This week, I am presenting a roundup of the latest Epstein Files release, including several original documents from the DOJ release and social media clips explaining them, for people not super-focused on the Epstein Files — a group that, anecdotally, seems to include most of the people in my social, professional, and social media circles.
Why? Because, as I’ve written twice before, while ICE, authoritarianism, and the threats against the 2026 elections are probably the most important substantive stories of the moment (if not the decade), the Epstein Files may be more lethal to Trump as a leader and MAGA as a movement. It is not a sideshow: it is a total betrayal of the trust that millions of people placed in Donald Trump, and that is important. It is realigning American politics, and reaffirming that the cleavage of top/down is more important than left/right. I’ve talked about this in my earlier pieces and won’t repeat the analysis here — but it would be a real mistake to trivialize or skip over this episode in American history.
It is also an important ethical story, as we are learning more and more about how many of our society’s elites either tolerated or participated in the brutal exploitation and trafficking of teenage girls. It is a story of profound moral and spiritual decline that spans ideological boundaries. And if you think you know all you need or want to know — just you wait.
At its heart, this is about the years-long (perhaps decades-long) organized rape of teenage girls by some of the most powerful people in the world, girls who were systematically exploited, mocked, disbelieved, ignored, and never given the justice they deserve. The women are the moral center of this story. And unbelievably (or not), they were again victimized by Trump’s DOJ last week, which, while redacting hundreds of names of abusers, unconscionably and unforgivably released hundreds of names and un-redacted images of victims. More on that below.
Now, it’s easy to be cynical about all of this and simply write it off. “What did you expect,” one might rhetorically ask. Well, scroll through this post and see if you hold that view by the end. See if you’re not as shocked as I’ve been — not because you and I are naive, but precisely because we aren’t naive and this is still shocking.
Finally, before we begin, one word of caution: there is a wide mix of stuff out there on the Epstein files, and a lot of it is extremely speculative. (Some is wacko, and some, as I’ll discuss below, is antisemitic.) Remember, the best argument against releasing the files is that nothing in these files is proven. Some of the emails do speak for themselves, but in general, files like these contain everything law enforcement agencies gathered about a person of interest, and that means they are intentionally over-inclusive. As it should be — we want law enforcement to chase down any lead they have, even if many (or most) of them turn out to be false. But that’s also why files like this are not usually released; many innocent people and unprovable theories get included as well.
Don’t worry, though: there’s plenty of guilt to go around. Beginning with this guy:
1. Trump Trump Trump
Donald Trump is all over the new release of files — and those are the ones that the DOJ didn’t exclude or censor. One statistic that’s been making the rounds is that Jesus’s name appears in the Bible around 1,200 times, Harry is mentioned 18,956 times in the Harry Potter series, but Trump’s name shows up over 38,000 times in the Epstein files. Now, admittedly, the Bible is not three million pages long, but it’s not just mentions: it’s incriminating, worrisome stuff. To recap from some of the earlier releases, here’s an email from Ghislane Maxwell to Epstein:
and this one from Epstein to Larry Summers:
![May be an image of ticket stub and text that says 'From: Sent: jeffreyE (jeevacation@gmail.com] 2/8/2017 9:53:21AM AM Larry Summers Re: Subject: Importance: High recall ive told you body. yes- dangerous have mct somc very bad On Wed, Feb 8, 2017 It's ok. BOB as bad as trump. 12:03 AM, Larry Summers not onc decent ccll in his He didn't wreck world and avoided scandal. wrote: What does Ruemmler say re his attitude towards women? Sent from my iPad Plcase direct all scheduling inquiries to my office at:'](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KaJa!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67006e21-07c8-4c44-893b-16c2c5a823f1_558x290.jpeg "May be an image of ticket stub and text that says 'From: Sent: jeffreyE (jeevacation@gmail.com] 2/8/2017 9:53:21AM AM Larry Summers Re: Subject: Importance: High recall ive told you body. yes- dangerous have mct somc very bad On Wed, Feb 8, 2017 It's ok. BOB as bad as trump. 12:03 AM, Larry Summers not onc decent ccll in his He didn't wreck world and avoided scandal. wrote: What does Ruemmler say re his attitude towards women? Sent from my iPad Plcase direct all scheduling inquiries to my office at:'")
In the new batch, there are excerpts from the journal of a sixteen-year-old girl who was abused by (and apparently impregnated by) Epstein, clearly implicating Donald Trump as well. Here’s a video about them:
Now, that’s not been established in a court of law — it’s a kid’s journal. But it surely warrants more exploration, no?
(Incidentally, there’s a supposed screenshot of an Epstein email floating around that says Trump was repulsed by black women and called them ‘boogers.’ This has been shown to be fake.)
Trump is all over these files.
2. Continuing to Betray and Exploit Women
The DOJ’s releases have included the names of over 100 of Epstein’s victims, and many uncensored, nude photographs of young women (or possibly girls), as well as many more of young-looking women apparently gagged and bound. I’m not linking to that shit, because those are real people. But here’s a summary from Molly Jong-Fast about the continued betrayal of these women:
As Jong-Fast also explains, this should never have happened; had there been serious attention paid to these files (including by previous administrations), there could have been a responsible evaluation of the evidence and investigations into alleged criminal activity. This file dump was a last resort, after years of failure. And now it was botched, either deliberately or incompetently, with the effect of somehow managing to make like even worse for Epstein’s former victims. For shame. Even if there were no underlying scandal, just this one act is deserving of the harshest condemnation.
3. The Cover-Up is On
As we all expected, the Trump administration is in full “nothing to see here, hurry up, time to move on” mode. The release of the files has been rife with illegalities, improprieties, and outrages:
Names of abusers were redacted, while names and even pictures of victims were released. (I’ve decided not to post those images, one of which also includes the former Prince Andrew.) In a previous batch, some of the redactions were done so incompetently that folks online un-redacted them — lo and behold, most were of Trump and his associates. But we don’t know who some of these people are. Here’s one example of a name that should surely not have been redacted:
Only half the files have been released, but Trump’s former personal lawyer and now DOJ official (as if there is a difference, at this point) Todd Blanche says that’s all we’re going to get. This is in direct violation of the law Congress passed.
FBI Director Kash Patel says no one is going to be charged and it’s time to move on. Continue reading here and see if you think that makes any sense at all.
Here’s what they’re basically saying now:
4. Yes, it was a trafficking operation
There have been repeated claims that Epstein only trafficked girls for his own abuse, or that, well, they were teenagers, so not exactly girls, right? Several emails in the new release contradict that preposterous claim, including this one possibly discussing a nine-year old [Edit: Some say the = sign is a formatting error and this was discussing a 19-year-old. Still possibly trafficking, depending what ‘just arrived’ means, but obviously very different.]:
Bonus questions: Why was this sender’s name redacted? Why, given that this [event] took place in 2019, is there not an ongoing investigation of him?
[Edit: Legally, sex trafficking is the trafficking of people involving force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of sex act. That is an intentionally broad definition, and flying young women to Little St. James Island, or “providing” them to friends, with promises of access or money or power, qualifies. There is ample evidence of that in the new release, though not legal proof.]
Lying Elites
In the last week alone, the list of elites newly revealed to have lied about their relationship, with Epstein now includes Donald Trump (again), Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Deepak Chopra, Peter Attia, J.K. Rowling, Noam Chomsky, Howard Lutnick, Richard Branson, New York Giants co-owner Stephen Tisch (with smoking-gun emails offering to connect Tisch with a ‘Ukrainian girl’ among others), private equity billionaire Leon Black, Brad Karp (the chairman of Paul, Weiss who led the firm’s capitulation to Trump), and members of the royal courts of the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Norway. Here’s Bill Maher running through some of the people caught in a lie:
Just to look at a few of these:
Noam Chomsky. Sorry, Chomsky fans. Well after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting an underage girl for prostitution, the famous activist/linguist remained in close, repeated contact with him. One recently released email from 2019, only six months before Epstein’s death in prison, records Epstein forwarding “thoughts from Chomsky” to an attorney and publicist; the forwarded note was signed “Noam” and read: “I’ve watched the horrible way you are being treated in the press and public. It’s painful to say but I think the best way to proceed is to ignore it.” Chomsky described the climate in 2019 as “a hysteria that has developed about abuse of women. It’s best I think not to react unless directly questioned, particularly in the current mood – which, I presume, will fade away, even if not in time to prevent much torture and distress.”
Deepak Chopra. Chopra and Epstein met at least 12 times between 2016 and 2019 for “meditation and funding meetings.” Here’s a lovely exchange between the famous ‘consciousness explorer’ and the infamous sex criminal:
Interestingly, I wrote about this exact phenomenon — nondualist philosophy being used as an excuse for unethical conduct — back in 2009, so it is exceedingly nauseating to see it manifested in this way.
This week, Chopra apologized, though he never actually uses the word:
So, no, he still doesn’t get it. Here’s a great video:
Elon Musk. As has been well-reported, Elon Musk has claimed that he was invited to the Epstein island but declined to go — but now we learn that he was trying to get invited and apparently never did. Which, by the way, did I ever tell you how I was invited to go to that cool underground party with all those hipster fashionistas in Brooklyn last week? They’re poseurs; I told them no way.
Here’s one of the exchanges:
Look, someone has printed out one of Musk’s more pathetic emails and put it on a bus stop near Tesla’s London headquarters:
Meanwhile, here’s Jon Stewart on another hilarious-until-it-turns-disgusting email exchange between Musk and Epstein:
Down the Rabbit Hole
Finally, if you’ve read this far, I can’t resist giving some space to the more outre theories out there.
First, there are a lot of Russian assets who appear in the latest batch of files — one appears to have been spying on and possibly blackmailing members of one of the most powerful VC firms in Silicon Valley, Draper Fisher Jurvetson. And this week, Poland has opened an investigation into the possibility that Epstein was working for the KGB to set a ‘honey trap’ for American and European elites. I don’t have much to say about that; I’m also not the prime minister of Poland.
Meanwhile, the extremely-online Internet is having a field day with a hitherto-unknown connection between Jeffrey Epstein and the founder of 4chan, Christopher Poole, better known online as moot. The facts are provocative: Epstein and moot met in October 23, 2011, right when moot was creating the /pol/ channel on 4chan, which was the original site promulgating not only of the QAnon conspiracy theory, but also of much of the right-wing culture-war insanity that has come defines the last two years.
Now, kindly don your tin hat for this next part. There is an intriguing meta-conspiracy-theory now making the rounds that Epstein worked with moot to establish /pol/ and that the QAnon conspiracy theory was developed to make talking about the actual elite pedophilia conspiracy seem ridiculous.
It does make a certain kind of sense. How better to discredit discussion of Epstein’s elite pedophile ring than by associating it with wacko details of Pizzagate, Adenochrome Harvesting, and bored housewives ‘doing their research’ on the internet. (The scholar Diana Pasulka has interviewed several UFO experts making a similar claim about the government’s promulgation of idiotic UFO sightings and theories to make credible ones seem non-credible by association.)
Here’s an explication of the theory:
Or, as this guy puts it, Epstein is the ‘pedo Geppetto’ — the puppetmaster:
Do I believe this? Not really. There’s a lot here that is extremely speculative. Other than the moot-Epstein meeting, which did apparently happen, there’s no evidence that Epstein had any role in the launch of /pol/ or the dissemination of Q drops. It does connect the dots, but so do all conspiracy theories.
But this is an earthquake on the Right, which is once again splitting into competing camps. Some buy Trump’s preposterous claims that all this stuff is fake. But more, it seems, sense that they’ve been duped and are furious. As I wrote about last November, the heart of QAnon was true — except the hero was actually one of the villains.
Conspiracies and Antisemitism
Finally, a cautionary note. It’s been said that all conspiracy theories end in antisemitism, and alas, the partly-true, partly-false, partly-who-knows conspiracy theories inspired by the Epstein Files are no exception. Here’s an excellent summary from the Forward.
Far Left and Far Right agree. “They might as well call it the Israel files,” said the popular far-left streamer Hasan Piker.
“Blood libel hits a lot different after reading the Epstein files. The goyim know,” said the far-right internet personality and former MMA star Jake Shields.
Not to be outdone, Tucker Carlson hosted the nominally-left-wing Cenk Uygur on his podcast in which they agreed Israel was behind Epstein, the JFK assassination, and 9/11. “There’s just no question about it. He is definitely intelligence, and in every turn, he’s looking to help one country and it’s Israel,” Uygur said of Epstein.
“You get the sense that it reveals the superstructure beneath. It gives you a glimpse into how power is exercised globally,” Carlson replied.
And never to be outdone, Candace Owens went on Russell Brand’s podcast to link Sabbatean Kabbalah with Zionism, stating “they believe that evil is okay, the doctrine of evil. You must lower yourself and commit the most depraved acts of evil to prove that evil doesn't exist- then you can ascend in society. This seems to be the guiding philosophy of people in Israel.” On her own podcast, according to the Forward, Owens referred to Jews as “pagan gypsies” and repeated the neo-Nazi conspiracy that B’nai Brith was behind the “ritualistic murder” of Mary Phagan, whose killing sparked the antisemitic lynching of Leo Frank in 1915. Owens posted on X, “Yes, we are ruled by satanic pedophiles who work for Israel,” adding “This is the synagogue of Satan we are up against.”
This is not some gray area anti-Zionism — this is the heart of conspiratorial antisemitism. And the latest files release — in which Epstein does use the word “goy” a lot and makes all kinds of offensive comments — just gave it a huge shot in the arm.
For the record, there is no evidence in the latest file dump that Epstein was working for Israel; if anything, there’s stronger evidence that he was in cahoots with Russia. Indeed — to return to an earlier guest star in the files — when Deepak Chopra (sleazily) invited Epstein to join him in Israel, Epstein replied
Which doesn’t seem very Zionist.
Now, maybe he was just saying that to avoid going to Israel and raising suspicion that he was, in fact, working for the Mossad, but at a certain point, the Mossad conspiracy theory fails the test of non-falsifiability. Nor does it square with the fact that Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak — who was clearly a frequent member of Epstein’s orbit — solicited his help in opposing Netanyahu in the 2019 elections. That is not something you’d ask a Mossad agent to do.
Further to the right, rabid antisemites are alleging that Epstein is typical of all Jews and calling for mass murder. Here’s the Nexus project, tracking it:
I won’t review all of this trash and have nothing to add to Nexus’s reportage. I close with it only to note that when you go down a rabbit hole, you find not only rabbits but a whole lot of shit as well.
One final story
I want to close, though, by re-centering the stories of the women Epstein and his network abused and this story that completely surprised me, because I hadn’t heard about it at all until I came across it on Instagram, and then it broke my heart — both for what Epstein did and, in this case, even more what supposedly responsible journalists did when she came forward in 2007. How many dozens (hundreds?) of girls might have been spared had she been taken seriously, instead of demeaned and defamed? And how many of her defamers were, like some other journalists, part of Epstein’s web themselves?
Through all the political intrigue, let’s remember to keep our hearts and minds focused on the real stories at the center of this scandal: those of the women who survived this hell, spoke up about it for years, and are still awaiting accountability.
As this was a long post with dozens of links, I’m going to skip the “things I’m reading” list this week, apart from noting my extremely accurate prediction that AIPAC’s duplicitous intervention in a New Jersey congressional primary would benefit an anti-Israel progressive — who may, as of this writing, have won the race as a result of their chicanery. Nice job, AIPAC.
Thank you for reading, for sharing this post, and for subscribing to Both/And. It enables work like this to happen.
For more on the antisemitism that's erupted, see https://forward.com/fast-forward/803404/latest-epstein-files-release-unleashes-wave-of-antisemitic-conspiracy-theories-on-social-media/
Thank you for explaining to this Gen-Xer what my Gen-Z son has been watching and trying to parse for me. And for centering the victims.