Epstein and the Horrible Mundanity of Child Abuse

The following story is co-published with Freddie deBoer’s Substack.

It’s an old saw, but for good reason — conspiracy theories tend to flourish because they are in some strange sense comforting. They create the appearance of order in a universe filled with chaos. If a lone nutcase can kill John F. Kennedy, then there’s a certain inextinguishable randomness to the violence that governs human affairs. But if it was all a conspiracy, one involving the CIA and the FBI and the KGB and the mafia and the Freemasons and the Knights Templar and Opus Dei and — if it’s all a vast and magisterial conspiracy, well, then in a deep sense the world is governed by rules. Cruel and unjust rules, maybe, the kind that rob the country of their telegenic leader. But still, there is a logic to that injustice, a cold sort of stepwise purpose. No wonder even a president can be killed, if the most powerful forces in the world were conspiring to end his life! And that’s a lot more comforting, isn’t it? If Lee Harvey Oswald was just some guy with a gun, well … who among us is safe?

It happens that I don’t reject JFK conspiracy theories out of hand; there’s enough smoke there that skepticism toward the official narrative is justified. And I’m on record saying that there’s a circularity to the term “conspiracy theory” that renders these conversations difficult. It’s also simply the case that many conspiracy theories have been proven true over time. After all, the idea that the United States orchestrated the coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh, or lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, or aided the Indonesian army in slaughtering half a million people, or deliberately looked the other way as Nicaragua supercharged the crack trade in Southern California — these were all once “conspiracy theories.”

Still and all, I recognize that the desire for order is a major driver of this tendency in modern politics. In a cacophony of limitless information, in a world of irreducible complexity, the tendency of these theories to introduce even more complexity and information paradoxically makes our era seem more comprehensible, more subject to human understanding. Conspiracy theories involve some extremely complex historical math, the endless multiplication of variables, the injection of unnecessary operations — but it’s still math. It still appears rule-bound. It suggests that, if we’re only smart enough, there’s a solution waiting. And that’s exactly what I think of when I see all of this fixation on Jeffrey Epstein; it’s a record of our desire to force the most disturbing crime of all to make sense.

Epstein was a true monster and I wish he had not successfully avoided jail, even though he did so through suicide. I’m glad Ghislaine Maxwell will likely die in prison. I don’t doubt that powerful people were involved in their systematic abuse of children, and in a perfect world we would be able to name them, shame them and prosecute them. I want whatever was true of his death to come to light, and if there was a cover-up, I want whoever was involved to face consequences. (But this is the United States, so lol.) I have no idea if he was connected to the Mossad, though stranger things have happened, and maybe we could get some sort of deeper understanding of how criminal prosecution is routinely obstructed by intelligence agencies. (If a foreign spy org really is obstructing investigations into child rape, my God.) There are secrets to be unearthed and more justice to be done. But fundamentally, the fixation on Epstein seems like a classic matter of displacement to me, where a person redirects a negative emotion from its original source to a target that is in some way more palatable to target. Epstein, a single human, and his potential conspirators, a limited number of specific miscreants, are easier to hate than a whole world of quietly evil anonymous child predators. These theories may be more or less true, but they are always conspiracies of convenience.

The truth is that child sexual abuse and exploitation is common and it is mundane. Its horror is unique, its pain unfathomable, its injustice incalculable. But the crime itself is ordinary, utterly ordinary. It’s very often committed by a family member, sometimes an immediate family member, and almost never by a stranger. It’s a crime of opportunity, more or less, not one that requires extensive orchestration. It’s one that’s difficult to prove, and we have good reason to believe that most incidents are never reported, let alone result in arrest or conviction. The physical and emotional toll can be devastating and often lingers for life. And at the same time, it’s also a type of crime uniquely likely to result in unjust prosecution, as the Satanic child abuse hysteria shows; the fallibility of memory, the suggestibility of children, and the tendency of adults in positions of authority to unduly influence potential victims has led to many incidents of false accusation, often with terrible personal consequences. (You see, my friends, it’s entirely possible for a particular crime to be both underpunished and the cause of malicious accusation and prosecution.) And of course there are very few things in human experience that are more viscerally horrific than child sexual abuse. It’s a problem from hell for which there can be no obvious single cure, a vast disease of human evil that has no internal coherence or easy moral. It’s as bleak as it gets.

And, yes, I think that’s why the public has been so doggedly invested in finding some deeper logic in Epstein, some way to connect all the dots, and why this phenomenon has been so bipartisan. I think people need to believe that there’s a conspiracy because it makes this unique horror more digestible, more understandable. This kind of allegation brings a certain kind of dark sense to the most senseless of human crimes. If Hillary Clinton and the globalists are meeting at Comet Ping Pong to rape and eat children, well, the good guys may be able to stop them. That’s why a guy showed up there with an assault rifle, because his addled mind was sufficiently influenced by the internet that he came to sincerely believe that he was going to storm the basement of a pizzeria and rescue children. You can fantasize about stopping that kind of bad guy. But how do you stop that random uncle, that elementary school gym teacher, that mother’s new boyfriend who has every opportunity to slip through the cracks, never to be punished? Far more comforting to think of child rape as a problem straight out of a 1970s thriller, with a real tangible conspiracy of villainous elites to blame, who can be arrested or killed. Far more comforting.

I confess that I have felt a little crazy about the question of his demise ever since it happened; the cross-ideological certainty you run into that he didn’t kill himself is … hard to justify. While it has become a kind of meme shorthand for elite corruption — “Epstein didn’t kill himself” — the more mundane and less cinematic explanation seems entirely plausible: Epstein was an utterly disgraced, high-profile, aging man facing a lifetime in prison with no path out, already convicted once, public reviled, and well aware that his life as he knew it was over. He was facing the hardest time you can do for the worst crime you can be accused of, likely to be sent to jail for the rest of his life and once there face constant threat of death from other prisoners while he served out his sentence. Meanwhile, conditions at the Metropolitan Correctional Center where he died were notoriously chaotic, suicide watch protocols had recently lapsed, and he had less than a month earlier been nearly asphyxiated in what was most likely a suicide attempt. In that context, suicide doesn’t require an elaborate conspiracy, only access to means, momentary opportunity, and the cowardice necessary to prefer death to the consequences, all of which he plausibly had. Sometimes, the most boring explanation is the truest one.

Do I know for sure? Of course not. But the level of conviction people have about this confuses me.

Of course, this is the world of partisan politics, and Epstein’s connections on both sides of the aisle make him an attractive talking point for people in either party. The fact that successive federal administrations had various roles in investigating his crimes and pursuing his prosecution merely adds more fuel to the fire. I don’t doubt that it’s appropriate for national politicians to demonstrate an interest in this ugly story. But I also don’t doubt that its remarkably voluminous coverage owes something to pure nasty political gamesmanship, to say nothing of the prurience of the scandal and how attractive it must be to the sensationalist press.

The larger point, though, is that “Jeffrey Epstein” has become a kind of catchall for so many different competing impulses in American politics, a stew of various controversies and complaints that regularly crop up in our increasingly fractious and surreal political landscape. “Jeffrey Epstein” speaks to the sense that elites operate with impunity and pull our strings — but of course you don’t need conspiracy to observe that reality. “Jeffrey Epstein” speaks to an ongoing dread that sexual deviancy is always hidden just off-frame in our society — but, as I’ve said, ordinary sexual abuse is far more common, and anyway I don’t think overstating the prevalence of such abuse actually makes it any easier to combat. “Jeffrey Epstein” speaks to our suspicion that there are not really two parties, just one set of elites that lords over all of us — he was tight with Trump and Clinton alike, with all kinds of prominent faces from both parties — but that reality is an emergent property of the way that capitalism always wins out over democracy when you try to put those two things together. “Jeffrey Epstein” speaks to the increasing pan-ideological belief that nothing is what it seems, that all of our institutions and systems are in on the same ugly cons, that everywhere you look, you find more corruption committed in total contempt for the will of the people — but, again, you don’t need an international pedophile network to get there.

I think of the great tradition of film noir and its obsession with the way that specific crimes point to larger, more diffuse, less manageable kinds of moral rot. In the best noir stories, the central mystery functions less as a puzzle to be solved and more as a thread that, when tugged, unravels a much larger and more visible moral rot. The beauty and the bleakness of great noir is that the real answer has often been hiding in plain sight: the crime is not an aberration, but an extension of the world as it is. In “Chinatown,” the murder of Hollis Mulwray isn’t the real story, but merely a shadow cast by the grotesque theft of public water and the violation of familial bonds, what Noah Cross calls “the future.” In “The Third Man,” Harry Lime isn’t a criminal mastermind so much as an inevitable byproduct of postwar chaos and greed, a man thriving in a world where human suffering has become a commodity. In “Devil in a Blue Dress,” Easy Rawlins is hired to find a specific missing woman, but ultimately uncovers a system where Black residents are used, displaced and criminalized to secure political ambitions and real estate gains for powerful white elites. Noir at its sharpest insists that the detective’s revelation is not a shattering twist, but a realization of something everyone already knew and chose to ignore.

I’m afraid the story of Jeffrey Epstein might be a little too bleak even for noir, one of our bleakest genres. It’s too prurient and gross and the crime is too fundamentally tragic and depressing to make for a good movie. But in this broader analysis, well, I guess you could take it a few ways. If there was a movie version, surely our detective hero would discover that there really is an international pedophile ring, and in the last reel he would learn that while he might be able to kill some leading figure within it, he could never hope to take down a whole network of people who have that much power and that much impunity.

What I’m suggesting, though, is that such a story might still be the more optimistic version; it would still offer a specific target, a network that could be investigated and perhaps prosecuted. But there is no such network involved in the vast majority of cases of sexual abuse of children, cases which are even grubbier, more pernicious, and more utterly hope-destroying than the Epstein crimes. Because they don’t require coaxing defenseless teenagers out to a mysterious island and keeping a log of the plane flights. They just require a child falling into the momentary control of the wrong person at the wrong time.

Release whatever files exist. Investigate the connections. Prosecute whoever you can prosecute. Have a truth-and-reconciliation commission, if you think it would help. But you’ll forgive me if I see this whole thing as something of a sideshow. The deeper devastation just keeps on going in the background, deemed unworthy of media attention, never to be made into a meme.