Not in the Epstein files: an institutional betryal

Picture: No Kings Protest, Washington DC, 18 October 2025

In the furore surrounding the release of millions of documents from the US government’s investigations into paedophile sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, we should remain focused on the important issues: the multiple injustices suffered by the young women and girls he abused.

That focus has already been lost to subsidiary scandals. Of course the morally and politically corrupt friends of Epstein, such as Peter Mandelson, should be held to account. Much more so should those who participated in abuse or facilitated it. As should those who chose to stay connected to Epstein after he was jailed in 2008 for soliciting prostitution and soliciting prostitution from a minor. They should take a long look at themselves as they must have known that he was guilty of much more than what was on his charge sheet. However, by focusing on the injustices and the fight against those injustices we will learn a lot more.

A lot of the injustice is embedded in the method of abuse used by Epstein – sex trafficking — the crimes which led to his 2008 conviction. US federal law defines the sex trafficking of adults as the use of force, fraud or coercion to compel sex acts in exchange for money or favours. When the victims are minors (under 18 in many US states), the law doesn’t require proof of fraud or coercion. It is in the nature of this crime that the victims will be poor, working-class and/or vulnerable.

Epstein ‘trafficked’ his victims from the run-down schools of West Palm Beach to Palm Beach, an island resort for the rich where he had a mansion. He used some of his victims as recruiters, plying them with cash.

The Florida police who initiated the first investigation, after the stepmother of one of the young women reported Epstein, at first tried to do right by these young women (although wrongly, they treated the recruiters as perpetrators). Epstein then threatened his victims and the local police and eventually the investigation was handed over to the FBI. At the point when the FBI investigators had more than forty women willing to give testimony, the state attorney shut things down.

For reasons that were never adequately publicly explained, the state attorney – Alexander Acosta, who went on to become Secretary of Labor in Trump’s first administration – agreed a plea deal with Epstein’s expensive lawyers. Epstein was charged with two relatively unserious offences and incarcerated in a low-security prison on a work release scheme. He subsequently told anyone stupid enough to believe him that the minor involved had lied about their age. The plea deal also included an unprecedented ‘non-prosecution clause’ so that he and potential co-conspirators could not be charged again for the same crimes. The full extent of his crimes – raping and sexually assaulting hundreds of victims – would not be made public.

FILTHY RICH

In the Netflix documentary series Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, one of Epstein’s lawyers, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, says in so many words that the lawyers trashed the victims, depicting them as unreliable witnesses. These women were uneducated, had multiple sexual partners, took drugs… how could any reasonable person believe them? In other words the class backgrounds and difficult home lives of the victims, the things that had made them more vulnerable to abuse, were used against them.

In the Netflix documentary the survivors very articulately describe how their lives had gone to shit after the abuse — because of course this would happen. Yet the state attorney’s office declined to explain these hardships and complexities of real life to a jury of peers. Instead they chose to take what they called an ‘unrisky’ course and lock Epstein up for 13 months in what one commentator has described as ‘a low grade motel’.

A further injustice is the fact that the full extent of Epstein’s crimes were made obscure enough for his rich and powerful associates to pretend he had been rehabilitated. That left Epstein free to rebuild his sex trafficking operation and abuse again and again. In fact Epstein was abusing women while he was in jail.

After his release from jail, some of his associates would see him out and about with young women in their late teens or early twenties, as he often was according to a Wall Street Journal investigation. What on earth did they think was going on? Other friends claimed they thought Epstein had rehabilitated himself. Perhaps some people are that naïve, or more likely Epstein’s wealth and connections overwhelmed their capacity or willingness to think.

According to the Wall Street Journal, from after his release from prison right up until his second arrest, Epstein entrapped young women, many from Eastern Europe, by promising to fund their education, and to get them jobs, especially modeling contracts. Epstein had part ownership of a modeling agency, MC2, in New York with Jean Luc Brunel – who after Epstein’s death was investigated in France and charged with raping minors. Brunel was another serial sexual predator whose downfall came long after his behaviour became an open secret.

CONNECTIONS AND CONSPIRACIES

Without his connections Epstein wouldn’t have been able to carry on his sexual exploitation. The fact that Epstein’s depraved activities were integrated into his social network – including sometimes ordering women to submit to sex with other men – has made many on the right and some on the left circulate conspiracy theories, including antisemitic ones. For example that Epstein was a US secret agent, or, in the antisemitic version, a Mossad agent.

These so-called theories, along with the sheer volume of text in the ‘Epstein files’, obscure the true realities. In fact, the social problem that Epstein embodied can be summed up like this: rich and powerful men abuse and exploit because rich and powerful men have a monstrous sense of entitlement and can often escape accountability. This is enabled by other powerful and influential people who want to benefit from the nexus of money and power created by the abuser. Anyone who wants to ‘blame it on the Jews’ is not only a grade-A idiot, they are doing Epstein’s victims (yet another) disservice.

The reason why the investigation into Epstein was reopened and he was arrested in 2019 can be ascribed to a few reasons, including the impact of the #MeToo movement, actions brought by civil case lawyers and investigative reporting by the Miami Herald. But the main force which turned things around was the brave, years-long campaigning by survivors to get their testimony into the public arena. This includes:
• Virginia Giuffre’s civil actions against Jeffrey Epstein, his abuse enabler Ghislaine Maxwell and the ex-prince, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor;
• A group of survivors who brought a legal action to have the 2008 plea deal ruled illegal for not consulting victims;
• Countless numbers of survivors who made complaints to the police, many of whom faced vicious threats from Epstein;
• Maria Farmer, a visual artist and survivor of Epstein’s abuse, who – having spent many years hiding from him – spoke out publicly against him and Maxwell in 2019.

A final injustice for the survivors was how Epstein’s suicide stopped them having their day in court. Small wonder many campaigned for the Epstein files to be released. Whether this brings us much closer to justice remains to be seen: that so many documents were so badly redacted the names of many victims were published, while other powerful figures continue to escape accountability, does not augur well.

As Annie Farmer, sister of Maria Farmer and another survivor put it when speaking of the battle to get the Epstein files published, said, ‘This is not an issue of a few corrupt Democrats or a few corrupt Republicans. This is a case of institutional betrayal. Because these crimes were not properly investigated, so many more girls and women were harmed.’