Six years after Jeffrey Epstein evidently hung himself to death in a Manhattan jail cell, the infamous child rapist now commands more public attention than any other time since his shocking supposed suicide. Despite the Department of Justice and the FBI trying to close the case with their declaration that Epstein indeed killed himself and did not keep a list of fellow pedophiles he blackmailed, the conspiracy theorizing around Epstein’s life and death has come to a crescendo so crazed that Donald Trump himself has finally declared he is done entertaining it.
“Are you guys still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years,” said an irritated Trump to a journalist who asked him about the announcement from the DOJ and FBI. “I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, where we’re having some of the greatest success.”
In all fairness to the Trump supporters still aghast over the administration’s declaration, the Attorney General in particular stoked the frenzy from the start of Trump’s second term, with Pam Bondi claiming she had Epstein’s list of clients on her desk and issuing bogus binders of the “Epstein files” to MAGAlytes in a humiliating photoshoot outside of the White House itself.
Furthermore, at Restoring America, intelligence expert John Schindler says Bondi indeed overpromised when she ultimately could not deliver. Schindler makes the case that this is because Epstein was indeed involved in American intelligence and potentially that of our allies.
It is possible that some of the Epstein obsessives truly are intelligence experts like Schindler. Another fringe of Epstein’s cottage industry has expressed a less savory obsession with his alleged ties to Israel that is belied by a coinciding defense of Andrew and Tristan Tate. But the majority of the Epstein conspiracy theorizing is actually a coping mechanism to avoid grappling with a much more banal truth: the fact that, statistically speaking, most rapists get away with it.
Only 12% of reported rapes in 2013 culminated in arrests, according to the FBI’s National Archive of Criminal Justice Data. NBC News was astonished to find in the data that just 1.4% of violent sex crimes reported in Los Angeles result in a conviction, and only 2% do so in Chicago.
Even if you do get convicted, the United States Sentencing Commission concedes you have a one-in-200 chance of never seeing the inside of a prison cell, and if you do go to prison, it may not be for very long. In 2023, the average sentence for a manufacturer of child pornography is more than 20 years, but for the fifth of these assailants in jurisdictions without mandatory minimums, the average sentence falls to half that. The average national sentence for those convicted of traveling to “engage in prohibited sexual contact with a minor” was 13 years, but for those in jurisdictions without mandatory minimums, the sentence falls to six years.
The total average sentence for convicted statutory rapists was just four years.
The circumstances around Epstein’s evasion of culpability were, of course, those of comic book villainy. Despite Palm Beach police initially filing a probable cause affidavit arguing that Epstein should be charging with raping pubescent girls, Epstein was allowed to plead guilty to one state charge of soliciting a single prostitute, even though the “prostitute” in question was one 14-year old rape victim of many. This 2008 sweetheart plea deal of the century, brokered by Trump’s eventual first-term Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, allowed Epstein to serve 12 months in his private prison with essentially open entry and exit privileges for “work release,” and then a year of probation on house arrest that included international vacations.
It is possible that Acosta let Epstein off with a slap on the wrist because the pervert was secretly an intelligence asset. But is it not as likely that Acosta knew that prosecutors faced an uphill battle against any predator, let alone one as powerful as Epstein?
And it’s possible that Epstein was blackmailing billionaires with evidence of them committing criminal rape of minor children. But we also know that Epstein was capable of blackmailing Bill Gates with something as banal as his skeezy but totally age-appropriate marital affair with an (adult) Russian bridge player named Mila Antonova.
We don’t have any evidence that Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, or any of the other billionaires and kingmakers who continue to cavort with Epstein after he pled guilty to soliciting a 14-year old prostitute (again, rape) partook in the most disgusting of his pedophilic predilections. But A-listers like Gates, Katie Couric, and George Stephanopoulos had zero problem continuing to befriend a man who pled guilty to raping a 14-year-old girl. Chelsea Handler and Elon Musk probably weren’t interested in Epstein’s underage sex victims, but they didn’t have an issue hanging out with him anyway.
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That is the moral rot hiding in plain sight, and no amount of conspiracy theorizing can explain that away.