a federal judge unsealed a handwritten note allegedly written by Epstein in July 2019, roughly three weeks before his death, following a suspected suicide attempt at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.
The note ends with “What do you want me to do – burst into tears!!”
The line has been traced back to 1931 Our gang With a short title My little daddywhere Stymie’s character turns it in when she learns that he and a friend are about to break up.
Watch the exchange here.
Epstein used the same expression in at least three previous emails, according to documents released earlier this year under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, including once to his brother in 2016 and one to a childhood friend in 2017.
But a search through the released files turns up an earlier, stranger instance of Little rascals stabilizing.
In a December 2, 2014 email to Joi Ito — the former director of MIT’s Media Lab who would resign in 2019 after the extent of his financial ties to Epstein became public — Epstein responds to a photo Ito apparently sent him.
Ito, in his letter, had already retracted an initial misidentification: “Wait, what was I thinking? That’s alfalfa, not squiggy.”
He meant to say clover, which is the scene stealer of the cow Our gang Shorts was played by Carl Dean Switzer, but mistakenly referred to Andrew “Squiggy” Squigman, the character played by David Lander in Laverne and Shirley.
“Even older, but I think what I remember dates me,” Ito added Little rascals“.
Epstein’s response did not address whether or not he found the comparison interesting. Instead, he asked, “Is there a Japanese symbol that when pronounced =AO sounds like AL-fa=fa,” apparently seeking to transliterate his new surname in favor of Ito.
In a separate letter, Epstein sent Ito a link to a photo of Switzer on IMDb: Image 55 of 82 on the actor’s page, a black-and-white publicity from around 1935 that shows the boy smiling in suspenders, his signature cowlick curling toward the sky.
Epstein’s accompanying letter: “Are there any similarities?”
In isolation, this is a trivial exchange, the kind of banter that passes between men who consider themselves friends.
In context, it is something else: a data point that indicates that Little rascals The reference in the suicide note was not accidental, but rather part of a real and recurring private vocabulary.
Whether this makes the note more or less likely to be authentic is a question that forensic analysts will eventually have to answer. What it proves, at least, is that Epstein was Scoundrels admired, and perhaps even clovered on his mind, for years.
