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Ten years ago, when I first found myself scrolling the lists of boldfaced names who had socialized with Jeffrey Epstein — not just a former president (Bill Clinton) and a future president (Donald Trump), both of whom had hobnobbed with the mysterious financier before he became a registered sex offender, but also the many oligarchs and world leaders who spent time with him after — it seemed too scandalous to be true. But as it turned out, outrageousness wasn’t a useful test. It was true: Among Epstein’s associates were many of the world’s most powerful people. And while we still don’t know exactly what drew them into his orbit, or what they knew, we do know that they were there — a suspicious-seeming social network looking like a conspiracy hanging in plain sight.
In the years since his second arrest and his apparent suicide in detention, the phrase “Epstein files” has been incanted so persistently on social media and podcasts that it has seemed to acquire, in certain quarters, properties both magical and concrete — as though you could pilfer a single accordion folder from a locked cabinet in Langley and watch the whole deep state collapse in a demolition cloud of revealed pedophilia.
But when Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to perform a version of that fantasy for an audience of right-wing influencers back in February, it quickly collapsed into farce — the distributed documents were largely already public, some released years before, and the big white binders looked like so many low-rent props. Then, 10 days ago, the F.B.I. suddenly declared that the much-hyped inquiry was now closed, with the nation’s top law-enforcement official offering apparently “modified” surveillance video as definitive proof of Epstein’s suicide and not even pretending to address suspicions, however vaguely sourced, that he might have been an intelligence asset.
The imagined center of the “Epstein files” has long been his supposed “client list.” But how much of Epstein’s life is still secret? Gawker published his address book a full decade ago; New York magazine delivered an annotated version in 2019 and Business Insider a searchable version the next year. There followed investigations by The Times and The Wall Street Journal, prolific enough that they now have their own landing pages, and depositions and civil suits and a public criminal trial for Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime partner in crime. The Epstein flight logs were made public in 2021, the same year that Michael Wolff published an astonishing account of Epstein’s final months, including the long transcript of an interview that Steve Bannon conducted with Epstein. Bannon has said he is sitting on 15 hours of material; Wolff says his own audio recordings run about a hundred hours. In one clip released just before the election, Epstein calls himself Trump’s “closest friend.”
Almost none of this information has satisfied those seeking it, or those seeking still more. And really, how could it? As with so many contemporary conspiracies, the known picture is expansive and uncomfortable enough, with abundant detail arrayed like so much proverbial red yarn. But the logic of paranoid thinking demands ever more cycles of disclosure and running epicycles of analysis. (This is among the many ways it is an extremely good match for the age of social media.) And what is missing in the Epstein story isn’t exactly more information — it’s more meaning. Is there more to see here, beyond the striking fact of a suspiciously wealthy and curiously well-connected sex offender? Or perhaps less, with Epstein turning out to have been more a shady influence hustler and savvy estate planner than some world-historical man of mystery?
We get a classic conspiracy theory, we’re often told, when disempowered people try to make sense of a disordered world, seizing on a story that gives them a comforting sense of control, at least as analysts of an otherwise overwhelming system producing improbable or inscrutable outcomes. How could a 24-year-old drifter have single-handedly killed a president and initiated an entirely new era of American life, and done so with just three bullets fired in just a few seconds? How could another young drifter, 61 years later, have gotten so close to changing the course of history, too? Then again, how could he have missed from that distance? And how could an ear have produced so much blood, then healed so quickly, leaving behind so little scarring?
On its face, the Epstein story suggests many of these kinds of questions — about the source of his interplanetary-seeming wealth, about the possibility of high-stakes blackmail, about those whispered connections to Israeli intelligence, British intelligence, American intelligence. But it also belongs to another paranoid tradition, in which those epicycles of analysis don’t demystify so much as re-mystify, layering over legible facts with something foggier and more darkly mythic. Think of David Icke’s lizard-people theory of history, the proposition that Sept. 11 was an inside job or that our water supply has been poisoned for decades, the widespread suspicion that the government has been doing research on alien wreckage for decades someplace in Nevada called Area 51. (That last one was recently revealed to be at least partly a Pentagon psy-op, in which the Americans were fed a set of incredible stories about alien encounters as a way of discouraging scrutiny of more quotidian military operations there.)
The current lineage probably starts with the birther conspiracy, which of course helped jump-start Donald Trump’s later-life political ascent too. It also includes the extended sex-ring universes of Pizzagate and QAnon, into which the Epstein story fits both as a kind of successor narrative and one with enough basis in lurid reality to invite all kinds of more fantastical speculation — about a powerful pedophile cabal, about a vast blackmail-and-influence operation, about foreign intelligence services secretly operating the levers of U.S. imperial power. The precise allegations are somewhat slippery, and conspiracists can pick and choose their point of entry, because above all the Epstein legend now serves as a new capacious monomyth for an increasingly paranoid and distrustful country.
Truthers are no longer pressing on the seams of midcentury monoculture to see where the consensus story might give way so much as threading together a kind of alternative consensus, both more suspicious and more visible. In place of falsifiable claims about otherwise inexplicable public phenomena, the Epstein story expresses a flexible, fit-for-all-purposes outrage at the perversity of the wealthy and the impunity of elites — whether you think the political class is full of child rapists or just that a bunch of powerful people believed they lived according to a somewhat different set of rules, beyond the scrutiny of more judgmental mortals.
This may help explain how MAGA Republicans could have obsessed over the story while also rallying behind a leader we already know was a friend of its central villain: In much the same way that evangelicals recognized Trump’s basic venality while nevertheless regarding him as their avenging hero, an Epstein truther could acknowledge the president’s previous friendship without giving up their belief that in any contest with corrupt elites, Trump the outsider was on the side of angels. It may also help explain how Democrats are now so opportunistically moving to capitalize, with Ro Khanna and Jon Ossoff and even Ritchie Torres sounding like Tucker Carlson or Benny Johnson in calling for a full and transparent release of information. Just a year ago, MAGA’s hysteria about what looked to them like a cover-up might have negatively polarized liberals into a “nothing to see here” position, but these days, anti-establishment gestures offer something like free political currency.
Trump, fighting with his outraged base, has dismissed their suspicions as obsessive and the story itself as a hoax, insisting that all “credible information” was already public. But even a pretty innocent account of what is publicly known, if you’re inclined to give one, feels still a bit itchy. Many of the world’s richest and most powerful people really do seem to have palled around with a registered sex offender. Even the supposedly aboveboard narratives of how he amassed his wealth don’t seem to add up. While the “client list” is more likely a figment of collective imagination than an actual document being withheld by Pam Bondi or Donald Trump, there hasn’t yet been a very satisfying explanation as to how Jeffrey Epstein became so well connected, crossing paths with Joe Biden’s C.I.A. director, William Burns, and Barack Obama’s White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, Bill Richardson and Larry Summers, Ehud Barak and Prince Andrew, Nathan Myhrvold and Bill Gates, among many, many others.
It’s often been said that the internet has brought about a golden age of conspiracy theory. But the paranoia is powered on the supply side as well, with so much once-shadowy behavior now visible in the daylight that reality can seem as if it has acquired a paranoid style, too. Sometimes you can’t help being suspicious.
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