Whether or not he kept a copy by his bed, we know that Epstein owned a first edition and ordered The Annotated Lolita for his Kindle in 2019, 43 days before he was arrested. As to the claim that Epstein was a “great Nobokov fan,” the only possible response is: nfw. He may have wanted others to believe he was, and he may also have tried to impress certain people with polite conversation about the book—maybe the kind of people who do not know how to spell Nabokov, or who wanted his money too much to call out his superficiality. The novel makes a cameo in his 2018 correspondence with the Harvard English professor Elisa New, wife of the hapless Larry Summers, whose poetry project he funded. “I’m going upstairs to hunt for my copy of Lolita,” New says in an email, seemingly at Epstein’s urging. She then suggests that Epstein read Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, writing that Cather’s novel has “similar themes to Lolita in that it’s about a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl.” The titular girl in Lolita is a 12-year-old who is kidnapped and serially raped by a much older man. To compare Lolita to My Ántonia in this way is a bit like saying Moby-Dick and Deliverance are both about fishing trips.