In March 2005, the Palm Beach police began to investigate whether a fourteen-year-old girl had been molested by a wealthy man named Jeffrey Epstein. When police interviewed the girl, she said that Epstein had paid her to give him a massage and masturbated in her presence. Before long, the police found twelve other girls with remarkably similar stories.
The girls’ stories were consistent not only in what they described, but in what they did not. Not one of Epstein’s initial accusers described being trafficked to other men. Marie Villafaña, the prosecutor who led the charge against Epstein in Florida, later recalled: “None of . . . the victims that we spoke with ever talked about any other men being involved in abusing them. It was only Jeffrey Epstein.”
It is now widely accepted that Jeffrey Epstein ran a pedophilic blackmail ring that implicated some of the world’s most powerful men, most likely on behalf of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Commentators who agree on little else are united in this belief. If such a ring existed, it must have been up and running in 2005—well into his career, and immediately before his downfall began.
But Epstein’s accusers in Palm Beach apparently had no knowledge of any blackmail ring. Nor has reliable evidence of one emerged in the years since. Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s long-time associate, was convicted of sex trafficking in 2021, but she was charged with and convicted of trafficking minors to exactly one person: Jeffrey Epstein. Where did the idea that Epstein ran a blackmail ring come from? Answering this question requires separating Epstein the man from the Epstein myth, which has put a respectable face on once-fringe ideas.
The person most responsible for promoting the idea that Epstein engaged in blackmail is Virginia Giuffre. In a 2015 affidavit, Giuffre claimed that Epstein had trafficked her “for sexual purposes to many other powerful men”—including Prince Andrew of the British royal family and the attorney Alan Dershowitz. Epstein did this, Giuffre claimed, to ensure that his targets would be “in his pocket.” She also later suggested that he had done it on behalf of Israeli intelligence. It isn’t entirely clear why Israeli intelligence would need to blackmail Alan Dershowitz, a lifelong defender of the Jewish state. And faced with legal action from Dershowitz, Giuffre later admitted that she “may have made a mistake” in identifying him.
Giuffre had a history of making claims that failed to withstand scrutiny. In 1998, at age fourteen, she swore that two male acquaintances, aged eighteen and seventeen, had sexually assaulted her. Following a months-long investigation, prosecutors declined to pursue the case, “due to the victim’s lack of credibility and no substantial likelihood of success at trial.” This incident is omitted from Giuffre’s memoir, which instead describes her being kidnapped in a stretch limousine by a man named Ron Eppinger, then freed by a team of FBI agents. (The FBI has no record of this incident.)
Giuffre’s first uncredited allegation is mirrored by her last. On March 30, 2025, shortly before she committed suicide, Giuffre accused a bus driver with sixteen years’ experience of hitting her car while going 110 kilometers (68 miles) per hour. Giuffre posted a photo of herself with a black eye, supposedly sustained in the crash, and the caption: “They’ve given me four days to live . . . I’m ready to go, just not until I see my babies one last time.” Her claims may have been an attempt to make contact with her children, whom she had been barred from seeing under a restraining order. In any case, the driver refuted her allegations, explaining that his bus was factory-designed never to go more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) per hour.
Sarah Ransome, another Epstein accuser, also claimed that he ran a blackmail ring. In 2016, she told a reporter at the New York Post that she possessed sex tapes featuring figures such as Donald Trump and Bill Clinton. She also told the reporter that she was involved in an international cat-and-mouse game: “My emails have been hacked. I have reached out to the Russians for help and they are coming to my aid. Thank goodness for Anonymous!!!!” (Ransome later told the New Yorker that she had invented the tapes.)
Perhaps the most substantial support for the belief that Epstein ran a blackmail ring comes from a 2019 article in the Daily Beast. The article contains a second- or third-hand claim from an unnamed source, to the effect that Epstein received a light sentence in Florida because he “belonged to intelligence.” According to the unnamed source, Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor in the case, gave this explanation to Trump administration officials while he was being vetted as secretary of labor.
There are several reasons to doubt this report, aside from the thin sourcing. Vicky Ward, the author of the story, has a history of dealing loosely with facts (as her former colleagues at Vanity Fair recently told the New Yorker). And Acosta later denied—on the record and under oath—that he had any knowledge of Epstein’s being involved with intelligence.
Fortunately, there is no need to take anyone’s word for it. A full picture of how Epstein received his light sentence—just eighteen months in prison, with work release—can be found in a report from the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility. It presents extensive contemporaneous evidence showing that, far from going easy on Epstein, Acosta was the key person ensuring that he faced at least some penalty for his crimes.
Epstein’s crimes were initially reported to state authorities. Acosta, a federal prosecutor, got involved only after it became clear that state-level prosecutors were reluctant to pursue the case. They had their reasons. #MeToo had not yet popularized the #BelieveWomen doctrine, and prosecutors expected that a jury would regard many of the accusers as lacking credibility. Their assessment was later seconded by a DOJ official who reviewed the case and concluded that a trial would have been a “crap shoot.” At one point, state prosecutors offered Epstein a plea deal that entailed five years of probation, no jail time, no sex-offender registration, and no need to pay restitution to victims—the ultimate sweetheart deal. So confident were Epstein and his attorneys that they turned it down.
Frustrated with state prosecutors, Palm Beach police approached Acosta, who agreed to take up the case. Because of the riskiness of a trial, he succeeded in arranging a “non-prosecution agreement,” under which Epstein would plead guilty to sex crimes. This task was complicated by the fact that Epstein enjoyed a world-class legal defense, led by the likes of Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr. Throughout the tense negotiations, Acosta insisted that Epstein must serve jail time, register as a sex offender, and offer restitution to his victims. On all three points, Acosta prevailed. Far from backing off Epstein at the behest of intelligence, Acosta was the reason Epstein faced any penalty at all.
It should not be surprising that the evidence for Epstein’s involvement in a blackmail ring is so meager, because the idea owes less to the facts of his case than to a long tradition of paranoid speculation—encompassing QAnon, the medieval blood libel, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
At the heart of the Epstein myth is the idea that an international conspiracy, notably involving Jews, relies on the destruction of innocence and the practice of blackmail to advance its power. This tradition presents sexual abuse of minors as a typically Jewish crime, an assault on innocence that amounts to ritual murder.
This trope emerged in a recent conversation between Tucker Carlson and the podcaster Daryl Cooper. Carlson claimed that Epstein was part of “a blackmail operation run by the CIA and the Israeli intel services, and probably others. . . . The usual darkest forces in the world colluding to make rich and powerful people obey their agenda.” Cooper added that Epstein’s crimes (as he perceives them) should be understood as a ritual practice that confers power on those who perform it: “Throughout history, people have looked at that as something that confers power. That’s what child sacrifice is.”
The idea that our elites are united in a pedophilic cabal has several recent precedents, including the satanic panic of the 1980s and the QAnon phenomenon during the first Trump term. But to understand the full significance of this exchange, one must revisit the history of the blood libel. The claim that Jews use human blood—generally taken from children—to bake their Passover bread can be traced back to the second half of the twelfth century. An English monk named Thomas of Monmouth claimed that a Christian boy, William of Norwich, had been killed by an international Jewish conspiracy. Jews, he believed, were under the spell of Satan and “could neither obtain their freedom, nor could they ever return to their fatherland” unless they engaged in ritual killings.
The blood libel spread across Europe, bringing disaster to Jews and discredit to Christian communities. Today it is often seen as a relic of medieval societies. But it has proved to have a modern resonance. One can see this in the Damascus affair of 1840, when the Jews of Damascus were accused of killing a Catholic monk named Thomas in order to bake matzoh with his blood. Many Europeans—including those with liberal views—credited the allegations, shocking their Jewish neighbors.
The early nineteenth century was supposed to be an era of rising liberalism, rationalism, and freedom. But progress did not eliminate prejudice. In certain ways, it enabled it. Relaxed censorship allowed for the expression of uncomfortable truths, but also for the spread of falsehoods. Newspapers—including some with progressive principles—indulged in sensational and misleading coverage of the case. As the historian Jonathan Frankel has observed, “This newly emerging world was potentially more dangerous for the Jews than the old. Stripped of the protection offered by state censorship, they could easily fall victim to a scandal-seeking press and to demagogic politicians outbidding each other for electoral advantage.”
A similar dynamic has played out since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now known as X. The general loosening of speech restrictions has allowed for an increase in anti-Jewish invective. You no longer need to go to 4chan to find people claiming, as QAnon did, that satanic elites kill children in order to consume their adrenochrome. But mainstream and liberal sources that otherwise decry this rhetoric find a point of agreement with it when it comes to Epstein. They, too, believe that an international Jewish conspiracy is exploiting innocents. The title of an essay by Joy-Ann Reid, the former MSNBC host, is telling: “What if the Q-anoners were (sort of) right?” Perhaps not coincidentally, the emergence of these conceits has coincided with an increase in anti-Israel sentiment.
Alongside the blood libel, the most important precedent for the Epstein myth is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This 1903 text, purporting to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders, is in fact a fabrication that plagiarizes earlier texts. Its compilers were reactionary Russians, whose hatred of Jews was matched only by their contempt for democratic societies. It presents the Jews as masters of “the art of directing masses and individuals by means of cleverly manipulated theory and verbiage.” This is an attack not just on Jews, but on the principle of popular sovereignty. For if the Jews are consummate manipulators, and the common man is a dupe, then democracy is nothing other than the masked rule of world Jewry.
Extending its anti-democratic argument, the Protocols presents democratic leaders as especially vulnerable to bribes and blackmail. Lacking the inherited wealth and fixed rank that typify aristocratic society, elected officials are unable to resist financial inducements or threats to their status, which arises solely from public approval. Exploiting this fact, Jews permit politicians to come to power only if they “have in their past some dark, undiscovered stain”—some exposure to blackmail.
The Epstein myth updates these lies for the age of Jewish statehood. It presents Epstein as blackmailing American leaders—not on behalf of a shadowy world Jewry, but on behalf of the Jewish state. And it recasts Jewish ritual sacrifice in terms of child sexual abuse. The anti-Semitic implications of the Epstein myth may not be widely acknowledged, but they are understood by many of the myth’s most important promoters.
Take Maria Farmer, an Epstein accuser who has been interviewed by MSNBC and respectfully profiled by the New York Times. She remarked in a recent interview, “All the Jewish people I met just happen to be pedophiles who run the world economy.” She is an adherent of David Icke, the UFOlogist who has promoted the Protocols and suggested that the world is controlled by shape-shifting alien “reptilians” that merely appear to be human, including the members of the Rothschild family.
Similar claims are made by another Epstein accuser, Juliette Bryant. Maurene Comey, the prosecutor of Ghislaine Maxwell, submitted a victim impact statement from Bryant at Maxwell’s sentencing hearing. Apparently, the government regards Bryant’s words on Epstein as credible. This is a remarkable judgment. Earlier this year, Bryant declared on social media that she had “witnessed Epstein turn into an alien reptilian creature.”
Certain facts about Epstein are well established and incontestable: He committed sexual crimes against minors. He deserved to be punished, and more severely than he was. What goes beyond the facts is the Epstein myth. This myth is a synthesis of conspiracy theories: satanic panic, blood libel, the Protocols, UFOs. It generally presents its assertions in a respectable guise, but as its most enthusiastic adherents reveal, it tends toward the demonization of Jews.
Acceptance of the Epstein myth reflects mistrust of our political establishment. That mistrust is in many respects reasonable. But you don’t need a Jewish cabal in order to explain the problems with U.S. foreign policy. You don’t need to theorize a pedophile ring in order to indict our elites. Americans are not the dupes of an international conspiracy. They alone are responsible for the leaders they’ve chosen, and they have the power to elect better ones in their place.
