The Real Reason Silicon Valley Won’t Stand Up to Trump

 

The Real Reason Silicon Valley Won’t Stand Up to Trump

Feb. 2, 2026

By Aaron Zamost

Mr. Zamost is a tech communications consultant and former head of communications, policy and people at Square.

Hours after Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, joined President Trump; his wife, Melania; and other luminaries in the White House to attend a screening of a documentary devoted to the first lady.

Apple employees voiced anger in internal Slack channels, and other Silicon Valley tech workers publicly denounced the Trump administration’s deployment of federal officers across America. Workers at Palantir erupted in internal complaints over the software company’s work with immigration enforcement. At Meta, some longtime employees are considering leaving the company, saying it is now led by a MAGA-skewing chief they no longer recognize.

But by and large, tech employees reacted to how their leaders addressed (or failed to address) what’s happening in Minneapolis with exhausted apathy. At a time when companies are shedding workers by the thousands, dumping them into an increasingly shaky job market, tech employees feel mostly powerless to influence an industry whose leaders had once convinced them they could change the world.

There are many theories about Silicon Valley’s swift, and very conspicuous, rightward turn. Tech leaders course-corrected from an overly permissive era. The Trump administration demands fealty in exchange for critical regulatory favors. Mr. Trump’s second election reshaped the national climate and reoriented the values of tech leadership.

Each of these explanations is convenient, but none are correct. I’ve worked in tech for 20 years, across both Big Tech and venture-backed start-ups, and I can tell you the truth is much more mundane. Silicon Valley’s chief executives have always been driven by economics, not ideology. As Michael Corleone put it: It’s not personal — it’s strictly business.

What has happened in tech is a market correction, not a cultural one — a transfer of power from labor back to management. To attribute this change to a vibe shift among tech leaders may flatter political actors, but it’s beside the point. The real danger is mistaking a change in leverage for something permanent or confusing business incentives with values. The idea of woke corporations was always flawed; conflating business strategy with political belief distorts not just how we understand the tech industry but also how we interpret corporate power in American life more broadly.

Here’s how Silicon Valley actually works. Big tech companies and growing start-ups are in constant, vicious competition with one another to hire and retain the best employees, especially in product and engineering roles. When these companies are in hypergrowth mode and particularly when the job market is tight, hiring top talent can be nothing short of a matter of survival. And they are fishing in a largely progressive pond: Political donation data shows tech employees are predominantly Democratic-leaning.

The late 2010s and early 2020s were a particularly intense period in the industry’s war for talent. Hiring exploded. Meta nearly doubled to 86,000 employees in 2022 from approximately 45,000 three years earlier. Amazon added over 400,000 employees in 2020 alone. As Silicon Valley recruiting teams relentlessly poached one another’s people, tech labor had infinite choices and all the leverage.

So what did companies do when a generous compensation package was no longer enough to win over candidates? They instead sold a sense of belonging. Amid fierce competition, many companies realized that encouraging workers to bring their perspectives and passions to the office could increase their loyalty and their willingness to work hard. That, in turn, served the real financial objective: higher job acceptance rates, lower employee attrition and faster growth.

When the pandemic further supercharged hiring, tech companies started a corporate-values arms race to differentiate on employee experience. LinkedIn gave workers a paid full week off to combat burnout. Pinterest increased monetary assistance for adoption and expanded fertility benefits. Even Tesla made Juneteenth a company holiday (and no one would accuse Elon Musk of being woke). Companies said, “Bring your whole self to work.”

Tech didn’t embrace these policies out of moral enlightenment. It did so because replacing a top engineer could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity, institutional knowledge, recruiter time and onboarding. When attrition costs are existential, empathy becomes a strategy. Whether it’s flexible work-from-home policies or mental health stipends, you give your people what they want, or they’ll go somewhere else to get it. Whole-self culture wasn’t part of a political movement. It was a labor-market artifact of when talent war conditions made employee empowerment economically rational.

A new economic reality after the height of the pandemic — evident in Silicon Valley Bank’s failure, a crypto winter of plummeting currency prices and a significant slowdown in the tech sector’s growth — pushed companies from Amazon to Microsoft to rein in spending on hiring, and the incentive structure flipped. Because they no longer needed to compete for labor at any cost, executives exhausted by their formerly empowered employees were happy to take back the control that they’d ceded. The slowdown didn’t just change how companies behaved; it exposed what had been driving their behavior all along.

It’s worth asking whether many tech companies’ professed values were ever real. We’ve seen leaders who built their reputations on defying authority become foot soldiers for the administration. The same elasticity informs their rollback of the culture they once championed.

Four years ago, Marc Benioff, the Salesforce boss, said, “Office mandates are never going to work.” He now works mainly from Hawaii when he is not traveling for work; most of his employees are required to be in the Salesforce offices three to five days a week. In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would donate $10 million to groups working on racial justice. Last year he rolled back Meta’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Did his values change? Or did the power dynamics?

Of course, work is not the best place for cubicle fights about the war in Gaza. Nor is it a place where lavish perks are entitlements. These companies are businesses, not nonprofits. But when companies said, “Be your authentic self,” and then silenced employees who raised societal concerns related to their work, they essentially blamed workers for a culture war they didn’t start and disciplined them for holding leaders to the values they had promoted.

This about-face will prove counterproductive over the long term. In my conversations with tech employees, the result hasn’t been anger at hypocrisy so much as detachment — a loss of tribal loyalty (fewer T-shirts emblazoned with tech company logos) and a clearer understanding of the limits of corporate idealism.

The recent reassertion of managerial prerogative was possible only in an economic environment where top executives could flex their muscles like a boss. It won’t last forever. When labor is scarce again, many of these companies will rediscover the values they abandoned. The question is whether employees will forget just as quickly.

Now We Know What All Those People Got From Epstein

 

Now We Know What All Those People Got From Epstein

Feb. 7, 2026

 

By Molly Jong-Fast

Ms. Jong-Fast is a contributing Opinion writer.

Jeffrey Epstein, as has become clear again with the latest Department of Justice file dump, will go down in history as perhaps this century’s most horrifically accomplished social climber. He knew pretty much everybody, name-dropping, favor-trading, sex-trafficking and possibly blackmailing his way all the way up, up, up.

Only Vladimir Putin, it seems, was beyond his Mephistophelian charms.

Many of the people revealed as knowing him well had previously claimed they hardly knew him, and all of them are now claiming they certainly didn’t know him well enough to witness the pedophilia. Now they are disgraced by their connection, and often, out of a job.

Many people stuck with him even after he had gone to jail in 2008 in Florida for sex crimes, and in some cases even after he landed in jail again in 2019 on sex-trafficking charges. Back then, the plight of the victims often seemed to be an afterthought. That’s most likely because whatever they received from him in the past — access to career-enhancing people, access to young girls and an endless supply of freebies — might still be on offer. This is the nature of the Epstein files: It’s the record of what a global class of very privileged, accomplished and self-important people want to get gifted.

Sometimes it was a Prada bag. Other times it was a flight on Mr. Epstein’s jet, or a weekend at his island. Sometimes it was a donation to a charity or school. Or a job for their kid working on a Woody Allen film, or a shortcut for Mr. Allen’s own kid to get into Bard. Sometimes it was a “tall, Swedish blonde.” Other times it was a young woman who might be a “a little freaked by the age difference.”

In writing about an earlier tranche of emails, in The Times, Anand Giridharadas asked: “How did Mr. Epstein manage to pull so many strangers close? The emails reveal a barter economy of nonpublic information that was a big draw. This is not a world where you bring a bottle of wine to dinner.”

Inside dope wasn’t the only thing Mr. Epstein had on hand. The picture provided by the latest files shows how Mr. Epstein won favor and friendships by acting as a kind of superconcierge. Sometimes that meant sending the helicopter to pick up guests, as Mr. Epstein offered to do for Elon Musk in a 2012 email, writing, “How many people will you be for the heli to island?” On another occasion, Mr. Musk asks his concierge Epstein, “Do you have any parties planned?” Mr. Epstein provided private plane trips, internships, Apple Watches, Hermès bags, extra-large zipper sweatshirts (those went to Steve Bannon), nearly $10,000 worth of boxers and T-shirts (Woody Allen) and an XXL cashmere sweater (Noam Chomsky). And then there’s the resistance Substack star Michael Wolff, who is all over the Epstein files, who emails Mr. Epstein, “Shoes are very nice. Thanks.”

There are numerous ways to look foolish and creepy in the Epstein files, the worst of which is obviously emails like the one Peter Attia wrote to Mr. Epstein in 2016, eight years after Mr. Epstein became a registered sex offender: “Pussy is, indeed, low-carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.” Everyone has surely by now seen the photo of the erstwhile Prince Andrew with his arm around a 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre. There’s also a photo of Bill Clinton in a hot tub.

There are other, seemingly more innocuous, emails that are somehow just as damning, because they show a world where it’s fine to bring your children to the island of a registered sex offender. In 2012, the wife of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to Mr. Epstein’s assistant Lesley Groff, “We will be coming from Caneel Bay in the morning,” bringing “two families each with four kids ranging in age from 7-16! Six boys and two girls. I hope that’s OK.” Later, Mr. Lutnick lied about his association with Mr. Epstein, saying he was so “disgusted” by Mr. Epstein in 2005 that he had no more contact. In 2017, Mr. Epstein donated $50,000 in honor of Mr. Lutnick to an unknown organization.

Many of the emails show a world that includes a form of status upselling. Mr. Epstein used his Hollywood friends (Mr. Allen and Brett Ratner, the future director of the “Melania” documentary) to entice his rich, smart but unglamorous friends. A free plane flight for a high-status person (perhaps even a royal) who otherwise doesn’t have access to a private plane will go a long way.

In 2016, Brad Karp, the chair of Paul Weiss, the fanciest law firm in New York and one of the first to settle with the Trump administration, wrote to Mr. Epstein, “Can I raise a personal issue with you concerning my son David?” He went on, “He would love to work, in any capacity, with Woody on his upcoming film project, if that’s a possibility. He certainly doesn’t need to be paid and he’s a really good, talented kid.” A parent asking a friend for a job for their kid is hardly illegal. But it’s interesting that Mr. Karp’s law firm was one of the first to make a deal with the administration of another person who appears thousands of times in the Epstein files, Donald Trump.

And what does Mr. Trump have to do with it? He’d promised to rid America of exactly the sort of self-dealing global elite that Mr. Epstein was in the middle of. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” Mr. Trump said in his 2016 speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination. It was a message that resonated, and when you watch the speech again as I did the other day, the enthusiasm of the crowd is striking. Finally, someone was letting the American people know the terrible secret that no matter how hard one worked, no matter how smart one was, there was no getting ahead in America circa 2016. It wasn’t their fault. It was the fault of the elites. Around this time, we saw the rise of QAnon, a conspiracy theory that claimed that a sex-trafficking ring was being run by elites out of the nonexistent basement of a pizza shop.

QAnon sounded crazy to the rest of us at the time — and it’s still crazy — but the Epstein files show it had parallels in reality.

There are many terrible secrets buried in the Epstein files, which mix the mundane and the horrific, the thirsty and the criminal, and perhaps that’s the most upsetting part of all of this. Casually wrapped up together with a bow are canceled men and sex trafficking and media advice from Michael Wolff. Being a convicted sex offender did not make Mr. Epstein an outcast, not when he seemed to have something to offer. His transactional amorality actually seemed to add to his appeal to people who were convinced that the rules didn’t apply to them.

 

When Shame Sanctions Are Necessary

The punishment needs to fit the "crime."

Asha Rangappa Feb 7

Earlier this week, my friend and colleague John Sipher sent me a thoughtful piece he wrote about the Epstein files, arguing that the dumping millions of documents without any way of sorting or filtering the content holds the potential to further erode the legitimacy of the justice system. He writes:

The proper place to assess this kind of material is inside a professional justice system, where trained investigators and prosecutors can evaluate credibility, corroborate claims, discard dead ends, protect victims, and bring charges only when evidence and law justify it. A mass release does the opposite. It turns investigatory material into a public scavenger hunt, where the loudest interpretation wins, and where “being mentioned” becomes “being guilty.”

Given our shared intelligence backgrounds, I get where he is coming from. Those of us who have worked in top secret arenas with classified, national security information can get worn down by conspiratorial thinking, when we know how these decisions were actually managed behind the scenes and the harm that might result from disclosing national security secrets. In these cases, I would probably agree with him that the internal processes that are were in place in these agencies did an overall good job in balancing the need for transparency and public accountability with national security.

The problem with applying that perspective here is that the Epstein files don’t implicate national security. More importantly, the one thing we do know is that the system Sipher describes — where prosecutors and agents sift through evidence and make decisions on accountability — broke down when it came to Epstein, and even failed completely in the case of the 2008 “sweetheart deal” that allowed him to walk free for another eleven years. Which necessitates a new mechanism for accountability.

There is an additional problem, which I highlighted in my “complicity cheat sheet” for the Epstein files that I wrote last month: The criminal justice system is actually a poor vehicle to address accountability in a sprawling network where people facilitated criminal activity — even if they didn’t participate in it themselves — by lending social legitimacy, signaling personal approval and even admiration, or choosing to turn a blind eye. As Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche put it earlier this week, “It’s not a crime to party with Jeffrey Epstein.”

Exactly. That’s the problem.

Enter “shame sanctions.” In the world of criminal justice, shame sanctions refer to a category of penalties that are designed to publicly stigmatize people for their wrongdoing as a way of forcing individual accountability and deterring similar behavior from others. You probably remember Hester Prynne from your high school American literature class, who was forced to wear the scarlet letter “A” on the front of her dress for committing adultery. That’s a shame sanction. As this University of North Caroline article notes, other, more contemporary shame sanctions include things like:

• A DWI offender [being] ordered to place an identifying bumper sticker or special license plate on his or her car, or to wear a special bracelet;

• Men convicted of soliciting prostitutes [being] required to have their names and faces displayed on a local access television program popularly known as ‘John TV’;

• A shoplifter required to wear a court-provided t-shirt reading ‘My record plus two six-packs equals four years.’

These are all examples of a type of shame sanction that involves communicating the nature of a person’s transgression to the public, fittingly categorized as “public exposure” sanctions. (Other forms of shame sanctions include “debasement,” such as ordering a slumlord to stay a night in one of his rat-infested units (this really happened), and “apology,” which is pretty much exactly that: making someone take accountability in writing, to their victim.) The purpose of shame sanctions is to use the threat of social stigmatization to reinforce norms and deter others from engaging in similar behavior in the future.

The release of the Epstein files is basically a public exposure shame sanction. And the norm it is reinforcing through the social stigmatization is: Partying with a guy who is obviously into nubile girls may not be a crime, but it’s morally repugnant and makes you unfit to hold positions of trust or high social status.

We’ve seen this norm reinforced already. At Harvard University, Larry Summers, the university’s former president (!), was forced to step down from his teaching position. Just this past week, Brad Karp, the chairman of Paul Weiss, a major New York law firm (and the first to cave to Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms), stepped down because of the ties that the Epstein files revealed.

The Brad Karp revelation reveals another reason that the release of the files is so important, given the current political context: If only the Trump administration is aware of who is in the files, that is enormous leverage that can be used against the very powerful people in the files to comply with Trump’s increasingly unhinged demands. I personally have to wonder whether knowing that trump could “out him” drove Karp’s decision not to fight the executive order (which was quickly slapped down in court when other firms did). It’s why the ongoing redactions of individuals who are clearly complicit to some degree in Epstein’s activities are not only in violation of the law, but pose a potential threat to the rest of us since they control some of the most important and powerful companies and institutions in the world.

Even if it were functioning robustly and with integrity, I don’t think any of these people could, or would, be charged with a crime. And I should add that I wouldn’t want the Justice Department to make a decision, on its own, to release investigative files just to embarrass individuals who don’t meet the threshold to be indicted — I think we can see the potential for abuse that would create. That’s why the process used to create the transparency here — bipartisan agreement by legislators who are directly accountable to the people — matters. This “punishment,” created by legislators through a fair and representative process, is as legitimate as one given by a court.

The Epstein files are precisely the kind of thing that we couldn’t leave to the justice system to sort out, because what allowed it to happen was the reassurance Epstein got from so many people who had an awareness of his activities that they would keep his secret. Sunlight, and shame, is the only antidote for that.

STOP TRUMP'S NEXT STEAL

 

STAFFER ??

 

 

We all live in Jeffrey Epstein's world

The most disturbing revelation so far

Carole Cadwalladr Feb 7

TW: Sexual assault and rape

This is not the piece on Jeffrey Epstein that I was going to write. I’ve struggled with that article all week. On Monday, I plunged into the three million-plus files which the Department of Justice dumped onto the internet a week ago and immediately surfaced a dozen or so gobsmacking emails that hadn’t then been made public. (Many of them now have, but not all.)

By Tuesday, I had a scoopy piece almost ready to publish…but I’ve been unable to finish it. I have, to be perfectly honest, been overwhelmed. Some of the key stories it reveals are areas that have been my specialist interest for years. The Kremlin. Silicon Valley. MAGA and the European far right. Israeli intelligence. And there, slap bang in the middle of it is a man who I’d never wanted to pay any attention to, Jeffrey Epstein. Not only are they all connected. Epstein connects them.

So many of the names in the files are subjects of long-standing interest: Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, Oleg Deripaska, even Peter Mandelson. It’s a gold mine of new evidence and connections and revelation after revelation. What I also realised diving deep into the mid 2000s to 2010s, is how I repeatedly almost crossed paths with Epstein.

I was drawn to some of the same milieus: not the island, obviously, but Moscow and especially Silicon Valley. I had the same curiosity about the disruptive new technologies that were emerging: cryptocurrencies and web 2.0. I even went to the same tech conferences.

I am still going to write that piece, it’s sitting half-finished in my drafts, but it’s been weighing on me in ways that are both obvious and submerged. One of the most popular insults used against me by both right-wing commentators and people who should know better was to call me a “conspiracy theorist”. Well, guess what. This more than anything, I’ve ever written sounds like a conspiracy theory. It’s just a criminal rather than a theoretical one.

There’s been something else that’s been holding me back. It’s the geopolitics that’s fascinated me, the files are like a door you didn’t even know existed suddenly swinging open. But there’s another subject in there that’s manifestly Epstein’s core interest, a subject I’ve covered, that underlies so much of my reporting, that I’ve both tried to expose and found myself hard up against: power.

And yesterday, I realised the first piece on Epstein I wrote has to tackle what I believe is the overwhelming revelation of the files. It speaks, I think, to our inability to even see the edges of this story, let alone process it. It’s not just the rampant misogyny that oozes from the pages of these documents. Women as chattel. Women as objects. Women as objects of both hate and desire.

It’s darker than that. Because it’s something that we do not want to see, that we cannot comprehend, that’s as sickening as it’s pervasive.

What Epstein shows us is that we live in a paedophiliac culture.

---

It’s not just Epstein. That’s what these files reveal. Epstein is communicating with hundreds of men in these millions of pages. Men from every country and power structure: US finance, petrodollar royalty, Russian oligarchy, Hollywood, Palo Alto, Washington, Westminster. We know that more than 1,000 women and girls were trafficked and there are hundreds of Epstein survivors. As well as those who tragically didn’t survive, such as Virginia Guiffre. We must keep them front and centre, always.

Epstein was a criminal. Whether any of the men named in these files are too is not something we can know: no charges or prosecutions have been brought. But it’s not just Epstein. That’s what we now have to realise. Obsessive, pervasive sexual interest in teenage girls - and to some degree, boys - is threaded insistently through our culture.

We just choose to ignore it. We redact it. It’s a darkness that we cover with more darkness.

Are we going to reckon with that? Can we?

What percentage of legal porn features “teens” or “barely legal” content? I asked ChatGPT moments ago. I got no answer. “This content may violate our usage policies,” it said. There’s a prudish veil of respectability that Silicon Valley maintains even while most tech platforms derive a huge percentage of their profits from sexual interest in children.

Porn represents 1/4 of all internet searches and according to Pornhub, “teen” is the most searched-for term. Meanwhile, OnlyFans exploits a market for sexual content that from teenagers posting adult content at one minute past midnight on their 18th birthdays.

We all reacted with disgust to Elon Musk’s Grok non-consensually undressing women and girls, but at least we knew about it. Musk had made it visible rather than as it is on most platforms politely hiding it just out of view.

Not all men are paedophiles, obviously. Very few are. But our culture eroticises teenagers for money. Our technology finds, exploits, amplifies what maybe passing impulses. It monetises them. In the dark corners of the internet, the recommender systems do their work. Instagram, the “safe” social media platform? Facebook’s own internal documents show that it connects paedophiles to children.

We don’t want to know. And/or we’ve forgotten. A friend commented earlier, “We all knew who the pervy teacher was at school.” It’s true. Ask any teenage girl or anyone who’s ever been a teenage girl.

We block that out as we get older just as Google blocks the predictive text for porn terms in its search box. And that’s why Epstein is not a ‘scandal’, not a news ‘story’, not a black redacted hole where we know Trump’s name should be, it’s us. It’s our world. The culture we live and breathe but pretend not to see.

The question is: will we now?

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Instead of finishing my Epstein article yesterday, I found myself googling a piece I wrote twenty years ago. It’s from when an editor sent me to spend a day at Club 55, a legendary beachside restaurant in St Tropez, for a jolly travel feature, that took an unexpected turn.

There, I describe how I met:

“A sixtysomething Englishman called David Hamilton. That’s David Hamilton as in ‘you’ve probably heard of me - the photographer’. I nod. ‘Sounds familiar,’ I lie, although later I Google him and find that he is quite famous. But I’ll come to that in a bit.”

The article is mostly mid-2000s celeb spotting - Paris Hilton and Tamara Beckwick - and skewering myself as David makes a point of telling me how unattractive and over the hill I am. All while he gives me a ‘who’s who’ rundown of the crème de la crème of the Cote d’Azur. I also witness an endless line of men come over to talk to him, many of them asking to buy his photography books. “‘You promised me, David!’ says one. ‘We want five copies of the book and five of the catalogue.’”

Then, during a lull in the conversation, I ask if he has any of his photos on him and he digs a book out of his bag:

Contes Erotiques it says and the first few pages are Seventies-style soft-focus nudie shots of women with flowers in their hair. I flick on, though, and realise they’re not women. Strictly speaking, they’re girls, arranged in erotic poses, all looking moodily at the camera. The breasts get smaller and smaller until they disappear completely and I’m staring at a photo of a naked prepubescent girl. ‘That’s the one the Venezuelan wants to buy,’ says David, looking over my shoulder and chuckling. ‘Oh yes, they all like the girls. What about you? Did you have a Romeo when you were young? Hmm? Hmm? Was there some big amour? Were you ravished?’

I hand the book back. Later, I Google him and discover he is ‘the most successful fine-arts photographer of all time’, but a month ago a man pleaded guilty at Guildford Crown Court to possession of indecent photographs, including some of Hamilton’s.

The piece is from 2005. Eleven years later, a French television presenter, Flavie Flament, accused David Hamilton of raping her when she was 13 years old. Three other women came forward to say that he had raped and sexually assaulted them too. Days later, the Guardian reported he was found dead in his Paris home. “Police reported that a bottle of medication was found nearby, and declared that Hamilton, 83, had taken his own life.”

It hadn’t occurred to me before writing this paragraph to look David Hamilton up in the DOJ’s Epstein database. But, of course there he is. The references are tangential but he’s there, nonetheless. In a series of emails, Epstein seeks, insistently, to buy an original David Hamilton photograph.

MICHAEL LATZ/DDP/AFP via Getty Images: “English photographer David Hamilton stands in front of one of his photographs taken in the late seventies at an exhibition of his work in Stuttgart 15 March 2007. The 84 year old enjoyed world-wide acclaim for his erotic photographs.”

In another, a redacted correspondent sends him a link to an article about Hamilton’s death. There is no comment, just the link.

In a third he’s corresponding with a 15-year girl who tells him about the fun party she just went to.

We know she’s 15 because her name wasn’t redacted (I’ve chopped it off the screenshot). But then, that’s par for the course for these documents: only the men’s identities have been diligently obscured. So here I am. Not writing about the FSB-trained government minister who Epstein repeatedly emails and various juicy revelations and connections that I could have scooped the mainstream outlets on.

Instead, I’m writing about David Hamilton, an (alleged) paedophile I once met, 21 years ago.

But I think that’s the point. The revelations of the Epstein files are, I believe, momentous. (And if you’re reading this in America, I have no idea what your press is doing, the New York Times, in particular, has been wholly missing in action.*)

Epstein has given us an extraordinary portal through which we can now see how hostile state influence, criminality and the impunity of the billionaire class are intimately enmeshed. That’s the piece I still want to write. But we can’t understand any of this until we realise that Epstein isn’t just a doorway, he’s also a mirror.

His culture is our culture.

In the UK, a press and political pack is providing a release by baying for the blood of Epstein’s “best pal” Lord Peter Mandelson, but it’s also a way of letting ourselves off the hook.

This was the second last paragraph of my piece in 2005:

“This incident more or less sums up my feelings about the Côte d’Azur, Paris Hilton, Tamara Beckwith, big fat yachts and fatter millionaires. Where’s F Scott Fitzgerald when you need him? He’s dead, that’s where, and in his place there’s only Heat and OK! and Hello!. There’s only pap shots of people getting on and off yachts, and falling in and out of their bikinis. There’s only arms dealers and nudie pics of young girls. It’s all fabulous-fabulous right up to the moment you scratch the surface and something sleazy oozes out.

Today was not the first time I’ve googled David Hamilton in the 20 years since. I understood that he was a rupture, a chink. That’s how I discovered he was an (alleged) child rapist who’d committed suicide. Though Hamilton in common with many predators had already told me exactly who he was.

He also told me that a culture which reveres female youth and innocence despises female age and experience. It disgusts them, scares them. That’s our paedophiliac culture too; misogyny of adult women is the opposite of sexual desire for girls, an inverted mirror.

We are crones, hags, witches. Because we’re a threat. Because we see these men for who they are. Because, except for rare exceptions - the monstrosity that is Ghislaine Maxwell - we are protectors. Of children. Of society. Of a world in which rich men don’t get to act with impunity. Not on our watch.

In 2005, I played David Hamilton’s insults for laughs. Later, those same lines became weapons used against me by the men I investigated in the course of my work. A fire hose of abuse, amplified at scale by technological tools, in what I came to understand - in my rational if not emotional brain - was a massive, relentless coordinated online operation. It was designed to depress and deter and deject me. And it did.

But I was also just another woman online who had it coming.

Epstein’s world is our world. That’s the darkest revelation of these files. He wasn’t an aberration. He was our culture made flesh. A culture that’s now encoded into 1s and 0s and is growing exponentially baked into the algorithms that power our social media platforms, replicated at scale and fed into the large language models that Epstein’s friends are building which are powering our future.

Epstein was a paedophile. And this is Epstein’s world now. We’re all living in it. It’s just that some of us knew that already. That, I think, is why my words wouldn’t come this week. And why other women I know have struggled too. A dark shadow has been exposed that we already knew was there. And in a world in which brutal authoritarianism is the rising political system and the world’s superpower is led by Jeffrey’s friend, the possibility of justice for the victims - any victims - this week feels bleak.

Epstein’s victims, Trump’s victims, Russia’s victims, Israel’s victims. We are in mafia country now. A world of strong men where the rules-based order is dead. Jeffrey Epstein is the symbol of that. And, we now, he also helped create it.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. Without this newsletter, I wouldn’t have written this, and if I hadn’t written it, I wouldn’t have understood it.

We can fight back. We have to. But first we have to see it.

Thank you so much for reading and supporting my work, Carole x