The Epstein humiliation

“Influencers” hoist their souvenir copy of the “Epstein Files” provided to them by Attorney General Pam Bondi, February 2025 — via Getty Images

In the past few days I’ve been somewhat unexpectedly deluged with requests to discuss the “Epstein Files” debacle. Here’s a podcast I did with Unherd. Here’s an appearance today on the 2WAY platform. And here’s an article I was asked to write for Compact magazine.

While I don’t claim to possess encyclopedic knowledge of every last aspect of the sprawling saga, I’ve consumed enough court transcripts and related material over the years to become increasingly wary of how this topic now functions in the popular imagination. And in particular, how it has been used by political scammers to manipulate, inflame, and entice a certain segment of the public, such that large quantities of people apparently believed there was something called the “Epstein Files” sitting somewhere in a cavernous government vault, just waiting to be triumphantly unveiled — and then at last would emerge this long-awaited Rosetta Stone of hidden elite depravity, exposing once and for all how power in society is really distributed.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Epstein mythology has also thoroughly humiliated the Trump Administration. Figures like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino auditioned for their current top roles at the FBI by spending the prior several years on the GOP podcast circuit, and if anything plays to the id of right wing social media, it’s peddling speculation about the supposed concealment of child-sex trafficking rings. Once the righteous are restored to power, so the story goes, the perpetrators will finally get what’s coming to them.

When people wonder why Pam Bondi, as attorney general, teased imminent scandalous revelations from the “Epstein Files,” only to then disclaim the very existence of those files, they overlook the obvious answer: She and other administration officials have long sought to rouse their followers on social media by indicating keen interest in Epstein mythology. Simply name-dropping Epstein was a surefire winner in the less-than-scrupulous podcast environments where JD Vance was shrewdly electioneering last year. This made it possible for “anti-establishment” media consumers to believe that by voting Republican in 2024, they were voting to defeat the Deep State—and so to release the “Epstein Files.” Such logic may have been shallow and deluded, but its political employment has proved to be highly clever and effective.

Still, the dam was bound to break eventually. Epstein mythologists now denounce Trump & co. for concealing evidence of a far-reaching child-sex-trafficking ring and blackmail network that they are certain exists. But if anything needs to be denounced, it is the charlatanism of those who exploited the credulous and trafficked in nonsense to attain high office. Now that would be a “trafficking” conspiracy worth exploring in greater depth.

There are many things that I’ve long found maddening about the prevailing conception of the Epstein issue, especially on social media. It’s considered vicious and offensive to simply observe that the original and most high-profile accuser, Virginia Guiffre, was an admitted serial fabricator. As though this should have no bearing at all on how we perceive the veracity of the wider mania she unleashed — and even though it was always Guiffre’s wild, sensational claims that formed the evidentiary basis for what people now profess to believe with such strident conviction: that Epstein orchestrated a massive child sex-trafficking and blackmail operation, implicating untold scores of powerful individuals in illicit sexual encounters, and now the horrifying truth continues to be covered up by the Trump Administration.

Giuffre, as the highest-profile Epstein accuser, was absolutely integral to the creation of the mythology. It was she who made the most sensational claims of being sex-trafficked to prominent third-party individuals—including Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, and former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. For nearly a decade, Giuffre accused Dershowitz of committing depraved sex crimes, but by 2022, she was forced to admit in a civil settlement that her claims had been false. Strangely, this development failed to penetrate the mythology—perhaps because it demonstrated the serial fabulism of the accuser on whose claims the mythology was built.

Despite her decade’s worth of sensational charges, Giuffre was not called as a witness by prosecutors in the 2021 trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. Not one of the four alleged victims to testify in that trial claimed they had ever been trafficked to any third-party individuals; indeed, the sex trafficking conspiracy for which Maxwell was ultimately convicted consisted of two persons: herself and Epstein.

Thus, the only time that the heightened evidentiary standards and adversarial scrutiny of a criminal trial were brought to bear, no claims were even tested that could have substantiated the central premise of the popular mythology—namely, that Epstein ran an elaborate sex-trafficking operation to supply prominent men with minors, and then capture their illicit exploits on tape for the purposes of blackmail. (Blackmail to what end, exactly? Never clear.)

Nor can you mention the absolute financial feeding-frenzy the case has become:

Epstein mythologists also resist any recognition of the perverse incentives created by the Epstein saga turning into an enormous cash-cow. Giuffre received at least five Epstein-related settlements, including $10 million from Prince Andrew, unspecified “millions” from Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, $500,000 from Epstein’s own estate, and an unknown amount from JP Morgan, which agreed to a staggering $290 million settlement to resolve a class-action suit of Epstein accusers who charged the bank with malfeasance merely for at one point having Epstein as a client. Deutsche Bank likewise settled for $75 million on the same grounds. Given the radioactivity of anything that can be remotely associated with claims of child sex trafficking, the calculus behind the settlements is not hard to grasp. A similar logic likely applied with Prince Andrew, whose odd performance in an infamous 2019 BBC interview landed him and the British royal family in hot water. He subsequently opted to settle his lawsuit with Giuffre, presumably viewing this as preferable to standing trial in the United States amid a maelstrom of publicity.

With this downpour of settlement funds, Giuffre purchased a six-bedroom oceanfront property in Perth, Australia, as well as a spacious nearby ranch estate. It might be uncouth to observe that Epstein accusers have made huge sums of money from their claims—but it’s also true.

The insidious civil liberties implications must also be steadfastly ignored:

However, the trial did highlight the constitutionally questionable practice of allowing self-described “victims” to testify pseudonymously. Maxwell’s appellate brief, now pending before the US Supreme Court, convincingly argues that this “transformed the trial into a form of Kabuki theater designed to remind the jury at every turn that these adult women were being protected because their privacy interests, and not Maxwell’s constitutional right to a public trial, were paramount.” The brief continues:

Immediately after Epstein’s death, complainants’ civil attorneys representing Epstein victims, including those who testified at trial, began to assist in the creation of the Epstein Victims Compensation Program (VCP), a non-adversarial and confidential claims resolution program set up to compensate self-identified victims of Epstein, even as they were actively involved in the Government’s investigation. On June 25, 2020, the Program began accepting claims. An attorney for one complainant encouraged her to cooperate with the Government in its case against Maxwell because it would improve her prospects for receiving a larger sum of money from the VCP. Tr. 2731-32. It did. “Jane” received $5,000,000.

Excluded from the popular mythology is any cognizance that persistent Epstein hysteria, like other hysterias, has tended to erode civil liberties and injure due process. It authorizes the casual proliferation of abject lies—such as those made ceaselessly against Alan Dershowitz, whose eventual attainment of an admission from Guiffre that she had falsely accused him of depraved sexual acts for eight years straight is diligently ignored by the mythology’s adherents. It accepts as perfectly sensible that a “self-identified victim” can be enticed by attorneys to cooperate with federal prosecutors because this would improve her chances of obtaining a bigger payout from an adjudicative process that is both “non-adversarial” and “confidential,” meaning there is no downside risk to maximally dramatizing one’s purported victimhood—and the upside can be $5 million.

I’m aware that most people on the internet violently detest my views on this subject. Commenters have been bitterly outraged everywhere I’ve appeared lately. All I can say is that my views are the product of authentic reasoning, to the best of my ability. The “Epstein Files” bait-and-switch was a genuine humiliation, on many levels, and so I’m trying to most rationally identify the culprits. If you want to be mad at anyone, I’m recommending to be mad at the hucksters who whipped up an anticipatory delirium to advance their own political and commercial interests.

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