This past week has been full of what might be described as 'Epstein sewage eruption news' and has been absolutely mesmerising, like the case itself. But there is a deeper question: the whole enormous, frightening, appalling saga is transfixing, but is it important, and if so, how?
The Epstein saga is as transfixing as a sewage spill; you don’t even want to look, you know you shouldn’t, you can smell the moral hazard from three suburbs away, and yet here we all are, leaning over the railing, watching the froth, half-hypnotised, half-furious, and quietly wondering what this says about the plumbing.
What has happened over the past few weeks takes it all to a whole new level. Just consider some of the fallout:
- Goldman Sachs chief legal officer Kathryn Ruemmler resigned after documents showed she accepted gifts and advised Epstein on handling media inquiries about his crimes. This is Goldman Sachs we are talking about, the absolute pinnacle of global finance and snob wealth.
- The group CEO of Dubai ports company DP World, which has over 100,000 employees and operates in 69 countries, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, resigned when it became apparent he had shared porn sites with Epstein.
- Casey Wasserman, chairman of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, is putting his eponymous talent and marketing agency up for sale, following the release of suggestive emails he exchanged years ago with Jeffrey Epstein's associate Ghislaine Maxwell and the departure of high-profile talent from his firm.
Then there are a whole bunch of other things that happened which we knew about, things we knew something about, and some of which we knew nothing about.
And it wasn’t just sex: UK politician and former cabinet member Peter Mandelson, who is openly gay and one assumes would have no interest in raping underage girls like Epstein did, quit the Labour Party and later the House of Lords, amid scrutiny over emails suggesting he forwarded confidential government material and questioned payments for services. He says he doesn’t recall, but Bloomberg reports files suggesting Mandelson emailed Epstein the day before a major euro rescue facility was announced in May 2010, telling him it would be announced “tonight.”
If you are not a conspiracy theorist already, may I invite you to become one? Mandelson apparently suggested that the JPMorgan boss should call the chancellor and “mildly threaten” him. In the December 2009 emails, Epstein asked about taxes on corporate bonuses.
This aspect of the case is so vile that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer did that thing - betraying his friend to preserve himself. Morgan McSweeney (Starmer’s chief of staff and old adviser) resigned, explicitly taking responsibility for advising Starmer to appoint Mandelson despite known links.
Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 comes to mind, in which the character Doc Daneeka articulates a deeply cynical, reversed version of the John 15:13 "greater love" scripture. Daneeka says, absurdly like most of the novel, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down the life of his friend for his own." The betting markets are now predicting Starmer will be booted by the end of the year, and if that happens, then it will be the first government collapse rooted in the Epstein saga.
And just a reminder here that this is all about something so depressingly, sadly tragic - young women full of hope and naivety, lured by false promises and outright lies, used like tissues and thrown away. For years. By the hundreds. A whole process assisted and condoned not just by men but by other women! It's gut-wrenching.
And that gut-wrenching aspect of this whole case is, in a way, its greatest weakness. The story’s 'mesmerising' quality is precisely the problem: it’s a perfect attention trap - sex, wealth, secrecy, scandal, famous names, and mystery. It can crowd out less cinematic but more important issues like systemic and grotesque judicial failure, which is totally typical of sexual abuse cases.
In some ways, it involves a monster-fixation problem. The case can comfort us with a tidy villain who is 'mysteriously' and gloriously dead, while the broader reality, widespread exploitation, grooming, trafficking dynamics, and institutional dereliction of duty are all neglected.
I have a theory about why this story has dominated the news for so long, and it's not just about the sexual undertone; it's about gender. Men are captivated by the saga out of a sense of guilt because men are biologically inclined to be attracted to younger women. This means that even for men who find the story repellant they do, in their heart of hearts, understand. Women are transfixed by the saga out of fear: all of the vulnerability and danger of being a woman is writ large in the Epstein epic. In their heart of hearts, they recognise how good-looking young women might naturally leverage their looks to climb up the ladder into the heady atmosphere of possibility and the super-rich.
There is also another big problem: the saga is uniquely portable as a political weapon. Because it involves prestige and shame, it’s endlessly useful for insinuation: “X was connected, therefore X is guilty.” That dynamic can corrode due process and turn genuine concern for victims into factional mud-slinging.
Think about the case of Bill Gates, who has given away almost $60-billion in his quest to improve African healthcare, among many other causes. It's now, I think, an overstatement to say that Gates has saved millions of African lives.
Draft emails on Epstein’s account claimed Gates tried to hide a sexually transmitted disease from his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, after having sex with “Russian girls”. A spokesperson for Bill Gates has said the claims are “absolutely absurd and completely false", demonstrating only Epstein’s “frustration that he did not have an ongoing relationship with Gates,” the Financial Times reports.
But Gates did have several interactions with Epstein, and has acknowledged publicly that he was “foolish” and that he “regrets ever having engaged with Epstein”. And it must be part of the reason his wife divorced him.
Gates was lured by Epstein’s claims that he could mobilise significant philanthropic resources for global health through a fund, but the Gates Foundation said it made no payments to Epstein, did not pursue any collaboration with him, and no fund was ever created. I have the feeling that Gates may be an example of a fairly innocent bystander being tarnished more than they are due, but we don't know.
This all took place after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for solicitation and procuring a child for prostitution. So there is that, oh and a bunch of pictures of Gates with redacted women. There are also pictures of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, New York Times columnist David Brooks, President Trump’s one-time top strategist Steve Bannon, Noam Chomsky, and filmmaker Woody Allen, natch.
You have to hand it to Epstein, he was adept at the most intense form of fraternising, hobnobbing, and socialising, and he was determinedly non-ideological about it. His “product” was never a measurable expertise you could put on a CV; it was a kind of social capital - proximity, access, introductions, and the glossy suggestion that he could open doors that don’t open for normal mortals.
And in that sense, he was taking advantage, literally, of the network effect, where a product gets more valuable as more people use it, like social networks. In the case of the elite/social network effect, a person becomes more “valuable” as more high-status people are seen to know them. Of course, that works both ways: if you fall out of the network, you fall fast and far.
To end, just back to the original question, the Epstein story is mesmerising, but is it important? I think it is, and here is my argument:
Institutional accountability matters. The saga revealed systemic failures across law enforcement, the justice system, and elite institutions. His 2008 plea deal, where he served just 13 months for soliciting prostitution from a minor, exposed how wealth and connections can bend justice. Understanding these failures is essential for reform.
It illuminates power structures. Epstein's connections to presidents, princes, academics, and business leaders raise legitimate questions about how such networks operate and protect their members. Whether or not specific individuals knew of, or participated in, his crimes, the case reveals how wealth creates insulation from scrutiny and consequences.
It shapes public trust. When a story convinces large numbers of people that “there are different rules for different classes,” that changes civic behaviour, including jury attitudes, willingness to cooperate with police, voting patterns, policy demands, and even conspiracy susceptibility. In that sense, it’s politically and socially consequential whether or not every claim is true.
It’s a mirror for how information spreads. The saga is also about media incentives - what gets covered, what gets buried, what gets sensationalised, and how misinformation can piggyback on legitimate outrage. How was he able to continue after conviction? These aren't tabloid curiosities; they point to potential corruption and systemic vulnerabilities. That’s a modern governance issue in itself.
And just in case you think there is an end to this, there is not. The big unanswered question is how he acquired his wealth. At his death in August 2019, Epstein's estate was valued at approximately $577-million. The estate has since declined dramatically to around $120-million, though some sources cite figures ranging from $145-million to 200-million depending on when the assessment was made.
The reduction is a result of $17o-million paid in victims' compensation to the most eligible claimants by 2021; $105-million went to the U.S. Virgin Islands in settlement of civil racketeering charges; the estate initially paid approximately $190-million in estate taxes (and incredibly got some of it back!); and properties were sold for far less than appraised values.
But still, the money has not yet been followed.
There is one genuinely useful takeaway (useful in the way that soap is useful after you’ve touched something revolting) from this Epstein sewage eruption news. It matters most when it illustrates the need for better rules (for victims, for prosecutors, for disclosure, for oversight), and it matters least, indeed it becomes harmful, when it devolves into a “list culture” that treats reputations like kindling and mistakes like acceptable losses.
Epstein is where the crisis of institutions meets the crisis of information, and the casualty, unless we’re careful, will be justice itself. 💥
From the department of the A-bsolutely not meaningful ...
Neal Riley Digital Producer, CBS Boston
From the department of rewriting imagination ... and tea parties ...
From the department of the CIA no longer bothering so much about the facts ...
Bill Chappell
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Tim Cohen
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