The confirmation hearings of Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s selection to succeed Pam Bondi as attorney general, have pushed the Epstein Files back into the spotlight. But the preceding few months had seen interest in them wane.
Once it became clear that their contents could no longer be used for immediate political advantage, they stopped being headline news. And the alternative media, which has traditionally drawn attention to suppressed stories, preoccupied itself with other topics.
The gruesome irony is that most of us take exploitation for granted until someone can exploit it for personal or political ends.
We have everything we need to keep the story alive.
There is still an enormous quantity of information to sift through on the US Department of Justice website created in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Numerous victims of the sexual abuse documented there have supplemented the formal investigation with personal testimony, most of which can be accessed with a simple internet search.
Organisations created to support survivors—such as The Survivors Trust, World Without Exploitation, and the Africa-focused Survivor Network—provide guidance about how to handle research on the topic.
Sadly, it was not the victims mentioned in the Epstein Files that attracted so much attention, but the rich and powerful individuals linked with their exploitation.
The pressure to make Todd Blanche meet with survivors was political, a function both of tensions within the Republican Party and the Democratic Party’s frantic efforts to remain relevant. That’s why the survivors expressed disappointment at their eventual audience with Blanche. It felt like a reflex, not a sincere attempt to understand their quest for justice.
Back in February, the last time the Epstein Files were the focus of Congress, The Survivors Network shared a powerful statement by its Communications Officer, Lucy May.
“My fear is that in the frenzy, in the analysis, the sensationalism, the endless commentary, there is potential for us to lose sight of the lives that were deeply changed and disrupted”, she wrote. “We risk turning trauma into spectacle. We risk allowing the shock value to eclipse the human cost.”
May also anticipated that this frenzy would soon lead to burnout.
“The barrage of disturbing information can dull us. The repetition of horrific details can create distance”, she continued. We scroll. We react. We argue. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, we drift further from the people whose lives were harmed.”
“Photographs furnish evidence”, Susan Sontag writes in On Photography. “Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it.”
This statement certainly applies to media coverage of the Epstein Files, in which a few pictures of Epstein with his rich and powerful acquaintances figure prominently. But so does something Sontag writes towards the end of that opening essay.
“Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised—partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror.”
This escalation ultimately leads to fatigue. Sontag describes how moved she was when, as a teenager, she first saw photographs from the Third Reich’s concentration camps.
“When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying.”
As horrific as the contents of the Epstein Files are, they cannot compare with documentary evidence of mass genocide. If overexposure can numb our response to such images, it can do so with anything.
“The same law holds for evil as for pornography”, Sontag concludes. “The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more.”
How can we combat this fatigue?
The recent horror film Obsession suggests one approach. Made on a tiny budget by Hollywood standards, Curry Barker’s film has been a commercial sensation. As of this week, it had earned over $ 442 million, one of the most impressive profit margins in recent history.
On the surface, Obsession doesn’t have an obvious connection with the Epstein Files. But the more you think about its story, the more light it sheds on how their contents have been perceived.
Again and again, survivors have expressed dismay that the massive scope of the Epstein Files has done little to advance their cause.
The most obvious explanation for this failure to act decisively is that some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people have prevented it. Although a few individuals, like Britain’s Prince Andrew, have been offered up as scapegoats, most participants in Epstein’s network have suffered little for their involvement.
This is why conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein continue to gain traction. And why even the most superficially far-fetched ones are hard to dispel.
To be sure, the Epstein Files provide an excellent counterargument to anyone who believes that paranoid thinking is never helpful. It’s almost impossible to describe the vast range of the financier’s connections without sounding like someone mistaking a nightmare for reality.
This brings us to the other major reason that so little has been done to act on the Epstein Files. The issue isn’t simply that portions have been redacted and other crucial evidence deleted entirely.
There is still vastly more material at our disposal than is required to identify Epstein’s co-conspirators and hold them accountable. But that sheer quantity also poses problems. Overwhelmed by facts, human beings fall back on fiction to manage them.
In the case of Jeffrey Epstein, this approach has turned his story into a modern fairy tale.
Discussing the great Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp’s groundbreaking study of this genre, Jonathan Culler writes that, “Propp’s predecessor, Veselovsky, had, in a rudimentary structural analysis, argued that a plot was composed of motifs, such as ‘a dragon kidnaps the king’s daughter’. But, says Propp, this motif can be decomposed into four elements, each of which can be varied without altering the plot.”
The interrelationship of these structural elements shapes the fairy tale as a literary genre.
“The dragon could be replaced by a witch, a giant, or any other villainous force”; Culler explains, “the daughter by anything beloved; the king by other fathers or possessors; and kidnapping by any version of disappearance.”
Crucially, this “villainous force” partakes of the supernatural. Dragons, witches, and giants do not exist in the real world. They are fictional devices human beings use to make sense of facts that confound them.
Without consciously realising it, the mainstream media has reproduced these structural relationships over and over when describing the young women Epstein exploited. He occupies the sorcerer’s position and they, in turn, are cast in the role of the daughters he abducts.
Survivors have explained how Epstein lured them in by promising to make their wishes come true, so long as they did what he commanded: better pay, higher education, medical care for loved ones, and personal contact with the global elite.
Epstein and his companion Ghislaine Maxwell were masterful at simultaneously targeting the part of young women eager to grow up fast and the part still clinging to the fond dreams of childhood.
This is why people trying to make sense of the incomprehensible turn to the narrative framework provided by fairy tales. Almost everyone is conversant with the most famous ones.
Focusing on what made Jeffrey Epstein stand out is understandable. But focusing on it too narrowly downplays what his network had in common with less media-friendly forms of human trafficking.
In her landmark 1975 essay “The Traffic in Women”, Gayle Rubin makes a powerful case, not for focusing on what makes particular forms of exploitation unique, but on what they have in common with each other.
“Women are given in marriage, taken in battle, exchanged for favours, sent as tribute, traded, bought, and sold”, Rubin writes. “Far from being confined to the ‘primitive’ world, these practices seem only to become more pronounced and commercialised in more ‘civilised’ societies.”
Rubin goes on to note that men are also trafficked, as “slaves, hustlers, athletic stars, serfs, or as some other catastrophic social status”. But it’s in specific roles that men suffer this fate, not as a universal condition. Women, by contrast, are “transacted as slaves, serfs, and prostitutes, but also simply as women.”
The problem with treating Jeffrey Epstein as a fairy-tale villain, like the Sea Witch, Ursula, in Disney’s retelling of The Little Mermaid, is that his singular qualities conceal what he shares with men the world over who traffic young women.
The biggest challenge posed by the Epstein Files is to acknowledge what set Jeffrey Epstein apart from other sexual abusers without giving him more credit than he deserves.
Most exploitation takes place in modest private homes and apartments, not luxurious ranches or private islands. Victims aren’t lured by major financial incentives but by little attempts to curry favour: a sympathetic ear, a ride home in the rain, or maybe just a candy bar.
Epstein moved freely through a rarified social world. The young women he and Ghislaine Maxwell groomed were sacrificed to men who expect to get their way and have the money and connections to make it happen.
It’s hard to imagine many people being given the preferential treatment that Epstein received in Florida during the late 2000s. Alexander Acosta, who was then US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, is rumoured to have explained his office’s leniency towards the financier by describing a conversation in which someone told him Epstein was a spy and that the situation was therefore “above his pay grade”.
By contrast, the majority of sexual abusers keep to themselves, aware that the slightest misstep could lead to dire consequences. To the extent that they network with like-minded individuals, their interactions are usually long-distance and mediated by technology.
In other words, the difference between Epstein’s world and that of typical sexual abusers was a matter of scale. What set him apart wasn’t the nature of his crimes, horrific as they were, but the wealth and privilege that made it possible for him to assume the role of the fairy-tale villain, a supernatural being with the power to make all manner of wishes come true.
Structurally, Obsession resembles a classic fairy tale.
The male protagonist makes a wish, not believing it could come true, only to suffer the gruesome consequences of getting exactly what he wished for. The woman he bewitches suffers even more, in the end, because she not only is forced to give him what he desires, but is denied the gift of death.
During one of the film’s most memorable scenes, she recites her version of a classic fairy tale, an incestuous take on “Hansel and Gretel”.
According to Vladimir Propp’s structural analysis, the villain in the story is the witch who holds the siblings captive. This is the role Jeffrey Epstein ends up playing in so many accounts of his crimes. In the Obsession version of the tale, however, the witch is an afterthought. What matters is the dynamic between the siblings.
What makes Obsession such a revelation is that it locates the supernatural force not in a being but in an inanimate object, the One-Wish Willow, which sets the plot in motion.
This isn’t a singular figure, like Jeffrey Epstein, but an inexpensive novelty toy. It metonymically represents not an exception to modern consumer society but its rule.
Doing things to women without their consent isn’t special. Nor should it be treated that way.
And standing up for the survivors documented in the Epstein Files shouldn’t mean treating them differently from survivors who will never make the headlines.
Photograph courtesy of Cory Doctorow. Published under a Creative Commons license.
