We Are Exploiting Epstein's Victims For Our Own Politics

The Epstein List doesn't exist. Our relentless search for it says more about ourselves.

Can we all agree finally that we will never, ever see such a thing as an “Epstein List?”

I phrase it like that because, if it ever did exist, we can say with close to one hundred percent certainty that it has been destroyed. If, the theory goes, that Trump is on The List, there is no way it hasn’t been atomized. Trump famously and illegally destroys most of his official documents so there’s not a damn chance he’d keep this one hanging around his neck. So, either way it does not, at the present time, exist.

I’m hoping that since we can agree on that, now, given the events of the past week, everyone might be a little less mad at me for saying it never existed.

I’m not saying he wasn’t guilty as sin. Jeffrey Epstein was an absolute monster. But over years of public immersion in this story there are elements that have been distorted or even hallucinated. I forgive anyone who has been under the impression this whole time that Epstein’s client list is a real and confirmed thing that people have been trying to track down like the Nixon tapes, something that people have seen and can describe, but which has gone missing via nefarious means.

What's that in his hand?

It is practically what people call a Mandela effect at this point, like those who swear Curious George had a tail and the Monopoly Man wore a monocle. But actually, the existence of an Epstein client list was, from the outset, entirely hypothetical and, like many elements of conspiracy culture, it’s something people insist is real—demand is real—due entirely to how badly they want it to be real.

Epstein’s crimes were real, and the lives he destroyed were real, but you rarely hear very much about his victims. One of the tragedies here is the way in which we have eagerly sought to make Jeffrey Epstein about ourselves, much more than the women he harmed. Most people can’t name any of his victims, but you know who everyone can name?

The people they want to be on that list.

That’s the real reason this has become the scandal of the century, why presidents have campaigned on releasing The List. It’s Excalibur. It’s the One Ring. It’s the Ark of the Covenant. It is a weapon that can destroy all of your enemies, and all we have to do is find it. If you’re on the right, the List includes Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, as well as a laundry list of woke Hollywood and music industry figures. If you’re on the left, the List features Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and a whole bunch of other Republican ghouls. Maybe half of the Supreme Court, wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t that solve all our problems?

Would it even be surprising?

Nothing gets people angrier on either side of politics than someone who suggests the Epstein List isn’t out there somewhere, because people have begun relying on its existence. The idea that there is a book out there like a political version of the Death Note containing a list of names, and each name is an automatic prison sentence and the end of a public life—maybe the end of a whole political ideology!—and all of the names in that book, we are certain, are the people we most want to be in it. It’s too tempting not to be true.