Lydia Laurenson is US a writer- I don't agree with everything she says but she's written some interesting stuff on both sex & politics. Her Substack post on her encounter with Epstein indicates he did at least sometimes engineer situations that should seem at least potentially dodgy to the average person. I've copied the most relevant bits below.
https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/its-just-politics-the-time-i-met
The acquaintance who introduced me to Jeffrey Epstein told me that Epstein was a very interesting guy, had funded amazing projects, but had a “complicated” reputation. They said Epstein’s reputation was due to “politics.”
We discussed basic scientific research (Epstein reportedly was one of the biggest private science funders in the USA). We discussed public health. Then, with the public health conversation, we started talking about New York City’s sexual history.
I should note here that I spent much of my twenties doing activism, writing, and education related to sexuality. People often ask me about this personal history, and I always try to answer their questions honestly t. As a result of my unusual history, I was not automatically discomfited when Epstein brought up sexual topics, because people frequently bring up those topics with me. Yet, as the conversation intensified, something about his energy became intensely uncomfortable for me, even though I am accustomed to navigating such topics.
From my brief scan of Epstein’s Wikipedia entry, I recalled that Epstein had been convicted of something related to sex crimes against minors, but I also recalled that he hadn’t served much time. The person who introduced me to Epstein dismissed his crimes as “politics.” But was it true? I thought to myself: I would expect a man convicted of such crimes to carefully contain his sexuality. Yet Jeffrey Epstein, in person, was anything but contained.
Within the first fifteen minutes of our conversation, the phone rang and Jeffrey picked it up. He said something like: “Oh yeah, give the girl an internship.” Then he named several large amounts of money Then Jeffrey hung up and turned to me with a smile. He informed me that sometimes, he really wanted to give people money. It was the easiest thing in the world, Jeffrey smilingly said, to make it look like the money hadn’t come from him.
Soon after that, he rang a bell and a group of young women entered the room. Really pretty women. Who looked like teenagers.
I had read about these barely-legal Russian women in Page Six. A source told the gossip magazine that Jeffrey’s Manhattan mansion was “full of young beauties,” and that “half of them are from the former Soviet Union and the other half are a mix of Americans and Europeans… When the Russian girls arrive in the city, they already have Jeffrey’s phone number.” I looked at them. They did not look underage to me. The Page Six article had reported that they were at the legal age of consent.
I was confused about what might be expected of me. But I didn’t have much time to think about it, because Jeffrey immediately prompted me to start talking about the sexuality workshops I used to teach in my twenties. Then he encouraged the girls to ask me questions. The group particularly wanted to know about BDSM and polyamory
By doing this, Jeffrey, intentionally or not, diverted me into my educator mode. This is a role I’m accustomed to, and the young women seemed genuinely interested, so I simply started talking to them about sex education. Taking this familiar “educator” role did not erase the strangeness of the moment, but it gave me something to talk about while I sought a sense of what lay under the surface.
My audience was clearly surprised by the impromptu sex education lesson — they were just as surprised as I was. But despite their surprise, they did not seem nervous or angry. Were these girls being trafficked? The situation felt weird, but simultaneously, the young women — at least, the women I was seeing in front of me, in that moment — seemed capable. They showed an unusual mix of curiosity, excitement, and intense judgments: One, sitting kitty-corner from me, responded to a mild description of BDSM by insisting, “Any man who’d do that to you doesn’t really love you.”
I gazed across the table at her. The gap in our ages and life experiences hit me abruptly, like a blow. Later, I read the stories about his ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s somewhat older than me. I learned about the sorts of things they (allegedly) did together. And eventually, finally, I began to understand the terrible role that, maybe, Jeffrey Epstein tried to recruit me for.
Occasionally, in my perambulations around the media and tech industries, his name cropped up. One woman turned to me at a random party and said: “I heard you met Jeffrey. Isn’t he great?” “Ah,” I said. I cast about for the right thing to say, and decided to be fairly direct. “I did meet him. What do you think of the charges against him?”“Oh,” she said, with an airy wave of her hand, “it’s just politics.”
A year or two later, I heard from a female friend, through a community whisper network, that this woman was a known procuress for Epstein.
Stories like mine show an outline of how recruitment attempts were made. These stories show how our social context, including our non-sexual networks, created a seemingly respectable veneer over recruitment among the “liberal coastal elite,” while also entangling our sexuality, and how this sometimes occurred in situations where the presence of sexual energy felt strangely hard to define.