The Caligula-like antics of Jeffrey Epstein and friends occurred over two decades that saw the decline of America’s manufacturing sector and the subprime mortgage crisis, in which millions of Americans lost their homes.
If Epstein’s goal was to build a wall of protection around his abuse by surrounding himself with the well-connected, he failed in the end.
But both before and after he was first prosecuted for abusing girls, his correspondence described a network of people whose high-flying lives belied the struggles of ordinary Americans. And at the centre of that network was a sexual predator seemingly on top of the world.
“We’ve heard so much about the Epstein scandal over the past several years,” said Nicole Hemmer, a history professor at Vanderbilt University who writes frequently about political culture.
“And yet people do seem shocked by the scope of elite complicity in his world. It’s a level of corruption that the public is now getting a full view of.”
In 2002, Epstein hosted former President Bill Clinton and actor Kevin Spacey on a tour of African countries aboard his private jet.
His talent for entertaining attracted interest from one of the world’s richest men, Elon Musk, who emailed Epstein in 2012 to ask, “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Musk has said on social media that he “had very little correspondence with Epstein and declined repeated invitations to go to his island”.
There was of course his friendship with US President Donald Trump.
And he dispensed favours to, and rubbed elbows with, Woody Allen; Noam Chomsky, the linguist and intellectual; Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel in the Clinton investigation; Kathryn Ruemmler, a former Obama White House counsel who resigned on Friday as general counsel of Goldman Sachs amid scrutiny of her ties to Epstein; Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s top political allies; Deepak Chopra, the New Age guru; film producer Barry Josephson; Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard and former Treasury secretary; Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew; Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York; Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway; and a cavalcade of financial titans.
James Staley, who recently stepped down as the chief executive of Barclays in the wake of allegations involving his ties to Epstein, emailed Epstein in 2014 to suggest that upper-caste Americans like themselves were unlikely to ever face a populist uprising like the protests taking place in Brazil at the time.
Pointing to Super Bowl ads that year, Staley wrote: “Its all about hip blacks in hip cars with white women. The group that should be in the streets, has been bought off. By Jay-Z.”
The shocking nature of some of the revelations, combined with the prominence and status of those in Epstein’s orbit, has done nothing to quiet the conspiracy theories that his behaviour spawned and that both the right and the left have sought to weaponise for political advantage.
If anything, the raft of new details has spiralled into feverish new speculation with little or no factual basis.
In 2014, Epstein received an email from an associate whose name has been redacted that said in full: “Thank you for a fun night … your littlest girl was a little naughty”.
In another email, Epstein instructed a recipient whose name is also redacted to buy several sex toys, adding: “I want you to talk as nasty, vulgar, imaginative as you can … It will free your mind. Its like a mental sneeze.”
Epstein wrote to another undisclosed recipient in 2009, who was identified last week in a House hearing as Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, a powerful Emirati businessperson: “where are you? are you ok, I loved the torture video”.
Lacking context, such messages are subject to speculation about their meaning and provide fresh opportunities for those intent on drawing attention to themselves and their views.
An assistant to Epstein wrote to him in 2011: “I ordered sweet young coconuts from Thailand for you and they just arrived … just so you don’t have to drink juices from old hairy things.”
Underscoring how even the apparently mundane can be stretched into the potentially conspiratorial, frequent references to pizza have given fresh life to the discredited 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, in which prominent Democrats were said to be torturing and raping children in the basement of a Washington restaurant.
That the places and characters in Pizzagate are almost entirely different from the ones appearing in the Epstein files has not stopped some from insisting that there is a connection.
In an email exchange in 2018, Epstein’s urologist, Dr Harry Fisch, informed him that “You have refills available” and that “after you use them, wash your hands and lets go get pizza and grape soda” — a peculiar combination used in several emails between the two men that, Fisch wrote, “No one else can understand”. Fisch did not respond to an email request for comment.
“It was this exchange,” right wing podcaster Tucker Carlson said on his show last weekend, “that made us think, ‘Whoa, wait a second. Maybe the long-debunked conspiracy about Pizzagate wasn’t actually debunked, and maybe someone should take a closer look at this.’”
Hemmer, the Vanderbilt professor, said the shadowy nature of Epstein’s life, coupled with the Trump Administration’s haphazard production of the documents, was “bound to beef up a ton of conspiracy theories”.
Newly released video logs of the prison wing where Epstein was found dead, for example, suggest that a human figure not previously accounted for in the records was moving in the general direction of Epstein’s cell late that evening.
This has led some internet sleuths to conclude that Epstein, whose death in federal custody in 2019 was ruled a suicide, might have been killed.
Others have speculated that he might not be dead at all, given that Epstein testified in a deposition in 2017 that he had a barbed-wire tattoo on his left biceps, but no such tattoo is visible in the recently released photo of his body.
Representative Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who worked with former Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Representative Thomas Massie, (R-Kentucky), to pass legislation compelling the release of the documents, dismissed the conspiracy theories.
But, he said in an interview, “we must ask ourselves how we have produced an elite that is so immature, reckless and arrogant”.
Greene, who fell out of favour with Trump for repeatedly demanding the release of the Epstein files, said she felt some vindication about the behaviour of a male governing class they exposed.
“The files are giving us an inside look into a world that we all thought existed,” she said. “And we were all called conspiracy theorists for saying so.”
While Epstein’s remarkable web of connections suggests to some that he was a puppet master calling the shots for a cabal of elites, that same web offers at least some proof to the contrary.
Epstein counted presidents and Cabinet members as his friends, but his influence on American policymaking was negligible.
His chums in the media were not newspaper publishers and TV network chief executives but those farther down the food chain, including author Michael Wolff and a New York Times financial reporter, Landon Thomas, who left the paper after admitting that he had solicited money from Epstein for a personal charity.
Notably absent from his coterie were any federal prosecutors, judges, or law enforcement figures who could have allowed him to escape justice.
In the end, Epstein was arrested, charged with serious sex crimes and died in prison while awaiting trial. His associate Ghislaine Maxwell also remains incarcerated.
Still, that is far from a complete reckoning, Greene said.
She noted that none of Epstein’s male friends or associates had been imprisoned for their behaviour.
“And now the administration is saying it’s time to move on?” she said. “I don’t hear any of the victims saying that.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Robert Draper
Photographs by: US Department of Justice
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
