The Jeffrey Epstein Saga is the Worst-Reported Story of All Time
Thanks to decades of misreporting, unproven conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein are the one thing uniting both camps of American politics.
In expectation of a release of documents pertaining to the Jeffrey Epstein case, reporter Michael Tracey and I are putting out first entries in a series, dealing with prevailing myths and misunderstandings about this case. Michael has been almost alone (along with Jay Beecher) in even asking questions about the case, a role he’s familiar with after Russiagate. We’re glad to have his article, “The Five Craziest Things About the Epstein Case, Vol. 1,” also printed in Racket today.
The Justice Department was expected to release “several hundred thousand” documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case today, in an effort to meet the deadline of a new law mandating disclosure. So far they’ve put out something, but the website is glitchy, and there’s little to be gleaned. Still, it will kick off the latest mass-truffle hunt by media on both the left and the right, who’ll surely find a life or six to torch in the records. This is our duty, as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez earlier this week reminded us by tweet:
Reminder that the Epstein Files are supposed to be released on Friday and every political development that you see between now until then should be viewed with that in mind.
Ocasio-Cortez was tweeting in advance of a Wednesday speech by President Donald Trump, which was widely expected to feature a major announcement. Tucker Carlson, who’s been thundering about a “civil war” on the right caused by Israel-backed establishment Republicans pushing “neocon foreign policy” on unsuspecting populists, told Andrew Napolitano earlier this week that “members of Congress were briefed yesterday that a war is coming and that it’ll be announced in the address to the nation tonight.” A lot of people believed him, and the AOC announcement served as a warning to stay focused on the right conspiracy story.
The Epstein saga is the worst-reported story of all time. The world’s leading news organizations on a regular basis print easily debunked untruths. Crucial details, like a federal case built on a recovered memory, the chief accuser being an epic fabulist, or nearly a billion dollars in civil claims won by “survivors” who themselves may be “professional recruiters” (as one victim put it to me), are left out of coverage. Almost all of the drama is concentrated in the expectation of revelations around things that still theoretically could be true, like underage hijinks with a Clinton or Trump, or an arrangement with the Mossad, but the absence of evidence of these things is rarely reported.
Inconvenient facts excised, reporters have used remaining details to build the mother of conspiracy tales, a keyhole through which the world may see All The Secrets, except the evidence doesn’t support the marquee. On closer examination, most elements of popular belief about Epstein collapse, leaving a manic, breathlessly wrong legend that’s on track to be remembered as a combination of Salem and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. What’s really there:
Anyone looking back at the Epstein story will find it took significant narrative leaps at specific junctures.
Epstein became an infamous object of fascination once Vicki Ward wrote “The Talented Mr. Epstein” for Vanity Fair in 2003. In the time since, a combination of civil claims (particularly Virginia Roberts a.k.a. Giuffre’s bombshell accusations involving Prince Andrew in 2011), furious media treatments (like Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail) and real events (his ridiculously suspicious death on August 10, 2019) has turned Epstein into an all-things-to-all-theorists cottage industry, with plaintiff lawyers clocking over a half billion dollars in settlements and both Republicans and Democrats piling up political capital by accusing each other of hiding secrets, protecting pedophiles, even covering up their own complicity in Epstein’s death. As Michael Tracey’s written more than once, a hilarious irony of the current mania is that it was originally driven by people now within the Trump administration. Similarly, current all-Epstein-all-the-time network MSNOW was called MSNBC and denouncing Epstein conspiracy theories as illuminati-type nonsense just two years ago:
In the phase since 2019, the Epstein legend has built up to fantastic dimensions via serial abuse/misuse of words like pedophile, ring, blackmail, intelligence, and global.
No term has done more damage than “trafficker.”
“A lot of the mischief is around that word, and the confusion around the two indictments,” said one source close to the case.
On November 18th* of this year, a press conference was held at the Capitol. NBC News ran a piece about the event, which involved four people who’d previously accused Donald Trump of sex offenses announcing they’d signed on to a letter sent by “four relatives of Virginia Giuffre, an outspoken Epstein accuser who died by suicide in April.” It featured a picture of Epstein accuser Annie Farmer, over a caption describing how she, Farmer, spoke to “other survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring”:
Sex trafficking ring. Epstein abused a large number of girls (though how the FBI came up with the claim that he harmed “over one thousand victims” remains unclear), but was he operating a “ring”? There is a ton of evidence of encounters of a certain type. The common theme in stories about Epstein’s behavior, particularly in Palm Beach, is one in which he solicited local girls for activities that ranged from massages by girls clad in underwear only, to watching girls touch each other or perform sex acts on one another. There are comparatively few stories about intercourse (see below for a good guess at why). But is there a confirmed case of trafficking to a third party in the Epstein record?
No, not even close. Even the second Epstein indictment for “sex trafficking conspiracy” doesn’t make an accusation of trafficking to anyone but himself. Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of trafficking, but Epstein never had a chance to be convicted of that second offense. The reason for that is beyond mysterious, but still true.
Typically, commercial media deals with situations like this by using terms like “accused sex trafficker.” There are some envelope-pushers who’d go so far as to say “sex trafficker” or even “notorious sex trafficker” with someone like Epstein, though most editors would stay away from such language when describing any not-suicided person with a lawyer. But even the most aggressive publication should stay away from “convicted sex trafficker,” as that’s simply wrong.
That hasn’t stopped the world’s biggest news agencies from regularly using the term, none more aggressively than NPR. Go back to 2019 and you’ll see the station did a story about how the “convicted sex trafficker was found unresponsive in his cell.” Last January, they did a show on a “fresh round of conspiracy theories tied to the convicted sex trafficker.” This July, they described Trump promising to release documents about the “late tycoon and convicted sex trafficker,” then that same month did a feature about Trump, Pam Bondi, and “the truth about the convicted sex trafficker.” You can find more examples here, here, here, and here. America’s public news station constantly misidentifies Epstein’s legal status.
Bloomberg also went there (“documents related to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein”) as did CBS (“federal investigation into the death of convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein”) the BBC last week (“never-before-seen photos and videos showing the island property of late financier and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein”), old no-longer-friends Democracy Now! (“investigation into the dead convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein”) and countless others, including the New York Times! This is from just a few weeks ago, in a story titled, “In the House, Censures Proliferate, Reflecting a Poisonous Climate.”
The purported offenses ran the gamut. One Democrat plotted to handpick his successor, while another texted with the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. A Republican was accused by his colleagues of contracting abuses, faking his military honors and assaulting a woman at his apartment.
News organs aren’t the only institutions that do this. The House Oversight Committee wrote about the “non-prosecution agreement for convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein,” while the Democratic National Committee’s “War Room” newsletter roared this August about how Donald Trump is a “friend of the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein”:
I reached out to all of these outlets, as well as the House Committee and the DNC. Alone among them, Lisa Hornung of USA Today replied.
“Epstein pleaded guilty to a charge in Florida of procuring for prostitution a girl below age 18, which you could say is the same as sex trafficking,” she said. “But you’re right that it’s a fine distinction… I should probably call him a convicted sex offender instead of a trafficker.”
If you’re thinking these are minor complaints, you’re right. The far more serious question is not whether Epstein was convicted of trafficking, but whether he actually engaged in trafficking to other people, specifically other men and other powerful men. This distinction seems more than minor, considering that he’s become a symbol of the issue. Epstein was a villain and a monster, but what kind?
What drove him? Was he a true pedophile? The clinical definition requires a fixation on “prepubescent children,” which doesn’t appear to be the case here, though some of Epstein’s victims, like Carolyn Andriano, were as young as 14 when they met him. (Another source close to the case said he liked “flat-chested young women.”) But when it comes to legally proven events, this is at least partly a news phenomenon grown out of the historical accident of Epstein having lived in the state with the highest age of consent on earth, Florida. This allowed orgiastic use of the term “pedophile” (see Michael’s story), when the only proven act with a minor involved one victim who was seventeen at the time of the offense.
Did he hire women of any age to provide services to his many powerful friends? There’s no official accusation of this anywhere, which is remarkable given how prevalent is the notion of Epstein as a head of a “global sex trafficking ring.” In fact, three of the words used most often and most devastatingly with Epstein — global, trafficking, and ring — depend on one very dicey story about Prince Andrew told by perhaps the world’s most unreliable source, the late Virginia Giuffre.
Giuffre is reportedly the girl in a photo with Prince Andrew, and the source of the first public accusations against him, which incidentally were initially dismissed as Republican-inspired bull by Democratic-friendly press:
Giuffre not only appeared to be a regular recruiter but has an astonishing record of libelous inventions, including a retraction of eight years of extremely detailed claims of sex with Alan Dershowitz. Anyone wanting a quick introduction to the Virginia Giuffre factual experience need only look at this Instagram claim, made shortly before her suicide this year, of being severely injured in a bus crash:
Michael tracked down Australian public records of the bus incident and managed to get both photos and an incident report showing “no visible damage”:
When the Daily Mail tracked down the driver, he said, “There is no way you could get that injury if you were in that car.” Giuffre also set up a highly dubious NGO that will be the subject of future reports by Tracey.
This matters, a lot, because Giuffre’s claims about Dershowitz and Prince Andrew are the only tales that offer even a hint of what an Epstein “global sex trafficking ring” may look like. Undoubtedly he had powerful friends, ranging from Bill Gates (who is often mistakenly thought to have indulged at Epstein island, when in fact his wife Melinda simply felt “betrayed” by his association) to Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. It’s more than possible they swapped stories about sex or worse. But the evidence for either isn’t there.
What evidence does exist points instead to a scenario rarely considered in prominent outlets and recently not at all beyond the offhand comments of (of all people) Donald Trump; that the Epstein saga is a “sordid but boring” tale of one deeply disturbed sadist whose private paraphilias were just that, and for good reason. For one thing, Epstein’s legendarily odd-looking penis has been described as not just tiny but misshapen and possibly non-functional, perhaps from excess masturbation.
“It all leads back to his deformed manhood,” is how victim Rina Oh Amen put it to me, saying she believed Epstein couldn’t have “normal penetrative sex” with women, and that this made him sadistic.
Amen was initially invited by Omny Miranda Martone from World Without Exploitation to a November 18th press conference on the Capitol steps, that would feature Congressmen Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie. At the last minute Amen was removed from the program, ostensibly at the behest of Khanna’s office. “I greatly apologize, the member’s team just got back to us and said we will be unable to accommodate another speaker,” Amen was told, “because we are already over our initial allotted time.”
Amen is unpopular with the other “survivors” mainly because she’s in litigation with the estate of the late chief accuser Virginia Giuffre and is not shy about describing the activities of women she calls “professional recruiters.” With Giuffre in particular, there’s an abundance of evidence of a prolonged role as a recruiter. One of her friends described her to Jay Beecher on Substack as the “head bitch,” while another said her recruiting regimen was “probably like one [girl] a week, maybe two a week.” The government thought enough of such claims to include the testimony of late victim Carolyn Andriano at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial:
One of the amazing ironies of the November 18th press conference was that the members honored both Andriano and Giuffre, who in life were at odds. Andriano’s mother Dorothy once said Giuffre should “be behind fucking bars!” Andriano meanwhile punched a major hole in Giuffre’s claims of being forced to have sex with Prince Andrew “against her will” as part of a “sex trafficking scheme,” when in 2022 she told The Daily Mail that Giuffre texted about Andrew, “I got to sleep with him,” and Andriano said her belief was that Giuffre thought it was “pretty cool,” if the event even happened. Andriano’s first impression was “bullshit.”
Meanwhile a host of other “survivors,” many of whom are near-constant presences on cable TV in the most recent iteration of this scandal, are themselves admitted recruiters. Haley Robson, who ironically played a central role at the November 18th Khanna/Massie presser, gave a deposition in 2009 in which she talked about being a recruiter: “I didn’t have to convince them,” she said. “I proposed to them. They just took it.” Infamously, Robson is said to have compared herself to Heidi Fleiss in interviews with law enforcement.
Amen and others were careful to note that there was a difference between people like Giuffre, Robson and the quasi-professionals who were picked up at Palm Beach “whack shacks,” and girls who at a young age brought friends to meet Epstein once, twice, three times for a few hundred bucks. One former acquaintance, who asked not to be named, described the visitors as “in two groups, the clueless and the eyes-wide-open crowd.”
Either way, the notion of having a press conference to commemorate the likes of Giuffre without addressing her record is incredible, especially given the centrality of Giuffre’s stories to the public’s understanding of Epstein as a trafficker (she is the only source of claims about Andrew). Considering also the awesome sums that have been paid out to “survivors,” it’s irresponsible for members of Congress and media to leave that background out. I asked Khanna’s office both about disinviting Amen and about the number of women at their presser who had histories as recruiters. They ignored the Amen question, but Khanna gave this statement about the latter issue:
Some of the survivors themselves talk about their guilt in recruiting others so they didn’t have to face abuse. I found the stories harrowing and sickening. I believe all files must come out so the American people can get the truth.
Epstein supercharged the imaginations of conspiracy theorists because the worst-case scenarios of his tale appeal to a range of archetypal fears common to the left and the right (along with one big one that appeals to both). It’s adjacent to conservative fears about leftist child exploitation and internationalist cabals led by the Clintons, while the left sees #MeToo, Gaza, and the long-sought, finally disqualifying Crime of Trump. The stories merge in a theory not terribly dissimilar to the aforementioned Protocols, in which a network of Jewish financiers conspires in the shadows to obtain control of the levers of power, in this case through seduction, trafficking, and blackmail.
Except, there is no strong evidence of blackmail anywhere. There was a 2017 Wall Street Journal article that cited “people familiar with the matter” in suggesting that Epstein “appeared” to threaten Gates with exposure of an affair (not with a prostitute, but with Russian bridge player Mila Antonova) in a letter, but that story hasn’t exactly been proven out, and there’s never been any suggestion of political motive. There are people who’ve been quoted saying they believe Epstein blackmailed his key client Les Wexner, but that’s never been based on more than speculation.
As for “global trafficking,” there’s never been real evidence of that, a fact that is alternately ackowledged by whichever political party happens not to be in power and in possession of access to Epstein’s files. Politico last year pooh-poohed Epstein-mania as dumb MAGA fantasy, wondering “why the far right is obsessed with sex trafficking”:
This year is a different story, of course:
Did Epstein run a “global sex trafficking operation,” as Vice put it? Not if the only known “trafficking” is to himself. If the proof can’t be extended to that word, it is no more than a “sordid but boring” story.
https://www.racket.news/p/the-jeffrey-epstein-saga-is-the-worst