Someone Needs To Go To Jail

A solution to the Epstein problem

We are at war with Iran, and in the coming weeks and months, it will be all we talk about. The Strait of Hormuz is the new Greenland. Tomahawk cruise missiles are the new AI. And for good reason: This conflict is set to impact the lives of millions around the world.

Yet while war rages on, so does everything else. Our tariff policy is still in limbo. ICE killings are still unaccounted for. AI advancement plows ahead. The significance of our new problem threatens to cut short what little progress we made on our old problems. (Some would argue this was by design.) But there’s no problem that wants to be forgotten more desperately than the one I’m about to dissect.

We’ll talk about Iran another time. Today, I want to give you my full and honest perspective on Jeffrey Epstein — a problem far larger than many care to admit, the solution for which too many choose to ignore.

Across The Pond

Two weeks ago, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested at his home on the royal Sandringham Estate over his connections to Jeffrey Epstein. It was the first time a senior British royal had been arrested in nearly four hundred years. (The last was Charles I in 1647.) He was released eleven hours later, but not before reporters captured what will go down as one of the most important images in British history.

The image is important for three reasons.

1) It represents a new era of justice in the U.K. — one where wealth and royalty do not make you immune to the rule of law. (For a nation whose rulers have long exempted themselves from the bounds of any earthly authority, that’s a big deal.)

2) It is humiliating. This may seem a trivial point. But when you consider what little justice has been served to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, the mere look of panic in the eyes of one of his closest associates (a look he likely witnessed in many women over the years) is no small triumph.

And 3) Sometimes all it takes to inspire justice is an image. Indeed, this is the entire point of a perp walk. Images of Ivan Boesky entering a courtroom were what led to the 1980s Wall Street crackdown. Images of Harvey Weinstein in handcuffs helped spur on the #MeToo movement. An image may not seem like much, but it can often be the catalyst that leads to change.

That’s why I was pleased to see that just four days after the image was taken, the chain reaction began. Lord Mandelson, the former British envoy to Washington, was arrested at his London home in connection to Epstein. Also last month, former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland was charged with “gross corruption” over his ties to Epstein. Justice is making its way across Europe, and it appears no amount of royal blood will be enough to stop it.

Meanwhile in America, justice is nowhere to be found. Seven years after Epstein’s mysterious death, we are ruled by his close associate who has installed into our “justice department” an army of tactically inept sycophants who’ve displayed greater interest in industrial indices and ice hockey games than the most pervasive sexual abuse scandal in the history of our country. Beers chugged: 1. Epstein arrests: 0.

American Royalty

America may not have a monarchy, but it does have royals. They don’t wear crowns and cloaks like the British — they wear Brunello Cucinelli sweaters and Loro Piana slippers. They also use different titles, not “prince” or “viscount,” but “executive chairman” and “philanthropist.” Unlike in Britain these royals technically earned their privileges, but the privileges are roughly the same: tax exemptions, legislative authority, judicial powers, sovereign immunity, and special protections from the law.

While Europe has sought to unwind these privileges (see above: Andrew), America has doubled down on them. What began with tax cuts for the wealthy has led to total and absolute political capture by the billionaire regime. The more money they poured into politics, the more they tilted the scales of privilege in their direction. More tax cuts and more exemptions, not just for them, but also for their children. As a result, the top 19 households now own nearly 2% of all wealth in America — up almost 20x in the past 40 years. Meanwhile the bottom 50% of Americans own 3%. America is one of the most unequal Western societies since Revolutionary France.

For years we thought the only common denominator among these individuals was being rich and powerful. But we soon discovered another: Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was the common bond that united American royals on both sides of the aisle — people such as: the current U.S. President, a former U.S. President, the current Commerce Secretary, the former Senate majority leader, the founder of America’s fourth-most valuable company, the former President of Harvard, America’s foremost law professor, and many of America’s wealthiest businessmen. The files, which were supposed to bring justice to Epstein’s victims, soon devolved into a Who’s Who for the rich and famous. As I tweeted recently: If you’re not in the Epstein Files, who even are you?

The Line

The conspiracy theorists weren’t right, but they weren’t wrong either. There was no “elite cabal” that met in the basements of pizza restaurants to speak in code and abuse minors. But there was an elite cabal that met in living rooms — and while they didn’t speak in code, they did abuse minors.

Did all of them abuse minors? No. At the same time, however, we don’t really know. The line between “mentioned in the files” vs. “complicit in sexual abuse” is a critical distinction that the Department of Justice appears determined to leave blurry. Some argue this blurriness unfairly implicates those who were simply mentioned in the files. I take the opposite view: It unfairly protects those who abused minors.

Wherever the line is drawn, one thing is clear. Every associate of Epstein was interested in him for the same reason. It didn’t matter who the women were, how old they were, or where they came from. It also didn’t matter if you were married, because part of the deal was your wife would never find out. The offering, which they all bought, was a harem of nameless, faceless, powerless young women, and in some cases children, whom they could use and abuse as much as they desired with no consequences or retribution. It was the kind of offering that money can’t buy today — the kind of offering that, for most of history, has only been available to tyrants.

But this was Epstein’s genius. He understood that most of his island companions already knew how it felt to live like a king. What they didn’t know, however, was how it felt to corrupt like a king, to molest like a king, to abuse like a king. These were the few monarchical privileges that had not yet been accessed by any American royal. And for just a couple of embarrassing emails and a guilty conscience, you too could experience them.

We Trusted You

Since the DoJ intentionally refuses to delineate between those whose names appeared once in an email vs. those who visited the island vs. those who abused children, we are forced to make delineations of our own. For the purposes of this post, I am delineating between those who hung out with Jeffrey Epstein multiple times vs. those who didn’t. That doesn’t mean they abused children, but it does mean they were likely attracted to Epstein for the reasons we just discussed. Those who fit this description we’ll call members of the “Epstein Club.”

As of March 2026, the Epstein Club has a collective net worth of roughly $400 billion. That number is greater than the market caps of Coca-Cola, Shell, Disney, Lockheed Martin, and Comcast. It’s also equal to the value of every NFL and NBA team, combined. (BTW, if we’d included Larry Page and Elon Musk in the club, who according to the files didn’t hang out with Epstein but tried to, that number would be $1.5 trillion.)

If the list were a bunch of names we’d never heard of, this story would be different. But it isn’t a list of random names — it’s a list of very specific names. Names we’ve seen on buildings and billboards. Names we’ve seen in board seats, and articles, and conferences, and fellowships, and endowments. Names we’ve seen literally everywhere. Not because we necessarily cared about these names, but because society told us we should.

Most of us went along with it. We assumed, for example, that because Bill Gates was the founder of Microsoft, and because he delivered the Harvard commencement address, and because he was the headline speaker at TED, he was the kind of person we should aspire to be. In any other timeline I might have questioned what kind of man would amass hundreds of billions of dollars. But the world told me over and over that he was awesome, so I assumed he was.

Which brings us to the great insult of the Epstein Club: Not only did these individuals enjoy the privilege of being wealthy, they also enjoyed the privilege of being revered. With every scholarship they donated and every honorary degree they received, they assumed a mantle of righteousness to which we obliged. 3.6 million of us listened to Bill Gates’s commencement address, in which he instructed young Americans on how to live our lives. Now that we know what we know, can we get a refund?

What To Do

For the hundreds of women and girls who were sexually abused, the path toward justice is obvious: Their abusers must be punished with the full force of the law. But for the millions of Americans who were lied to for decades about who these people really are (to be clear, a much lesser crime), the path is less obvious. How do you rectify the fact that many of our nation’s heroes were secretly subjugating women for years? How do you “make right” that the people who sold themselves as role models were degenerates all along? Can we “take back” the credibility we gave them? Can we “undo” the privileges we provided? I mean this genuinely: What are we supposed to do?

As it stands, we’re doing nothing. That’s why you feel sick to your stomach every time you read an Epstein headline. It’s not just that so many women were abused, it’s that you know nothing’s being done about it. You also know the perpetrators know this too. You know that somewhere on some distant archipelago, a very f*cked up and perverted billionaire is breathing a huge sigh of relief.

Perp Walk

There’s a solution to the Epstein problem, and it’s called a perp walk. It doesn’t matter what we get them for, but someone very rich and very famous needs to be seen in handcuffs. It could be Gates, it could be Dershowitz, it could be Clinton, it could be Summers, I don’t really care. I also don’t care if their lawyers negotiate them out of doing time. All I ask is that we see that image. All I want is a perp walk.

This image would do for America what Prince Andrew’s perp walk did for Britain. It would resolve, at least in part, many of the resentments and traumas that continue to boil within us. It would lighten the rage of the millions of women who were themselves abused. Or the millions of women who were told by men at fancy conferences how we’re “finally equal,” only to be harassed and exploited in the shadows of privacy. It would redress the outrage of the millions of Americans who looked up to these people, who read their books, collected their quotes, and listened to their interviews. It would do what justice is supposed to do: acknowledge and reconcile.

Without a perp walk, we will continue unresolved. According to recent polls, most Americans have lost trust in our nation’s leaders because of the Epstein files. Most Americans also say the files showed that “powerful people in the U.S. are rarely held accountable for their actions.” The mannerly language of these polling questions understate how angry Americans really feel.

One day we’ll look back and realize just how rotten this Epstein scandal really was. And, as with every great injustice of years past, we will ask ourselves that same, age-old question: Why didn’t we do anything?

See you next week,

Ed