Jeffrey Epstein Part 4: The Non-Reckoning
When the culpable decide what counts as evidence
An audio version of this article (narrated by me) is available here:
Hi. Welcome back to the Epstein abyss, where the updates get increasingly disgusting and existential – like a never-ending train journey where the doors are jammed and the announcer just starts screaming. If you haven’t read my parts one, two, and three, please start there. For those already up to date: hold your noses, we’re going in.
What’s just happened?
In a nutshell: the survivors of a global child trafficking operation have been sidelined to protect the reputations of rich and powerful men.
The longer version: on Friday 30 January, three million files relating to the late paedophile and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein were dumped into the digital ether. They were late. Under the Epstein Files Transparency Act – passed by Congress and signed by Trump in November – all documents should have been released by 19 December 2025. The Department of Justice (DOJ) missed the deadline, citing volume, the need to redact “sensitive information”, and technical errors.
Redactions were supposed to be limited to victims’ identities and material that could jeopardise ongoing investigations (of which there are… none?). The Act itself explicitly prohibits withholding documents for reputational or political reasons. Ha!
Redactions for the men, exposure for the girls
Nearly 100 victims’ names, nude photographs, email addresses, and financial details were left unredacted. While men were shielded – names blacked out, statements obscured – survivors had the worst moments of their lives plastered across official government websites.
NICE. WELL DONE, EVERYONE.
This Monday, members of Congress granted access to un-redacted DOJ files said they found evidence that at least six men had their identities protected without any clear legal justification. After outcry, some names were eventually unredacted.
These are not all the files. The DOJ initially said it had over six million pages of material, but Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche explained this away as “over-collection”, saying only half was “responsive” (i.e. relevant). In other words: tough breaks. Go away. Blanche (who is, incidentally, Donald Trump’s former criminal defence lawyer) announced this disclosure marked “the end” of a “comprehensive review”. In other words: please go away. Once a final report goes to Congress and the DOJ publishes its redaction justifications, it will consider its legal obligations complete.
Its ethical obligations remain MIA.
What’s missing and why it matters
The missed deadlines and unreleased files have enraged survivors (and everyone else living with permanent ‘resting WTF face’ right now). We know there is “responsive” stuff in there, not least information on how Epstein secured his unbelievably lenient 2008 plea deal avoiding federal prosecution, let alone stuff on other perpetrators and facilitators.
Amy Wallace, co-author of Virginia Giuffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl, told The News Agents USA that she knows Giuffre made official reports about another individual, yet those reports have not been released. As Jennifer Plotkin of Merson Law, representing more than 30 Epstein survivors, put it: “The release of the files proves the government failed the victims over and over again.”
What we’ve learned from what we’ve got
The files have whipped the cover off a fetid swamp. A hellhole. A terrifying gilded underworld with bad art (have you seen inside Epstein’s houses?). This is what we know so far:
That many of the world’s most powerful men are casual rapists, sexists, homophobes, racists, and grifters. They don’t think 14-17 year olds are too young to consent. (14 seems to be the cut-off of acceptability in paedo-apologist circles, the number thrown around as “not too young”. Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis, though, recently pulled a 180, having originally been dismissive of efforts to force wider disclosure saying “I don’t care”, she now admits it’s worth investigating, stating: “But nine-year-old victims ... wow”. So, nine is clearly the cut-off for Lummis.)
This turnaround proves something else, too: the importance of transparency. That people are lazy and want an easy life. They’re uninterested until forced to confront the evidence head-on, and even then will look to excuse either the perpetrators or their own previous disinterest.
We’ve also learned that many men believe they are inherently owed sex and that wanting to sleep with girls or vulnerable young women is normal. Acceptable. Desirable.
We know many of them are liars. Just outright liars. We know that despite years of protestations to the contrary, many remained in contact with Epstein after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution. Howard Lutnick, current U.S. Secretary of Commerce, previously claimed he was so disgusted by Epstein that he vowed never to see him again. Yet, the files show he visited the island in 2012. With his wife. And his children.
Ex-Prince Andrew told journalist Emily Maitlis that the infamous photograph of him with Virginia Giuffre was “probably” faked. Yet, emails show Ghislaine Maxwell recalling not only the evening in question, but specifically that photo being taken.
We learned that these people prioritised power, access, favours, and being “in the gang” over giving a microscopic shit about women and girls, ethics, morality, or the foundations of basic human decency. One of the more fascinating details from the latest tranche is the bizarre economy of favours Epstein ran like a well-oiled machine: Prada bags, free plane rides, jobs for someone’s kid on a Woody Allen film. He’d get it for them, and in doing so, sleaze his way up the greasy social pole. He knew things. He knew people. He leveraged both until he became too useful and too dangerous to discard. I think that’s how he got away with it for so long: playing on the needs of the greedy.
I just had no idea how greedy people were and how much they were willing to overlook to get what they wanted.
Epstein wasn’t a Svengali. He was just creepy.
I’d assumed he must have had something. Some hypnotic magnetism that at least offered a vague (if still unforgivable) reason for why so many people fell under his spell. A Svengali who somehow convinced people that the young girls in his house were there to —
Nah, I’ve got nothing.
The files prove he wasn’t some dazzling operator hiding a dark side. He wasn’t a Randall Flagg (a Stephen King character) or a Satan from Paradise Lost. He was an awkward, ‘off’ weirdo. The kind of man who makes you want a Ring doorbell and a stronger lock. This proves that riches and power really are all you need to get away with anything.
The only other explanation is blackmail.
The photographs from the files are astonishing. How were they taken? Who took them? Under what guise? If my creepy AF pal leapt into the room while I was chatting to an underage girl in my Y-fronts and pulled out a camera, my first response wouldn’t be “Loooool! Classic Jeffers!”
Did these people not care? Did they think they were invincible – despite Epstein having already been convicted? Did they think it was worth the risk? Or were many images taken with hidden cameras?
My bet is: all of the above.
Where does Trump fit in?
There are no direct communications between Trump and Epstein in this release. The New York Times, however, identified more than 5,300 files containing over 38,000 references to Trump, Melania, Mar-a-Lago, and related terms. That’s considerably more mentions than “Jesus” gets in the Bible, FYI. According to Todd Blanche, none of this warrants further investigation.
Claims about Trump circulating online largely stem from unverified tips to FBI hotlines, which carry no evidentiary weight. Trump is notoriously litigious, so everyone’s watching what they say. Including me. (Kind of.)
Trump, meanwhile, has claimed the files “absolve” him, celebrating that this is “the opposite of what people were hoping, you know, the radical left.” The fact that a sitting U.S. president centres himself when confronted with evidence of industrial-scale child abuse, misogyny and potential insider trading would be funny if it weren’t so dystopian.
The fallout
What fallout? WHAT FALLOUT?
Yes, Peter Mandelson has resigned from the UK House of Lords and faces potential legal trouble over information he may have passed to Epstein. Yes, ex-Prince Andrew has lost titles and his grace-and-favour gaff. But systemic accountability? Nada. Bupkis. Bollocks all. Ghislaine Maxwell – a woman, let’s not forget – is still the only person in jail. She still apparently trafficked underaged girls to nobody but Epstein.
Notably, most visible consequences have landed in the UK – and even there, the focus is on what Keir Starmer did or didn’t know, rather than on the women, what was done to them, or what justice might look like. It’s bizarre, but the person who has so far received the loudest public battering is the UK Prime Minister who isn’t even in the files. In the US, the DOJ has effectively shrugged. The loudest official calls for accountability still circle the Clintons. Bill, fine, makes sense. But Hillary? There’s no evidence she ever even met the man.
Attorney General Pam Bondi was dragged kicking and screaming in front of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday to answer criticisms about the handling of the release. It was, um, not a fun watch? I have a two-year-old son. When he disappears something I’m looking for, he is decidedly less combative and evasive than Bondi was. She followed the Trump team playbook to the letter: deny, deflect, defend. She blamed the previous administration, refused to apologise to the survivors present in the room, and when flustered, resorted to personal attacks.
At the time of writing, anyone implicated in any possible abuse is getting away with it. There is growing pressure for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to give evidence to Congress, but hahaha to that ever happening. There are also legal rumblings both in the UK and wider Europe about investigating secret trading and financial impropriety, but as for the rape? No go.
Why isn’t the law talking to survivors?
Here’s what I keep tripping over: why aren’t survivors being formally interviewed again? Why aren’t their accounts being re-examined in light of everything we now know?
The official answer is procedural. The DOJ and FBI concluded their investigation into Epstein’s potential co-conspirators in July 2025, having found “insufficient evidence” to charge unindicted third parties. Internal memos insist there was no definitive “client list” and no proof Epstein was running a trafficking network for anyone other than himself. Photos and videos, prosecutors say, do not clearly depict additional perpetrators(!).
“But what about the dozens, if not hundreds, of women all sharing the same stories?” I hear you cry. To which the official answer is: ‘females’ are silly, hysterical, and untrustworthy.
Many survivors were judged unreliable because their accounts shifted over time – a well-documented feature of trauma and of, you know, being human – and because misogyny is baked into the machine. Girls and women, especially young and poor girls and women, are still treated as unreliable narrators of their own lives. That comes as standard, let alone when they’re accusing billionaires and power brokers. Their testimony is labelled “emotional”, “messy”, or “hard to verify”, even when history keeps proving they were telling the truth all along. (Institutions prefer documents to people because paper can’t accuse them back.)
Also, threats and harassment have silenced other survivors. They’ve been intimidated physically, emotionally, and reputationally, and face real risk of being sued. You can’t blame them for distrusting a system that has failed them, repeatedly, for decades.
Investigating their stories creates obligations: following the threads, naming names, confronting how badly institutions failed – and why. It opens the door to liability, lawsuits, and the deeply uncomfortable likelihood that people still in power should have acted, and didn’t, or worse, were directly involved.
Take Virginia Giuffre. She spent her life trying to expose what happened and was vilified, harassed, mocked, stalked, and called a liar – not just by strangers online, but by the most powerful people in the world. In the end, she took her own life. Despite this, people still say: “But she could have left!” “Maybe she wanted to.” “14-17 isn’t that young.”
It’s much easier to frame Epstein as a lone monster than as the centre of an abuse pipeline protected by money, status, and wilful blindness. It’s much easier to dismiss any hint of wider conspiracy as Q Anon-adjacent nutbaggery (even though, let’s be honest, this really isn’t that far off the Pizzagate theory). It is much easier to pretend none of this matters, that it’s all a lot of fuss about nothing, than to acknowledge how monumentally screwed up it is.
All of which is why, despite survivors and their lawyers, members of Congress, MPs, journalists and the general public pushing for more, the systems remain determined to protect themselves.
However, a devastating spotlight has been shone on the everyday behaviour of the power class that cannot be switched off. We now know how those men talk about girls and women, let alone how some treat them in person. We know how the favour system works. And soon we’re going to know if gaslighting on a global scale works, too.
Because sure, they can deny, deflect and defend; they can undermine journalism; they can buy silence; and they can hide behind lawyers, titles, bluster, ‘flooding the zone’, and carefully worded statements. They can commission reviews that go nowhere, invoke privacy when it suits them, and rely on the old boys’ network to close ranks. But they can’t unknow what we all now know. The record exists. The patterns are obvious. And once the public understands how the machinery works – who protects whom, who looks away, who benefits – it becomes much harder to pass it off as coincidence or to blame someone else.
Or so I hope.
Just One More Thing
What would you look away from to get a free plane ride or a Prada bag? Lots of people who answered “the sex trafficking of children” are running the world.
The lid has been lifted on one of the greatest institutional failures of our time and the resulting whitewash. It proves what women have been saying for years: that even when there are emails, photos, videos, witnesses, and corroborating accounts from dozens of other survivors, belief is still conditional and excuses are still plentiful. If the conversation around gender-based violence continues to centre male reputations over female lives, is it any wonder women are so angry and exhausted?
It all feeds the growing sense of hypernormalisation: a deep unease that everything is off and that truly mad shit is being normalised – but that those in power are simply refusing to acknowledge it, leaving us all to question ourselves and our sanity.
We have to keep pushing: sign the petitions, join the marches, write the articles, call people out, repost the facts, make the art, teach the kids in our lives differently. Apathy is how they win. We have to stay mad and disgusted, even though we’re so bloody exhausted.
*My new book, Own Your Calm, is published in March 2026! Available across the US and Europe (in English), I’ve included the UK link here but please do check your local bookseller: Own Your Calm UK. I have written eight other (bestselling) mental-health books which have been translated into dozens of languages. I’ve also written a book about the TV show Friends which would make a delightful gift for any Friends obsessives. All are available to buy online or at your local bookshop.
But what of the dow jones?