As we try to find some cozy solace with our families for the holidays, the Department of Justice is starting to — as required by a law that it took an open political revolt by the MAGA base to enact — release the Epstein files. It is doing so in what seems to be the most haphazard, obfuscatory and confusing a manner possible. As a result, we are not getting much closer to the truth about many of the fundamental facts of how Jeffrey Epstein ran his sex-trafficking ring, spun his favors and kept some of the most powerful men on the planet in his orbit.
Oh, actually, we do know something of how the last part went: He facilitated their receiving the attentions of young women. Some of this was plainly illegal — sex trafficking and rape. Much of the rest of it fell into the legal gray zone of abusive or exploitative. In any case, we seem no closer to getting justice for the women who were the victims of this vast scheme.
The release of the Epstein files was not supposed to be this way. The fight was to get them released, and then all would be revealed. Instead, social media is filled with a bewildering number of documents — some real, many not — and photographs with celebrities and without context. The contents have clearly been selectively released by the Department of Justice, a lot of it highly redacted, revealing little but stirring up much. (Referring to some of these materials, the department has said it “simply reproduced” redacted content.) The flood of files has created the worst possible outcome, an even more hyperpartisan blame game that is completely unfocused on justice for the victims.
And the powerful men that Mr. Epstein cavorted with, who in turn seemed to provide him with so much? Why did many of his 10 possible conspirators have their names shielded? Are they being protected?
For me, all of these pictures of life in the 1990s transported me back to my genteel but feral youth on the Upper East Side. The city was then still a little grimy, and Donald Trump was a tabloid peacock continually teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. The world I was raised in, which thought itself so cosmopolitan, was ruled by problematic men, all of whom were indulged without much compunction. My grandparents believed Alan Dershowitz—another notable man in Mr. Epstein’s circle—was “good for the Jews.”
My feminist mother loved Bill Clinton. He appears often in these recent releases, as if to just remind us how skeevy that former president always was (and, one assumes, distract us from how skeevy this current one is). There is one particularly troubling photo in which Mr. Clinton has his arm wrapped around a young girl or woman (we don’t know her age) practically sitting on his lap. Her face is covered by a black redaction box. I wonder what she has been through.
I’ve tangentially known the Epstein pal Woody Allen my entire life. He and my grandfather — the Communist then capitalist Howard Fast — lived in the same Fifth Avenue apartment building in the 1980s. I was in lower school at Dalton with one of his kids, Moses. Mr. Allen made movies (such as “Manhattan”) about young women and girls (a 17-year-old Dalton girl, more specifically) who fell in love with fabulous older men roughly the same age as their fathers. I always thought of myself (I was a private-school kid with a drug problem back then) as one of those girls.
Mr. Allen is in many of the newly released Epstein photos — on Mr. Epstein’s plane, on a movie set. As Ginia Bellafante pointed out in her Times column, “By his own account, Mr. Allen began going to the Epstein house in 2010, two years after Mr. Epstein had been sentenced for soliciting sex from teenage girls.”
I remember the time 22 years ago when I found myself at a party with Mr. Allen and my husband immediately thought he seemed creepy. “Stop scratching your stomach. You’re going to give the baby furrows,” Mr. Allen chastised me as I scratched my enormous and very itchy belly. I was 24 years old and pregnant with my first child. We were in Italy, at a party at a pricey hotel on the Grand Canal. It was summer, and the Venice Film Festival was in full swing. My husband, who was an academic, hated Mr. Allen and thought his movies were gross. I told my husband that he just didn’t get it.
It turns out, I was the one who didn’t get it. A lot of us didn’t. We’re just playing catch-up now.
Part of the reason I didn’t get it was that I was ultimately insulated from the kinds of things that Mr. Epstein did. I didn’t need a job as a masseuse or money for new sneakers. I had access to well-connected, well-off people who would believe me, and I was — am — a loudmouth. These two things probably protected me from the fate of the hundreds of victims of Mr. Epstein.
On Nov. 18, 2025, I traveled to Washington, D.C., to watch a troupe of now middle-aged women like me recount what Mr. Epstein and his friends did to them when they were young and, unlike me, vulnerable. One of these women, Maria Farmer, had been begging the American government for an investigation since 1996. She accused Mr. Epstein of stealing nude images of her siblings, information that was relayed in an F.B.I. report and then apparently ignored. Ms. Farmer’s report was one of the very few interesting things made public by the Department of Justice’s Epstein dump.
It was an unusual, bipartisan news conference, with the MAGA firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Silicon Valley Democrat Ro Khanna and Kentucky’s libertarian-leaning Thomas Massie all standing together. I walked from the Cannon Building to the little triangle of grass between the big limestone buildings, which was fenced off with gray metal crowd-control fencing. A man dressed as a pink frog carried a sign that said, “Justice Epstein survivors.” A group of survivors stood in front of the microphones; they held photos of themselves around the time of their abuse. The women holding the photos looked centuries older than their victim selves.
The Epstein survivor Haley Robson started speaking, “And to the president of the United States of America, who is not here today, I want to send a clear message to you,” she said. “While I do understand that your position has changed on the Epstein files and I’m grateful that you have pledged to sign this bill, I can’t help to be skeptical of what the agenda is.”
It was clear these women were never going to get the kind of justice they wanted. I looked over at a correspondent I knew. Her eyes were filled with tears.
And so it has gone. The files have been released in a way that seems to be designed to maximize the arguing, give succor to conspiracy-mongers and minimize the illumination of what happened.
Why did at least 16 files disappear soon after the Department of Justice site went live? The department later reposted disappeared content, including a photo of Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein. And so it goes.
Failing these victims has been a nonpartisan activity. The victims have been failed by the Biden administration, by the Bush administration, by the Obama administration, by the Clinton administration, by the F.B.I. and probably countless others. These photos show a world filled with private planes and government leaders, sports cars and lots and lots of children under black boxes. These are the men who shaped policy, who went on television and who ruled the world.
The photos are revolting and also sad. Mr. Epstein’s tan, leathery skin is folded into a smile; in one photo a bit of blond hair is peeking out from under the large black redaction box. In another photo we see what looks like a young foot in a Croc. One photo shows a note that says someone (presumably a child) can’t come over tomorrow because of “soccer.” One of the photos shows just the hands of a girl who sits on Mr. Epstein’s lap.
I stare at the hands of the black-boxed girl and try to guess her age. I think about myself as a careless and brazen teenager, and I fear for those girls, the ones not insulated. Mr. Epstein is dead. But what about the other men? And what about the children, the ones behind the boxes, mostly grown up now, though some have died. What about the other young people out there caught in the web of other powerful men? Will they ever be safe, even now?
Molly Jong-Fast is the host of the “Fast Politics” podcast and the author of “How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir.”
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