Casey Wasserman and the Epstein moral panic

Casey Wasserman, chair of LA28, the private nonprofit organizing the Summer Olympics, spent parts of the last nightmarish year in L.A. cozying up to President Trump. But that’s not why Mayor Karen Bass, five Los Angeles City Council members and other political leaders think he should step down. 

It’s because of a few gross emails old enough to have graduated college by now.

In 2003, Wasserman, then 28, exchanged a handful of cringey, sexually suggestive messages with Ghislaine Maxwell (who would go on to be convicted of sex trafficking in 2021). Around the same time, he also flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane for a humanitarian mission to Africa. 

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This was three years before Epstein was accused of sex crimes. There’s no evidence Wasserman was aware of sex trafficking or anything else in the so-called Epstein files. He apologized for associating with Maxwell. 

No matter: So many of his high-profile clients have jumped ship that Wasserman put his talent agency up for sale just to save it. The pile-on has grown big enough that the pile-on itself has animated some calls for Wasserman’s head. 

As a journalist, I appreciate the need for people in positions of public trust to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. But I feel an even greater need to call out BS when I see it and identify what’s really happening: The righteous outrage over the Epstein files has set off a moral panic, and Wasserman is unrighteously being swallowed by it.

For a demonstration of the shallowness of this hysteria, read what state Assemblymember Mark González told CNN’s Elex Michaelson Thursday: “The Olympics and the Epstein files should not be in the same sentence.”

Sometimes, I feel like I’m the only one who read “The Crucible.”

Is it indoctrination to teach my granddaughter to have empathy?

If so, I’m fine with it. As a lifelong Californian, I’m acutely aware that my common-sense and compassionate life lessons could be viewed as wacko left-wing brainwashing by many.

Golden StateJane Ganahl

This isn’t to defend Wasserman’s record leading LA28. If he was concerned by the Trump administration terrorizing the host city’s 1.3 million immigrant residents, he didn’t show it at the White House last August. There, he bestowed Olympic medals from 1984 on the grateful commander in chief and proclaimed Trump would “preside over our games.” (Is that a threat?)

Wasserman has also been unable to fulfill some of his most important obligations to Los Angeles taxpayers, who are on the hook for Olympic cost overruns. As journalist Alissa Walker has thoroughly documented at her newsletter Torched, LA28 has blown past deadlines for reports and key agreements with the city on services, sustainability and human rights. 

Yet a bit of electronic flirting more than 20 years ago is resignation material? Get a grip.

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