The photo is of the heroic journalist Julie K. Brown

NANCY LINDISFARNE and JONATHAN NEALE report:

This article says four important things about the Epstein files.

First, though all the talk is about conspiracy theories, this case is of a piece with the cover-ups of the abuse of gymnasts by Larry Nasser; the cover-ups of generations of abuse in residential schools for indigenous children in Canada, the consistent cover-ups by the Catholic Church; the cover-up of the Smythe case by the Archbishop of Canterbury; and hundreds and thousands of other cover-ups by institutions all over the world. This is not some bizarre conspiracy. It is what the rich and powerful do.

Second, this is not just about Donald Trump. This cover up started way before Trump, and it goes way beyond Trump. Third, the liberal and centre mainstream media are unable to talk sensibly about any of this because the Democratic Party has been part of the cover-up. Fourth, as with almost other every abuse and Me Too case, this one came to light because brave survivors fought back.

THE FIRST EPSTEIN COVER-UP WAS WIERD

In 2008 Epstein was arrested in Florida and was facing many years in prison for selling sex with underage girls.

By then he had been running a sex business for some years. Men came to his mansion in Miami, the one in New York, or his private island in the US Virgin Islands. The men paid the girls, who were aged between fourteen and their early twenties, for sex, and Epstein took a cut. He also recorded much of the sex but did not put the video on the internet.

The federal prosecutor in Miami, Alex Acosta, arranged a plea deal. Epstein pled guilty to one count and was sentenced to 18 months, though he served only 13 months and was released from jail every day until 10 at night.

Further, and much more shocking, the plea deal gave immunity from any further prosecution to anyone, known or unknown, who had committed crimes with Epstein.

We have never heard of such an immunity deal, ever, at the federal or the state level, in America or any other country on Earth.

The whole business stinks of corruption. Acosta was clearly protecting someone or some people. It is extremely unlikely that it was Donald Trump, at that point a registered Democrat of no political importance. Although it is also true that ten years later Acosta was Secretary of Labor in Trump’s government.

THE RESISTANCE

Almost every exposure of sexual abuse and MeToo scandal over the last twenty years has happened because a group of victims or survivors came together to demand justice.

After Epstein’s conviction dozens of his victims filed civil suits against Epstein. They also filed a civil suit demanding that the plea deal be overturned, because they wanted to speak out publicly about what had happened. The bravest and most outspoken among them was Virginia Giuffre, who was in effect their leader.

Two books tell this story well. One is Relentless Pursuit: My Fight for the Victims of Jeffrey Epstein, by their lawyer Bradley Edwards. The other is Perversion of Justice, by the journalist Julie K. Brown. But the best way to understand their campaign is watching the Netflix documentary series Filthy Rich.

Two things stand out in that documentary. One is how terrified they were. They were working class girls who had seen Epstein’s world. They knew they were up against powerful and cruel men. And they had seen the state cover up.

The other thing is that stands out is how the process of seeking justice transformed them as human beings.

It was a long struggle. But then came the exposure of Harvey Weinstein and the explosion of #MeToo in 2017, one year into the first Trump administration.

After that, Julie Brown was able to reveal in the Miami Herald in 2018 that the plea deal had protected anyone who had ever committed a crime with Epstein.

That was dynamite. A media fire storm followed. The focus was why Acosta had organized such an extraordinary agreement. Acosta refused to say, but he was forced to resign as Donald Trump’ Secretary of Labor.

The federal prosecutor in New York arrested Epstein for trafficking. Epstein died in jail, either by murder or suicide. There was still intense pressure to reveal the truth, so Epstein’s number two, Ghislaine Maxwell, was arrested.

This was all during the first Trump administration.

COVER UPS #2 AND #3

By 2021 Biden was president.

On December 28, 2021, Maxwell was convicted in New York. Damien Williams, the federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, said there would no further charges. All investigations by his office or by the FBI were closed.

This time the federal prosecutor was a Democrat and Joe Biden was president. This was a bog standard, normal cover-up of sexual abuse by the rich and powerful. Indeed, this happened twelve months after the MAGA riot in Congress. It is unlikely that the Democrats did it to protect Trump.

From 2022 on many on the far right, campaigned to reopen the Epstein case. It was obviously a Democratic cover-up, and so evidently an egregious example of elite corruption that the demands for the Epstein files seemed a no-brainer.

During the election of 2024 Trump was publicly comfortable with the far-right campaign. As president, Trump named one of the main campaigners on the Epstein case as director of the FBI. And Pam Bondi, Trump’s Secretary of Justice, said she had the files on her desk.

And then, suddenly, whoosh, everything changed. The Department of Justice and the FBI put out a very short unsigned memo saying nothing happened, there are no files, nothing to see here, move along now.

This is the third Epstein cover-up, and it is public and hard core. And it’s obvious to everyone that some important secrets are being protected.

Our best guess as to what happened is that Trump and Pam Bondi learned who Acosta in Miami and the Democrats in New York had been protecting. And then they realized that they too had to protect those people.

This too may sound like a conspiracy theory. But think for a moment about how the Catholic Church protected and enabled thousands of abusers on a global scale for at least a century. That was a conspiracy, but all cover-ups are of their very nature conspiracies. Such cover-ups to protect powerful people and institutions are sometimes bizarre, but they are also normal in our world.

WHO ARE THEY PROTECTING?

Acosta, then Williams and then Trump were protecting someone or some people, and they still are.

Who? We don’t know.

But there is quite a lot of evidence around, and many people have been named. However, that does not automatically make them guilty, which is why we need a proper investigation.

The names come mostly from evidence in civil suits brought by some of Epstein’s victims and from reporting by journalists. A few examples will give you an idea of the range of people involved with Epstein.[1]

Bill Gates, for example, was closely involved with Epstein for many years. Indeed, his wife, Melinda Gates, left him because he refused to stop visiting Epstein.

Ehud Barak flew to visit Epstein thirty times between 2013 and 2017. Barak was a former general in the Israeli army, the leader of the Israeli Labour Party for many years, and Prime Minister of Israel from 1991 to 2001. For at least part of this time Epstein and Barak were partners in some financial business.

The Wall Street Journal has revealed the Federal Aviation Authority records show that Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet eight times, often with his family. Bill Clinton also flew on Epstein’s jet seventeen times in 2002 and 2003, to and from many different parts of the world, and on two occasions without his Secret Service bodyguards. Virginia Guiffre was the brave leader of the abused women who fought for years to expose Epstein. She said that she had seen Clinton on Epstein’s private island. Clinton denies it and insists he never had sex on that island.

What were Gates, Barak, Trump and Clinton thinking? National Public Radio reported last year that:

The documents include claims from Epstein’s alleged victims who say prominent men who socialized with Epstein must have known what was going on and failed to blow the whistle — even if they didn’t engage in criminal behavior themselves.

“If you walked foot into Jeffrey Epstein’s house and you went in there and you continued to be an acquaintance of his then you would have to know what was going on there,” Virginia Giuffre … testified in a newly revealed 2016 deposition.

“I would say the first time they came to [Epstein’s home] there is nude pictures everywhere. These are [photographs of] salacious acts of girls, young girls doing things to each other that would be considered child pornography,” she added.[2]

We know that other visitors to Epstein’s houses included Lawrence Summer, a former Treasury Secretary under Clinton; Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico; Senator George Mitchell, who presided over the negotiations that produced the Good Friday agreement; Prince Andrew and many more.

Noam Chomsky has admitted visiting Epstein several times. On one occasion, Epstein arranged a meeting between Chomsky and Barak to discuss Israeli politics. But the Chomsky example suggests the need for caution. Anyone who associated with Epstein should have seen what he was. That does not mean that they had sex with the young women. It is only proof that they tolerated Epstein and his business.

MOSSAD?

Finally, there are the accusations about Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. Anyone who has followed this case at all closely over the years has heard the accusations. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host and former close friend of Donald Trump, went public with these accusations last week. Again, the evidence is suggestive, but not conclusive.

The argument goes like this. Epstein taped much of the sex with clients that happened in the rooms of his house, and he had exhaustive computer records which he employed technicians to look after. This setup suggests, but does not prove, a business model involving blackmail or perhaps a ‘honey-trap’ run by an organization.

To Carlson this looks like an intelligence organization. He says, reasonably enough, that it would simply be too risky for the CIA to spy on so many prominent Americans. Mossad is the obvious alternative, because it is hard to imagine the FBI or the CIA tolerating any other intelligence agency running such an operation on American soil.

Well, maybe. And maybe not. But this is no longer a fringe theory. A New York Times podcast this week carried a one-hour conversation between Julie K. Brown and Ross Douthat, a widely respected moderate conservative opinion writer on the Times. Douthat treated the Mossad theory with respect and tried to tease out the evidence for and against.[3]

The fact that the New York Times, of all papers, would allow this discussion is a sign of how much damage the Gaza genocide has done to Israel’s standing in the world.

But as Brown pointed out on the podcast, there is no need for speculation here. She said it was the government’s job to investigate such allegations. Maybe, she said, they already had.

But in any case, it would be easy enough for a proper government investigation to find out if Mossad was involved or not. And to find out who else was being protected. There are hundreds of witnesses out there, and enormous numbers of records.

Brown also pointed that the investigators had relied too much on evidence from survivors. Instead, she said, follow the money, as in any serious investigation.

We would add that an investigation should focus strongly on the cover-ups, leaning heavily on Acosta and talking to the hundreds of FBI agents whose investigations were shut down by the Democrats.

That is unlikely to happen, precisely because of the earthquake it would create. But please, do not think of this as only a story about loony Republicans and impossible conspiracy theories. This is one episode, a very important one, in a long global struggle against cover-ups of sexual abuse and sexual violence.

Further Reading

We have written extensively on sex work and sexual violence on Anne Bonny Pirate. See for example:

How Neoliberalism Transformed Sex Work in the United States

Jimmy Saville, Boris Johnson and the Slow Burial of the Commission of Inquiry into Sexual Abuse

Me Too: The Economists Organize

Harvard: Sexual Politics, Class and Resistance

Racism and the Myth of Trafficking

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale are the authors of Why Men? A Human History of Violence and Inequality (Hearst, 2023) and The Sexual Politics of Capitalism (The New Press, January 2026).

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[1] For examples, see Emily Flitter and James B. Steward, “Bill Gates met with Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past,” New York Times, Oct. 12, 2019; Holly Baltz, “Flight Logs: Donald Trump flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s planes. Here are the details,” Palm Beach Post, Feb. 28, 2025; Andrew Lapin, “Noam Chomsky, Ehud Barak among names on Jeffrey Epstein’s newly uncovered calendar,” Times of Israel, May 2, 2023; TOI Staff and JTA, “Ehud Barak met with Jeffrey Epstein dozens of times, flew on private plane – report,” Times of Israel, May 4, 2023; Leila Fadel and Brian Mann, “Unsealed court documents reveal names of men allegedly linked to Jeffrey Epstein,” National Public Radio, Jan. 4, 2024; Brian Mann and Jaclyn Diaz, “Court documents reveal names of powerful men allegedly linked to Jeffrey Epstein,” National Public Radio, Jan. 4, 2024.

[2] Brian Mann, “Epstein papers leave questions about what powerful men knew about his crimes,” National Public Radio, Jan. 13, 2024.

[3] Ross Douthat, “She Exposed Epstein, and Shares MAGA’s Anger,” New York Times, July 19, 2025.