Word of the Week: Jeffrey Epstein was obsessed with building a ‘harem’

(CNN) — A day after meeting with Jeffrey Epstein in 2013, billionaire Richard Branson sent Epstein an email gushing about their time together.

“It was really nice seeing you yesterday,” he wrote on September 11 that year. “The boys in Watersports can’t stop speaking about it! Any time you’re in the area would love to see you. As long as you bring your harem!”

Virgin Group, the sprawling business empire that Branson founded, said that Branson was using Epstein’s term for a group of adult women who worked for him, and that if he knew the full picture at the time, he wouldn’t have used the word or been in contact with Epstein. But though Branson’s email exchange has made headlines recently, it’s hardly the only mention of a “harem” in the Epstein files. Epstein, it seems, was obsessed with the idea of building a “harem” — or, at least, what he imagined one to be.

“Harem” comes from the Arabic “haram,” which can mean forbidden, sacred or an inviolable place. In Islamic societies, particularly during the Ottoman Empire, the word described separate living quarters for the female members of a household, which outsiders were prohibited from accessing. Having harems was mostly a custom of the elite, who could afford residences large enough to seclude women from men.

Over time, the word came to refer to both the accommodations and the women living in them. Harems also varied from family to family; while some arrangements were polygamous, other harems were merely private living spaces shared by a man’s female relatives.

Westerners, though, fixated on the former description, especially as it related to the Ottoman sultanate’s harem. First known to be used in English in the mid-1600s, “harem” quickly became a popular term in the West, even if Westerners’ ideas about harems didn’t match up with reality. “Though Europeans were long fascinated by what they could know of the harem, what they could only imagine excited them still more,” the literary critic Ruth Bernard Yeazell wrote in her 2000 book “Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature.”

Western men especially allowed their imaginations to run wild. References to harems appear in the writings of the French playwright Jean Racine and the philosopher Montesquieu, as well as the operas of Mozart and Rossini. The scholar Leila Ahmed wrote in 1982 that the accounts of Western men involved “prurient speculation, often taking the form of downright assertion, about women’s sexual relations with each other within the harem.”

Even as Western women such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and later Edith Wharton, were able to gain access to harems and challenge the fact-free erotic fantasies of their male counterparts, the exoticized image of the harem stuck, and the hyper-sexualized harem girl became a Hollywood stock figure.

“The Western orientalist imagining of a harem as a private brothel where dozens of women lounged in perpetual competitive lust for one man’s affections was popular trope for paintings, operas, and stories, but is entirely false,” Catherine Cartwright-Jones wrote in the word’s entry in the 2013 edition of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women.

That this idea of a “harem” was little more than myth didn’t seem to matter to Epstein. The disgraced financier wanted an assemblage of women at his disposal, and he wanted to seclude them in dedicated quarters in his residences. One of Epstein’s victims told the FBI in 2019 that Epstein gave her books in English and Arabic and explained to her what a “harem” was, saying, “You’ll be part of Babylon” — an apparent reference to concubinage in ancient times. Another victim reported that Epstein said he didn’t believe in monogamy and that “the idea was to build a harem.”

In yet another FBI interview, an assistant for Epstein who said she was assaulted multiple times told investigators in 2019 of his ambitions to build a “harem” on his Virgin Islands property. “He wanted it to be a castle like structure, resembling the Alhambra in Spain. He wanted the structure to house multiple girls and he would ask for ideas about the structure,” the FBI report reads. Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace, the main residence of Ottoman sultans, was also one of his inspirations.

A “harem” can also mean a group of female animals associated with one male, and the Epstein files feature this usage, too. In 2010, the evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser — whom Harvard University later found to have committed scientific misconduct — emailed Epstein about a book he was working on, tentatively titled, “Evilicious: How We Evolved A Taste For Being Bad.” A year later, he sent over the manuscript (with the revised subtitle “Explaining our taste for excessive harm”), which discussed competition and dominance in the harems of elephant seals and hamadryas baboons.

Western fantasies about harems also produced the word “seraglio,” another term for the same concept. That word is a product of linguistic confusion, according to Yeazell. “Thinking of women as literally locked up in the harem, Europeans mistakenly associated the Turco-Persian word for palace, saray, with the Italian serrare, to lock up or enclose — by which false etymology the English “seraglio” and the French sérail came to signify not only an entire building … but the apartments in which the women were confined and even the women themselves,” she wrote.

The terms “seraglio” and “harem” both appeared in a 2011 email exchange in which someone asked Epstein about “the levels at Jeffrey’s Harem.” Epstein replied, with his usual fractured grammar and punctuation: “The Harem, meant protection.. for those inside .from those outside. mozart wrote the Seraglio.. There is a main theme , recapitulated, echoed , enhanced by its variations, many movements, intrigue, in the melodies. the harmony and wings can be heard. As you spend the summer eating experiences , try to be open, form your judgements only after they have been fully digested. I truly look forward to spending time with you.”

But as investigations into Epstein and the release of new documents have made clear, it wasn’t only “those outside” who Epstein’s so-called “harem” needed protection from. The biggest danger was coming from inside the house.

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