Epstein survivor Sarah Ransome told her story in the Washington Post (7/19/22): “It was a carefully scripted, well-oiled machine. This was a professional sex trafficking ring.”
Much has been written about sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, whose numerous social and business ties to members of the global elite are still being untangled. Epstein appears to have died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges; his longtime companion Ghislaine Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted on five counts of helping Epstein abuse girls below the age of consent.
According to the US Justice Department, Epstein sexually abused more than 1,200 women and girls. According to court and police records and reports, he lured minor girls to his Palm Beach mansion for nude massages, oral sex and intercourse. According to survivors, he pressured them into having unwanted sexual encounters with his friends.
Virginia Giuffre said Epstein sexually abused her from 1999 to 2002. Giuffre, who died by suicide in 2025, wrote in her memoir, Nobody’s Girl, that Epstein used a photo of her little brother to threaten her and keep her quiet about the abuse. He told her not to bother reporting him to the police because he owned the Palm Beach Police Department. Epstein, Giuffre wrote (BBC, 10/20/25), caused her “so much pain” during some of their encounters that she “prayed [she] would black out.”
Another woman, Sarah Ransome (Washington Post, 7/19/22), wrote that after suffering years of abuse at Epstein’s hands, she was “ridiculed by lawyers and ignored by law enforcement,” and twice attempted suicide.
Some reporters and news outlets have done serious and detailed reporting on the harm that police, prosecutors and survivors say Epstein and his associates did to hundreds of women and girls. In 2018, the Miami Herald (11/28/18) quoted retired Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter, who oversaw the department’s investigation of Epstein: “This was not a ‘he said, she said’ situation. This was 50-something ‘shes’ and one ‘he’—and the ‘shes’ all basically told the same story.”
Yet most elite media coverage has focused not on Epstein’s victims, the criminal justice system’s failure to protect them, or the ways in which powerful government officials have colluded to shield Epstein and his high-powered associates from accountability. Rather, the spotlight has been on the lifestyles of Epstein and his rich and famous friends—and the supposed lack of evidence that anyone other than the late Epstein and the incarcerated Maxwell sexually abused or facilitated the abuse of minors.
‘Scant evidence’
AP (2/8/26) treated Donald Trump’s FBI as a credible source on whether other “powerful men” were implicated in Epstein’s crimes.
Major news outlets are now reporting that, per an Associated Press review (“FBI Concluded Jeffrey Epstein Wasn’t Running a Sex Trafficking Ring for Powerful Men, Files Show,” 2/8/26) of internal DoJ records, the FBI “collected ample proof that Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused underage girls but found scant evidence the well-connected financier led a sex trafficking ring serving powerful men” (AP via PBS News, 2/9/26).
The BBC (7/8/25) reported that “the US Department of Justice and FBI have concluded that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein did not have a so-called client list that could implicate high-profile associates.” CNN (1/31/26) reported:
There’s no public evidence that any of the allegations against Trump contained in the new [Epstein] documents were deemed credible by the FBI, and the Justice Department said on Friday that the allegations against Trump in the documents were false.
Axios (7/6/25) wrote that “President Trump’s Justice Department and FBI have concluded they have no evidence that convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed powerful figures, kept a ‘client list’ or was murdered.” The conclusion that there was no client list flatly contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi’s February 2025 statement on Fox News (2/21/25) that Epstein’s list was “sitting on [her] desk right now.”
Many of these reports treat FBI Director Kash Patel and Bondi as legitimate sources, despite the fact that government officials have credibly accused both of lying, and the FBI has a well-documented history of lying to both Congress and the American public. One need not be a conspiracy nut to conclude that these files have been heavily redacted to protect the powerful, including the current president, nor a history buff to note precedents like the Watergate tapes—or, for that matter, the founding of the US government.
‘Two separate lives’
ABC (7/16/25): Plaintiff lawyer Brad Edwards “cannot ethically reveal the names of any of Epstein’s alleged associates without permission from his clients.”
Elite media outlets have been eager to suggest that Epstein’s penchant for abusing young girls was entirely separate from his social relationships with the rich and powerful. ABC News (7/16/25) quoted Florida lawyer Brad Edwards, who has represented Epstein survivors, saying he “has been in pursuit of the truth about…Jeffrey Epstein’s life and crimes for nearly two decades.” He “would be the first to say that Epstein caused incalculable damage and trauma to hundreds of women and girls.”
Edwards told ABC, “Nearly all of the exploitation and abuse of all of the women was intended to benefit only Jeffrey Epstein.” He described the “enigmatic” sex offender as having lived “two separate lives: one in which he was sexually abusing women and girls ‘on a daily basis,’” and another where he mixed with royals and top-tier figures in politics, business, academia and science. “For the most part,” Edwards added,
those two worlds did not overlap. And where they overlapped, in the instances they overlapped, it seems to be a very small percentage…. There were occasions where a select few of these men engaged in sexual acts with a select few of the girls that Jeffrey Epstein was exploiting or abusing—primarily girls who were over the age of 18.
It was just a “select few” who engaged in sex acts, “primarily” with “girls” over the age of 18—nothing to see here!
‘Just not finding much’
Ezra Klein (Ezra Klein Show, 7/18/25) cited David French‘s “good line”: “Jeffrey Epstein theories [are] the thinking man’s QAnon.”
If you forced me to give you my best guess, I think this guy had a lot of powerful friends. I think this guy was a predator and a pedophile on an extraordinary scale. And I think those sides of his life were mostly separate.
What led Klein to believe this? Simply the fact that “there’s been a lot of big law firms hunting for cases…. There is a lot of money to be made in suing anyone connected to Epstein.” He added:
Very, very powerful firms—to say nothing of big media organizations—firms and organizations that have the money to hire the best investigators. The best journalists. They’re just not finding it.
Apparently that was true of organizations like the New York Times in 2025, though the paper (2/12/26) recently referred to the “Caligula-like antics of Jeffrey Epstein and friends,” and described Epstein’s as “the story of a sexual predator given a free ride by the ruling class.” Yet in the same article, the Times went on to warn that none of this proves anything:
While Mr. Epstein’s remarkable web of connections suggests to some that he was a puppet master calling the shots for a cabal of elites, that same web offers at least some proof to the contrary. Mr. Epstein counted presidents and cabinet members as his friends, but his influence on American policymaking was negligible.
Moreover, “his chums in the media were not newspaper publishers and TV network chief executives but those farther down the food chain.” Nor did his “coterie” include “any federal prosecutors, judges or law enforcement figures who could have allowed him to escape justice.”
These blithe assertions directly contradict years of credible reporting, including from the Times itself. Epstein did, in fact, count newspaper publishers and financial and tech titans among his media chums, including the Daily News’ then-owner, Mort Zuckerman, who helped quash unfavorable coverage of his pal (Al Jazeera, 2/9/26).
Other Epstein associates with powerful roles at the top of the media pyramid include X owner Elon Musk (Guardian, 1/30/26); Google co-founder Sergey Brin (PBS, 2/1/26); private equity investors Leon Black, Marc Rowan and Josh Harris of Apollo Global Management (New York Times, 10/18/25; Axios, 2/17/26), which owns Yahoo and Cox Media Group; Bill Gates (2/5/26), whose Microsoft owns MSN; and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn (ABC, 11/19/25).
‘A bygone elite’
M. Gessen (New York Times, 2/20/26): “It is possible, even easy, not to see people’s suffering in front of your face. This ability not to see is an essential survival skill in America today.”
With some exceptions, elite media outlets have shown far more interest in the fates of the high-profile men who surrounded Epstein than in the women and girls who were abused. As M. Gessen commented in the New York Times (2/20/26):
When Epstein’s victims do come up, it is usually to ask the question: How did all these influential or wealthy men — and a few women — maintain their relationships with Epstein, in spite of what he had done to these girls? And the way this question comes up, the way it still leaves the victims out of the picture, contains the answer.
And the Times has been among the worst offenders. The paper’s Shawn McCreesh (11/16/25) wrote elegiacally that Epstein’s documents were “steeped in a clubby world that is all but gone.” His emails, the paper added, “are like a portal back to a lost Manhattan power scene.”
That story mentioned in passing “allegations made against [film director Brett Ratner] by six women” and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, who left his university position “after being accused by several women of sexual misconduct.” But the article focused primarily on how “that protected realm vanished into the mists of time, pulled under by the rising forces of the internet and the #MeToo movement.”
‘Many have denied wrongdoing’
In a story that contained few references to women and girls, the Economist (2/12/26) wrote that the most recent file dump
has claimed scalps, including Brad Karp, head of a large law firm in New York; Miroslav Lajcak, Slovakia’s national-security adviser; and Jack Lang, boss of the Arab World Institute, a Parisian cultural center.
Epstein, the publication noted, “did not waste time on middle managers,” and “traded emails with at least 18 current or former billionaires” and elite political figures.
The BBC (2/10/26) breathlessly declared that “the list of some of the world’s most rich and powerful people with ties to late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has lengthened.” It added, “There is no suggestion that appearing in the documents implies any wrongdoing,” and noted that “many people who have featured in previous releases have denied any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein.” Well, then—case closed!
The sole expression of concern for Epstein’s victims in the February 10 BBC story came in the form of a quote from Bill Gates’ ex-wife, Melinda, who told NPR (2/3/26): “I’m able to take my own sadness and look at those young girls and say, my God, how did that happen to those girls?”
“We were girls who no one cared about,” Virginia Giuffre wrote in her memoir, which was published after she killed herself. To many in elite media, girls and women without money or status are mere footnotes in the spellbinding saga of Epstein and his famous friends.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Raina Lipsitz.