Public Intellectual with Jessa Crispin · Jessa Crispin

"Leave Your Husbands" (with Margaret Howie)

July 27, 2019·51 min·3 clips

Crispin argues there is 'a horror movie inside Pride and Prejudice'—the story of Charlotte Lucas, forced by economic vulnerability to marry 'one of the worst men ever.'

The premise is bleakly simple. Crispin treats the conversation as another wife studies case, using the Epstein scandal to talk about married men, public shame, and the women still beside them. It starts with vacancy. Jordan Peterson's wife gets read less as a person than as an image of endurance, with blankness, torture, and a Children of Men comparison doing the work. Then the episode gets sharper. Howie and Crispin turn to the wives of hideous men who stay silent, and they treat that silence as both tactic and symptom. Fashion takes a hit too. Marchesa's return through Project Runway becomes the perfect ridiculous object, a puffy-dress distraction that lets scandal put on better fabric. The tone stays cruel and funny. They talk Tim, Heidi, Michael Kors, and the pleasure of watching a show they call indefensible. Then Lawrence Krauss enters. His line about judging only by empirical evidence lands as ugly self-protection once Epstein planes and his wife's support are part of the story. The joke keeps tightening. The point is not that every wife is the same. It is that marriage can turn into public relations around men's damage. Loyalty gets picked apart from the side. The episode keeps asking what it means to stand by someone when that stance also helps hold up the whole arrangement. Even community curdles. Epstein's money, defenses, friendships, and blackmail logic get treated as a sick version of showing up for your people. The ending does not reach for uplift. Crispin and Howie imagine what could be done with tainted funds, still laughing because the joke has almost nowhere left to go.

As heard by us

A sharp, darkly funny look at Epstein, marriage, and the women left beside bad men.

Jessa Crispin and Margaret Howie keep the wife studies series pointed at the latest Epstein fallout, with the focus on married men in Jeffrey Epstein's orbit and the wives who stayed put.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For when you want a savage, funny autopsy of the wives orbiting terrible men.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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