In the last decade, I’ve occasionally written pieces that compared what’s happening in the world — specifically, in the Trump presidency — to something we’re used to seeing on the big screen. Eight months into his first term, I wrote a column entitled “Donald Trump’s Pop-Culture Presidency Enters Its Thriller Phase,” in which I argued that Trump was “acting like an unhinged president out of a movie,” and that his reckless threats against North Korea were designed to get a cinematic rise out of us; it was saber-rattling as showbiz. Given how disastrous and threatening his second term has turned out to be (no mere cinematic posturing — a true descent into authoritarian terror and lawlessness), such comparisons may now seem trivial and beside the point. I certainly wouldn’t say there’s much about the Trump presidency today that “reminds me of a movie.”
But I will say that, insistently, about the Epstein files. Let’s be clear: The Jeffrey Epstein story is a scandal of impossible momentousness. Right now, it’s already looking like it could be Watergate times 10. It’s a saga of crime, cover-up and corruption — not just corruption but bone-deep rot — that’s driven by primal currents of fear and horror and victimization. The victims are real, and there are many of them. Keeping the awareness of what they’ve been through front and center is essential to approaching this story.
What I want to talk about, however, is the way that so many of us have experienced the Epstein story over the last two weeks — specifically, since Friday, Jan. 30, the day of the second document dump of redacted files. Let me make a confession: Ever since that day, I have been in the rabbit hole — that is, down the Epstein rabbit hole on the Internet, where I have scarcely come up for air. I am not, by nature, a conspiracy theorist (for the record: I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone). And in the occasional rabbit holes I’ve let myself go down a bit, like the long night I spent in 2007, from about 1:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m., in 9/11-was-an-inside-job land (by the time the sun came up, I had snapped back to reality), I’ve learned how unhealthy and warped it can be to give in to the desire to go through the looking glass.
But the Epstein case is different. Simply put, there’s so much we don’t know. The story is so disturbing and sensational in its criminality that it’s like a car accident: horrific, but you can’t turn away. Through it all, we’ve been looking at mere fragments of information, trying to poke around black boxes and black bars. We have a government that wants to wall it off forever. I so wish that this was Watergate, and that I was reading full-scale investigative reports about it in places like The New York Times. But that’s not the world we’re in. Like so many others, I’ve been trying to piece together the Epstein saga in shadowy corners of the Web because that, for the moment, is the only way to glimpse the reality, to grab onto the tips of the icebergs and see where they lead.
For that reason, the Epstein files story has now taken on the dimensions of a labyrinthine dark thriller, one that promises to lead to a staggering revelation at the end of the tunnel. The revelation, in this case, being two things at once: the identities of those involved…and what they did. And it’s the latter point that’s now starting to look darker than many of us could have imagined. The movie question, the one of intense and unfathomable drama, is this: How dark does this thing get? Is it “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” or is it “Cannibal Holocaust”?
When you explore the Epstein case on the Internet, you’re led to some very unsettling theories and places. Some of it is speculative, some is attached to shards of evidence, and the fact that so much of it exists in a gray zone between the plausible and the uncanny is part of the unique quality of the case. It’s an onion of evil that raises the following questions, almost in order: Are we dealing, simply, with a convicted sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, who indulged his criminal sexual pathologies and shared them with his ring of fellow predators and associates? Since we know that he had surveillance cameras everywhere (hence the thousands of hours of confiscated Epstein video, almost none of which we’ve seen), was he involved in blackmail? If so, to what end — financial or political? Or was he just using all of that for “leverage”? Was Epstein working for the Mossad, or for Russian intelligence (Russia is mentioned 10,000 times in the Epstein files; Putin 1,000 times)? Or both? That Ghislaine Maxwell’s late corrupt media-baron father, Robert Maxwell, was allegedly working for the Mossad raises the possibility.
But all of this has been discussed for years. In recent weeks, the specter has been raised of a disquieting new level of Epstein darkness. And that’s where the “movie” I’m talking about becomes murky…but also where it changes character and grows deadlier in its significance. For if that darker level is real, we could be in the midst of the most world-shaking news event since World War II.
It’s been said that the three million Epstein files yet to be released are the worst of them: the most graphic and extreme. Do they contain images of the sexual abuse of children? Children as young as 9 or 10? Or younger? Do they contain images of torture? To even consider the possibility requires, in one’s imagination, the entrance into a kind of horror movie. I say that because it’s just about the only paradigm we have. Yet as you research this stuff, and come upon stories of “elite” global aristocrats who have participated in child sex abuse and child murder, you find yourself thinking, “My God, was QAnon onto something?”
There’s a powerful piece of data that backs up the idea that QAnon, as unhinged and farfetched as its theories could be, was onto something. It’s been documented that in the 1990s, with the rise of the Internet, the amount of sex trafficking around the globe spiked in a significant way. That’s because the new technology facilitated it. It is now a $150 billion industry. There are millions of people who are trafficked around the world each year, and a number of them are children. The question that’s almost too disturbing to ask is: Who are those children trafficked to? It seems more than likely that they’re trafficked to people of wealth and power. And it’s not as if those children are then “returned”…to their parents, or orphanage, or wherever. They’re abused, and then they — or some of them, anyway — disappear.
Jeffrey Epstein was arguably the most powerfully connected sex trafficker in the Western world. So it only makes sense to look at him and think that he might have participated in that criminal circle of hell. That’s why the stray clues we’ve seen so far in the Epstein files (references to children, and photographs of them; references to torture) are so unnerving. It’s telling, to me, that up until two weeks ago, almost no one had even heard of Zorro Ranch, the vast compound Epstein owned in New Mexico. (It was isolated, because he owned miles of the surrounding land, which he’d purchased at a fire-sale price.) It was as sprawling a “getaway” as Little St. James Island, the Epstein compound we all know about. But why is it never mentioned? The rumor — I’m speaking in rumors because I have not read a report about this in The New York Times — is that that’s where he oversaw his darkest activities. What went on at Zorro Ranch? After Epstein’s death, the place was sold off and never treated as a crime scene.
When you go down the Epstein rabbit hole, you encounter stories and theories that can seem outlandish, the majority of which are likely untrue. Here are just a few: that Epstein’s death was faked, and that he is still alive (“photographs” of him in Tel Aviv have been popping up; they are surely AI); that Stanley Kubrick was murdered for laying bare the depravity of the global elite in “Eyes Wide Shut”; and that the owner of a certain Washington, D.C., pizza parlor is a member of the Rothschild family. This is all stuff that would make a good suspense film.
Yet the essence of the Epstein rabbit hole is that you begin to encounter “outlandish” things that start to seem less outlandish. Like, for instance, the theory that Epstein was murdered (there have been significant circumstantial questions about what went on, with respect to guards and surveillance tapes, the night of his death). Or the fact that Epstein ordered 60 55-gallon drums of sulfuric acid delivered to his island, the invoice dated the same day the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan reopened its federal investigation into him. (That actually happened.) Or the haunting videotape I have seen online that purports to show a well-known political operative torturing a child. Is the video real? I cannot say. But a part of me says that I’m haunted by it because it is real.
All of this — true or untrue, confirmed or speculative — has the effect of making it feel like we’re seeing a curtain slowly being drawn back, revealing the reality we were living with without knowing it, the nightmare lurking behind our everyday dream. Very “Rosemary’s Baby.” And to the degree that that nightmare proves to be real, it could shake the very foundations of our society: our core perceptions of power, and politics, and celebrity, and what members of the “privileged” class feel secretly privileged to do. The videos in the Epstein files are, of course, all too real, and if they’re ever released, the crimes that are on them finally revealed, it could start to bring this ultimate true-life mystery movie to a close, and in a way that stays shockingly true to our movie-fed imaginations: by letting us see it all with our own eyes.