The Epstein files represent a larger, scarier truth

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Adnan R. Khan is an independent journalist.

The allegations at the heart of the Jeffrey Epstein case are horrifying to contemplate. Some of the world’s most powerful men have been accused of trafficking hundreds of young women and girls for sex. As investigators around the world continue to dig through the financier’s messages for evidence, the belief that the Epstein files would reveal something very dark about the world – a notion once dismissed as mere conspiracy – may be all too real.

But as Gilad Edelman points out in The Atlantic, none of the documents, at least so far, reveal that Mr. Epstein was actively operating an organized trafficking network. Indeed, Brad Edwards, the Florida lawyer who represented 200 of Mr. Epstein’s victims, told ABC News last July that he never saw a client list, saying that “Jeffrey Epstein was the pimp and the john ... Nearly all of the exploitation and abuse of all of the women was intended to benefit only Jeffrey Epstein and Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual desires.”

Fallout from Epstein files in Europe affects royalty, politicians and diplomats

That’s not to say evidence will never turn up implicating others. Given the scale of the alleged crimes, it seems inconceivable that there were those in Mr. Epstein’s vast network who were not at least aware of – or, in some instances, complicit in – the alleged abuse. Still, it may be that only a small number of men in Mr. Epstein’s inner circle of depravity were involved.

But like all conspiracy theories, this one does reveal a larger, grotesque truth. Because of Mr. Epstein’s tentacled reach into virtually all institutions of society – political, bureaucratic, academic, artistic, humanitarian – the massive release of his emails and text messages give us our most complete picture of how thoroughly our world has been captured by elite interests, even if they were not directly connected to Mr. Epstein.

The Epstein files do not just contain the usual suspects. It wasn’t just the oligarchs, royals, politicians, lawyers, and businessmen who apparently played chummy with a convicted sex offender, casually exchanging highly sensitive information with him or trading eye-watering amounts of money in pursuit of goals with meaningful consequences on everyday people’s lives. We also have categories of people who were drawn in, if not to Mr. Epstein directly, then to his broader world of sordid temptations, which allowed this moral collapse to occur: military officers, academics, journalists, even members of humanitarian organizations, cultural elites who were all seduced by power and money.

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Spend enough time going through the documents, and it’s likely that you will find something that hits close to home. For me, it was a June 6, 2011, exchange between Mr. Epstein and Tom Pritzker, who was the executive chair of Hyatt Hotels Corporation until his resignation earlier this month. Mr. Epstein, in his terse style, asked his billionaire friend if he had “time to speak,” and some hours later, Mr. Pritzker replied that he couldn’t, because he was in a remote valley in Afghanistan for his birthday. “Spent time w Petraeus yesterday and he loaned me a chopper (actually two with one as a back up),” he wrote, referring to David Petraeus, who was in command of NATO forces in Afghanistan from July, 2010, to July, 2011, and who became the director of the CIA shortly thereafter.

I was in Afghanistan at that time, reporting on a critical phase of the Afghan war. Canadian forces were beginning their withdrawal from Kandahar province, handing security responsibility over to the Americans, and Canadian commanders were complaining to their U.S. counterparts about the heavy-handedness of the American war machine and how it was undermining the trust Canada had built among local communities. Mr. Petraeus was not listening. And as I learned 15 years later, the top American general in Afghanistan was actually more interested in lending out precious military assets for a billionaire’s birthday joyride than heeding the advice of America’s NATO peers. In November, 2012, he was forced to resign as CIA director when it was revealed that he shared classified documents with his biographer and his lover.

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Mr. Petraeus has not been directly connected to Mr. Epstein, but the files show that others like him operated in the same world, where connections cement relationships and pad bank accounts. And the Epstein files are filled with, if not evidence of elite corruption, then at least willful ignorance of the kind of man Mr. Epstein was in return for the favours he provided. We have Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor passing along confidential information to Mr. Epstein while working as a trade envoy for the British government, including investment opportunities in Afghanistan – turning a country at war into an economic opportunity. We have Noam Chomsky, the renowned linguist and champion of the downtrodden, receiving financial advice and assistance from Mr. Epstein and later reciprocating by offering the convicted pedophile advice on how to deal with the negative press over his past crimes. There was Joscha Bach, a leading cognitive scientist and AI researcher who more or less admitted he maintained a relationship with a man he described as a sociopath, because Mr. Epstein was the source of funding for his research in the United States. The list goes on and on.

The Epstein files show evidence of serious crimes, and victims deserve justice. But they also reveal a pattern that points to a deeper, societal-level crisis that affects us all, about who does (and doesn’t) get to access power and how it is maintained.

And so the Epstein files are a moment of reckoning. We are in a Second Gilded Age where the elite have captured the architecture of our societies – our politics, our economics, our cultural and intellectual institutions – and are using them to pursue their own interests and desires. The question now: How do the rest of us wrest control back from them?