The Trump-Epstein Files: Look but Don’t Touch

Illustration by João Fazenda Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story When it comes to reading rooms, New Yorkers are spoiled for choice. There’s the Morgan Library’s Sherman Fairchild Reading Room (for perusing, say, a fifteenth-century Book of Hours). Or the N.Y.P.L.’s Rose Main Reading Room (fluffy clouds on a fifty-foot ceiling). And recently, if you wanted to be near three thousand four hundred and thirty-seven bound volumes of Department of Justice files pertaining to the alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, you could visit the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, in Tribeca.

“All that we ask is that you do not take any of the books off the shelves and look through them,” a receptionist informed a group the other day. The Memorial Reading Room, a temporary installation by the nonprofit Institute for Primary Facts, did not allow visitors to handle the books because D.O.J. redaction errors mean that some victims’ names are visible. (Verified victims could make an appointment and view the files in private.)

Why visit a gallery full of documents you aren’t allowed to read? Sue Bailey, a retired HBO executive with strawberry-blond hair and chunky glasses, was hoping that the physical presence of the files would help her comprehend their import. “You know how they do those illustrations? ‘A stack of a trillion dollars would reach from Earth to the moon.’ I need to see the scale,” Bailey said. She tries to modulate her Epstein fixation in conversations with friends: “I don’t want to bug people too much.” But the case seems to follow her. She described how a maître d’ had recently told her, referring to Epstein’s apparent suicide, “Oh, did you hear that the guard for his cell got paid five thousand bucks like two or three days before it happened?”