Sunday Pages: White Houses

Musings on Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, Evelyn Nesbit, and Jay Gatsby.

Nov 09, 2025

Dear Reader,

He was dashing, charming, talented, and brash: a self-made man of wealth and distinction, whose power and influence extended well beyond New York City. He lived there, in Manhattan, in a lavish but oddly decorated mansion. He knew everyone there was to know, and he used his social network to great advantage. Those who had not made his acquaintance wanted to, because to know him, to socialize with him, to befriend him, was to enter society’s inner sanctum, that most rarified of worlds, where sex, money, and power were all on offer, there for the taking.

But he had a secret—an open secret, among the well-heeled New Yorkers who traveled in that exclusive class: He liked girls. Young girls. And he preyed upon them, using his wealth, and his influence, and his preternatural powers of seduction to have his way with them. He was especially well connected in the world of fashion and theater. When he felt like it, he would help the girls who were his victims land modeling deals or plum roles in Broadway shows. This was a valuable tool for recruiting and grooming the girls he desired.

His fancy apartments were tailored to suit his debauched lifestyle. One of the vast rooms was painted dark green: walls, floor, ceiling. From the extravagantly high ceiling hung a swing, a child’s swing, the kind you see at a playground, but with a seat made of soft red velvet. He would use this to lure his victims in. Who wouldn’t want to swing on a red velvet swing inside one of the toniest residences in New York?

Dark rumors swirled around him like cigar smoke. Those in the know were also complicit, and thus had no great urge to spill the beans; those who suspected could only go on intuition and rumor—and it was easier to forget about it than to call him out. And so his predation continued, year after year after year, from one century into the next.

It was only after his death—such a violent, unusual, headline-making death!—that the full extent of his dissolution became known. And it became known to everybody. The public was curious, the press coverage was massive, and the massive press coverage only made the public more curious to know the answer to the question: How had he operated so wantonly, and for so long, without being detected?

One biographer explained: “The process of seduction was a major feature of his obsession with sex, and it was an inexorable kind of seduction which moved into the lives of very young women, sometimes barely pubescent girls, in fragile social and financial situations—girls who would be unlikely to resist his power and his money and his considerable charm, who would feel that they had little choice but to let him take over their lives… [he] would sometimes adopt the role of a paternal benefactor, and then would take advantage of the trust and gratitude that had been built.”

A famous writer—a novelist and essayist—denounced the pervert’s sociopathic habit of “eagerly and diligently and ravenously and remorselessly hunting young girls to their destruction,” and charged, with thinly veiled contempt, “These facts have been well known in New York for many years, but they have never been openly proclaimed until now.”

The name of the man who lured young girls to their destruction, and who died under such violent and unusual and headline-making circumstances, was, of course, Stanford White.

A lifelong New Yorker born in 1853, White was the most prominent architect at the famous firm of McKim, Mead & White, and the designer of some of Manhattan’s most recognizable buildings, including the old Madison Square Garden and the arch in Washington Square Park. He was also what at the turn of the last century was called a “roué” and is now called a “serial sexual predator.” Notoriously, he belonged to a secret cabal of rich, influential, and concupiscent New Yorkers known as the Sewer Club, whose libertine members regularly debauched themselves at orgies. White was the Dionysian figure at the center of the bacchanal, the dynamo of all of that depravity.

A full century before another man of wealth and mystery came along—also a sick pedophile with a swing in his Manhattan mansion!—there was Stanford White, with his red hair, his fine clothes, his quick wit, his boyish charm, and a mustache that looked like someone snipped off an entire horse’s tail and glued it to his upper lip. He was the city’s first Jeffrey Epstein.

The most famous of his victims was Evelyn Nesbit, a model and chorus girl. They met in 1901, when she was 16 and he was 47. Like many of the girls, she came from a broken home. Unlike many of the girls, she was already successful when their paths crossed. He took her under his wing, found her more lucrative modeling work, introduced her to better Broadway producers. And one night, not long after they first met, he brought her back to his mansion—perhaps inviting her to take a ride on the red velvet swing; plied her with Champagne, laced with some sort of drug; and, once she was unconscious, had his way with her. She could only remember waking up on the bed, naked, blood running down her leg, and when she began to cry, White tossing a silk kimono at her and saying, “Don’t cry, Kittens. It’s all over. Now you belong to me.” At least, that is what she testified in the trial five years after the incident occurred—and what a titillated public read about in horror and disbelief.

Even after the incident, they remained close for half a year, spending her seventeenth birthday together. After that, White turned his attention to other, younger, less famous girls, while Evelyn Nesbit began dating a handsome young actor named John Barrymore—a relationship her mother asked White to torpedo, which he happily did, with dire results for him. She was also being stalked by a half-deranged fan, who’d seen her in every one of her performances in a play called “White Rose,” sending flowers and billets-doux to her dressing room. When he revealed himself to be Harry Thaw, the wealthy scion of a Pittsburgh banking family, she married him. White, who still kept tabs on Nesbit, found him ridiculous—a “Pennsylvania pug.” But he was way worse than that.

On the evening of June 25, 1906, the 52-year-old architect took in a musical at the rooftop theater of the Madison Square Garden—a venue he’d designed. During the finale—a number called, aptly, “I Could Love A Million Girls”—Harry Thaw suddenly materialized in front of him. The “Pennsylvania pug” drew a revolver from his jacket, looked him in the eye, and said, “You have ruined my wife.” And then he shot White three times—twice in the face, once in the shoulder—killing him instantly.

At first, the audience thought this was part of the show, and they weren’t sure how to react to this bit of inventive stagecraft. But once the blood began to gush, and the theatre-goers next to him scream, all hell broke loose. Thaw was quickly apprehended and sent to the Tombs; Nesbit, who was already in the lobby on her way out, slipped away unnoticed, and made herself scarce for a few days, earning her the nickname “Girl Houdini.”

The trial that followed was the sort of thing that would have broken Twitter, if social media existed in 1906. While no strangers to tawdry scandal, the American public was unprepared for what came out regarding Stanford White’s depraved secret life. As Mark Twain—the famous novelist I alluded to before—recalled, “On the witness-stand, in the hearing of a court room crowded with men, the girl told in the minutest detail the history of White’s pursuit of her, even down to the particulars of his atrocious victory—a victory whose particulars might well be said to be unprintable.”

William Randolph Hearst, whose sensationalized newspapers covered it breathlessly, dubbed it “The Trial of the Century.” It was only 1906, just six years removed from the 1800s, and Hearst had a reputation for hyperbole; even so, he was not exaggerating. There would not be another American trial that so captivated the public’s attention until O.J. Simpson’s.

Harry Thaw was tried twice. The first trial ended in a hung jury. At the second, he was found not guilty for reasons of temporary insanity. He wound up in the loony bin and died in 1947.

With the rise of motion pictures and then radio and television, Prohibition, a global pandemic, and two world wars, Americans forgot all about Stanford White. Nesbit—who’d made bank in her silent film career, in the salad days before income taxes—drifted into obscurity. She was in her seventies when Joan Collins played her in 1955’s unremarkable film The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing, and died in 1967.

I bring up Stanford White because last Friday, as the funding for SNAP benefits was about to expire, Donald Trump and his disgusting enablers threw a Great Gatsby party at his garish Palm Beach club—in the same tacky ballroom, one assumes, where were stored the classified documents he stole from the White House back in 2021. The official party theme was “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody,” a nod to the song on the soundtrack of the Leonardo DiCaprio Gatsby flick. It featured beautiful women in flapper get-ups dancing, one of them purring seductively in an oversized martini glass.

As someone who published an edition of The Great Gatsby earlier this year, on occasion of its centennial, I feel the need to set the record straight. [taps mic, shouts] That was not a Gatsby party!

In my foreword to the novel, I write about Gatsby’s enduring relevance:

Even so: if The Great Gatsby isn’t the Great American Novel, it is certainly a Great American Novel. It’s also, indisputably, a Great American Novel. Fitzgerald manages to stuff so many peculiarly American fascinations into the book’s economical 47,093 words—old money, sudden wealth, fame, name-dropping, sports, gambling, snobbery, slumming, organized crime, reinvention, deceit, gossip, violence, sex (straight and gay), infidelity, fancy automobiles, guns, swimming pools, Wall Street, racism—that even now, a full century after its publication, Gatsby feels as relevant as when Coolidge was in the White House, booze was illegal, and the Nazis were still a fringe party.
Consider: Our current president is a Jay Gatsby gone bad; he apprenticed at the foot of his own mobbed-up Meyer Wolfshiem, Roy Cohn; the Cabinet is littered with abusive, white supremacist Tom Buchanans; Daisy would fit right in at Mar-a-Lago; East Egg is not unlike Palm Beach. Spoiled rich people still behave the same spoiled way and remain objects of our voyeuristic curiosity—only now, we get to “keep up” with them on reality TV. None of Fitzgerald’s character names are aurally anachronistic; doesn’t Jordan Baker sound like she could be a 19-year-old TikTok influencer? And even today, despite the benefit of Google and a full century’s worth of newer writing, you would be hard-pressed to find a better descriptor of the MAGA quintessence than what Fitzgerald wrote about the Buchanans: “They were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

I called Trump a “Jay Gatsby gone bad,” with that qualifier, because there are many aspects of the eponymous party-thrower that Trump has nothing in common with whatsoever. Unlike Fred Trump, Gatsby’s father—who appears at the end of the book—did not leave his son 413 million bucks. Gatsby only threw his extravagant parties, only bought the West Egg mansion, only came to Long Island to begin with, in the hopes of luring the love of his life into his orbit, so he could show her that he was rich enough to be worthy of marriage. Trump would never do such a thing!

After Daisy runs over and kills Myrtle, while driving Gatsby’s yellow car, Gatsby lies, saying that he was the one who was driving—sacrificing himself for her. Not only is that something Trump would never do, it’s something he couldn’t even conceive of anyone else doing; he would absolutely think Jay Gatsby was a “sucker and a loser.”

(Nor is Trump Tom Buchanan. Tom Buchanan is not nouveau riche; he comes from old money. He’s handsome and manly and strapping, plays polo, rides horses, is emotionally capable of having relationships with people, and, for all his many ugly faults, is the only character in the book who sees Gatsby for what he actually is. Trump wishes he was Tom Buchanan, and Tom Buchanan would absolutely detest Donald Trump.)

So, no: that mirthless Mar-a-Lago bash was not a Gatsby party. What it was was a Stanford White party: decadent, over the top, creepily inappropriate. Seeing the photo of the dancer in the big martini glass on social media, I immediately thought of White. Because that’s the sort of thing he did. You know the cliché of the scantily clad hottie bursting out of a giant cake? Stanford White invented that! That was his idea! It happened at one of his birthday parties. (And yes, it’s in exactly the same spirit as what turned up in Jeffrey Epstein’s “birthday book” ten decades later.)

Furthermore, Gatsby’s parties had, as discussed, a higher purpose: he wanted everyone to come and have fun, so that Daisy might come by. The purpose of the Florida wingding—insofar as it had one—was to demonstrate Trump’s pathological indifference to the suffering of other people: poorer people especially. It was not revelry, it was not frolic, it was not fun. It was a sadistic flaunting of bloated wealth and egregious excess—a giant FUCK YOU to the millions of Americans being kicked off SNAP, and to anyone with a functional soul. It was APRÈS MOI, LE DÉLUGE at a Florida Versailles, I DON’T CARE, DO U? with hors d’oeurve and flapper dresses and watered down drinks: not romantic dreamer Jay Gatsby, but debauched nihilist Stanford White.

A little party never killed anyone, sure, but a big party, the Republican Party, has indubitably killed hundreds of thousands of people—and it’s just getting warmed up. If we count the 300,000 who died of covid as a direct result of Trump’s botching of the pandemic response, add the 600,000 who died this year as a direct result of Elon Musk DOGE-ing USAID, and tack on the deaths from ICE Gestapo raids, the pregnancy-related deaths that are a direct consequence of Trump’s embrace of Dobbs, the thousands slaughtered in mass shootings because of the GOP’s ghoulish fidelity to a twisted interpretation of the Second Amendment, the Venezuelan fishermen blown out of their boats, and the many people sure to die as a consequence of the Epstein Shutdown, Trump and the MAGA Republicans already have a body count approaching seven figures. “I Could Love a Million Girls?” More like, “I Could Claim a Million Lives.”

Speaking of killing people: One thing that Jay Gatsby and Stanford White had in common is that they were both shot dead by jealous, vengeful, and mentally unstable husbands. The fictional character paid the ultimate price for the death of a woman he’d never met and did not kill. As for the nonfictional architect? To quote another musical set in the Jazz Age: He had it coming.

And he’s not the only one. Just as the truth about what happened in the White house eventually came out, so too will the truth about what’s happened in the White House—and what happened during the many Sewer Club-style encounters its current occupant had with his good buddy Jeffrey Epstein: Stanford White 2.0.

But when the full extent of Donald Trump’s sick depravity becomes known, he, unlike White, will be alive to fully experience the public shame and humiliation, suffer the narcissistic injury, and, one hopes, face the consequences: legal, social, political, financial—and eschatological.

Trump has been musing a lot lately about his chances of getting into Heaven. Yeah, no. If there’s a Hell, Trump will be fast-tracked to the deepest, fieriest depths, where he will find Jeffrey Epstein, and Stanford White, and his idol Adolf Hitler, and his mentor Roy Cohn, who will smile at him and, gesturing to the flames all around them, say: “This is why I used the tanning bed so much—to build up my resistance!”

What George Wilson, the cuckold in Gatsby, says to his cheating wife might just as well be spoken to Trump: “God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!’”