The unfolding Epstein story reveals how contemptibly women were treated by the wealthy and powerful men that Epstein drew into his orbit. The conspiracy theory that there is a secretive global cabal that runs things may not be true in its most extreme forms but seems to be somewhat true at least when it comes to men engaged in sex trafficking with young women.
The millions of Jeffrey Epstein files dumped last Friday by the US Department of Justice will provide journalists, conspiracy theorists and interested members of the public with months of reading. And what they will read is enraging.
What makes these files so infuriating, however, is not just Epstein’s horrific predatory behavior, which is well-known, but the more mundane examples of elite conduct that the documents continue to expose. They vividly illustrate a world whose existence many everyday people, whether fevered with visions of the Illuminati or just jaundiced by banal anti-establishment cynicism, already suspected exists: an informal global club of powerful, ultra-rich people who all help one another out, and protect each other from the consequences of their depravity.
…Although the documents may not expose an actual criminal conspiracy, he said, they confirm the belief behind most conspiracy theories: that elites “get special treatment, that they’re shielded from the rules that are supposed to apply to everyone equally, and that there is a kind of corruption in the broadest sense of the word”.
…The new material is the largest, and possibly last, tranche of the so-called Epstein files, though the government is keeping as many as 3m more pages under wraps. Yet even the initial revelations of these files deepen the astonishing constellation of ties between Epstein and members of the global elite – including tech billionaires; a former US president; British, Norwegian and Saudi royalty or royal courtiers; current and former US cabinet secretaries and governors; and prominent business executives and academics.
…If anything, the files make a mockery of public political commitments of all kinds; above a certain stratosphere of wealth or fame, it would seem, ideological and other differences are subsumed by far more motivating forms of elite self-interest. To read the files is to realize that class solidarity is real – just not within the class where Marxists might hope to find it.
Read the full article to see the extent of the rot.
The worst instances of abuse were the young women and girls who were trafficked for sex and passed around among these men as if they were playthings or were ornamental decorations to titillate them by just being around. Then, as if that was not bad enough, those women were victimized again when some of their names and even nude photographs were released unredacted by the department of justice, while care was taken to redact other things so that we still do not know the extent of the abuses and all the perpetrators.
The newest batch of Epstein files has exposed the names of dozens of his victims, with some appearing more than 100 times, and included dozens of unredacted nude images of young women, some of whom may have been teenagers.
A Wall Street Journal report found that 43 names were left unredacted in files released by the Department of Justice. Among them were many individuals who had not gone public with their identities or were minors when they were abused by Jeffrey Epstein.
A New York Times analysis also turned up more than 40 unredacted images that appeared to be part of a personal collection.
…However, lawyers for Epstein survivors say their clients needed to find their names themselves, then submit lengthy requests for removal to the DOJ.
“We notified them of the problem within an hour of the release,” attorney Brad Edwards said. “It’s been acknowledged as a grave error; there is no excuse for failing to immediately remedy it unless it was done intentionally.”
They just do not give a damn about the victims.
Then we have the fact that all these abusive men seemed to have women whose jobs as their assistants was to set up all these trysts for their bosses and make sure that there were plenty of young women around.
The Epstein files reveal a patriarchy in action. This is a world where the men are rich and powerful, and the women are not. The emails showcase the private behaviour of a male ruling class, as they network, joke and trade information. Women exist at the periphery, tolerated because they organise the diaries of the busy men, they arrange food, they grace a table, they provide sex.
A typical email from Epstein to a man in his network will say: “Head of the Nobel Peace Prize committee Thorbjorn Jagland will be staying in ny with me. You might find him interesting.” Epstein is writing to Richard Branson in characteristic style, combining some casual showing off with an offer to share access to someone else influential.
A typical email from Epstein to a woman might say: “Take a selfie of your pussy and send.”
Spend three days rummaging through the chaotic, sprawling, sordid pit of information contained in the Epstein files, and you learn valuable lessons about how this modern global patriarchy operates: through flattery, the exchange of favours and occasional curt reminders of who owes what to whom.
For women, these files offer an unprecedented chance to eavesdrop on conversations from which they are usually excluded. They provide salutary insights into what a set of distinguished global figures think and say about women when they assume the women aren’t listening.
…Without women observing their behaviour, the men are uninhibited in the way they communicate with each other, frat-boy-style tones unchecked. “By the way,” the Emirati businessman Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem messages Epstein early on a November Tuesday morning in 2013, “the Ukrainian and the Moldavian arrived. Big disappointment the Moldavian is not as attractive as the picture.” “Photo shop,” Epstein suggests. “Not only that she was too short and skinny,” Bin Sulayem replies.
Is this just standard locker-room banter? (How can women who aren’t normally allowed in these spaces possibly know the answer to that?) There are just 525 messages referencing pussy, but more often the word is coyly initialised. Men sign off messages to Epstein wishing him “lots of P”. “Happy new year with lots of P” or “Happy birthday and a year full of health, money and lots of P”. Epstein’s friends like to email him updates about the health benefits of sex. “Pussy is, indeed, low carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though,” the Canadian longevity doctor Peter Attia writes.
…Lesley Groff, Epstein’s long-term executive assistant, appears to be responsible for organising schedules, snacks and sex.
…In parallel, she sorts out logistics for the women that Epstein likes to move around the world with him – air tickets are purchased, visas sorted, cars arranged. She handles countless requests to extract women from cities in eastern Europe: “Organise for [redacted] to come from moscow to paris arrive 2.40 sat, leave late sun night, she will send her passport.” She sends out details of the addresses that women should be picked up from (“Girls to meet at 71st Street with their IDs. Heli to East Hampton”). She reassures women that payments for tickets have been “purchased on JE’s Black Amex!!”. She gets saunas fixed, steam rooms serviced, makes sure the modem is working in the bedroom.
…Helping boost each other’s reputations is standard practice. One of Epstein’s friends tells him he has been working on editing his Wikipedia page for him. “BTW, we also took out you in the sex offender category … And, now it just reads businessman, philanthropist.”
Marina Hyde writes about ‘Epstein’s little helpers’, the many powerful men who knew about his behavior but enabled and covered for him.
Since the latest lot dropped, I’ve been collating the emails from extremely famous men who actively sought to help the since-deceased underage sex trafficker trivialise his crimes in the years after his jail release in 2009. Richard Branson, Noam Chomsky, Steve Bannon, Mandelson, Andrew (obviously) – all of these men offer strategic advice, or media training, or chummy solidarity. Or, in the case of Chomsky, all of the above plus a drive-by on the notion of female victimhood. According to text signed under his first name that Epstein sent to a lawyer and publicist in February 2019, months after the Miami Herald had run an explosive series of articles laying out the scale of Epstein’s serial underage sexual abuse and the perversion of justice that covered it up, Chomsky sneered at “the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women”.
…There are so many big hitters in Epstein’s circle that we could be hours off the wholly absent Jeff Bezos starting a hashtag: #notallbillionaires. These days, the thing about Epstein’s many, many powerful friends is that if they ever break cover about their appearance in the files – and how terrifyingly quiet they’re all being – they tend to say they had no idea about his crimes. And yet, if one of your friends or my friends went to jail for a year, even if they told us it was a big old mistake/little local difficulty, we’d Google what it was all about – right? So imagine being as worldly as Richard Branson/Elon Musk/Peter Mandelson/Steve Bannon/Bill Gates and thinking that a billionaire with billionaires’ lawyers in the malleable US justice system ends up in jail in Florida because of some fit-up. Do me a favour. All those men know the world doesn’t work like that – and didn’t in this case, with Epstein gifted an incredibly controversial secret plea deal.
…They all sell out women in the end. So yet again, it’s being left to the victims. Twenty of the Epstein survivors recently released a statement saying that information about them was included in the latest file release, “while the men who abused us remain hidden and protected”. That is the dark heart of this – yet even now we’re looking the wrong way. I keep hearing frantic commentary about what this means for Keir Starmer, for Fergie, for Mandelson’s peerage, whatever. How about the biggest and grimmest question of all: what it means for women and girls to be able to clearly see that we live in a world where so many of the richest and most powerful men alive are just not bothered enough by their exploitation. Or worse.
As we have learned Epstein liked to befriend famous people. He seemed to have that sense often found in sociopaths, the ability to sense someone’s weaknesses and then exploit them. (See how Epstein cultivated Noam Chomsky, though it does not excuse Chomsky’s awful support of him that will forever tarnish his reputation.) He used his wealth to lure people in with promises of money, parties with celebrities, young women and girls, and flights to exotic places such as his island in his private jet, and then used those people to lure others into his net.
However not everyone was successfully seduced this way. There are rare instances of people who saw through the rot. Take the case of Norman Finkelstein. Epstein used one of his defenders Robert Trivers, an eminent professor at Harvard (he is prominent in the field of evolutionary theory) to try and draw him in. Trivers spoke of Epstein as a ‘person of integrity’. Finkelstein responded to Trivers’ overtures by sending him an excerpt of the sworn testimony of a 15-year old girl about the sex acts she had to perform on Epstein while Dershowitz was present and seemingly unconcerned. Finkelstein ends by saying that given their behavior with women, Epstein and Alan Dershowitz both deserve to be throttled. See this short video for more details. (Note that the woman who is narrating the video uses modified words to avoid triggering the filters whenever sex terms are used.)
Given the depths of misogyny and general depravity that have been on display in even the highly redacted files that have been released, one can only wonder what the redactions contained, not to mention the three million documents that the Trump gang say they are not going to release.
There is absolutely one system for commoners and another for VIPs, in European countries and even more in USA.
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You can also read about Epstein’s cunning deceptions.
All apologies should be taken with a *large* pinch of salt but the story below about how Epstein manipulated the then 85-year-old Chomsky in 2015 seems…at least plausible.
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Epstein knew Chomsky had suffered persecution and attempted set-ups in the 1960s and 1970s and played on his experience to make him believe in his innocence.
A cunning sociopath locates the Achilles heels of those he wants to swindle and the bastard was certainly cunning.
But the real victims are the trafficked girls and this should be repeated over and over again.
The other half of the Epstein files *must* be released!
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“Noam Chomsky’s wife apologizes for their ‘grave mistake’ in Epstein ties” | .https://share.google/qamXdfnGgFZzR4EnQ
I hope a disgusted civil servant sends a copy of the rest of (or the complete) Epstein files to a responsible publisher, like The Guardian.
^ Jörg @ 2
Absolutely!
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This years Valentine’s Day should have “Release All Files” as a theme, underlined by demonstrations.
What I don’t really get is the shock and surprise… As someone I follow on Instagram put it: “what, you think that maybe all these billionaires who openly profit from child slavery every single day might also be secretly up to no good?”
It’s a club, and we’re not in it. The rich have always understood the importance of class solidarity -- probably not out of any particular analytical framework or political understanding, but just because they instinctively hate and fear the teaming masses of the poor -- but still sense, at some level, that they depend on us. And, to be clear, “poor” in this context is basically everybody, including almost everybody that normal people would think of as “rich”.
However, on a brighter note, I do find it hilarious that even these ghastly fuckers apparently draw the line at hanging out with Elon Musk.
Dunc, #4
Obviously there should be very little shock and surprise about these findings, but I think you’re downplaying the extent to which our cultural and media environment has numbed and obfuscated people into thinking that the oligarchs are basically just like us but with fancier houses. We’re meant to be shocked, because we’re meant to assume no wrongdoing on their parts.
Epstein’s crime is, he was working as an individual, for individual exploitation.
The networks set up to further the ambitions of Hayek and Milton Friedman are nominally legal while causing civilizational damage on a vastly greater scale. And now Trumpistan is supporting fascism in the UK.
Do not expect US media to report on this.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=srCked8HMNc
cartomancer, @ #5:
Perhaps, or perhaps I’m not fully aware of it because I’m a bitter old lefty who doesn’t watch TV or read the gossip pages… The rich might as well be a different species. John Carpenter’s They Live was practically a documentary.
On the other hand…
I’ve just read a good piece from Carole Cadwalladr, that others might find worthwhile: We all live in Jeffrey Epstein’s world.
At the start of the Epstein drops, there was a huge (orchestrated?) backlash against the young girls themselves for being trafficked. The general consensus in the comment sections in the article I read around Christmas was the 15- an 16-year-olds being raised by disinterested or abusive parents “should have known better” than to take a job at Mar-a-Lago’s spa or agree to come work for Epstein. Dunc @7 touches on it with Cadwalladr’s piece (I’m going to go read it after I post) about the larger culture approving of this behavior and reacting terribly to people who speak out against it even by their very existence. We’ve seen even on these blogs the hysteria that results when people hear the facts they don’t want to hear.
I fell down an internet rabbit hole last night, and wound up reading about this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Kendall_Thaw. Both Thaw and the man he killed are examples of this same phenomenon: men with too much money, no moral centre, and a certain attitude towards women. La plus ca change….
Males have sex drive. So do women, but it’s different. What I’m not seeing in current news and discussions is that most men get civilized. I recall a study years ago on the rape of Nanking -- about a quarter of the occupying Japanese army thought this was great, another quarter went along for the ride, and half wanted nothing to do with it. Our popular culture currently elevates the attitudes that support that first quarter. Let’s talk more about the better half as normal, and how to reject the parts of culture that glorify that first quarter.
Some people are both, which complicates your gender-essentialist argument.
This may sound strange, but I find it a bit depressing that the Grand Conspiracy just boils down to sad, old men trying to poke their cocks at young women.
I mean, where’s Sauron’s plan to rule the world through magically enslaved proxys? Where’s the Matrix-like system of total control? Where’s the Luciferian gambit to challenge the Throne itself?
This is what we get? Just half-literate old men exchanging emails about how some lady was mean to them?
We can’t even get good villains in this timeline.
Fucking pathetic.
Beholder at 11: absolutely true. I like the native American traditions that called these “two spirit people,” as did assorted other cultures around the world. Another good topic: How women benefit from the existence of gay men.
@ 11 beholder
I think it’s fine to generalize. Where it gets uncomfortable is when people erase.
E.g. “Men have a different sex drive to women” -- Okay IMHO.
“If you are a man (or have certain body parts) you have this predefined sex drive” -- Not okay IMHO.
@^
When are you ever humble?
@ ^
https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2026/02/01/blog-comments-policy-11/
Also,
https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2026/02/10/lead-and-criminality/#comment-5525042
any more off topic questions?
@Dunc, #7:
One of the side-effects of the existence of private schools is that middle-class children and their parents can be largely isolated from ever having to meet meeting “normal” children and their parents. Of course, this works both ways; it also minimises normal people’s exposure to what goes on in rich people’s private family lives.
@ cartomancer, #5:
This is intentional.
“Lifestyle” and “property” columns in newspapers are written by privately-educated middle-class hacks (who, therefore, have no idea what life is like for the rest of us). So when they advise readers to keep three months’ wages in their bank account as a buffer against unemployment, they genuinely don’t appreciate that many of their readers, if they lost their jobs, would be lucky to scrape together the bus fare to the dole office.
When middle-class people have dinner parties, not only are they not praying there’s enough on the meter to finish the cooking before the guests arrive and if they light some candles and invent an excuse for why the stereo isn’t working, they might get away with it; they are incapable of even rolling the idea around their heads that anyone’s electricity supply might be rationed.