Before Helping Jeffrey Epstein Get His First Big Gig, Donald Barr Wrote Sordid Pulp Fiction Novel, “Space Relations”

I’m obsessed with the Epstein files. Completely obsessed. Any time I get a spare moment, my fingers unconsciously wander over to my permanent Jmail tab to take another gander. Some days, I unblinkingly click through the police-produced Zillow tour of Epstein’s 71^st Street townhouse, homing in on deranged bathroom décor, like the chummy caricature of Epstein and Bill Clinton above one toilet and a bone-chilling wall-mounted child ballerina leg sculpture. Other days, I take digital walking tours of Little St. James, staring at the strange masks surrounding a dentist chair (What happened here?!) before gazing into the watery depths from the inexplicable hatch to the sea in a utility building (What went down there?!). Sometimes, I watch Epstein’s seconds-long videos chasing redacted women around a kitchen island and dangling his mouth open to inspect a red and swollen lip, both of which are more frightening than any horror movie I’ve ever seen. And yet other times, I meander around his inbox, searching for key food words, like jerky, which features in over 300 emails. Totally normal! In one, chef Francis Derby informs a redacted person:

“Just wanted to touch base about Jerky.

JE said he was gonna start eating regular food again so he might be eating less jerky. That said he has 6 bags of it in the downstairs freezer for his next trip. I believe it should be enough to get him through. Any other questions please let me know.”

6 bags?!! How much jerky was he eating that he had to announce he was going back to “regular food”? Is jerky not a regular food? Or is it a code word for something….something like human meat?! Francis did work at a restaurant called The Cannibal, which is clearly a bit too on the nose to be taken seriously. Yet with this crowd, anything is possible.

I’m not entirely mystified by my obsession. Most obviously, the Epstein files give us a glimpse into how global power really works, through money laundering, disaster capitalism, glad-handing, insider trading, and the exploitation of women and children. But more than that, when else do you get to stare into the inbox of pure, unadulterated evil?! Which explains why Jeffrey and Ghislaine’s vacay photos, in particular, grab me: the mundane travels of the demonic. Another reason is the Epstein files made me realize just how much of our reality was influenced and constructed by this noxious pedophile and his cadre of pedo or pedo-accepting friends, from roaming co-conspirator Les Wexner’s stores when loitering around the mall as bored aught teens to the 2008 crash, when, according to his two-hour interview with Steve Bannon, Epstein was in jail using his allotted two-a-day phone calls to chat with the CEOs of Bear Sterns and JP Morgan. Then, there’s Epstein’s haunting presence prowling around the art world of the 2010s. I recently googled Epstein’s girlfriend’s name and came up with a 2014 photo of the duo at the New York Academy of Art’s Tribeca Ball, a gala I covered around that same time, meaning I could unknowingly have been in the room with him at some point. I’m going to puke…

Beyond all of this, there is also a deranged joy in being able to raise disturbed, dark theories in polite society without seeming absolutely, completely off my nut. As Tim Dillon said on a recent podcast, “We’re all a little QAnon now.” And after all this time judging the conspiratorial wackos ready for the Storm, I finally get it. It’s FUN to ask questions like: Did you hear Epstein was interested in Angel’s Trumpet, a plant that contains a chemical that turns people into zombies? What about Ed Epstein inviting Ghislaine to serve on a “9/11 Shadow Commission”? Why does Howard Lutnick keep giggling about child sexual abuse and 9/11? What was going on with Epstein’s Manhattan Project of Eugenics at his Zorro Ranch? Were they breeding people?! Did Robin Leach choke a girl to death? Was Pizzagate real? Is Epstein still alive and ordering shipments using his FedEx account as late as 2024? Why was he buying so much sulfuric acid? Did former Trump 1.0 Attorney General Bill Barr’s daddy, Donald Barr, a former O.S.S. officer (the pre-CIA for the uninitiated), who likely hired Coney Island drop-out Epstein at the ritzy, smart-fuck Dalton School, with zero qualifications, really publish a sci-fi novel entitled Space Relations: A Slightly Gothic Interplanetary Tale about an intergalactic oligarchy that kept sex slaves that bred with children?

I can at least answer that last one. Yep. Real. I know because I read it. I first heard about Donny Barr’s Space Relations while watching Tucker’s nearly three-hour Epstein-athon with Darryl Cooper who described the book as “a pulpy kind of L. Ron Hubbard-style science fiction book,” in which the protagonist is “kidnapped and sold into slavery on an alien planet ruled by seven oligarchs that spend most of their time breeding slaves and kidnapping children around the universe to bring home as sex slaves.” After hearing this same synopsis echoed by Breaking Points’ Saagar Engeti on Flagrant’s also three-hour Epstein-a-go-go (I told you, I’m obsessed), I had to see if this grotesque underaged dystopian smut was lingering online anywhere. Magically, it is! In PDF form via the Internet Archive. Though promptly downloaded, the novel sat on my laptop untouched for months. When is the right time to read a former spook’s book about child sex slaves? Ok, probably never, but I decided to take the slightly gothic interplanetary plunge in the midst of the file drop, because Space Relations hovers right at the start of Epstein’s story. If Epstein hadn’t been hired by the Dalton School, where according to former students in The New York Times, he had an uncomfortably flirty relationship with students (one student recalls, “There was a real clarity of the inappropriateness of the behavior—that this isn’t how adult male teachers conduct themselves”), he would never have landed his job with Bear Sterns, hired at the recommendation of a Dalton parent, and then, worked those connections to, seemingly, create a shadow government of arms dealing, sex trafficking, money laundering, and insider trading that oversaw pretty much everything that happened from Iran-Contra onward. I should note that I can’t be entirely sure that Donald Barr was the one to hire Epstein, though it’s referred to as fact in many places. The timing is a bit confused as Barr resigned as Dalton headmaster in June 1974, “over budget priorities and his disciplinarian approach to substance abuse” (Don was a narc!), and Epstein began in September 1974. Yet the interim Peter Branch didn’t hire Epstein and, in fact, was the one to shitcan him for being a crappy teacher, so…one can only assume…Regardless of these questions, to try to understand how Epstein got here—how WE got here—it seemed necessary to go back to the beginning.

And the beginning sucks. Space Relations opens with—what else?—a good probing, with protagonist John Craig, “naked, wincing, waiting,” with his asshole, mouth, and urethra hooked up for testing, while he sits back in stirrups like he’s at the gyno, or the “pussy doctor,” as Epstein frequently called the profession in emails. The point of this examination is unclear, as Craig is poked, prodded, and given a word association test, which physician Fritz Krause, pretentiously refers to as “Neofreudian” (why not just Freudian?). From what contextual clues I can gather, Craig is seemingly a former slave, with numbers tattooed on his arm, who is now some kind of respected Earth official, bound for an interplanetary summit where the High Council of Kossar is going to argue over the abolition of slavery. I say seemingly because most of this introductory scene is devoted to vaguely off-putting banter like this:

“Subject heard, ‘Knife.’ It excited him. But where did it get to him? Here?” Kraus clapped his hand on his crotch. “Castration anxiety? Or what? You know that shrinking feeling? At least the old word-test sometimes gave us a clue. Now, you see—”

“I see,” Craig, turned a hard, bright gaze on the physician. “But what do you see, Fritz?”

“I see a boy with a problem…”

“Have you ever seen a boy without a problem?”

Huh?!

The first thing any non-reader of Space Relations has to know is this: Donald Barr is a wretched writer. Astonishingly atrocious. So atrocious that I wish I could time-travel and ask for Barr’s resignation from the Dalton School another time. Take this verbiage exercise as Barr introduces the seven oligarchs that rule Kossar and their distinctive walks:

“The seven rulers of Kossar swept back into the Council Chamber after a recess–Orme striding, Wynther tottering, Falkendire marching, Ewbold drifting, Lynne pacing; Parad mincing, and Lady Morgan moving with a kind of restless restraint.”

Someone rip the thesaurus out of his meaty paws!

That cartoonishly flowery nonsense has nothing on Barr’s descriptions, which are so baffling I could easily believe HE was from another planet. Three of my favorites: “There was an alarm like a demented child playing with a penny whistle”; “A booming gurgle, a vastly amplified retching sound, a muttering resonance”; and “The Lady’s aide-de-camp, an enormously obese man in a white suit, trotted in a moment later, agitated and perspiring, like a pig charging at peacocks.” What? How often do pigs charge at peacocks? Is this a common scene in the Barr household? Even his word choices are questionable, like “He found that his bare feet were copiously wet with blood.” COPIOUSLY wet?! Did he mean conspicuously?

Straining a muscle while eye rolling is not the only effect of Barr’s godawful writing. His writing is so appalling that I had trouble even distinguishing what was happening most of the time! This blurred confusion starts early with little to no perceptible transition between the contemporary High Council of Kossar summit and Craig’s flashback to his capture by space pirates and enslavement on Kossar. This temporal shift is made so suddenly that it took me more pages than it should have to realize that Craig hadn’t just ghosted his meeting, but was recalling the last time he was on a spaceship. At that point in some nebulous past, space pirates yanked him out of his spaceship netting and chained him to a slab next to another slave, where they spent their time waiting for the four-time-a-day trip to the trench. What’s going on in that trench? Beats me! Are they taking a dump?!

This general befuddlement makes the child sexual abuse that much more jarring and distressing, floating in a challenging reading comprehension haze until an extraterrestrial pirate rapes a 15-year-old. What the fuck?! Barr doesn’t depict this scene with the appropriate level of horror and revulsion. Instead, he focuses largely on describing the child’s good looks—“auburn-haired and pretty”—and her panties (“old-fashioned delicate pink underclothing”). Barf. Rather than recoiling, Barr treats the rape with ho-hum indifference, with other pirates remarking, “That’s the second one spoiled on this run,” and docking the rapist’s pay. Craig is just as nonplussed, an apathy about child rape that pervades all of Craig’s observations of and participation in sex crimes on Kossar. Now, it’s hard to know whether this apathy is purposeful or whether it’s just because Donald Barr should be posthumously indicted for high crimes against literature. But, really, does it matter?

This literary bewilderment travels to Kossar with Craig, where he’s sold off to the only female oligarch of the land, Lady Morgan (Ghislaine?!), who pals around with her fat, former obstetrician friend, Dr. Khoory.  From here, it’s hard to even describe what the “plot” is, if you can even call it that, a collection of adventurous scenes with Craig acting as a swashbuckling, clever, rugged figure, always outsmarting his guards and other officials and slipping away from his forced labor at the mines or Kossar gardens. Other stuff happens, too, but I’d be hard-pressed to logically explain it. There are subplots about something called squeed (no idea). There is a hidden underwater cave filled with alien guns, which are important for some reason. And there is a Squad of Ukrainians that comes to the rescue…because…? Mostly, Barr spends his time being impressed with Craig and his survival instincts and resourcefulness. Craig isn’t just all brawn, though; he’s also brains, a real intellectual, as evidenced by the random bits and pieces of putrid poetry, like this, peppered throughout the book:

“Seeing once more the sweet breasts hammering
Softly against the silk, the brave eyes glancing
At me like momentary teeth, the swing
Of thigh past thigh, and all your garment dancing;
Seeing again the suave posteriors
In easy motion, and the back-flying shoulders,
The smile beneath which lonely anger stirs,
The icy smile behind which longing smoulders;
Seeing you now, oh Lady! oh Possessor/
I waver like a swimmer on the shore ·
Looking at shark-torn waters, a transgressor
Against my reason, and I feel once more
The old delight, the challenge, and the pains,
The old unwanted uproar in my veins.”

SUAVE POSTERIORS!! 

What stands out, though, is the persistent uncomfortably juvenile eroticism, which mirrors Epstein’s birthday book in seeming like it was written by a middle school boy trapped in the body of a middle-aged man. A slave gets a boner after being whipped (Did Emerald Fennell read this?). Lady Morgan and Dr. Khoory inspect Craig’s scrotum before purchasing. Craig murders a guard after a blow job gone wrong. And while under some truth serum-like substance, Craig prattles about pederasty and the “Director of Foreskins.” Much of Craig’s libido is devoted to his slave owner Lady Morgan, who is drawn to Craig’s cunning, as well as his ferret-like stank (seriously)—or as one slave remarks, Craig “tend[s] her ladyship’s little garden.” (“I hope your trowel isn’t rusty, boy,” he quips.)

This would all be sordid enough. But it wouldn’t make me, a connoisseur of bad bad taste, as well as good bad taste, clutch my pearls. But, then Barr tosses in slave girls…and I mean girls, as he also refers to them as “youngsters,”…being bred. Unsatisfied with simply keeping Craig all to herself, Lady Morgan farms him out to the “shabby and grim,” Planned Parenthood Center” (subtle), where Craig has to mate with a fellow slave girl on “a grimy cot” while Lady Ghislaine, I mean, Morgan watches. Like the poor auburn-haired girl on the spaceship, his partner, Marina, is effusively described as “a diminutive, taut, black-haired girl with raging hazel eyes” with freckles that resemble “a small child.” Before having sex with this “trapped, shamed youngster,” Craig observes her face “distorted with fear,” yet still goes through with it. Though the underage sex act is not described in gruesome detail (thank god), Barr makes sure we know Craig could seal the deal, since later, Marina has a child, whom she names Craig. How sweet! Lady Morgan is also impressed, snarking that Craig was “so tender, so considerate, while you crawled into her poor body.” A phrase so grotesque that surely it would be redacted in an Epstein email.

Lest you think Lady Morgan is an aberration, she’s not the only oligarch with a penchant for perversion. Another sicko is Sir Osman, who appears later in the book for no other reason than to inflict upon us his cadre of genetically modified intersex sex slaves, including one named Shakerleb aka “Sugar-lips,” as they writhe around their overlord. Barr includes a long explanatory diatribe from Dr. Khoory to make sure readers understand how these “creatures,” as he calls them, were created:

“It was a boy once…it is not, you will understand, a matter of injecting a boy crudely with female hormones. That will produce a sexual vegetable, very passive. This is—active. The patient retains three primary male characteristics, develops the secondary female characteristics in profusion, and has a strong libido. This requires a fine-tuning of the molecules and a perfect balance.”

Sounds like a mix of Epstein’s Manhattan Project of Eugenics and his deeply creepy fixation with “transgender biology.”

While I won’t spoil the ending for all you Epstein completists out there, I’ll just say it was more, uh, romantic than expected! Now, what did I get from reading Space Relations other than a major case of the yucks? It’s hard not to read Barr’s novel without making, as I have here, copious connections between his fictional dystopia and the one Epstein and his web of highly connected billionaire pedo buddies created here on Earth. It also just so happens this was published a year before Epstein got hired at Dalton. I wonder if he read it before his first day?! Not that the actions in Space Relations are exactly the same, it would be hard to publish a fiction as noxious and conspiratorial as the one we see unraveling in front of us in the files. So, this isn’t a blueprint for future crimes, but there is a clear ideology being mapped out that I don’t think only exists on Kossar—and I don’t think it did for Barr either. In fact, Barr felt so comfortable expressing this ideology that he wrote this schlock while a headmaster at a prominent school! And released it with two actual publishers under his own name! Hell, even Sam Steward had a pseudonym! Imagine your principal writing books in his downtime about a 15-year-old’s undies and forced human breeding! I know. I know the 1970s were a different time, but I don’t think THAT different. But when I really think about it, perhaps the difference is that Barr played out his grotesque fantasies in crappy fiction, while Epstein made them real.