If you want to recreate an archetypal scene from countless Westerns — the one in the crowded saloon where the hero says the wrong name and heads suddenly turn while the piano stops and every voice goes silent — try casually letting it slip at your local watering hole, as I did recently, that you are “in the Epstein files.”
Let me explain. I am not one of Jeffrey Epstein’s former clients. The only islands I have ever visited are in Lake Huron. My name does not even appear in the documents released by the Department of Justice. Instead my claim to infamy is simply that on April 28, 2019, Mr. Epstein’s accountant, Richard Kahn, emailed Mr. Epstein a link to an article I wrote in The Week.
The email is not especially interesting. It contains no commentary or gloss on my work — indeed it contains no text at all. I would not have known of the email’s existence if a former colleague had not brought it to my attention two weeks ago. Until then, I had paid little attention to the release of the Epstein files. But after seeing the link to my article, I began looking at the materials.
What struck me most forcefully was the stultifying tedium. Mr. Epstein dispenses conventional stock market advice. He receives an email with a parody video featuring the Minions characters. Pinterest informs him about his favorite topics, sending him links to images of a vintage Bugatti automobile. His written style is tawdry. Double exclamation points (“New York has such great food!!”) are common. Certain adjectives recur — meals and snacks are “tasty.” He dabbles in criticism: A painting purchased by a Saudi prince for $450 million is not “very good,” an impression he attributes to “my art guy.” Occasionally he unburdens himself of abstract reflections. His philosophical opinions (“bliss is not complete happiness. where did you find that bourgoiuis definition.”) are sophomoric.
Then there is his online shopping history. In the period covered by the files, Mr. Epstein made more than 1,000 Amazon orders. There is something odd about the idea of a criminal worth $600 million who owns two private islands qualifying for free two-day Prime shipping. He buys mattress toppers, chinos, Fruit of the Loom boxer briefs. He buys an LED bedside reading lamp, gel toe separators, cases of prune juice, cabinet knobs. He buys a pink bucket hat, a swivel chair, a vanity mirror, a Magic 8 Ball, a disco ball, a digital speedometer, Crocs, sunglasses. He buys cheap digital editions of Shakespeare, Dickens, Twain and Joyce — and, separately, a copy of “Finnegans Wake,” which is not yet in the public domain. He buys a pack of 10 novelty $10,000 bills that a guy at a bachelor party might use as a prop for a joke about a hypothetical billionaire handing out $100,000 party favors to his friends.
Not all of the released information is anodyne. You can spend hours scrolling through routine reminders from assistants, bland congratulations, therapeutic gibberish, corny jokes and random N.B.A. chatter, and then suddenly hit upon Larry Summers’s lament that he is currently “going nowhere” sexually with a young woman who is not his wife or a lurid description of a massage that Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem received from prostitutes in Tokyo (“Whole body massage with feather touch”). One video whose provenance appears to be unknown features a toddler — whose face is mercifully obscured — playing with a toy. It is something I wish I could forget.
But I draw attention to the boring stuff for a reason. Notwithstanding the salacious tidbits, one has to admit that the documents I have spent the past few weeks reading do not resemble the Epstein files as they once existed, and indeed probably continue to exist, in the popular imagination.
Calls to release the Epstein files became common half a decade ago. By 2025, everyone from Tucker Carlson to the Democratic congressman Ro Khanna insisted that the federal government seemed to be hiding, well, something. No one knew what the files were, but many people envisioned some kind of “client list” of the rich and famous, combined with incriminating images and vivid accounts of an organized pedophilia ring, all deliberately compiled by Mr. Epstein himself, perhaps for purposes of blackmail. The release of the files, it was suggested, would incriminate the political, social and economic elite of the post-1989 neoliberal order — the rulers of the darkness of this world. In that sense the Epstein files were part of an inchoate but ultimately coherent political idiom on the populist right and the hard left.
The actual released materials have been less momentous. What we have is not a trove of CD-Rs assembled by Mr. Epstein that implicate a host of powerful men in child abuse and satanic rituals, but rather a more random collection of less sensational documents related to Mr. Epstein and his associates assembled for release by the Department of Justice. Some two dozen people — including Mr. Summers and Mr. bin Sulayem — have lost jobs or even face. But this is not the apocalyptic reckoning we were promised.
Still, the paucity of truly shocking evidence in the released files should not lead us to issue contrarian pronouncements, as some have done, about an Epstein “myth.” I have a sneaking suspicion that the more conspiratorial portrait of Mr. Epstein will be the one historians remember — that his reputation as not just a sexual predator but also a scheming panderer of underage sex for his famous buddies will turn out to be largely deserved. The banality of the files, with their dull opinions and conventional consumer habits, is a reminder that primary sources, considered in isolation, often fail to provide us with a satisfactory picture of any human life, much less one as horrifying as Mr. Epstein’s.
Imagine if an enthusiastic biographer of Pope Alexander VI — a byword for the corruption of the early modern papacy — were to fixate on the pontiff’s letters to the Curia. He would find no direct evidence that Alexander had fathered children while in holy orders or that he had obtained the papal office by simony. Should this biographer disregard the many contemporary chroniclers who testified to Alexander’s low moral character? Of course not. Even if Alexander was innocent of some of the most depraved acts of which he was accused (the implausible, orgiastic “Banquet of Chestnuts” comes to mind), the fact that such things were widely believed of him is itself evidence that cannot be responsibly ignored, however critically it needs to be sifted. Alexander’s own writings are neither exhaustive nor dispositive; they must be weighed against the considerable body of external sources from which the historical consensus about any person always partly emerges.
A just historical verdict on Mr. Epstein will require more than the decontextualized and often redacted artifacts that make up the files. Testimony continues to be gathered in the House of Representatives. Criminal investigations are ongoing in a number of jurisdictions. The memoirs and biographies of most of his associates are yet to be written. Ghislaine Maxwell, Mr. Epstein’s longtime companion and partner in crime, has offered to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency. The public statements of other witnesses must be sorted through. The files remind us that the moral contours of a life are not reducible to its digital texture.
This should give us all pause. Much of what we now regard as inconsequential personal ephemera — emails, text messages, social media posts — has a chance of outliving us. Thanks to the dubious miracle of online communications technology, most contemporary American lives will be better documented than those of all but a handful of historically significant men and women. From the vantage point of the surviving private memorandums of our own existences, with their random exigencies and throwaway meretriciousness, many of us will resemble Mr. Epstein to a degree that we should all find dismaying.
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