The hypocrisy of the Epstein panic Conspiracy theorists ignore a bleaker truth

It is with some reluctance that I point out the obvious: things are once again going bonkers on the internet. First came the excesses of #MeToo; now we have #JeeToo. Thanks to the recent Department of Justice file dump, the knives are out for every non-trafficked person who ever sent a friendly message to Jeffrey E. Epstein’s “vacation” email account. Guilt-by-association is the medieval method of diagnosis, and reputational destruction the cure. 

Talk of moral panics is cheap, but during an actual one, what is going on becomes difficult to name. Usually keen detectors of collective cortisol spikes go quiet, for the category of perceived evildoers has now started to expand chaotically. Make one incautious statement about insufficiency of evidence or the importance of due process, and you might find yourself in there too.

Still, it has to be said: there is definitely something dysfunctional going on. To press this point is compatible with noting matters of genuine public interest in the files: for instance, indications that Peter Mandelson and the former Prince Andrew passed on privileged financial information to Epstein, now being reviewed by police. Other countries are also belatedly realizing that when politicians or royalty get too close to billionaires, national interests can start to look horribly parochial. 

But there isn’t much excitement in a whiff of financial corruption on its own — as demonstrated by the relative silence on a recent Wall Street Journal scoop involving a UAE microchip contract and $500 million investment in a Trump-owned firm. The presence of colorful sexual scandal is clearly the magic extra ingredient that ensures a feeding frenzy. And yet, strangely, the files don’t offer much in the way of interesting new information in that respect.

This is not because they are low on sleaze — on the contrary. It is rather that we already knew about it. We have long been aware of Epstein’s exploitative sex crimes against minors and Maxwell’s grooming of victims. There have been interviews, documentaries, books. We also knew about the constant presence of very young women, the nightmarish taste in vaguely pedophilic art, and the boast of keeping a copy of Lolita by his bedside.  

On this basis, we could surely have guessed about the pornography on hard drives, the women offered as gifts, the gynecologist on speed dial. For years, it has been obvious that many friends and associates must have turned a blind eye to the lubriciousness pouring off the man, and that a few of them were probably similarly inclined.

When Mandelson was appointed as an ambassador, the basic facts about Epstein were all in the public domain, and most did not care about the personal connection — a fact which makes the current hypervigilance about further associates look bogus. Some now seem to be playing a game of Six Degrees of Separation, but with Epstein in the place of Kevin Bacon. The mycologist Merlin Sheldrake was in the papers this week merely for discussing taking a large grant from Epstein, though in fact the two never met and no money changed hands. Elsewhere, the chairman of the Los Angeles Olympics organizing committee is under pressure to resign. The main charge is that he had a flirtatious email exchange with Ghislaine Maxwell in 2002. 

This feels like overcompensation, but is still fairly vanilla compared with the absolute scenes in cyberspace. A dump of one million files with little immediate context has proved irresistible to online detectives. The main rule of interpretation is that every document deserves the most lurid treatment possible. 

Any off-color remark or hyperbolic statement made in a private context — quipping about attending a “paedophile convention” with Woody Allen, or writing of an unnamed other “I give you permission to kill him” — is to be understood perfectly literally. Epstein’s ordering of a reproduction of “Massacre of the Innocents”, a 1591 painting by the Dutch old master Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, should be taken as a direct confession of baby-killing. 

In this hysterical register there is no irony; no possibility of a malignant personality knowingly satirizing his own infamous reputation; and nor are there any mistakes or coincidences. Pity the chef mentioned several times in the files, charged with satisfying Epstein’s apparently large appetite for “jerky”. This has been interpreted by internet sleuths as a secret code for human remains. In retrospect, the chef probably regrets his professional connection with the disgraced financier; and I bet he regrets naming his former restaurant Cannibal even more.

In one sense, this was all inevitable — the result of the ungovernable internet getting rocket fuel from the monetization of clicks. A variety of bedroom-based obsessives are teaming up to bang their drums together: I won’t mention your rampant antisemitism if you support my quest to bring down Harvard elites. But even mainstream commentators seem prepared to endorse madly conspiratorial claims as long as it will hurt their enemies. Given the unusual range of Epstein’s social associations, there is material in the files for score-settling in many directions; though frustratingly, nothing juicy for Trump haters yet.

There is a way of using the term “moral panic” which purports to exhibit a worldly indifference to Epstein’s sexual decadence, and a contempt for critics’ irrationalism and prudery. In this view, the panicking is bad but the moralizing is worse. I only half agree. People should certainly stop panicking, but they are not moralizing nearly hard enough. 

Were people to stop the former, the files would provide ample material for less dramatic, more acute critique of familiar human weaknesses. It’s like a satire of modern hypocrisies brought to life. There’s Deepak Chopra, the New Age spiritual guru who refers to Epstein’s “girls” as if they were a string of polo ponies; Noam Chomsky, the famous Left-wing intellectual apparently indifferent to the economic exploitation under his nose; Lawrence Krauss, the astrophysics professor dealing with his own allegations of sexual assault, asking the veteran offender for advice. (Epstein’s irritated verdict is also recorded for posterity: “you may be a great scientist but you suck at this sexual harassment game.”)

After the file release, Chomsky’s wife protested in her husband’s defense that Epstein “began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities” in order to “ensnare” him. You can see the same dynamic with Krauss in the emails: a car sent on a family holiday here; a lawyer paid there. One particularly dependent cognitive scientist, Joscha Bach, seems to have received plane tickets, an apartment, and tuition fees for his children at a private school. This may not have been prostitution, but there was definitely a kind of quid pro quo expected of academics taking Epstein money: they had to accept his rules, help him to perform philanthropic respectability for the outside world, and offer intellectual stimulation to keep him amused. While the women had to pretend to enjoy sex, the men had to feign interest in his ideas about the nature of consciousness.

But perhaps the biggest lesson to draw from the publication of the files concerns the reaction to them. The basic elements in the Epstein story that make his behavior abhorrent are, in fact, depressingly mundane. I have seen online outrage at child-like pornographic images in the files that would cause mere shrugging, had they been found on a different browser — not because they aren’t disgusting (they are), but because they are everywhere. And if you ignore the private jets and the Caribbean islands, everything awful thing that ever happened to a girl or young woman on an Epstein property would be just another day to many of those stuck in prostitution. Grooming, pimping out, coercive control, sexual exploitation, an insatiable appetite for extreme youth and novelty: all fall under the respectability cover of “sex work”. There was nothing unusual about Epstein’s perversions. He just had the means to indulge them to the max.

Yet it seems that onlookers can only get really offended about these sorts of events when there is another element to keep it spicy: for instance, if the perpetrators are billionaires. And even then, the topic cannot stay interesting for very long, apparently requiring further injections of drama to maintain fascination: tantalizing rumors about new names, or fantastical tales of murder and cannibalism. Before you know it, the discourse has run away with itself, and yet again the conspiracy theorists have failed to join up any actual dots.

The depressing fact is that sexual behavior like Epstein’s is absolutely standard in our society, in the twin forms of prostitution and the pornography industry. Not only that, but they are mostly tolerated. You can either take this as a defense of Epstein or as an indictment of society, and I do the latter. It’s great that we are all tough on Satanic cannibal billionaires now, but it would be good to channel all that outrage into something real. 

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