Forever Young
Some scandals never die
“Nothing ever change, oh no
Nothing ever change
I’m just living in a life without meaning
I walk and walk, do nothing
I’m just living in a life without feeling
I talk and talk, say nothing
Nothing ever change, oh no
Nothing ever change”
- Do Nothing by The Specials
“I was the bad thing in his life,” said Myra Lewis Williams in 2022 when a L.A. Times reporter asked her to reflect on the passing of her ex-husband Jerry Lee Lewis, who she married when she was only 13 years old. “It was because of our marriage that his career hit the pavement. You know, you were judged for everything you did back then.”
I sometimes wonder if rock n’ roll’s “original wild man” would be “judged” as harshly today as he was in 1957. Not content with his first two wives or the immense wealth he accumulated through his soulless ripoffs of Black music, Mr. Lewis aka “The Killer” was 22 years old when he married his first cousin once removed. Or to borrow a phrase I learned while going down my latest Wikipedia rabbit hole of reading about powerful men who got away with extraordinary and unspeakable improprieties, this means that Jerry Lee Lewis was a “cousin-uncle” to the child once known as Myra Gale Brown.
Lewis’ cousin-uncle-husband relationship wasn’t made public until he arrived at Heathrow airport in London, at which point reporter Ray Berry approached him and began asking questions about the young girl traveling with him. I don’t have the official transcript of their interaction and I will not bother to seek it out, but I imagine it went something like this:
Lewis: “Doesn’t my hair look great?”
Berry: “Who is that child you are holding hands with?”
Lewis “That’s my wife.”
Berry: “Is she old enough to be married? And why does she look like she’s related to you? Is your divorce with your second wife Sally Jane Mitcham even finalized yet?”
Lewis: **sings his hit song High School Confidential**
Regardless of what was actually said during this exchange, ol’ Jerry only managed to play a couple shows before Myra’s age was published in the local papers. During the third show, he was booed offstage and the rest of the UK tour was swiftly cancelled. His divorce from his second wife had indeed not yet been finalized, meaning that he had to re-marry his cousin-niece in June of 1958, shortly before her 14th birthday. She gave birth to their first child less than a year later, and that child later drowned in the couple’s swimming pool at the age of three. Myra was still not 18 years old when she lost her first son.
Jerry Lee Lewis was later inducted into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall Of Fame in 1986 during its inaugural year. In a 2015 interview with the Guardian shortly before his 80th birthday, Lewis talked about how he had never done anything that he was ashamed of, but at the same time that he was unsure of whether he would get into heaven or hell.
The one thing he did seem to be sure of was that his 7th wife (who was 14 years younger than him) was the love of his life.
Jerry Lee Lewis with his 14 year old wife Myra and their first child in early 1959. Image via The L.A. Times/The Associated Press.
Last week I was reading an article about the recent trove of declassified email correspondence from deceased pedophile and likely Mossad asset Jeffrey Epstein when I came across a name I didn’t recognize.
“Who the fuck is Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor? Am I supposed to know who that is?” I mused out loud.
I quickly came to realize that this is of course the man who Producer Yung Chomsky brilliantly dubbed “The Andrew Formerly Known As Prince” on a recent episode of TrueAnon, a podcast which has now squeezed 500+ episodes (and an excellent theme song) out of left-wing political commentary that largely revolves around Epstein-adjacent new stories. After another excellent joke about The Who song “Fiddle About” - written about a fictional pedophile and featuring a real life pedophile on guitar - the hosts then move on to a lengthy breakdown of how long it took the Royal Family to excommunicate Andrew despite his connections to Epstein being known for years.
Long story short: it took a photo with deceased Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre which Andrew claimed was fake (but which a newly released email from Epstein appears to verify is indeed real), followed by Andrew doing an interview about the photo where he said that Giuffre’s testimony about him was false because he “didn’t sweat at the time” due to an overdose of adrenaline he experienced while being shot at during the Falklands War, which then spawned a Netflix movie AND an Amazon Prime miniseries about said interview, and then several more years of Andrew quietly attempting to repair his reputation before Giuffre (allegedly) killed herself a few months before the release of her memoir Nobody’s Girl, which finally forced the Royal Family to strip Andrew of all his titles.
I think that now is also a good time to mention that after The Who’s Pete Townsend was arrested for child pornography, he served no jail time. The man who was in charge of public prosecutions at the time was Keir Starmer, who is currently the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
A sticker I spotted in London earlier this year, shortly after Giuffre’s death.
The TrueAnon episode mentioned above is titled “Always Be Careful”, a line taken from a 2008 email to Epstein from billionaire and retail magnate Les Wexner, who wrote “all I can say is I feel sorry. You violated your number 1 rule… Always be careful.”
This is a reference to the 2008 case in which Epstein was convicted in a Florida state court after pleading guilty to soliciting prostitution and procuring an underage girl for said prostitution. Alexander Ocasta, who had served in four separate senate-confirmed positions during the George W. Bush administration, was the the U.S. attorney for Southern District of Florida at the time. Ocasta famously offered Epstein the “sweetheart” plea deal that allowed Epstein to avoid federal charges despite the fact that he had been investigated by federal law enforcement.
In September, The Independent published an article about Ocasta testifying under oath in regards the plea deal for the first time. According to the piece, Ocasta claimed that his thinking was it was better to serve time in Florida than take the case to the federal level and potentially lose, giving Epstein a “green light” to continue committing his crimes. Later in the piece it is noted that the sweetheart deal granted the convicted pedophile extensive work release, during which he had a green light to do just about whatever he wanted: “Epstein, who had been on federal officials’ radar since 2006, ended up serving just over a year in prison, much of the time being allowed to commute to his West Palm Beach office. An Epstein survivor has said she was raped during this period.”
Alexander Ocasta went on to serve as Secretary of Labor during Trump’s first presidential administration. Overlapping with Ocasta’s tenure in The White House was Attorney General Bill Barr, whose father Donald Barr once wrote a book called Space Relations, a science fiction novel whose plot reportedly deals with interplanetary oligarchs who engage in child sex slavery. Donald Barr served as the headmaster of the elite Dalton School in New York, where Jeffrey Epstein briefly served as a teacher and was reported to have had some “inappropriate” and “creepy” interactions with some of the teenage girls that attended the school.
Attorney General Bill Barr famously declared Epstein’s death a suicide before the investigation was fully complete.
Vice President JD Vance wrote these tweets after he had spent time working for Republican megadonor and antichrist obsessive Peter Thiel, who is now known to be have been corresponding with Jeffrey Epstein as late as 2019.
Another Trump official whose name is all over the recently-released emails is Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and the primary architect of his 2016 election campaign. Bannon left the White House in 2017 (he claimed it was mutual but other people reported he had been fired) and later went to jail on charges of money laundering and conspiracy. It had been previously reported that Bannon had filmed 15 or more hours of footage of him interviewing Epstein, which was meant for as coaching for a 60 Minutes interview or to be used as content for a documentary. Obviously, neither of those ever materialized.
But these latest emails reveal that the consulting seemingly went both ways. In various texts and emails, it appears that Epstein was coaching Bannon on public appearances and political messaging while Bannon attempted to protect his own image and keep publicly supporting the MAGA agenda despite having been forced out of the White House. This not only confirms Elon Musk’s statement that Bannon is in the mythical “Epstein files”, but it also seems to confirm that in addition to being a wealthy financier, blackmail ring mastermind, money launderer, child sex trafficker and international intelligence asset, Jeffrey Epstein was also doing media coaching for Trump-adjacent figures, even after they had supposedly fallen out with Trump.
This raises questions about the idea that Trump and Epstein hadn’t been friends since the early 2000s. Over the years Trump has given various different explanations about when and why he kicked Epstein out of Mar-A-Lago. A 2020 book claimed that Trump banned Epstein from the club after Epstein hit on his daughter Ivanka. In July, the president gave a different explanation, saying that Epstein “stole” girls from the club, and that Virginia Giuffre was one of these girls.
In the newly released emails, Epstein claimed that he was “never a member ever” of Mar-A-Lago, as well as claiming that Trump had “spent hours with” Giuffre at Epstein’s New York residence. Even if Epstein did “steal” Giuffre from Trump, both men clearly knew she was underage (unless she used a fake ID when she was filling out hiring paperwork at Mar-a-Lago), and they both spent time with her outside of the club. And even if Trump and Epstein did have a falling out, many of the people in Trump’s orbit continued hanging out with and/or working with Epstein for over a decade after his 2008 sweetheart plea deal and conviction. Steve Bannon may very well have been the last major figure that Epstein had significant business dealings with prior to his “suicide”.
At pretty much the exact same time these new emails hit the web, Arizona Representative Adelita Grijalva was finally sworn in seven weeks after her election, after House Speaker Mike Johnson had refused to allow her to take her seat. Grijalva was the final vote needed to force a House vote on the release of the Epstein files, which will then head to the Senate. Multiple Republicans in both chambers of congress have already announced their public support of the release. Initially Trump was so resistant to the files being released that he privately and publicly went after Republicans he had previously endorsed including:
Representative Nancy Mace, who shortly after the 2024 election introduced a bill intended to ban all transgender women from using bathrooms and locker rooms on federal property.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has blamed wildfires on Jewish space lasers.
Representative Lauren Boebert, who was once kicked out of a performance of the Beetlejuice musical for vaping and groping her date.
The other night I was having drinks with some friends in Glasgow and we discussed who we thought could be the most upsetting person to potentially be implicated once the files are released. Amongst the names we came up with were Tom Hanks and George Clooney, not necessarily because they were favorites of ours, but because of the damage it could do to some of America’s beloved liberal elites.
For me, one of the most disappointing figures possible was already revealed to have spent a lot of time with Epstein, that being legendary linguist and author Noam Chomsky. Chomsky was reported to have had “financial dealings” with Epstein back in 2023, but since then additional evidence has surfaced that appears to show the two had a deeper relationship than that. Whether or not Chomsky did indeed like them Yung remains to be seen, but the title of his legendary book Manufacturing Consent certainly hits a bit different these days.
Trump, ever the reactionary figure, has since reversed course on the release of the Epstein files, and Speaker Mike Johnson has followed suit to save himself from further political damage. This would seem to imply that whatever ends up getting released will be heavily redacted, and any more truly damning, presidency-ending information might never actually come to light unless it is leaked. It will take someone with Great Balls of Fire to pull that off.
There are very few people involved in any of this that don’t make me feel sick to my stomach. Whether it’s academics who I respect that may be implicated, or US Government officials who I despise who seem to be doing the right thing for once, the only thing that remains certain is that our society is propped up on the backs of the innocent and the exploited, and as long as capitalism exists in its current form, the rich and powerful will continue to get away with pretty much anything and everything they want.
Nothing ever changes. Nothing ever ends.