A lot of things age terribly: meat left out in the summer sun, Justin Timberlake’s bleached perm, most ’90s stand-up comedy, Justin Timberlake in general... but few things have aged more poorly than this 2007 segment from VH1's The Fabulous Life Of... Wall Street Billionaire Ballers. Like, seriously. And we know how much that sentiment is tossed out these days, but it’s sincerely difficult to put into words just how deep this clip should have remained buried in the bowels of the Internet. Prepare yourself.
First brought to our attention by Eoin Higgins on Twitter and unfortunately verified through multiple venues, this is a very real episode of the very mid-2000s wealth-worshipping series, The Fabulous Life of..., which was an unholy successor to the seminally awful, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. After about 15 excruciating minutes, we’re treated to lavish praise draped upon none other than Jeffrey goddamn Epstein.
We’re not sure where to begin: the reminder that Epstein was once a schoolteacher, the name-dropping of Kevin Spacey and Bill Clinton, the hindsight realization that our current hellscape was foretold that long ago. Let’s simply start (and end) with the adoration heaped on Epstein’s Boeing 727 jet, shall we?
“He has a Boeing 727. I’m just wondering, ‘Now, what do you need with a commercial-sized airliner for?” muses Mickey Boardman, editorial director for Paper magazine. “It comes in handy when you have powerful friends to fly around,” the show’s narrator chimes in, failing to mention the open secret in powerful circles that Epstein’s 727 was purportedly nicknamed the “Lolita Express” for reasons both obvious, awful, and not worth rehashing here.
Goddamnit. Just… goddamnit. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we need to go scream into a pillow for the rest of the afternoon.
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