Some have dismissed the emails exchanged by Giants co-owner Steve Tisch and Jeffrey Epstein as evidence of nothing more than the normal behavior of consenting adults. That grossly oversimplifies the situation.
Apart from the skeevy content of the messages back and forth between Tisch and Epstein, the broader context is critical. This wasn't a situation in which a friend was linking a friend to another friend who was looking for friendship. This was what Epstein did to build and maintain his bizarre influence among rich and powerful men. He found them women.
Epstein's ability to leverage his connections to "help" the women he recruited relied on the ability to direct them to men who had the juice to do so. And Tisch, a film producer, was ostensibly one of those men.
Consider the most important aspect of the recent article from The Athletic, which generally demonstrated that Tisch's claim of a "brief association" with Epstein was anything but. The reporting from The Athletic potentially links the Epstein-Tisch "association" to a woman who recently told her story to Radio France One.
The woman said Epstein had introduced her to an "American producer" in 2013. The woman and the producer met at his "New York residence on the top floor of a building with a sprawling view of the city."
Per The Athletic, public records reveal that, in 2013, Tisch was renting a "$60,000-a-month, 13-room penthouse in the Trump Park Avenue building."
Here's what the woman told Radio France One, via The Athletic: "[The producer] asked what I hoped to make of my life. I told him about my plans. . . . I could see he was watching me talk, but he was not truly listening. . . . We sat down on a leather couch, a screen came down, and he showed me a [bike] race. I didn’t really understand what I had to do with that story. Then he starts to put his hand on the inside of my thighs. I threw out my hand and I said no. . . . He said to me: ‘You are a very smart girl.' . . . I ran. I rushed into the elevator. I don’t even know how I got myself home.”
The woman said she received a call from Epstein the next day.
"He told me that I was an idiot, that I was never going to make anything of my life," the woman said.
The takeaway is obvious. The behavior explained by the woman reflects the same kind of predatory behavior that people like Harvey Weinstein allegedly (or actually) engaged in, tying career advancement to sexual favors. While not necessarily illegal, it's far from proper.
And it gives the NFL something tangible to investigate, beyond the content of the emails. The league can, if it chooses, attempt to determine whether the producer in question was Tisch. If it was, the NFL needs to decide whether that behavior runs afoul of the Personal Conduct Policy.
The overriding question is whether the NFL will wait for a smoking gun to be stuffed in its face through reporting from The Athletic or the Wall Street Journal or some other outlet, or whether the league will realize based on the available information that doing nothing is not acceptable. That if owners are indeed held to a higher standard than players, there's an obligation to roll up the sleeves and get to work at searching for independent evidence and asking Tisch tough questions.
Will they? We'll see. But as we've learned as it relates to the broader reality of the "Epstein files," this isn't something that is going to be forgotten when the next bright, shiny object comes along.