On an Entirely Predictable Series of Events - Part 3:

Epstein and a Woman's Worth

So…yea, we're talking about the Epstein files.

If you remember, we began this series with an admonition against hope, and I want to reiterate that here. No matter how bad the Epstein fiasco seems for Trump at the moment, there's no guarantee that this will still be in the news cycle a few months from now. By November, we could all be talking about Trump's newly released list of approved patriotic hairstyles or his dispatching of the National Guard to force the Gershwin Theatre to put on a Broadway adaptation of The Sound of Freedom.

At the same time, there is a very real chance that Trump's comically terrible handling of this story, along with the bridges burned with popular right-wing figures like Musk and Rogan, demobilizes a significant part of his voting base and neutralizes the anti-establishment aura that has given him the advantage against the historically unpopular Democratic Party.

While the horse race implications of Epstein's legacy are tantalizing to think about in a context where it may be the only thing preventing America from falling into full-throated authoritarian fascism, the way this story has captured the public consciousness is actually the more important and interesting aspect.

Who Was Jeffrey Epstein?

The sobering truth is that we will likely never know the full story behind Epstein's rise from middle-class obscurity to darling confidant of the rich and powerful elite, all the while operating a decades-long sex trafficking operation that purposely targeted young girls. The parts of his story we do know are filled with so many "wait, what?" moments that it almost feels like he was the villain of a poorly plotted Jack Reacher novel.

The less salacious version of events is that Epstein just had a way with billionaires and used his interpersonal skills to land a series of jobs that he was not obviously qualified for. Epstein dropped out of college before completing his mathematics degree at NYU, yet was hired to teach math and physics at the prestigious Dalton School. There he would spend two years being creepy toward his female students until he was fired for poor performance.

Apparently, an unqualified teacher who was fired for doing a bad job and had a history of showing up to student parties was just the kind of person that Bear Stearns CEO Alan Greenberg was looking for and immediately hired Epstein upon his dismissal from Dalton. Within four years at Bear Stearns, Epstein worked his way up from a low-level assistant to a floor trader to limited partner.

Again, his fortuitous employment situation ended somewhat abruptly when he was asked to leave the firm over regulatory violations. This didn't sour his relationship with them, and he remained a client of Bear Stearns until they folded during the 2008 financial collapse.

From then on, it seemed like money just found Jeffery Epstein. The majority of his fortune seems to have come from exactly two billionaires: Les Wexner, the CEO of L Brands and Victoria's Secret, and Leon Black, co-founder of Apollo Global Management.

Epstein became Wexner's right-hand man and was paid over $200 million in fees over the course of several years to sort out the CEO's finances. Eventually, Wexner granted Epstein power of attorney, which Epstein was alleged to have abused by posing as a recruiter for Victoria's Secret. Wexner distanced himself from Epstein when he was arrested in 2019 on sex trafficking charges, claiming that his former confidant had stolen money from him. However, it was alleged that Wexner knew of Epstein's predatory proclivities and ignored those who tried to bring it to his attention. Later he was directly named as a client.

Leon Black paid Epstein $170 million in fees over five years for tax avoidance advice. He was alleged to have been a participant in Epstein's systematized underage sex abuse in a lawsuit that was ultimately dropped by the accuser. Black beat another allegation in court, but in 2023 he paid the U.S. Virgin Islands $62.5 million to settle claims involving Epstein's crimes.

We aren't even scratching the surface here. There is just so much about Epstein's life story and massive fortune that invites conspiratorial thinking. But it just might be the case that the man was extremely charismatic and charmed his way into the lives and bank accounts of the American elite.

Then there is the other explanation: the one where Epstein wasn't just another in a long line of sociopathic financial hatchetmen who just happened to run an underage sex trafficking business on the side, but rather an intelligence asset who was allowed to commit his crimes with relative impunity in exchange for providing kompromat on his wealthy and famous clients.

Working from a tip made to the Palm Beach Police by a mother in 2005, the department launched a 13-month investigation into Epstein's solicitation of underage girls for prostitution. After the police chief accused the county prosecutor of slow-rolling the investigation, the FBI became involved, and soon after, Epstein was accused of abusing 34 minors based on a massive amount of evidence including witness interviews, pictures and videos recovered from searches of his mansion, high school transcripts in his trash, and even Amazon purchases of books on BDSM. A later exposé by journalist Julie Brown identified 80 potential victims of Epstein during that time.

Eventually, Alexander Acosta, the then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, agreed to a non-prosecution agreement negotiated by Alan Dershowitz (?!?) where Epstein was granted immunity from federal charges—an immunity that was extended to four named co-conspirators and any unnamed potential co-conspirators. This plea deal saw Epstein serve 13 months of an 18-month sentence at a minimum-security prison, where after a few months he was allowed work release for 12 hours a day, six days a week. He was granted unprecedented privileges during his incarceration and subsequent probation. The agreement also stopped any further investigation into crimes and potential clients and collaborators.

To add insult to injury, Acosta violated a federal law to keep the deal a secret from his victims.

So why did Acosta agree to such a ridiculously lenient deal for someone accused of horrific crimes on a massive scale? Well, in 2017, an anonymous source told a journalist at the Daily Beast that when interviewing with the Trump transition team, Acosta said he was told Epstein "belonged to intelligence" and that he should leave it alone. Acosta was interviewing with the Trump administration at the time ahead of his eventual appointment to the cabinet position of Labor Secretary. Because when you think of labor policy, you think of lawyers who inexplicably granted immunity to all potential co-conspirators in an underage sex trafficking operation based in the town where Donald Trump lives.

The Tweet

Liberals knew that Trump was in the Epstein files. The Left knew he was in the Epstein files. Most average conservative-leaning voters knew in their heart of hearts that he was in the Epstein files but tried not to think of such unpleasant things.

No liberal, leftist, or average conservative-leaning voter was going to convince MAGA faithful that Trump was in the Epstein files. But they kind of had to take Elon Musk seriously. Elon earned his bonafides, one Nazi salute at a time. Not to mention that Musk's breakup with Trump was ostensibly over Trump not being conservative enough in his Big Beautiful Bill. Trumpworld couldn't brush Elon's accusation away as coming from a hysterical liberal with Trump derangement syndrome.

Trump did not help matters by acting cagey and belligerent whenever the topic came up. First there was denial, claiming that the files that Pam Bondi once claimed were on her desk never existed. Then there was anger at reporters and supporters who dared to ask him about fulfilling a core campaign promise, when the administration was having so much success in destroying the capacity of the federal government, killing the economy, and dismantling civil liberties.

At the moment, we seem to be at the bargaining stage. No, you can't have the Epstein files, but how about the MLK files? Hey, wouldn't it be cool if the Washington Commanders football team changed their name back to the racial slur they previously used? How about instead of finding out who took advantage of Epstein's services, let's relitigate Russiagate and prosecute Barack Obama over it.

Trump is well-versed in flooding the zone with bullshit to distract from his glaring lack of competence and morals. But this time, it didn't really work. Trump clearly believed that his base thought of all this Epstein, child sex trafficking, and deep state conspiracy stuff the same way he did—a useful weapon against the Democrats that could be forgotten about the second it became inconvenient for him personally. But for MAGA faithful, this wasn't just a cynical rhetorical device; it was an existential fight between good and evil. For the influencers and podcasters who had built small fortunes stoking these flames, toeing the Trump line that there was nothing to see here would have been akin to taking a blowtorch to their careers.

Now, this is not to say that he has lost his entire base. There are plenty of people whose only attachment to politics is their hatred for liberal Democrats, who are willing to accept Trump's claims of innocence. And they have an answer for all these questions surrounding their president's involvement with a notorious peddler of underage girls—a response that is no less cynical and sweaty than all of the other attempts to distract people from the allegations against Trump, but somehow still manages to raise a good point.

If Trump is in the Epstein files... why didn't Democrats release them when they were in power?

With That Woman, Relations

We now know for a fact that Trump is in those files. It's been reported that Bondi told Trump he was in those files and had his name redacted in case they were ever released for real. So why didn't Biden have his DOJ release them to the public, even if Trump's alleged involvement was minimal? Especially given how much Democrats talked about the threat to democracy a second Trump term posed. The answer is depressingly simple.

They didn't release them because Bill Clinton is also in the Epstein files.

The obsession of the Democratic Party with maintaining the aura of Clintonism is both confounding and instructive. Many of Clinton's legislative successes in the 1990s are rightfully excoriated today and seen by many as the beginning of America's lurch toward Trumpism. He is a walking contradiction in liberal democratic politics. The party of workers, racial justice, and protecting women still venerates a president who deindustrialized large swaths of America with NAFTA, supercharged racist policing with his crime bill, and had a list of women accusing him of sexual assault almost as long as Trump's. Indeed, Trump's most deft campaign move was to deflect from the "grab them by the pussy" tape by bringing Clinton's accusers to a surprise public appearance before a debate.

One of the more disingenuous criticisms of the #MeToo movement at its heyday was questioning why so many women—many of whom possessed a measure of power in their own right—waited so long to levy accusations at the powerful men who they claimed abused them. To anyone actually paying attention, the answer was obvious: it was because of Monica Lewinsky.

In 2025, we all have a pretty good understanding that what Bill Clinton did to Monica Lewinsky was gross and abusive. It took us a while to get there as a culture, but it's pretty obvious that the person acquiescing to a blowjob for their boss doesn't deserve more ire and ostracization than the boss demanding blow jobs from his subordinates. But in the 1990s, we more or less treated Monica Lewinsky like a dumb whore—either starstruck by presidential dick or trying to get ahead by giving it.

Lewinsky was the butt of bad jokes; Bill became Slick Willie. Not only did his popularity among Democrats not take a hit, he arguably became even more popular by getting away with it and making Republicans look like petty little crybabies in the process.

Clinton is more than just an ex-president who used to be popular. He was the original standard bearer for the Democratic Party's neoliberal turn. He's the guy who took Democratic Party politics away from the shop floors and community centers and put it in C-suite conference rooms and on private planes owned by charismatic financiers headed to private islands for private parties. What Clinton means to the Democratic Party leadership is much more than the halcyon period of 1990s political dominance—he's the guy who gave them access to the perks of the elite.

And this is where we need to reckon with the real reason why the Epstein files will likely never be released in full.

It's because of us. We're all in the Epstein files.

A Woman's Worth

Despite the best efforts of feminist thinkers through the ages, it took us all the way until #MeToo to even begin to grapple with what we culturally allow powerful men to do to women as a matter of business. We recoiled in horror at all the details revealed about men like Harvey Weinstein's and Matt Lauer's predatory tendencies. We found the dark humor in the reported fumbling attempts of dirty old men like Andrew Cuomo to come onto their female staffers and coworkers. But did we really understand why these powerful men thought their behavior was okay? Why did they think they would get away with it?

For reasons that are just a bit out of the scope of this conversation, powerful men tend to believe that they are owed access to women's bodies. Rich and powerful men see themselves as objects of desire because we have collectively agreed that desirable manhood is attained through conspicuous consumption—consumption not just of goods and services but of other people. They justify their behavior by telling themselves that this is what women actually want. That a woman's worth is in being possessed.

Or as Donald Trump put it:

"I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything. (...) Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

And it's easy right now to say that these attitudes are disgusting and disturbing. We actually listen to women now... sometimes. It's even easier to say that men who prey on underage girls should be fed to a woodchipper. But it's hard to keep that energy up when every time one of our favorite male musicians dies, we rush to search their catalogues for questionable lyrics about teenage paramours or check Wikipedia to see if they've ever "dated" a 15-year-old.

This is the cultural milieu that Epstein weaponized. Whether you think he was an intelligence asset or not, people around him looked the other way when they saw underage girls being led behind closed mansion doors because that's just what powerful men get to do. That's what on some level we expect them to do.

It's not a coincidence that the Epstein story became national news and pop culture lore in 2017—we were in peak #MeToo. Epstein's documented crimes and 2007 slap on the wrist validated so much about what we were beginning to understand about systemic sexual abuse within our institutions of power. It was this brief moment in time when we were ready as a society to start holding these rich fucks accountable for being serial sex pests.

But that moment was brief. Franken and Lauer lost their careers, Weinstein went to jail... and that was it? Almost as quickly as the call for accountability became a cultural norm, the backlash to the "demonization of men for being men" came to stall any progress we might have made. In many ways, the popularity of Donald Trump with young men was the apotheosis of this backlash.

In Trump's image, conservatism—never all that friendly to women—became more outwardly hostile to what they saw as irrational feminine energy pervading social structures. Toxic empathy, as it were. Their performative hatred of pedophiles and groomers had little room for the concerns and needs of actual victims; it was always about what they were allowed to do to a political enemy who they could label as a pedophile or a groomer.

Anti-wokeness didn't take off until the backlash to #MeToo became the foundation of populist conservatism. Wealthy elites who had been stalwart Clinton-era Democrats realized that the party now represented a world where you could actually get in trouble for cornering the coat check girl in an elevator. This simply would not do. So they got on board with the anti-woke crusade. Sure, there were gripes about trans people and DEI training, and getting to openly endorse race science was a plus, but none of the other woke issues actually sent someone powerful to jail.

The Democratic Party leadership will not throw Clinton under the bus where he belongs, even if doing so could potentially end Trump as a political figure. How could they abandon Bill Clinton? They need his charisma for endorsing another serial sexual harasser in a race against something far worse than the systemic objectification and abuse of women... socialism. And isn't all this Epstein file stuff just a distraction from the real issues?

Those women who were abused just aren't worth it.

The cat's out of the bag though, at least for right now. Epstein isn't going away, and getting to the bottom of his crimes is a bipartisan priority. Bill Clinton's days of being too cool for this shit are long gone, and Trump's Teflon coating is starting to flake off in the morning eggs. At the risk of sounding like a true crime podcast finale, maybe the real story of Jeffrey Epstein is less about a conspiracy of elite predators and more about how we as a society decided to stop putting up with their abusive bullshit.

It will be interesting to see if the MAGA right will be a serious partner in this sea change. Whether or not the Epstein files ever come to light, the bigger question is: will those who feel betrayed by Trump's evasiveness on the issue follow that energy to its logical conclusion? That is, no red line for Trump's egomaniacal narcissism, not even the age of consent. That for all his populist posturing, he is just another New York City elitist who sees everyone with less money than him as beneath his consideration, just another product to be used and tossed away.

They've had plenty of evidence that this was the case: his multiple marriages, accusations of assault and rape, his professed habit of walking into the dressing rooms at his Miss America pageants, where some of the contestants were teenagers. They could wave all that away as just boys being boys. An association with Epstein puts Trump in the same circles that have been sold to them as the cancerous rot dragging America down. Can they ignore this now too? Some of them certainly are, but is it enough to hold together an already fragile coalition?

I can't say, but I can say it's going to be morbidly fun watching Trump sweat while we find out.

And if by some minor miracle, Trump's Epstein gambit leads to a real investigation of who participated in this child abuse club and those victims finally get some sort of justice, then it will be unequivocally the best thing that he's ever done.

Just don’t hold your breath.

Solidarity forever.

(Authors Note: Originally I had let this piece take me on one or two many tangents than were morally justifiable to put in this article and for the sake of my readers I killed a few darlings. But I couldn’t let them stay dead, so I’ll be posting the unabridged version of this article for paid subscribers. Thanks for the support!)