Will the Epstein sex abuse scandal become another MeToo debacle?

From Elite Scandal to Moral Panic, and Back Again.

This is a longer edit of my article currently published in the print edition of The Hungarian Conservative.

On 30 January 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) flooded the news cycle with over three million additional pages of Epstein-related files. Contemporaneously, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche held a press conference, stating that this represented full compliance with the DoJ’s obligations under the Epstein Files Transparency Act to release all responsive materials, intimating that the matter was now over. As with previous releases, however, it was bungled. Of more than six million pages deemed potentially responsive, three million remain unproduced due to duplication, privilege, violence, and irrelevance. The new batch contained a diverse mix of documents, including 2000 video files and 180,000 images. Though strict protocols were set in place to protect the identities of victims, the Wall Street Journal reported that dozens of victims were failed by those safeguards. The DoJ also warned that it contained many lurid, uncorroborated and sensationalist claims. Whatever one’s particular taste for scandal or conspiracy, it could be found there, opened like a latter-day Pandora’s box, revealing the evil of the privileged elite to the world. The DoJ’s warning was not heeded.

Rumour enters: painted in tongues.

In the prologue to Shakespeare’s third Henriad is an extraordinarily prescient monologue:

Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?...¹

It is oft-omitted in performances, so many are unaware of it. Written four centuries before the new millennium, it foreshadows our current age of social media and misinformation. The allegorical character of ‘Rumour’ continues from above:

I, from the Orient to the drooping West,
Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold
The acts commenced on this ball of earth.
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports…

Although warned of many ‘false reports’ in the Epstein files, the most salacious and dubious exposés gained the most traction. This atavistic bias for hyperbole over facts even pertained to descriptions of Epstein’s crimes. Epstein is a convicted child sex offender, though for many, this ignoble epithet is not scandalous enough. The youngest of Epstein’s verified victims is fourteen, yet even the BBC, which in its editorial guidelines claims to be committed to due accuracy, labels Epstein a paedophile, something that specifically means someone with a primary sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Perhaps this is an error made to comply with its audience’s expectations, as in ‘due’ accuracy? It is no defence of Epstein or his crimes to parse these facts or to remonstrate about the minimising of the actual meaning of paedophilia. It has a unique designation because it is a uniquely horrific crime. The accurate term for Epstein’s convicted crime is hebephilia², a primary sexual attraction to pubescents³. His overall preference seems to be ephebophilia, mid to late adolescents. But even for the BBC, whilst knowing the worst proven facts—being a convicted child sex offender of a 14-year-old—appears not deplorable enough.

Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wavering multitude,
Can play upon it…

But what of these conjectures?

Although initial reports suggested that no further arrests were pending following the first wave of disclosures, subsequent developments have proven this false. According to reporting by The New York Times, two additional arrests occurred, a number that has since increased with the inclusion of Peter Mandelson. In parallel, seven foreign politicians have resigned and are under investigation, while 16 individuals across politics, academia, business, and law have stepped down from their positions. The breadth of these repercussions suggests that Epstein’s associations spanned a diverse spectrum of elite networks. The unfolding scandal evokes comparisons to similarly atavistic patterns of scapegoating, redolent of humanity’s long history of channelling moral outrage through symbolic acts of expiation. Such instincts are especially pertinent to those high-status personages deemed guilty by association, such as former HRH Prince Andrew.

Historical anthropological scholarship notes that numerous ancient societies practised ritual sacrifice involving rulers or high-ranking figures to appease deities or restore ecological equilibrium. While the present cases concern allegations of corruption and criminal misconduct rather than actual ritual violence, the cancellation of people—loss of status, income, and communal resources—was, for most of human history, a death sentence. Add to this that the surrounding discourse is suffused with the frisson of sexual wrongdoing. Central to this discourse are the individuals identified as victims. Approximately one hundred alleged victims appear in the files, alongside a far larger group of accusers who have adopted the language and identity, victimhood and survivorship, at times referring to themselves collectively as ‘sister survivors’. To date, however, and notwithstanding the scale of these claims, only four women ultimately testified in the criminal trial of Ghislaine Maxwell. Other claimants have secured substantial outcomes through civil litigation, private settlements, and compensation mechanisms, with estimates indicating that roughly $616 million distributed to claimants and their legal representatives.

The credibility of certain high-profile allegations, however, has been called into question. Sarah Ransome, who initiated legal proceedings against Epstein and Maxwell, later acknowledged fabricating elements of her account, including assertions concerning incriminating recordings involving prominent individuals. She stated that these falsehoods were intended to draw attention to Epstein’s conduct. As a character note, during her deposition, when asked about her occupation, she stated she was a ‘writer’. When pushed, she had to admit that she had not written professionally or ever been paid for her musings. She then, per her claim of having incriminating video evidence, retracted the statement admitting writing was merely ‘a hobby’.

Similarly, the late Virginia Giuffre accused Alan Dershowitz of sexual assault and pursued defamation claims after he denied the allegation, only to later withdraw her lawsuit and concede that she might have erred in identifying him. Such episodes underscore the complex interplay between legitimate grievance, illegitimate grievance, strategic litigation, and reputational harm. False or inaccurate accusations risk undermining the evidentiary foundation upon which genuine claims of sexual abuse depend and eroding public confidence in processes designed to deliver justice. Then there are the further female enablers of Epstein aside from Maxwell. Sarah Kellen, Epstein’s personal assistant and scheduler; Nadia Marcinkova, his model pilot; Lesley Groff, his executive assistant; and Adriana Ross, who worked at Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion. All were named as potential co-conspirators in the 2007 Florida non-prosecution agreement, but received immunity from federal prosecution in exchange for Epstein pleading guilty to two state misdemeanours for prostitution.

These controversies also raise broader questions concerning the relationship between power and corruption. Corruption is not a trait confined to one sex; it is a structural risk inherent in the basic asymmetries of authority and influence. From classical literature such as the Iliad to modern popular fiction, Western intellectual and artistic traditions have repeatedly examined the moral vulnerabilities that accompany power. Philosophical thought experiments, such as the Ring of Gyges, have long asked whether any individual, shielded from accountability, would resist the temptations of impunity. Contemporary feminist critiques might argue that women operating within historically ‘patriarchal’ systems confront constraints that shape their agency. Yet the expansion of women’s participation in elite institutions and the exposure of corruption within these female networks necessitate rejecting essentialist assumptions that portray either sex as uniquely virtuous or uniquely corruptible.

The Epstein and Maxwell convictions stand as legal determinations of serious wrongdoing. At the same time, the broader cultural and media response illustrates the cyclical nature of moral crises, in which revelations of abuse provoke both necessary reckoning and speculative excess. History demonstrates that human communities repeatedly confront the darker dimensions of ambition, desire, and domination. While no individual should be presumed complicit solely by association, neither should the gravity of substantiated crimes be minimized. The challenge lies in sustaining a principled commitment to due process, evidentiary rigor, and proportional accountability, without succumbing to either instinctive disbelief or its opposite: moral panic.

A New MeToo?

MeToo exposed the seedy underworld of Hollywood, with the casting couch a trope since its inception. It is a long-documented pattern of often mutual exploitation that becomes abuse with force, blackmail and the threat of retaliation for noncompliance. History is replete with tales of beautiful young women willingly entering into transactional sexual relationships with older, powerful men. Its victims, we seldom hear about. MeToo, in its initial noble origins, changed this. Inevitably, a bandwagon effect ensued with trivial exchanges being lumped in with serious assaults, and the drama queens marginalized real victims. Ultimately, the slogan ‘Believe All Women’ became the rock on which MeToo foundered. This also had a chilling effect on men generally, with acute and real negative consequences for women when men began to refuse to mentor or even work with them one-to-one. On one level of analysis, this is a triumph for feminism, as it means more women-only networks. On a higher, more realistic level of analysis, it means talented, non-ideological women are excluded from arenas because of their group identity. MeToo’s downwards trajectory from honourable to hysterical reflects feminism’s myopic, but romantic focus on male villainy and denial of female agency.

It is also not as if Epstein could not inspire genuine emotion in women. Consider that the files include many affectionate emails from Epstein’s then-girlfriend, Karyna Shuliak, one of which contains the word ‘love you’ 153 times. This is not hard evidence, but neither are the ghost-written memoirs from accusers that include prose that is clearly meant to titillate rather than horrify, such as: ‘...my nipples hardened at the freezing blast of air’, writes Ransome. Giuffre, meanwhile, admits to recruiting girls herself, writing that she became Jeffrey’s ‘handy little helper’. The charge of criminal trafficking must entail evidence of force or coercion. There is, as yet, no evidence of this in the files. These women could all have easily consulted their boots and found them ready to walk at any moment. None did, not while there was money in their purse.

Compare this to the victims of the British ‘grooming gang’ scandals. As noted in the Hansard Record—the official written record of proceedings and debates in the UK Parliament—on November 20 2025, Conservative peer Baroness Emma Nicholson of Winterbourne led a House of Lords debate on compensation for victims of the gangs. She detailed the litany of bureaucratic and political roadblocks victims faced in receiving compensation for what is unquestionably a scandalous failure of the UK government’s duty of care to protect its citizens from harm. The ‘National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse’, often referred to as The Casey Report, even begins with the diminishing qualifier, ‘Group-based child sexual exploitation, rare though it may be (emphasis author’s), is one of the most heinous crimes in our society.’

Levity excused, but when one of the greatest scandals of present-day politics is phrased, in the words of Bill & Ted, as ‘most heinous’ but —qualifier—‘rare’, which are we to take seriously? Keir Starmer, in an effort to untangle himself from the many scandals whirling around his tenure, recently released a marketing reel on social media in which he vowed, ‘I will never walk away from the mandate I was given to change this country.’ Starmer won the election with the lowest vote share for any winning party in modern UK history. Labour’s 2024 manifesto was titled ‘Change’ and focused on practicalities such as stabilising the economy, reforming public services, and addressing everyday concerns such as the cost of living. His democratic mandate was never to ‘Change this country’, though arguably, his own undemocratic mandate was to do exactly that.

In 2024, the Labour Party made a manifesto pledge to halve violence against women and girls. Statistics from the National Audit Office show an increase of police-recorded rape and sexual assault of 264% from the years 2010 to date. In a House of Commons debate in June 2025, the Hansard records that Labour MPs voted against a national enquiry into grooming gangs three times, ‘...the Prime Minister repeatedly ruled out a national inquiry, to the cheers of all the Labour MPs’.

Presently, in the United Kingdom, there are no ‘compensation mechanisms’ for the actual, criminally sanctioned victims of the ‘grooming gangs’. This could appear to be a travesty of justice that even the most speculative of Jeffrey Epstein’s accusers are awarded millions, while proven underage victims of gang rape, abuse, and torture in the United Kingdom cannot even be fast-tracked to NHS services to allow them to deal with their trauma. In defence of this system, Labour peer, the Baroness Levitt, is recorded as saying, ‘We are very anxious not to create a hierarchy of victims.’ The Baroness describes herself as a ‘lifelong feminist’ and also expostulated against the 2025 Supreme Court ruling that defined ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 as referring to biological sex, not gender identity. The flattening of hierarchies is a core tenet of feminism and is central to its concept of ‘equality’. Ostensibly, it is to make the world more equitable. In reality, it breeds corruption and makes accountability rare.

Feminists today, both male and female, are vastly overrepresented in the corridors of power, and as we have seen with the Labour Party, and especially via Levitt and former Deputy PM Angela Rayner, they have little compunction to protect women when it challenges their ideology or threatens their grip on power. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare attributes to Portia one of the most universally recognized lines in the history of English literature. A line that evokes themes of justice, compassion, and divine grace, which would have aligned with Shakespeare’s Christian audiences of the day.

‘The quality of mercy is not strained…’⁴

Those days are gone. Today, the quality of mercy is woefully strained and droppeth not like ‘gentle rain from heaven‘ but from the Godless triad of ideology, politics, and identity. The grooming gangs are not elites, but are protected by the elites who sanctioned their barbarism to purchase votes, to push progressive ideology on a native population lulled into complacency by the long peace, and to destroy the identity of Western civilisation.

Will the elite ever be held to account?

There is a growing miasma of MeToo moral panic around the Epstein files as disparate groups scramble for a foothold on soft power. Feminists are predictably using the scandal to reinforce victimhood narratives; politicians are politic with their new friends, and cunning with their new enemies; the media, old and new, are slaves to their own algorithms, crying, ‘Oh, won’t somebody think about the children!’, when what they actually mean is, ‘Oh, won’t somebody think about the news cycle!’

Another literary great, this time Russian, foresaw and parodied our shallow, soulless culture in 1865. Dostoevsky’s novella The Crocodile turns a sharp satirical eye upon egotism, western liberalism and collective madness. It tells the story of a civil servant, Ivan Matveich, who visits the fashionable, new-fangled St. Petersburg shopping arcade, a proto-20th-century shopping mall. Among the exhibits is a live crocodile. Ivan is swallowed whole by the beast but does not die. This event is even more of a sensation than the crocodile exhibit itself. Crowds flock to observe the spectacle of a man living, breathing and conversing with others whilst abiding in the innards of a monstrous beast. Initially, he protests, demanding that the beast be killed so he can be saved. The crocodile’s owner demurs: his exhibit has never been so popular! Ivan, absurdly, agrees with this logic, as do the St. Petersburg authorities. Ivan eventually finds his new rooms quite comfortable, and the crocodile’s owner begins to turn a huge profit. Ivan also starts to like his captive audience. He begins to lecture them on his progressive ideas, of his vision of a utopia based on rationalism and enlightened self-interest. His new perspective on the world from inside the crocodile has liberated his intellectual imagination. He even begins to strategise a lecture circuit. The media also flock to the spectacle, each with its own agenda, notably either propagandistic or sensationalist.

Ivan was swallowed by the abstract beast of ideology long before the literal beast ever laid an eye on him. That an actual crocodile swallowed him is in the nature of Dostoevsky’s literary beast—his genius for turning the absurd into devastating satire. In our allegory, Epstein is the crocodile, the beast, which some of the Epstein accusers were, arguably, willingly trapped inside and also, like Ivan, quite comfortable in their novel situation. As time passed and the ephemeral nature of their position began to dawn on them, they adopted a different strategy: using a sensational, algorithmically grooved platform for more personal and ideological gain. The victims of the grooming gangs are not so lucky, being trapped within the beast but having no voice.

An even bigger beast then swallowed Epstein. The devourer became the devoured.

Human beasts do prowl the world. They take the vulnerable as prey. But within such a closely sexually dimorphic species as modern humans, either sex can get the upper hand by using their wits and agency. Women are lacking in neither. It is true that still, many are unwillingly trafficked for sex, labour, wet-nursing, surrogacy, and more. It is unconscionable. But let us not forget that men, throughout the ages, have also suffered their own selection pressures due to their sex. We no longer traffic young men in their millions to die on the Western Front in Europe, but still, any one of us in this age of equality can end up as cannon fodder for the elite.

‘The posts come tiring on,
And not a man of them brings other news
Than they have learnt of me. From Rumour’s tongues
They bring smooth comforts false, worse than true wrongs’

1. William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, Induction, Cambridge, MA: MIT, n.d.

2. Ray Blanchard et al., ‘Pedophilia, Hebephilia, and the DSM-V, Archives of Sexual Behavior 38, no. 3 (June 2009): 335–50, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-008-9399-9

3. Mickey Emmanuel, Brooke, R. Bokor, Tanner stages. StatPearls Publishing (11 December 2022). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470280/

4. The Merchant of Venice (Act IV, Scene I)