Jeffrey Epstein, Dead Man’s Switch

The infamous pedophile gives virtually everyone something to hate.

A myth is a story that expresses the collective dreamworld of a culture: its fears, its wishes, its self-conception. Some myths refine themselves over generations. Others spring into consciousness in an instant. A bit of story or news captures the imagination so thoroughly that the entire culture suddenly projects its hope or terror onto a single hero—or, more often, a villain.

Jeffrey Epstein is one of these myths. Since his arrest and jailhouse death, the disgraced financier, socialite, and pedophile has become America’s most famous villain, an archetype who offers virtually all factions something to hate.

To some, he represents the hidden sexual depravity of elites. To others, a global conspiracy established through blackmail, espionage, and intrigue. To still others, he is a weapon to be wielded against his onetime friend, President Donald Trump.

Epstein embodies the omni-conspiracy. To some critics, his connections to the world’s most powerful people suggest membership in a cabal that runs elite institutions. And his houses, airplanes, and islands—paired with the uncertain provenance of his wealth—all stand as proof that he profited from his corruption.

The game, then, is to assign the blame and establish the meaning of his crimes. Epstein has captured the public mind, and the question is whether he will be cast as the Marquis de Sade or as Charles Ponzi.

A number of theories circulate: that Epstein was an intelligence asset who orchestrated sexual blackmail against the super-elite; that Epstein was a Rasputin figure who seduced the rich out of their fortunes; that he had enough kompromat on world leaders that he had to be secretly murdered in his prison cell. There is enough documentary evidence to raise suspicion, at least: the snapshots of Bill Clinton getting a massage in a private airport hangar; the bizarre contracts and transactions between Epstein and billionaire Les Wexner; the seeming disappearance of the “tens of thousands of videos” of Epstein “with children or child porn.”

In each case, Epstein seems to transgress America’s most deeply maintained taboos. He is a pedophile who abused scores of young girls. He is a criminal who defrauded others of billions. He is a serpent who twisted his way into high society through manipulation and deceit. He represents a complete repudiation of the virtues of America’s Puritan culture—modesty, honesty, humility—and, instead, symbolizes all that is rotten with America’s elite in a period of decadence and anxiety.

Thus, the intense public reaction. Epstein allows us to project our hatreds and fears onto a single man. His biography contains sufficient mystery to allow us to fill in the blanks with our pet obsessions. Some, or all, of the conspiracy theories might be true. But the facts will never be enough. On one side, it appears that many powerful people have a vested interest in burying Epstein’s secrets; on the other, the public has grown so distrustful of officialdom that no report or accounting will ever be transparent enough.

I’ve watched the Epstein case percolate through right-wing and left-wing media for years, without forming strong judgments. My sense is that the most elaborate fantasies—that Epstein was part of a cabal of pedophile cannibals, or that he was running world governments on behalf of the Mossad—are a deflection from a more banal, but perhaps even more disturbing, reality. Jeffrey Epstein was not a cannibal or foreign subversive but a depraved twist on an all-American archetype: the Jay Gatsby character.

Like Gatsby, Epstein was an arriviste who sought to dissociate himself from his humble origins, gained his wealth through fraud and artifice, and showered money onto others in the hopes of being accepted into high society. He amassed astounding wealth and cultivated an elite network. But the money, the parties, the islands, the brokerage accounts, and the snapshots with the rich were all empty symbols, bribes that temporarily masked the horror of a badly lived life. When it all came crashing down, no one attended Epstein’s funeral—as no one attended Gatsby’s.

We should seek to uncover all the facts, but we do not need an omni-conspiracy, or an elaborate espionage plot, to identify the deepest lessons of the Epstein myth. Our elites are easily seduced by material wealth and, at a minimum, willing to turn a blind eye to a man who surrounds himself with teenaged girls. Epstein produced nothing of value, built his status only on perceptions, and, for anyone who cared to look, bore all of the marks of a predator.

But even America’s wealthiest and most powerful could not resist a private plane or a few nights in the Virgin Islands. Epstein was a monster, but the people who helped him maintain his status were guilty of a very American style of nihilism. Epstein was just the dead man’s switch, who, when his life blew up, sprayed the others in shrapnel.