The dumb, abhorrent truth at the heart of the Epstein scandal

November 13, 2025, 9:32 PM ET

Some generations get a nationally televised car chase featuring O. J. Simpson fleeing police in a white Bronco. Others get the communal adrenaline rush of frantically “CTRL-F”-ing a House Oversight Committee trove of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails.

Yesterday, lawmakers released more than 20,000 pages of documents related to Epstein, including thousands of emails between him and his powerful contacts in the government, Silicon Valley, and the British royalty. There is an obvious voyeuristic thrill to reading them, but these documents have a deeper relevance. They are a skeleton key for understanding the dynamics of Donald Trump’s America, one in which the wealthy and powerful appear not as master operators but as bumbling sycophants, eager to cozy up to influence no matter how villainous or depraved.

Like Epstein’s birthday book, published in September by the House Oversight Committee, the messages are often enthusiastic, even fawning (unlike the birthday book, these messages were sent long after Epstein took a plea deal to reduce his sentence for sex-trafficking charges). His interlocutors ask for favors, seeking insight or dirt on Trump, or advice. In some instances, Epstein responds pompously (“Needs edit,” he wrote in one message, when asked to forward an invitation). When glimpses of his character come through in a message—“‘Girls?’,, careful i will renew an old habit,” he replied to an innocuous email that used the word girls—they seem to always be tolerated or ignored.

Read: You really need to see Epstein’s birthday book for yourself

But perhaps most striking is how unimpressive Epstein seems. He appears to have been a serial emailer, frequently pecking out barely legible, one-line messages in rapid succession to political advisers, journalists, and well-known personalities such as Peter Thiel and Deepak Chopra. (Reached through a spokesperson about his email correspondence with Epstein, Chopra told me, “I’m always cognizant of Dr. and patient privilege. However, in this case, I hope that all of the truth comes out after ongoing and proper investigations. I’m happy to share whatever I know with authorized officials. Otherwise there are only endless speculations without knowing the context.”)

The emails reminded me of the Elon Musk text messages that were made public in 2022 as part of a legal dispute with Twitter: Here we have another coterie of men infatuated with their own ideas and engaged in shallow conversations and insipid gossip. In one representative email exchange, the economist Larry Summers—the former president of Harvard and a member of the Obama and Clinton administrations—griped about women to Epstein: “I’m trying to figure why American elite think if u murder your baby by beating and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard, but hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank,” Summers wrote. He then added, “DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.” A spokesperson for Summers declined to comment. Summers has previously acknowledged “regretting my past associations with Mr. Epstein.”

Read: Elon Musk’s text messages explain everything

Some of the emails read like absurdist tone poems. In one email to himself with the subject line “radical breakthrough,” Epstein appears to be free-associating and journaling his thoughts about anatomy, science, and consciousness, jotting down disconnected phrases such as “Skin as part of brain?” and “Beards and long hair , are meant to catch and hold smells. ?”

Other emails are unnerving, given that Epstein was arrested for allegedly sex-trafficking minors. In March 2016, he emailed Thomas Barrack, a Trump ally and the current United States ambassador to Turkey, “Send photos of you and child. — make me smile.” A State Department representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump has personally called the emails part of a hoax. “The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects,” he wrote on Truth Social yesterday.

The emails show that, in the lead-up to and during the first Trump administration, Epstein was in communication with journalists looking for dirt on the president. He also frequently discussed his relationship with Trump. “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump,” Epstein wrote in 2011 to Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator, who is serving time in prison for child sex-trafficking. Epstein said in one email to himself that Trump “came to my house many times.” In another, Epstein wrote that he once “gave” a 20-year-old girlfriend to Trump; in yet another, he alleged that Trump “spent hours” with a “victim,” as the redacted document says, while at Epstein’s home. At one point, Epstein emailed a journalist: “Would you like photos of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen?” Across these messages to various correspondents, Epstein describes Trump as “dirty,” worse “in real life and upclose,” and “borderline insane.”

Yet it also seems that Epstein was acting as an informal adviser to people in Trump world; prominent Trump associates such as Thiel and Steve Bannon corresponded with him. One email with Bannon suggests that he and Epstein were scheduled to have dinner in March 2018. (A spokesperson for Thiel has said that he never visited Epstein’s island; Bannon did not respond to a request for comment.) One email dated August 21, 2018, to an unknown recipient captures this dynamic. Epstein writes:

1. Peter Thiel in town. 2. Lets make sure you are keeping your own path on front burner. Strategy etc. 3 at the same time . Take no heat re me. Not worth it for the moment. Mid terms . Over exposure , create shooting star risks. 4. The mooch ( still in contact with Ivanka ) has reached out to me , and asked how he can re engage with you. ?? I ve only met him once. odd. 5 /

He follows that message with the equally cryptic “Like musk, your health first. Its a very long game.”

This is a near-perfect representation of the Epstein trove in all of its dizzying, typo-plagued ingloriousness. Epstein’s pidgin writing style, paired with his name-dropping and vagueness, makes emails like this excellent fodder for both speculation and genuine concern. There’s enough detail to cause the mind to race, and not quite enough to get a full picture of what is going on. It’s conspiracy-theory jet fuel, yet it seems to point to some very real behind-the-scenes maneuvering.

There’s a surreal quality to reading these messages for yourself. At times, some of the emails read almost like QAnon fan fiction. One of the eerier documents is an email from Epstein sent to himself six days before his 2019 arrest with the subject line “list for bannon steve.” The body of the email is just a list of a few dozen names, some recognizable, some not. There is no context here, just names, rattled off by the subject of the 21st century’s most durable conspiracy theory just 41 days before his mysterious death in a jail cell.

It’s too early to tell what the release of these emails will ultimately accomplish. The messages certainly suggest that Epstein and Trump had a longer and closer relationship than the president previously said, and they imply that Trump had, at minimum, firsthand knowledge of Epstein’s depravity. The House is now poised to hold a vote as part of a bipartisan effort to force the Justice Department to release a broader set of documents related to the case, known colloquially as the Epstein files.

Read: The Epstein “client list” will never go away

As grist for the algorithmic mills of social media, the emails are a cursed document—one that seems all but certain to sow maximum chaos online. There are enough famous names, insinuations, and revelations that the messages are inherently newsworthy. But they are also a perfect storm of context collapse—a massive, searchable supply of salacious and screenshottable fodder, dumped online for anyone with any political motive to post. Given that many of Epstein’s correspondents are redacted and that threads start and stop randomly, many of the emails are perfect building blocks for constructing plausible but ultimately unprovable narratives. On X, the far-right influencer Jack Posobiec suggested that the emails actually show Epstein and other associates “trying to figure out ways to enwrap Trump into this.” In right-wing spheres, Epstein’s email to the journalist Michael Wolff, which includes the assertion that Trump “knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop,” is now being used as proof of Trump acting heroically to intervene. “Trump was the first to expose Epstein. That’s why they came after him,” Infowars’ Alex Jones said on his show. (An attorney for Wolff did not respond to a request for comment.)

Read: MAGA’s next top influencer

The emails are corrosive in another way too. When Epstein’s birthday book was released, I argued that the fawning messages therein were more proof that “there is a festering rot among at least one group of powerful elites with an abiding belief that their money and power make them invincible.” Now we know that the birthday book was just the tip of the iceberg. Although the extent of Epstein’s crimes might not have been known to all of his correspondents, he was still a registered sex offender who took a highly unusual plea deal to avoid a long prison sentence for child sex-trafficking—yet this doesn’t appear to have stopped people from wringing whatever value they could from him. What the obsequious emails to Epstein seem to illustrate is that many people with influence were willing to overlook his crimes, horrific behavior, and witless observations as long as there was something in it for them.

In this respect, it’s hard not to see these emails as something like a final nail in the coffin when it comes to a broader distrust and contempt for the ruling class of lawmakers, gatekeepers, and the ultra-wealthy. The populist sentiment that elites are corrupt and operate with impunity is one that Trump and the MAGA movement have harnessed successfully. Trump himself has amplified and endorsed the QAnon conspiracy theory, which offers a dramatic fantasy that a cabal of pedophiles is controlling world events from the shadows. Like many durable conspiracy theories, QAnon depicts an immoral elite that is both evil and hyper-competent. There is always a master plan shrouded in secrecy and protected by code words.

From the June 2020 issue: The prophecies of Q

The Epstein revelations of the past few months suggest that these conspiracies actually do represent reality in some way—plainly speaking, some of the most powerful people in the world were communicating with one another through the kingpin of an alleged child-sex-trafficking operation. But the emails also prove that the truth is dumber than fiction. These global elites are far from organized and hyper-competent—it feels like how *Veep *would have treated QAnon. The elites don’t message with sex pests using code words; they openly muse about having fun with girls at “Hawaiian Tropic” parties.

That reading these emails feels surreal makes sense—they shatter the myth of genius and merit that the ruling class tries carefully and spends exorbitantly to cultivate, and they affirm the worst suspicions of the conspiracy-minded. As more revelations are made public, it may feel like the conspiracy theorists have won. But they’ve been wrong as well. Cabal is too flattering a word for this crowd of cosplaying, hunt-and-peck email addicts. Conspiracy theories are a flawed tool meant to help make sense of a nonsensical world. The truth is darker: You don’t need an elaborate master plan to dodge accountability when everyone’s all too willing to simply look the other way.

About the Author

Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Galaxy Brain, about technology, media, and big ideas. He can be reached via email.

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