From the halls of the DOJ to the towers of academia, the unsealed 2026 disclosures reveal a "global criminal enterprise" that thrived not in the shadows, but in the blatant complicity of global elites
We seem to be in a paradigm shift, where time moves strangely and long-held certainties dissolve, where the centre cannot hold in the face of a collapse of moral leadership.
A mere three weeks have passed since the US Department of Justice released – under lawful compulsion – the latest tranche of the ‘Epstein Files’. Consisting of three million pages of text messages, emails, documents, and notes, the files also contain tens of thousands of images and videos. Astoundingly, some reporting indicates that this release constitutes just a tiny fraction of all material seized from Epstein’s lairs by law enforcement – perhaps only 2% of the total, according to the UK’s Channel 4 News.
Even if one were to set aside that astonishing claim, there are at least three million of Epstein’s files still in DOJ’s possession. However, US Attorney General Pam Bondi, following her extraordinary appearance before the US Congress last week, sent Congress a letter declaring compliance with the Act and that none of the remaining documents would be supplied to Congress. The A-G’s message in the letter was clear: ‘trust us’, she says, while refusing to even acknowledge victims present at the hearing.
While we wait for the rest of the data, there is more than enough horror to process. Horror at the tone expressed in Epstein’s emails and messages, which leaves one feeling by turns repulsed, outraged, stunned, and helpless. Horror at how powerful men exchange jolly notes with Epstein about their appetites for sexual abuse, torture, and blatant corruption. Horror at the way their emails marinate in a casual, blithe and smirking sense of impunity.
For the Epstein class, girls and young women exist to be exploited, used, and then cruelly, perhaps even violently, discarded.
Those of us who have been involved in the analysis and investigation of online paedophile communities will not be surprised by Epstein’s global reach. The largest networks disrupted by law enforcement agencies around the world in recent years comprise hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Members of these sites are highly organised, often part of the professional classes, cosmopolitan, and affluent.
What the Epstein Files reveal is not that the sexual abuse and enslavement of children is global. Instead, what is revealed is the depth of moral turpitude and degeneracy at the heart of global systems of politics, finance, technology, academia and culture – with leading members of hallowed institutions grovelling for crumbs from Epstein’s Caribbean table.
The Files supply, to borrow a phrase from journalist Edward Luce, ‘an MRI of the establishment’.
In fact, one of the more extraordinary insights is that Epstein’s reputation, influence, and access to global institutional power only increased after he was jailed in 2008 for raping children. The network of gilded parasites around Epstein thickened from this time, and while it contained the usual cast of Newsnight main characters, it also grew to include men who had ostensibly devoted their lives to progressing humanist ideals.
The list is dismal. Noam Chomsky, anarcho-syndicalist Cassandra of manufacturing consent, himself manufacturing a protective rind for history’s most manipulative paedophile. Bill Gates, founder of the Gates Foundation which lists ‘Gender Equality’ as one of its main focus areas. Sam Harris, whose critiques of religious fundamentalism and theocracy highlight the treatment of women and girls. Deepak Chopra, who through a nebulous New Age spirituality calls on followers to ‘sympathise with all suffering, no matter which side you take in a conflict’.
The hypocrisy and complicity on display – burnishing Epstein’s image, advising him on managing his reputation, and consoling him over his ‘horrible’ and ‘putrid’ treatment by the media – leaves one sickened and disoriented. After all, are these not the leaders, thinkers and teachers, visionaries and radicals who were supposed to show us how to live ethically, compassionately and rationally? Instead, they have behaved to minimise, shield and redact Epstein’s criminality, in much the same way the DOJ has used its power to protect the identities of perpetrators.
Indeed, this is one of the more shocking features of the Epstein disclosures. The names of powerful men desperate for Epstein’s patronage, or worse, access to his ‘harem’, are blacked out. Yet there is no such regard for the welfare or privacy of victims, 1200 of whom have been revealed in all their vulnerability on page after page, either through negligence or malice – which, at this point, is a distinction without a difference.
The inversion here of a fundamental formula – protect victims, prosecute offenders – represents the most shocking and gut-wrenching institutional failing I have seen in my lifetime.
We should be clear about the implications from this: The unstructured, uncategorised, slipshod and ‘flood-the-zone’ approach to publishing the Files represents the DOJ’s deliberate decision to barely, even maliciously, comply with statutory requirements.
Yet, to describe the Epstein Files as illustrating some kind of global scandal debases and subverts the meaning of Jeffrey Epstein. Watergate was a scandal, albeit one that brought down a president. Scott Morrison’s holding of secret ministries was a scandal. So too Boris Johnson’s ‘Partygate’ debacle, and the tawdry Profumo Affair.
This is something else. Unlike those events, this is not a question of a failing by an individual or even an organisation, but a system – in fact multiple systems, global in scope. Something here feels epochal, almost impossible to comprehend. It is possibly the greatest moral collapse of the modern age, where the dignity, rights, bodies, and even lives of children were traded for proximity to power.
Thankfully, this fact has been recently recognised by independent human rights experts serving with the UN Human Rights Council, who on Monday held that the offences revealed in the Epstein Files could reach a threshold to make them the gravest crimes under international law. “So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls, that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity,” the experts said.
The offending includes allegations of sexual slavery, reproductive violence, enforced disappearances, torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, and femicide, all contained within an elite worldview that denigrates difference, despises women, and sees power as a goal justifying all means, no matter how debased.
The UN Committee: “These crimes were committed against a backdrop of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption, extreme misogyny, and the commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls from different parts of the world.”
Under such an extraordinary finding, accountability in this moment must mean more than loss of prestige and influence, of reputation and standing, or of peerages and titles. True accountability for the miseries inflicted by the Epstein class on thousands of girls and young women can only be achieved in one way: By perpetrators being identified, named, and put in the dock to be judged according to law – even if that means in the International Criminal Court for knowingly being involved in a conspiracy to inflict, as the experts have observed, a ‘systematic attack directed against a civilian population’.
Governments must support their law enforcement agencies to pursue evidence wherever it leads, to whoever’s door is darkened by an early morning search warrant. However, this requires the moral leadership that is so darkly lacking in Bondi’s DOJ. Before police can prepare their warrant kits, they must first have the DOJ unmask the perpetrators of these monstrous crimes. Only then can we expect anything like accountability – and perhaps then the collapse of this corrupt paradigm in favour of one that is fairer and more just.