[Preliminary Note: Responses to Qs addressed to me by a Turkish journalist, Murat Sofuoğlu, affiliated with TRT World. My responses have been modified.]
- What do Epstein’s ties with the high and mighty say about Western ‘elite’ structures?
These ties reveal networks of power and influence that has long been shielded from legal accountability, and even moral scrutiny. Epstein’s network of friends and associates gives to the wider public some sense of the lure of decadence with regard to sexual gratification. After Epstein’s first conviction of criminal abuse revealed in graphic detail in the batch of documents so far released. The dimensions of predatory sexuality, victimizing young women and old men, are convincingly confirmed in a documentary film titled Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich. The film also reveals a total absence of empathy for the helpless victims of these unlawful and despicable forms of sexual gratification with teen-age innocent girls drawn by money and deception from poor and vulnerable families. Exposure to these patterns of behavior by those who sit comfortably atop skyscrapers of corporate, financial, and political power influence enjoy an almost automatic entitlement to back alleys of collective narcissism apparently treated as if normal, an ethos that appears common among economic and political elites. Even when the shielding fails, as it did in the Palm Beach Epstein operation of his sanctuary for upper class pedophile. It was only the uncommonly conscientious investigations of the high and mighty that local law enforcement and dutiful police officials built a criminal case against Epstein. Even then the wheels of justice barely turned. Rather than the right to mount a defense during ‘a day in court’ such gilded perpetrators are generally able to intimidate, bribe, and threaten those representing the state as prosecutors and judges face hurdles that evidence alone cannot overcome. One lesson to be learned is that money and class often speak louder than law in such high-profile situations, even in the United States where the rule of law is sanctified in public discourse.
In an interesting presumably coincidental preview of the Epstein saga was the mainstream movie, Eyes Wide Shut, starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise illustrating a tamer more religiously framed hideaway for rich and powerful sexual predators. Significantly, the sexually abused women were adults, compensated as if prostitutes, and without any political linked agenda as underlying Epstein’s habitual escapades on his provate Caribbean island and New York and Palm Beach mansions. Yet a suggestive similarity is the coercive suppression of any divulgence of such goings on in public space. Whereas Epstein equipped his various homes with sophisticated surveillance systems to ensure confidentiality by blackmail evidence to disgrace any informer or insider, the film relied on outright thuggery as threat and violence as needed. Confidentiality was achieved by keeping the guest list to a trusted coterie of carefully vetted rich and powerful had every social and material incentive to keep the events securely under wraps.
2. Why do so many rich and powerful people need underage girls for their sexual satisfaction? What does this say about these powerful people?
As suggested, it is less the illicit need than a carefree demonstration of impunity for what occurs in the collective privacy and confidentiality provided by Epstein’s supposedly secure and luxurious playgrounds. It comes to an abrupt end at the undisclosed cost of surveillance, which created a different set of vulnerabilities to blackmail than the risks of being exposed held accountable for the criminal exploitation of underage girls, who often are scarred for life by the experiences of pleasuring older men, and have no off ramp by way of resignation from high visibility career positions. Epstein’s fastidious management pf the predatory sexual behavior of guests, as is now well-established. was monitored by a sophisticated network of cameras apparently installed and even managed by Mossad agents. In effect, a punitive system to safeguard privacy and confidentiality, perhaps further reinforced by threats of physical retaliation to anyone daring to expose linkages between sexual gratification oblivious to law with the exertion of political influence among the rich and powerful augmenting Israel’s leverage in the United States. As yet, there is no reliable information on whether Epstein’s extraordinary wealth was owed in part to these Israeli ties, but the frequency with his interactions with the former Israel Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, is to say the least, suggestive of a principal/agent relationship.
3. Does this show something is profoundly wrong in Western political and financial power networks?
More investigative work is needed to disclose whether there are equivalent non-Western outlets for the sexual appetites and political maneuvers of the rich and powerful. In one sense, Epstein’s files do not indict the West as such. It seems primarily an American class phenomenon, with exceptions made for such transnational Western elite public figures as Prince Andrew and Ehud Barak, Israel’s former Prime Minister, and unlikely prominent intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Stephen Pinker, Alan Dershowitz, and even Stephen Hawkins whose associations did not necessarily involve participation or even knowledge of the lurid sides of what I call Epstein’s entrapment network. The participation by Americans was more salient than the involvement of Europeans, and certainly than non-Western upper echelons. This is tentatively confirmed by the contents of some leaked and unredacted files detailing the multiple, as yet unspecified involvements of the Epstein network with such eminent public figures as Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.
4. How do many ordinary people, who want to have a quiet family life with their partners and kids, perceive Epstein’s links with big politicians and rich people?
I suspect there is great diversity of response, although the public majority culture is portrayed by the media as one of moral outrage. In a few high-profile instances, the disclosures to date have resulted in some prominent resignations and disavowals by such academic celebrities, as the former Harvard President, Larry Summers, and the wild-eyed ultra-Zionist controversial professor and lawyer for controversial criminal defendants, Alan Dershowitz, and by corporate billionaires and celebrity lawyers. It appears that those who identify as Republicans overwhelmingly are in denial or minimize the engagement, especially of Trump with the Epstein phenomenon. This minimization is reinforced by the selective release and redaction of files that might incriminate Trump or MAGA adherents. So far there has been a bureaucratic coverup that has limited the impact of the release of what should be in political culture that still upheld the rule of law on ‘ordinary people’ as shaped by partisan party politics, with Democrats far more appalled than either Independents or Republicans.
Epstein was an unusual figure for such a dark role, harboring seemingly genuine interests in higher education and technological innovations along with his strong, yet still vague and shadowy attachments to Israel. He befriended and managed to somewhat implicate Noam Chomsky, a critic of Israel and bitter adversary of Dershowitz. Chomsky’s image the most admired and influential public intellectual of our time has been tarnished by his murky connections with Epstein who seemed a financial advisor and friend of Chomsky and his wife. What remains blurry is the extent to which Chomsky was deliberately attracted to be a friend or to be rendered vulnerable a high-value target of Israeli intelligence.
There is also an element of governmental power at play in this unfolding Epstein affair. The fact of Trump is America’s most unabashedly autocratic president further bolstered by a Republican grip on Congress and the Supreme Court, and of course, the Executive Branch has so far led to the shielding of some, the exposure of and would have been handled somewhat differently if a liberal, upstanding president was in the White House such as Barack Obama, although even Obama refrained from any legal scrutiny of highly controversial behavior of his predecessor, George W. Bush, widely believed to have authorized interrogation practices in Iraq and elsewhere, that violated human rights and the International Convention on Torture (1984), ratified by the U.S. in 1988, and at least 173 countries..
In concluding it may be the highly relevant to note the degree of moral hypocrisy on matters of family loyalty and sexual mores that exist in the U.S. as distinguished from its European soulmate states, which seem more comfortable acknowledging the frailties of human nature. By no means is this meant directly or indirectly as a partial exoneration of those who conspired in their own entrapment within ‘Epstein’s World.’ Nor does this whitewash ordinary people who brush morals and law aside in favor of loyalty to a political party or national leaders. The loudest chant of American constitutionalists has long been that we are ‘a country of laws, not men’ now only overheard as a dissident whisper.
5. Do these ordinary people question the legitimacy of the system they are living under these powerful people’s influence? If so, would you project a significant popular challenge against the existing political/financial system?
A growing number of ordinary citizens in the United States are shocked by the ugly spectacle of the Epstein disclosures, but this may lead in the short-run, at least, to greater repressiveness of independent media and oppositional critics rather than to significant reforms, must less a systemic challenge to the deep roots of the Epstein crisis in the inequalities currently wrought by wealth and political power. There are various forms of corruption evident in most countries of the world, and this is accompanied by moral hypocrisy that effectively shields private behavior from public scrutiny. In the U.S. context the present declining popularity of Trump’s second term leadership may embroil him and other establishment figures in belated attempts to impose criminal accountability for ‘statutory rape’ of underage girls, a crime that in the U.S. has no statute of limitations.
So far, the Republican Party has privileged party loyalty to moral and legal accountability with respect to Trump and his friends and associates. Whether the widening cracks in this support structure will withstand further disclosures is of course uncertain. We can expect that Trump will do his best to divert attention even if this means a costly and dangerous second attack on Iran even more unprovoked that the first attack of a year ago.
What we do know with some confidence is that the Epstein files will continue to preoccupy both elites and ordinary citizens for some time to come, at least in the United States. It should also have the international effect of casting additional doubts about the U.S. attachment to liberal values of human rights and democracy, and of course about the claims of moral superiority associated the creed of American Exceptionalism, persuasive as a public philosophy in the US yet dismissed with increasing cynicism elsewhere in the world.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
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