By calling the files a kind of Rosetta Stone, I don’t mean they allow us to decode every relationship or act contained within them. They don’t. But they do reveal a pattern.
A better metaphor may be an MRI. An MRI does not tell a story; it renders structure. It exposes connective tissue—nerves, vessels, hidden systems beneath the skin. It requires interpretation, but it shows what is there. The Epstein files function similarly. They expose the underlying networks of a transnational elite: the social, financial, and political circuitry through which influence flows.
Much remains sealed, and that concealment is itself informative. Even so, what is visible suggests a class bound less by nationality than by wealth and access. Their loyalties are horizontal, not civic. They protect one another because their interests align.
Those interests are straightforward: expand wealth, shield assets, minimize constraint. Public institutions—tax authorities, regulators, prosecutors—are obstacles to be navigated or neutralized. Capital, deployed strategically, purchases discretion, delay, and sometimes effective immunity. Within these circles, information about tax avoidance and asset protection travels as easily as gossip.
If impunity is central to maintaining position, then systems that weaken accountability become attractive. Constitutional democracy, with its equal application of law, is friction. Personalized power structures are more efficient. The rule of law is admirable in theory; in practice, it is inconvenient.
They live in a different ecosystem and intend to preserve it. Extreme wealth breeds insulation; insulation breeds entitlement; entitlement hardens into contempt. [If you wanted to see a public demonstration of that contempt, all you had to do was watch five minutes of Attorney General (or should I say trump's mouthpiece) Pam Bondi's disgraceful 'testimony' before the House Oversight Committee yesterday.]
Sex in this environment is not an aberration but an instrument. It is transactional, traded like stocks and bonds - rich men comparing their 'girls' as they would their investment portfolios.
Why is the Epstein scandal proving to be so politically potent?
It is not primarily moral outrage. Public standards of sexual conduct no longer determine political survival. Nor is the sustained political energy driven solely by concern for victims—who must continually insist they not be forgotten, as we saw at the Bondi hearing.
What resonates is impunity. “Pedophile ring” operates as shorthand for something larger: a closed network of privilege operating beyond consequence. The sexual crimes are monstrous. But politically, they symbolize asymmetry—rules that bind downward and dissolve upward.
The scandal strikes a nerve because it makes visible the humiliation embedded in inequality. The wealthy can dangle access, opportunity, and money before the less powerful, then retreat behind lawyers and influence. For those outside that world, the files do not merely describe exploitation; they confirm suspicion. The system is not neutral. It protects its own.
And yet there is a limit to what these files can show. An MRI reveals structure, not cure. Exposure is not reform. Networks adapt; elites recalibrate; outrage dissipates. Without institutional will, transparency hardens into spectacle and then into memory. The real question is not what the files reveal, but whether societies possess the capacity—or the appetite—to translate revelation into constraint.
