We Are Exploiting Epstein's Victims For Our Own Politics
Can we all agree finally that we will never, ever see such a thing as an “Epstein List?”
I phrase it like that because, if it ever did exist, we can say with close to one hundred percent certainty that it has been destroyed. If, the theory goes, that Trump is on The List, there is no way it hasn’t been atomized. Trump famously and illegally destroys most of his official documents so there’s not a damn chance he’d keep this one hanging around his neck. So, either way it does not, at the present time, exist.
I’m hoping that since we can agree on that, now, given the events of the past week, everyone might be a little less mad at me for saying it never existed.
Before you start yelling at me, I’m not saying he wasn’t guilty as sin, and I'm not saying there aren't unknown offenders. Jeffrey Epstein was an absolute monster. But over years of public immersion in this story there are elements that have been distorted or even hallucinated. I forgive anyone who has been under the impression this whole time that Epstein’s client list is a real and confirmed thing that people have been trying to track down like the Nixon tapes, something that people have seen and can describe, but which has gone missing via nefarious means.
It is practically what people call a Mandela effect at this point, like those who swear Curious George had a tail and the Monopoly Man wore a monocle. But actually, the existence of an Epstein client list was, from the outset, entirely hypothetical and, like many elements of conspiracy culture, it’s something people insist is real—demand is real—due entirely to how badly they want it to be real.
Epstein’s crimes were real, and the lives he destroyed were real, but you rarely hear very much about his victims. One of the tragedies here is the way in which we have eagerly sought to make Jeffrey Epstein about ourselves, much more than the women he harmed. Most people can’t name any of his victims, but you know who everyone can name?
The people they want to be on that list.
That’s the real reason this has become the scandal of the century, why presidents have campaigned on releasing The List. It’s Excalibur. It’s the One Ring. It’s the Ark of the Covenant. It is a weapon that can destroy all of your enemies, and all we have to do is find it. If you’re on the right, the List includes Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, as well as a laundry list of woke Hollywood and music industry figures. If you’re on the left, the List features Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and a whole bunch of other Republican ghouls. Maybe half of the Supreme Court, wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t that solve all our problems?
The speculation—driven by who people want to see eliminated from public life by The List—is reaching fever pitch. The other day, novelist Stephen King, who is politically sort of a normie Democrat of the Mark Hamill vein but who, for reasons that utterly escape me, seems to be absolutely reviled by everyone under 40 on the political compass, questioned the existence of a physical Epstein Client List. Now everybody on Bluesky is absolutely over the moon about the certainty of him going to prison for the rest of his life. (King doesn't appear on any Epstein flight logs and there is no evidence they have ever met)
Nothing gets people angrier on either side of politics than someone who suggests the Epstein List isn’t out there somewhere, because people have begun relying on its existence. The idea that there is a book out there like a political version of the Death Note containing a list of names, and each name is an automatic prison sentence and the end of a public life—maybe the end of a whole political ideology!—and all of the names in that book, we are certain, are the people we most want to be in it. It’s too tempting not to be true.
The hardest part is removing yourself from the case and thinking about what we actually know, and what makes sense based on what we know. The fact is that the Epstein List doesn’t make sense.
The crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell involve human trafficking. The mythologies that have been extrapolated from this fact are that Epstein was the kingpin of a massive child trafficking pedophile syndicate, and, being that he had a lot of friends in high places, his dozens or hundreds of clients were all wealthy people you have heard of or at the very least have their own Wikipedia articles. Of course, this is an ideal opportunity for blackmail, so Epstein would naturally be keeping records.
Surprisingly little of this follows from the actual known facts of the case. Most of the trafficking that Maxwell has been convicted of involved her trafficking girls… to Epstein. He raped a lot of girls, and Maxwell was the honey trap.
There definitely were other men involved, and possibly some who we’ve heard of (Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz could not possibly be more suspicious here) but the idea of a large number of very high-profile power brokers being connected to this is pure speculation and hope. All that I see in discussions, on either side of politics, about Epstein is how glorious it’s going to be when such-and-such is going to be locked up forever, once The List comes out.
Why would Jeffrey Epstein write a list? If you flew the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or a dozen of them, or a few former presidents or current senators, to your private island to illegally have sex with an enslaved prostitute, do you think you would remember doing that? The whole Epstein List narrative is predicated on the theory that Epstein would not. But even if he wouldn’t, why would he need to?
“Blackmail,” people say. But Epstein wasn’t known for blackmail. There’s little reason he would want to blackmail people. He was fairly wealthy already, as evidenced by the land mass that he owned.
Mutually assured destruction, in case someone thought of ratting on him? That’s dumb. The only way a client could turn him in would be to turn themselves in, so what leverage does the list offer? Why would a physical written list be any better than Epstein’s testimony, freely given?
The existence of The List doesn’t make any sense in a real world full of rational actors, but it makes more sense to us in a “justice must exist in the universe” way. If the universe is just, then The List simply must exist, because otherwise how will we get justice?
This, as well as the diehard insistence that Epstein was murdered in jail, only reflects our rejection of loose ends. This story didn’t go the way stories are supposed to go. We truly thought we were about to get America’s own Operation Yewtree. Then it just ended abruptly like a fart in the wind. For six years we have held, white-knuckled, to the surety that this is not finished—the third act is coming. Someone knows who crept into Epstein’s cell that night and murdered him. The evidence will out. The List will be found, and all of the high-profile people you specifically hate will be on it, and they will all fry.
This must be true because what’s true about the world is our preferred story.
But again, the reason we care so much about this story, so much more than any other case of sexual exploitation or trafficking, has less to do with the victims and more to do with the fact that this was our opportunity for our revenge.
The Republican Party knew this very well. It is why the release of The List was a key promise of Trump’s campaign. I do think they might have thought there was a list, or at least that something existed that was better than absolutely nothing. If they truly knew they had nothing, then I think they would have had a better plan, a better exit strategy, that didn’t involve months of increasingly desperate stalling. From releasing already public documents under the charade that they were new, to Pam Bondi and Kash Patel writing open letters to each other instead of communicating like normal coworkers, to Bondi lying and saying that she’d found The List and it was on her desk pending public release.
A popular theory by people who cling to the List Exists narrative say that they were telling the truth the whole time but suddenly, just now, discovered that Trump is on it, so they buried it. The reason that doesn’t make any damn sense is that Trump would obviously know he’s on The List, and wouldn’t have ruthlessly pursued it in the first place. If it was real, and he was on it, he would have downplayed the fuck out of it from day one.
What happened instead was the same thing that happened with all of the other aspects of conspiracy culture that were going to be revealed—the dog caught the car but the car was parked and empty.
Rather than heroically pursue the destruction of an insidious network of predators, what they did instead was add to Epstein’s crimes. If Donald Trump and his hideous cabinet did not, themselves, abuse these girls physically, they have nevertheless unquestionably added to their exploitation and extended their nightmare. With no effort to actually seek any kind of justice, they instead used these victims politically, making their horror into a clown show, and then a whole circus, for the entertainment of their braying followers.
And anyone, either on Trump’s team or not, still clinging to these vast revenge fantasies, is in some way complicit. I know I will catch flak for saying so. I know that people will accuse me of not wanting justice for these women. I absolutely do, and I hope that there is still some chance for that. If evidence of the identity of some of his co-conspirators emerges somehow, then I will welcome it, even if it’s one of my faves. But whenever a thought enters my head like “man I hope it's (some asshole I hate)” then I shut that shit down. It’s not helpful and it’s insulting to the people who actually suffered immensely more than I suffer from obliquely hating somebody in the news.
Because I know where the Epstein List is. It was inside the brain of Jeffrey Epstein and it ceased to exist when the oxygen to his frontal lobe was cut off moments after he hanged himself. And that’s not fair. That sucks. Now that no document has shown up that prominently features Bill Clinton’s name alongside a list of payments for services rendered, the Trump GOP has exhausted all political capital they can possibly squeeze out of this and there is zero chance they will care to investigate if Epstein’s Johns are five or a dozen or a hundred guys you’ve never heard of. If there is any chance of legitimate justice, it will never surface under a Republican administration.
I'm writing a book about how reactionary geeks in the internet era tumbled down the fascism pipeline and set about smashing up the world out of hubris and spite, and how they worked their way into the deepest corridors of power. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:
S Peter Davis
