As you have probably seen, Attorney General Pam Bondi has announced that there’s no there there with the whole Jeff Epstein saga: no list, no hidden group of the world’s most powerful men having sex with minors, no prostitution ring, etc. etc. etc. Of course MAGA has gone into paroxysms with claims that Bondi, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino may be part of the Deep State themselves. I confess to as much schadenfreude as the next red blooded American seeing MAGA eat itself alive over this latest turn of the conspiracy theory. But is it possible that none of this stuff was ever true in the first place or that it’s perhaps been wildly exaggerated?
Let me be clear about what I mean by “this stuff.” There’s more than enough evidence that Epstein preyed on underaged girls and had a system for procuring them. He pled guilty to a limited version of this and he clearly got a sweetheart deal. Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown was largely responsible for reviewing that earlier deal, detailing just how much Epstein got away with and making Epstein’s actions and that earlier deal a mega story in 2018.
She interviewed dozens of Epstein victims — underaged, often from fractured or abusive homes, vulnerable to manipulation which kept them from going to the authorities — and identified 80 of them. For this there’s plenty of evidence. And as Brown argued in her Herald series and subsequent book, Epstein had a whole network of people who procured these girls for him. For this there’s lots of evidence, and his sometimes-girlfriend-turned-procurer Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison for it.
But that’s not the thing that has made Epstein and the conspiracy theories tied to his name and predation such cultural totems. It’s the idea that he also made underaged girls available to many of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world and not only facilitated these statutory rapes but videotaped them and kept various kinds of evidence of those crimes. There appears to be credible evidence about Prince Andrew. One accuser accused Alan Dershowitz, who denied the accusation. A few other specific men were named. But I’ve always been struck by the way that once you get beyond this handful of men, the entire story gets very nebulous — huge amounts of smoke, but, in terms of reporting, it at least seems like accusations and speculations bouncing back and forth between different people. You start from a nucleus of reasonably documented bad actors and then surmise and speculation solidify into conventional wisdom and eventually purported fact.
The idea that Epstein procured girls for the world’s richest and most powerful didn’t emerge out of nowhere. Epstein clearly collected rich and powerful men. He met with them. He threw parties they attended. Bill Gates met with him. So did Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. He also fancied himself and wanted to be seen as a man of ideas. He gave comparatively small sums (relative to his purported wealth) to sponsor symposia and meetings of world-renowned professors and scholars at top universities. After Epstein’s downfall, Harvard did an internal investigation and subsequent report that found that between 1998 and 2008 Epstein gave $9.1 million to the university “to support a variety of research and faculty activities.” Epstein’s largesse even managed to land him a “visiting fellow” gig at Harvard’s Department of Psychology in 2005. Clearly being tied to the super wealthy, the politically powerful and the world’s most respected minds was hugely important to Epstein. But whether it was ego or a way to find richies whose money he could manage — or just what the core motivation was — has never been entirely clear to me. Of course, maybe it was in part to pull them into his web of sexual predation. But maybe isn’t evidence.
Now maybe this all happened. I’m no expert on this whole story. It’s never particularly interested me. All I’ve done over the years is, I think, look at the story as a reporter and have a reporter’s instincts around when you see something where there are a lot of accusations, a lot of them taken as a given or at least probably true, and, yet, when you look for the specific evidence that really grounds it, it gets very fuzzy. I would say that when you look at the more extreme versions of the Epstein conspiracy theories it even verges into stuff that looks genetically similar to PizzaGate. And I mean that in the sense of a conspiracy theory that purports not only to bring together the global elite into one vast ecosystem of the worst kind of criminal conduct — the sexual abuse of vulnerable minors — but would perhaps fatally undo that elite if the truth were ever known.
When you note that this broader version of the Epstein story doesn’t seem grounded in a lot of evidence or ask why more evidence hasn’t leaked (surely one of the purported videotapes would have come out?) you get the standard conspiracy theory answer: with the global elite so compromised, no wonder the evidence remains under wraps!
Some of my suspicion of what we might call the broader Epstein story started with the initial questions about his wealth. Just how much money Epstein was worth and where he got his money were very fuzzy when he first moved to the center of the news conversation in 2018. But it eventually turned out he wasn’t as wealthy as some believed. He was worth about $500 million. But an outsized portion of that wealth came from managing the money of just two men — Les Wexner, CEO of L Brands, and Leon Black of Apollo Global Management. Even before he became the cultural avatar of sex trafficking, there were lots of legends about Epstein, many of which were simply false or vastly inflated. A latticework of confabulation surrounded the man almost his entire life.
As I hope I’ve made clear, I’m definitely not planning to die on the hill of “no broader Epstein sex ring.” I truly don’t know how many other men might have had sex with the girls Epstein’s people had procured. I’m simply saying that the evidence for this part of the story seems to be much less than a lot of people seem to think. And it could well be that Bondi, Patel and the rest for once may actually be telling the truth — that there’s just not much there.
