The 3 layers of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal

Anticipation is rising for the potential release of the “Epstein files.” 

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to approve the release of Justice Department case files related to the accused sex trafficker Tuesday, something even President Donald Trump belatedly said he supports (after months of opposing it).

But will the files corroborate any of the frenzied speculation about what exactly Jeffrey Epstein may have been up to and which powerful people might be implicated?

Or, will they simply feed further conspiracy theories without managing to prove anything?

To get a sense of what we might — and probably won’t — learn, it’s worth breaking down the various bits of the Epstein scandal into three different categories.

First, there’s what we know for sure about the scandal: Epstein recruited a vast number of young women and underage teenage girls and tried to convince or coerce them into sex acts. 

Second, we enter the more contested realm of allegations. Most importantly: Did Epstein suggest or coerce girls to have sex with the many prominent friends who frequently socialized with him at his New York and Florida mansions and his private island? And, if so, which friends?

Third, there are even murkier and more speculative theories. Was Epstein taping or blackmailing these prominent men? Was he working on behalf of US or foreign intelligence agencies? Was his supposed suicide in fact a murder?

Many on the internet think these sound plausible and can point to various tidbits of information they argue point in these directions. But they remain essentially unsubstantiated — and likely always will.

The accusations that Epstein personally preyed on a vast number of victims are very well documented and corroborated

In court filings, government documents, and journalistic accounts, there is voluminous and well-documented evidence of Epstein’s modus operandi for preying on teen girls and young women between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s.

Typically, Epstein would have his companion Ghislaine Maxwell or another of his female associates scout for or recruit prospective victims. In New York, many were aspiring artists and models. In Florida, many were recruited from spas (including Mar-a-Lago), came from disadvantaged backgrounds, or were high school students.

They’d be invited to visit one of Epstein’s opulent homes, at which point he’d make a pass or assault them. Those victims recruited from spas would typically be brought in to give Epstein a massage, during which he’d pressure them for sexual acts. Afterward, he’d pay them money and ask them to come back or offer them money to go recruit others. Many of these victims were underage — some as young as 14 — so any sexual conduct with them was statutory rape.

Afterward, some of these girls or young women would leave and never return, but Epstein paid others to stick around. (Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Epstein’s most prominent public accuser, said he gave her money to rent an apartment on the condition she be available to him at all times.) Long before Epstein was accused of criminal activity, many who encountered him were struck by how many young women or girls appeared to constantly be in his presence. In 2002, Donald Trump told a reporter that Epstein was a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Epstein’s indictment in 2006 by local authorities brought this to a halt and, soon, sparked a federal investigation into him for sex trafficking. However, his top-shelf lawyers managed to craft what was later derided as a sweetheart plea deal; he pleaded guilty to two state charges and spent a year in prison. 

After his release from prison in 2009, Epstein was re-embraced by many of his influential friends, though he faced a flurry of lawsuits from his victims. Finally, in 2018, a searing series of reports on his case revived public outrage, spurring a new investigation and eventual indictment from federal prosecutors in New York. Epstein was arrested for much more serious charges in July 2019, but he never faced trial, because he was found dead in his cell the following month.

The Justice Department and FBI have said that “Epstein harmed over one thousand victims.”

But the government never alleged Epstein trafficked girls to other prominent men. Why not?

While a vast number of women have accused Epstein of abusing them during that mid-1990s to mid-2000s period, a smaller number have made a different allegation: Epstein trafficked them to other men, and specifically, to his prominent friends. (Epstein was fabulously rich and cultivated many famous friends in the worlds of politics, academia, and tech; many of these friends often visited his mansions or his private island.)

Nailing down the exact number of women who say this happened to them is challenging, as some have made the claim as unnamed “Jane Does” in various lawsuits. But the most detailed and specific public accusations of trafficking have come from one accuser in particular: Virginia Roberts Giuffre.

Giuffre sued Epstein as a “Jane Doe” in 2009, but in 2011, after a British reporter tracked her down, she began speaking publicly about it. She said that, while underage, she was recruited by Maxwell from Mar-a-Lago’s spa to be a masseuse for Epstein and then groomed to have sex with him and his influential friends in exchange for money, which she did for a few years. “I was one of the very few he trusted as ‘special’ and chosen to ‘entertain’ his friends,” she said in 2011.

And, over the course of the next few years, Giuffre named names, most notably the UK’s Prince Andrew (Giuffre provided reporters with an instantly infamous photograph of her, the now-former prince, and Maxwell together). In depositions or court proceedings, she also said she was told to have sex with, among others, law professor and attorney Alan Dershowitz, French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, and former Senate Minority Leader George Mitchell. (But Giuffre was consistent that she was never trafficked to the two Epstein friends most often speculated about: Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.)

The men Giuffre accused denied her claims. Dershowitz, in particular, fought a years-long legal battle that ended in a settlement where Giuffre said she “may have made a mistake” in identifying him. Others pointed out inconsistencies and changes in Giuffre’s story over the years. She died by suicide this April.

Prosecutors have never accused Epstein of offering underage girls to other men and have never charged any other men in his crimes. But, at some point, investigators must have tried to assess these claims.

Many suspect that, in not bringing charges, prosecutors were simply covering up for the powerful. But there are a range of other possibilities, too. Did they find Giuffre credible and manage to corroborate her claims or not? Did they face inherent evidentiary problems about proving what exactly certain men did inside certain massage rooms on certain dates more than a decade ago and whether these men actually knew certain girls were underage? Did prosecutors run up against statutes of limitations? Did Epstein’s death make a broader case impossible, because he could no longer be used as a witness?

Documents in the Epstein files could conceivably clear up what prosecutors and investigators actually concluded and give us a clearer idea of why they never charged a broader conspiracy.

The hazier, wilder theories: a “list,” blackmail, tapes, intelligence agencies, murder

Beyond the realm of accusations actually made by people, there are the more inventive, elaborate, and purely speculative theories that are popular on the internet. These include:

• Did Epstein have a list of “clients” who paid him to partake in his underage sex ring?
• Alternatively, was Epstein taping prominent men having sex with underage girls so he could blackmail those men?
• Were Epstein’s activities undertaken by, or financed by, intelligence agencies, domestic or foreign?
• Was Epstein murdered in prison to prevent his case from going to trial — and to prevent him flipping on other powerful people?

In arguing that one or several of these may have happened, internet theorists typically point to various tidbits of Epstein lore or hearsay claims. Some of these, like the viral claim that an Epstein prosecutor was told to lay off him because he “belonged to intelligence,” appear dubious.

Federal officials have issued firm denials of several of the leading theories. A Justice Department and FBI memo released in July reiterated the conclusion that Epstein died by suicide and said a systematic review of this case found:

• No “client list.”
• No “credible evidence that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.”
• No “evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.” 

That last point is a bit vague, though — whether evidence is sufficient to predicate an investigation can be in the eye of the beholder. The Epstein files will undoubtedly include many tips, leads, and claims that raise eyebrows, even if investigators deemed them not to be useful for a larger case.

That’s why, if the files are released, they’ll likely satisfy no one and only spur further speculation and theories. Almost surely, they won’t be sufficient to prove any of the deeper conspiracies people suspect are true — but they will inevitably include a lot of hearsay. And the internet will run wild with it.