If there’s one thing our increasingly polarized nation can agree upon, it’s that Jeffrey Epstein was a bad guy. Like really bad. Years after his suicide, the financier and convicted sex offender is still dominating the news cycle as the world waits for the full release of the Epstein files—the cadre of government-classified documents about Epstein’s exploits, which allegedly involved rich and powerful men like Elon Musk, Bill Clinton, and President Donald Trump. Naturally, the twisted minds at The Onion thought such a dark situation would make perfect fodder for comedy.
Cue Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile, a 20-minute satirical documentary that blends fact and fiction as it skewers the deceased predator. “I’m supposed to say this—I run the company—but it is the funniest thing I’ve seen this year,” says Onion CEO Ben Collins. “And it’s deeply stupid.”
In reality, Epstein and his crimes are no laughing matter. But The Onion’s editorial staff has found a way to mock him while also making fun of the true-crime documentaries that pop up like weeds on Netflix and HBO Max. The film’s talking heads include an investigative reporter from the Pedophile Island Tribune (“I was the only one on the island who wasn’t a sex slave,” she comes to realize), and a man dressed as a priest with the chyron “pedophile expert.”
“So much of this is social commentary, and so much of it’s just stupid dick jokes, basically,” says Collins of the film. The short was made quickly, as a direct response to the media and the public’s shared obsession with all things Epstein. In early August, Collins and his staff tried to figure out a fresh way into the scandal: “Trump clearly doesn’t know how to maneuver around this. He’s acting super sketchy about it. It just didn’t feel like it was going away.”
So they leaned into the chaos, using the budget normally set aside for Onion News Network—the company’s news series—to make it a reality. “The scripting came together almost instantly,” says Collins. “I tend not to go into the writers room when they’re doing big things like this, and you could just hear them laughing for 15 minutes at a time.” Casting the film, which was primarily shot in the annex of The Onion’s Chicago-based office, was more difficult. As it turns out, “some people don’t want to be cast as Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend who didn’t actually get into his inner circle because she wasn’t cool enough.” (Spoiler alert: Misogyny does in fact rear its ugly head in Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile.)
Nevertheless they persisted, and shot Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile over the course of six weeks. “We just went whole hog,” says Collins. He takes a beat. “Maybe ‘whole hog’ is the wrong thing to say.”
While Epstein is often the butt of the movie’s jokes, The Onion also isn’t afraid to take shots at others who were (allegedly) in Epstein’s orbit. There’s a section on Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s now incarcerated accomplice and “gross pervert assistant,” per the film. (Never forget, the movie says, that “behind every male sex trafficker, there’s an even more powerful female sex trafficker.”) Alleged members of Epstein’s cabal like Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, and esteemed Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz feature prominently as well.
But perhaps unsurprisingly, the supporting character with the most screen time is none other than Trump himself. “The president is friends with the world’s most notorious sex-trafficking pedophile, and has been for decades,” says Collins. “And then he was murdered—or sorry, excuse me. Probably he killed himself. Nothing else happened.” (Trump has said he had “no idea” that Epstein was abusing young women, and that he barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago: “He stole people that worked for me…. I threw him out, and that was it.”)
Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile is being unleashed at a time when speaking out against the president and his cronies feels riskier than ever—let alone insinuating that Trump was involved in a convicted pedophile’s circle. Two weeks ago, Jimmy Kimmel was promptly taken off the air for making jokes about the reaction to the killing of Charlie Kirk. While Kimmel was reinstated a week later, the ordeal had lingering consequences for Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile.
“We were set to air this in a bunch of screens throughout the country through a national chain,” says Collins. “[On September 10] Charlie Kirk got shot, and then within a few hours we were told they were no longer comfortable with it.” The Onion didn’t fight the theater chain’s decision at the time, because they “didn’t want to make a big hairy deal” out of it—but Collins wants to be very clear that he thought the decision was “bad.”
“I think Charlie Kirk being shot is horrific, and what we all saw was awful and disgusting, and political violence is really terrible and inexcusable. I also believe that if your first instinct as a company is to say, ‘Jeffrey Epstein is friends with the president, and the president was friends with Charlie Kirk, therefore we can’t talk about the world’s biggest pedophile,’ that’s a bad instinct,” says Collins.
Ultimately, Collins and crew got scrappy and called up every independent theater they could think of. The gambit worked. “We had many, many more cinemas than we would’ve had originally,” says Collins. “We’re in towns that we never would’ve ever thought of. We’re in Joplin, Missouri, and we’re in Prince Edward Island. There are places in Australia and the UK and Germany that want to run this thing.” Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile is not only playing all over the country—it’s selling out. “They’re all having to add second or third screenings or new days,” says Collins. “People really want to see this thing.”
This, Collins believes, is not only a testament to The Onion’s quality, but a referendum on Trump himself. “People do not like what’s going on, and people vote with their dollars,” he says. “It’s not purely capitalistic. We are making art for the sake of art, absolutely, but there is sort of a protest-vote element in showing up to this thing.”
Even beyond Kimmel, comedy has become increasingly politicized in Trump’s second term. In recent days, the internet erupted after comedy A-listers like Dave Chappelle, Pete Davidson, and Whitney Cummings agreed to headline the Riyadh Comedy Festival in Saudi Arabia. “I’m going to say something really brave: I think Jeffrey Epstein is bad, and I also think 9/11 was bad,” says Collins, alluding to the Saudi government’s alleged ties to the terror attacks. “I think both those things were bad, and I wouldn’t hang out with either of those people—the 9/11 people or the Jeffrey Epstein. Somebody’s going to make a statue of me with that as the placard: ‘I think 9/11 was bad, and I think Jeffrey Epstein was bad.’”
On a more serious note, Collins thinks the Riyadh lineup reflects something dire about both American politics and the bifurcated woke-versus-anti-woke comedy scene. Collins says there’s “a lot of money” behind enticing anti-woke comics to shill for the political project on the right. “I also like money, but I think getting hundreds of thousands of dollars to tell jokes for 10 minutes about ‘airline food is bad’ is actually illustrative of a much larger thing: The stuff that’s getting greenlit is not necessarily popular with the populace. It’s popular with rich people who are sick of being yelled at in the media. They are using some of these people as vehicles for whatever the comedy equivalent of greenwashing is.”
There’s a parallel to be drawn between the Riyadh Comedy Festival and Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile—the ultra-wealthy getting whatever they want. “George Carlin said it best: ‘It’s a big club and you ain’t in it,’” quotes Collins. “That is just the truth. Now more than ever, the club has stopped pretending they’re a club; it’s a bunch of rich guys who want to maintain this. I would ask people gently to not fall for it.”
And he’s doing so by asking people to watch Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile. What’s more, Collins says he’s submitting Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile to the best-live-action-short category at the Oscars this year. And while Collins admits that this is a shot in the dark, he has already come up with a pretty compelling Oscar campaign. “The Academy: Do you like pedophiles? I don’t think you do.” He smiles. “You know what you could do to prove it?”
Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile premieres in select theaters on October 2nd.
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