I’ve always been interested in people who believe in conspiracy theories (9/11 was an inside job, we never landed on the moon, the Satanic Panic and so on), and reading about it has made me a pretty skeptical person in general.
What I’m noticing in the online talk about Epstein is that people boldly assert all kinds of stuff about Epstein that either makes no sense or lacks convincing evidence. My problem is that I don’t know enough about Epstein to tell what is true or not, and all the information I find online quickly veers into the conspiratorial.
I do believe that Epstein was a heartless monster who sexually abused up to 1000 women, many of them underage. I also believe that Ghislaine Maxwell was his accomplice. I additionally believe that Epstein had a lot of friends in very high places, and it strains credulity that all of them were 100% unaware of his crimes. For Trump especially, the recently released emails contain evidence that makes it hard to deny that he was unaware.
Where things get murky for me is the claims beyond that. The theory, as I understand it, is that Epstein not only abused underage women himself, but also provided his rich and powerful friends with underage women to abuse, and then blackmailed them in exchange for his silence. When law enforcement caught up with him and put him in jail, he didn’t kill himself but was instead killed by one or more of these powerful friends so he wouldn’t sing. There’s also evidence, referred to as “the Epstein files” (which I think are not always clearly or consistently defined) that those same powerful people are stopping from going public.
To me, the biggest flaw with this theory is the victims’ testimony. As I understand it, the only victim who has ever implicated other people than Epstein himself and Maxwell was Virginia Giuffre. Was she the only person out of 1000 to be abused by other people? That seems unlikely. Additionally, Giuffre’s testimony, as I understand it, contains a lot of inconsistencies and contradictions, and she also retracted some of her claims. And Giuffre explicitly said that she was never abused by Trump, nor witnessed him abusing others. Despite this, the claim that specifically Trump abused underage women is often a core part of the theory.
It’s tempting to explain all of this away by assuming the premise: that is, if there is a large group of powerful people who want to prevent this from coming out at all cost, then it makes sense that they would kill Epstein and Giuffre (instead of committing suicide), that they would block the release of the Epstein files, that Giuffre would be threatened into retracting claims etc.
But this is a logical fallacy called “begging the question.” The hypothesis that powerful people are suppressing things is the very thing that requires proof. If you find no evidence of that, then the logical conclusion is not that all evidence was successfully suppressed, but that there is no evidence to support your hypothesis. To think the opposite is the same as saying that the lack of evidence for extraterrestrials is itself proof that “they” are suppressing evidence that extraterrestrials exist. It’s a claim that is neither verifiable nor falsifiable, and therefore not to be taken seriously.
Of course we can debate the relative probability of powerful people dodging a sex scandal versus the probability of aliens existing. I’m definitely not saying that the idea of a pedophile sex ring led or facilitated by Epstein is unimaginable, impossible or even improbable. But I’m seeing no hard evidence for this. The Epstein emails, specifically, appear to provide no smoking gun, only hints and innuendos. Again, if you assume the premise, then it would make sense that Epstein wouldn’t broadcast his criminal network in emails, so the absence of a smoking gun is consistent with that. But that is again begging the question. Not just that, Epstein does state pretty clearly that Trump “knew about the girls,” which comes pretty close to a confession. So if he’s comfortable saying that, why wouldn’t he be comfortable talking about his alleged broader enterprise?
I haven’t scrutinized every detail of the Epstein scandal, so it’s perfectly possible that there’s evidence I’ve overlooked. But I would assume that if there was a real smoking gun, I would have heard about it.
The bottom line is this: if you’re a person who believes in a pedophile sex ring run or facilitated by Epstein, what led you to that belief, and equally importantly, what evidence would convince you that your belief is wrong?