Since his death in 2019, Jeffrey Epstein has become internationally recognized as a rapacious pedophile devoid of any redeeming qualities. He has also become an inescapable punch line, more meme than monster, less bogeyman than buffoon. “If anyone wanted to know how middle school boys are doing in these times,” read one viral Substack post, “they’ve been accusing each other of being in the Epstein Files as a bit.” One user added, “High school boys, too.” This particular strain of humor sprung from horror is exemplified by Five Nights at Epstein’s, a free online survival game in which players attempt to evade the convicted sex offender during a stay at his island estate. Built from photographs of Epstein himself as well as of his home’s interiors (in the style of Five Nights at Diddy’s, which came before), the game is both absurd and legitimately unnerving. When Epstein catches you, a jump scare-inducing screech accompanies his leap toward the screen, where he hovers in a pose reminiscent of a sky diver.
Such a degraded fate is perhaps inevitable given the cartoonish excess of Epstein’s island and private jet — hallmarks of corny James Bond villains — paired with his smug, schlubby mien, mugging for the lens in so many pictures taken over his 66 years of life, even when his companions look elsewhere. New documents released from his eponymous files affirm his puerility, the generic smallness expected of any man constantly in the company of much, much younger women, and in light of his abhorrent crimes, otherwise negligible details, like his inability to spell or compose a coherent sentence, evoke visceral disdain. Scores of women know well the indignity of having been violated and mistreated by a careless, selfish, meritless man whose pathetic nature is matched — in fact, determined — by his propensity for wanton harm. To take such a figure seriously, to speak of him in hushed tones with somber faces, may feel too close to affording him respect, of which he deserves none.
This is circus, not praxis.
Yet mass ridicule carries little sting during our time of pervasive, gleeful, and open amorality, when shame by association is not what it once was, and the intended butt of the joke is not always clear. Like a meme, Epstein is, essentially, popular: a symbol with elastic properties suited to many uses across many demographics. Despite documented ties to Republicans and Democrats, he’s wielded as a cudgel by partisans on either side, while the files and the myriad associated conspiracies are mined for titillating content by influencers, podcasters, and news outlets, regardless of ideological affiliation. In March, Iranian politician Ali Larijani tweeted an Epstein jab at Pete Hegseth and the Trump administration; fake images of missiles with Arabic text reading “In memory of the victims of Epstein Island” were shared and liked hundreds of thousands of times; one of Iran’s AI-generated Lego videos featured a song about pedophiles running the government. An anonymous collective has erected sophomoric, life-sized statues on Washington’s National Mall in order to highlight Donald Trump’s friendship with Epstein. More recently, at least one Washington Metro train was decorated with posters of the two men together, with “BFF!” inscribed in a heart between them, as if there is anyone left in the Western hemisphere, let alone in the capital of the United States, who doesn’t know about the men’s association.
These spectacles are as crude as the graphics of Five Nights at Epstein’s, though I’d say the game, by preserving and highlighting the creepiness of the facts, is more subversive. (It, too, prominently features Trump in later rounds.) None of these products, including the discourse at large, is about the girls he preyed upon, and few purport to be. Instead, Epstein’s name is used as shorthand for cronyism, corruption, the impunity of elites, and the humiliation of the American public that tolerates their flagrant crimes. It’s a dig and a dunk, a tool to make whoever invokes it feel superior, in the same way “A minor” was shouted exuberantly by thousands of people at Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 Super Bowl halftime show. (I enjoy “Not Like Us” as much as anyone with ears, but I’ve never been able to shake the nauseating certainty that plenty of unrepentant rapists love to sing along.) This is circus, not praxis. Ali Larijani has been assassinated, Trump is still president, and Epstein’s victims have not received anything approximating justice. The commentariat mirrors the man when they exploit women for their own ends and pleasures.
Before he was an avatar, Jeffrey Epstein was a real person, one who leveraged existing systems to essentially streamline abuse. He may be gone, but the systems remain, and we’ve known their names and functions for a long time. An honest public accounting of Epstein and his extensive social group would start with patriarchy and misogyny — concepts that he and his cohort further marginalized with their orchestrated attacks on #MeToo’s brief momentum. As civil rights lawyer Alexandra Brodsky notes, Epstein’s emails provide abundant evidence of a “concerted and organized” backlash undertaken by the men who stood to be targeted: “They are the reason we’ve seen such regression on sexual harassment policy and politics, not because some 22-year-olds who got raped didn’t talk about it in the right way.”
It is part of Epstein’s legacy that the voices dominating the conversation around his life and crimes belong almost exclusively to men, though, as historian Susan Pedersen points out, “it was women — Julie K. Brown, Tina Brown, Vicky Ward, Tara Palmeri — who broke and pursued the story.” (Brodsky’s quote above is taken from a panel on Epstein that featured three men who, per the transcript, seem uninterested in or incapable of addressing the role of rape in our culture.) These men arrived at expert status because of their willingness to sideline gendered violence in favor of financial misconduct and fake suicides. The absence of the topic, just like its routinized presence in Epstein’s daily life, is integral, not incidental, to their success.
Women know well the indignity of having been violated and mistreated by a careless, selfish, meritless man.
Epstein presents “a paradigmatic example of patriarchy as cartel,” in the words of journalist Soraya Chemaly. It’s paradigmatic because it proliferates across all levels of society, from priests and doctors to teachers and lionized political activists. Once again it falls to women — Celeste Davis, Lori Marso, countless others — to insist upon the obvious connection between Epstein and Dominique Pelicot, a working-class Frenchman who arranged an untold number of rapes of his then-wife, Gisèle. Both Epstein and Pelicot acted as hubs, enabling other men’s predations, and there was no shortage of willing collaborators before or after their activities came to light. Epstein’s social standing was unharmed by his 2008 conviction for soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution; several of Gisèle Pelicot’s rapists told brothers or friends what they had done, and the relationships were apparently unimpacted. One man, Joseph Cocco, left without penetrating her because she was deeply asleep. But he didn’t report the incident to police, and said that despite giving her unconscious body a “libertine caress” (for which he was convicted of assault), he refused to “accept that [he] victimised Gisèle Pelicot.”
To be a feminist, or to be any person who truly cares about the ubiquity of sexual violence, is to be vastly outnumbered by a coalition of the indifferent and the enemy, who together insist that rape is a private anomaly, a union of unfortunate circumstances and specific debauched individuals, or, in Epstein’s case, the purview of oligarchy. It can never be acknowledged as what critic Jamie Hood calls “an entire matrix of sexual subordination,” one that keeps all women in its net. Epstein’s example could serve as a gateway into this truth, but has only facilitated more flamboyant avoidance, a fixation on the extraordinary wealth and privilege instead of on the ultra-ordinary exploitation of girls and women.
Charlotte Shane’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work.
Images courtesy of Evan Productions / geometrylitepc.io.
Here's why we publish
Feminist thought is increasingly banned from universities and marginalized in billionaire-owned media. We’re proud to publish it. While these institutions are firing feminists, we’re hiring them — as brave journalists, writers, and artists who challenge ideas about gender at every level.
If this matters to you, please support Lux today. Independent media depends on you.