Patrick Radden Keefe: 'We as a society have given a pass to elite bad actors'
The past few years have seen a reckoning among the powerful, such as disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein, and the once-influential Sackler family and their now-bankrupt drug company, Purdue Pharma.
How did these figures evade justice for so long? One best-selling author says it’s because society enabled them. On a recent episode of "Influencers with Andy Serwer," the New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe asserted that elite business people are less likely than everyday Americans to face consequences for immoral and even criminal behavior.
“I think we as a society have given a pass to elite bad actors, people who went to the right schools and made the right connections and our you know, photographed with, with notable political and business figures,” Keefe told Yahoo Finance.
Keefe went on to cite Weinstein, who's serving a 23-year sentence for sex crimes; Epstein, who took his own life in jail after being charged with sex trafficking; and the Sackler family, who agreed to pay a $6 billion settlement over its role in the opioid epidemic.
“I think there's a sense whether it's Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein or the Sacklers," he said, "that if you surround yourself with the right people and the right blue-chip institutional affiliations over the decades, it's possible to do a great deal of wrong without it catching up with you.”
Keefe recently released a new book called "Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks," which features portraits of miscreants like El Chapo, the Mexican drug lord and Amy Bishop, a biology professor who perpetrated a mass shooting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Previously, Keefe published "Empire of Pain," which chronicled the Sackler family's connection to the nation's opioid epidemic and "Say Nothing," which told the story of a murder during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Speaking to Yahoo Finance, Keefe pointed out that powerful individuals can access high-caliber law firms and consulting agencies to buffer themselves from the consequences of their actions. Weinstein, co-founder of Miramax, infamously hired Black Cube, a British-Israeli private intelligence firm, to stop actresses and reporters from publicizing the abuse allegations against him, according to Ronan Farrow's reporting in The New Yorker. Meanwhile, Epstein — a financier whose connections included Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and Prince Andrew — retained the services of elite lawyers such as Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz and former U.S. Solicitor General Ken Starr to combat the charges against him.
“People say, in retrospect, well, how did they get away with it for so long? How could they have gotten away with it? The answer is, they're surrounded by high end extremely capable, mercenary, white shoe service providers who should really know better,” Keefe said.
Keefe says such providers not only offer services to bad actors in the short-term, but often over the course of years. He pointed to former Securities and Exchange Commission chair and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Mary Jo White, who has represented four members of the Sackler family since their company first pleaded guilty to federal charges back in 2007.
“You have these players who, in some ways they sort of avoid the moral taint themselves, because there's a sense that they're just these kind of neutral service providers that you would bring in,” Keefe said. “But to me, they are entirely morally culpable if over decades, they abet and protect this kind of behavior.”
Dylan Croll is a reporter and researcher at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @CrollonPatrol.
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