The Epstein Story Is Both Conspiracy Theory and Genuine Scandal

Opinion|The Epstein Story Is Both Conspiracy Theory and Genuine Scandal

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?