“What a World”

by Cat Gilligan, Arts and Culture Editor

What’s left to say at this point? 120 Days of Sodom is a documentary? The Q Shaman has been vindicated at last? The world is, in fact, run by a cabal of billionaire pedophiles? Everything that comes to mind feels both melodramatic and entirely incapable of capturing the gravity of the situation at hand, both too flippant and too tame. I, like many others, have been afflicted with what I can only think to refer to as “Terminal Epstein Brain” since his arrest and subsequent murder in 2019. Something about the flagrancy of the crime and the carelessness with which it was carried out warped my mind in a way that I have a difficult time articulating. As such, when the latest tranche of emails were released by the House Oversight Committee in a “show of transparency,” (ha!) I sort of lost my shit.

The short-list of people implicated in these documents is truly stunning: Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky, Bill Clinton (duh), Alan Derschowitz (duh squared), Woody Allen (do I even have to say it?), Prince Andrew, Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon, and of course, our Beloved Leader, President Donald J. Trump. Furthermore, many of the C- and D-listers who have wormed their way into JE’s inbox in the past 15 years are even more repulsive (and in some cases, even more powerful) than the aforementioned superstars: Les Wexner (former CEO of Victoria’s Secret), Leon Black (former CEO of Apollo Global Management), Kathryn Ruemmler (Obama’s former White House Counsel), Larry Summers (Clinton’s former United States Secretary of Treasury), Ehud Barak (former prime minister of Israel), Gordon Brown (former prime minister of the U.K.), and Bill Burns (former director of the CIA) are all incriminated in these emails.

Of course, none of this is news to sickos like me; because the contacts in Epstein’s infamous “little black book” were made public in 2021, the vast majority of the people listed above were already confirmed to be friends with or acquaintances of the world’s most popular pedophile. Speaking broadly, these emails aren’t necessarily revelatory, but they do verify certain things that many internet sleuths have suspected to be true for a while. For example, these correspondences confirm that Epstein was very close with members of the Israeli intelligence community such as Yoni Koren, which should come as no surprise to anyone who knows anything about Ghislaine Maxwell’s father and his untimely demise in international waters (look it up). Secondly, these emails prove, for all intents and purposes, that the current president of the United States was party to an international child sex trafficking operation. While neither of these insights are “bombshells,” per se, they do seem to beg the question: where do we go from here?

I’ve spent days now poring over these documents, some of which are horrific, many of which are utterly banal. There’s something perversely thrilling about sifting through these emails—it’s a fantastic way to fulfill your gumshoe fantasies without ever having to leave your room. Of course, this type of rubbernecking is morbid at best and morally reprehensible at worst. It’s the society of the spectacle, and we’re just living in it; what could be more quintessentially American than turning harrowing accounts of exploitation and abuse into hours of entertainment? Moreover, the commodification of the entire Epstein saga by podcasters and social media personalities alike feels particularly ghoulish; as much as I enjoy listening to the musings of Brace Belden and Liz Franczak, I often can’t help but feel that the line between amateur investigative journalism and wildly unethical true crime slop becomes razor-thin the second you begin to (quite literally) capitalize on the suffering of others. Nevertheless, it seems similarly grotesque to turn away from the case altogether, because in doing so, you are capitulating to the demands of both the federal government and the mainstream media. The Trump administration will stop at nothing to make this story go away, and it’s difficult not to feel as if you have a responsibility to ensure that they don’t succeed.

I’m ultimately left with two takeaways: the vast majority of people are indifferent to the abuse of teenage girls, and the depravity of the ruling class knows no bounds. Regarding the first point, we are already beginning to see right-wing political pundits who were clamoring about the “pedocracy” just a few months ago insist that men like Epstein and Trump aren’t pedophiles at all; as Megyn Kelly so astutely puts it, Epstein “was into the barely legal type ... he liked 15-year-old girls ... he wasn’t into 8-year-olds.” Furthermore, many prominent right wing e-celebs have started arguing that the adolescent girls who Epstein “employed” in Palm Beach were teen seductresses looking to make a quick buck. To quote Twitter’s favorite sex tourist Matt Forney, “the bulk of so-called ‘sex trafficking’ victims CHOSE their lifestyles because they’re already fucked in the head ... the girls are not ‘victims ‘... [they] are just looking for a payout because, shockingly, whores are liars who only care about money.” The sentiments espoused by Kelly and Forney illustrate what many conservatives already believe to be true about teenage girls: they are dumb, malicious sluts, both mature enough to sell their bodies, and too childish and stupid to understand the consequences.

As it pertains to my second point, I think it is important to remember that this type of brutality is to be expected from the capitalist class. The abuse of sweatshop workers, migrant laborers and cobalt miners, the unimaginable violence and ethnic cleansing carried out by Western imperial powers in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, the deliberate refusal on behalf of the government to provide food, shelter and medical care to the most vulnerable members of society in the wealthiest nation in the world—all of these things must be understood as symptoms of the exact same economic system that allows billionaires and their accomplices to rape and traffick children with impunity. The lesson that we learn from the Epstein saga cannot be that the most powerful people on the planet are sadistic, sexually deviant monsters (although this often seems to be the case). Instead, we should walk away from this with the knowledge that this is the inevitable conclusion of capitalism and colonialism; sexual violence and the maintenance of Empire have always gone hand in hand, and the exploitation of workers is inextricably intertwined with the exploitation of children. So...whatever. I’m gonna go bang my head against a wall.