One morning last month, an 11-year-old boy who lives in our small town in Southern Italy asked me a question I never expected to hear from an 11-year-old boy who lives in a small town in Southern Italy.
He asked me, “Have you read the Epstein files?”
We were in a classroom at the local middle school, Istituto Comprensivo Abele de Blasio. I’d volunteered, as an American expat now a full-time resident in Italy, a few hours a month as a teacher there. My curriculum was designed to encourage my 60 students to discover their personal family histories through interviews with their parents and then report their findings.
The children took the opportunity to ask me all kinds of questions. “Why did you move to Italy?” “Did you know Michael Jackson?” “What do you think of Donald Trump?” “How far do you think the New York Knicks can go in the NBA playoffs?”
But the question about the ubiquitous Epstein files left me flabbergasted. The boy posed the query with a perfectly straight face, no mischief in evidence, genuinely curious. At no point did I suspect he was pretending to conduct a congressional cross-examination.
My answer about whether I had actually eyeballed the evidence compiled to date — all 3.5 million pages, 180,000 images, and 2,000 videos — came easily. “No, I have not,” I said bluntly.
“I have no intention of reading the Epstein files either,” I went on. “I already know enough about the Epstein files to hold me for life. There’s a lot of other stuff I would much rather be reading.”
But I took care to avoid sounding unduly haughty and dismissive. So, with a kidding smile, I asked my student, “Have you read the Epstein files?” He nodded his head with an emphatic no.
“Do you intend to read the Epstein files?” I asked. Again, he nodded no, only now more emphatically.
“OK, but then why have you asked me this question in the first place?”
“Because it’s in the news,” he said. “It’s all over the place.”
Well, he certainly got that right. The argument could be made that the mainstream news media has overplayed its hand, hyperventilating obsessively over the Epstein files to a degree perilously close to pathological. And yes, I’m presuming to make that argument here.
Italian media, in particular, have zeroed in, albeit understandably so, on the Italian connections at play here. The name of Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister, appears in the Epstein files nearly 100 times. But the Epstein-Salvini association exists only because of Salvini’s email exchanges about international politics with political strategist Steve Bannon.
Even so, apropos the question my student asked me, I have to ask some questions of my own here. Have we already learned 99% of everything we really need and care to know about the Epstein files? Does anyone still suspect that the Epstein files are the holy grail that justify every conspiracy theory ever hatched, and that every disclosure, every bold-face name unearthed, qualifies as a revelation that should automatically lead to accusation, indictment, conviction, and incarceration?
Just asking here is all.
Now granted, whatever remains to be investigated about Jeffrey Epstein should be investigated and investigated aggressively. That’s a given and plainly pragmatic. Epstein and his accomplices committed grievous, revolting, and unforgivable wrongs, some already widely known but others remaining to be pried loose. Justice should, by all means, be done.
My student’s question raised still other questions, too. How had he learned about this most sordid of scandals? Did he overhear his parents arguing about the Epstein files over the dinner table? Exactly how much does he know? Is he, by any stretch, better off knowing what he knows, or would he benefit more from knowing nothing about it?
The question also drove home an increasingly ugly truth, namely that children are now exposed to everything, the best of us and the worst of us in equal measure. Childhood is no longer an impermeable cocoon. More disturbing, I interpreted the question as a clear-cut case of innocence violated.
Ultimately, though, this particular student-teacher query — “Have you read the Epstein files?” — signified something I find generally positive. It reinforced the reality that American culture, for good and for ill — though by far mostly for good — is always dramatically on display across the Italian landscape.
DOJ DEFENDS WITHHOLDING MORE EPSTEIN FILES, SEEKS 60-DAY EXTENSION FROM JUDGE
To wit, any time music plays around Christmas here, you’re as likely to hear Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin as Luciano Pavarotti. Go into any supermarket around here, and you’ll have no trouble finding shelf after shelf of American brands, from Coca-Cola to Heinz ketchup and Skippy peanut butter. The movie theater in the next town over is playing the latest Star Wars sequel. We even have a cafe around the corner from our house called The Cotton Club, though whether its owners know that its legendary Harlem namesake defined the Jazz Age — and launched the careers of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway — I have no idea.
So, for an 11-year-old boy in an agricultural Italian hillside town with fewer than 5,000 residents and only two traffic lights to ask his teacher about the Epstein files tells us a lot about ourselves as Americans. It embodies how the United States, 250 years in, is still, by every reliable measure, the center of the known universe.
Bob Brody, a consultant and essayist, is an American expat living in Italy and author of the memoir Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.