Different groups of people had different reactions when the billionaire financier, sex abuser, and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide in his New York City jail cell in 2019.
To be sure, Epstein had seen jail before this incarceration. A “guilty” plea that came with a deal enabled him to get unbelievably light terms in 2008, which he violated anyway by going out of his home and flaunting his usual lifestyle. Nothing was learned except the fact that money does in fact buy powerful friends who could “make things go away.”
His many victims – girls and young women at the time he abused them – must have felt cheated out of the justice that had long eluded them. But in 2019, while Epstein was finally in the custody of authorities, and was looking at a long trial that would upend his luxurious lifestyle, his death prevented the trial and looming conviction to achieve their purpose.
The second group would be his powerful friends who at one point or another partook of his lifestyle including jets, mansions, overseas homes, an island, and young women. However they regarded their friend, there must have been a wave of relief that his death would kept many things hidden from the public view.
Thus, the Jan. 30 release of the most recent batch of Epstein files, amounting to some 3 million documents, brings these people’s fears back to life. While heavily redacted, some names, communication, and photos inevitably appear nonetheless. The files show some of the most prominent names in society – royalty, academics, politicians, business giants — as friends, belying their earlier claims that they had severed ties with Epstein after his first indictment.
Of course the biggest names on the list is that of the United States president, whose simultaneously megalomaniacal, racist, and erratic actions have pushed the world closer to the edge. There is nothing more that President Donald Trump would like better than to have everybody move on from Epstein. But the public can’t, because it exposes the real nature of the leader of the free world.
In a world fraught with injustice, mischief, and scandal, those with secrets bank on people’s short memory and the sheer amount of newer, more scandalous incidents happening by the day. This is true whether one talks about the abuse and trafficking of girls, wanton disregard of human life, corruption, or other shady transactions. On rare occasions, people do get to carry the weight of their secrets to their graves. For the most part, however, truth has a way of coming back and settling scores.
