I found him the way most people find monsters now: in a clip.
Two men, two chairs, a table. No dramatic lighting, no swelling music. Just Jeffrey Epstein talking to Steve Bannon about money and systems, like any other mid-tier YouTube interview in the endless scroll.
I pressed play expecting confirmation of what I already “knew.” The predator, the creep, the grotesque caricature of perversion. What I got instead was something far less satisfying.
He was smart.
Not omniscient, not profound, but unmistakably fluent in the machinery of finance and power. He moved easily from interest rates to derivatives, from central banks to philanthropy, from abstract numbers to institutional behavior. No talking points. No corporate polish. The peculiar tension of someone who actually understands the system he’s describing.
If you have a certain kind of brain, you recognize the pattern immediately. He was thinking in structure, not slogans.
And that was the first problem.
Because by the time that camera was rolling, Epstein was not an ambiguous figure. He was a convicted sex offender with a documented pattern of grooming and exploiting girls, a man whose plea deal was a national scandal, a figure whose name had become shorthand for a very specific kind of predation.
The facts were not in doubt. The harm was not hypothetical.
Yet here he was, speaking with the calm authority of a man who has lived inside the bloodstream of elite institutions. And part of me—the part trained to enjoy high-bandwidth conversation—leaned forward.
That split in my own reaction is where this essay begins.
It would be easy to write another piece about him: the crimes, the plea deal, the island, the plane, the famous names, the mysterious death in a cell. That story has been told, commodified, packaged into prestige documentaries and podcasts and explainers. You already know that script. You’ve seen the aerial shots, the red circles around faces in grainy photos, the diagrams of flight logs.
What interests me is not the man in the chair.
What interests me is the people on the couches.
The millions who have given more mental real estate to Jeffrey Epstein than to any other single instance of harm. The people who can describe the layout of his properties, the timeline of his arrests, his social circle, his alleged handlers, his last twenty-four hours—while knowing almost nothing with comparable detail about any other cruelty in their own country.
The question is not: How could he do what he did? Men like him have existed in every era.
The question is: What does our fixation on him say about us?
About what we find compelling, what we find safe to hate, what we choose to memorize, what we treat as morally “central” even when it changes nothing about how we live.
Because strip away the voyeurism and the conspiracy theories and you are left with a simple, unnerving fact: Epstein is one of the best-known criminals in American life not because his evil was uniquely vast, but because his evil was uniquely watchable.
We turned him into a recurring character in the national imagination. We gave him seasons and spin-offs. We promoted him from felon to symbol, then from symbol to obsession.
That is not a story about him. That is a story about the audience.
About us.
About why we prefer certain kinds of evil over others, why we return to some crimes like comfort shows, why we are drawn again and again to monsters we can condemn without cost.
The man in the interview is dead. His part of the story is over.
Ours isn’t.
This is not an essay about Jeffrey Epstein’s sins.
It is an essay about the people who hit play.
Chapter One – The Case Everyone Thinks They Know
Ask around.
“Jeffrey Epstein.”
Almost everyone can give you some version of the same outline, delivered with the easy fluency of a story they’ve heard enough times to own.
The island.The plane.The rich men.The underage girls.The sweetheart deal.The “Epstein didn’t kill himself” punchline.
People know the brands: Victoria’s Secret, the townhouse, the private jet, the lawyer’s names if they’re really into it. They can tell you that he was “connected to everybody,” that he had cameras in the walls, that there’s a list somewhere, that the list is why he died.
What they almost never know is how they know.
Most people did not learn about Epstein from court documents or police reports. They learned him the way you learn a prestige TV show: one season at a time.
First season: brief headlines about a mysterious financier in Florida getting an unusually generous plea deal.
Second season: resurrection—new charges, new victims, the shock that he was still operating.
Third season: the death in custody and its immediate transformation into a cultural meme.
Along the way, the spin-offs: Netflix documentaries, HBO documentaries, multi-part investigative podcasts, long-form articles, explainer threads, interviews with former employees, YouTube channels devoted to mapping his network with red string and digital corkboards.
By now the surface facts are almost standardized. When people say they “know the Epstein case,” what they mean is that they have absorbed the consensus highlight reel:
* wealthy man with unclear source of fortune,
* social circle of politicians, billionaires, academics, royalty,
* pattern of recruiting underage girls for sexual exploitation,
* a bizarrely lenient 2008 plea deal,
* a second arrest in 2019,
* a body in a Manhattan jail cell, and cameras that allegedly malfunctioned at just the right time.
It is an airtight package. It feels complete. It feels like knowledge.
But if you press on it—if you ask people to list, say, three of the girls’ names without googling, or to describe what, exactly, was in the non-prosecution agreement, or which institutions took his money and when—there is suddenly less to say.
We remember the story beats.
We do not remember the humans.
That gap is the first thing the audience reveals about itself.
The “Epstein story” that lives in the public mind is not the case. It is the adaptation of the case.
Like any good adaptation, it has protagonists, antagonists, key scenes, and recurring imagery. Aerial shots of the island. The mugshot. The townhouse door. The plane taxiing. The now-iconic photograph of him with one or another powerful man whose name is useful to invoke.
These images are not chosen by accident. They are chosen because they do what images are supposed to do in a story: signal stakes, compress meaning, sell.
The audience, for its part, cooperates. It learns the canon. It forwards the screenshots. It sends links with captions like “if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention” and “this explains everything,” even though nothing about the case explains everything.
And gradually, Epstein joins the small pantheon of names that function as portable symbols. Say “Manson,” “O.J.,” “Bundy,” “Weinstein,” and an entire narrative constellation lights up. Epstein is now in that set.
Manson means cult psychosis.O.J. means race and celebrity and the trial of the century.Bundy means charismatic serial killing.Weinstein means casting couch.Epstein means elite sexual predation.
You do not need to define it. The audience fills in the rest.
This is not incidental. This is how a culture tells you what it has decided to remember.
Notice what details are sticky.
People remember:
* the island’s nickname,
* the name of the plane,
* the famous passengers,
* the “black book,”
* the word “massage” as euphemism,
* the bare outline of the recruitment pipeline.
They do not remember:
* the names of the non-famous adults who enabled him,
* the prosecutors and judges beyond one or two convenient villains,
* the mid-level staff who booked rooms, scheduled flights, cut checks.
The audience’s memory is tuned to everything that reinforces a particular fantasy: that the heart of corruption lies in private places where rich men gather, and that if only we could see all the names on the guest list, we would finally understand the real game.
It is less interested in the unglamorous machinery: the offices, the filings, the minor officials who looked the other way, the institutions that quietly kept his donations after his first conviction, the banks that handled his accounts.
It remembers luxury and scandal.
It forgets process.
That forgetting is a choice—if not by each person, then by the culture as a whole. It tells you what kind of evil the audience is built to track.
There is another layer: the way this one case has become a shared language.
You can walk into almost any room, mention Epstein, and assume a baseline of understanding. Jokes about “not having an island… yet” land. Dark comments about “not wanting to end up like Epstein” get the reference. Memes circulate and require no explanation.
Think of how rare this is.
Most crimes, even large ones, never achieve that kind of cultural saturation. Financial fraud that ruins thousands of lives will be forgotten in a year. Workplace abuse that destroys careers barely leaves a mark outside the company. Everyday predation—teachers, coaches, pastors, bosses—stays filed under “local news,” if that.
Epstein broke through that ceiling. He is national shorthand.
To become shorthand, a case has to offer more than facts. It has to offer roles.
The audience uses Epstein to play at being:
* the outraged citizen who “sees through” the system,
* the anti-elite critic who knew all along that the rich are like this,
* the insider who knows the hidden connective tissue of power,
* the moral person who would never, ever be in those rooms.
The more people build their miniature identities around these roles, the more valuable the story becomes to them. They are no longer just consumers of content; they are participants in a recurring ritual.
To talk about Epstein is to talk about who you are in relation to him.
That is not a neutral act. It is a form of self-construction.
Officially, the Epstein case is about what a man did to girls, and what powerful institutions did or failed to do in response.
Unofficially, in the audience’s hands, it has become about what we can say about ourselves while pointing at him:
“I hate that kind of man. I would never be like that.”“I always suspected that world was corrupt.”“I don’t trust any of them now.”“I see the pattern. I’m not naive.”
The case has turned into a mirror we only use from one angle. We stand behind him, looking over his shoulder at the elites and the institutions, and congratulate ourselves for noticing. We rarely turn the mirror around.
That asymmetry is revealing. It suggests that our interest in the case is at least as much narcissistic as it is moral. Epstein is useful because he gives us a way to narrate our own supposed moral clarity.
If the case had remained about anonymous girls and faceless functionaries, it would not have worked nearly as well. We need names we recognize, not names we don’t. We need mansions, not motel rooms. We need the sense that by learning the contours of this one story, we are piercing the veil of “how things really are.”
It is a flattering fantasy.
It is also fragile.
The average person who has watched ten hours of Epstein content cannot tell you, in any operational sense, how a plea deal gets negotiated, how prosecutorial discretion works, how federal vs. state charges interact, how jurisdiction is chosen, how wiring laws made his financial structure possible, how oversight actually fails.
They know that it failed. They know that it was outrageous. They do not know how.
Which means their outrage, however genuine, is not coupled to comprehension. They are angry at a feeling of corruption, not at a concrete mechanism. This makes their anger safe for the system and extremely satisfying for them. It does not force them to learn anything painful about the ordinary workings of the institutions they live under.
The audience wants to feel informed without doing the work of being informed. Epstein provides this perfectly. He is a one-word thesis for everything people suspect but have not studied.
“The system is rigged; look at Epstein.”
Never mind that “the system” in question is a complicated thicket of laws, customs, incentives, and rulings that barely anyone has time or training to decipher. The name is enough.
He is the emoji for a whole cluster of suspicions.
The more we rely on him that way, the less we are compelled to confront the fact that our detailed knowledge of this one case is actually pretty shallow—and that our ignorance of equally important domestic injustices is almost total.
One way to see the audience clearly is to look at comparative ignorance.
Ask people who can vividly explain Epstein’s island, “What is the name of the nearest women’s prison to where you live? What are the conditions there? How does solitary confinement work in your state? How does probation actually function for poor people?”
Blank stares.
Ask them, “Which local judge has the harshest sentencing patterns? What does bail look like in your county? How many registered sex offenders live within fifty miles of you, and how does the registry actually function?”
More blank stares.
This is not to say they should know all of that. Most of us are drowning in work, worry, and noise. No one can keep track of everything.
The point is narrower: look at what we do manage to learn.
We have memorized the mythology of one predator’s life in astonishing detail. We can describe the decor of his house from documentaries. We can name a half-dozen famous people who were photographed with him. We know his pilot’s nickname.
We do not know the basic architecture of harm and punishment within ten miles of our homes.
That is not a random distribution of knowledge. It is a map of what the audience finds narratively satisfying.
We like evils that are cinematic, concentrated, and bracketed by wealth. We ignore evils that are bureaucratic, diffuse, and bracketed by poverty.
Epstein’s case is not just something that happened. It is something we selected to know, retell, and bind ourselves to.
Our selection criteria are visible in the silhouette.
Another way to look at this is to ask: what, exactly, did the audience demand?
When the story broke again in 2019, there was a brief window when many of the right questions were being asked:
* Who knew what, when?
* Which institutions took his money after 2008, and under what rationalizations?
* How did he secure his original plea deal?
* What does this say about prosecutorial culture, philanthropy, the non-profit world, elite universities, the social rules of the very wealthy?
Some of that reporting was done, and done well. There are articles and books that walk through the details. There are survivors who have written and spoken with devastating clarity.
But this is not what the audience as a whole latched onto.
Instead, the center of gravity moved rapidly toward:
* lists of names,
* speculation about who “really” did what,
* elaborate theories about intelligence agencies,
* memes about his death,
* beefs over which famous figures were adequately condemned.
You can measure an audience’s seriousness by the kinds of answers it insists on.
We did not insist on structural answers. We insisted on more scandal.
We wanted to know, above all, who else was in the room.
That is a legitimate question. It is not the only question. The speed with which it eclipsed everything else tells you that the audience is more interested in contamination than in construction. We want to know who is “tainted” by him—whose photo belongs in the collage—more than we want to know how the machine around him was built and maintained.
Why? Because contamination is a simple concept. It allows us to redraw our mental map of “good” and “bad” people with one stroke. Construction is harder. It would force us to recognize that the same kinds of incentives and blind spots that protected him exist in smaller, less obvious forms everywhere.
Contamination lets us fix the problem by shunning more people.
Construction would require us to admit that we live inside versions of the same pattern.
The audience chose contamination.
This is why it matters to scrutinize not just the content, but the shape of the obsession.
It is not simply that we pay a lot of attention to one criminal. It is that the form of that attention tells you what kind of moral activity we have trained ourselves to enjoy.
We enjoy:
* having a clear villain whose evil is uncontested,
* learning salacious detail under the cover of indignation,
* speculating about high-status people’s secrets,
* feeling that we have deciphered a hidden network,
* performing outrage without any risk.
We do not enjoy, and therefore do not sustain:
* tracing mundane institutional failures,
* learning how ordinary procedures can be weaponized,
* holding uncomfortable questions about our own workplaces, communities, and social circles,
* changing our behavior in ways that would cost us time, money, or status.
You cannot understand the audience by looking only at what they watch. You have to look at what they do not stay for.
Epstein holds attention because he allows us to exercise the parts of ourselves we find flattering—our suspicion of the powerful, our supposed sensitivity to injustice—without engaging the parts we find costly: our responsibilities as neighbors, workers, citizens.
He is the ideal moral treadmill: lots of motion, no forward movement.
So yes, the case everyone thinks they know really happened. The girls existed. The rooms existed. The crimes were real.
But the “Epstein” most people carry around in their heads is not that man. It is a composite: one part court record, five parts adaptation, ten parts projection—a monster shaped precisely to fit the needs of an audience that wants to feel awake while remaining fundamentally asleep.
If you want to know who we are, don’t just ask what we condemn.
Ask what we know by heart.
Ask which sins have become household stories and which have not. Ask why this case, and not ten thousand others, became a cultural franchise.
You will not get a flattering answer.
But you will get an honest map of the audience that made him immortal.
Chapter Two – Why This Story Feels So Good (and How We Binge It)
If you strip the Epstein case down to its wiring, it stops being mysterious.
It is not just “a terrible thing that happened.” It is a near-perfect match for what a human nervous system likes to lock onto: status, sex, threat, mystery, clean villains.
Before this is moral, it is ergonomic.
We keep returning to this story not because we are unusually just, but because it is unusually well-fitted to the way our brains and our media environment now work.
1. The Cognitive Skeleton
Start at the simplest level: how the story is built.
The brain loves characters. Not statistics, not abstractions—faces and roles.
Epstein is a face. A slightly odd one—smirk bordering on blankness, the mugshots that invite projection—but stable, memorable, memeable. You see it, you know the script.
Around him, a cast assembled by a malicious casting director:
* billionaires, politicians, scientists, royalty
* pilots, assistants, “recruiters,” lawyers
* survivors who can narrate what happened in full sentences on camera
You are given social types you already understand: the fixer, the naive protégé, the compromised genius, the oblivious rich, the ruthless enabler.
Your brain’s social machinery wakes up. It starts doing what it evolved to do in tribes and villages: tracking alliances, hierarchies, who can be trusted, who is dangerous. The case lets you practice an ancient skill—“who did what to whom, with whose help?”—on glamorous inputs.
Then layer status.
This isn’t a story about a creepy guy in a strip mall. It’s private jets, Manhattan townhouses, island estates. The people in the frame are the kind of people most viewers will never meet. They live where the air is thin: boards, foundations, royal families, cabinets.
There is a double charge here:
* envy: so that’s what that life looks like
* contempt: of course they’re like this
You can loathe that world while still being fascinated by its decor. You get to peek inside the mansion and spit on it at the same time.
The case flatters a very stable appetite: the desire to see the high brought low, and to have your resentment of them morally certified.
Then sex.
You don’t need explicit footage. The words do the work:
“Underage girls.”“Massage.”“Recruitment.”“Private bedroom.”“Island.”
The combination of taboo + asymmetry + secrecy is rocket fuel for attention. Horror and arousal are neighbors. The mind zooms in, even as the mouth says “disgusting.”
The public script is outrage. The nervous system doesn’t care about the script. It just registers that someone is speaking, at length, about power and flesh and things that should not have happened in rooms you’ll never see.
This is why people drift so easily into speculative detail:
“What do you think actually happened in those rooms?”“How bad do you think it really was?”
That curiosity is not neutral. Even sanitized, the narrative is erotically charged enough to keep large numbers of people pinned to the couch for hours.
Now threat—without risk.
Predators with access to the young are a primal fear. Parents, former victims, anyone who’s ever felt small under someone else’s power—all feel this in the spine.
But by the time most people encounter the case in depth, the threat is historical. He is arrested, convicted, dead. The “ring” is broken. The worst has already happened.
You get to rehearse fear and protective rage in a situation where nothing will be asked of you. There is no hotline to call, no door to knock on, no one you can practically protect. The danger is pure theory; the adrenaline is real.
It is a horror ride with a safety bar.
Then mystery.
If the story were completely resolved—cameras that worked, guards who did their jobs, every document public—interest would still exist, but at a much lower voltage.
Instead we have:
* failed cameras
* sleeping guards
* disputed autopsy interpretations
* sealed depositions
* partially redacted files
* rumors of intelligence ties
The case is an open loop. Unanswered questions are sticky. They generate endless “what if’s” and “here’s what they’re not telling you.”
The brain loves unfinished patterns more than solved ones. A finished puzzle gets put back in the box. An unsolved one stays on the table.
So the case can be “finished” in court and still not finished in your mind. The story invites perpetual amateur detection. You are never done.
Then conspiracy scent.
You don’t need a worked-out theory. You just need the pattern: powerful men, inexplicable leniency, doors that close at the right moment, a death that doesn’t line up cleanly.
The intuition that some decisions are made offstage is not crazy. But the case gives that intuition a playground. You can attach it to names, jets, acronyms, hotel meetings, “lists.”
You get to feel like someone who sees connections, who is not fooled by official narratives. You can dramatize your skepticism at low cost: no one important is betting their career on a clean, respectable version of this story.
And finally, moral clarity.
Whatever else is confusing in your world, this isn’t. Predators like this are wrong. There is no respectable defense. No culture war split. No serious constituency says, out loud, “this man is misunderstood.”
That’s rare. Most live moral questions are messy: tradeoffs, uncertainty, people and institutions that are both necessary and harmful. You risk alienating someone every time you take a position.
Epstein carries no such risk. You can crank your disgust to maximum and remain entirely safe. No job, friendship, or family tie depends on a more nuanced view.
In this single case, you get all the perks of moral heat—certainty, intensity, unity—without the usual relational cost.
That is the cognitive skeleton: characters + status + sex + safe threat + mystery + conspiracy + no-controversy condemnation.
From the nervous system’s perspective, it’s an all-inclusive resort.
2. Outrage as a Bingeable Product
Once you understand why the case “fits,” the rest is mechanics.
We live in a world where evil arrives primarily as content. The Epstein story was chopped, scored, and serialized like any other show.
You sit down at night. The interface lines up a season for you: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Each ends on a cliff: a new witness, a fresh diagram, a hint of a bigger network, the slow approach to the cell.
You tell yourself you’re staying because you care. Because it’s important to understand. Because you “don’t want to look away.”
That’s not entirely false. But look at the structure:
* carefully placed reveals
* ominous music cues
* cross-cuts between luxury and violation
* interview arcs designed to keep you through the ad break or autoplay
You are consuming atrocity in the exact format that taught you to binge prestige drama.
The service behaves accordingly: episode 1 ends, episode 2 starts on its own. You “just see how far you get.” Before you know it, it’s 1 a.m. and you’ve taken in four hours of a predator’s life as if it were a show.
The fact that it’s true does not make it less of a product.
The feeling in your body—tension, horror, interest—is the same circuitry that holds you through a fictional thriller. The difference is the aftertaste: you feel virtuous for having stuck with it.
You endured something hard. You watched the survivor interviews. You made it through the worst parts. You “educated yourself.”
Spectator morality sells you endurance as ethics.
3. Social Life in the Theater
None of this happens in isolation. The story is social glue.
You’ve heard the conversations:
“How far are you?”“Just wait until episode three.”“I had to pause that scene; I felt sick.”“You have to watch this, it will make your blood boil.”
Post-hoc, people rank their horror:
* which episode “broke” them most
* which revelation was “most insane”
* which institution came off “worst”
The same dynamics that surround hit series appear around this case. The group bonds over shared outrage. There are in-jokes (“Epstein didn’t kill himself”). There’s social pressure to have seen the “required viewing.”
All of this happens after the crimes are over. You’re discussing a closed file as if you were following a live playoff run. The only variable left is how intensely you can react.
Outrage becomes a kind of entertainment, not because people are faking their feelings, but because the structure around those feelings is the same: teaser → binge → debrief → meme.
You feel like you’ve participated in something serious. The next day looks exactly the same.
4. The Algorithm Is Just the Mirror
There is a temptation to blame all of this on “the algorithm,” as if some malevolent grid were force-feeding us Epstein.
The reality is dumber and worse.
Recommendation systems watch what you do:
* Do you click his name?
* Do you watch to the end?
* Do you watch faster when “new revelations” are promised?
* Do you comment, argue, share?
If yes, the system learns a very simple rule: more of this shape.
Not more Epstein necessarily—more high-status scandal, more sex/power abuse, more “secret list,” more “if you’re not furious, you’re not paying attention.”
If you routinely drop off when a video shifts into dry breakdown of procedure, but stay locked in for salacious backstory or conspiratorial speculation, the machine takes notes.
It doesn’t understand morality. It understands retention.
Over time, your feed is tuned: less about how plea deals are structured, more about who else might have been on the plane.
It looks like the platform leading your attention. Underneath, it’s just playing back a statistically precise picture of what you have already voted for with your clicks.
When it keeps shoving Epstein-shaped stories in front of you, it is not revealing its worldview.
It’s revealing yours.
5. The Moral High That Costs Nothing
Tie all of this together and you get a pattern:
* a case whose structure is perfectly adapted to human cognitive bias
* a media environment that packages it for maximum bingeability
* a social environment that treats high-intensity reactions as moral badges
* a set of machines that learn, quickly, that you will give this story more time than almost anything else
The result is a kind of outrage treadmill.
The sequence:
exposure → shock → binge → discourse → meme
is so familiar we hardly see it. The Epstein saga is just one of the most efficient runs of that loop.
The crucial point is not that we shouldn’t know what he did.
It’s that we confuse how good this story feels to process with how central it is to our real obligations.
We feel maximally moral in the moments when we are least required to act: sitting in the dark, watching the worst man in the room be dissected long after he can be touched.
We aren’t just learning. We’re mainlining a very specific, very cheap kind of righteousness:
* I hate him.
* I see through the system that protected him.
* I care about the girls.
* I am not like any of them.
All that can be true, and yet nothing in our behavior changes.
That’s the dissonance this chapter is meant to expose.
We are not transfixed by this case because we’re uniquely sensitive to suffering. We are transfixed because it gives us everything our nervous system craves—narrative tension, social drama, safe fear, clean enemies—while asking almost nothing from the rest of us.
It is evil in a format that fits.
The next question is not “why do we watch?” We’ve just answered that.
The next question is what sort of people we become when this is the primary way we choose to exercise our moral feelings: seated, entertained, unthreatened.
Chapter Three – The Safe Villain and Our Need to Feel Clean
There’s a particular ease in saying, “He’s disgusting,” and knowing nobody in the room will push back.
You can feel it when Epstein’s name comes up. People lean in, not cautiously but confidently. The risk of conflict drops almost to zero. You can say the harshest things you know how to say about a human being and be rewarded—not punished—for it.
“He’s a monster.”“Anyone who went near him knew.”“Men like that should rot.”
Nods. Dark jokes. Muted satisfaction.
That ease is the tell. Epstein isn’t just a symbol of evil. He is a safe villain—someone we can hate together at full volume without any cost to ourselves. And because we’re built the way we’re built, we don’t just vent into that safety.
We use it to feel clean.
1. Why He’s So Perfectly Safe
On paper, his danger is obvious. In practice, for us, he’s harmless.
* He’s dead.Nothing you say can affect his fate. No policy you push will put him away or let him out. There is no practical consequence to your opinion of him.
* He’s officially condemned.Law enforcement, media, politicians, institutions—no one with power is publicly defending him. Aligning against him is aligning with the consensus.
* His crimes are uncontested.There is no serious faction saying “we’ll never know what really happened” in the way there is around almost every other contested harm. The record is too clear.
* His victims are morally unambiguous.Young girls, obvious power imbalance, a documented pattern of grooming and coercion. You don’t need to dance around messy adult gray zones to sound nuanced.
All of that means your strongest condemnation is risk-free. You don’t lose a job, a friendship, a family member, or a social circle by calling him what he was. No one you depend on is tethered to his reputation.
Now contrast that with the predators and bullies that actually intersect your life:
* The executive whose behavior is whispered about, but whose sponsorship people rely on.
* The cop everyone “knows” abuses discretion, but who is backed by a union and neighbors.
* The community figure who “everyone” has heard stories about, but who funds the building.
* The manager whose promotions mysteriously track who socializes with him.
Calls for justice there are not costless. You risk being sidelined, labeled, sued, isolated.
And so, very rationally, most people don’t call them. Or they do so once, carefully, and then go quiet when they realize what it would take to push further.
Epstein, by contrast, is a sandbag: you can unload everything onto him and nothing pushes back.
We practice feeling brave on a target that cannot hit us.
2. Practicing Courage Where Nothing’s at Stake
This isn’t new. Every society has its ritual villains—figures used as lightning rods for disgust, so the underlying order doesn’t have to change.
What is new is how many hours a modern audience can spend rehearsing its moral courage in completely simulated environments: podcasts, docs, feeds.
You can spend a weeknight doing any of the following:
* Describing in detail what you would have done if you’d been one of his associates.
* Fantasizing about how you would have confronted him or cut him off.
* Praising institutions for “finally” disavowing him and promising you would have done it earlier.
* Exchanging the most extreme possible sentences you’d like to see applied to “men like that.”
It feels like training. It’s not.
Real courage is situational and costly. It sounds like:
* “No, I’m not going to that offsite if he’s there.”
* “We need to look at this complaint again; it reads like the start of a pattern.”
* “I’m not taking that money.”
* “I believe her. And if you punish her for speaking, I will not stay.”
There’s no music, no cameras, and usually no applause. It’s awkward, slow, and personally dangerous.
Practicing outrage at Epstein isn’t useless; it clarifies your sense of what you hate. But if that’s the only arena where you go to 10/10, you’re not training courage.
You’re training volume.
3. Monsters as Boundary Markers
Part of why he’s so serviceable to us is that he’s become a boundary marker for the category “monster.”
We sort people into two stacks:
* regular flawed humans: selfish sometimes, cowardly sometimes, messy, but basically inside the circle
* monsters: qualitatively different, outside the circle, broken in some essential way
Epstein has been slotted firmly into the second stack. We reach for words that exile him from our species:
“Not human.”“A demon.”“A psychopath.”
Sometimes that feels accurate. But rhetorically, it has a function: it creates a reassuring cliff between “him” and “us.”
Once that cliff exists, it’s tempting to throw everything we don’t like about ourselves, in miniature, over the edge:
* that night we stayed quiet when a friend crossed a line
* that time we took advantage of someone’s need for our approval
* the porn habits that tilt toward youth and asymmetry
* the way we occasionally use money, status, or charisma to get more than our fair share
None of those are “the same as him.” But they are on the same spectrum of using asymmetry for self.
We don’t want a spectrum. We want a gulf.
So we make sure “monster” means something so extreme that almost nothing in our own life can qualify. He’s on the wrong side of that word. We’re safely on the right.
We get to keep our smaller violences in the “flawed but normal” bucket.
4. The Conscience Washing Machine
Now add shame.
Most adults live with a background hum of moral unease:
* unresolved apologies,
* people we harmed and never squared things with,
* compromises we made for comfort,
* things we did sexually that we still don’t know how to name,
* ways we benefit from arrangements we know are unfair.
It’s rarely dramatic enough to make us change everything. But it accumulates.
A case like Epstein’s offers an emotional shortcut: a way to vent that pressure outward.
The logic is primitive and powerful:
* He is clearly evil.
* I clearly hate what he did.
* I am clearly not like him.
Every hour spent reviling him is an hour you’re inhabiting the identity of “someone who despises predators.” The more intensely you inhabit it, the easier it is—for a while—to forget the quieter ledger inside you.
He becomes a moral trash can:
* We dump our disgust at exploitation into him.
* We dump our resentment at the rich into him.
* We dump our class guilt into him (“that’s the real dirty money”).
* We dump our sexual shame into him (“whatever I am, I’m not that”).
The internal math goes:
If I hate him enough, whatever I’ve done shrinks.
The case becomes less about what happened and more about who I get to be while reacting to it.
That’s the conscience-washing function: not that we feel good watching, but that we feel cleansed by how much we hate what we see.
5. “I Would Have Known”
Part of feeling clean is also feeling clairvoyant.
You hear this all the time:
“I don’t know how anyone could have spent five minutes around him and not known.”“He always gave me bad vibes, just from the photos.”“I would have cut ties immediately. No question.”
Maybe. Or maybe that’s hindsight flattering itself.
The fantasy of perfect moral radar lets you preserve a comforting self-story: “I’m the kind of person who can’t be seduced by evil.”
That story is easier to maintain if evil looks like Epstein: slightly off, surrounded by rumors, obviously dirty once you see the file.
Real predators often look like the opposite:
* charming,
* useful,
* generous,
* indispensable,
* deeply integrated into structures you rely on.
Real grooming is not cinematic either. It’s slow, layered in favors, rationalizations, charm, self-pity. It looks, for a long time, like “opportunity,” “mentorship,” “special attention.”
If you admit that, you also have to admit that you might not have known. That you, like others, might have explained something away, taken the donation, laughed off the rumor.
It’s much nicer to put yourself in the imaginary camp of the small minority who would have immediately seen through everything and walked.
So we rewrite our fictional past in order to feel cleaner in the present.
6. Symbolic Hygiene vs. Actual Cleaning
The desire to feel pure isn’t in itself a flaw. It’s what drives people to apologize, make amends, change.
The problem is when we satisfy that desire with symbolic hygiene instead of actual cleaning.
Symbolic hygiene:
* binge the doc,
* post the right outrage,
* draw the sharpest possible line between you and “men like that,”
* use that emotional high as proof that you are, fundamentally, good.
Real cleaning:
* revisit specific moments where you were on the wrong side of a power imbalance and name them without euphemism,
* change how you handle leverage and dependence in your own relationships,
* stop participating in environments that protect the everyday versions of what you claim to hate in him,
* accept real costs—social, financial, professional—for aligning your behavior with your stated disgust.
Symbolic hygiene feels intense and public. Real cleaning is usually quiet and humiliating.
We choose the former because it is rewarded. People will applaud your post about how monstrous he was. No one will applaud you for refusing a subtle career boost from someone whose character you don’t trust.
One makes you feel clean. The other makes you cleaner.
The Epstein fixation lets you get the first feeling over and over without forcing you into the second.
7. What This Reveals About Us
Put all of this together and the picture is ugly but coherent.
We prefer:
* villains who are already utterly safe to condemn,
* evils that are so extreme they make ours look trivial,
* stories that let us be absolutely certain we’re “not like that,”
* forms of outrage that relieve guilt without requiring change.
We like having one man whose name we can load with our worst fears and hates, so we can offload our own smaller violences onto the other side of an imaginary line.
That doesn’t mean our hatred of him is fake. It means it’s overdetermined:
* part moral sanity,
* part voyeurism,
* part class resentment,
* part self-exoneration.
The “safe villain” and the “need to feel clean” are the same phenomenon seen from two angles. He is safe to condemn because everyone needs him in that role.
The question isn’t whether he deserves our disgust. He does.
The question is whether we’re willing to admit how much we’ve used that disgust as a product: to polish ourselves, to project, to avoid turning the same scrutiny on people and choices that might actually push back.
It’s easier to keep him where he is: the worst man in the room, permanently available as a reference point and a moral shower.
A different kind of audience would keep him as evidence of what humans can become, and then go looking—not for another monster to hate, but for the far smaller, far closer places where the same logic lives in miniature.
That shift doesn’t happen on a couch in front of a documentary.
It happens in the next quiet, untelevised moment when you’re tempted to reach for symbolic cleanliness again—and instead do something that makes you even a little less safe and a little more honest.
Chapter Four – Spectator Morality
If you look at a random living room from the right angle, it already looks like a courtroom.
There’s a central object—usually a screen. There is a defendant—whoever is on the screen. There is a chorus of commentary—whoever is on the couch. There is judgment, laughter, disbelief, anger. There are verdicts.
The only thing missing is jurisdiction.
Nothing that happens in that room will touch the person being tried.
That’s the defining posture of our age: we experience most evil as spectators. Not neighbors, not witnesses in the legal sense, not decision-makers—viewers.
The Epstein story just makes this posture impossible to ignore.
Consider how most of us interact with the case:
We didn’t discover it by accidentally walking into a police station or sitting in a courtroom. We encountered it through screens: a headline, a clip, a docuseries, a thread.
We sat down. Pressed play. Consumed.
Our bodies did the rest: the tightening jaw, the disgust, the commentary. We might have paused to text someone: “Watching this Epstein doc. I’m sick.” We might have posted a screenshot with a caption about how “everyone needs to see this.”
Then the episode ended.
We got up, brushed our teeth, checked our phones, slept. The next day, perhaps, we watched another episode. We added a new angle to our internal portrait. We repeated a line from a survivor’s testimony. We congratulated ourselves, quietly, for “not looking away.”
What did we actually do?
We watched. We felt. We talked.
That’s it.
Spectator morality is the belief that this sequence—see, feel, say—is the core of being a decent person.
To be clear, seeing matters. Refusing to know anything is its own kind of complicity. There’s virtue in facing unpleasant facts. But the spectator’s mistake is to treat emotional engagement as the primary currency of ethics.
If something happens and we fail to feel the right feelings about it, we think we’ve failed morally. If we feel deeply, talk loudly, and align with the chorus, we think we’ve done our part.
The Epstein obsession is one long case study in this confusion.
The intensity of our reaction to him makes us feel virtuous. We do not ask whether that intensity has any meaningful relationship to:
* our actual influence,
* our real decisions,
* the smaller harms within our reach.
We have learned to equate moral seriousness with the degree of our emotional arousal, not with the direction of our actions.
The Epstein story is a perfect instrument for this training. It lets us experience peak outrage with zero obligations.
You can see spectator morality most clearly when you trace what happens after the emotional spike.
A survivor tells her story. The room goes silent. People are visibly moved. The doc cuts to black with a dedication. Credits roll over somber music.
At that point, in a different kind of culture, there might be a built-in next step:
* information about specific campaigns that came out of these cases;
* concrete options for support, reform, or intervention;
* questions that point back at the viewer’s own world: “Where might this be happening near you? What are the signs? What will you do if you see them?”
Occasionally, something like that appears. Usually, it doesn’t. Usually, the service suggests the next show.
The message embedded in that design is simple: Your job was to feel. You’ve done it. Now relax.
We have built an entire ecosystem around that expectation. Podcasts, series, long reads: each invites you to “bear witness,” but very few insist on anything beyond that.
We get habituated. We start to believe that the essence of goodness is to stay informed and appropriately outraged.
Action—specific, costly, non-performative action—becomes an optional extra. A boutique feature for unusually motivated people.
Another symptom: the way we talk about “not looking away.”
It sounds like courage. And sometimes it is.
But very often, “not looking away” means “continuing to watch from a safe distance.” It doesn’t mean telling a girl in your own life that you believe her. It doesn’t mean confronting a friend about something you’ve let slide. It doesn’t mean challenging the internal culture of your company, your church, your union, your family.
It means loading another episode.
We have managed to turn “bearing witness” into a spectator sport. The Epstein material is Exhibit A.
People will praise themselves, and each other, for “making it through” a series about his crimes the way they brag about finishing a marathon: as if endurance in watching were itself a contribution.
You endured what exactly?
The discomfort of seeing what someone else went through. The inconvenience of feeling disgust in a comfortable room. That’s not nothing. But it’s not what we like to pretend it is.
Spectator morality mistakes emotional endurance for moral courage.
The courtroom metaphor returns here.
In a real courtroom, a few roles matter more than others: judge, jury, lawyers, witnesses, defendant. Their decisions determine outcomes.
The spectators have a different function. They mostly just watch. Their presence can provide moral pressure, but their participation is limited. They stand when told, sit when told, leave when told. They talk about the case at lunch. They go home.
Now translate that to the culture at large.
In the Epstein saga, who actually had non-spectator roles?
* Prosecutors who re-opened the case.
* Journalists who spent years digging.
* Survivors who testified, over and over, at real personal cost.
* Whistleblowers who brought information forward.
* Judges who ruled.
* Lawyers who fought.
* Investigators.
Everyone else—and that almost certainly includes you and me—is in the gallery.
We may prefer to think of ourselves as jurors, but we aren’t. We have no vote in that courtroom. Our verdicts are social, not legal.
This distinction matters because spectator morality blurs it. It encourages us to talk as if our opinions carry the weight of a juror’s.
“They should have done X.”“I would have done Y.”“If I had been in that position, I would never…”
We pass sentences in our heads. We hand down punishments. We talk like sovereigns.
In reality, we’re doing what spectators have always done: narrating, judging, gossiping.
It’s not that our judgments are meaningless. Public opinion shapes future cases. Cultural consensus can either shield or expose similar predators. But if we’re honest, our individual commentary is mostly consumption.
We are more like fans than like jurors.
Once you see this, the tone of a lot of Epstein discourse becomes hard to un-hear.
It sounds like sports talk:
* “Can you believe they got away with that call (plea deal)?”
* “The refs (prosecutors) were clearly biased.”
* “If they had just done X earlier in the game, this would never have happened.”
* “That play (the death) was absolutely rigged.”
We keep score. We assign blame. We speculate on alternative endings.
Nothing wrong with analysis. But when analysis is something we do about strangers, far away, to pass time and feel sharp, we’re not acting as moral agents. We’re acting as an audience.
The deeper problem is that the more we practice morality in this format, the more we default to it in all contexts. We start treating everything as something to watch, interpret, react to, rather than something to participate in or alter.
A neighbor’s situation, a colleague’s complaint, a friend’s bad relationship—each becomes content. Something to “follow,” “check in on,” “see how it plays out.”
We’ve been trained.
Epstein is just the darkest channel on the same frequency.
Spectator morality also has a built-in exit ramp: the ability to declare the story “too much” and opt out.
At any point, you can say:
“I can’t handle this right now.”“I need a break from this topic.”“This is bad for my mental health.”
Sometimes, that’s healthy. There are limits. People break.
But notice who gets the power to choose.
The audience does. The survivors do not.
They don’t get to turn off their memories. They don’t get to decide that, for the next few weeks, they’ll just “take a break” from what happened to them. They live with it, body and mind, all the time.
Spectator morality turns that asymmetry into a kind of theater of sensitivity.
We congratulate ourselves for how deeply affected we are by a documentary—and then we celebrate our self-care when we turn it off.
We’ve built a model of ethical engagement that makes our own feelings and thresholds the central plot point.
The case becomes a vehicle for our emotional journeys, not theirs.
That’s what an audience does. It uses the material of others’ lives to have experiences.
There is one more uncomfortable layer: the illusion of participation.
Modern platforms make it easy to confuse commentary with contribution. You can:
* retweet a clip,
* like a survivor’s statement,
* sign a petition,
* post an angry paragraph,
* add a hashtag,
and feel—briefly—that you have “done something.”
These gestures are not meaningless. They contribute to visibility. They shape discourse. But spectator morality inflates them. It tempts us to treat low-cost acts as primary, and to quietly exempt ourselves from higher-cost ones.
Ask a simple question:
If you had never posted a single thing about Epstein, but had:
* donated money to organizations that work with exploited minors,
* intervened in one questionable situation in your own environment,
* supported one person in your orbit who needed to get away from a predator,
would your actual moral footprint be larger or smaller than it is now?
For most people, the answer is obvious. And embarrassing.
We accumulate online signals the way fans accumulate merch. It feels like affiliation. It feels like belonging to a cause. It is rarely the hard part.
The hard part is acting in contexts where there is no audience.
Spectator morality thrives where there is always an audience.
So what does this say about us, as the crowd that can’t stop watching?
At minimum:
* We prefer low-risk moral heat to slow, unglamorous responsibility.
* We have come to treat our emotional states as the main site of ethics.
* We know more about the theater of evil than about the mechanics of protecting people around us.
* We spend vastly more time watching predators be exposed than we spend learning how to spot or confront the smaller predators inside our own circles.
This doesn’t mean we’re faking our concern. It means our concern is being channeled into a format that mostly feeds on itself.
The Epstein fixation is a mirror showing us what we’ve become:
* spectators who think their job is to have intense reactions,
* fans of stories about monsters,
* people who can describe a crime in exquisite detail and yet be almost untouched in how we structure our lives.
It’s not that nothing changes. Cultural narratives shift. A few people fall. A few institutions put up belated guardrails.
But at the level of the individual audience member, the dominant experience is consumption.
We gorge on other people’s nightmares and call it moral vigilance.
If there is any way forward inside this diagnosis, it begins here:
By admitting that watching evil is not the same as resisting it,that knowing about a case is not the same as being changed by it,that feeling deeply is not the same as paying any actual price.
Spectator morality isn’t going away. We remain creatures who learn through stories and screens. The question is whether we keep letting platforms and habits define our role as “the people who react,” or whether we insist on a different role—even in small, untelegenic ways.
The next turn in this essay is not to praise or blame algorithms as if they were separate from us.
It’s to ask how much of our spectator posture is being trained and amplified by systems that exist to keep us watching—and what it would mean to step, even slightly, out of our assigned seat.
Chapter Five – What a Different Audience Would Look Like
If you strip away all the defenses, the question underneath this whole thing is embarrassingly simple:
Is there any other way to be an audience?
If “audience” just means “a group of humans in front of a story,” then maybe not. We will always be curious, always drawn to extremes, always susceptible to the thrill of watching someone worse than we are.
But if “audience” means “the way we have been trained to relate to stories now”—as consumers, reactors, moral tourists—then yes. There are other ways. They are smaller, less gratifying, harder to monetize. They look nothing like what the platforms want from you.
And they would change what Epstein is allowed to be in our heads.
Start with something concrete:
Imagine two people who both know the basic story.
Same facts, same headlines, same number of episodes watched.
What distinguishes a different kind of audience member isn’t what they know about him. It’s what they do after they know it.
One version closes the laptop and says, explicitly or not: That was crazy. Then they go back to their life unchanged, except for a few new anecdotes and opinions.
The other version asks: What does this demand from me, if anything? And refuses to let the answer be “nothing.”
The differences show up in unglamorous ways.
A different audience would interrogate patterns, not just personalities.
Instead of stopping at “Epstein was a predator,” they would keep asking:
* Where have I seen smaller versions of this pattern—power using “opportunity” as cover—in my own world?
* What, specifically, allowed people around him to explain away his behavior long after it was obvious?
* Where do I see those same explanations being used now, with less famous men?
They would treat the case less as a freak show and more as a training document.
They would pause at the rationalizations in the story:
* “He’s so generous.”
* “He’s connected to everyone.”
* “We need his money.”
* “He’s important for the work.”
* “It’s not my place.”
Then they would listen for those lines in their own environment.
A different audience would not be satisfied with having identified the monster. They would become hypersensitive to the grammar of enabling wherever they are.
A different audience would refuse to let the story stay distant.
That doesn’t mean pretending everyone around them is secretly a sex trafficker. It means refusing the emotional convenience of saying, “That world has nothing to do with mine.”
They would ask narrower, more dangerous questions:
* Who, in my life, does everyone seem to bend rules for? Why?
* Who gets the benefit of the doubt over and over, even when complaints circulate?
* Where have I already decided, quietly, that someone is “too important to lose” despite what I’ve heard?
They would accept that evil doesn’t only live in billionaires’ circles. It lives in small power asymmetries, in ordinary rooms, in relationships where one person depends on another.
The point is not to inflate every flaw into a crime. It’s to stop pretending that the only place we have moral responsibilities is in front of a documentary.
A different audience would be willing to risk small frictions—uncomfortable conversations, awkward questions, coolness from people who liked them better silent—in order to bring even a fraction of their screen-born indignation into their actual social world.
A different audience would treat attention as a limited moral resource, not a recreational infinite.
They would ask, bluntly:
* How many hours have I already spent on this one man?
* What has changed in my behavior because of that?
* How much of this attention is just feeding my curiosity?
And then they would cap it.
Not because the story isn’t serious, but because they recognize the cost of obsession: every additional hour spent scanning for new micro-revelations about a dead predator is an hour not spent learning something that could still be altered.
A different audience would adopt a kind of personal policy: once I know enough to see the pattern, I don’t need ten more servings of the same horror. I need to act on what I’ve already seen.
They would resist the pull to keep refreshing the outrage. They would treat the desire for “one more angle” as a craving to be negotiated with, not a duty to fulfill.
This would make them terrible customers for the outrage economy and better citizens for the world that exists outside of it.
A different audience would downgrade spectacle and upgrade the boring parts.
They would know the names of:
* at least one local judge,
* at least one DA,
* at least one public defender’s office,
* at least one organization dealing with exploitation where they live,
and roughly what each does.
Not because that knowledge is sexy. Because it’s where leverage actually lives.
They would read at least one dry document: a plea agreement, a sentencing guideline, a policy memo. If not about Epstein, then about a similar case closer to home. They would endure the boredom long enough to understand one mechanism of how power shields abusers.
Then, the next time a big case dominated the feeds, they wouldn’t just say “the system is corrupt.” They would be able to finish the sentence with something like:
“…because in situations like this, here’s how the deal-making really works.”
The point isn’t to become a legal expert. It’s to make sure that your outrage is tethered to something more than vibes.
A different audience would understand that if all you ever do is react to the most engaging version of evil, you will always be outplayed by the paperwork.
So they would spend some of their outrage budget on bureaucracy.
A different audience would practice unspectacular courage.
They wouldn’t test their bravery against hypothetical scenarios (“If I had been on that island…”) but against real ones:
* An offhand “joke” in a meeting that everyone laughs at and nobody calls.
* A rumor whispered about someone vulnerable that no one bothers to verify.
* A friend’s story that sounds too much like the beginning of a pattern they’ve already seen on the screen.
They would recognize, very clearly, that there is no camera rolling. No audience to applaud. No neat arc. Just the moment where their body says: Say something and another part of their body says: Stay out of it.
A different audience would understand that this is what all their viewing was supposed to be training them for.
That instead of proving they are the kind of person who “cares about victims” by watching more documentaries, they prove it by being just slightly, locally, inconvenient when it counts.
They wouldn’t always succeed. No one does. But failure would hurt in a different way. It would register as a real moral loss, not something you can wash away with another night of performative disgust at a safe villain.
A different audience would be suspicious of moral highs that cost nothing.
They’d notice the small rush that comes from posting a scathing take, from sharing a clip with a furious caption, from demolishing “people like him” at dinner. They’d name that for what it is: pleasure.
Not invalidate it. Just refuse to let it masquerade as sacrifice.
They would build a private habit of asking themselves, quietly:
* What did this feeling cost me?
* What risk did I take?
* What did I give up?
If the honest answer is “nothing,” they’d downgrade the significance.
Not to zero—but out of the center.
They would reserve the word “courage” for situations where someone actually puts something on the line: safety, status, money, belonging.
This would make a lot of cultural noise suddenly look as thin as it is.
It would also make their own moral life more demanding, because they could no longer get away with confusing emotional intensity with integrity.
A different audience would resist turning monsters into identity props.
They would stop using “Epstein” as a shorthand for every fear and resentment they have about power. They’d be precise:
* Sometimes the problem is money.
* Sometimes it’s law.
* Sometimes it’s culture.
* Sometimes it’s the specific cowardice of specific people.
They would also stop using his name as a crude argument-ender.
“Do you want more Epsteins?” is not an argument. It’s a scare tactic. A different audience would have the discipline to make the harder, less dramatic case: connecting a particular policy or norm to specific ways it enables abuse.
They would tolerate complexity even when it dampens the thrill.
They’d understand that if everything you hate becomes “Epstein-esque,” the word stops meaning anything, and your ability to see real danger gets worse, not better.
A different audience would keep the figure where he belongs: a severe example of a pattern, not the entire pattern itself.
A different audience would be willing to feel less righteous, more responsible.
Righteousness feels clean: “I hate that man. I see the truth. I’m not like them.”
Responsibility feels murky: “Given who I am and where I live, what do I owe to the people I will never meet, based on what I now know?”
The first is a mood. The second is a program.
A different audience would understand that most of the important moral work in a life happens after the feelings have cooled and when no one is watching, in decisions like:
* Where you work and what you’re willing to do there.
* What you will and won’t laugh at.
* Who you listen to when they tell you something ugly about someone you like.
* How much convenience you’re willing to sacrifice for someone else’s safety.
They would let those questions bother them more than the latest rumor about a dead financier’s guest list.
They would not be purer people. They would simply be people who have shifted their moral center of gravity from the story to their role inside it.
All of this sounds small because it is.
There is no grand program in “a different audience.” No manifesto. No movement. Just a cluster of habits:
* less binging, more learning;
* less repetition, more application;
* less projection, more self-examination;
* less fixation on the worst man, more attention to the almost-worst man who still has a key to your building.
From the platform’s perspective, this would look like failure: decreased watch time, less stickiness, more drop-off. The curves would sag. The outrage machine would underperform.
From the perspective of the audience member, it would look like something else: the reintroduction of friction between what you see and what you allow yourself to remain.
The goal is not to become a saint.
It’s to become the kind of person for whom knowing about a case like Epstein’s cannot remain just an intellectual or emotional event.
If a different audience existed in any numbers, the story would still circulate. The documentaries would still be made. The series would still chart. Predators would still exist. None of this magic-wands the world into justice.
What would change is the downstream behavior:
* Fewer institutions would be able to accept checks from men who make everyone uneasy.
* Fewer bystanders would stay decorously silent when someone says “she’s so mature for her age.”
* Fewer people would confuse their ability to diagram a scandal with their willingness to confront the untelegenic abuses around them.
* Fewer hours would be harvested from our lives by a machine that knows our morbid curiosity better than we know ourselves.
The Epstein story, under that audience’s eyes, would stop being primarily a horror franchise and start being what it always should have been: a case file, a warning, a map.
Not a mirror we use to admire our outrage.
A chart we use to notice where the next version is quietly being built, in miniature, around us.
Epilogue – The Person with the Remote
At some point, the interview ended.
The clip that started this whole thing—two men, two chairs, a tidy table between them—hit its time limit. The progress bar filled. The algorithm tried to guess what I wanted next: another Epstein segment, another Bannon segment, another adjacent scandal promising to explain “how the world really works.”
I sat there for a moment in the half-silence you get when the laptop fan is still going but the sound is gone.
Everything in this essay lives in that gap.
Not in the crimes themselves; those are already done.Not in the institutions; they will move at their own speed, with or without you.Not in the performance of outrage; the culture has more than enough of that.
In that thin strip of time between one video ending and the next beginning, there is exactly one thing that’s actually yours:
What kind of audience you are going to be.
You do not choose what era you’re born into. You don’t choose the fact that you live in a country where evil shows up on your screen more often than in your street. You don’t choose the wiring of your own nervous system, which will always, predictably, be more excited by scandal than by policy, by predators with private jets than by predators with day jobs.
You don’t even really choose the first story that grabs you. Epstein came in like everything else: a headline, a shock, a recommendation from a platform that knows your appetite for horror better than you do.
What you do choose—if you choose anything at all—is what you let that story do to you.
There are two clean options. Everything else is a variation.
You can let it turn you into a more skillful spectator. Or you can let it make you a slightly less convenient person to have in an unjust world.
The first is easy. The second is not. The first is what the whole environment is built for. The second is what almost nothing is built for, including you.
The skillful spectator version looks like this:
You learn the lore. You memorize dates, names, flights, deals. You refine your opinions. You can distinguish between the hot takes and the “serious” takes. You can correct others at dinner when they get a detail wrong. You know which documentary is lazy, which podcast missed the key angle, which commentator is milking the case for clout.
You become, in the narrowest sense, an expert audience member.
Your horror is fluent. Your takes are sharp. Your contempt is precisely aimed. Your sense of yourself as someone who “gets it” solidifies.
None of that is fake. You really do know more than you did. You really are less naive about how certain kinds of predators operate and how institutions protect them.
But if you stop there, you are still exactly what the system wants you to be: an engaged user.
You have upgraded your consumption, not your life.
You are, in the end, one more set of eyes in the dark, watching a monster on a screen.
The other option is humiliatingly modest.
You take everything you now know about this man, this network, this failure, and you use it as a mirror held inches from your own face.
You ask questions that will never trend:
* Where am I most like the people who helped him, not in scale but in kind?
* What am I quietly tolerating nearby because it’s convenient, profitable, or socially safer than naming it?
* How often do I spend my moral energy on cases that cost me nothing, instead of the ones that might alter my actual relationships?
* What would it look like, in practice, if I stopped treating horror as a show and started treating it as instructions?
You don’t need a perfect answer. You need one answer you’re willing to act on.
Maybe it’s as small as:
* believing someone when they tell you a story that makes you want to look away,
* not laughing at a joke you would have laughed at before you knew what grooming looked like in long form,
* declining a “great opportunity” because it comes with the smell of that same asymmetry,
* choosing, once, not to be quiet in a room that expects your silence.
None of those moves will make sense to an algorithm. They won’t feel as intense as a late-night docuseries binge. They won’t give you a rush of moral self-satisfaction. They will make your life marginally more inconvenient and, occasionally, more lonely.
They are also the only proof you will ever have that you used this story for something other than your own stimulation.
There is a temptation, reading any analysis like this, to aim it outward.
“Yes, people do that.”“Yes, the public is like that.”“Yes, the audience is disgusting.”
It’s a relief to talk about “them”: the trolls in the comments, the rubberneckers, the bored consumers of atrocity content. You get to stand outside the frame again, watching the watchers.
But the core of this essay is not that the crowd is bad.
It’s that you are in the crowd.
You, the person with the clip in your history, with the documentaries half-watched, with the opinions, with the disgust. You, the one who can enumerate his sins in more detail than you can describe the power structure of the hospital, courthouse, school district, or company closest to you.
You, the one who knows the layout of a dead man’s island more vividly than the layout of the harms down the street.
None of that makes you uniquely wicked. It just makes you normal here.
The question is whether you are content to remain normal.
Every age has its emblematic monsters. They stand in for an entire bundle of fears and failures. People gather around them the way earlier generations gathered in front of gallows or public trials: to see, to feel, to reassure themselves they are on the right side of the rope.
In ours, the gallows are digital and infinitely replayable. The crowd is bigger. The applause is quieter. The logic is the same.
Epstein is not special in that sense. Somebody else would have filled that slot if he hadn’t. Someone else will fill it next. The feed will supply a new face. The story architecture will be familiar: sex, power, corruption, collapse.
If you stay a passive audience member, you will slide him into the same shelf and start again. New evil, same function: stimulation, absolution, identity.
If you choose otherwise, you might still watch. But you won’t be able to watch the same way.
You’ll know, sitting there on the couch, that every extra hour spent on a man who is already dead is a conscious decision to postpone some small, boring piece of work in a life that is still alive.
You’ll know, when you feel the old pleasure of condemning him, that you are getting something out of it—and that the real test of your character starts after the credits, when no one is prompting you and no music is playing.
You’ll know, when the next monster appears in the recommendations, that the system is not just telling you what the world is like.
It is telling you what it thinks you are like.
You cannot fix the justice system from your couch. You cannot rewrite plea deals or rebuild entire institutions with a better sense of threat detection and duty. You cannot retroactively save the girls he hurt.
What you can do is unglamorous and private and, by every external measure, small.
You can decline to let your moral life be reduced to the role of viewer.
You can refuse the cheapest satisfactions: the outrage that costs nothing, the hatred that demands nothing, the knowledge that changes nothing.
You can start treating stories like his as evidence files instead of entertainment packages.
Evidence of what predators look like when they’re wearing respectability like a skin.Evidence of what enabling sounds like in ordinary language.Evidence of how easily institutions fold when status and money apply pressure.Evidence, above all, of how much we like to keep evil at a distance so we never have to ask: Where does the pattern land in me?
That last question is the one the audience was built to avoid.
You are not “the audience.”
You’re one person with a remote, a browser tab, a nervous system wired like everyone else’s, and—whether you admit it or not—a choice.
It won’t feel grand. It won’t feel like revolution. It will feel like turning something off halfway through and doing something untelegenic with what you’ve already seen.
But that, more than any impeccably worded take on a dead man, is the only thing that moves you even one inch away from being exactly the kind of crowd this story was designed for.
In that inch is the only freedom you’re likely to get.
Take it or don’t.
The algorithm doesn’t care.
The audience will never know.
You will.
—Elias WinterAuthor of Language Matters, a space for reflection on language, power, and decline.
