Who Epstein and Maxwell were photographed with isn’t a particularly good measure of anything, except that we should generally question that (1) the ability to purchase access to people signifies nothing moral or intellectual, (2) there is no relationship between accomplishment and morality, (3) monsters get away with shit because people convince themselves that the obvious warning signs don’t matter because they’re profiting.

This is going to get nuanced but…what’s far more important is how money and access flowed around Epstein. Enclosed social structures create shared unrealities—most obviously, see the action of cults—but when this is combined with capital, and thus power, antisocial desires can just be instantly actualized. Epstein couldn’t be a pimp for the rich if there wasn’t a market for a middleman that granted permission for powerful men to creep on very young women.

Normal society, with it’s premise that money is license, is still an enclosed structure.

Watching coverage of the Maxwell trial, there’s this press meta-narrative of “girl from good society gone wrong” that keeps leaking through, but…in actuality this situation should not be surprising because the upper class is very consistent in viewing the bodies of others as not their own.

(and—bonus round—this means that they’re not into safe, consensual sex work where there are clear boundaries. Or, you know, labor rights at all)

Don’t get me wrong—no man who hung out with Epstein should have any credibility and should probably never appear in public without a shoe thrown at them—but…he’s not the first procurer for the tastes of wealthy New Yorkers and he won’t be the last, and he’s also not the first guy to use money to leverage his way into the more conventional elite.

People like Epstein can exist because there is a demand for them. He doesn’t actually stand out from the “elites” he obtained access to: the scientists willing to be flattered by a rich patron, the gentry willing to pettifog him as eccentric because of his perceived success, the powerful men who admired the direct translation of power into sex. Epstein shows how power is successfully abused and how abuse of power is facilitated by enclosed, informal systems that lash together affiliation and capital. He’s not the anomaly, the contaminating agent, he’s the stage machinery exposed to the eye of the audience.