Predatory Strongmen: Epstein’s Kindred Spirits
Part I: Mussolini and Gaddafi
"I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it -- Jeffrey enjoys his social life."
This was how Donald Trump summed up Jeffrey Epstein when the magazine interviewed him for a profile on Epstein in 2002. We now know that Epstein’s “social life” featured a system of sex trafficking and abuse of hundreds of young women, many of them underage girls, which went on for years at Epstein’s homes in Manhattan, Palm Beach, and on his private island in the Caribbean.
News coverage has focused on Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who reportedly served as chief procurer of his victims (Maxwell is now serving a prison sentence for sex trafficking). Yet predation on a large scale always requires a network of enablers, and high school students were apparently among those Epstein and Maxwell utilized to recruit the young women, arrange their travel to his residences, and manage a “social life” that involved Epstein also “sharing” them with his powerful friends and associates.
In authoritarian states, secret police, paramilitaries, and the leader’s personal security and fixers have filled the roles Maxwell and her associates performed for Epstein. Authoritarian leaders are known to be brutal and lawless, but their Epstein-like systems of sexual predation have remained largely in the dark.
Whether the leader is Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, Chadian head of state Hissène Habré, or Paraguayan tyrant Alfredo Stroessner, state security forces have scouted for women, abducted them to detention cells and the leader’s private spaces, and arranged for abortions, payoffs, and threats to keep their crimes a secret.
This two-part essay looks at the Epstein-like operations in authoritarian states that have provided female bodies for the sexual and psychological satisfaction of the leader and his cronies. Part 1 is about the Italian and Libyan dictators Benito Mussolini and Muammar Gaddafi.
Part 2 examines how such systems can operate in the 21st century with an autocratic-minded leader in a damaged democracy. It focuses on Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Trump and gives us context for some of Trump’s past practices and his relations with Epstein.
Mussolini’s Sex-Predator System
Mussolini was the first autocrat to develop a state-assisted machine of libidinal gratification. Police files, diaries, and testimonies from Mussolini’s inner circle and his last major lover, Clara Petacci, suggest that he had extramarital sex with up to four different women daily during his twenty-three years in power. The hours he spent on this pursuit did not decrease even in the run-up to World War Two, when the increasingly grandiose Mussolini headed the Ministries of War, Army, Navy, Colonies, and the Air Force.
Initially, Mussolini’s brother Arnaldo was the fixer who disbursed funds for abortions, maintenance of illegitimate children, and silence. After Arnaldo died in 1931, Fascist Police Chief and OVRA (secret police) head Arturo Bocchini became his chief enabler. Bocchini’s secret police worked with Il Duce’s Personal Secretariat staff to vet and track prospects and arrange for punishments or payments after sex.
Mussolini’s treatment of Bianca Ceccato set a precedent. Ceccato served as his secretary at his newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia in 1918 and suffered through a coerced abortion before she had a son with him in 1920. After Mussolini became Prime Minister in 1922, he had his personal secret police follow her, pay her to keep silent, and then threaten to take her child away when she wanted to marry her boyfriend.
After he declared dictatorship in 1925, the new secret police Bocchini created flagged new prospects for him at rallies and events, or through letters women sent to him. Five to twenty women per week received an invitation to meet Il Duce in his private quarters in Palazzo Venezia. When the “brief and violent” encounters (Fermi) that he favored had ended, the women became persons of interest to Mussolini’s security apparatus: they were put under surveillance and were paid and threatened to keep them quiet, as were their husbands or boyfriends.
It is sobering to think of the numbers of unrecognized mini-Mussolinis who may have come out of Il Duce’s sexual exploitation system. In the case of Epstein, an apparent desire to “seed the human race with his DNA” seems to have also fueled “his insatiable appetite for girls,” but it is unclear whether Mussolini had such avowedly eugenicist aims.
Feeling powerful because he and he alone could have as many women as he wanted, was as much the point of Mussolini’s encounters as sexual satisfaction. In this he resembles many other dictators, the Libyan tyrant Muammar Gaddafi among them.
Gaddafi’s Dystopian “Department of Protocol”
In public, Gaddafi supported women. His 1969 military coup granted Libyan women and men equal legal status and gave women educational opportunities. In private, the Libyan dictator constructed a state system to procure and confine women for his personal satisfaction.
The name chosen for this agency – the Department of Protocol –cloaked the violence and terror Gaddafi unleashed on his victims in a veil of gentility. His victims included students flagged by Gaddafi and his scouts during his speeches at universities and schools, women (many of them underage) who were abducted after being seen by his Revolutionary Guards while out at the market or in the family car, and wives of visiting foreign businessmen or his officials.
The Department was a full-service agency. It arranged for payments (sometimes called “investment agreements”) to foreign victims who might expose the regime abroad, and oversaw “personnel” management. Gaddafi’s captives were forced to serve as guards, housemaids, and servers when he entertained at home. Some of them were also trained to work as bodyguards when Gaddafi traveled abroad, generating media buzz as evidence of Gaddafi’s “progressive” gender attitudes.
Reducing people to mere instruments of your desires for money, sex, and more is part of the strongman way of life and rule. In Gaddafi’s case, unlimited wealth from oil and unchecked power created a “monster who thought he was God,” (Cojean) in the words of one of his former captives. It’s a description that could also apply to some 21st century authoritarian leaders, as we shall see in the next essay.
References: The virility and masculinity chapter of my book Strongmen contains more information on systems of predation and abuse and how they change over time. See the references in that book for additional sources and bibliography.
Mussolini:
Roberto Olla, Il Duce and his women: Mussolini’s Rise to Power (Richmond, 2011).
Mimmo Franzinelli, Il Duce e le donne. Avventure e passioni extraconiugali di Mussolini (Milan, 2013).
Laura Fermi, Mussolini (Chicago, 1961).
Christopher Duggan, Fascist Voices. An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (Oxford, 2013).
Richard Bosworth, Claretta: Mussolini’s Last Lover (New Haven, 2017).
References for Gaddafi:
Annick Cojean, Gaddafi’s Harem (New York, 2013).
L.S., interview with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, April 6, 2019.
Thank you for writing about this disturbing topic. "In the case of Epstein, an apparent desire to “seed the human race with his DNA". Hasn't Musk in his eugenic fantasy said something similar?
A woman, Maxwell, is the only person in jail for all of these horrific abuses of his sexual abuses. The hundreds or thousands of men are walking free to abuse more women. Sad and horrific.