I’ve held off writing about the Epstein scandal because it’s growing faster than any cancer, and like the worst cancers it changes direction at will. It’s a moving, metastasizing target.
It began as a sex scandal, then morphed into a sexual trafficking scandal, grew to be abanking scandal, a business scandal, then a political scandal, a philanthropy scandal, afemale enabler scandal, a Royal Families scandal (Britain and Norway), a Prime Minister’s scandal, a global network scandal, a possible spy scandal and, lest we forget, aDonald Trump scandal…and a Melania scandal.
In a restrained understatement, the New York Times labelled Jeffrey Epstein “this century’s most horrifically-accomplished social climber.”
I think he’s also the creator of the world’s largest, slowest-burning and most explosive atomic device. This is because we’re only now starting to feel the time-bombs going off in the 3.5 million pages of documents, hundreds of thousands of images, and 2,000 videos released this month. What’s more, the U.S. Justice Department is still sitting on 2.5 million more documents whose release may be spasmodic right now, but will likely come to see the light of day. By their nature, secrets leak, and 2.5 million of them can’t stay sealed up forever.
Indeed, the sheer size of the Epstein scandal dwarfs other notorious document dumps such as the Panama Papers, the massive leak of confidential tax files from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca in 2016. That leak exposed 11.5 million documents. Three years earlier, a systems administrator at the U.S. National Security Agency, Edward Snowden, downloaded 1.5 million Top Secret files, and leaked tens of thousands to journalists, exposing to the world the many U.S. government surveillance programs on Americans.
But with Epstein, we’re not talking about spy stuff, or how to evade paying your taxes. Nor are we talking about massive data leaks.
We are talking about an absolutely barbaric pedophile scandal.
We are also talking about the American government, in protecting its President from being impeached by the Epstein revelations, executing a strategy that has few precedents in human history.
Rather than suffocating a scandal by depriving it of oxygen, which every other holder of power from Julius Caesar to Doug Ford has done in order to stay in power, Washington has decided to drown us in evidence, hoping we’ll turn away because the scandal is so big and complex. Or we won’t stop to figure it out because it’s so fast-moving. Or we’ll move on, numb from the daily assault on our belief that money and power don’t always corrupt absolutely.
Or, and this is a relatively new point in the calculus of denial, we’re so disgusted by endless tales of people at the centre of power, influence and trust having sex with underage girls whom Epstein procured for them, that the mere mention of the word “Epstein” causes us to turn away.
So I urge us all to pay heed, to drill down into the abhorrent and not flee from it.
A good way to get started is to listen to this week’s Ezra Klein Podcast,
The Infrastructure of Jeffrey Epstein’s Power, on Apple Podcasts. As Klein notes: “We are still far from the end of the story…But what has come into clear view is the incredible breadth of Epstein’s network, the huge range of people who relied on him, communicated with him, traded with him, and the role he played in this network as a broker of information, connection, wealth and, ultimately, human beings.”
Who knows, this could even be the end of Donald Trump, a long-held desire of mine that painful experience has taught me not to dare dream of in the past 14 months.
Meanwhile…
1. Wanna be in pictures? Now you can make the entire picture show, thanks to AI. Two examples, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt duke it out on a rooftop. This 15-second clip was created by Irish director Ruairi Robinson using Seedance 2.0 and scaring the hell out of Hollywood. Also, just to show that anyone can make a movie these days, here is The Road That Can’t Be Fixed, about potholes.
In other AI news, it’s making top-tier predictions available to all of us. What will happen to all those pundits?
2. Urgent news on curling. To understand why Canada is the bad-boy of Olympic curling, we first need to know the rules of the game. Here they are.
3. The Grifters. It was a 1990 Stephen Frears’ film-noir about fixing horse races which starred John Cusack, Anjelica Huston, and Annette Bening, Here, American historian Heather Cox Richardson reports on today’s grifters.
4. What kind of person…joins a cult? Every kind…murdered Van Gogh?…tells the truth about our kids?… Uses poison from dart frogs to kill their political opponents? Andbuys a Toyota because it’s reliable?…and hides in plain sight as ordinary?
5. Does conservation mean leaving nature alone? It seems not. Many species, forests and wetlands now need active human intervention to survive. Shawn Regan reports on the pitfalls of letting nature care for itself.
6. Shame has to change sides. Gisèle Pelicot’s book, A Hymn to Life, on how she survived her husband’s horrific abuse, is out this week. Published in 22 languages, Emma Thompson reads the English audio version.
7. Not just to the mountains; or even in the mountains; but on the mountains. If you’re looking for a short, intense brain squeeze and soul refresh at summer’s end, joinSteve Paikin, Dr. Heather Ross, Ron Deibert and Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux for The Canada Summit, Aug. 30 – Sept. 3 in the Canadian Rockies. Details here.
8. Strange sports. Like mountain uni-cycling…and resistance dancing…Andsynchronized figure-skating…and figure-skating tiger moms.
9. In America’s trenches. Dan O’Connor is the Chief Security Officer at FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Because the U.S. government is on strike, he’s once again, along with hundreds of his colleagues, working for no pay. Every Friday, he sends them (and me) an e-mail to help them feel better about their work and themselves. Like this.
10. Tourism is growing…and not in the usual places. The world’s largest industrygrew by 4% in 2025 over the year before. Biggest gainer? Brazil by a whopping 37%. And of course, Greenland also enjoyed its “best year ever” because of Donald Trump.
11. What I’m liking. The Netflix movie, Queen of Chess, about Hungarian Judit Polgár, who became the world’s top female chess player and who beat Gary Kasparov at his own game. Her oft-slagged father, who turned his three daughters into a social engineering project by making them practice chess eight hours a day from age 5, doesn’t seem to have turned them into twisted asocial adults. If anything, the opposite.