Among the stranger threads running through the Epstein files is a minor obsession with The Little Rascals.
The connection first drew attention this week, when a federal judge unsealed a handwritten note purportedly written by Epstein in July 2019, roughly three weeks before his death, following a suspected suicide attempt at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.
The note ends with the phrase, “Whatcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!!”
The line has been traced to a 1931 Our Gang short titled Little Daddy, in which the character Stymie delivers it upon learning he and a friend are about to be separated.
Epstein had used the same expression in at least three previous emails, according to documents released earlier this year under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, including once to his brother in 2016 and once to a childhood friend in 2017.
A 2016 exchange with his brother features a previous citation from Jeffrey Epstein of the 1931 Our Gang dialogue.
Courtesy
But a search of the released files turns up an earlier, odder instance of the Little Rascals fixation.
In a Dec. 2, 2014, email to Joi Ito — the former MIT Media Lab director who would resign in 2019 after the extent of his financial ties to Epstein became public — Epstein responds to a photo Ito had apparently sent him.
Ito, in his message, already had walked back an initial misidentification: “Wait, what was I thinking? This is Alfalfa, not Squiggy.”
He meant to say Alfalfa, the cowlicked scene-stealer of the Our Gang shorts played by Carl Dean Switzer, but had mistakenly referenced Andrew “Squiggy” Squiggman, the character played by David Lander on Laverne & Shirley.
“Even older,” Ito added, “but I guess it dates me that I remember Little Rascals.”
Epstein’s reply does not address whether he found the comparison flattering. Instead, he asks: “is there a Japanese symbol that when pronounced =AO sounds like AL-fa=fa,” apparently seeking to render his new nickname in Japanese characters for Ito’s benefit.
Epstein joked in 2014 with former MIT Media Lab director Joe Ito about his resemblance to Alfalfa from The Little Rascals.
Courtesy
In a separate message, Epstein sent Ito a link to an IMDb photo of Switzer: image 55 of 82 on the actor’s page, a black-and-white publicity still from around 1935 showing the boy grinning in suspenders, his signature cowlick curling skyward.
Epstein’s accompanying message: “any resemblance?”
Carl Dean Switzer as Alfalfa.
Courtesy Everett Collection
In isolation, it’s a trivial exchange, the kind of joshing that passes between men who consider themselves friends.
In context, it is something else: a data point suggesting that the Little Rascals reference in the suicide note was not incidental but part of a genuine and recurring private vocabulary.
Whether that makes the note more or less likely to be authentic is a question forensic analysts will ultimately have to answer. What it establishes, at minimum, is that Epstein had been a Rascals fan, and perhaps even Alfalfa in his own mind, for years.
