Fin: Jeffrey Epstein, Hollywood, and another mass delusion

What most people get wrong about the case. Also, the c-word changes meanings, a memorable 2000 clip, and why Elmo won’t resign

I keep coming back to that list of “Epstein island visitors.”

If you were on Twitter/X in 2023, you probably saw it roughly once a day: An alphabetical list of famous names who had supposedly visited Jeffrey Epstein’s island, consisting of a virtual who ’s-who of big names in politics and entertainment.

Everyone was included, from Al Gore to Kathy Griffin to Rihanna to Joe to Seth Green, as well as every major Hollywood A-lister and the people who were at the time the sitting president of the United States, prime minister of Canada, and King of England.

The important thing to know about this “list” is that it’s completely bogus, based on no legitimate sourcing whatsoever. With a handful of exceptions like Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, none of the people listed have ever surfaced in any legitimate investigation of the Epstein case. Their “involvement” in the case is based entirely on lies and Internet games of telephone.

Also, Donald Trump is not included.

In the last two weeks, the Epstein case has completely taken over the news cycle and threatened to derail Trump’s presidency. Something has crystallized itself: A lot of “facts” have been flung around about the Epstein case over the years, and the majority of them are complete and utter nonsense.

And one of those facts is that “Hollywood” was deeply enmeshed with Epstein and his crimes. There’s little to no evidence that that’s true.

That’s what was allegedly by the “Island Visitors” list, as well as by that stupid Ricky Gervais Golden Globes monologue, reposted by every conservative during every awards show, in which he castigated Hollywood (“Just like Jeffrey Epstein. Shut up. I know he’s your friend but I don’t care.”)

Epstein did like to surround himself with rich and famous people, and it doesn’t speak well of those people that they ever had anything to do with him (that goes for Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Bill Gates, and whoever else.) But very few of them, if any, were Hollywood figures, and of the ones who were, none have been named by victims as having been involved in sex crimes.

Epstein, The Guardian reported last year, was prone to “flimsy braggodocio” about “knowing” the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett.

Hollywood, of course, has to answer to plenty of abusers. But Epstein was never more than a peripheral figure, if that, in the entertainment industry.

There are things about Jeffrey Epstein and his campaign of abuse that remain unknown, but based on the available facts, here’s what I think is true: Epstein abused hundreds of victims, and evaded justice and punishment for way too long. He’s a monster, and I’m glad he’s dead.

He was the abuser, and the idea that he trafficked victims to other famous people seems based on speculation and conjecture. He almost certainly wasn’t murdered — there’s no evidence or even a theory of the case over who might have killed him or how — nor did is there is there much solid evidence that he blackmailed anyone.

There is almost certainly not, and never was, an “Epstein list.”

Why do I believe this?

It’s my natural skeptism about conspiracy theories, as taught to me by my college professor Jerry Cohen. Massive, high-level conspiracies seldom hold together, because large numbers of people tend not to keep their mouths shut over time.

There have been multiple prosecutions and numerous lawsuits, and based on that, we actually know quite a lot. The vast majority of Epstein’s victims have not accused anyone other than Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell of taking part in his sex crimes.

Also, the idea of a secret “Epstein list” doesn’t really fit with how criminal investigations work in America. “Make a list of all the crimes, who committed them, and then keep that list a secret, forever” is just not how law enforcement, the FBI or prosecutors do things in the real world. When famous people are implicated in crimes, prosecutors tend to want to convict them.

I’m certainly no fan of the Trump Administration, or its Justice Department. But I think their conclusion in the Epstein case is, more likely than not, accurate. The most likely explanation is that Trump put conspiracy theorists in charge of the DOJ and FBI, who vowed to get to the truth about Epstein- and when they got a look at the evidence of a vast conspiracy, they realized there wasn’t any such evidence.

And the reason Trump’s base has revolted over this is that the conservative influencer class has lied to them, over and over again, over a period of many years. (And now the liberal influencer class is trying similar things.)

Epstein conspiracies — the “Epstein mythology,” as Michael Tracey calls it — in the last couple of years have essentially replaced what used to be QAnon and Pizzagate, with many of the same people pushing them. It’s all based on the widespread idea that:

1. There’s a massive conspiracy, consisting of every single person I don’t like.

2. All of those people are pedophiles.

3. The pedophile conspiracy is always right on the verge of being definitively exposed.

4. Anything that ever happens in the world is merely a “distraction” from the impending exposure of that conspiracy.

Those who traffic in this type of nonsense, it’s clear, don’t care in the slightest about any of Epstein’s victims. And a lot of them are perfectly happy to Stan for someone like Andrew Tate, who is essentially the same guy as Jeffrey Epstein.

It’s almost shocking how much idiocy these presuppositions have led to in the last five years. It’s the reason Aaron Rodgers went on TV to speculate that Jimmy Kimmel was nervous about the upcoming release of the Epstein list, when Kimmel had zero ties to Epstein and there was no such impending release. It’s how idiot X influencers can post years-old Epstein documents and call them “breaking” and “bombshells.” (Really- the Musk-era X, with its embrace and unbanning of conspiracy theorists and Nazis, and its incentives toward engagement-farming, has a great deal to answer for, on this in particular.)

It’s the reason vast groups of people on the Internet can conjure, based on nothing, the idea that Tom Hanks is a notorious pedophile, or how it’s widely believed that Epstein had deep ties to Hollywood, when really he was much more embedded in the financial and scientific worlds. Or how the movie The Scary of Sixty-First can exist.

Will we learn more about Epstein at some point, in a way that implicates more people who have not been previously implicated, and shows that the entire Hollywood elite (or, conversely, Donald Trump himself) was involved directly with Epstein’s crimes? That Wall Street Journal story yesterday is embarrassing for Trump, surely, but it’s not exactly a smoking gun.

Anything is possible. But the people who have been promising that for the last several years have been wrong, or lying, every single time, and making a lot of extravagant promises that haven’t come through. I don’t expect that to change.