Our society has given a pass to elite bad actors: Patrick Radden Keefe
'Rogues' author, Patrick Radden Keefe, joins Andy Serwer as they discuss the 'breakdown in accountability' for the elite members of our society.
Video Transcript
ANDY SERWER: Are the bad guys just getting worse? I mean, I'm thinking about the Sacklers. I think about Bernie Madoff. I think about Jeffrey Epstein. And so two-part question-- are they getting worse? And secondly, wow, Jeffrey Epstein. Isn't that the great untold story of our time still?
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: Yeah, there's so much about the Epstein story that's still not known. Absolutely. And I think as to whether or not they're getting worse, I think that they have better and better resources that they can rely on. And I think increasingly, particularly if they're white collar bad guys, I think that there's just-- I think we, as a society, have given a pass to elite bad actors, people who went to the right schools and made the right connections and are photographed with notable political and business figures.
I think there's a sense, whether it's Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein or the Sacklers, that if you surround yourself with the right people and the right blue chip institutional affiliations, over the decades, it's possible to do a great deal of wrong without it catching up with you. For me, what I really struggle with is that I trained as a lawyer. I never practiced. But I went to law school, took the New York Bar. My wife's a lawyer. A lot of my friends are lawyers.
And I think that in any of those instances, if you're trying to reconstruct-- I think particularly with Epstein and Weinstein, people say in retrospect, well, how did they get away with it for so long? How could they have gotten away with it? The answer is, they're surrounded by high end, extremely capable, mercenary, white shoe service providers who should really know better.
And that could be law firms. It could be McKinsey, as was the case with the opioid crisis. You have these players who, in some ways, they sort of avoid the moral taint themselves because there's a sense that there are just these kind of neutral service providers that you would bring in. But to me, they are entirely morally culpable if, over decades, they abet and protect this kind of behavior.
