Frédéric Martel, the author of the 2019 international bestseller, “In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy,” told me over the weekend about the time he was invited to lunch by Steve Bannon, who asked him to come to Bannon’s palatial Paris hotel suite shortly after his book was published. “I didn’t know why he asked me to come,” he said.The meeting was arranged via one of Martel’s right-wing Catholic sources who was allied with Bannon. Martel, a journalist who covers the far right in Europe and is working on a new book focused on it, certainly had a professional interest in meeting Bannon.“It was at the Hotel Bristol,” he explained to me by phone from Paris, “in a suite that costs 8,000 euros per night.” Per the exchange rate at that time, that would have been about $8950 per night. Forbes reports suites at the hotel begin at $3200 per night and go up to as high as $46,000 per night. It was June of 2019. And he was surprised about what Bannon wanted from him. “He said during the lunch that he wanted to make a movie about my book,” Martel explained, noting that he “wouldn’t have ever given that [permission] to Bannon.” But he offered Bannon a more polite truth. “I don’t have the rights to the book [for a film],” Martel said he told Bannon, as his publisher had already sold those rights.That was the end of the discussion on the book, and Martel was perplexed because, as he explained, the book is “probably the most pro-Francis” book, and Bannon, a Catholic “traditionalist” connected to all of the most extreme radical right elements of the church, was working with his allies to take down Francis because of his progressive reforms and his criticism of populist right-wing governments, including Donald Trump’s. “In the Closet of the Vatican” exposes the hypocrisy of a church hierarchy built up over many decades—including under the virulently homophobic Pope Benedict—which included many powerful closeted gay priests, monsignors, and cardinals who were publicly working against gay rights while privately leading lives counter to their pronouncements and harmful actions.While exposing all of that might bring down some of the very people on the Catholic right Bannon was courting—many inside the church itself, among the clergy and the hierarchy—he clearly didn’t see the nuance. Bannon is all about chaos and destruction, and was laser-focused on hurting Francis’ leadership and influence. He asked his good friend Jeffrey Epstein for help in his project.In the Epstein files there are thousands of text message exchanges between Bannon and Epstein, as Bannon sought the help of Epstein—a true globalist within the uber-wealthy elite—to promote his faux populist, supposedly anti-globalist movement across Europe. As CNN reports: Bannon had been highly critical of Francis whom he saw as an opponent to his “sovereigntist” vision, a brand of nationalist populism which swept through Europe in 2018 and 2019. The released documents from the DOJ appear to show that Epstein had been helping Bannon to build his movement.Bannon, after being pushed out in 2017 as Trump’s national security adviser, was living in Rome, traveling to Paris, London, and throughout Europe, and asking Epstein to connect him to powerful people. Epstein offered the use of his jet and homes for Bannon’s travels, while Bannon offered media training and advice for Epstein to grotesquely help clean up the convicted pedophile’s reputation. And Bannon recorded many hours of interviews, 12 hours of which have been released among the files, for a documentary film he was making on Epstein, the aim of which no doubt was to promote a media makeover for Epstein. Epstein’s jet, per the files, was unavailable when Bannon asked if he could use it to fly from Rome to Paris in one instance, but there is evidence in the files that Bannon stayed at a grand apartment where Epstein was living near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on that trip. Epstein invited Bannon to stay in a March 29th, 2019 text; Bannon said he was “Enroute,” and then Epstein texted someone else the next morning: “Steve Bannon is here with me.” Bannon’s spokesperson told The New York Times that Bannon didn’t stay there (and that he never stayed at Epstein’s homes or flew on his plane) and decided to stay at a hotel instead. But the Times noted the spokesperson didn’t provide a receipt. My question would have been, even if that’s so, who paid for the hotel—again, Bannon’s spokesperson didn’t show the Times any receipt—and was it in fact the lavish Hotel Bristol, the same place where he met Martel later in June? After all, per the files, Epstein did offer to pay for a charter flight for Bannon when Epstein said his jet was unavailable. (There’s no indication as to whether he did or didn’t pay for a charter flight.)Around that same time, Bannon expressed to Epstein his interest in making Martel’s book into a film and having Epstein fund it as executive producer.