๐๐ ๐ณ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐บ๐ฒ๐ ๐ถ๐ ๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ต๐ผ๐๐ด๐ต ๐น๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ป๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฎ๐ฏ๐ผ๐๐ ๐๐ฝ๐๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป'๐ ๐ฝ๐ฎ๐๐ ๐๐ผ๐๐น๐ฑ ๐ต๐ฎ๐๐ฒ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐พ๐๐ถ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฑ "๐ท๐๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ถ๐ผ๐๐๐น๐ ๐๐ป๐ผ๐ผ๐ฝ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐๐ต๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ด๐ต ๐ผ๐น๐ฑ ๐ป๐ฒ๐๐๐ฝ๐ฎ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐๐ถ๐ฐ๐น๐ฒ๐." But by 2015, when Chomsky's correspondence began, the Epstein case was not some obscure footnote you'd need to dig for. The 2011 Daily Beast piece by Conchita Sarnoff was widely circulated. The 2015 Gawker flight log publication was a major news event. The Virginia Giuffre lawsuit against Maxwell, which named numerous powerful figures, was generating headlines across every major outlet. The basic facts โ dozens of underage victims, a federal investigation that was killed, a plea deal widely condemned as corrupt โ were not hidden knowledge. They were dinner party conversation in exactly the intellectual circles Chomsky moved in. This isn't about "snooping." It's about whether Noam Chomsky, a man who spent sixty years insisting that intellectuals have a responsibility to scrutinize power and hold the powerful accountable, bothered to Google someone he was actively befriending. The answer appears to be no, and that's not exculpatory โ it's damning in its own way. Chomsky was the ultimate compulsive newspaper-reading sleuth, it's hard to believe he was unaware.
"๐๐ฒ ๐๐ฎ๐๐ป'๐ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ถ๐ฐ๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ผ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ณ๐ณ" ๐ฑ๐ผ๐ฒ๐ ๐ฎ ๐น๐ผ๐ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐พ๐๐ถ๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ธ. BB's framing throughout is that Epstein was convicted of a minor offense and therefore it was reasonable to treat him as someone who'd served his time. But the reason Epstein wasn't convicted of the serious stuff ๐๐ฎ๐ ๐ถ๐๐๐ฒ๐น๐ณ ๐ผ๐ป๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฏ๐ถ๐ด๐ด๐ฒ๐๐ ๐๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ๐ฎ๐น๐ ๐ถ๐ป ๐ณ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐น ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฐ๐๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฎ๐น ๐ต๐ถ๐๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐. This wasn't a case where the FBI investigated and found insufficient evidence. They had the evidence. They drafted the indictment. Acosta killed it. This was public knowledge by 2015 โ the corruption of the plea deal had been reported extensively, including a detailed 2011 Daily Beast investigation. So "he wasn't convicted" isn't the clean defense BB thinks it is. It's more like saying "well, the mob boss was only convicted of tax evasion, so why would you assume he was involved in organized crime?" The gap between what Epstein did and what he was convicted of was the story, and it was a widely known story.
"๐๐ฒ ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ต๐ถ๐ ๐๐ฒ๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ป๐ฐ๐ฒ, ๐๐ผ ๐ต๐ฒ'๐ ๐ฏ๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ป ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฒ๐บ๐ฒ๐ฑ" ๐บ๐ถ๐๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐ป๐๐ ๐ฏ๐ผ๐๐ต ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ฒ๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ป๐ฐ๐ฒ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐ฐ๐ฒ๐ฝ๐. Epstein served 13 months in a county jail under a work-release program that allowed him to leave for 12 hours a day, six days a week, to go to his office. The Palm Beach Sheriff's department later acknowledged this arrangement was irregular. A federal judge subsequently ruled the plea deal itself was illegal because prosecutors violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act by not notifying victims. So the sentence Epstein "served" was the product of a deal that a federal judge later found to be unlawful, under conditions that barely qualified as incarceration. Invoking "he served his time" as though this represents the justice system working as intended requires ignoring everything publicly known about why that sentence was what it was.
๐ข๐ป ๐๐ต๐ฒ "๐ป๐ผ ๐ถ๐ป๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป ๐ต๐ฒ ๐ถ๐ ๐ฎ๐๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ถ๐๐" ๐ฐ๐น๐ฎ๐ถ๐บ: BB says if you read the correspondence, there's no sign Chomsky knew about Epstein's crimes. But what exactly would that indication look like? People don't typically write "I know you trafficked children but let's have dinner anyway" in emails. The absence of explicit acknowledgment in correspondence is not evidence of ignorance โ it's evidence of correspondence. What we do know is that Chomsky visited Epstein's Manhattan townhouse, which multiple visitors have described as containing overtly disturbing imagery including a painting of Bill Clinton in a dress and photographs of young women. We know Chomsky and Epstein discussed having Epstein help rearrange Chomsky's finances, including transfers related to Chomsky's wife. We know Chomsky arranged for Epstein to meet with other academics. None of this proves Chomsky knew about the abuse. But it shows a level of financial and social intimacy that goes well beyond "briefly spoke with Epstein," which is how BB frames it despite calling Chomsky someone "closer to Epstein" in the same paragraph.
๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฟ๐ต๐ฒ๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐น ๐บ๐ผ๐๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐ถ๐ป๐๐ผ๐ธ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐๐ต๐ผ๐บ๐๐ธ๐'๐ ๐๐๐ฟ๐ผ๐ธ๐ฒ ๐ถ๐ ๐บ๐ฎ๐ป๐ถ๐ฝ๐๐น๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐๐ฒ. BB frames criticism of Chomsky as kicking a debilitated 97-year-old who can't defend himself. But the criticism isn't directed at present-day Chomsky โ it's directed at the choices 2015-2018 Chomsky made. The fact that he later had a stroke doesn't retroactively change whether those choices were defensible. And the reason people feel strongly about it is precisely because of who Chomsky was โ not some random academic, but the person who more than perhaps anyone else in American intellectual life insisted that proximity to power requires moral scrutiny, that intellectuals who fail to challenge institutional crimes are complicit, and that "I didn't know" is not an acceptable defense when the information was available. The criticism of Chomsky is ultimately Chomskyian. People are applying his own framework to him and finding him wanting.
๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ต๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐๐ ๐ด๐ฒ๐๐ ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ด๐ต๐: Nobody has presented evidence that Chomsky participated in or knew about the sexual abuse. That matters and should be stated clearly. The criticism of Chomsky is about judgment, not criminality. And there is a meaningful distinction between "this person showed terrible judgment in who they associated with" and "this person committed crimes." Matthew is correct that the public discourse often collapses that distinction. Where he goes wrong is in using that valid point to suggest there's nothing worth criticizing at all โ that Chomsky's choices were reasonable given what was publicly known. They weren't, and the reason they weren't is fully available in the public record that existed before Chomsky ever emailed Epstein.
Well that email is more consistent with a hypothesis of: โChomsky didnโt believe the allegationsโ. Not a great look in its own right, but a different failing than โhe believed them and didnโt careโ.
You frame Epstein's conviction as "having sex with a 17-year-old on the day before her 18th birthday" and use this framing to suggest people who associated with him after his conviction were merely befriending someone convicted of a minor offense. This is misleading. The accusers in the NPR story were 13. Giuffre was 16 when recruited. A court document describes a 14-year-old brought to Mar-a-Lago and introduced to Trump. Files flagged for congressional review contained photographs of a 5-year-old being abused at Epstein's New York house during a party. The Palm Beach police investigation that triggered the FBI case began when a 14-year-old's stepmother reported her stepdaughter was being abused. Witness testimony describes Epstein asking to see a girl's ID specifically to confirm she was underage, and rejecting girls who were too old. The FBI's draft federal indictment was based on interviews with dozens of victims, many 14 and 15. This was a systematic operation with a preference for young adolescents, not ambiguous situations near the age of consent.
On February 24 โ just yesterday โ NPR reported that through serial number analysis of the DOJ's own document database, at least 53 pages of FBI interview transcripts related to sexual abuse allegations against Trump are catalogued in the system but not publicly available. These involve two separate accusers. The first told the FBI that around 1983, when she was approximately 13, Epstein introduced her to Trump, who forced her head toward his exposed penis โ which she bit, after which Trump punched her in the head and threw her out. The FBI found this credible enough to conduct four separate interviews with her in 2019 and refer the matter to the Washington field office โ a major escalation, given that most tips on the compiled list were dismissed outright.
Only the first of those four interviews is public, and it's the only one that doesn't mention Trump. In it, the woman showed agents a cropped photograph; her attorney explained the cropping was "due to fear of retaliation" from implicating "well-known" individuals. The FBI's own notes identified the uncropped version as a "widely distributed photograph" of Epstein with Trump. Of 15 documents logged in Maxwell discovery materials for this accuser, only 7 are in the public database. A second accuser separately told the FBI she was brought to Mar-a-Lago at age 13 or 14 and that Epstein told Trump "This is a good one, huh?" โ both men chuckled while she stood there. That interview was removed from the public database after the January 30 release and quietly restored on February 19. The interview with her mother remains offline. The White House's response: Trump has been "totally exonerated."
The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed Congress near-unanimously and Trump signed it in November 2025. It required full release within 30 days, with redactions limited to victim identities. The DOJ missed the deadline, initially released under 10,000 pages, and has to date released roughly 3.5 million pages while acknowledging approximately 6 million may qualify โ meaning roughly half remain withheld. At least 16 files disappeared from the DOJ website within 24 hours of the initial December release, including a photo of Trump with Epstein, Maxwell, and Melania. Files containing hundreds of Trump mentions were removed from the January 30 release. Deputy AG Blanche has declared there will be no further prosecutions.
Epstein's email exchanges include references to children as young as 10-13 being "so much fun" and other sexually suggestive language. The names of the people on the other end of these exchanges are blacked out. These aren't the emails of casual acquaintances โ they're communications with people who appear to have been aware of and engaged with the nature of Epstein's operation.
He was in a federal detention center that held mob bosses, terrorists, and cartel leaders โ not a lax minimum-security camp. He had been placed on suicide watch and then removed after an unusually short period. His cellmate was transferred out, violating facility policy. Both guards assigned to his unit fell asleep and pleaded guilty to falsifying records claiming they'd checked on him every 30 minutes โ they hadn't checked for approximately eight hours. The security cameras for his tier malfunctioned that night. The forensic pathologist hired by Epstein's brother (Michael Baden, a former NYC chief medical examiner) said the injuries were more consistent with homicide by strangulation than suicide by hanging. Every single protocol failure broke in the same direction for the single highest profile inmate at a facility whose suicide-prevention protocols are usually so effective they hadn't seen one in 21 years, despite boasting hundreds of inmates facing the bleakest of life sentences.
At AG Bondi's February 11 hearing, photographers captured her holding a printout labeled "Jayapal Pramila Search History" โ tracking which Epstein documents a congresswoman had searched at the DOJ's secure review terminals. The review setup itself was designed to obstruct: four computers in a small room, unique logins tracking each member's searches, no phones, handwritten notes only. Raskin's staff calculated it would take seven years to review all files under these conditions. When the Republican co-author of the transparency law, Rep. Massie, pressed Bondi on why co-conspirator names were redacted, she called him a "failed politician" with "Trump derangement syndrome."
Survivors' attorneys say the DOJ failed to redact the identities of at least 31 people victimized as children, with approximately 100 victims affected overall. One survivor received death threats after her banking information was exposed. Meanwhile, the names of co-conspirators โ including Les Wexner, who appeared in an FBI document as a "possible co-conspirator" โ were blacked out. The DOJ only un-redacted Wexner's name after Massie caught it during his review, prompting Massie to say "forty minutes of me catching you red-handed."
The Palm Beach police conducted one of the most thorough investigations their department had ever seen, interviewing dozens of victims who independently corroborated each other's accounts. The FBI then conducted its own independent investigation and drafted a 53-page federal indictment charging Epstein and four co-conspirators. Career prosecutors were prepared to go to trial. U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta killed the prosecution and negotiated a plea deal with Epstein's defense team (which included Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz) over the objections of the line prosecutors who built the case. The resulting deal granted immunity not just to Epstein but to unnamed "potential co-conspirators" โ an extraordinary clause that only makes sense if the evidence was strong and the goal was containment, not justice. A federal judge later ruled the deal was illegal because prosecutors violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act by concealing it from victims. Acosta himself told the Trump transition team he'd been told to back off because Epstein "belonged to intelligence" and was "above his pay grade." None of this was secret by 2015, when Chomsky's correspondence began. The corruption of the plea deal had been widely reported, including detailed investigations in the Daily Beast and extensive court filings.
This was not an individual's private misconduct. Employees testified that their duties included fanning out hundred-dollar bills on the bed before girls arrived, placing a gun inside the mattress, and disposing of used condoms after "massages" with minors. Three "massages" a day was the routine at the Palm Beach house. The New York townhouse had a dedicated massage room. Victims were recruited through a pyramid scheme where existing victims were paid to bring new girls. This operation ran for decades across multiple properties and countries. Maxwell was convicted by a federal jury of sex trafficking โ not based on Giuffre's testimony, but on the testimony of four other women (Jane, Kate, Carolyn, and Annie Farmer), several of whom were 14-16 when the abuse began. Over 150 victims eventually came forward.
Multiple victims and employees described hidden cameras throughout Epstein's properties. One victim described seeing a room with monitors showing feeds from multiple cameras โ a dedicated surveillance operations center. When the FBI raided the New York townhouse in 2019, they found a safe containing hard drives and CDs labeled with what appeared to be a person's name followed by a description of a sexual act. The prosecution referenced this material at bail hearings. What happened to those drives? They're in FBI custody. They've never been part of any public filing. The DOJ has never provided an accounting of what was on them. If the surveillance system worked as described, those drives potentially contain direct visual evidence of crimes committed by identifiable people. And they're just... unmentioned, while the DOJ declares the investigation closed.
Epstein claimed to be a billionaire financial manager, but no one has ever been able to identify how he made his money. He had one known client โ Les Wexner โ and the nature of that financial relationship has never been fully explained. Wexner transferred his New York townhouse (worth approximately $77 million) to Epstein under circumstances that remain murky. Epstein had no college degree, was fired from Bear Stearns, and yet somehow accumulated a fortune estimated at over $500 million, maintained multiple lavish properties including a private island, and moved through the highest circles of finance and power. The "intelligence" connection Acosta referenced has never been confirmed or denied. If Epstein's primary "business" was actually the collection and leverage of compromising material on powerful people, the unexplained wealth, the surveillance infrastructure, and the immunity deals all become coherent parts of a single picture.
Musk has repeatedly claimed he barely knew Epstein and declined invitations to his island. The files contain at least 16 emails between them in 2012-2013, including Musk writing "What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?" and coordinating a helicopter trip to the island with his then-wife. A scheduling email from late 2014: "Elon Musk to island Dec. 6 (is this still happening?)." His brother Kimbal appears extensively too. This isn't "briefly exchanging an email." It's an extended, enthusiastic social relationship with someone whose conviction for sex crimes involving a minor was public knowledge.
Former Norwegian PM Thorbjรธrn Jagland has been charged with "gross corruption" and faces up to 10 years. The UK's Peter Mandelson was stripped of his ambassadorship and faces criminal investigation. Prince Andrew was forced from his royal estate. Norway's ambassador to Jordan resigned. Turkey and Lithuania launched trafficking investigations. Sweden's UNHCR chair resigned. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted his family visited Epstein's island after previously claiming "very limited interactions" โ said "I don't recall why we did it" โ and remains in his cabinet position. Deputy AG Blanche has declared no further prosecutions will be pursued, while roughly half the qualifying documents remain unreleased.
You compare the Epstein response to Salem, McCarthyism, and the Satanic Panic. In those cases, the underlying crimes were largely fabricated โ there was no Satanic cabal, most accused "communists" weren't spies. Here, the underlying crimes are extensively documented, a co-conspirator was convicted by a federal jury, over 150 victims have come forward, and the question isn't whether crimes happened but who else participated and why the government is suppressing evidence. The better historical analogy isn't Salem โ it's the Catholic Church abuse scandal, where institutional defenders spent decades calling scrutiny "hysteria" while systematically covering up real crimes against children. The actual civil liberties crisis in the Epstein files isn't public curiosity โ it's the DOJ tracking which files members of Congress search, exposing children's identities while redacting perpetrators' names, and violating a federal transparency law signed by the president.
You frame yourself as courageously standing against the mob, with Michael Tracey as your only ally. But "don't look too closely at the Epstein files" is the position of the president, the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and the entire DOJ apparatus. It's also the majority position of Republicans: A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 67% of Republicans said the statement โitโs time for the country to move on from talking about the Epstein filesโ described their thinking at least somewhat well, compared to only 21% of Democrats.
So the MAGA base has largely followed Trumpโs cues: they went from demanding full transparency to wanting to move on, precisely as the files started implicating Trump more directly. The people actually taking risks are Rep. Massie (Republican) confronting his own party's AG over redactions, Rep. Khanna (Democrat) demanding unredacted files, NPR journalists doing serial number analysis on suppressed documents, and Reddit users crowdsourcing document reviews for congressmembers who get two hours in a restricted room. The contrarian move here isn't skepticism of the public. It's scrutiny of the powerful.
I agree with you that Sam Harris shouldn't be pilloried for declining one email. I agree that the cannibalism theories are unfounded. I agree that victim identities should have been protected. But you've written an article that uses those valid points as a shield against engaging with any of the substance โ the NPR investigation, the document suppression, the congressional surveillance, the redaction pattern, the 53 missing pages โ that was breaking news the day you published. The Epstein story isn't a moral panic. It's the most extensively documented case of elite institutional corruption in modern American history, and the institutions are still actively suppressing the evidence. That deserves more than a meditation on why everyone should calm down.
I can understand your perspective but I donโt think people are overreacting, in fact we are underreacting. Politicians overreact for the sake of performance, most of their career is a performance. But in actuality, nothing is happening. No one except Ghislaine Maxwell has been arrested despite evidence of thousands of children being abused and trafficked. I understand your point but I think the criticism should be geared towards public figures. Performative overreactions donโt help anyone. But as a collective, we are disgustingly under reacting to the pedophilic and abusive nature of our countryโs elite (the people who control nearly every aspect of our economic and political lives).
>despite evidence of thousands of children being abused and trafficked
I don't think this evidence exists, or at least not good evidence. The (good) evidence we have points to overwhelmingly smaller-scale and less interesting crimes, mostly by Epstein himself and not some grand elite-wide secret phenomenon.
Surely youโre not referring to the photos of children bound, the emails discussing different types of girls they could bring to their parties, the victims that allege there were others there besides them, the already established and known method of grooming and targeting girls in middle school and highschool, as well as the art pieces speculated to be used as blackmail against other high profile individuals. The Clintons specifically have other โstrangeโ deaths in their history, such as the boys on the tracks (you can look it up). Of course, these are only emails. Youโd have to do an actual investigation, which it appears the DOJ and FBI have not started yet as all the victims indicated in court the other day that they have not been interviewed once by the current departments.
Some of your descriptions are a bit vague so I don't necessarily know what specifically you're referring to (I have some guesses), but probably none of these are going to end up being good evidence for the more maximalist allegations I took you to be suggesting, and some of them will be false/misrepresented/absurd. For example, what are the photos of children bound? If it's that one gruesome, widely circulated description of a child abuse photo from a law firm's letter I've seen posted a thousand times on Twitter, it wasn't something recovered from Epstein's estate or anyone connected to him. But maybe you're thinking of something else.
I donโt have Twitter so Iโm not sure what youโre talking about but the New York Times reported nude and explicit images of minors and women were released in the files and have since been redacted. The BBC also reported images such as one of the former Prince Andrew on top of a small female (unclear her age because of the redaction). There were also emails discussing children as easily disposable and replaceable (boys harder than girls). If Iโm mistaken, feel free to correct me. And of course as I said, this is only emails. An actual investigation would need to happen for concrete evidence. The administration also changed their tune claiming they had files and files of evidence on their desks and now suddenly thereโs no evidence at all. Sometimes whatโs not being done says more about something than whatโs being said. They have the resources to investigate election fraud despite there being less than 100 cases out of over 200 million people, but not this?
I was referring to this[1] widely circulated footnote. It's the only thing off the top of my head I'd encountered from the recently released files that sounded like a photo of a bound child. Is that what you were talking about? And what are the emails discussing children as disposable?
I didnโt see this, I can see what youโre talking about. This is what Iโm saying, people are either using the case for views and then bad actors are using the theatrics as an excuse to underplay it. Hereโs some of what I meant, correct me if Iโm mistaken:
My point is that there are clearly enough victims and complaints from the 1980s to now for them to investigate beyond these emails. I hope thatโs being communicated across the screen.
In the spirit of correcting errors, I will note that the claim that thousands of children were traffic is almost certainly nonsense. Even the DOJ has only claimed a little over a thousand people as victims and their counting strategy involved, not only counting the families of victims as victims themselves but also includes adult women who constituted the overwhelming majority of the trafficed individuals, trafficking here being understood as taking sex workers across state boundaries, regardless of whether it was completely voluntary. Honestly, I would be surprised if the number of actual people under 18 affected was over a hundred.
@Ali fair, and again my criticism is that no one has been arrested or even investigated regarding these claims.
@Philip In case it was unclear, when I say minors, I am in fact including teenage girls. And thereโs been credible reports for decades that havenโt been investigated. Sex crimes are often underreported and most of the victims who have spoken out WERE under 18 at the time of their abuse. Thereโs enough for us to assume teenagers were the preference, so I think the claim that a majority were trafficked adult sex workers is an assumption. Either way, we are all speculating because. There. Is. No. One. Investigating. not to beat a dead horse but that is my entire criticism, that people have sensationalized this into a child sacrifice case, obscuring and distorting any actual criminal investigation which the powers at be seem to have no issue with.
All of that seems reasonable to me, I was just correcting what I saw as a clear mistake, which made your case appear stronger than it is. I think the rest of your points are all very reasonable and constitute either justified concerns or at least concerns that are arguably justified, and I certainly didnโt mean to criticise any of that. I was just correcting a mistake that might cause confusion and make the matter appear different to What it actually is in order to avoid additional mistakes and confusion. I just think itโs good and desirable to correct factual errors when you see them even when they are completely in good faith and the rest of the arguments are reasonable, and it should not be taken as a sign of disagreement with the rest of your arguments.
I appreciated your correction! Thatโs why I said it was fair. Iโm sorry if it came off in a negative tone, this isnโt the first time Iโve had to convince people that something is very wrong with the DOJ. The degree to which it is and the details, impossible to concretely say until thereโs more work done. Another issue is the fact that Epstein committed โsuicideโ (which I put in quotes because itโs been speculated, not because I am speculating it) when the crimes he was arrested for were very similar to the ones heโd been charged and convicted of before. And thenโฆ that was the end of the investigation? Am I misinformed here as well?
Donโt worry, you didnโt come across as negative. I was just afflicted with a similar worry, that perhaps I came across more negative than I intended, so was trying to set the record straight.
> No one except Ghislaine Maxwell has been arrested despite evidence of thousands of children being abused and trafficked.
Someone else was arrested for abusing and "trafficking" children: the actual perpetrator, Epstein, who was arrested twice for his crimes. There is no credible evidence thousands of children were abused or trafficked (this figure was concocted by the DOJ in 2025 and includes the families of the alleged victims). The reason no one else has been arrested is because there is no credible evidence that anyone else* abused or "trafficked" children in connection with Epstein (as was confirmed by the lead prosecutor of both the second Epstein and Maxwell cases).
If the country's elite were actually pedophilic and abusive, then perhaps people would be underreacting. But since that's false, any overt reaction to this story is an overreaction.
*Young women like Virginia Roberts-Giuffre and Haley Robson have been credibly accused of procuring women for Epstein; something which could possibly constitute abuse or trafficking. I suppose Robson could be arrested in relation to the alleged crimes she committed between 2002-2005, but I doubt the DOJ's failure in this regard is the travesty of justice you are alleging.
You can keep doubting it but the DOJโs lack of investigation and charging of individuals is exactly what I am criticizing. Donโt know how else to say it, Iโve said it multiple times.
The Epstein case has been investigated by the Palm Beach county police, the US Southern District of Florida, the US Southern District of New York, the US DOJ Office of Professional resposibility and the FBI. At the same time, thousands of journalists, often with the support and financial backing of major journalistic and media institutions have privately investigated the Epstein case. And yet there has never been found an allegation of "trafficking of children to the country's elite" that didn't immediately disintegrate upon scrutiny because the accuser was mentally ill and later recanted.
Kash Patel, who believed so fervently in the Epstein mythology that in 2023 he instructed the director of the FBI to "Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are," is now the director of the FBI. Conspiracy theorist Dan Bongino, who on his podcast accused the DOJ of an Epstein coverrup, is now co-deputy director.
Either the entire American law apparatus, including organizations acting at the behest of some of the most fervent Epstein accusers, are colluding to cover up Epstein's crimes AND the entirety of the global journalism industry is somehow failing to find evidence of this, OR actually it didn't happen and it's all made up.
Palm Beach county police had to fight for the case to get picked up. The case never made it to a conviction as the man arrested committed suicide. Kash Patel, who fervently believed in the case, is also the same guy who wrote childrenโs novels about the current president where he is his helpful magical wizard. The same president that claims this entire issue is a Democrat hoax (despite making it a campaign point). Charlie Kirk also made a u-turn, claiming heโd trust his friends in the government on the issue (which is not an evidence based turn around). To think that the government doesnโt pick and choose what it investigates, especially seeing how the feds blatantly lied about a man being shot at point blank in Minnesota until a video showed otherwise, is a naive stance. Itโs not about the crime, itโs about the criminals. Itโs clear that at the very least, high profile members of society were involved in at the very least, creepy associations, and at the worst, enjoying the sexual abuse of teenage girls. All of this to sayโฆ if itโs been investigated, youโre genuinely claiming Jeffrey Epstein was the sole abuser of minors and adult sex workers? If so, then weโre just going to have to agree to disagree.
Iโฆ amโฆ. talkingโฆ. aboutโฆ the aggregate of victim statements. What is so difficult about this? Over the course of decades. Iโll correct myself, hundreds. Is that better? If you watch the documentary, there were multiple girls each day at the New York house. I find it extremely silly that we are here arguing semantics when an investigation would clear all of these statements. Instead, letโs sit here on Substack and mince words instead of acknowledging that no one is investigating when clearly high profile crimes were committed. And this is what I meant when I said people are underreacting. Itโs either Twitter theatrics of conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, or debating if crimes occurred at all.
You want evidence for them to investigate but you need to investigate to gather evidence. Victim statements, reports to authorities, and circumstantial evidence including the fact that no one seems to know where this dude got his money (and heโs coincidentally also engaging in sexual abuse of minors) isnโt enough to warrant a thorough investigation? Again, the victims who attended the hearing with Pam Bondi indicated they hadnโt even been interviewed once by the new administration. How does one conduct an investigation without speaking to the victims of the alleged crime?
I agree that the Epstein hysteria has gone too far, but your post goes too far in the opposite direction.
For example to most of us, it just appears ridiculous to say that if your friend has been accused of severe wrong doing, you should not at least look into whether the accusations were credible before making the association, especially since once you do actually dig into them, it becomes obvious that his criminal punishment was obviously way too lenient given the strength of the evidence.
I am aware that Epstein tried to argue that he was lied to about the ages of many of these girls, but firstly in some of these cases, if I remember correctly, we had 14 year olds claiming to be 18 years old, which should have been obvious to detect as a falsehood on casual inspection, and secondly, it was at minimum extremely reckless to just rely on the say of people with a financial incentive to exaggerate their age and honestly strikes me as similar to websites that make a pretence of caring about your age by just asking you to lie about it once with zero verification.
Now, of course, you can try to argue that the benefits to his research were such that the association was worth it, but itโs at least completely reasonable people to argue that actually you should not associate with people. Credibly accuse of such serious crimes, especially when the criminal justice system appears to have dropped the ball in terms of sufficient punishment.
Your argument that there are more serious crimes out. There is just literal. Whataboutism. We are discussing whether it is reasonable to criticise these public figures. Perhaps we should also criticise other people for more serious misbehaviour but thatโs not actually relevant to whether we should criticise these people and in any case, there is the obvious difference that criticising somebody when nobody is willing to assist you is not a punishment that anyone will notice, but once you have a preference cascade going on, it can still be prosocial to join in the punishment.
Also for the record Michael Tracy, while he doesnโt actually say things that are contrary to the evidence, is generally interpreting everything in the maximally charitable way that is permitted by the evidence. For example, we have loads of people accusing Epstein of having been seen with younger girls and he was known to have a fascination with Lolita and have weird photos of younger girls in his house. You can explain each one of these separately, but the combination has one very simple explanation that makes sense given the rest of his behaviour.
Also part of the issue here is that given the circumstances of the case and the fact Epstein committed suicide. Many of the people are unlikely to have sufficient evidence to punish them in criminal court, but for reasonable reasons of less severity, we have lower threshold for social punishment compared to criminal punishment if you disagree with this and think criticising people is actually something that should be subject to do process. Please do not criticise people who are part of the hysteria without due process. Personally, I think that subjecting social punishments to such demanding standards would lead to a collapse of social norms and social behaviour. Because people willingness to punish bad behaviour is part of what is keeping bad behaviour down.
Also for the record, it doesnโt seem that crazy that association with Epstein would be considered reasonable grounds to investigate you and making your emails public is just additional transparency on top of that because of concerns that perhaps itโs not being investigated properly given how the original 2000 cases mishandled and once we do actually know what is in these emails, I donโt see any reason we should pretend we do not in order to let creepy behaviour slide.
It should be clear from my opening that I donโt actually entirely agree with the social reaction, but you go too far in the opposite direction by basically giving everyone a free pass unless we have enough evidence of criminal behaviour and even then you appear to advocate that criminal punishment is enough an we should just forget about bad behaviour apart from criminal punishment even though there is no magic making sure that the punishment is as severe as we think it should be as one can certainly have reasonable disagreement with a judge regarding that.
Put it another way, I personally would not criticise your parents for inviting a convicted murderer but I also would not think it unreasonable for people to advocate a social rule against inviting convicted murderers if the evidence against them is convincing, especially if we think they got off too easily or havenโt done enough, good to outweigh their bad behaviour. After all, if you are allowed to support people, you think have been treated to harshly by the criminal justice system. As every reasonable person believes you should be then why arenโt you allowed to try to punish people you think have goten off too lightly.
You could argue that we have no mechanism to make sure social punishment is that the level we would consider optimal, but that equally applies to you. There is no mechanism for you to make sure that itโs at exactly 0, and it seems easier to persuade people to dial it down from where itโs currently compare to getting them to bring it to exactly 0 as that seems completely contrary to how human nature works. The number of people who on being told that someone is a murderer or otherwise, a sex, criminal or other serious offender would not respond by behaving in ways that would amount to social punishment is very small. There is a reason for this. Itโs just not adaptive to ignore bad behaviour the way you are recommending.
You frame Epstein's conviction as "having sex with a 17-year-old on the day before her 18th birthday" and use this framing to suggest people who associated with him after his conviction were merely befriending someone convicted of a minor offense. This is misleading. The accusers in the NPR story were 13. Giuffre was 16 when recruited. A court document describes a 14-year-old brought to Mar-a-Lago and introduced to Trump. Files flagged for congressional review contained photographs of a 5-year-old being abused at Epstein's New York house during a party. The Palm Beach police investigation that triggered the FBI case began when a 14-year-old's stepmother reported her stepdaughter was being abused. Witness testimony describes Epstein asking to see a girl's ID specifically to confirm she was underage, and rejecting girls who were too old. The FBI's draft federal indictment was based on interviews with dozens of victims, many 14 and 15. This was a systematic operation with a preference for young adolescents, not ambiguous situations near the age of consent.
On February 24 โ just yesterday โ NPR reported that through serial number analysis of the DOJ's own document database, at least 53 pages of FBI interview transcripts related to sexual abuse allegations against Trump are catalogued in the system but not publicly available. These involve two separate accusers. The first told the FBI that around 1983, when she was approximately 13, Epstein introduced her to Trump, who forced her head toward his exposed penis โ which she bit, after which Trump punched her in the head and threw her out. The FBI found this credible enough to conduct four separate interviews with her in 2019 and refer the matter to the Washington field office โ a major escalation, given that most tips on the compiled list were dismissed outright.
Only the first of those four interviews is public, and it's the only one that doesn't mention Trump. In it, the woman showed agents a cropped photograph; her attorney explained the cropping was "due to fear of retaliation" from implicating "well-known" individuals. The FBI's own notes identified the uncropped version as a "widely distributed photograph" of Epstein with Trump. Of 15 documents logged in Maxwell discovery materials for this accuser, only 7 are in the public database. A second accuser separately told the FBI she was brought to Mar-a-Lago at age 13 or 14 and that Epstein told Trump "This is a good one, huh?" โ both men chuckled while she stood there. That interview was removed from the public database after the January 30 release and quietly restored on February 19. The interview with her mother remains offline. The White House's response: Trump has been "totally exonerated."
The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed Congress near-unanimously and Trump signed it in November 2025. It required full release within 30 days, with redactions limited to victim identities. The DOJ missed the deadline, initially released under 10,000 pages, and has to date released roughly 3.5 million pages while acknowledging approximately 6 million may qualify โ meaning roughly half remain withheld. At least 16 files disappeared from the DOJ website within 24 hours of the initial December release, including a photo of Trump with Epstein, Maxwell, and Melania. Files containing hundreds of Trump mentions were removed from the January 30 release. Deputy AG Blanche has declared there will be no further prosecutions.
Epstein's email exchanges include references to children as young as 10-13 being "so much fun" and other sexually suggestive language. The names of the people on the other end of these exchanges are blacked out. These aren't the emails of casual acquaintances โ they're communications with people who appear to have been aware of and engaged with the nature of Epstein's operation.
He was in a federal detention center that held mob bosses, terrorists, and cartel leaders โ not a lax minimum-security camp. He had been placed on suicide watch and then removed after an unusually short period. His cellmate was transferred out, violating facility policy. Both guards assigned to his unit fell asleep and falsified records claiming they'd checked on him every 30 minutes โ they hadn't checked for approximately eight hours. The security cameras for his tier malfunctioned that night. The forensic pathologist hired by Epstein's brother (Michael Baden, a former NYC chief medical examiner) said the injuries were more consistent with homicide by strangulation than suicide by hanging. Every single protocol failure broke in the same direction for the single highest profile inmate at a facility whose suicide-prevention protocols are usually so effective they hadn't seen one in 21 years.
At AG Bondi's February 11 hearing, photographers captured her holding a printout labeled "Jayapal Pramila Search History" โ tracking which Epstein documents a congresswoman had searched at the DOJ's secure review terminals. The review setup itself was designed to obstruct: four computers in a small room, unique logins tracking each member's searches, no phones, handwritten notes only. Raskin's staff calculated it would take seven years to review all files under these conditions. When the Republican co-author of the transparency law, Rep. Massie, pressed Bondi on why co-conspirator names were redacted, she called him a "failed politician" with "Trump derangement syndrome."
Survivors' attorneys say the DOJ failed to redact the identities of at least 31 people victimized as children, with approximately 100 victims affected overall. One survivor received death threats after her banking information was exposed. Meanwhile, the names of co-conspirators โ including Les Wexner, who appeared in an FBI document as a "possible co-conspirator" โ were blacked out. The DOJ only un-redacted Wexner's name after Massie caught it during his review, prompting Massie to say "forty minutes of me catching you red-handed."
The Palm Beach police conducted one of the most thorough investigations their department had ever seen, interviewing dozens of victims who independently corroborated each other's accounts. The FBI then conducted its own independent investigation and drafted a 53-page federal indictment charging Epstein and four co-conspirators. Career prosecutors were prepared to go to trial. U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta killed the prosecution and negotiated a plea deal with Epstein's defense team (which included Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz) over the objections of the line prosecutors who built the case. The resulting deal granted immunity not just to Epstein but to unnamed "potential co-conspirators" โ an extraordinary clause that only makes sense if the evidence was strong and the goal was containment, not justice. A federal judge later ruled the deal was illegal because prosecutors violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act by concealing it from victims. Acosta himself told the Trump transition team he'd been told to back off because Epstein "belonged to intelligence" and was "above his pay grade." None of this was secret by 2015, when Chomsky's correspondence began. The corruption of the plea deal had been widely reported, including detailed investigations in the Daily Beast and extensive court filings.
This was not an individual's private misconduct. Employees testified that their duties included fanning out hundred-dollar bills on the bed before girls arrived, placing a gun inside the mattress, and disposing of used condoms after "massages" with minors. Three "massages" a day was the routine at the Palm Beach house. The New York townhouse had a dedicated massage room. Victims were recruited through a pyramid scheme where existing victims were paid to bring new girls. This operation ran for decades across multiple properties and countries. Maxwell was convicted by a federal jury of sex trafficking โ not based on Giuffre's testimony, but on the testimony of four other women (Jane, Kate, Carolyn, and Annie Farmer), several of whom were 14-16 when the abuse began. Over 150 victims eventually came forward.
Multiple victims and employees described hidden cameras throughout Epstein's properties. One victim described seeing a room with monitors showing feeds from multiple cameras โ a dedicated surveillance operations center. When the FBI raided the New York townhouse in 2019, they found a safe containing hard drives and CDs labeled with what appeared to be a person's name followed by a description of a sexual act. The prosecution referenced this material at bail hearings. What happened to those drives? They're in FBI custody. They've never been part of any public filing. The DOJ has never provided an accounting of what was on them. If the surveillance system worked as described, those drives potentially contain direct visual evidence of crimes committed by identifiable people. And they're just... unmentioned, while the DOJ declares the investigation closed.
Epstein claimed to be a billionaire financial manager, but no one has ever been able to identify how he made his money. He had one known client โ Les Wexner โ and the nature of that financial relationship has never been fully explained. Wexner transferred his New York townhouse (worth approximately $77 million) to Epstein under circumstances that remain murky. Epstein had no college degree, was fired from Bear Stearns, and yet somehow accumulated a fortune estimated at over $500 million, maintained multiple lavish properties including a private island, and moved through the highest circles of finance and power. The "intelligence" connection Acosta referenced has never been confirmed or denied. If Epstein's primary "business" was actually the collection and leverage of compromising material on powerful people, the unexplained wealth, the surveillance infrastructure, and the immunity deals all become coherent parts of a single picture.
Musk has repeatedly claimed he barely knew Epstein and declined invitations to his island. The files contain at least 16 emails between them in 2012-2013, including Musk writing "What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?" and coordinating a helicopter trip to the island with his then-wife. A scheduling email from late 2014: "Elon Musk to island Dec. 6 (is this still happening?)." His brother Kimbal appears extensively too. This isn't "briefly exchanging an email." It's an extended, enthusiastic social relationship with someone whose conviction for sex crimes involving a minor was public knowledge.
Former Norwegian PM Thorbjรธrn Jagland has been charged with "gross corruption" and faces up to 10 years. The UK's Peter Mandelson was stripped of his ambassadorship and faces criminal investigation. Prince Andrew was forced from his royal estate. Norway's ambassador to Jordan resigned. Turkey and Lithuania launched trafficking investigations. Sweden's UNHCR chair resigned. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted his family visited Epstein's island after previously claiming "very limited interactions" โ said "I don't recall why we did it" โ and remains in his cabinet position. Deputy AG Blanche has declared no further prosecutions will be pursued, while roughly half the qualifying documents remain unreleased.
You compare the Epstein response to Salem, McCarthyism, and the Satanic Panic. In those cases, the underlying crimes were largely fabricated โ there was no Satanic cabal, most accused "communists" weren't spies. Here, the underlying crimes are extensively documented, a co-conspirator was convicted by a federal jury, over 150 victims have come forward, and the question isn't whether crimes happened but who else participated and why the government is suppressing evidence. The better historical analogy isn't Salem โ it's the Catholic Church abuse scandal, where institutional defenders spent decades calling scrutiny "hysteria" while systematically covering up real crimes against children. The actual civil liberties crisis in the Epstein files isn't public curiosity โ it's the DOJ tracking which files members of Congress search, exposing children's identities while redacting perpetrators' names, and violating a federal transparency law signed by the president.
You frame yourself as courageously standing against the mob, with Michael Tracey as your only ally. But "don't look too closely at the Epstein files" is the position of the president, the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and the entire DOJ apparatus. It's also the majority position of Republicans: A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 67% of Republicans said the statement โitโs time for the country to move on from talking about the Epstein filesโ described their thinking at least somewhat well, compared to only 21% of Democrats.
So the MAGA base has largely followed Trumpโs cues: they went from demanding full transparency to wanting to move on, precisely as the files started implicating Trump more directly. The people actually taking risks are Rep. Massie (Republican) confronting his own party's AG over redactions, Rep. Khanna (Democrat) demanding unredacted files, NPR journalists doing serial number analysis on suppressed documents, and Reddit users crowdsourcing document reviews for congressmembers who get two hours in a restricted room. The contrarian move here isn't skepticism of the public. It's scrutiny of the powerful.
I agree with you that Sam Harris shouldn't be pilloried for declining one email. I agree that the cannibalism theories are unfounded. I agree that victim identities should have been protected. But you've written an article that uses those valid points as a shield against engaging with any of the substance โ the NPR investigation, the document suppression, the congressional surveillance, the redaction pattern, the 53 missing pages โ that was breaking news the day you published. The Epstein story isn't a moral panic. It's the most extensively documented case of elite institutional corruption in modern American history, and the institutions are still actively suppressing the evidence. That deserves more than a meditation on why everyone should calm down.
There are a lot of problems with this! First, while Epstein was only convicted for sex with an older teenage girl, he was originally accused of significantly more heinous offenses for which there was also plenty of publicly available evidence - anyone who was even remotely familiar with the details of the case would have been able to confidently determine that he was a sexually abusive predator. So framing anything around the details of the incredibly nice plea deal, rather than the crimes any reasonable person would understand him to have committed, is unreasonable.
I mean, Chomsky himself first made contact in like 2015, right? By then, *I* knew about Epstein being an obvious monster, just from ambiently seeing it discussed in various lefty news sources. And we're supposed to believe that Chomsky - not exactly known for his ignorance when it comes to the misdeeds of wealthy and powerful people - agreed to get on the guy's plane and fly to his private island with less of a grasp on things? I strongly, strongly, doubt it. But even if that is the case, it would still be *at best* an insanely irresponsible decision on his part that could only really be explained by willful ignorance.
Secondly, while it's true that no one "goes to jail for pedophilia," Epstein was clearly a pedophile in every sense that would be morally relevant in terms of what sort of relationship people ought to have with him. See Defending Feminism's latest article on that: https://defendingfeminism.substack.com/p/yes-jeffrey-epstein-was-clearly-a
More generally, the obvious distinction between Epstein and (for example) a convicted murderer your family befriended after he served his sentence is that, presumably at least, the murderer was in some sense repentant or reformed, whereas Epstein immediately began sexually abusing women and girls after serving his first sentence in exactly the same way he sexually abused them before. So the actual comparison you should make would be something like: You know someone who was very clearly a serial killer, but who only ended up going to prison for one count of kidnapping; then, the moment they get out, you notice they're still going out late and night and picking up prostitutes who you never see again. In a situation like that, it *would* be totally insane to say, "Well, they've served their time!" The only reasonable response would be to cut ties with them so long as it was incredibly likely that they were still engaged in horrendous crimes. And the same is true for Epstein.
Also, while privacy concerns aren't totally irrelevant here, it does seem pretty clearly noteworthy that (to use your example) a Yale professor is comfortable sexually objectifying the young women he's supposed to be supporting while in conversation with an obvious sexual predator. That's the sort of thing that would reasonably trigger an internal investigation and serious consequences in any workplace, even if the other person in the conversation *wasn't* a notorious abusive pedophile! So I just don't get this idea that it's somehow inappropriate for people to care about that. If it's something that would get a random cashier fired from a Wendy's, it's probably something that should matter when it comes to some of our most important public figures who are in positions of real authority and power.
Finally, I think it's really, really crazy to talk positively about Michael Tracey in particular here when his own theory of the case is so outrageously absurd that no person who was even trying to apply basic Bayesian principles could ever think it was reliable. Like, as far as I can tell, he doesn't even think Epstein did anything particularly wrong at all. And coming to that conclusion requires such an obvious, overwhelming refusal to actually engage with the evidence that I think he's very clearly more out of touch with reality than the average person he criticizes for being too into Epstein stuff.
What's the evidence that Epstein immediately began sexually abusing girls after serving his first sentence? There are no credible allegations to that effect.
I don't see why it's crazy to talk positively about Michael Tracey. Tracey has repeatedly and frequently denounced Epstein for his behavior at Palm Beach; if you haven't seen this, you haven't engaged with his work sufficiently deeply to call someone else really, really, crazy for talking positively about him.
His theory of the case is relatively simple: Epstein had a predilection for young girls and paid teenage girls (some under the age of 18, the age of consent in Florida) for a variety of sexual favors between 2002 and 2005, primarily at his Palm Beach residence. In relation to these crimes, Epstein was investigated by the state of Florida in conjunction with the Department of Justice. Because of the difficulties prosecuting the case โ Epstein's high-powered legal team, many victims were unwilling to talk to the police or testify in court, many victims were of dubious credibility, establishing federal jurisdiction etc. โ the U.S. attorney and Epstein agreed to a federal non-prosecution agreement that, while not commensurate with the totality of his criminality, was still quite onerous: lifetime registration as a sex offender, pleading guilty to the one abovementioned case of solicitation of a minor, jail time etc.
No trafficking children to powerful individuals, no blackmail, no "client list", no Mossad, no CIA, no torture chambers or child sacrifice or eating babies.
I'm interested in what aspect of this theory of the case you consider to be an obvious, overwhelming refusal to actually engage with the evidence.
So Michael Tracey is *that* wrong? Do you have evidence that Virginia Roberts Giuffre *did not* lie, contradict, and retract statements? That the jurors in Ghisaine Maxwell were *not* influenced by one juror to change their not guilty vote? Because that would be news to me.
This has nothing to do with decoupling - if anything, I think a lot of people who take this position are themselves failing to decouple the actual facts of the case from their broader takes on the cultural moment.
The facts of the case indicate that Epstein and his wife would find and manipulate young women, many of them teenagers, to have sex with him. That's the facts we have. Yet there are people who seem deeply convinced that Epstein was running a pedephile sex ring where he trafficked prepubescent girls to the rich and powerful at the behest of intelligence agencies. The facts of the case don't really support that position, but a lot of people feel very strongly that they should, and if we don't have facts supporting it then they must have been suppressed by conspiracy.
For sure, many of the conspiracy theories around him are ridiculous. But the facts of the case, by themselves, are still much worse than what is being acknowledged by many of those who identify with the "high decoupler" label.
I don't see how. The original post acknowledged that Epstein probably committed some sexual crimes beyond the ones he ultimately pled guilty for. It's just that the severity of the crimes, while bad enough to have morally earned him a harsher sentence he didn't serve, aren't nearly either bad or else unambiguously true enough to be worthy of cannibalizing like 20% of American national attention for years and years. The reason most people care about Epstein is mass pedophilic rape cabals and/or international blackmail operations, not "a specific rich guy got away with touching a 14-year-old who showed up at his house to knowingly/intentionally give him a sexual massage while claiming to be 18 20 years ago, and then he went on to have sex with a ton of 18-year-old prostitutes." And they're not even *remotely* bad enough to justify the hysterical mass moral panic people have been whipped up into on places like Twitter, where expressing any doubts about the conspiratorial allegations means you get dogpiled by frothing strangers for being a witch (I mean, pedophile) yourself.
Powerful figures from Ro Khanna to Elon Musk are making nonstop, impassioned, ominous demands for political enemies to be jailed on the basis of unstated evidence. Popular internet influencers like The Young Turks are switching on a dime and suddenly willing to endorse absurd 9/11 conspiracy theories (about Israel) on the basis of what they take to be revelations extracted from the files. Iranians are now burning statues of the Canaanite god Baal, and receiving glowing praises from figures like Candace Owens, because they've decided an OCR transcription error from a copy of one of his bank communiquรฉs proved Epstein and possibly a larger shadowy elite were secret Baal-worshippers. It's *insanity*, and not as some unfortunate externality, but because it's the primary point.
โEpstein and his wife would find and manipulate young women, many of them teenagers, to have sex with himโโฆ that IS child sex trafficking. Maybe the issue here is that a lot of people on both sides donโt understand what sex trafficking of minors is.
Bizarre. This deeply uninteresting man seems to have two points of attraction: money, and freely available young women, about whom we can debate interestingly how attraction to them should be defined. If we examine his correspondence with everyone the innocent will surely be able to establish their innocence? Your point sounds to me like Enough of the witch hunt about anyone employed in whatever capacity at Auschwitz Birkenau.
Why am I "you people" and what is your point? If it is that people are presumed innocent anyway, that only goes so far. If you are found in a room with a bloodstained dagger and a stabbed corpse, establish your innocence is exactly what you need to do. Being chums with Epstein creates a presumption of guilt.
I think there are a couple slightly different claims being made here, and I disagree with both of them.
The first seems to be that people are wrong when they say Epstein was convicted of pedophilia. The reasoning is that pedophilia is a word with a strict scientific definition that refers to attraction to prepubescent children.
To this, I would say that clearly "pedophile" has acquired multiple meanings in our culture. There is a scientific definition, which you describe, and there's a colloquial, non-standard meaning, which refers to "sexual predator who targets children". If somebody raped an eight year old girl, most people would casually refer to the rapist as a "pedophile", and most people would continue to do so even if the victim had turned out to have precocious puberty and was no longer a prepubescent.
It would probably strike most people as odd and inappropriate to insist that another word be used for the predator once the girl's physical condition was revealed. It's true that people would be using the word incorrectly according to the technical definition in that case, but that doesn't automatically show that it's problematic to do so, as lots of words acquire similar multiple meanings in our culture.
The second disagreement I have relates to the idea it's inappropriate to condemn people who associated with Epstein after his convictions. This seems strange to me as well because the reaction to Epstein's associates is largely comparable to the reaction to other people who maintained friendly contact with known child predators.
For example, football coach Jerry Sandusky raped a series of teenage and preteen boys under his care. Sandusky's boss, Joe Paterno, knew about the rapes, and some of Sandusky's associates even saw him raping a very young boy. But they did nothing because Sandusky was an incredible football coach. After Sandusky's crimes became broadly known, Paterno and others who knew but continued associating with Sandusky faced extreme backlash, with Joe Paterno in particular being disgraced.
As far as I know, nobody seriously disagrees with this backlash. If this backlash was appropriate in Paterno's case, it is at least prima facie appropriate for others who similarly associated with Epstein even after his rapes of young girls became known. I don't think that means everyone in the Epstein files is equally guilty, obviously, but some degree of backlash is appropriate in Epstein's case just as it was in Sandusky's case.
I think what you say about word meaning is interesting. It is sort of an intersection between a current cultural topic and philosophy of language stuff I find interesting. I wanted to ask you a question about something you said, just in the spirit of inquiry and not trying to be combative. You write that "'Pedophile' has acquired multiple meanings in our culture." For clarity, I will use pedophile1 to express the concept of being attracted to prepubescent children and pedophile2 to express the concept of a sexual predator who targets children.
What I don't get is how one of the thought experiments you use shows that the word 'Pedophile' expresses two distinct concepts, pedophile1 and pedophile 2 rather than showing that there is only one concept which pedophile expresses and that concept is pedophile2.
Take any Gettier case, for instance the stopped clock case. A broken clock stopped at 12:00pm. John looks at the clock and forms the belief that it is 12:00pm. Because his belief is based on what the clock says it is justified. As it happens, it actually is 12:00pm. So John's belief is true and justified. But John doesn't know it is 12:00pm. Hence, knowledge isn't true and justified belief.
Another way the thought experiment could be taken is that actually it shows there are at least two senses of the word knowledge. John doesn't know it is 12:00pm in the sense of having a true and justified belief that it is 12:00pm. Instead of concluding that knowledge isn't true and justified belief, we could instead conclude that there are two senses of the word knowledge, knowledge1 (true and justified belief) and knowledge2 a sort of knowledge that John actually does possess in the scenario.
You propose the following thought experiment. An eight year old is raped. People call the person who did it a pedophile. As it turns out the eight year old is not actually prepubescent. But you think people wouldn't be wrong to continue to refer to the person who did that as a pedophile. You take this to show that there are two distinct concepts which the word pedophile can express. The question is if this thought experiment shows this, then why don't gettier cases show that there is more than one concept which knowledge expresses. Why would the thought experiment you propose not just show that what you refer to as the scientific sense of pedophile is actually not the correct concept.
There is one more question I want to ask. It seems to me that one of the reasons it might feel strange to stop referring to the person as a pedophile after figuring out the eight year old is not prepubescent is because there are not many eight year olds who are not prepubescent. So it is odd to think of someone who sexualizes eight years as not being a pedophile. But that isn't because the term pedophile actually means something different from the scientific definition, it's just because the case of the prepubescent eight year old is an outlier. It sounds weird to say that a sexual abuser of an eight year old is not a pedophile, not because there is some other non-scientific sense of the word pedophile but because the idea of someone sexually abusing an eight year old who is non-prepubescent is unusual because such eight year olds are outliers.
Another reason it might seem odd is because of pragmatic implicature. Consider this scenario. Martha and John are watching television. They flip the channel to a popular pundit show, the Newman News Hour. Frank Newman, the host of the show says that a pedophile by the name of Mark Brandy was recently convicted of sex trafficking fifteen year old girls to his new jersey apartment where he would have sexual intercourse with them. John says "That isn't pedophilia." Martha says "What that man did was clearly wrong." It sounds like Martha thinks John is saying that what Mark Brandy did was not wrong. So it sound wrong to assert that Brandy is not a pedophile not because it is false but because in many contexts it has the pragmatic implicature that Brandy did not do anything wrong. This does not show that it is true Brandy is not a pedophile though. Consider this analogy. In most contexts the pragmatic implicature of "Africian Americans score the lowest on IQ tests" is something like "Africian Americans are an inferior race." But this doesn't show that "Africian Americans score the lowest on IQ tests" is false. The worry here is that the intuition that people like Mark Brandy are pedophiles is based on a confusion between what that claim itself means and what the pragmatic implicature is going to be of asserting it in many contexts. In many contexts, the pragmatic implicature of those claims is false but it doesn't follow that those claims are themselves false.
Sorry for the extremely long comment. If you made it through thanks for reading and I would be interested to hear how you would response.
No not at all, the linguistics stuff is tricky but interesting.
I'm not sure I follow your objection with the Gettier problem. But here's another analogy that can hopefully clarify what I'm trying to say.
Let's say Taylor Swift does something cool. A Buzzfeed writer publishes an article titled: "Taylor Swift Is a Queen". Someone responds: Taylor Swift is not a queen. A queen is a member of a royal family, and Taylor Swift doesn't possess that characteristic. Buzzfeed is misleading people!
I imagine the Buzzfeed author would say that, well ok, Taylor Swift is not a queen in that sense. But "Queen" has acquired another meaning in our culture, meaning "cool woman" or sometimes even "cool person of any gender or sexuality". So the article title isn't actually wrong, or at least isn't something that needs to be corrected. Do you agree that the Buzzfeed author is in the right here?
So that's all I'm saying with regards to pedophile too. Obviously people who use the term typically mean it to refer to a "child sexual predator", where child is defined fairly loosely.
I guess I don't immediately see the connection to the Gettier case you're describing, but it seems like this is consistent with any number of views on it.
RE Gettier case: What I was trying to get at with the gettier case was the following question: You take your thought experiment to show that the word 'pedophile' can express both what you refer to as the scientific concept and another concept which you refer to as colloquial. If this inference is cogent, then why wouldn't it be cogent to infer from Gettier cases that 'knowledge' can express the concept true and justified belief and also express some other concept? Given that the eight year old is not prepubescent, you infer that the word 'pedophile' can express both the concept of being sexually attracted to a prepubescent child *and* some other concept. But why not just make the sort of inference pattern typically made in the Gettier cases? That the thought experiment shows the word 'pedophile' doesn't actually express the concept of being sexually attracted to a prepubescent child at all? Let me know if this clarifies things.
RE Buzzfeed article analogy: I don't think this addresses any of the questions I put forward initially. If your right about the buzzfeed case (and it seems right to me), then this would only establish an initial plausibility of your thesis. It would show that there are cases where (i) a word can come to express a concept it didn't previously possess (e.g. 'Queen' can express the concept of 'cool women') and (ii) it would be inappropriate to tell people to stop calling people Queen who do not fall under the concept the word used to exclusively express (e.g. it would be inappropriate to tell buzzfeed authors not to call Taylor Swift a queen because she is not a member of the royal family).
I would call this sort of argument a plausibility analogy. If successful it would show that there are things which have gamma set of properties. This makes it more plausible that y (in this case the word 'pedophile') also has these properties for in general we expect nature to be uniform. But this doesn't show that y actually has these properties.
I am also not sure that this plausibility analogy succeeds. I don't think that 'queen' in typical contexts of asserting sentences similar to 'Taylor Swift is a queen.' means 'cool woman. Initially, a queen was a female monarch. As such Queens typically held a lot of political power and status. To say 'Taylor Swift is a queen.' is to say that she is a powerful woman who has status. This makes sense given that Swift is a very famous musical artist, whose work is loved by a lot of people and she has a lot of money. There is also another related concept, but I am not sure if it is the same which is 'queen' in the sense of 'Yas Queen!' This reads to me as more an affirmation of a sort of extravagant style that is often associated with LGBT. This works by drawing an analogy between the extravagance of royalty and fashion styles rather than their power or status. So I would identity at least three different related concepts which the term 'queen' can express neither of which are 'cool woman.'
This may seem like a nitpicky point since your initial characterization of the buzzfeed example could be easily adjusted to fit the analyze of the concept 'queen' I provided above. It would be unreasonable to say "It is false that Taylor Swift is a queen because she is not a female monarch" because although she is not a queen in that sense she is a queen in the sense of being a powerful woman who has status.
I want to offer though a slight pushback here as to why the plausibility analogy may not be relevant to the conclusion about the word 'pedophile.' When we 'Taylor swift is a queen.' I think it is plausible that this is partly an expression of subjective attitudes. Here is my evidence. People can agree that Taylor Swift is a powerful women while also disagreeing about whether she is a queen while all parties understand the relevant concepts. Consider this dialogue:
Martha: "The life of a showgirl was the best album of 2025. Taylor Swift is such a queen."
Susan: "Taylor Swift is not a queen. That album was terrible. The real queen of 2025 was Beyonce. She's reigned since Lemonade came out."
I don't think the disagreement here is about anything factual but rather comes down to a differences in preferences to the two people. One might argue that it isn't a question of preferences and there is a fact of the matter if Swift really is a queen or not or if as Susan maintains Beyonce has been the only queen since 2016. But even in this case it is clear that the disagreement here is a normative one and not about purely descriptive facts.
You propose that pedophile can express the concept of being someone who sexually preys upon children. But whether or not a person sexually preys upon children is not a question of preference nor is going to be decided by any sort of normative factor. We might consider 'prey' as a verb to have a negative normative valence in this context, but whether someone preys upon children in this way or not is not determined by anything normative but only descriptive facts.
Sorry, this is again very long. I hope that what I intend to communicate here is clear enough.
I agree there is some hysteria in the sense that maybe people are technically wrong about some of the facts here and obviously your name simply appearing in the files shouldn't be enough to conclude you're evil, but I don't think you really grappled with the "hysterical" position. My broader understanding of what happened doesn't change much based on what you wrote here (and on Michael Tracey's or Hanania's stuff) and yet I'd say I'm closer to the hysterical position than where you seem to be, so I feel like you're not really seeing what I am.
I like Both Sides Bridgade's "...the facts of the case, by themselves, are still much worse than what is being acknowledged..."
I have read and enjoyed your articles for a long time, but here I just feel like your desire to be contrarian has taken you to the insane depths of defending one of the known worst people.
> Unfortunately, in this case, nobody (save Michael Tracey) is willing to call out the lunacy.
Thankfully, this is a hyperbole. Richard Hanania is on the right track from the beginning and doing livestreams with Michael Tracey for months. Quilletteโs Claire Lehmann, Reasonโs Robby Soave, First Thingsโ Julia Yost, Compact Magazineโs Matthew Schmitz, The Spectatorโs Brendan OโNeill, Claremont Instituteโs Inez Stepman, The Free Pressโs Park MacDougald, The Wall Street Journalโs Barton Swaim, National Reviewโs David Harsanyi and some others will be remembered for refusing to go with hysteria too.
I agree that there is hysterical overreach. The chief problem is the failure of the justice department to use the evidence it has to pursue other criminal offenders and criminal sexual predators, who surely exist. Releasing the files was as much a diversion tactic as anythingโflooding the zone with shit. There is however an interesting story about the interactions of the very wealthy, and Epstein's genius at manipulation and grift, including criminal sexual activities.
๐๐ ๐ณ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐บ๐ฒ๐ ๐ถ๐ ๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ต๐ผ๐๐ด๐ต ๐น๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ป๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฎ๐ฏ๐ผ๐๐ ๐๐ฝ๐๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป'๐ ๐ฝ๐ฎ๐๐ ๐๐ผ๐๐น๐ฑ ๐ต๐ฎ๐๐ฒ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐พ๐๐ถ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฑ "๐ท๐๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ถ๐ผ๐๐๐น๐ ๐๐ป๐ผ๐ผ๐ฝ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐๐ต๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ด๐ต ๐ผ๐น๐ฑ ๐ป๐ฒ๐๐๐ฝ๐ฎ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐๐ถ๐ฐ๐น๐ฒ๐." But by 2015, when Chomsky's correspondence began, the Epstein case was not some obscure footnote you'd need to dig for. The 2011 Daily Beast piece by Conchita Sarnoff was widely circulated. The 2015 Gawker flight log publication was a major news event. The Virginia Giuffre lawsuit against Maxwell, which named numerous powerful figures, was generating headlines across every major outlet. The basic facts โ dozens of underage victims, a federal investigation that was killed, a plea deal widely condemned as corrupt โ were not hidden knowledge. They were dinner party conversation in exactly the intellectual circles Chomsky moved in. This isn't about "snooping." It's about whether Noam Chomsky, a man who spent sixty years insisting that intellectuals have a responsibility to scrutinize power and hold the powerful accountable, bothered to Google someone he was actively befriending. The answer appears to be no, and that's not exculpatory โ it's damning in its own way. Chomsky was the ultimate compulsive newspaper-reading sleuth, it's hard to believe he was unaware.
"๐๐ฒ ๐๐ฎ๐๐ป'๐ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ถ๐ฐ๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ผ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ณ๐ณ" ๐ฑ๐ผ๐ฒ๐ ๐ฎ ๐น๐ผ๐ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐พ๐๐ถ๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ธ. BB's framing throughout is that Epstein was convicted of a minor offense and therefore it was reasonable to treat him as someone who'd served his time. But the reason Epstein wasn't convicted of the serious stuff ๐๐ฎ๐ ๐ถ๐๐๐ฒ๐น๐ณ ๐ผ๐ป๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฏ๐ถ๐ด๐ด๐ฒ๐๐ ๐๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ๐ฎ๐น๐ ๐ถ๐ป ๐ณ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐น ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฐ๐๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฎ๐น ๐ต๐ถ๐๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐. This wasn't a case where the FBI investigated and found insufficient evidence. They had the evidence. They drafted the indictment. Acosta killed it. This was public knowledge by 2015 โ the corruption of the plea deal had been reported extensively, including a detailed 2011 Daily Beast investigation. So "he wasn't convicted" isn't the clean defense BB thinks it is. It's more like saying "well, the mob boss was only convicted of tax evasion, so why would you assume he was involved in organized crime?" The gap between what Epstein did and what he was convicted of was the story, and it was a widely known story.
"๐๐ฒ ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ต๐ถ๐ ๐๐ฒ๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ป๐ฐ๐ฒ, ๐๐ผ ๐ต๐ฒ'๐ ๐ฏ๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ป ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฒ๐บ๐ฒ๐ฑ" ๐บ๐ถ๐๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐ป๐๐ ๐ฏ๐ผ๐๐ต ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ฒ๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ป๐ฐ๐ฒ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐ฐ๐ฒ๐ฝ๐. Epstein served 13 months in a county jail under a work-release program that allowed him to leave for 12 hours a day, six days a week, to go to his office. The Palm Beach Sheriff's department later acknowledged this arrangement was irregular. A federal judge subsequently ruled the plea deal itself was illegal because prosecutors violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act by not notifying victims. So the sentence Epstein "served" was the product of a deal that a federal judge later found to be unlawful, under conditions that barely qualified as incarceration. Invoking "he served his time" as though this represents the justice system working as intended requires ignoring everything publicly known about why that sentence was what it was.
๐ข๐ป ๐๐ต๐ฒ "๐ป๐ผ ๐ถ๐ป๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป ๐ต๐ฒ ๐ถ๐ ๐ฎ๐๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ถ๐๐" ๐ฐ๐น๐ฎ๐ถ๐บ: BB says if you read the correspondence, there's no sign Chomsky knew about Epstein's crimes. But what exactly would that indication look like? People don't typically write "I know you trafficked children but let's have dinner anyway" in emails. The absence of explicit acknowledgment in correspondence is not evidence of ignorance โ it's evidence of correspondence. What we do know is that Chomsky visited Epstein's Manhattan townhouse, which multiple visitors have described as containing overtly disturbing imagery including a painting of Bill Clinton in a dress and photographs of young women. We know Chomsky and Epstein discussed having Epstein help rearrange Chomsky's finances, including transfers related to Chomsky's wife. We know Chomsky arranged for Epstein to meet with other academics. None of this proves Chomsky knew about the abuse. But it shows a level of financial and social intimacy that goes well beyond "briefly spoke with Epstein," which is how BB frames it despite calling Chomsky someone "closer to Epstein" in the same paragraph.
๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฟ๐ต๐ฒ๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐น ๐บ๐ผ๐๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐ถ๐ป๐๐ผ๐ธ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐๐ต๐ผ๐บ๐๐ธ๐'๐ ๐๐๐ฟ๐ผ๐ธ๐ฒ ๐ถ๐ ๐บ๐ฎ๐ป๐ถ๐ฝ๐๐น๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐๐ฒ. BB frames criticism of Chomsky as kicking a debilitated 97-year-old who can't defend himself. But the criticism isn't directed at present-day Chomsky โ it's directed at the choices 2015-2018 Chomsky made. The fact that he later had a stroke doesn't retroactively change whether those choices were defensible. And the reason people feel strongly about it is precisely because of who Chomsky was โ not some random academic, but the person who more than perhaps anyone else in American intellectual life insisted that proximity to power requires moral scrutiny, that intellectuals who fail to challenge institutional crimes are complicit, and that "I didn't know" is not an acceptable defense when the information was available. The criticism of Chomsky is ultimately Chomskyian. People are applying his own framework to him and finding him wanting.
๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ต๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐๐ ๐ด๐ฒ๐๐ ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ด๐ต๐: Nobody has presented evidence that Chomsky participated in or knew about the sexual abuse. That matters and should be stated clearly. The criticism of Chomsky is about judgment, not criminality. And there is a meaningful distinction between "this person showed terrible judgment in who they associated with" and "this person committed crimes." Matthew is correct that the public discourse often collapses that distinction. Where he goes wrong is in using that valid point to suggest there's nothing worth criticizing at all โ that Chomsky's choices were reasonable given what was publicly known. They weren't, and the reason they weren't is fully available in the public record that existed before Chomsky ever emailed Epstein.
The files do actually outright show Chomsky was wholly aware of who Epstein was. https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA01032522.pdf
Well that email is more consistent with a hypothesis of: โChomsky didnโt believe the allegationsโ. Not a great look in its own right, but a different failing than โhe believed them and didnโt careโ.
I think you're greatly underreacting to the substance of the story. It's as if you wrote an article titled:
๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ต๐ถ๐น๐ฑ ๐ฅ๐ฎ๐ฝ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐๐ฎ๐๐ต๐ผ๐น๐ถ๐ฐ ๐ฃ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฒ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฎ
๐ฆ๐๐ฏ๐๐ถ๐๐น๐ฒ: ๐ข๐ป ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฐ๐๐น๐ผ๐๐ ๐๐บ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ฟ ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐บ๐ฝ๐ฎ๐ถ๐ด๐ป ๐ฎ๐ด๐ฎ๐ถ๐ป๐๐ ๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ผ๐ป๐ฒ ๐๐ต๐ผ ๐๐ผ ๐บ๐๐ฐ๐ต ๐ฎ๐ ๐ต๐ฎ๐ฝ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ป๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐๐ผ ๐ฏ๐ฒ ๐ฎ ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฒ๐๐
And then published it a day after the Pope was found by an NPR investigation to have suppressed allegations that he had been sexually abusing minors in violation of a transparency law mandating their release. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5723968/epstein-files-trump-accusation-maxwell
๐ญ. ๐ง๐ต๐ถ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ ๐ป๐ผ๐ ๐ฎ ๐ฏ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐น๐ถ๐ป๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป ๐ถ๐ป๐๐ผ๐น๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด "๐ฏ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐น๐น๐ ๐ญ๐ณ-๐๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ฟ-๐ผ๐น๐ฑ๐."
You frame Epstein's conviction as "having sex with a 17-year-old on the day before her 18th birthday" and use this framing to suggest people who associated with him after his conviction were merely befriending someone convicted of a minor offense. This is misleading. The accusers in the NPR story were 13. Giuffre was 16 when recruited. A court document describes a 14-year-old brought to Mar-a-Lago and introduced to Trump. Files flagged for congressional review contained photographs of a 5-year-old being abused at Epstein's New York house during a party. The Palm Beach police investigation that triggered the FBI case began when a 14-year-old's stepmother reported her stepdaughter was being abused. Witness testimony describes Epstein asking to see a girl's ID specifically to confirm she was underage, and rejecting girls who were too old. The FBI's draft federal indictment was based on interviews with dozens of victims, many 14 and 15. This was a systematic operation with a preference for young adolescents, not ambiguous situations near the age of consent.
๐ฎ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ถ๐๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ป๐ ๐ถ๐ ๐ป๐ผ๐ ๐บ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐ฐ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฏ๐น๐ ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ฐ๐๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐ฐ๐ต๐ถ๐น๐ฑ ๐๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐น ๐ฎ๐ฏ๐๐๐ฒ, ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐ต๐ถ๐ ๐ผ๐๐ป ๐๐ข๐ ๐ถ๐ ๐๐๐ฝ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ป๐ฐ๐ฒ.
On February 24 โ just yesterday โ NPR reported that through serial number analysis of the DOJ's own document database, at least 53 pages of FBI interview transcripts related to sexual abuse allegations against Trump are catalogued in the system but not publicly available. These involve two separate accusers. The first told the FBI that around 1983, when she was approximately 13, Epstein introduced her to Trump, who forced her head toward his exposed penis โ which she bit, after which Trump punched her in the head and threw her out. The FBI found this credible enough to conduct four separate interviews with her in 2019 and refer the matter to the Washington field office โ a major escalation, given that most tips on the compiled list were dismissed outright.
Only the first of those four interviews is public, and it's the only one that doesn't mention Trump. In it, the woman showed agents a cropped photograph; her attorney explained the cropping was "due to fear of retaliation" from implicating "well-known" individuals. The FBI's own notes identified the uncropped version as a "widely distributed photograph" of Epstein with Trump. Of 15 documents logged in Maxwell discovery materials for this accuser, only 7 are in the public database. A second accuser separately told the FBI she was brought to Mar-a-Lago at age 13 or 14 and that Epstein told Trump "This is a good one, huh?" โ both men chuckled while she stood there. That interview was removed from the public database after the January 30 release and quietly restored on February 19. The interview with her mother remains offline. The White House's response: Trump has been "totally exonerated."
๐ฏ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ข๐ ๐ถ๐ ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐น๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐น๐ฎ๐ ๐ง๐ฟ๐๐บ๐ฝ ๐๐ถ๐ด๐ป๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐๐๐๐ฒ๐บ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐น๐น๐ ๐๐๐ฝ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฑ๐ผ๐ฐ๐๐บ๐ฒ๐ป๐๐.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed Congress near-unanimously and Trump signed it in November 2025. It required full release within 30 days, with redactions limited to victim identities. The DOJ missed the deadline, initially released under 10,000 pages, and has to date released roughly 3.5 million pages while acknowledging approximately 6 million may qualify โ meaning roughly half remain withheld. At least 16 files disappeared from the DOJ website within 24 hours of the initial December release, including a photo of Trump with Epstein, Maxwell, and Melania. Files containing hundreds of Trump mentions were removed from the January 30 release. Deputy AG Blanche has declared there will be no further prosecutions.
๐ฐ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฒ๐บ๐ฎ๐ถ๐น๐ ๐ถ๐ป ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ณ๐ถ๐น๐ฒ๐ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ฎ๐ถ๐ป ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ณ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ป๐ฐ๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ผ ๐๐บ๐ฎ๐น๐น ๐ฐ๐ต๐ถ๐น๐ฑ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ป ๐ถ๐ป ๐๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐น ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ โ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐ฝ๐ผ๐ป๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ป๐๐' ๐ป๐ฎ๐บ๐ฒ๐ ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐๐ฒ๐ฑ.
Epstein's email exchanges include references to children as young as 10-13 being "so much fun" and other sexually suggestive language. The names of the people on the other end of these exchanges are blacked out. These aren't the emails of casual acquaintances โ they're communications with people who appear to have been aware of and engaged with the nature of Epstein's operation.
๐ฑ. ๐๐ฝ๐๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป'๐ ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐๐ต ๐ฎ๐ ๐ ๐๐ ๐ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ต๐ฎ๐๐๐ฎ๐ป ๐๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ณ๐ถ๐ฟ๐๐ ๐๐๐ฐ๐ฐ๐ฒ๐๐๐ณ๐๐น ๐๐๐ถ๐ฐ๐ถ๐ฑ๐ฒ ๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐ณ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ถ๐น๐ถ๐๐ ๐ถ๐ป ๐ฎ๐ญ ๐๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐.
He was in a federal detention center that held mob bosses, terrorists, and cartel leaders โ not a lax minimum-security camp. He had been placed on suicide watch and then removed after an unusually short period. His cellmate was transferred out, violating facility policy. Both guards assigned to his unit fell asleep and pleaded guilty to falsifying records claiming they'd checked on him every 30 minutes โ they hadn't checked for approximately eight hours. The security cameras for his tier malfunctioned that night. The forensic pathologist hired by Epstein's brother (Michael Baden, a former NYC chief medical examiner) said the injuries were more consistent with homicide by strangulation than suicide by hanging. Every single protocol failure broke in the same direction for the single highest profile inmate at a facility whose suicide-prevention protocols are usually so effective they hadn't seen one in 21 years, despite boasting hundreds of inmates facing the bleakest of life sentences.
๐ฒ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ข๐ ๐ถ๐ ๐๐๐ฟ๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐น๐น๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐ด๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป๐ฎ๐น ๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ถ๐ด๐ต๐ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ณ๐ถ๐น๐ฒ๐.
At AG Bondi's February 11 hearing, photographers captured her holding a printout labeled "Jayapal Pramila Search History" โ tracking which Epstein documents a congresswoman had searched at the DOJ's secure review terminals. The review setup itself was designed to obstruct: four computers in a small room, unique logins tracking each member's searches, no phones, handwritten notes only. Raskin's staff calculated it would take seven years to review all files under these conditions. When the Republican co-author of the transparency law, Rep. Massie, pressed Bondi on why co-conspirator names were redacted, she called him a "failed politician" with "Trump derangement syndrome."
๐ณ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป ๐ฝ๐ฎ๐๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ป ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฐ๐๐ ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ฐ๐๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐๐ฟ๐ฎ๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ ๐๐ต๐ถ๐น๐ฒ ๐ฒ๐ ๐ฝ๐ผ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฐ๐ต๐ถ๐น๐ฑ ๐๐ถ๐ฐ๐๐ถ๐บ๐ โ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ถ๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐น๐ฎ๐ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐พ๐๐ถ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐.
Survivors' attorneys say the DOJ failed to redact the identities of at least 31 people victimized as children, with approximately 100 victims affected overall. One survivor received death threats after her banking information was exposed. Meanwhile, the names of co-conspirators โ including Les Wexner, who appeared in an FBI document as a "possible co-conspirator" โ were blacked out. The DOJ only un-redacted Wexner's name after Massie caught it during his review, prompting Massie to say "forty minutes of me catching you red-handed."
๐ด. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐๐ผ๐ป ๐๐ฝ๐๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป ๐๐ฎ๐๐ป'๐ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ถ๐ฐ๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ผ๐๐ ๐ฐ๐ฟ๐ถ๐บ๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ ๐ถ๐๐๐ฒ๐น๐ณ ๐ผ๐ป๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฏ๐ถ๐ด๐ด๐ฒ๐๐ ๐๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ๐ฎ๐น๐ ๐ถ๐ป ๐ณ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐น ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฐ๐๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฎ๐น ๐ต๐ถ๐๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ โ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐ต๐ถ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ ๐ฝ๐๐ฏ๐น๐ถ๐ฐ๐น๐ ๐ธ๐ป๐ผ๐๐ป ๐ฏ๐ฒ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐๐ต๐ผ๐บ๐๐ธ๐ ๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐ฒ๐บ๐ฎ๐ถ๐น๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ต๐ถ๐บ.
The Palm Beach police conducted one of the most thorough investigations their department had ever seen, interviewing dozens of victims who independently corroborated each other's accounts. The FBI then conducted its own independent investigation and drafted a 53-page federal indictment charging Epstein and four co-conspirators. Career prosecutors were prepared to go to trial. U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta killed the prosecution and negotiated a plea deal with Epstein's defense team (which included Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz) over the objections of the line prosecutors who built the case. The resulting deal granted immunity not just to Epstein but to unnamed "potential co-conspirators" โ an extraordinary clause that only makes sense if the evidence was strong and the goal was containment, not justice. A federal judge later ruled the deal was illegal because prosecutors violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act by concealing it from victims. Acosta himself told the Trump transition team he'd been told to back off because Epstein "belonged to intelligence" and was "above his pay grade." None of this was secret by 2015, when Chomsky's correspondence began. The corruption of the plea deal had been widely reported, including detailed investigations in the Daily Beast and extensive court filings.
Continued...
๐ต. ๐๐ฝ๐๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป ๐ฏ๐๐ถ๐น๐ ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ถ๐ป๐ณ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐๐๐ฟ๐๐ฐ๐๐๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ ๐ฐ๐ต๐ถ๐น๐ฑ ๐๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐น ๐ฎ๐ฏ๐๐๐ฒ, ๐๐๐ฎ๐ณ๐ณ๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ฏ๐ ๐ฒ๐บ๐ฝ๐น๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ต๐ผ๐๐ฒ ๐ท๐ผ๐ฏ ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐๐ฐ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฝ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป๐ ๐ฐ๐ฒ๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ผ๐ป ๐ณ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ถ๐น๐ถ๐๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ถ๐.
This was not an individual's private misconduct. Employees testified that their duties included fanning out hundred-dollar bills on the bed before girls arrived, placing a gun inside the mattress, and disposing of used condoms after "massages" with minors. Three "massages" a day was the routine at the Palm Beach house. The New York townhouse had a dedicated massage room. Victims were recruited through a pyramid scheme where existing victims were paid to bring new girls. This operation ran for decades across multiple properties and countries. Maxwell was convicted by a federal jury of sex trafficking โ not based on Giuffre's testimony, but on the testimony of four other women (Jane, Kate, Carolyn, and Annie Farmer), several of whom were 14-16 when the abuse began. Over 150 victims eventually came forward.
๐ญ๐ฌ. ๐๐ฝ๐๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป ๐บ๐ฎ๐ถ๐ป๐๐ฎ๐ถ๐ป๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ฒ๐ป๐๐ถ๐๐ฒ ๐ต๐ถ๐ฑ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ป ๐๐๐ฟ๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐น๐น๐ฎ๐ป๐ฐ๐ฒ ๐๐๐๐๐ฒ๐บ๐, ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐๐ ๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ต๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฑ ๐ฑ๐ฟ๐ถ๐๐ฒ๐ ๐ณ๐ฟ๐ผ๐บ ๐ฎ ๐๐ฎ๐ณ๐ฒ โ ๐๐ต๐ถ๐ฐ๐ต ๐ต๐ฎ๐๐ฒ ๐ป๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐ฏ๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ป ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ฐ๐ผ๐๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ.
Multiple victims and employees described hidden cameras throughout Epstein's properties. One victim described seeing a room with monitors showing feeds from multiple cameras โ a dedicated surveillance operations center. When the FBI raided the New York townhouse in 2019, they found a safe containing hard drives and CDs labeled with what appeared to be a person's name followed by a description of a sexual act. The prosecution referenced this material at bail hearings. What happened to those drives? They're in FBI custody. They've never been part of any public filing. The DOJ has never provided an accounting of what was on them. If the surveillance system worked as described, those drives potentially contain direct visual evidence of crimes committed by identifiable people. And they're just... unmentioned, while the DOJ declares the investigation closed.
๐ญ๐ญ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ด๐ถ๐ป ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ฝ๐๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป'๐ ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ๐๐๐ป๐ฒ ๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐ป๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐ฏ๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ป ๐ฒ๐ ๐ฝ๐น๐ฎ๐ถ๐ป๐ฒ๐ฑ.
Epstein claimed to be a billionaire financial manager, but no one has ever been able to identify how he made his money. He had one known client โ Les Wexner โ and the nature of that financial relationship has never been fully explained. Wexner transferred his New York townhouse (worth approximately $77 million) to Epstein under circumstances that remain murky. Epstein had no college degree, was fired from Bear Stearns, and yet somehow accumulated a fortune estimated at over $500 million, maintained multiple lavish properties including a private island, and moved through the highest circles of finance and power. The "intelligence" connection Acosta referenced has never been confirmed or denied. If Epstein's primary "business" was actually the collection and leverage of compromising material on powerful people, the unexplained wealth, the surveillance infrastructure, and the immunity deals all become coherent parts of a single picture.
๐ญ๐ฎ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐น๐ผ๐ป ๐ ๐๐๐ธ ๐บ๐ฎ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฎ๐น ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฐ๐๐น๐ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ฟ๐ฎ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฐ๐๐ ๐ต๐ถ๐ ๐ฝ๐๐ฏ๐น๐ถ๐ฐ ๐๐๐ฎ๐๐ฒ๐บ๐ฒ๐ป๐๐.
Musk has repeatedly claimed he barely knew Epstein and declined invitations to his island. The files contain at least 16 emails between them in 2012-2013, including Musk writing "What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?" and coordinating a helicopter trip to the island with his then-wife. A scheduling email from late 2014: "Elon Musk to island Dec. 6 (is this still happening?)." His brother Kimbal appears extensively too. This isn't "briefly exchanging an email." It's an extended, enthusiastic social relationship with someone whose conviction for sex crimes involving a minor was public knowledge.
๐ญ๐ฏ. ๐๐๐ฟ๐ผ๐ฝ๐ฒ ๐ถ๐ ๐๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐๐๐ฎ๐น ๐ฐ๐ฟ๐ถ๐บ๐ถ๐ป๐ฎ๐น ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ฐ๐ผ๐๐ป๐๐ฎ๐ฏ๐ถ๐น๐ถ๐๐. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐จ.๐ฆ. ๐ถ๐ ๐๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ป๐ผ๐ป๐ฒ.
Former Norwegian PM Thorbjรธrn Jagland has been charged with "gross corruption" and faces up to 10 years. The UK's Peter Mandelson was stripped of his ambassadorship and faces criminal investigation. Prince Andrew was forced from his royal estate. Norway's ambassador to Jordan resigned. Turkey and Lithuania launched trafficking investigations. Sweden's UNHCR chair resigned. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted his family visited Epstein's island after previously claiming "very limited interactions" โ said "I don't recall why we did it" โ and remains in his cabinet position. Deputy AG Blanche has declared no further prosecutions will be pursued, while roughly half the qualifying documents remain unreleased.
๐ญ๐ฐ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ "๐บ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐น ๐ฝ๐ฎ๐ป๐ถ๐ฐ" ๐ณ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐บ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ถ๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐๐๐ฎ๐น ๐๐ถ๐๐๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป.
You compare the Epstein response to Salem, McCarthyism, and the Satanic Panic. In those cases, the underlying crimes were largely fabricated โ there was no Satanic cabal, most accused "communists" weren't spies. Here, the underlying crimes are extensively documented, a co-conspirator was convicted by a federal jury, over 150 victims have come forward, and the question isn't whether crimes happened but who else participated and why the government is suppressing evidence. The better historical analogy isn't Salem โ it's the Catholic Church abuse scandal, where institutional defenders spent decades calling scrutiny "hysteria" while systematically covering up real crimes against children. The actual civil liberties crisis in the Epstein files isn't public curiosity โ it's the DOJ tracking which files members of Congress search, exposing children's identities while redacting perpetrators' names, and violating a federal transparency law signed by the president.
๐ญ๐ฑ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฏ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐๐ฒ ๐ฝ๐ผ๐๐ถ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป ๐ถ๐ป ๐๐ฒ๐ฏ๐ฟ๐๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ ๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ฎ๐ฒ ๐ถ๐ ๐ป๐ผ๐ "๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ผ๐ป๐ฒ ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐น๐บ ๐ฑ๐ผ๐๐ป."
You frame yourself as courageously standing against the mob, with Michael Tracey as your only ally. But "don't look too closely at the Epstein files" is the position of the president, the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and the entire DOJ apparatus. It's also the majority position of Republicans: A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 67% of Republicans said the statement โitโs time for the country to move on from talking about the Epstein filesโ described their thinking at least somewhat well, compared to only 21% of Democrats.
So the MAGA base has largely followed Trumpโs cues: they went from demanding full transparency to wanting to move on, precisely as the files started implicating Trump more directly. The people actually taking risks are Rep. Massie (Republican) confronting his own party's AG over redactions, Rep. Khanna (Democrat) demanding unredacted files, NPR journalists doing serial number analysis on suppressed documents, and Reddit users crowdsourcing document reviews for congressmembers who get two hours in a restricted room. The contrarian move here isn't skepticism of the public. It's scrutiny of the powerful.
I agree with you that Sam Harris shouldn't be pilloried for declining one email. I agree that the cannibalism theories are unfounded. I agree that victim identities should have been protected. But you've written an article that uses those valid points as a shield against engaging with any of the substance โ the NPR investigation, the document suppression, the congressional surveillance, the redaction pattern, the 53 missing pages โ that was breaking news the day you published. The Epstein story isn't a moral panic. It's the most extensively documented case of elite institutional corruption in modern American history, and the institutions are still actively suppressing the evidence. That deserves more than a meditation on why everyone should calm down.
Please don't use AI to write substack comments without warning people of it.
And if you do use AI, please try to use a higher-quality one.
I can understand your perspective but I donโt think people are overreacting, in fact we are underreacting. Politicians overreact for the sake of performance, most of their career is a performance. But in actuality, nothing is happening. No one except Ghislaine Maxwell has been arrested despite evidence of thousands of children being abused and trafficked. I understand your point but I think the criticism should be geared towards public figures. Performative overreactions donโt help anyone. But as a collective, we are disgustingly under reacting to the pedophilic and abusive nature of our countryโs elite (the people who control nearly every aspect of our economic and political lives).
It can be both that people overreact and underreact, in different domains.
Agreed.
>despite evidence of thousands of children being abused and trafficked
I don't think this evidence exists, or at least not good evidence. The (good) evidence we have points to overwhelmingly smaller-scale and less interesting crimes, mostly by Epstein himself and not some grand elite-wide secret phenomenon.
Surely youโre not referring to the photos of children bound, the emails discussing different types of girls they could bring to their parties, the victims that allege there were others there besides them, the already established and known method of grooming and targeting girls in middle school and highschool, as well as the art pieces speculated to be used as blackmail against other high profile individuals. The Clintons specifically have other โstrangeโ deaths in their history, such as the boys on the tracks (you can look it up). Of course, these are only emails. Youโd have to do an actual investigation, which it appears the DOJ and FBI have not started yet as all the victims indicated in court the other day that they have not been interviewed once by the current departments.
Some of your descriptions are a bit vague so I don't necessarily know what specifically you're referring to (I have some guesses), but probably none of these are going to end up being good evidence for the more maximalist allegations I took you to be suggesting, and some of them will be false/misrepresented/absurd. For example, what are the photos of children bound? If it's that one gruesome, widely circulated description of a child abuse photo from a law firm's letter I've seen posted a thousand times on Twitter, it wasn't something recovered from Epstein's estate or anyone connected to him. But maybe you're thinking of something else.
I donโt have Twitter so Iโm not sure what youโre talking about but the New York Times reported nude and explicit images of minors and women were released in the files and have since been redacted. The BBC also reported images such as one of the former Prince Andrew on top of a small female (unclear her age because of the redaction). There were also emails discussing children as easily disposable and replaceable (boys harder than girls). If Iโm mistaken, feel free to correct me. And of course as I said, this is only emails. An actual investigation would need to happen for concrete evidence. The administration also changed their tune claiming they had files and files of evidence on their desks and now suddenly thereโs no evidence at all. Sometimes whatโs not being done says more about something than whatโs being said. They have the resources to investigate election fraud despite there being less than 100 cases out of over 200 million people, but not this?
I was referring to this[1] widely circulated footnote. It's the only thing off the top of my head I'd encountered from the recently released files that sounded like a photo of a bound child. Is that what you were talking about? And what are the emails discussing children as disposable?
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/DU6XQkoDf4K/
I didnโt see this, I can see what youโre talking about. This is what Iโm saying, people are either using the case for views and then bad actors are using the theatrics as an excuse to underplay it. Hereโs some of what I meant, correct me if Iโm mistaken:
https://jmail.world/thread/EFTA01758926?view=inbox
https://lisevoldeng.substack.com/p/dont-worry-boys-are-hard-to-find?r=6vtdht&utm_medium=ios (this is a victim claim/statement my mistake)
My point is that there are clearly enough victims and complaints from the 1980s to now for them to investigate beyond these emails. I hope thatโs being communicated across the screen.
In the spirit of correcting errors, I will note that the claim that thousands of children were traffic is almost certainly nonsense. Even the DOJ has only claimed a little over a thousand people as victims and their counting strategy involved, not only counting the families of victims as victims themselves but also includes adult women who constituted the overwhelming majority of the trafficed individuals, trafficking here being understood as taking sex workers across state boundaries, regardless of whether it was completely voluntary. Honestly, I would be surprised if the number of actual people under 18 affected was over a hundred.
@Ali fair, and again my criticism is that no one has been arrested or even investigated regarding these claims.
@Philip In case it was unclear, when I say minors, I am in fact including teenage girls. And thereโs been credible reports for decades that havenโt been investigated. Sex crimes are often underreported and most of the victims who have spoken out WERE under 18 at the time of their abuse. Thereโs enough for us to assume teenagers were the preference, so I think the claim that a majority were trafficked adult sex workers is an assumption. Either way, we are all speculating because. There. Is. No. One. Investigating. not to beat a dead horse but that is my entire criticism, that people have sensationalized this into a child sacrifice case, obscuring and distorting any actual criminal investigation which the powers at be seem to have no issue with.
All of that seems reasonable to me, I was just correcting what I saw as a clear mistake, which made your case appear stronger than it is. I think the rest of your points are all very reasonable and constitute either justified concerns or at least concerns that are arguably justified, and I certainly didnโt mean to criticise any of that. I was just correcting a mistake that might cause confusion and make the matter appear different to What it actually is in order to avoid additional mistakes and confusion. I just think itโs good and desirable to correct factual errors when you see them even when they are completely in good faith and the rest of the arguments are reasonable, and it should not be taken as a sign of disagreement with the rest of your arguments.
I appreciated your correction! Thatโs why I said it was fair. Iโm sorry if it came off in a negative tone, this isnโt the first time Iโve had to convince people that something is very wrong with the DOJ. The degree to which it is and the details, impossible to concretely say until thereโs more work done. Another issue is the fact that Epstein committed โsuicideโ (which I put in quotes because itโs been speculated, not because I am speculating it) when the crimes he was arrested for were very similar to the ones heโd been charged and convicted of before. And thenโฆ that was the end of the investigation? Am I misinformed here as well?
Donโt worry, you didnโt come across as negative. I was just afflicted with a similar worry, that perhaps I came across more negative than I intended, so was trying to set the record straight.
> No one except Ghislaine Maxwell has been arrested despite evidence of thousands of children being abused and trafficked.
Someone else was arrested for abusing and "trafficking" children: the actual perpetrator, Epstein, who was arrested twice for his crimes. There is no credible evidence thousands of children were abused or trafficked (this figure was concocted by the DOJ in 2025 and includes the families of the alleged victims). The reason no one else has been arrested is because there is no credible evidence that anyone else* abused or "trafficked" children in connection with Epstein (as was confirmed by the lead prosecutor of both the second Epstein and Maxwell cases).
If the country's elite were actually pedophilic and abusive, then perhaps people would be underreacting. But since that's false, any overt reaction to this story is an overreaction.
*Young women like Virginia Roberts-Giuffre and Haley Robson have been credibly accused of procuring women for Epstein; something which could possibly constitute abuse or trafficking. I suppose Robson could be arrested in relation to the alleged crimes she committed between 2002-2005, but I doubt the DOJ's failure in this regard is the travesty of justice you are alleging.
You can keep doubting it but the DOJโs lack of investigation and charging of individuals is exactly what I am criticizing. Donโt know how else to say it, Iโve said it multiple times.
The Epstein case has been investigated by the Palm Beach county police, the US Southern District of Florida, the US Southern District of New York, the US DOJ Office of Professional resposibility and the FBI. At the same time, thousands of journalists, often with the support and financial backing of major journalistic and media institutions have privately investigated the Epstein case. And yet there has never been found an allegation of "trafficking of children to the country's elite" that didn't immediately disintegrate upon scrutiny because the accuser was mentally ill and later recanted.
Kash Patel, who believed so fervently in the Epstein mythology that in 2023 he instructed the director of the FBI to "Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are," is now the director of the FBI. Conspiracy theorist Dan Bongino, who on his podcast accused the DOJ of an Epstein coverrup, is now co-deputy director.
Either the entire American law apparatus, including organizations acting at the behest of some of the most fervent Epstein accusers, are colluding to cover up Epstein's crimes AND the entirety of the global journalism industry is somehow failing to find evidence of this, OR actually it didn't happen and it's all made up.
Palm Beach county police had to fight for the case to get picked up. The case never made it to a conviction as the man arrested committed suicide. Kash Patel, who fervently believed in the case, is also the same guy who wrote childrenโs novels about the current president where he is his helpful magical wizard. The same president that claims this entire issue is a Democrat hoax (despite making it a campaign point). Charlie Kirk also made a u-turn, claiming heโd trust his friends in the government on the issue (which is not an evidence based turn around). To think that the government doesnโt pick and choose what it investigates, especially seeing how the feds blatantly lied about a man being shot at point blank in Minnesota until a video showed otherwise, is a naive stance. Itโs not about the crime, itโs about the criminals. Itโs clear that at the very least, high profile members of society were involved in at the very least, creepy associations, and at the worst, enjoying the sexual abuse of teenage girls. All of this to sayโฆ if itโs been investigated, youโre genuinely claiming Jeffrey Epstein was the sole abuser of minors and adult sex workers? If so, then weโre just going to have to agree to disagree.
"thousands of children being abused and trafficked"
Iโฆ amโฆ. talkingโฆ. aboutโฆ the aggregate of victim statements. What is so difficult about this? Over the course of decades. Iโll correct myself, hundreds. Is that better? If you watch the documentary, there were multiple girls each day at the New York house. I find it extremely silly that we are here arguing semantics when an investigation would clear all of these statements. Instead, letโs sit here on Substack and mince words instead of acknowledging that no one is investigating when clearly high profile crimes were committed. And this is what I meant when I said people are underreacting. Itโs either Twitter theatrics of conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, or debating if crimes occurred at all.
You want evidence for them to investigate but you need to investigate to gather evidence. Victim statements, reports to authorities, and circumstantial evidence including the fact that no one seems to know where this dude got his money (and heโs coincidentally also engaging in sexual abuse of minors) isnโt enough to warrant a thorough investigation? Again, the victims who attended the hearing with Pam Bondi indicated they hadnโt even been interviewed once by the new administration. How does one conduct an investigation without speaking to the victims of the alleged crime?
Evidence of thousands of children being trafficked?
Source, please.
I agree that the Epstein hysteria has gone too far, but your post goes too far in the opposite direction.
For example to most of us, it just appears ridiculous to say that if your friend has been accused of severe wrong doing, you should not at least look into whether the accusations were credible before making the association, especially since once you do actually dig into them, it becomes obvious that his criminal punishment was obviously way too lenient given the strength of the evidence.
I am aware that Epstein tried to argue that he was lied to about the ages of many of these girls, but firstly in some of these cases, if I remember correctly, we had 14 year olds claiming to be 18 years old, which should have been obvious to detect as a falsehood on casual inspection, and secondly, it was at minimum extremely reckless to just rely on the say of people with a financial incentive to exaggerate their age and honestly strikes me as similar to websites that make a pretence of caring about your age by just asking you to lie about it once with zero verification.
Now, of course, you can try to argue that the benefits to his research were such that the association was worth it, but itโs at least completely reasonable people to argue that actually you should not associate with people. Credibly accuse of such serious crimes, especially when the criminal justice system appears to have dropped the ball in terms of sufficient punishment.
Your argument that there are more serious crimes out. There is just literal. Whataboutism. We are discussing whether it is reasonable to criticise these public figures. Perhaps we should also criticise other people for more serious misbehaviour but thatโs not actually relevant to whether we should criticise these people and in any case, there is the obvious difference that criticising somebody when nobody is willing to assist you is not a punishment that anyone will notice, but once you have a preference cascade going on, it can still be prosocial to join in the punishment.
Also for the record Michael Tracy, while he doesnโt actually say things that are contrary to the evidence, is generally interpreting everything in the maximally charitable way that is permitted by the evidence. For example, we have loads of people accusing Epstein of having been seen with younger girls and he was known to have a fascination with Lolita and have weird photos of younger girls in his house. You can explain each one of these separately, but the combination has one very simple explanation that makes sense given the rest of his behaviour.
Also part of the issue here is that given the circumstances of the case and the fact Epstein committed suicide. Many of the people are unlikely to have sufficient evidence to punish them in criminal court, but for reasonable reasons of less severity, we have lower threshold for social punishment compared to criminal punishment if you disagree with this and think criticising people is actually something that should be subject to do process. Please do not criticise people who are part of the hysteria without due process. Personally, I think that subjecting social punishments to such demanding standards would lead to a collapse of social norms and social behaviour. Because people willingness to punish bad behaviour is part of what is keeping bad behaviour down.
Also for the record, it doesnโt seem that crazy that association with Epstein would be considered reasonable grounds to investigate you and making your emails public is just additional transparency on top of that because of concerns that perhaps itโs not being investigated properly given how the original 2000 cases mishandled and once we do actually know what is in these emails, I donโt see any reason we should pretend we do not in order to let creepy behaviour slide.
It should be clear from my opening that I donโt actually entirely agree with the social reaction, but you go too far in the opposite direction by basically giving everyone a free pass unless we have enough evidence of criminal behaviour and even then you appear to advocate that criminal punishment is enough an we should just forget about bad behaviour apart from criminal punishment even though there is no magic making sure that the punishment is as severe as we think it should be as one can certainly have reasonable disagreement with a judge regarding that.
Put it another way, I personally would not criticise your parents for inviting a convicted murderer but I also would not think it unreasonable for people to advocate a social rule against inviting convicted murderers if the evidence against them is convincing, especially if we think they got off too easily or havenโt done enough, good to outweigh their bad behaviour. After all, if you are allowed to support people, you think have been treated to harshly by the criminal justice system. As every reasonable person believes you should be then why arenโt you allowed to try to punish people you think have goten off too lightly.
You could argue that we have no mechanism to make sure social punishment is that the level we would consider optimal, but that equally applies to you. There is no mechanism for you to make sure that itโs at exactly 0, and it seems easier to persuade people to dial it down from where itโs currently compare to getting them to bring it to exactly 0 as that seems completely contrary to how human nature works. The number of people who on being told that someone is a murderer or otherwise, a sex, criminal or other serious offender would not respond by behaving in ways that would amount to social punishment is very small. There is a reason for this. Itโs just not adaptive to ignore bad behaviour the way you are recommending.
I think you're greatly underreacting to the substance of the story. It's as if you wrote an article titled:
๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ต๐ถ๐น๐ฑ ๐ฅ๐ฎ๐ฝ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐๐ฎ๐๐ต๐ผ๐น๐ถ๐ฐ ๐ฃ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฒ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฎ
๐ฆ๐๐ฏ๐๐ถ๐๐น๐ฒ: ๐ข๐ป ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฐ๐๐น๐ผ๐๐ ๐๐บ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ฟ ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐บ๐ฝ๐ฎ๐ถ๐ด๐ป ๐ฎ๐ด๐ฎ๐ถ๐ป๐๐ ๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ผ๐ป๐ฒ ๐๐ต๐ผ ๐๐ผ ๐บ๐๐ฐ๐ต ๐ฎ๐ ๐ต๐ฎ๐ฝ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ป๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐๐ผ ๐ฏ๐ฒ ๐ฎ ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฒ๐๐
And then published it a day after the Pope was found by an NPR investigation to have suppressed allegations that he had been sexually abusing minors in violation of a transparency law mandating their release. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5723968/epstein-files-trump-accusation-maxwell
๐ญ. ๐ง๐ต๐ถ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ ๐ป๐ผ๐ ๐ฎ ๐ฏ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐น๐ถ๐ป๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป ๐ถ๐ป๐๐ผ๐น๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด "๐ฏ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐น๐น๐ ๐ญ๐ณ-๐๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ฟ-๐ผ๐น๐ฑ๐."
You frame Epstein's conviction as "having sex with a 17-year-old on the day before her 18th birthday" and use this framing to suggest people who associated with him after his conviction were merely befriending someone convicted of a minor offense. This is misleading. The accusers in the NPR story were 13. Giuffre was 16 when recruited. A court document describes a 14-year-old brought to Mar-a-Lago and introduced to Trump. Files flagged for congressional review contained photographs of a 5-year-old being abused at Epstein's New York house during a party. The Palm Beach police investigation that triggered the FBI case began when a 14-year-old's stepmother reported her stepdaughter was being abused. Witness testimony describes Epstein asking to see a girl's ID specifically to confirm she was underage, and rejecting girls who were too old. The FBI's draft federal indictment was based on interviews with dozens of victims, many 14 and 15. This was a systematic operation with a preference for young adolescents, not ambiguous situations near the age of consent.
๐ฎ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ถ๐๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ป๐ ๐ถ๐ ๐ป๐ผ๐ ๐บ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐ฐ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฏ๐น๐ ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ฐ๐๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐ฐ๐ต๐ถ๐น๐ฑ ๐๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐น ๐ฎ๐ฏ๐๐๐ฒ, ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐ต๐ถ๐ ๐ผ๐๐ป ๐๐ข๐ ๐ถ๐ ๐๐๐ฝ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ป๐ฐ๐ฒ.
On February 24 โ just yesterday โ NPR reported that through serial number analysis of the DOJ's own document database, at least 53 pages of FBI interview transcripts related to sexual abuse allegations against Trump are catalogued in the system but not publicly available. These involve two separate accusers. The first told the FBI that around 1983, when she was approximately 13, Epstein introduced her to Trump, who forced her head toward his exposed penis โ which she bit, after which Trump punched her in the head and threw her out. The FBI found this credible enough to conduct four separate interviews with her in 2019 and refer the matter to the Washington field office โ a major escalation, given that most tips on the compiled list were dismissed outright.
Only the first of those four interviews is public, and it's the only one that doesn't mention Trump. In it, the woman showed agents a cropped photograph; her attorney explained the cropping was "due to fear of retaliation" from implicating "well-known" individuals. The FBI's own notes identified the uncropped version as a "widely distributed photograph" of Epstein with Trump. Of 15 documents logged in Maxwell discovery materials for this accuser, only 7 are in the public database. A second accuser separately told the FBI she was brought to Mar-a-Lago at age 13 or 14 and that Epstein told Trump "This is a good one, huh?" โ both men chuckled while she stood there. That interview was removed from the public database after the January 30 release and quietly restored on February 19. The interview with her mother remains offline. The White House's response: Trump has been "totally exonerated."
๐ฏ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ข๐ ๐ถ๐ ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐น๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐น๐ฎ๐ ๐ง๐ฟ๐๐บ๐ฝ ๐๐ถ๐ด๐ป๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐๐๐๐ฒ๐บ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐น๐น๐ ๐๐๐ฝ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฑ๐ผ๐ฐ๐๐บ๐ฒ๐ป๐๐.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed Congress near-unanimously and Trump signed it in November 2025. It required full release within 30 days, with redactions limited to victim identities. The DOJ missed the deadline, initially released under 10,000 pages, and has to date released roughly 3.5 million pages while acknowledging approximately 6 million may qualify โ meaning roughly half remain withheld. At least 16 files disappeared from the DOJ website within 24 hours of the initial December release, including a photo of Trump with Epstein, Maxwell, and Melania. Files containing hundreds of Trump mentions were removed from the January 30 release. Deputy AG Blanche has declared there will be no further prosecutions.
๐ฐ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฒ๐บ๐ฎ๐ถ๐น๐ ๐ถ๐ป ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ณ๐ถ๐น๐ฒ๐ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ฎ๐ถ๐ป ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ณ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ป๐ฐ๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ผ ๐๐บ๐ฎ๐น๐น ๐ฐ๐ต๐ถ๐น๐ฑ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ป ๐ถ๐ป ๐๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐น ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ โ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐ฝ๐ผ๐ป๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ป๐๐' ๐ป๐ฎ๐บ๐ฒ๐ ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐๐ฒ๐ฑ.
Epstein's email exchanges include references to children as young as 10-13 being "so much fun" and other sexually suggestive language. The names of the people on the other end of these exchanges are blacked out. These aren't the emails of casual acquaintances โ they're communications with people who appear to have been aware of and engaged with the nature of Epstein's operation.
๐ฑ. ๐๐ฝ๐๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป'๐ ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐๐ต ๐ฎ๐ ๐ ๐๐ ๐ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ต๐ฎ๐๐๐ฎ๐ป ๐๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ณ๐ถ๐ฟ๐๐ ๐๐๐ฐ๐ฐ๐ฒ๐๐๐ณ๐๐น ๐๐๐ถ๐ฐ๐ถ๐ฑ๐ฒ ๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐ณ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ถ๐น๐ถ๐๐ ๐ถ๐ป ๐ฎ๐ญ ๐๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐.
He was in a federal detention center that held mob bosses, terrorists, and cartel leaders โ not a lax minimum-security camp. He had been placed on suicide watch and then removed after an unusually short period. His cellmate was transferred out, violating facility policy. Both guards assigned to his unit fell asleep and falsified records claiming they'd checked on him every 30 minutes โ they hadn't checked for approximately eight hours. The security cameras for his tier malfunctioned that night. The forensic pathologist hired by Epstein's brother (Michael Baden, a former NYC chief medical examiner) said the injuries were more consistent with homicide by strangulation than suicide by hanging. Every single protocol failure broke in the same direction for the single highest profile inmate at a facility whose suicide-prevention protocols are usually so effective they hadn't seen one in 21 years.
๐ฒ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ข๐ ๐ถ๐ ๐๐๐ฟ๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐น๐น๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐ด๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป๐ฎ๐น ๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ถ๐ด๐ต๐ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ณ๐ถ๐น๐ฒ๐.
At AG Bondi's February 11 hearing, photographers captured her holding a printout labeled "Jayapal Pramila Search History" โ tracking which Epstein documents a congresswoman had searched at the DOJ's secure review terminals. The review setup itself was designed to obstruct: four computers in a small room, unique logins tracking each member's searches, no phones, handwritten notes only. Raskin's staff calculated it would take seven years to review all files under these conditions. When the Republican co-author of the transparency law, Rep. Massie, pressed Bondi on why co-conspirator names were redacted, she called him a "failed politician" with "Trump derangement syndrome."
๐ณ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป ๐ฝ๐ฎ๐๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ป ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฐ๐๐ ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ฐ๐๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐๐ฟ๐ฎ๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ ๐๐ต๐ถ๐น๐ฒ ๐ฒ๐ ๐ฝ๐ผ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฐ๐ต๐ถ๐น๐ฑ ๐๐ถ๐ฐ๐๐ถ๐บ๐ โ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ถ๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐น๐ฎ๐ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐พ๐๐ถ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐.
Survivors' attorneys say the DOJ failed to redact the identities of at least 31 people victimized as children, with approximately 100 victims affected overall. One survivor received death threats after her banking information was exposed. Meanwhile, the names of co-conspirators โ including Les Wexner, who appeared in an FBI document as a "possible co-conspirator" โ were blacked out. The DOJ only un-redacted Wexner's name after Massie caught it during his review, prompting Massie to say "forty minutes of me catching you red-handed."
๐ด. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐๐ผ๐ป ๐๐ฝ๐๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป ๐๐ฎ๐๐ป'๐ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ถ๐ฐ๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ผ๐๐ ๐ฐ๐ฟ๐ถ๐บ๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ ๐ถ๐๐๐ฒ๐น๐ณ ๐ผ๐ป๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฏ๐ถ๐ด๐ด๐ฒ๐๐ ๐๐ฐ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ๐ฎ๐น๐ ๐ถ๐ป ๐ณ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐น ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฐ๐๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฎ๐น ๐ต๐ถ๐๐๐ผ๐ฟ๐ โ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐ต๐ถ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ ๐ฝ๐๐ฏ๐น๐ถ๐ฐ๐น๐ ๐ธ๐ป๐ผ๐๐ป ๐ฏ๐ฒ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐๐ต๐ผ๐บ๐๐ธ๐ ๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐ฒ๐บ๐ฎ๐ถ๐น๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ต๐ถ๐บ.
The Palm Beach police conducted one of the most thorough investigations their department had ever seen, interviewing dozens of victims who independently corroborated each other's accounts. The FBI then conducted its own independent investigation and drafted a 53-page federal indictment charging Epstein and four co-conspirators. Career prosecutors were prepared to go to trial. U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta killed the prosecution and negotiated a plea deal with Epstein's defense team (which included Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz) over the objections of the line prosecutors who built the case. The resulting deal granted immunity not just to Epstein but to unnamed "potential co-conspirators" โ an extraordinary clause that only makes sense if the evidence was strong and the goal was containment, not justice. A federal judge later ruled the deal was illegal because prosecutors violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act by concealing it from victims. Acosta himself told the Trump transition team he'd been told to back off because Epstein "belonged to intelligence" and was "above his pay grade." None of this was secret by 2015, when Chomsky's correspondence began. The corruption of the plea deal had been widely reported, including detailed investigations in the Daily Beast and extensive court filings.
Continued...
๐ต. ๐๐ฝ๐๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป ๐ฏ๐๐ถ๐น๐ ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ถ๐ป๐ณ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐๐๐ฟ๐๐ฐ๐๐๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ ๐ฐ๐ต๐ถ๐น๐ฑ ๐๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐น ๐ฎ๐ฏ๐๐๐ฒ, ๐๐๐ฎ๐ณ๐ณ๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ฏ๐ ๐ฒ๐บ๐ฝ๐น๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ต๐ผ๐๐ฒ ๐ท๐ผ๐ฏ ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐๐ฐ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฝ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป๐ ๐ฐ๐ฒ๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ผ๐ป ๐ณ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ถ๐น๐ถ๐๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ถ๐.
This was not an individual's private misconduct. Employees testified that their duties included fanning out hundred-dollar bills on the bed before girls arrived, placing a gun inside the mattress, and disposing of used condoms after "massages" with minors. Three "massages" a day was the routine at the Palm Beach house. The New York townhouse had a dedicated massage room. Victims were recruited through a pyramid scheme where existing victims were paid to bring new girls. This operation ran for decades across multiple properties and countries. Maxwell was convicted by a federal jury of sex trafficking โ not based on Giuffre's testimony, but on the testimony of four other women (Jane, Kate, Carolyn, and Annie Farmer), several of whom were 14-16 when the abuse began. Over 150 victims eventually came forward.
๐ญ๐ฌ. ๐๐ฝ๐๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป ๐บ๐ฎ๐ถ๐ป๐๐ฎ๐ถ๐ป๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ฒ๐ ๐๐ฒ๐ป๐๐ถ๐๐ฒ ๐ต๐ถ๐ฑ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ป ๐๐๐ฟ๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐น๐น๐ฎ๐ป๐ฐ๐ฒ ๐๐๐๐๐ฒ๐บ๐, ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐๐ ๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ต๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฑ ๐ฑ๐ฟ๐ถ๐๐ฒ๐ ๐ณ๐ฟ๐ผ๐บ ๐ฎ ๐๐ฎ๐ณ๐ฒ โ ๐๐ต๐ถ๐ฐ๐ต ๐ต๐ฎ๐๐ฒ ๐ป๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐ฏ๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ป ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ฐ๐ผ๐๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ฑ ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ.
Multiple victims and employees described hidden cameras throughout Epstein's properties. One victim described seeing a room with monitors showing feeds from multiple cameras โ a dedicated surveillance operations center. When the FBI raided the New York townhouse in 2019, they found a safe containing hard drives and CDs labeled with what appeared to be a person's name followed by a description of a sexual act. The prosecution referenced this material at bail hearings. What happened to those drives? They're in FBI custody. They've never been part of any public filing. The DOJ has never provided an accounting of what was on them. If the surveillance system worked as described, those drives potentially contain direct visual evidence of crimes committed by identifiable people. And they're just... unmentioned, while the DOJ declares the investigation closed.
๐ญ๐ญ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ด๐ถ๐ป ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ฝ๐๐๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป'๐ ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ๐๐๐ป๐ฒ ๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐ป๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐ฏ๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ป ๐ฒ๐ ๐ฝ๐น๐ฎ๐ถ๐ป๐ฒ๐ฑ.
Epstein claimed to be a billionaire financial manager, but no one has ever been able to identify how he made his money. He had one known client โ Les Wexner โ and the nature of that financial relationship has never been fully explained. Wexner transferred his New York townhouse (worth approximately $77 million) to Epstein under circumstances that remain murky. Epstein had no college degree, was fired from Bear Stearns, and yet somehow accumulated a fortune estimated at over $500 million, maintained multiple lavish properties including a private island, and moved through the highest circles of finance and power. The "intelligence" connection Acosta referenced has never been confirmed or denied. If Epstein's primary "business" was actually the collection and leverage of compromising material on powerful people, the unexplained wealth, the surveillance infrastructure, and the immunity deals all become coherent parts of a single picture.
๐ญ๐ฎ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐น๐ผ๐ป ๐ ๐๐๐ธ ๐บ๐ฎ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ถ๐ฎ๐น ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฐ๐๐น๐ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ฟ๐ฎ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฐ๐๐ ๐ต๐ถ๐ ๐ฝ๐๐ฏ๐น๐ถ๐ฐ ๐๐๐ฎ๐๐ฒ๐บ๐ฒ๐ป๐๐.
Musk has repeatedly claimed he barely knew Epstein and declined invitations to his island. The files contain at least 16 emails between them in 2012-2013, including Musk writing "What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?" and coordinating a helicopter trip to the island with his then-wife. A scheduling email from late 2014: "Elon Musk to island Dec. 6 (is this still happening?)." His brother Kimbal appears extensively too. This isn't "briefly exchanging an email." It's an extended, enthusiastic social relationship with someone whose conviction for sex crimes involving a minor was public knowledge.
๐ญ๐ฏ. ๐๐๐ฟ๐ผ๐ฝ๐ฒ ๐ถ๐ ๐๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐๐๐ฎ๐น ๐ฐ๐ฟ๐ถ๐บ๐ถ๐ป๐ฎ๐น ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ฐ๐ผ๐๐ป๐๐ฎ๐ฏ๐ถ๐น๐ถ๐๐. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐จ.๐ฆ. ๐ถ๐ ๐๐ฒ๐ฒ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ป๐ผ๐ป๐ฒ.
Former Norwegian PM Thorbjรธrn Jagland has been charged with "gross corruption" and faces up to 10 years. The UK's Peter Mandelson was stripped of his ambassadorship and faces criminal investigation. Prince Andrew was forced from his royal estate. Norway's ambassador to Jordan resigned. Turkey and Lithuania launched trafficking investigations. Sweden's UNHCR chair resigned. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted his family visited Epstein's island after previously claiming "very limited interactions" โ said "I don't recall why we did it" โ and remains in his cabinet position. Deputy AG Blanche has declared no further prosecutions will be pursued, while roughly half the qualifying documents remain unreleased.
๐ญ๐ฐ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ "๐บ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐น ๐ฝ๐ฎ๐ป๐ถ๐ฐ" ๐ณ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐บ๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ถ๐ป๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐๐๐ฎ๐น ๐๐ถ๐๐๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป.
You compare the Epstein response to Salem, McCarthyism, and the Satanic Panic. In those cases, the underlying crimes were largely fabricated โ there was no Satanic cabal, most accused "communists" weren't spies. Here, the underlying crimes are extensively documented, a co-conspirator was convicted by a federal jury, over 150 victims have come forward, and the question isn't whether crimes happened but who else participated and why the government is suppressing evidence. The better historical analogy isn't Salem โ it's the Catholic Church abuse scandal, where institutional defenders spent decades calling scrutiny "hysteria" while systematically covering up real crimes against children. The actual civil liberties crisis in the Epstein files isn't public curiosity โ it's the DOJ tracking which files members of Congress search, exposing children's identities while redacting perpetrators' names, and violating a federal transparency law signed by the president.
๐ญ๐ฑ. ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฏ๐ฟ๐ฎ๐๐ฒ ๐ฝ๐ผ๐๐ถ๐๐ถ๐ผ๐ป ๐ถ๐ป ๐๐ฒ๐ฏ๐ฟ๐๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ ๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ฎ๐ฒ ๐ถ๐ ๐ป๐ผ๐ "๐ฒ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ผ๐ป๐ฒ ๐ฐ๐ฎ๐น๐บ ๐ฑ๐ผ๐๐ป."
You frame yourself as courageously standing against the mob, with Michael Tracey as your only ally. But "don't look too closely at the Epstein files" is the position of the president, the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and the entire DOJ apparatus. It's also the majority position of Republicans: A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 67% of Republicans said the statement โitโs time for the country to move on from talking about the Epstein filesโ described their thinking at least somewhat well, compared to only 21% of Democrats.
So the MAGA base has largely followed Trumpโs cues: they went from demanding full transparency to wanting to move on, precisely as the files started implicating Trump more directly. The people actually taking risks are Rep. Massie (Republican) confronting his own party's AG over redactions, Rep. Khanna (Democrat) demanding unredacted files, NPR journalists doing serial number analysis on suppressed documents, and Reddit users crowdsourcing document reviews for congressmembers who get two hours in a restricted room. The contrarian move here isn't skepticism of the public. It's scrutiny of the powerful.
I agree with you that Sam Harris shouldn't be pilloried for declining one email. I agree that the cannibalism theories are unfounded. I agree that victim identities should have been protected. But you've written an article that uses those valid points as a shield against engaging with any of the substance โ the NPR investigation, the document suppression, the congressional surveillance, the redaction pattern, the 53 missing pages โ that was breaking news the day you published. The Epstein story isn't a moral panic. It's the most extensively documented case of elite institutional corruption in modern American history, and the institutions are still actively suppressing the evidence. That deserves more than a meditation on why everyone should calm down.
Get ready to be called a pedophile by like 50,000 people
There are a lot of problems with this! First, while Epstein was only convicted for sex with an older teenage girl, he was originally accused of significantly more heinous offenses for which there was also plenty of publicly available evidence - anyone who was even remotely familiar with the details of the case would have been able to confidently determine that he was a sexually abusive predator. So framing anything around the details of the incredibly nice plea deal, rather than the crimes any reasonable person would understand him to have committed, is unreasonable.
I mean, Chomsky himself first made contact in like 2015, right? By then, *I* knew about Epstein being an obvious monster, just from ambiently seeing it discussed in various lefty news sources. And we're supposed to believe that Chomsky - not exactly known for his ignorance when it comes to the misdeeds of wealthy and powerful people - agreed to get on the guy's plane and fly to his private island with less of a grasp on things? I strongly, strongly, doubt it. But even if that is the case, it would still be *at best* an insanely irresponsible decision on his part that could only really be explained by willful ignorance.
Secondly, while it's true that no one "goes to jail for pedophilia," Epstein was clearly a pedophile in every sense that would be morally relevant in terms of what sort of relationship people ought to have with him. See Defending Feminism's latest article on that: https://defendingfeminism.substack.com/p/yes-jeffrey-epstein-was-clearly-a
More generally, the obvious distinction between Epstein and (for example) a convicted murderer your family befriended after he served his sentence is that, presumably at least, the murderer was in some sense repentant or reformed, whereas Epstein immediately began sexually abusing women and girls after serving his first sentence in exactly the same way he sexually abused them before. So the actual comparison you should make would be something like: You know someone who was very clearly a serial killer, but who only ended up going to prison for one count of kidnapping; then, the moment they get out, you notice they're still going out late and night and picking up prostitutes who you never see again. In a situation like that, it *would* be totally insane to say, "Well, they've served their time!" The only reasonable response would be to cut ties with them so long as it was incredibly likely that they were still engaged in horrendous crimes. And the same is true for Epstein.
Also, while privacy concerns aren't totally irrelevant here, it does seem pretty clearly noteworthy that (to use your example) a Yale professor is comfortable sexually objectifying the young women he's supposed to be supporting while in conversation with an obvious sexual predator. That's the sort of thing that would reasonably trigger an internal investigation and serious consequences in any workplace, even if the other person in the conversation *wasn't* a notorious abusive pedophile! So I just don't get this idea that it's somehow inappropriate for people to care about that. If it's something that would get a random cashier fired from a Wendy's, it's probably something that should matter when it comes to some of our most important public figures who are in positions of real authority and power.
Finally, I think it's really, really crazy to talk positively about Michael Tracey in particular here when his own theory of the case is so outrageously absurd that no person who was even trying to apply basic Bayesian principles could ever think it was reliable. Like, as far as I can tell, he doesn't even think Epstein did anything particularly wrong at all. And coming to that conclusion requires such an obvious, overwhelming refusal to actually engage with the evidence that I think he's very clearly more out of touch with reality than the average person he criticizes for being too into Epstein stuff.
What's the evidence that Epstein immediately began sexually abusing girls after serving his first sentence? There are no credible allegations to that effect.
I don't see why it's crazy to talk positively about Michael Tracey. Tracey has repeatedly and frequently denounced Epstein for his behavior at Palm Beach; if you haven't seen this, you haven't engaged with his work sufficiently deeply to call someone else really, really, crazy for talking positively about him.
His theory of the case is relatively simple: Epstein had a predilection for young girls and paid teenage girls (some under the age of 18, the age of consent in Florida) for a variety of sexual favors between 2002 and 2005, primarily at his Palm Beach residence. In relation to these crimes, Epstein was investigated by the state of Florida in conjunction with the Department of Justice. Because of the difficulties prosecuting the case โ Epstein's high-powered legal team, many victims were unwilling to talk to the police or testify in court, many victims were of dubious credibility, establishing federal jurisdiction etc. โ the U.S. attorney and Epstein agreed to a federal non-prosecution agreement that, while not commensurate with the totality of his criminality, was still quite onerous: lifetime registration as a sex offender, pleading guilty to the one abovementioned case of solicitation of a minor, jail time etc.
No trafficking children to powerful individuals, no blackmail, no "client list", no Mossad, no CIA, no torture chambers or child sacrifice or eating babies.
I'm interested in what aspect of this theory of the case you consider to be an obvious, overwhelming refusal to actually engage with the evidence.
So Michael Tracey is *that* wrong? Do you have evidence that Virginia Roberts Giuffre *did not* lie, contradict, and retract statements? That the jurors in Ghisaine Maxwell were *not* influenced by one juror to change their not guilty vote? Because that would be news to me.
And now we get to see which half of your audience are high decouplers and which are low decouplers. ๐
This has nothing to do with decoupling - if anything, I think a lot of people who take this position are themselves failing to decouple the actual facts of the case from their broader takes on the cultural moment.
The facts of the case indicate that Epstein and his wife would find and manipulate young women, many of them teenagers, to have sex with him. That's the facts we have. Yet there are people who seem deeply convinced that Epstein was running a pedephile sex ring where he trafficked prepubescent girls to the rich and powerful at the behest of intelligence agencies. The facts of the case don't really support that position, but a lot of people feel very strongly that they should, and if we don't have facts supporting it then they must have been suppressed by conspiracy.
For sure, many of the conspiracy theories around him are ridiculous. But the facts of the case, by themselves, are still much worse than what is being acknowledged by many of those who identify with the "high decoupler" label.
I don't see how. The original post acknowledged that Epstein probably committed some sexual crimes beyond the ones he ultimately pled guilty for. It's just that the severity of the crimes, while bad enough to have morally earned him a harsher sentence he didn't serve, aren't nearly either bad or else unambiguously true enough to be worthy of cannibalizing like 20% of American national attention for years and years. The reason most people care about Epstein is mass pedophilic rape cabals and/or international blackmail operations, not "a specific rich guy got away with touching a 14-year-old who showed up at his house to knowingly/intentionally give him a sexual massage while claiming to be 18 20 years ago, and then he went on to have sex with a ton of 18-year-old prostitutes." And they're not even *remotely* bad enough to justify the hysterical mass moral panic people have been whipped up into on places like Twitter, where expressing any doubts about the conspiratorial allegations means you get dogpiled by frothing strangers for being a witch (I mean, pedophile) yourself.
Powerful figures from Ro Khanna to Elon Musk are making nonstop, impassioned, ominous demands for political enemies to be jailed on the basis of unstated evidence. Popular internet influencers like The Young Turks are switching on a dime and suddenly willing to endorse absurd 9/11 conspiracy theories (about Israel) on the basis of what they take to be revelations extracted from the files. Iranians are now burning statues of the Canaanite god Baal, and receiving glowing praises from figures like Candace Owens, because they've decided an OCR transcription error from a copy of one of his bank communiquรฉs proved Epstein and possibly a larger shadowy elite were secret Baal-worshippers. It's *insanity*, and not as some unfortunate externality, but because it's the primary point.
โEpstein and his wife would find and manipulate young women, many of them teenagers, to have sex with himโโฆ that IS child sex trafficking. Maybe the issue here is that a lot of people on both sides donโt understand what sex trafficking of minors is.
Bizarre. This deeply uninteresting man seems to have two points of attraction: money, and freely available young women, about whom we can debate interestingly how attraction to them should be defined. If we examine his correspondence with everyone the innocent will surely be able to establish their innocence? Your point sounds to me like Enough of the witch hunt about anyone employed in whatever capacity at Auschwitz Birkenau.
"Surely be able to establish their innocence"
Do you people even hear yourselves?
Why am I "you people" and what is your point? If it is that people are presumed innocent anyway, that only goes so far. If you are found in a room with a bloodstained dagger and a stabbed corpse, establish your innocence is exactly what you need to do. Being chums with Epstein creates a presumption of guilt.
I think there are a couple slightly different claims being made here, and I disagree with both of them.
The first seems to be that people are wrong when they say Epstein was convicted of pedophilia. The reasoning is that pedophilia is a word with a strict scientific definition that refers to attraction to prepubescent children.
To this, I would say that clearly "pedophile" has acquired multiple meanings in our culture. There is a scientific definition, which you describe, and there's a colloquial, non-standard meaning, which refers to "sexual predator who targets children". If somebody raped an eight year old girl, most people would casually refer to the rapist as a "pedophile", and most people would continue to do so even if the victim had turned out to have precocious puberty and was no longer a prepubescent.
It would probably strike most people as odd and inappropriate to insist that another word be used for the predator once the girl's physical condition was revealed. It's true that people would be using the word incorrectly according to the technical definition in that case, but that doesn't automatically show that it's problematic to do so, as lots of words acquire similar multiple meanings in our culture.
The second disagreement I have relates to the idea it's inappropriate to condemn people who associated with Epstein after his convictions. This seems strange to me as well because the reaction to Epstein's associates is largely comparable to the reaction to other people who maintained friendly contact with known child predators.
For example, football coach Jerry Sandusky raped a series of teenage and preteen boys under his care. Sandusky's boss, Joe Paterno, knew about the rapes, and some of Sandusky's associates even saw him raping a very young boy. But they did nothing because Sandusky was an incredible football coach. After Sandusky's crimes became broadly known, Paterno and others who knew but continued associating with Sandusky faced extreme backlash, with Joe Paterno in particular being disgraced.
As far as I know, nobody seriously disagrees with this backlash. If this backlash was appropriate in Paterno's case, it is at least prima facie appropriate for others who similarly associated with Epstein even after his rapes of young girls became known. I don't think that means everyone in the Epstein files is equally guilty, obviously, but some degree of backlash is appropriate in Epstein's case just as it was in Sandusky's case.
Hi,
I think what you say about word meaning is interesting. It is sort of an intersection between a current cultural topic and philosophy of language stuff I find interesting. I wanted to ask you a question about something you said, just in the spirit of inquiry and not trying to be combative. You write that "'Pedophile' has acquired multiple meanings in our culture." For clarity, I will use pedophile1 to express the concept of being attracted to prepubescent children and pedophile2 to express the concept of a sexual predator who targets children.
What I don't get is how one of the thought experiments you use shows that the word 'Pedophile' expresses two distinct concepts, pedophile1 and pedophile 2 rather than showing that there is only one concept which pedophile expresses and that concept is pedophile2.
Take any Gettier case, for instance the stopped clock case. A broken clock stopped at 12:00pm. John looks at the clock and forms the belief that it is 12:00pm. Because his belief is based on what the clock says it is justified. As it happens, it actually is 12:00pm. So John's belief is true and justified. But John doesn't know it is 12:00pm. Hence, knowledge isn't true and justified belief.
Another way the thought experiment could be taken is that actually it shows there are at least two senses of the word knowledge. John doesn't know it is 12:00pm in the sense of having a true and justified belief that it is 12:00pm. Instead of concluding that knowledge isn't true and justified belief, we could instead conclude that there are two senses of the word knowledge, knowledge1 (true and justified belief) and knowledge2 a sort of knowledge that John actually does possess in the scenario.
You propose the following thought experiment. An eight year old is raped. People call the person who did it a pedophile. As it turns out the eight year old is not actually prepubescent. But you think people wouldn't be wrong to continue to refer to the person who did that as a pedophile. You take this to show that there are two distinct concepts which the word pedophile can express. The question is if this thought experiment shows this, then why don't gettier cases show that there is more than one concept which knowledge expresses. Why would the thought experiment you propose not just show that what you refer to as the scientific sense of pedophile is actually not the correct concept.
There is one more question I want to ask. It seems to me that one of the reasons it might feel strange to stop referring to the person as a pedophile after figuring out the eight year old is not prepubescent is because there are not many eight year olds who are not prepubescent. So it is odd to think of someone who sexualizes eight years as not being a pedophile. But that isn't because the term pedophile actually means something different from the scientific definition, it's just because the case of the prepubescent eight year old is an outlier. It sounds weird to say that a sexual abuser of an eight year old is not a pedophile, not because there is some other non-scientific sense of the word pedophile but because the idea of someone sexually abusing an eight year old who is non-prepubescent is unusual because such eight year olds are outliers.
Another reason it might seem odd is because of pragmatic implicature. Consider this scenario. Martha and John are watching television. They flip the channel to a popular pundit show, the Newman News Hour. Frank Newman, the host of the show says that a pedophile by the name of Mark Brandy was recently convicted of sex trafficking fifteen year old girls to his new jersey apartment where he would have sexual intercourse with them. John says "That isn't pedophilia." Martha says "What that man did was clearly wrong." It sounds like Martha thinks John is saying that what Mark Brandy did was not wrong. So it sound wrong to assert that Brandy is not a pedophile not because it is false but because in many contexts it has the pragmatic implicature that Brandy did not do anything wrong. This does not show that it is true Brandy is not a pedophile though. Consider this analogy. In most contexts the pragmatic implicature of "Africian Americans score the lowest on IQ tests" is something like "Africian Americans are an inferior race." But this doesn't show that "Africian Americans score the lowest on IQ tests" is false. The worry here is that the intuition that people like Mark Brandy are pedophiles is based on a confusion between what that claim itself means and what the pragmatic implicature is going to be of asserting it in many contexts. In many contexts, the pragmatic implicature of those claims is false but it doesn't follow that those claims are themselves false.
Sorry for the extremely long comment. If you made it through thanks for reading and I would be interested to hear how you would response.
No not at all, the linguistics stuff is tricky but interesting.
I'm not sure I follow your objection with the Gettier problem. But here's another analogy that can hopefully clarify what I'm trying to say.
Let's say Taylor Swift does something cool. A Buzzfeed writer publishes an article titled: "Taylor Swift Is a Queen". Someone responds: Taylor Swift is not a queen. A queen is a member of a royal family, and Taylor Swift doesn't possess that characteristic. Buzzfeed is misleading people!
I imagine the Buzzfeed author would say that, well ok, Taylor Swift is not a queen in that sense. But "Queen" has acquired another meaning in our culture, meaning "cool woman" or sometimes even "cool person of any gender or sexuality". So the article title isn't actually wrong, or at least isn't something that needs to be corrected. Do you agree that the Buzzfeed author is in the right here?
So that's all I'm saying with regards to pedophile too. Obviously people who use the term typically mean it to refer to a "child sexual predator", where child is defined fairly loosely.
I guess I don't immediately see the connection to the Gettier case you're describing, but it seems like this is consistent with any number of views on it.
RE Gettier case: What I was trying to get at with the gettier case was the following question: You take your thought experiment to show that the word 'pedophile' can express both what you refer to as the scientific concept and another concept which you refer to as colloquial. If this inference is cogent, then why wouldn't it be cogent to infer from Gettier cases that 'knowledge' can express the concept true and justified belief and also express some other concept? Given that the eight year old is not prepubescent, you infer that the word 'pedophile' can express both the concept of being sexually attracted to a prepubescent child *and* some other concept. But why not just make the sort of inference pattern typically made in the Gettier cases? That the thought experiment shows the word 'pedophile' doesn't actually express the concept of being sexually attracted to a prepubescent child at all? Let me know if this clarifies things.
RE Buzzfeed article analogy: I don't think this addresses any of the questions I put forward initially. If your right about the buzzfeed case (and it seems right to me), then this would only establish an initial plausibility of your thesis. It would show that there are cases where (i) a word can come to express a concept it didn't previously possess (e.g. 'Queen' can express the concept of 'cool women') and (ii) it would be inappropriate to tell people to stop calling people Queen who do not fall under the concept the word used to exclusively express (e.g. it would be inappropriate to tell buzzfeed authors not to call Taylor Swift a queen because she is not a member of the royal family).
I would call this sort of argument a plausibility analogy. If successful it would show that there are things which have gamma set of properties. This makes it more plausible that y (in this case the word 'pedophile') also has these properties for in general we expect nature to be uniform. But this doesn't show that y actually has these properties.
I am also not sure that this plausibility analogy succeeds. I don't think that 'queen' in typical contexts of asserting sentences similar to 'Taylor Swift is a queen.' means 'cool woman. Initially, a queen was a female monarch. As such Queens typically held a lot of political power and status. To say 'Taylor Swift is a queen.' is to say that she is a powerful woman who has status. This makes sense given that Swift is a very famous musical artist, whose work is loved by a lot of people and she has a lot of money. There is also another related concept, but I am not sure if it is the same which is 'queen' in the sense of 'Yas Queen!' This reads to me as more an affirmation of a sort of extravagant style that is often associated with LGBT. This works by drawing an analogy between the extravagance of royalty and fashion styles rather than their power or status. So I would identity at least three different related concepts which the term 'queen' can express neither of which are 'cool woman.'
This may seem like a nitpicky point since your initial characterization of the buzzfeed example could be easily adjusted to fit the analyze of the concept 'queen' I provided above. It would be unreasonable to say "It is false that Taylor Swift is a queen because she is not a female monarch" because although she is not a queen in that sense she is a queen in the sense of being a powerful woman who has status.
I want to offer though a slight pushback here as to why the plausibility analogy may not be relevant to the conclusion about the word 'pedophile.' When we 'Taylor swift is a queen.' I think it is plausible that this is partly an expression of subjective attitudes. Here is my evidence. People can agree that Taylor Swift is a powerful women while also disagreeing about whether she is a queen while all parties understand the relevant concepts. Consider this dialogue:
Martha: "The life of a showgirl was the best album of 2025. Taylor Swift is such a queen."
Susan: "Taylor Swift is not a queen. That album was terrible. The real queen of 2025 was Beyonce. She's reigned since Lemonade came out."
I don't think the disagreement here is about anything factual but rather comes down to a differences in preferences to the two people. One might argue that it isn't a question of preferences and there is a fact of the matter if Swift really is a queen or not or if as Susan maintains Beyonce has been the only queen since 2016. But even in this case it is clear that the disagreement here is a normative one and not about purely descriptive facts.
You propose that pedophile can express the concept of being someone who sexually preys upon children. But whether or not a person sexually preys upon children is not a question of preference nor is going to be decided by any sort of normative factor. We might consider 'prey' as a verb to have a negative normative valence in this context, but whether someone preys upon children in this way or not is not determined by anything normative but only descriptive facts.
Sorry, this is again very long. I hope that what I intend to communicate here is clear enough.
"I keep telling you, it's ephebophilia!" ๐ฅ๐ฅ
I agree there is some hysteria in the sense that maybe people are technically wrong about some of the facts here and obviously your name simply appearing in the files shouldn't be enough to conclude you're evil, but I don't think you really grappled with the "hysterical" position. My broader understanding of what happened doesn't change much based on what you wrote here (and on Michael Tracey's or Hanania's stuff) and yet I'd say I'm closer to the hysterical position than where you seem to be, so I feel like you're not really seeing what I am.
I like Both Sides Bridgade's "...the facts of the case, by themselves, are still much worse than what is being acknowledged..."
"confidential emails"
email is so insecure that that's basically an oxymoron lol (not trying to disagree with your point, just a psa)
I have read and enjoyed your articles for a long time, but here I just feel like your desire to be contrarian has taken you to the insane depths of defending one of the known worst people.
> Unfortunately, in this case, nobody (save Michael Tracey) is willing to call out the lunacy.
Thankfully, this is a hyperbole. Richard Hanania is on the right track from the beginning and doing livestreams with Michael Tracey for months. Quilletteโs Claire Lehmann, Reasonโs Robby Soave, First Thingsโ Julia Yost, Compact Magazineโs Matthew Schmitz, The Spectatorโs Brendan OโNeill, Claremont Instituteโs Inez Stepman, The Free Pressโs Park MacDougald, The Wall Street Journalโs Barton Swaim, National Reviewโs David Harsanyi and some others will be remembered for refusing to go with hysteria too.
Source: https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-epstein-next-door/
I hope everybody remembers the people who used their influence to try to protect pedophiles and loses trust for those people
https://philosophicalrebellion.substack.com/p/the-epstein-story?r=211fuw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Pedophilia is bad and people should not be defending pedophiles who sexually assaulted children like Jeffrey Epstein and his many clients
I agree that there is hysterical overreach. The chief problem is the failure of the justice department to use the evidence it has to pursue other criminal offenders and criminal sexual predators, who surely exist. Releasing the files was as much a diversion tactic as anythingโflooding the zone with shit. There is however an interesting story about the interactions of the very wealthy, and Epstein's genius at manipulation and grift, including criminal sexual activities.