“I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of any interest to anybody. It’s pretty boring stuff. It’s sordid, but it’s boring. I think only really-bad people, including fake news, want to keep something like that going.” Donald Trump stood next to his billionaire friend and secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, on an airport runway when he made the bizarre comments above in July 2025.
The latest partial release of Epstein files shows that Lutnick arranged to visit Epstein’s island in 2012, despite previously claiming to have broken all contact with Epstein in 2005, and Trump and his Mar-a-lago club are referenced 38,000 times – more times than Harry Potter’s name appears across all seven Harry Potter books. We’ve already reported on Trump’s years-long friendship with serial child abuser Jeffrey Epstein here.
In Dec 2025, a CNN poll found that just 6% of Americans were satisfied with how much Epstein info had been released by then. Last Friday, 31 January, the Trump administration released nearly 3 million Epstein-related documents, while continuing to withhold millions more. Though limited, the files give us a sense of the depraved nature of the “boys’ club” culture of the ruling class. Trump said he thought it was “really time for the country to move onto something else.” That’s very convenient given that the latest files contain numerous allegations against the President that were received by the FBI. They include claims of sexual misconduct and abuse by Trump, including against girls as young as 13 and 14. Some callers complained about events at alleged sex parties where Trump, Epstein and Maxwell were said to be present.
The mainstream media has fallen short by giving a very selective analysis of the facts. The argument that was pushed was that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were serial child abusers, but there was little evidence of other high-profile co-conspirators or a blackmail operation. There is now rightly a heavy emphasis from the corporate media on Epstein’s ties to the Russian state and oligarchs, but, unfortunately, there has been virtual silence on Epstein’s even more extensive ties to prominent Israeli politicians and businesspeople. More on that later.
Predatory elites
It’s become common knowledge that sociopaths often thrive in the cut-throat world of corporate finance or at the higher ends of the state apparatus or academia. But this scandal also shows just how much the accumulation of power can pervert and brutalise the person who holds it.
We already knew that Epstein had close ties to Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, former Harvard president Larry Summers, and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
We now know that Elon Musk emailed Epstein on Christmas Day in 2012, begging for an invite to his private island, asking, “Do you have any parties planned? I’ve been working to the edge of sanity this year, and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for”. Billionaire Richard Branson’s warm relationship with Epstein included a 2013 email to the predator saying, “Dear Jeffrey, it was really nice seeing you yesterday… Any time you’re in the area would love to see you. As long as you bring your harem!”
Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, Noam Chomsky, Peter Mandelson, and Woody Allen all shared close ties to the deceased financier in the 2010s, years after he became a convicted sex offender in 2007. All told, the Epstein scandal is a gross miscarriage of justice.
Abuse survivors have condemned the Department of Justice (DOJ) for heavily redacting [blacking out] the identities of many of the co-conspirators and perpetrators, shielding more abusers from scrutiny. While ICE officers are executing people on the streets in broad daylight for trying to help undocumented migrants from being hunted down, the billionaire sexual predators are enjoying legal immunity.
Many want to know why no third parties linked to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s trafficking of girls and women have ever been arrested. The FBI went out of its way to avoid investigating the involvement of third parties. The victims were given barely any acknowledgement of the scale of what was done to them. They’ve also been given no explanation as to why so much of this scandal has been covered up.
Travesty of Justice
Police investigations of Epstein began in 2005 when the parents of a 14-year-old girl reported him for coercing their daughter to give him a massage. This was followed by statements from many other teenage girls that he had sexually abused them at his mansion. The conclusion of this process amounted to Epstein getting a slap on the wrist after he pleaded guilty to two charges concerning one 17-year-old child, even though the police had interviewed 40 girls (including girls as young as 14) who had accused Epstein of abusing them. He received a sweetheart deal from a top prosecutor, Alex Acosta (who in 2017 became Trump’s Labour Secretary).
Epstein was given an 18-month sentence, but was allowed to leave his minimum-security prison for 12 hours each day when his limousine would collect him in front of the prison each morning at 10am. Incredibly, the deal also included a non-prosecution agreement that gave immunity to Epstein and “any co-conspirators” from further prosecution. He was released after serving fewer than 13 months in prison and then went on his merry way to wreck the lives of many, many more children.
The main reason he faced a second trial at all was due to public pressure after the #MeToo movement arose against other powerful men like Harvey Weinstein, whose abuse of women had also been an open secret in elite circles.
Lifehood of trauma for the survivors
Epstein was, of course, represented by top lawyers, such as outspoken Zionist and Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz. It is well documented that Dershowitz and his other defence lawyers waged a campaign of intimidation against the survivors. We saw a public display of this when Dershowitz viciously attacked and undermined Virginia Giuffre every time he got in front of a microphone for years after she alleged Epstein trafficked her to have sex with him (Dershowitz), Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and Democrat politician George J Mitchell. Another victim also said she was trafficked to Dershowitz.
Julie K Brown, a journalist from the Miami Herald, has extensively investigated the grooming and abuse that Epstein and Maxwell committed across southern Florida. She interviewed 80 survivors in the process. Two hundred women received compensation from a fund for victims that was paid out of Epstein’s estate after he died. So, there are at least 200 survivors, 98% of whose stories have not been given in court trials. It is also alleged that Epstein orchestrated a sex trafficking ring in Eastern Europe. Most survivors are currently trying to maintain their anonymity. Virginia Giuffre sadly took her own life in April 2025. Mother of five, Carolyn Andriano, waived her anonymity after she testified against Ghislaine Maxwell alongside three other witnesses in 2021. She was found dead in a Florida hotel in 2023 due to a drug overdose.
In July 2025, Todd Blanche, the No.2 official in the Justice Department, visited Ghislaine Maxwell in prison to interview her about information that could be politically useful to the administration. As a thank you for her cooperation, Maxwell was moved to a minimum security prison that mainly houses white-collar criminal inmates. In response to this move, survivors of Maxwell’s abuse, Annie and Maria Farmer and the family of Virginia Giuffre said in a statement: “It is with horror and outrage that we object to the preferential treatment convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell has received… Without any notification to the Maxwell victims, the government overnight has moved Maxwell to a minimum security luxury prison in Texas… This move smacks of a cover-up. The victims deserve better.”
While the DOJ made sure to hide the identities of many of possible perpetrators in the latest file release, they had to wipe thousands of documents from their website due to their failure to protect the identities of many of the victims, who wanted to maintain their anonymity. Epstein survivor Annie Farmer said “It is hard to focus on the new information that has been brought to light because of how much damage the DOJ has done by exposing survivors this way.” Another survivor, Lisa Phillips added, “We feel like they’re playing some games with us but we’re not going to stop fighting.”
Far-right friends
For all Steve Bannon’s talk of being a working-class fighter against the global elites, he spent most of his adult life as a Wall Street investor. He even worked as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs. Epstein came from a working-class background in Brooklyn. His father was a groundskeeper for the New York Dept of Parks and Recreation, and his mother was a school aide and homemaker. Both Epstein and Bannon became ingratiated in the culture of Wall Street in early adulthood. Maybe because of their similar backgrounds and extraordinary levels of cynicism and misogyny, they hit it off in the 2010s and became good friends, as revealed in the latest drops of the Epstein files.
Epstein repeatedly paid for flights for not just Bannon but his whole entourage, in one instance offering to let Bannon and his “boys” stay in his Paris apartment. The two strategised together about Bannon’s political work; engaged in mutual backslapping; complained about the #MeToo movement; and exchanged gossip and crude banter. The files even contain a two-hour-long interview of Epstein with Bannon that was due to be used in a documentary that Bannon was putting together in an attempt to rehabilitate the child abuser. Bannon texted this to Epstein just three months before the disgraced financier was arrested in 2019:
“We must counter ‘rapist who traffics in female children to be raped by worlds [sic] most powerful, richest men’ — that can’t be redeemed… Can’t redeem unredeemable — you are a lot of things, which we will show — but you are NOT that.”
Epstein had a number of email exchanges with far-right billionaire and Palantir founder, Peter Thiel. Epstein invested $40 million in one of Thiel’s capital firms, Valar Ventures, which the Epstein estate still owns shares in that are now worth $170 million. The DOJ also released a recording of a conversation between Epstein and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, where Epstein encourages Barak to speak to Thiel about an advisory role at Palantir.
Epstein was also connected to 4chan founder, Chris Poole, who he met shortly before 4chan launched the /pol/ forum that became a hotbed of far-right activity, including the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Chomsky relationship
Many who lean to the left have been shocked and disgusted by the revelations that Noam Chomsky was a friend of Epstein. According to text signed by Chomsky in a letter to Epstein, he advised the child trafficker about how to handle the public scrutiny he faced in the 2010s, “the best way to proceed is to ignore it… that’s particularly true with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder.” Chomsky’s long-time academic colleague, Vijay Prashad, with whom he co-authored two books said “there is no defence of this, in my view, no context that can explain this outrage.” Chomsky, who was famed for his consistent anti-imperialist stances, shared dinner with Epstein and Ehud Barak, and even fraternised with Bannon.
The files also show how academic Robert Trivers tried and failed to pull the anti-Zionist stalwart Norman Finkelstein into the orbit of Epstein. In an email exchange, Finkelstein told Trivers, “My guess is, if Epstein put your daughter at age 15 in such a position, you wouldn’t publicly describe him as a ‘friend’ and person of ‘integrity.’ In fact, I would hope that you’d promptly throttle both Epstein and Dershowitz.”
Intelligence asset?
The latest batch of files document that less than two weeks before Epstein’s suspicious death by suicide in jail in 2019, his lawyers had discussed the possibility of cooperation with federal prosecutors before his impending trial.
Epstein’s financial wealth was $578 million at the time of his death. While it’s not clear whether the FBI ever “followed the money”, journalists at Forbes have uncovered that Epstein made most of his money operating as a money manager for super wealthy clients. Around $480 million was made through charging fees to billionaires by helping them avoid taxes. Billionaire owner of Victoria’s Secret, Les Wexner, paid him over $200 million, while billionaire Leon Black paid him $170 million. Fees of that scale are highly unusual for money managers, even in the high-flying world of Wall Street. Wexner also gifted Epstein his Manhattan mansion.
Forbes couldn’t account for where about $100 million of his fortune came from. The Forbes report notes how the online discourse alleges that “Epstein secretly taped his wealthy friends engaging in sex crimes with trafficked minors in his homes and on his islands and then blackmailed them, with his financial business serving as cover.” We just don’t know to what degree this is true or not at this stage.
When Alex Acosta, who arranged the sweetheart deal for Epstein in Florida in 2008, was asked whether Epstein was given a light sentence because he was an intelligence asset for the CIA, Acosta gave this answer: “I can’t address it directly because of our guidelines”. Journalist Vicky Ward, who worked for Vanity Fair and The Daily Beast, has reported that a source she had in Trump’s first administration confirmed to her that Acosta told Trump officials, “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”
The New York Times recently did an investigation into Epstein’s origins as a financier, and focused on his close friendship with Stanley Pottinger, a lawyer who he shared a penthouse with in the 1980s. Drop Site News went on to detail how:
“Stanley Pottinger, as it happens, was a notable figure in the scandal that became known as Iran-Contra, in which the CIA used Israel as a middleman to move off-the-books weapons to Iran. In the early 1980s, under the CIA’s supervision, Pottinger advised an Iranian banker on shipping embargoed arms to Iran using fraudulent paperwork and overseas “dummy companies” — in the very same period that Pottinger and Epstein worked together selling “tax-avoidance” strategies from a penthouse by Central Park. Pottinger’s system eventually gave rise to a network of covert intermediaries shipping arms around the world; the CIA’s profits became a slush fund used to illegally bankroll the insurgent Contra army, who waged a war against Nicaragua’s leftist government while simultaneously trafficking cocaine to the United States… ”
Another Epstein associate in the 1980s, was Agnan Khasoggi, a notorious money launderer and weapons dealer who was a central player in the Iran-Contra Affair. Epstein even moved planes used in the Iran-Contra Affair to Ohio for the use of his billionaire buddy, Les Wexner. Les Wexner is an outspoken Zionist with many connections to Israel, including a foundation called the Wexner Israel Fellowship Program.
The Israel connection
Former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Barack met with Epstein 36 times between 2013-2017, including on a 2014 private flight to Florida. Barak was the head of Israeli military intelligence during the planning of Iran-Contra, and he supervised the CIA’s first arms delivery, but claims that he first met Epstein in 2003 when introduced to him by another former Israeli Prime Minister, Shimon Peres.
Epstein organised meetings and arrangements between representatives from the UAE, Israel and India in the late 2010s. In an email to Barak in 2018 about a meeting they were both due to attend with former Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, Epstein appeared to joke: “you should make clear that i dont work for mossad. :)”
Epstein worked with Barak on a deal between Netanyahu and the state of Egypt about the export of Israeli natural gas.
The files show that Epstein was a back-room power broker amid the strengthening of Indian-Israel ties in 2017. And he set up meetings between Indian state leaders with figures in Trump’s first administration. For example,
“Epstein connected an Indian billionaire close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak ahead of the first-ever trip by an Indian PM to Israel. Days later, that billionaire, Anil Ambani, told Epstein after a visit to Delhi that “Leadership” wanted Epstein’s help for Ambani to meet “Jared and Bannon asap,” and requested his “assistance” regarding Modi’s upcoming meeting with Trump.”
There is also copious evidence that Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, had connections to Mossad. As this quote from The Times of Israel about Maxwell makes clear,
“Over the next four years, thanks to his Mirror Group profits, Maxwell pumped millions into the country, buying newspapers, investing in hi-tech and pharma companies, and, in the process, becoming the largest single investor in Israel’s economy. Maxwell also began to pass on useful information to the Mossad.”
Obscene power and wealth breeds monsters
Some people are appalled when they realise that pro-capitalist politicians whom they voted for turn out to be liars and hypocrites. That the ideals of democracy, equality and justice that liberals and conservatives profess to stand for are just empty rhetoric used to prettify the status quo of capitalist exploitation. Socialists see the entire economic system as the fundamental problem rather than the morality of its leaders and rulers. But given that the system is fundamentally based on labour exploitation, competition, individualism, and imperialist violence, is it any wonder that it breeds narcissists and sociopaths like Epstein, Maxwell, Dershowitz, Bannon, and Trump?
The #MeToo grassroots movement from below played a huge role in bringing down Epstein and Maxwell in the late 2010s. Today, the mass movement in Minneapolis against ICE’s brutality and the international pro-Palestine movement against Israel’s genocidal settler-colonial occupation show glimpses of the best of humanity. These movements also show the way forward for striking blows against the increasingly authoritarian, fascistic trajectory of capitalism today. The fight to defend our rapidly eroding democratic rights must organise a socialist, working-class offensive against this sick system and its depraved ruling class.