Truth, consequences and the limits of Epstein’s web

The shock blast from last week’s epic Epstein file drop has radiated out widely, triggering nauseated panic and fueling longstanding grievances among and against a new set of participants in a far-reaching and exceedingly sticky web.

Reams of documents, emails, photos and videos have touched almost every corridor of global power, including finance, government, the media, arts, sports, academia and the vast stomping grounds of billionaire leisure. Those ensnared include people from Peter Attia and Bill Gates to Reid Hoffman and Deepak Chopra.

Deepak Chopra! (On March 8, 2017, he sent Epstein a brief email: “God is a construct,” he wrote. “Cute girls are real.”)

These people did not return calls seeking comment. Attia, Chopra and Hoffman have previously expressed regret. Gates has said he met with Epstein to discuss philanthropy and it was a mistake.

Emails reveal the wealthy taking proxy measures of one another’s yachts and villas, showboating their riches in ways that make Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” look like a genteel glimpse into society mores.

Few come off looking well, but much remains opaque. Some of those embedded in the files hail from Epstein’s innermost circle while others may have done nothing more than respond hastily to a single email. Being included in the files does not necessarily imply wrongdoing.

Some in the files had money for Epstein and others wanted money from him, occasionally for valid reasons, whether to buy a table at a gala or raise funds for a new theater. People appeared in photos at the dinner parties hosted by Epstein or where Epstein was seated beside them. Soon, real and doctored versions of those photos were filtering their way across the internet. There were the willing and the unwitting, including some whose names appeared primarily in emails Epstein sent to himself.

The chumminess among some of the gilded people in Epstein’s circle has landed at an acutely populist moment. On social media, the schadenfreude has verged on gleeful, with the public picking up on even the smallest references to confirm their priors and their thirst for justice is palpable. It’s a digital storming of the Bastille, but with Paris gone global.

Cascading revelations, pored over on X and Bluesky, have, in turn, become a parlor game of Choose Your Own Enemy. Some people felt, for example, that the time had finally come for Brad Karp, the head of Paul Weiss and a source of widespread ire for kowtowing to Donald Trump last year, to get his comeuppance. (Like a scene out of Woody Allen’s own “Bullets over Broadway,” Karp had pressed upon Epstein to have Allen let his kid assist on a film; Karp submitted his resignation as chairman on Wednesday.)

A spokesman for Paul Weiss said Karp “never witnessed or participated in any misconduct” and his interaction with Epstein was limited to two dinners and “a small number of social interactions by email, all of which he regrets.”

Major sexual abuse cases in Europe, such as the grooming gangs inquiry in the U.K. and the Gisèle Pelicot case in France, resulted in clear resolutions and something akin to national deliverance. It’s not yet clear whether America’s handling of the Epstein case will bring survivors of sexual abuse the same sense of justice.

For those outside the citadel—anti-boomer millennials, Gen Z, the underpaid and aggrieved—the Epstein revelations tell a sordid story they’ve long suspected. Here they are, the rich and powerful, some of them expressing sympathy for a criminal in their midst, often as a means to protect their own.

Many of those freshly outraged came of age with Donald Trump already in office, having demonstrated that you can spout vulgar language about women and face multiple accusations of sexual misconduct, deny them, and still rise to the presidency, twice. #MeToo went down nearly a decade ago, years before Gen Z had smartphones and the news transformed into a highly visual scroll of outrage and memes.

And what had come of those earlier revelations, anyway? #MeToo and its disappointments left many women exhausted. There’s a sense that even with an imprisoned Harvey Weinstein, who denied the charges against him, that plenty of men never fully paid a price. We’re still only midway through the #MeToo backlash.

The latest tranche of Epstein files is screaming evidence that there is work to be done and that previous generations had fallen down on the job.

Epstein has been dead for years, while his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, is in jail. But there is a sense among the public that justice has not yet been served.

Unlike #MeToo, which the right portrayed as the peevish complaint of angry feminists and evidence of cancel culture gone amok, the Epstein Files has gone bipartisan. What once seemed like a strange Pizzagate-like fixation, internet red meat for conspiracy theorists, Clinton haters, MAGA moms and Marjorie Taylor Greene 1.0, has since broadened its base considerably.

On Wednesday, California Rep. Ro Khanna, who introduced the Epstein Files Transparency Act that led to this release, called on Congress to haul in every single person who emailed Epstein about visiting his island. “The American people are frustrated with the rich and powerful getting a different set of justice,” he said.

Some of the leading figures in the last round of Epstein files had gotten away with the tiniest of reputational stains. Those guys are still out there. Their resilience perpetuates what looks from the outside like a tacit understanding among those with wealth and power: They can get away with it.

But the files are incomplete and heavily redacted. We do not know if crimes were committed. The best-case scenario for Epstein’s associates and his associates’ associates, may be that the public becomes briefly sated by taking down a few grubby Epstein correspondents before becoming overwhelmed or exhausted by yet another devastating news cycle, and the social media frenzy spins itself out. There’s still no independent commission tasked with sorting through the files or demanding accountability. No further government action has been promised. The president wants us to move along.

It’s unclear whether the animating forces that enabled Epstein’s crimes will ever be addressed. As usual, it’s the bad guys who attract the most attention rather than the conditions that enabled their behavior or the consequences for those who suffered from it. The rallying cries are less about justice for women or a call for higher morals and more like a furious power play against men whose weaknesses have been exposed. These guys are going down.

Whether any of these downfalls will result in a re-examination of how men treat women writ large looks less likely. Dude-bro culture is alive and kicking, especially in a highly energized manosphere. The Epstein files featured casually misogynist language in which girls, real and grown, were assessed by the size and aesthetic quality of their body parts. The vulgarity that Trump once dismissively referred to as “locker-room talk” and which Attia, a popular wellness influencer and one of those named in the emails, described as “banter.”

We’ve yet to see a mass movement to end sex trafficking result; according to a recent U.N. report, global sex trafficking is on the rise. Prostitution has been rebranded as “sex work.” Its advocates are keener on legalization and labor rights for willing participants than on penalizing the men who pay for the services of vulnerable girls and women with little choice. Virginia Giuffre, only 16 when she got caught up in Epstein’s sex trafficking ring, is now dead by suicide.

Perhaps the most telling indication of where this is all headed is the sad fact that in the initial release, names and images of some of Epstein’s victims were accidentally left unredacted, an oversight or afterthought. Amid the accusations, excuses and mea culpas, the speculation over who-did-what and whether that makes them guilty or merely gross, it may well be that the women most harmed by Epstein’s sex trafficking, abuse and fraud will remain a sideshow.

Lofty ideals like truth, justice and full transparency could also remain black boxes. The girls and women victims largely forgotten, the massive pornography and prostitution rings that peddle their bodies, continuing apace, the criminal transactions that once took place on email (boomers!) relocated to encrypted apps and the dark web. Nothing else to see here.

Write to Pamela Paul at pamela.paul@wsj.com