The Epstein Saga
In days like these it is impossible, not to write about the Epstein Saga since it encapsulates so much about America & the West. Its three circles, the money circle, the elite circle and the sex circle are so elaborately intertwined that their intersections tell us much more about power in our neo-liberal societies than we ever wanted to know. In our myriad illusions about consensus, rule of law and stability in post-war democracies we could not believe that the division, illegality and destruction of Trumpism could enter our peaceful sphere. Nor did we imagine that our elites had reached a state of moral degradation that in our naïve minds had been reserved for the Romans in times long passed.
To enter the “Epstein Library” you go to www.justice.gov/epstein . There you will find 5.300 files with about three million pages and 38.000 referrals to “Donald Trump”, “Melania” and “Mar-a-Lago”. Many of the photographs are redacted to shelter the victims of Epstein’ criminal service offering underage girls to powerful people. In some cases, this redaction did not work as some of the abused women have stated whilst the names of quite a few men from Epstein’s client list are not legible. And the Trump Administration is still refusing to release the 2 ½ million remaining pages off this sordid library.
Scrolling through those 12 data sets of files you can visit places like Epstein’s private Caribbean Island Little St. James - also dubbed “paedophile island” – where most of the sexual abuse took place before Jeffrey Epstein was sentenced to a suspiciously low sentence of 18 month by a Florida court in 2008. Or you can also enter his Manhattan Town House where the predator of girls and networker among the powerful had assembled photographs on his mantelpiece showing him with Arab leaders or the Pope. And where - as the released short messages show - members of the jet set dropped in for monetary advice, psychological uplifting or just for having fun, whatever that meant. In the words of the Financial Times: “Epstein’s emails read like a self-help group for the 0.01 per cent”.
Even after Epstein’s conviction his network remained wide and reached from the far-right MAGA-promoter Steve Bannon (mentioned 1859 times) to the far-left intellectual Noam Chomsky (mentioned 3801 times). From the US president down, it comprised Wall Street financiers, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, heads of law firms, British and Norwegian Royals, movie directors, politicians of all stripes and celebrities of all kinds.
They all make an illustrious list: Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Sarah Ferguson, Richard Branson, Lord Mandelson, and on and on; plus, some 30 members of the Trump administration or people in his circle. Some of those figures appearing in the Epstein Files will have committed serious criminal offences, others will have just flouted the law, but most of them wilfully ignored what he went to prison for. They did not even google all his crimes.
Many of them took Epstein’s friendship money as a “gift of permission” (Tina Brown), as a licence to overstep legal rules and moral inhibitions. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes very perceptively in the “Indian Express”, Little St. James Island served as the promise and place to escape all the norms of mainstream society. Here the “offshoring” of moral principles and financial crimes could merge undetected.
The simultaneous acts of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein during the late 90s and early 2000s with their self-promoting and criminal energies – and their predilection for “girls on the younger side”- were emblematic for an out of bounds neo-liberalism and its concurring culture before the financial crisis of 2008.
Both men proved amazingly perceptive about the needs and fears of their respective audiences. Jeffrey Epstein would understand the secret desires and personal insecurity of his rich clients, be it as a generous dispenser of credit for their cash flow problems or as an agony aunt for their childish wishes. Later Donald Trump would prove as ingenious at exploiting the anger and fears of America’s lower middle-class, irate about arrogant elite-behaviour whilst having to pay for the crashed economy.
Both men have been peddlers in the dreams and insecurities of others and knew exactly when and how to turn dependencies into threats. There are quite a few emails by Jeffrey Epstein where he switches from his helpful demeanour into barbed threats. In the case of Donald Trump his acts of revenge against former allies are legend.
And the way the US-president has so far escaped the Epstein Saga unscathed shows how he still manages to turn threats to himself into danger for others. Some might see this amoral or criminal entrepreneurial behaviour as the business model of late capitalism. Even the London Times calls the Epstein Saga “a fable of modern capitalism”.
What does it do to a society when its elite is exposed to the world as venal and venereal, corrupt, cruel and criminal, immature, ridiculous and childish, enjoying impunity where others suffer? What the bourgeoisie and the political class never wanted to know, what the lower classes, Roman historians, Oswald Spengler and Vladimir Putin thought they knew, and what conspiracy theorists could only dream of? No, it wasn’t that Hillary Clinton ran a paedophile ring from the basement of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C, as the QAnon conspiracy theory would have it in 2016. It was a close friend of her nemesis Donald Trump who groomed underage girls for his rich clients on Little St. James Island in the Caribbean - and it is true.
The first thing such a society and its media do is construct a wider conspiracy theory out of what is known. This is not surprising. Because if you were a scriptwriter for a James Bond movie your plot could easily centre around a charming paedophile who ensnares members of the economic, political and cultural elite by providing them with cash, economic advice and “Russian girls for Kompromat”, all in the service of the enemy.
Such a plot would wonderfully explain the so far unknown source of Epstein’s considerable wealth and why Trump has been so lenient with Russia: because the money came from Moskau and Putin holds incriminating material on Trump. Reputable persons like Poland’s Premier Donald Tusk or the British journalist Andrew Marr are sincerely suggesting such a “backstory” and, given what has come out to be true, this does not sound too farfetched. But it is by no means proven from what we know so far. And it would not be the first time that the West would outsource the reasons for its own troubles to Russia.
So, the collapse of the moral order and new conspiracy theories go hand in hand. And it will be interesting to see what the different political camps in America and Europe will make of it. Will MAGA insist on the release of all files and the potential “client list”, as some activists of the right-wing movement demand? Will the Republican Party lose 10% of the MAGA vote because of Trump’s controversial handling of the files, as Steve Bannon suggested not long ago? Or will the public just “move on” from the Epstein scandal, as the president recommends?
Will Europe’s anti-American left celebrate that the United States declare moral bankruptcy just when they are desperately needed by Europe in the Ukraine? And how will Germany’s AFD party balance the traditional anti-Americanism of its supporters – freshly nourished by the Epstein scandal – with its political proximity to the Trump-Administration.
In any case, millions of people all over the world will suspect that many of those holding power in America are intrinsically evil. And 250 years after its creation millions of Americans on the right and on the left will think that their celebrated democracy is rotten to the core with a two-tier justice system and an elite that sees itself above the law.
Most political crises in the history of America’s democracy have been followed by an act of political reckoning, be it through a thorough report by a public commission or some national soul searching. Yet there will be no chance for this as long as Donald Trump is holding power and keeping the lid on the Epstein files. It will be the unenviable task of the next US-administration to address the questions of how a society could produce an elite of this kind; and how to restore a culture of shame after the licentious age of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.
Whatever long-term impact the Epstein Saga will have on the already brittle condition of American democracy: for the time being it is drifting towards authoritarianism with an elite that has little authority left.