The Epstein Phenomenon ought to foist the subject of sexual cruelty to the forefront of our consciousness. It is a common cruelty, so common and so awful that we have had to find ways to blind ourselves to it so that we may be relieved of the jagged responsibility of interrogating our own complicity — our own comfort — with its prevalence in our culture. It would unknit our social order to take this evil seriously. In this instance, our strategy has been to feign that Jeffrey Epstein’s cruelties have nothing to do with us, that we are not implicated by what his story demonstrates about human habit. We have localized his evil and sequestered it within the “The Epstein Class.” The progressive Ro Khanna, for whom Epstein’s monstrosities are a confirmation of Khanna’s class politics, uses the term “Epstein Class” to refer to a group of “elites” who, he hectors, “play by a different set of rules.” Those repulsive elites! They have their own rules! That blasted One Percent with its impenetrable carapace of privilege and power! The “elite,” the moneyed powerful whose names we all spent hours looking up with delicious voyeuristic glee in early 2026, has nothing whatever to do with us. We scanned the Epstein files as if it was a kind of game with no discomfiting lessons for the plebs. It was even fun. Did you know anyone in the files? Were you yourself inscribed? Can you believe it about Larry Summers? Can you believe it about the saintly, justice-seeking Noam Chomsky? Noam Chomsky. And my word, can you believe that they all knew? Knew what? What was this awful secret to which these elites were all privy? Did they know something that we did not know? Did they do something that we would never do? They got away with rape or forgave it — but don’t we? Surely most people — certainly most women — have forgiven worse sexual cruelties than anything Larry Summers has allegedly done. Are you so certain, reader, that you have not attended dinner parties at the home of an abuser or a rapist? Are you so certain that you would scrupulously distance yourself from anyone so much as plausibly suspected of such debased behavior? Do good liberals, or good God-fearing and hard-working citizens of good democracies, really care all that much about rape? I have, alas, reason to doubt our sterling records and intentions. I’m afraid I have reason to believe — to know — that ordinary unEpsteined non-elites of every creed, color, and political fealty care staggeringly little about rape. People choose to routinely rub shoulders with rapists with no power or money to speak of, and they are borne by simple, uncomplicated, uncalculated desire. They want to. There are so many rapists, you see, and most of them are just our neighbors or business partners or brothers-in-law living in small towns, the scandals of which would never grace the front pages of any newspaper. Most abusers are not famous. They are merely guilty. Rape is too horrific a crime to believe anyone would actually commit it, and too mundane a crime to care about even if it is likely that someone has committed it. That, I can tell you, is what victims learn, and it is what readers of national newspapers deduce from coverage about cases symptomatic of this oxymoronic law. People are unfazed by rape and they are horrified by it. It is the ur-crime, absolutely unforgivable in soldiers except that it is to be expected, repellant in men with enormous power except that it is their inevitable wage, a black stain on a shimmering intellect except that brilliant men must be allowed their transgressions if society is to progress. As for the anonymous rapists — boys will be boys and what are we supposed to do, skin the bastard? There would be so many skinless bastards! There would be so many disarranged friend groups, so many sidelong glances and prudish or prurient staring. And what business is it of ours if something horrible may or may not have happened to some woman who may or may not have invited it? Why does she insist on talking about it? Even if it is true, each of us is more than the worst thing we have ever done, as Bryan Stevenson taught us. Time cleanses reputations even when it does not mend decimated spirits. We say that Epstein was permitted to indulge his evil predilections for as long as he did because of how much power he had. This is true with respect to the judicial system’s repeated incapacity to punish him. His power certainly accounts for the legerdemain which got him out of legally bolted cages time after time. “I own the Palm Beach Police department,” he used to say. But this is not the only reason that he escaped social opprobrium for as long as he did. Epstein got away with rape because people get away with rape. Far more people get away with rape than get punished for it. This is a hideous and inconvenient fact. If all ordinary people were decent people they would be compelled to act on this fact, to alter society. But society — by which I mean us — resists alteration. So we avoid drawing out the implications of Epstein’s sordid story. He got away with it because he was powerful, but he also got away with it for the same reasons that men we all know have gotten away with rape. We all know men who have gotten away with rape. I know more victims of rape than I can count with two hands and I do not know a single one who has secured justice. The same — statistically — is more than likely true for each of you. 
Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s name is well known because she was among the most outspoken and courageous of Epstein’s victims. But Giuffre, like so many of the girls
Phallocracy All the Way Down
