Epstein gave America a common enemy

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I feel a bit of trepidation when anyone brings up the Jeffrey Epstein case. It’s hard to know, at first blush, which they’re talking about: the documented crimes of which Epstein was convicted or the surrounding fog of conspiracy. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. 

That’s especially true in the wake of a massive, chaotic document release, like the one that we got over the weekend.

The confirmed details of Epstein’s crimes are terrible enough. Over a period of several years, the financier sexually abused and trafficked dozens of girls and women. 

He did so while maintaining close personal friendships with an extraordinary range of high-powered people, including politicians, business executives, and prominent journalists. Some of those people have been directly implicated in Epstein’s abuse. Others have rightfully faced questions about how much they knew and why Epstein was not prosecuted sooner.

But around those truths, an even more rickety scaffolding of speculation and rumor has formed. On the right, such conspiracy theories have broadly held that Epstein and his crimes prove the existence of a pervasive, evil, pedophilic cabal like the one decried by the Qanon conspiracy movement. To many in the MAGA camp, Epstein and his ilk perfectly embody “the culture of impunity of coastal elites,” argued Ashutosh Varshney, a professor of political science at Brown University.

But perhaps because Epstein was also associated with right-wing political figures — or perhaps because distrust of coastal elites is not exclusively a right-wing issue — the disgraced financier has become an object of interest and speculation on the left, too.

Over the weekend, for instance, I saw a number of social media posts that claimed the latest release of files from the Epstein investigation seriously implicated President Donald Trump. That isn’t true. While Trump is named in the files more than 1000 times, the (extremely lurid) allegations circulating on social media came from a list of unvetted accusations submitted to a public FBI tip line. 

The fog of conspiracy and rumor around the Epstein case makes it easy to dismiss the entire story as partisan hysteria or tabloid fodder. But that’s a mistake, for two reasons.

First, there was a real crime here — with real victims. Lawyers for those women are currently petitioning the government to take down its most recent tranche of Epstein files, which failed to redact their names and images in thousands of instances.

Second, the conspiratorial ecosystem itself tells us something important about the cultural and political mood in the United States, especially as those conspiracies gain hold across the political spectrum. Writing about the Epstein case for the French paper Le Monde seven months ago, the political scientist Julien Giry noted that “conspiracy theories reveal…the state of our societies.”

“In the United States, where conspiracism has enjoyed broad social acceptance since at least the Revolution, these theories reflect a pervasive distrust of political, media and judicial elites,” wrote Giry.

That distrust didn’t begin with Epstein, of course. But the Epstein case, in all its sprawl and unresolvedness, makes both an ideal vehicle and perpetuating force. In fact, the release of more documents related to the case, far from resolving skeptics’ questions, has arguably given them more reason to doubt the Department of Justice and other “elite” institutions.

Case in point: On Friday, after the DOJ published what it described as its final batch of 3.5 million files related to Epstein’s criminal investigation, Democrats accused the Trump administration of withholding millions of pages of additional evidence.

And on Monday, Bill and Hillary Clinton agreed to testify before a House committee that’s investigating Epstein, following a months-long standoff with the committee’s Republican chair.

In other words, the Epstein story continues to do that rarest of things: unite the American right and left against a common enemy — a class of powerful people that, they suspect, continue to act with impunity.