He Said He “Sucked Up to Spit It Out.” But With Epstein, What Was Michael Wolff Really Doing?

Inside the amoral collusion between a writer and the financier he claimed to merely “report on.”

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

For years, Michael Wolff sold the world a seductive story: that he alone was brave enough to slip inside the lairs of powerful men like Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, Roger Ailes, Jeffrey Epstein and emerge with their secrets. A kind of journalistic snake-charmer who could get close without ever taking on their venom.

His own metaphor said it best: “You’re sucking up so in the end, you can spit it out.”

It was almost charming in its self-awareness, until you look at what he was actually doing.

Because the distance he claimed to keep from Epstein was never as wide as he wanted us to believe. The revelations coming out now show a man who wasn’t just observing the monsters of our age.

He was orbiting them, enjoying the warmth and trying to become them.

The Money Trail No One Talked About

A stunning detail buried in Shawn McCreesh’s The New York Times piece this weekend: In 2003, Wolff, Epstein, Harvey Weinstein and Mort Zuckerman jointly tried to buy New York Magazine. It was a failed bid, but one that reveals more than Wolff ever admitted.

This wasn’t just proximity. This was partnership.

“I’ve never had a financial relationship with Epstein or Zuckerman, nor did I in the NYM deal,” Wolff responded in a text.

Wolff’s long-standing explanation that he merely tolerated Epstein because journalists must sometimes “suck up” for access collapses under this. He wasn’t just taking Epstein’s calls. He was prepared to take his money.

There’s nothing more corrupt than a journalist who feigns moral disgust while simultaneously opening the door for a predator’s financial backing.

This relationship wasn’t incidental. It was strategic.

And Epstein wasn’t Wolff’s only benefactor in that world. Weinstein’s orbit was there too, in the financial mix, in the parties and pitches and late-night phone calls. For a man who claims to be writing portraits of monsters, Wolff seemed a little too eager to sit for one himself.

He Gave Epstein an Unpublished Draft and Advice

According to documents and accounts from the period, Wolff emailed Epstein unpublished work, a feature he planned to write about him that appeared in his book “Too Famous,” a monumental breach of journalistic ethics, and even offered him advice on how to rehabilitate his image.

If that had happened at a magazine, an editor would have shut it down instantly. Unpublished drafts don’t go to sources, especially not sources like this.

But Wolff wasn’t just reporting on Epstein. He was flirting with him.

The Portrait Artist Reveals Himself

Wolff, like many writers, is a portrait artist, someone who reflects themselves back in their work. But the truth emerging now is far stranger: He wasn’t just painting them. He was living among them.

His wife, Victoria Floethe, who he first started a courtship with while he was married father of three and she was a fact checker at Vanity Fair, three decades his junior, started a substack called “Our Amagansett House.” She recently wrote a listicle titled, “I married the news cycle,” about what it’s like to be married to a man who covers “the monsters of our time.”

He got close to Epstein because he wanted something. Money. Access. Status. A story.

And Epstein, the master groomer, recognized the type. Wolff wasn’t trying to expose him. He was trying to handle him.

A Final Question

Michael Wolff built a career on telling us who powerful men really are.

But maybe the real story, the one we missed, is who he was willing to become in order to tell it.