The Epstein mythology can be roughly defined as the popular belief, nearly ubiquitous on social media and adjacent outlets, that the deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein orchestrated a sprawling child sex-trafficking operation in which the powerful individuals across government, business, entertainment, and academia with whom Epstein consorted were systematically entrapped into compromising sexual encounters, surreptitiously filmed, and then blackmailed into silence or complicity—likely with the assistance of some unknown intelligence agencies (Mossad being a typical candidate). The true scale of this operation has been covered up, the mythology goes, because its exposure would unveil the evil at the very heart of global power structures.
More recently, the mythology has taken on a startling new dimension. While the second Trump administration promised to vanquish the Deep State and to bring long overdue justice to child-predating wrongdoers, there appears to have been a slight snafu. Justice was apparently to be served by releasing what had colloquially become known as the “Epstein Files”—a compendium of damning documents understood to be sitting in a government repository somewhere, shielded from public disclosure by reprobates in the Biden Administration—and indeed the first Trump administration, which had also been obstructed by the insidious Deep State. But this time, Trump would install only the most loyal and tenacious warriors. Incorruptible heroes such as Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Pam Bondi would stop at nothing to reveal the truth, once and for all. And yet now, in a shocking twist, Trump and his subordinates have decided to join the coverup, and let the elite pedophiles continue enjoying their impunity.
That’s a brief rundown of the current iteration of Epstein mythology. Of course, there are also non-mythological components to the Jeffrey Epstein saga. He really did procure teenage girls for his own perverse gratification. He really did hobnob with an astonishing array of well-connected and powerful individuals. He really did die under peculiar circumstances. It is easy to see why this story has morphed into an object of such sustained intrigue. But kernels of truth have long since given way to an ever-expanding mythology which cannot be falsified. No countervailing evidence could ever disabuse its most committed adherents of their essential belief: that organized sexual predation rings of the kind orchestrated by Epstein are pervasively real and play a decisive role in how power is distributed in society.
Belief in the ubiquity of elite pedophilia networks is a constant in the right-wing imagination, typically fused with turbulent variants of grassroots Christianity. In this way, Epstein mythology is a successor to the QAnon phenomenon from the first Trump administration, which was also believed to have sweeping explanatory power, though it lacked the more concrete factual predicate of Epstein mythology. While the right-wing version associates “sex trafficking” with demonology and sin, there’s a left-wing version as well. It is more secular, more concerned with notions of power imbalance and hierarchy, but nonetheless tends to converge on the same endpoint: that these wicked trafficking networks are anywhere and everywhere, and our failure to combat them is a profound indictment of our society.
Compare a right-leaning NGO focused on sex trafficking to a left-leaning NGO focused on the same subject. The Tim Tebow Foundation describes child sexual exploitation as a “horrific evil hidden in the darkness,” and presents itself as a rescue ministry, bringing “salvation” to “survivors” in the name of God. The Empowered Network aims to help these same “survivors” attain “economic freedom,” with an emphasis on “women of color” and “survivors from diverse backgrounds.” Instead of “horrific evil,” it speaks of “generational cycles of poverty and exploitation.” Evaluating the actual efficacy of these organizations is a daunting task, perhaps by design.
One person who eventually got in on the act was the late Virginia Giuffre, the most influential Epstein accuser, who reportedly secured a $2.7 million donation from the late Queen Elizabeth for her sex-trafficking awareness nonprofit, SOAR. The group appears to have done little to “raise awareness” beyond producing a barebones website to serve as a portal for Giuffre’s various media activities. “Giuffre is perhaps the most prominent survivor of Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, but he was not her first abuser,” the website reads. “By the time she met Epstein, when she was 16, Giuffre had already been sexually trafficked by another man.”
“Giuffre was a serial fabricator.”
Perhaps the most glaring omission in the Epstein mythology is any acknowledgement that Giuffre was a serial fabricator. Her death earlier this year, at age 41, has been yet another boon to Epstein mythologists, as it would seem to vindicate in their minds that she needed to be “silenced,” even though no evidence has been presented for anything other than what’s already in the public record: that a deeply troubled woman in the throes of a worsening personal and familial crisis committed suicide. Giuffre’s estranged husband had recently been granted custody of their children, after claiming Giuffre had physically attacked him and was mentally unstable. Local authorities agreed. Giuffre was distraught, and posted online what could be construed as farewell messages to her children, whom she’d been legally barred from seeing. But regardless of the facts, mythologists will always assume Giuffre must have been “suicided” by unknown assailants, who for some reason neglected to prevent her from generating massive publicity with endless incendiary accusations over more than a decade, but decided in April 2025 that it was time for her to be killed.
Giuffre, as the highest-profile Epstein accuser, was absolutely integral to the creation of the mythology. It was she who made the most sensational claims of being sex-trafficked to prominent third-party individuals—including Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, and former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. For nearly a decade, Giuffre accused Dershowitz of committing depraved sex crimes, but by 2022, she was forced to admit in a civil settlement that her claims had been false. Strangely, this development failed to penetrate the mythology—perhaps because it demonstrated the serial fabulism of the accuser on whose claims the mythology was built.
Major planks of Epstein mythology give way under the barest examination. Its adherents love to cluck that Alex Acosta, the former Trump labor secretary and federal prosecutor who was involved in arranging a 2008 plea deal for Epstein, said he was told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence,” and that Acosta should therefore “leave it alone.” This admittedly spicy claim derives from a single Daily Beast article from 2019, and has never been corroborated anywhere else, despite the avalanche of legal and journalistic resources dedicated to the Epstein saga. The quote is also plainly second- or-third-hand—hearsay, in other words—not a direct statement from Acosta, as it’s often portrayed.
Is it implausible that Epstein, over his many years of strange international jet-setting, might have come in contact with certain intelligence agency assets, or even performed certain tasks at their behest? No. After all, this is a person who managed to insinuate himself into the company of everyone from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump. But the wild extrapolations that follow are the hallmark of a mythology lacking any epistemic guardrails. That Epstein plausibly could have come into contact with intelligence operatives is somehow taken to mean that it’s been dispositively established that he was coordinating a large-scale pedophilic sex-trafficking and blackmail operation, the full scope of which could finally be revealed if only the FBI would make good on its promise to release something called the “Epstein Files.”
Epstein mythologists also resist any recognition of the perverse incentives created by the Epstein saga turning into an enormous cash-cow. Giuffre received at least five Epstein-related settlements, including $10 million from Prince Andrew, unspecified “millions” from Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, $500,000 from Epstein’s own estate, and an unknown amount from JP Morgan, which agreed to a staggering $290 million settlement to resolve a class-action suit of Epstein accusers who charged the bank with malfeasance merely for at one point having Epstein as a client. Deutsche Bank likewise settled for $75 million on the same grounds. Given the radioactivity of anything that can be remotely associated with claims of child sex trafficking, the calculus behind the settlements is not hard to grasp. A similar logic likely applied with Prince Andrew, whose odd performance in an infamous 2019 BBC interview landed him and the British royal family in hot water. He subsequently opted to settle his lawsuit with Giuffre, presumably viewing this as preferable to standing trial in the United States amid a maelstrom of publicity.
With this downpour of settlement funds, Giuffre purchased a six-bedroom oceanfront property in Perth, Australia, as well as a spacious nearby ranch estate. It might be uncouth to observe that Epstein accusers have made huge sums of money from their claims—but it’s also true.
Despite her decade’s worth of sensational charges, Giuffre was not called as a witness by prosecutors in the 2021 trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. Not one of the four alleged victims to testify in that trial claimed they had ever been trafficked to any third-party individuals; indeed, the sex trafficking conspiracy for which Maxwell was ultimately convicted consisted of two persons: herself and Epstein.
Thus, the only time that the heightened evidentiary standards and adversarial scrutiny of a criminal trial were brought to bear, no claims were even tested that could have substantiated the central premise of the popular mythology—namely, that Epstein ran an elaborate sex-trafficking operation to supply prominent men with minors, and then capture their illicit exploits on tape for the purposes of blackmail. (Blackmail to what end, exactly? Never clear.)
“Epstein hysteria, like other hysterias, has tended to erode civil liberties and injure due process.”
However, the trial did highlight the constitutionally questionable practice of allowing self-described “victims” to testify pseudonymously. Maxwell’s appellate brief, now pending before the US Supreme Court, convincingly argues that this “transformed the trial into a form of Kabuki theater designed to remind the jury at every turn that these adult women were being protected because their privacy interests, and not Maxwell’s constitutional right to a public trial, were paramount.” The brief continues:
Immediately after Epstein’s death, complainants’ civil attorneys representing Epstein victims, including those who testified at trial, began to assist in the creation of the Epstein Victims Compensation Program (VCP), a non-adversarial and confidential claims resolution program set up to compensate self-identified victims of Epstein, even as they were actively involved in the Government’s investigation. On June 25, 2020, the Program began accepting claims. An attorney for one complainant encouraged her to cooperate with the Government in its case against Maxwell because it would improve her prospects for receiving a larger sum of money from the VCP. Tr. 2731-32. It did. “Jane” received $5,000,000.
Excluded from the popular mythology is any cognizance that persistent Epstein hysteria, like other hysterias, has tended to erode civil liberties and injure due process. It authorizes the casual proliferation of abject lies—such as those made ceaselessly against Alan Dershowitz, whose eventual attainment of an admission from Giuffre that she had falsely accused him of depraved sexual acts for eight years straight is diligently ignored by the mythology’s adherents. It accepts as perfectly sensible that a “self-identified victim” can be enticed by attorneys to cooperate with federal prosecutors because this would improve her chances of obtaining a bigger payout from an adjudicative process that is both “non-adversarial” and “confidential,” meaning there is no downside risk to maximally dramatizing one’s purported victimhood—and the upside can be $5 million.
Epstein mythology has also thoroughly humiliated the Trump Administration. Figures like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino auditioned for their current top roles at the FBI by spending the prior several years on the GOP podcast circuit, and if anything plays to the id of right wing social media, it’s peddling speculation about the supposed concealment of child-sex trafficking rings. Once the righteous are restored to power, so the story goes, the perpetrators will finally get what’s coming to them.
When people wonder why Pam Bondi, as attorney general, teased imminent scandalous revelations from the “Epstein Files,” only to then disclaim the very existence of those files, they overlook the obvious answer: She and other administration officials have long sought to rouse their followers on social media by indicating keen interest in Epstein mythology. Simply name-dropping Epstein was a surefire winner in the less-than-scrupulous podcast environments where JD Vance was shrewdly electioneering last year. This made it possible for “anti-establishment” media consumers to believe that by voting Republican in 2024, they were voting to defeat the Deep State—and so to release the “Epstein Files.” Such logic may have been shallow and deluded, but its political employment has proved to be highly clever and effective.
Still, the dam was bound to break eventually. Epstein mythologists now denounce Trump & co. for concealing evidence of a far-reaching child-sex-trafficking ring and blackmail network that they are certain exists. But if anything needs to be denounced, it is the charlatanism of those who exploited the credulous and trafficked in nonsense to attain high office. Now that would be a “trafficking” conspiracy worth exploring in greater depth.