No one will get punished for being in the Epstein files. And no one should be surprised. But we will all act as if we are shocked. Of course. Because we do not know how we are being manipulated.
Here is what I think is actually happening, and why I think this entire spectacle is unfolding exactly the way it is.
The waters will be very muddied, first, by the sheer addition of so many names that it becomes almost impossible to figure out what is actually going on. Names from every part of the political, academic, media, show business, research, finance, and business world. Everyone and their uncle. And that is not an accident.
There is a reason for this. Epstein was not just a sex offender. He was an influence peddler. He was, in every meaningful sense of the word, a pimp. That was his business model. Not just trafficking bodies, but trafficking access, proximity, and perceived power. Being seen. Being photographed. Being able to say, I know this person, I was at that party, I have that number in my phone.
It is not just possible, it was central to how he operated, to befriend celebrities, politicians, financiers, academics, media figures, anyone important. He made it a point to be seen with them. To host them. To insert himself into their orbits. Exactly like Lucky Singh, the character played by Boman Irani in Lage Raho Munna Bhai, whose entire shtick is being photographed with famous people and somehow ending up in their little black books, mistaking proximity for legitimacy. Except that Boman used Photoshop to insert himself into the image. Epstein had actual access. But the objective, and the end result was the same. A saleable commodity: influence, whether real or implied.
Yes, he threw parties where illegal and immoral, even evil things happened. Yes, many celebrities knew him and he knew many of them. Both of these things can be true at the same time without the third thing automatically following, that every person who knew him, or was photographed with him, or exchanged an email with him, is therefore implicated in crimes of the worst imaginable kind.
Unless there is very clear evidence. And in some cases, there is. With Donald Trump. With Bill Clinton. With Bill Gates. With Prince Andrew. With the Arab royalty. With others where the trail is not just social but substantive. But without that kind of evidence, connecting every acquaintance to every crime is reaching.
And reaching is dangerous.
Because what happens when you start reaching is that the entire waters get muddied. Everyone gets implicated by association. Guilt becomes atmospheric. And that, I believe, is deliberate on the part of those who are truly guilty. When everyone is guilty, no one is.
The second problem is even more insidious.
The allegations are escalating. We have moved from being shocked that powerful men abused underage girls to allegations of murder, torture, ritualistic cruelty, almost horror-film villain territory. Island dungeons. Prison conspiracies. Acts so depraved, so theatrical, that they begin to sound unreal.
And that shift matters.
We are slowly being nudged from shock into disbelief. From moral outrage into incredulity. From saying, “This is horrific,” to saying,
“Come on, man, that is not possible. Nobody could do that!”
And once the mind rejects the most extreme allegation, it becomes very easy to reject everything else along with it.
If torture and murder sound too absurd to believe, then surely the rest must be exaggerated too. And if the whole thing feels like a grotesque fantasy, then maybe none of it really happened. That is the danger.
That is what the real perpetrators want. Exactly.
They want you to think that what was happening was so crazy, so absurd, so deranged, that it must be made up. They want every name thrown into the pot so that association loses meaning. They want damnation by proximity to become so widespread that it collapses under its own weight.
Everybody associated, therefore nobody accountable. If everyone is a criminal, no one is. If everyone is a deviant, no one is.
They want accusations repeated until they become noise. Until the horror becomes unbelievable. Until the entire thing can be dismissed as gossip, conspiracy, hysteria, even mass hallucination. And once that happens, everyone walks free. History records it as a footnote. And Bob’s your uncle.
So yes, this is a very cynical prediction. But I do not think anyone will get prosecuted. Not in any meaningful way. It will remain gossip. It will remain implication. It will remain a vast, muddy swamp where truth, exaggeration, evil, and opportunism dissolve into each other.
And when the waters finally settle, there will be no clear shapes left. Just ripples. And silence. With us wondering what all of that was about.
That is the sad reality. And even as the most optimistic man on this planet (as I like to call myself), I find only pessimism in my soul when I look at what is happening.
Let me repeat. No one will get punished for being in the Epstein files. And no one should be surprised. We are being herded in that direction already.
