Hundreds of thousands of pages of the Justice Department’s files related to investigations of Jeffrey Epstein are set to be released Friday, and though all the files won’t be released just yet, this batch is sure to create a frenzy on social media when it drops.
The Epstein scandal is an important national story, and key questions about it remain unanswered. Hopefully these documents will shed some light on these questions. Valuable and even revelatory information could well be in the released files somewhere.
But as the hivemind of the internet grapples with this imminent release, one thing that’s sure to ensue is an onslaught of misleading, out of context, or outright wrong claims — many of which will go viral — about what these files show.
The way social media functions, this is inevitable. People will post anything they see that looks suspicious or damning, and the posts that express the most outrage will go the most viral. In some cases, this viral outrage may be merited; in others, it won’t.
The documented facts about Epstein — that he abused hundreds of young women and underage girls, while maintaining friendships with powerful and influential people — are damning. They’ve helped make the Epstein saga the mother of all conspiracy theories, with something for practically every political faction to obsess over. Any tidbit in the files that can conceivably be used to bolster the darkest theories will be so used.
The nature of investigatory files, though, is that they will include a ton of information that is hearsay, rumor, unproven, or false. This, my colleague Ian Millhiser recently wrote, is why the Department of Justice typically doesn’t release files like these — because they could smear people with false or unproven information, without giving them a chance to prove their innocence in a court of law.
Elon Musk’s X is a sewer where the most virulent right-wing-coded conspiracy theories regularly go viral. It’s beyond hope. But Democrats — and many journalists, particularly in their social media posts — haven’t always reacted all that responsibly to these Epstein revelations either. (Last month, House Democrats released an email in which Epstein said Trump had spent “hours” with a victim at his house; however, it quickly emerged that the victim in question has long said Trump never abused her.)
But I cling to the hope that there are people out there who are legitimately interested in trying to find out what actually happened, and who are not just looking for ammo to use against their political opponents or prove the conspiracy theories they’re already completely sure are true. So if you, dear reader, are interested in advice on how to consume the Epstein files responsibly, read onward.
To many, it looked damning. Just last month, the New York Times’s David Brooks had written a column arguing that there was too much focus on the Epstein story. On Thursday, after a new release by House Democrats, it turned out that Brooks was in the Epstein files, implicated, photographed, hobnobbing with the man himself! Clearly, his column was an enormous ethical violation, covering up his own complicity!
But was any of that actually true?
In fact, Brooks told reporter Max Tani Thursday that he’s never even met Epstein. He said he attended a TED conference in 2011 “and was invited to an adjacent dinner.” He continued: “There were about 60 people there if memory serves. Apparently Epstein was also at this dinner. I don’t think we met or exchanged a word. I never heard of Epstein until I read a Miami Herald story about him in 2018. I’ve never had any contact with him by email or any other means.”
Brooks’s clarification does, in fact, still tell us something about Epstein’s influence; the dinner in question, an annual event called the “billionaires’ dinner,” was put on by an organization called Edge that was in part funded by Epstein. But Epstein wasn’t the face of the organization or the dinner, and he wasn’t very well-known nationally then (in 2011). So on its face, Brooks’s account — that he went there to have dinner with a bunch of billionaires and had never heard of Jeffrey Epstein — sounds plausible.
But many on social media were already convinced of his malfeasance. After all, there was a picture of him in the Epstein files! (Even though the picture in question was one of several from the dinner that had been on Edge’s website for years.) Clearly, they argued, Brooks’s denials must be lies. So in the minds of many, Brooks is guilty until proven innocent, and if prior experience is any guide, the denunciations of him will be far more viral than any attempt by him to correct the record.
A more responsible way of assessing this information would have been to pause and assess what it actually shows, which was: House Democrats released a picture of Brooks at a dinner that Epstein also attended. Pausing to try to ascertain when the dinner was, who else attended, and other basic facts would have been the responsible reaction. Instead, the default social media response was to run around like a chicken with its head cut off and yell: “David Brooks is in the Epstein files!”
So what actually matters in the Epstein scandal?
People have different unanswered questions. How did he make his money? Was he tied to intelligence agencies in some way? Did he really kill himself? Was Trump involved in his crimes?
Journalists have tried to answer these questions — take, for instance, the two new lengthy Times reports on Epstein’s money and his friendship with Trump. The government has offered other answers, asserting that, yes, its investigation found he did kill himself. But many people have been unsatisfied with these answers, believing there must be more to the story.
Personally, the biggest unanswered questions I have about the Epstein scandal that the files could conceivably shed light on are: Did investigators believe other men committed sex crimes with Epstein, and, if so, why weren’t any of them charged?
For background: Hundreds of women have accused Epstein of sexually abusing them in the 1990s or 2000s. There is also a smaller subset of that vast group of victims that has said Epstein trafficked them to other men as well.
This, of course, has been the centerpiece of Epstein theories — that he was not just a solo sexual predator, but rather a procurer and supplier of young women and underage girls to his wealthy, powerful, and influential friends.
Yet none of these male friends has ever been charged by prosecutors with any crimes related to Epstein. (The only other person charged was Epstein’s longtime companion Ghislaine Maxwell.)
So what did investigators conclude about the claims from certain Epstein accusers that other men were involved in his crimes? Why didn’t they bring charges about it?
That’s what I’ll be looking for in the files: candid assessments from prosecutors and investigators about what the evidence showed and why they didn’t move forward with charging anyone else. I have no idea if the Trump administration will choose to release this information — they could conceivably use loopholes to avoid doing so — but I’ll be on the lookout for it.
In contrast, information from the investigation phase — tips, rumors, leads — should be taken with several grains of salt. Not every source being interviewed by the FBI is honest. Not every lead checks out.
But the broader takeaway is that, if you’re interested in assessing whether something is actually true, you should assess where the information is coming from, how reliable it seems, whether it’s corroborated, whether it fits the timeline of what we know about the scandal, and more. You should not just take something as gospel truth because “it’s in the Epstein files!”