Me Too revealed a lot of villains. Why is Epstein the one we still care about?
As part of its ongoing release of the Epstein files, the Department of Justice has released three FBI memos relating to accusations of sexual assault against President Donald Trump. The news came days after Bill and Hillary Clinton were brought before the House Oversight Committee to testify about Bill’s connection to notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
All of this was perhaps only a matter of time. The right has long been as obsessed with how Clinton fits into the Epstein story as the left has been with the question of how Trump fits into it.
Both Trump and Clinton feature in the Epstein files. They appear in photos, grinning and tanned next to a smirking Epstein; they appear in magazines, giving admiring quotes about him. The persistent presence of both presidents in the Epstein story is part of what has given it such staying power.
Epstein’s story first became inescapable because of the Me Too movement. Yet while the Epstein story still has avid followers, the same cannot be said for the rest of the stories that dominated headlines in 2017 at the height of Me Too. Instead, we are in the midst of a full Me Too backlash.
Many of the gains the movement ostensibly brought have been either overturned or used as justification for an anti-feminist “correction.” Trump won his reelection bid in 2024 even after being found civilly liable for sexual assault; after his victory, the gloating phrase “Your body, my choice” trended on social media. High-profile men accused of sexual misconduct are being greeted with not just indifference but outright sympathy. In a 2025 poll run by The 19th, more than half of the men surveyed said that women should return to “traditional” gender roles like child-rearing and housewifery.
Yet Epstein remains a bipartisan issue, in large part because both sides can use it as evidence for a bigger narrative. It’s these metanarratives that explain why the Epstein story lingers when so few other Me Too stories have — and why Me Too had as much impact as it did in 2017.
The Epstein story first caught fire at the height of the Me Too movement
In 2018, the Me Too movement made Jeffrey Epstein — already a convicted sex offender, but little known among the general public — into a monster. Usually, stories about relatively unknown men doing terrible things to women are met with a muted response from the public, but that year, things were different.
Bombshell reporting that year from the Miami Herald revealed that as early as 2006, law enforcement had compiled mountains of evidence suggesting that Epstein had sexually abused dozens of underage girls. But wealthy, well-connected Epstein worked out a sweetheart deal with prosecutors that limited his sentencing to just 13 months in the county jail, pleading guilty to nothing more than two prostitution charges. He was also allowed to commute to work from jail while he was serving out his sentence, a privilege he allegedly used to sexually abuse more women.
The 2018 Epstein story met an audience primed to be angry at the abuses of monstrous men, and they really did get angry.
In the wake of the Herald’s reporting, Epstein was rearrested in 2019 and charged with sex trafficking minors. He was found dead in his jail cell later that year, before his trial could begin.
The Epstein story was a matter of public record before Me Too caught fire in 2017, but it took Me Too to elevate it to the level of common knowledge. Once Me Too had lifted it up, it would meet an audience bigger than the rest of the Me Too stories, including Larry Nassar, the other infamous pedophile of the Me Too exposés, but one who has been largely forgotten since his 2017 sentencing. Epstein had so many victims — at least 1,000 — and they were all children, regular anonymous little girls. Even people who didn’t care about the assault of Oscar winners cared about that.
“This case is about justice, not just for us, but for other victims who aren’t Olympic stars or Hollywood stars,” Epstein survivor Courtney Wild told the Miami Herald.
Over the next few years, the anti-feminist backlash would come for Me Too, but it never came for the Epstein story. Trump’s MAGA base spent years clamoring for the release of the Epstein files, and they now pronounce themselves severely disappointed by the mess his administration has made of it. Recent polling finds that more than half of Americans have heard about the Epstein files — more than have heard about the shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by immigration law enforcement — and they are concerned. “The whole Epstein debacle, I think that should have been out already months and months ago,” said one Republican man who regrets his vote for Trump during a recent focus group of voters who don’t follow the news.
In the midst of the Me Too backlash, Epstein stands alone: the monster nobody wants to redeem, the bogeyman the public never gets tired of hearing about. Long dead and with all the questions about his crimes left unanswered, his is the one Me Too story for which Americans writ large still demand justice.
The first reason for Epstein’s continued relevance might be the most obvious: Very few people have an interest in trying to clear his name. He has no stan army, no one monitoring his name’s appearance on social media so they can leap to his defense. He is also dead, so he cannot hire publicists or lawyers to muddy the waters around the accusations against him, like Justin Baldoni and Johnny Depp did.
As a result, we don’t see that many malicious narratives about how Epstein’s accusers are probably just in it for the fame and the money, or how the accusers have kind of a mean girl vibe so shouldn’t be believed. While enough of those narratives exist to make the lives of Epstein’s victims very difficult, they haven’t achieved mainstream saturation in the way that they did for Amber Heard and Blake Lively. The full horror of Epstein’s crimes can remain clear in the public view.
Then, too, there are all the persistent, only partially resolved questions around Epstein that seem to invite conspiracy. His death, alone in an under-surveilled jail cell shortly before his trial, has given rise to multiple theories that he was assassinated at the behest of an old friend who didn’t want Epstein to talk about what he knew. (An official autopsy determined Epstein died by suicide.) During his life, Epstein’s extreme wealth didn’t seem to match his public career as a money manager with just two known clients. (A New York Times investigation from last year seems to have solved that mystery: Epstein appears to have built his fortune via a series of petty white-collar scams like abusing expense accounts.) Finally, there’s the mystery of the charges against Epstein. He was accused multiple times of trafficking his victims to his wealthy, well-connected friends, including a former royal prince of Britain. Yet the government has never brought charges against anyone for that crime, which has led to endless theories that it’s because of the behind-the-scenes influence of powerful people.
How Clinton and Trump fit into the Epstein story
Both Clinton and Trump appear to have associated with Epstein for years. Clinton rode Epstein’s private jet multiple times in the early 2000s, writing in his memoir Citizen that he used his plane rides to help establish the Clinton Foundation. Clinton says he was never close to Epstein, and there’s little evidence to suggest they were. There are, however, a few pictures of Clinton in the Epstein files, including one in which he sits on what appears to be a private plane, embracing a young woman perched on the arm of his chair — enough to launch an avalanche of theories. Clinton has been accused of sexual violence, including rape, in other contexts, but none of Epstein’s victims have ever publicly accused Clinton.
Trump, meanwhile, had a longstanding and well-documented friendship with Epstein, although they appear to have fallen out sometime in the early 2000s. That friendship may or may not have included joint sexual assault: One unnamed plaintiff filed a lawsuit in 2016 alleging that Trump and Epstein raped her in 1994 when she was 13 years old, but she withdrew her suit for unknown reasons. The recent DOJ release shows that another woman told the FBI in 2019 that Trump and Epstein raped her in the 1980s when she was a teenager.
The flight logs, the pictures, the dirty jokes: There are so many suggestive details here, and so few concrete facts. These ambiguous, fuzzy connections are a conspiracist’s dream. A person might reason that Epstein escaped legal consequences for his crimes for many years because of his connections. And what if the most important of those connections happened to be the president who I don’t like? What are all these powerful people hiding from me?
Eight years of conspiracy theories about Epstein, Clinton, and Trump
The right began developing theories about Epstein and Clinton very soon after the Miami Herald’s 2018 story broke. Some of that was because Clinton and Epstein really did know each other, but a lot of it was simply because the Epstein story fit so well into the extant QAnon mythology about decadent elite pedophiles already developing on the outskirts of the right-wing internet.
For the left, meanwhile, the Epstein story was a Trump scandal from the beginning. The initial news hook for the Miami Herald’s reporting was that Alexander Acosta, the prosecutor who signed off on Epstein’s scandalous 2008 plea deal, was now a Trump official. Democrats called for Acosta to testify before Congress, and for the DOJ to launch an investigation into Epstein’s plea deals and release its records.
The persistence of the Epstein files even reveals why the Me Too movement was briefly popular on both sides of the political aisle.
After Epstein died and Trump left office, Democrats largely stopped demanding transparency (possibly because Ghislaine Maxwell’s case was still making its way through the courts). Trump’s allies were agitating on right-wing podcasts, and specifically wanted the names of Epstein’s alleged clients. “What the hell are the House Republicans doing?” Kash Patel, now the FBI director, demanded in 2023. “Put on your big boy pants, and let us know who the pedophiles are.”
Once in office, Trump declared the files a hoax. Maxwell’s case was over and done with, and Democratic politicians began once again calling for the files to be released. Trump dragged his feet until it became clear last year that Congress, with bipartisan support, was going to push the matter one way or the other.
Notably, while the right has looked pointedly away from Trump’s association with Epstein, the left appears willing to sacrifice Clinton if it means bringing down Epstein’s associates. Democrats joined Republicans in pressuring Clinton to testify before Congress. “It’s less about allegiances to, you know, individuals, and more about what’s best for our party and what’s best for this country,” Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) told Politico in February.
Now the Epstein files, such as they are, have been released to the public. And as journalists and activists sift through them, the outcry surrounding Epstein shows no sign of calming down. His story has become a myth, a parable that both sides of polarized America are desperate to claim.
On the left, the Epstein files detail how many men are abusing women and girls and getting away with it because we live in a country that makes it easy for them to do so. Epstein was a cautionary tale of what happens when victims aren’t taken seriously: a man who abused a thousand girls and left a mountain of evidence; who was found guilty of his crimes and got a slap on the wrist; who was surrounded by people who had every resource in the world available to them to do something about him but who never, ever did.
On the right, the Epstein files show how wealthy people with prestigious jobs who claim to have the moral high ground use their prestige to do awful, depraved things. They are a story about how many of the people we are supposed to respect are secretly doing terrible things, a story about the villainy of people like Epstein and Clinton, who will commit a sex crime and then tell you that actually, they were doing charity.
Seen through this lens, the persistence of the Epstein files even reveals why the Me Too movement was briefly popular on both sides of the political aisle. On the left, Me Too may ostensibly have been a story about the problem of sexual violence everywhere in American life (hence Me Too, as in, it’s a common enough problem that all women know about it). On the right, Me Too was a story about finally taking down those hypocritical liberal elites in Hollywood and media, who were doing things that normal people would never do.
Both of these stories speak deeply to the concerns of Americans of all political persuasions. Advocating for survivors of sexual assault is not always easy in a culture that is not generally inclined to believe or support victims, and sustaining interest in a movement like Me Too is difficult when sexual violence is just so pervasive. Staying committed to a larger narrative about the shadowy forces of evil you’re voting against is a lot more compelling. Who would ever get tired of trying to take down a president?