What Does It Even Mean to Be ‘In the Epstein Files’?

In the case of Jeffrey Epstein, association seems to imply guilt. And so the release of the so-called Epstein files is generating a wave of firings, resignations, and public apologies.

The health influencer Peter Attia had to resign from a protein-bar company after emails showed him participating in crude banter with Epstein. CBS News, where Attia was recently hired as a contributor, pulled a 60 Minutes segment featuring him. Brad Karp, who in one email to Epstein gushed, “You’re amazing,” is stepping down as chair of the law firm Paul Weiss. Queen’s University Belfast has announced that it is removing former U.S. Senator George Mitchell’s name from its peace institute and his bust from its campus. Mitchell, who is now 92 years old, presided over the negotiation of the Good Friday agreement in 1998 and served as the school’s chancellor for a decade. But the files suggest that Epstein had scheduled a meeting with him as recently as 2013. Los Angeles officials are calling for the city’s Olympic Committee chair to resign because he exchanged flirtatious emails with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s accomplice, in 2003. The number of people who have put out statements insisting that they did nothing illegal and apologizing for having ever known Epstein is in the dozens and rising quickly.

Nothing comparable happened in the cases of other high-profile sex criminals. The many famous friends of Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby generally did not issue public apologies. Epstein is different because, under a certain set of assumptions, an individual’s presence in the files is presumptively damning. Epstein is known to have paid or coerced dozens, possibly hundreds, of teen girls, some as young as 14, to perform sexual acts. Beyond what has been proved, the conventional wisdom holds that Epstein built his network by trafficking teen girls to other powerful men, whom he then blackmailed to generate his mysterious wealth; that his private plane and island were essentially brothels; and that even friends who didn’t participate in his crimes were surely aware of them, and chose to consort with him anyway.

Those assumptions are all widely held—but poorly substantiated. The Epstein files reveal plenty of powerful people to have tolerated or participated in disgusting and shameful behavior. Far from shedding light on a grand conspiracy, however, the files bolster the case that although terrible crimes were committed, there never was a larger conspiracy to begin with.

For anyone who has only passively kept up with the Epstein story, this is hard to wrap one’s head around. The notion that Epstein routinely trafficked teen girls to other men aboard the Lolita Express is widely accepted as fact. But the accusations that led to his initial criminal conviction were specific to Epstein himself. The notion of other abusers arose later, largely owing to explosive allegations first made in 2014 by Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre, who committed suicide in 2025, claimed that Epstein had trafficked her to some of his friends, including the nobleman formerly known as Prince Andrew and the defense attorney Alan Dershowitz. She may have been telling the truth—we do not know—but her claims, which later grew to include more men, have never been substantiated. She dropped the accusation against Dershowitz, saying she “may have made a mistake,” after he sued for defamation. (Andrew settled a case with Giuffre out of court while maintaining his innocence.)

[Kaitlyn Tiffany: America will be reading the Epstein files for decades]

The attorney Brad Edwards has represented more than 200 Epstein victims in civil lawsuits. As someone who earns money by suing perpetrators, he is perhaps the last person on earth with an incentive to downplay the culpability of Epstein’s rich friends. Last week, Edwards told the BBC that one of his clients says Epstein flew her to the United Kingdom for sex with Andrew. But in an interview with ABC News last year, Edwards nonetheless dismissed the idea that Epstein had run a trafficking ring. “Jeffrey Epstein was the pimp and the john. He was his own No. 1 client,” he said. “Nearly all of the exploitation and abuse of all of the women was intended to benefit only Jeffrey Epstein and Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual desires.” (Maxwell was convicted of trafficking girls to Epstein.) Edwards allowed that “a select few” of Epstein’s friends might have “engaged in sexual acts with a select few of the girls that Jeffrey Epstein was exploiting or abusing,” but argued that Epstein otherwise lived a double life. In one, he hobnobbed with artists, billionaires, and politicians. In the other, he abused women and girls. “For the most part,” Edwards said, “those two worlds did not overlap.”

The theory that Epstein was blackmailing his rich contacts was also always based on speculation. As an exhaustive New York Times Magazine investigation recently explained, Epstein built his fortune mainly by insinuating himself as a wealth manager for a few superrich old men and drawing hefty fees. One of those men, Leslie Wexner, has said that Epstein “misappropriated” $46 million of his money.

Nor is it obvious that Epstein’s friends necessarily knew about his crimes. Some surely did—Brad Karp, the Paul Weiss chair, kept emailing with Epstein through 2019, after his offenses had become national news—but plenty might not have. His 2008 plea deal is scandalous precisely because he was allowed to admit to the lesser offense of soliciting underage prostitution, rather than rape or child sexual abuse. He spent only a year in jail and continued to move in polite society once he got out. Acquaintances might have taken all that as evidence that whatever he had done wasn’t so bad, or they may not have known about it at all. He surely did not go around telling them the truth.

Inversely, having been friends with Epstein before his conviction is no proof of ignorance. Donald Trump, for example, insists that he fell out with Epstein in the 2000s, before the guilty plea. But in 2002, he told New York magazine that Epstein was a “terrific guy” before noting, “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”  The notorious birthday book that was released well before the most recent document dump makes clear that many of Epstein’s powerful friends knew about and celebrated his interest in girls.

Epstein has been dead for much longer than he was a household name. Although he had appeared in the news over the years, few Americans knew who he was until November 2018, when the investigative reporter Julie K. Brown published her now-legendary exposé in the Miami Herald. Less than eight months later, the Department of Justice charged Epstein with sex trafficking, and in August 2019—less than a year after the story broke—his lifeless body was found hanging in the Brooklyn jail cell where he was awaiting trial.

In death, Epstein has taken on far more significance than he did in life. Some Americans were already primed to believe in international pedophilia rings. Bonus points if they were run by wealthy Jews—Jews who were perhaps on the Mossad payroll, as many conspiracists have insisted Epstein was. Especially potent was the notion of a “client list” naming everyone in Epstein’s trafficking ring. This idea seemed to explain why he’d received a lenient deal in 2008 (to protect his powerful clients) and why he had supposedly been murdered in jail (to keep him from talking).

This was all a natural fit for members of the MAGA right, some of whom already believed that Trump had been sent by God to expose pedophiles. Even though Trump was president when Epstein died in federal custody, and had enjoyed a well-publicized friendship with him in the period when Epstein is known to have been abusing teen girls, the MAGA movement nurtured the idea that Democrats were covering up “the Epstein files” to protect their own. Trump himself said that he would release the files if he won a second term. During a Fox News interview in February 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that the client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review. That’s been a directive by President Trump.”

Then Trump abruptly backtracked, declaring the whole Epstein matter to be a “witch hunt.” Suddenly, Release the files was just about the only thing this nation could agree on. Trump’s explanations for the reversal were so bizarrely unconvincing that it was hard to believe the files wouldn’t contain damaging information about him. The longer Trump delayed, the more explosive the files seemed destined to be. Could the client list include Trump himself?

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s Epstein denials are ever so slightly unconvincing]

The truth seems to be that there never was a client list. The Epstein files encompass millions of documents in the Department of Justice’s possession, including seemingly every email to or from Epstein’s account over a period of years. To say that someone is “in the Epstein files” therefore doesn’t mean much on its own. Some names are discussed by Epstein and his assistants, but are not attached to any correspondence. Others appear only in news clippings. Trump does appear, many times, but in the third person. (Trump famously does not like to use email.) The most explosive claims against him are unvetted allegations submitted to the government.

Many of the emails are newsworthy. Some of Epstein’s male friends seem to have relied on him for introductions to young, but not underage, women who were either sex workers or aspiring sugar babies. In one email, Epstein tells Andrew, then 50, about a beautiful 26-year-old Russian woman that Epstein thinks he should meet. Andrew replies that he’d be “delighted.” In others, Steve Tisch, a co-owner of the New York Giants, solicits information about potential sex partners from Epstein, at points asking for clarification on whether they’re a “working girl” or “civilian.” (Both Andrew and Tisch have denied any wrongdoing.) Peter Mandelson, who was recently removed from his role as British ambassador to the United States over his Epstein ties, not only emerges as one of Epstein’s closest and creepiest confidants, but also appears to have fed Epstein financially valuable information from meetings with government officials. Noam Chomsky, the linguist and political theorist, is seen advising Epstein on how to manage the fallout from his conviction.

Other documents contradict what prominent people have said about their connections to Epstein. Elon Musk, for example, is one of the world’s foremost purveyors of Epstein conspiracism. He posted last fall that Epstein “tried to get me to go to his island and I REFUSED.” In fact, as The New York Times has reported, the files suggest that Musk was eager to go: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” he emailed Epstein in 2012. Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, has claimed that he vowed in the mid-2000s to “never be in a room with that disgusting person ever again.” The files show him emailing Epstein in 2012 to arrange a family visit to Epstein’s private island.

More unseemly or even criminal material may well come out. Perhaps evidence will even emerge to prove that Epstein systematically trafficked minors to other men or blackmailed them over legal but secret liaisons. But so far, none has.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Circles of Epstein hell]

Because the Epstein conspiracy theory is treated as reality by so many, however, merely appearing in the files seems to be grounds for suspicion. And because Epstein cultivated as many high-profile contacts as possible, that leaves a whole lot of people potentially exposed to unfounded insinuations. A Daily Beast headline over the weekend, for example, declared of the journalist Nellie Bowles, “MAGA-Curious CBS Boss’s Wife Busted Ingratiating Herself With Epstein.” In fact, the files show Bowles, who is now married to CBS News head Bari Weiss, emailing with Epstein to interview him for a New York Times story. An Inside Higher Ed article published Tuesday lists nine academics who appear in the files and notes that this puts “pressure on those named to explain their communications”—as many of them then do, in statements to their campus newspapers. A sure way to get engagement on social media is to extrapolate recklessly from suggestive nuggets of information. J. K. Rowling evidently felt compelled to issue a statement contradicting files-based accusations that she had invited Epstein to the opening of her Harry Potter musical.

Epstein committed horrific acts against a staggering number of women and girls, but, judging from the available evidence, he was not at the center of a global pedophilia ring that included dozens of criminal co-conspirators. The apparent truth is somehow even more depressing. Smarmy jerks can get obscenely wealthy in this country just by managing other people’s money. Men who sexually abuse women and children can be charming. The most accomplished people in our society can be terrible judges of character. They can, in the pursuit of proximity to wealth and power, ignore or downplay what’s right in front of them. The Epstein files show us that the world is an ugly and unfair place. But we already knew that.