Subscribe on Apple Podcasts
Watch on YouTube
“So what do I have to do to see you in a tight leather outfit?” Casey Wasserman — founder of the Wasserman agency, chair of the LA28 Olympic Committee, and grandson of Hollywood founding father Lew Wasserman — wrote in a 2003 email to Ghislaine Maxwell, later convicted of sex trafficking minors. The message is one of several exchanges included in the millions of documents released by the Justice Department as part of the Epstein files — and it has thrown one of the industry’s most connected executives into crisis. Chappell Roan and Abby Wambach publicly cut ties with Wasserman this week, with others threatening to follow.
But he’s not the only major player to appear in the Epstein email archive, as journalist and author Allen Salkin found out. Still, the bigger story may be what the cache reveals about the clubby worlds of media and entertainment, industries built on proximity — who gets invited to the dinner, who makes the introduction, who vouches for whom. Salkin joins Elaine Low and Natalie Jarvey to unpack the boldface names surfacing in the files and what their presence — whether incidental, transactional, or something more — says about the networks that drive the entertainment business. Plus, Sean McNulty breaks down the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics ratings, and Paramount’s latest sweetened bid for Warner Bros.
You named David Copperfield, and not David Blaine. What's up with these rapey prestidigitators?
Think it's worth saying that Bethany Consentino of Best Coast was first out of the blocks with an open letter leaving Wasserman. Chappell Roan is obviously a bigger profile and important to the story, but Best Coast led the way.