The Epstein Myth

In March 2005, the Palm Beach police began to investigate whether a fourteen-year-old girl had been molested by a wealthy man named Jeffrey Epstein. When police interviewed the girl, she said that Epstein had paid her to give him a massage and masturbated in her presence. Before long, the police found twelve other girls with remarkably similar stories.

The girls’ stories were consistent not only in what they described, but in what they did not. Not one of ­Epstein’s initial accusers described being trafficked to other men. ­Marie Villafaña, the prosecutor who led the charge against Epstein in Florida, later recalled: “None of . . . the victims that we spoke with ever talked about any other men being involved in abusing them. It was only Jeffrey Epstein.”

It is now widely accepted that Jeffrey Epstein ran a pedophilic blackmail ring that implicated some of the world’s most powerful men, most likely on behalf of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Commentators who agree on little else are united in this belief. If such a ring existed, it must have been up and running in 2005—well into his career, and immediately before his downfall began.

But Epstein’s accusers in Palm Beach apparently had no knowledge of any blackmail ring. Nor has reliable evidence of one emerged in the years since. Ghislaine ­Maxwell, ­Epstein’s long-time associate, was convicted of sex trafficking in 2021, but she was charged with and convicted of trafficking minors to exactly one person: Jeffrey Epstein. Where did the idea that Epstein ran a blackmail ring come from? Answering this question requires separating Epstein the man from the Epstein myth, which has put a respectable face on once-fringe ideas.