Jeffrey Epstein is plural: An autopsy of the liberal world order

As a political sociologist, I have trained myself to maintain analytical distance from my subjects, to study everyday events and political phenomena with the detachment required for rigorous scholarship. My work revolves around analyzing, researching, and explaining the processes, historical influences, and unfolding of global socio-political events. But the recent release of the Jeffrey Epstein files has shattered that professional remove. I find myself not just analyzing, but reckoning with what these documents reveal about the architecture of power in our contemporary world order.

This is not to say I was naïve about horrendous crimes against humanity, my research in post-colonial studies and Middle Eastern politics has exposed me to systematic violence in various forms. But the Epstein case crystallizes something profound about how global politics, power structures, knowledge production, institutional violence, and hegemonic practices operate within the framework of modern nation-states, unchecked capitalist networks, and state-sponsored operations masked as national security.

Beyond the individual monster narrative

Jeffrey Epstein was not just a global financier. He was not merely someone with contacts among the world’s most powerful and wealthy. He was an operative functioning within the institutional apparatus of one of the world’s most powerful countries, a nation that positions itself as the guardian of democracy, the foundation of progressive liberal values, the beacon of Western civilization.

Here lies my central argument: Jeffrey Epstein is not a singular case. He is a plural phenomenon. He represents everything problematic with the socio-political, economic, and moral contradictions of the liberal world order we inhabit today.

Epstein’s network spanned politicians, the intellectual community, celebrities, tech leaders, scientists, and royalty. His crimes were documented. His communications were traceable. He operated openly among the most powerful echelons of global society. Yet the system did not intervene, because the system was implicated.

Jeffrey Epstein is not a singular case. He is a plural phenomenon.

The performance of justice

What disturbs me most about the current moment, Epstein’s death under suspicious circumstances in federal custody, Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction and imprisonment, the gradual court-ordered release of documents, is that it functions as theater. None of this was happening in darkness. This operated in broad daylight. Systems were aware. Institutions knew. People in power were not just aware, they were participants.

Yet it took decades for exposure, and only after investigative journalist Julie K. Brown’s 2018 Miami Herald series forced the issue. Even then, Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, negotiated by then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, gave him just 13 months in a private wing of a county jail for crimes that should have meant life imprisonment. We still don’t know the full circumstances of his death. We don’t know the complete nature of the information in these files being released to us at a controlled pace, in measured doses. But from what we can see, the pattern is unmistakable: this is how power protects itself.

The intelligence dimension: An unspeakable connection

Jeffrey Epstein is being framed primarily as a pedophile, which he was, and as a financial criminal, which he was. But he was also a highly sophisticated operative with documented connections to intelligence services. Multiple investigative journalists, including Whitney Webb and reporting from Mintpress News, have traced Epstein’s ties to Israeli intelligence operations, specifically connections to Mossad through his relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell, whose father Robert Maxwell was a known Israeli intelligence asset.

Former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe has stated on record that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were both working for Israeli intelligence, using sexual blackmail to compromise powerful individuals for intelligence gathering. The purpose was clear: to influence American policy, particularly regarding Israel, through kompromat on politicians, business leaders, and cultural influencers.

Yet nobody in mainstream American discourse addresses Epstein’s documented role as an intelligence asset. Nobody discusses the implications for American sovereignty, for the integrity of American institutions, for foreign influence on U.S. policy. American support for the regime he allegedly served continues unabated, stronger than before. What kind of justification exists for this silence? What ideology, what power structure makes this omission comprehensible?

The systems that trained, protected, and deployed him continued to shield him until he became a liability. But he was never alone. He was the visible face of a much larger apparatus.

The intellectual legitimisation machine

What makes Epstein’s operation particularly insidious was how it secured intellectual legitimacy through association with globally recognized thought leaders. This was not merely social climbing, it was strategic positioning to influence policy, economics, and law through the borrowed credibility of celebrated minds.

Consider the cases of Noam Chomsky and Deepak Chopra, men who built entire careers on specific moral and intellectual positions, only to become entangled with Epstein’s network.

Noam Chomsky, the renowned critic of American imperialism and corporate power structures, met with Epstein multiple times after his 2008 conviction, including visits to Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. The Wall Street Journal reported that Epstein’s calendar showed meetings scheduled years after Epstein’s crimes were public knowledge. Chomsky attempted to justify these meetings as discussions about academic funding, but this raises profound questions: Why would a critic of power structures legitimize a convicted sex offender connected to intelligence operations and elite networks? How does one reconcile decades of writing about manufactured consent and institutional corruption while providing social capital to someone who embodied both?

Deepak Chopra, the wellness guru who positioned himself as a spiritual guide toward enlightenment and human flourishing, was photographed at Epstein’s residence and attended Epstein-hosted events. Here is someone who commodified Eastern philosophy, sold the promise of consciousness and ethical living to millions, while associating with a man whose entire operation was built on the exploitation of young women and girls. The hypocrisy is not incidental; it reveals that the wellness-industrial complex operates by the same capitalist, exploitative logic it claims to transcend.

Bill Gates, perhaps the most damaging case, met with Epstein numerous times despite his wife Melinda’s objections, even after Epstein’s conviction. Gates sought Epstein’s connections for philanthropy and Nobel Prize nominations. Here is a man who brands himself as a global health savior, whose foundation claims to work for humanity’s benefit, yet who sought access to power networks through a known sex trafficker. Gates later admitted these meetings were a “mistake,” but the pattern is clear: powerful men valued Epstein’s network access more than the humanity of his victims.

These were not passive associations. Epstein cultivated these relationships deliberately to provide intellectual cover, to influence policy discussions, to access institutional power. These thought leaders, in turn, lent him credibility, whether through silence, through minimization, or through continued engagement. They preached one thing and practiced another, revealing that their intellectual projects were never about genuine human liberation but about maintaining proximity to power while performing morality.

The systemic production of impunity

Epstein demonstrates that:

• The global legal order operates on dual tracks. Laws are enforced against the powerless while providing immunity to the connected.
• Protective institutions violate those they claim to protect. The FBI had evidence for years but failed to act decisively
• Connections trump policies. It’s not laws or principles that govern, it’s networks of power that build, destroy, and defy accountability.

The question is not what Epstein was doing, that has been known for years. Now that evidence is accessible, creating a kind of global trauma, the real question is: How will those who enabled, protected, and benefited from his operation be held accountable?

Bill Clinton took multiple trips on Epstein’s plane; flight logs document this. Prince Andrew’s association led to a civil settlement but no criminal charges. Donald Trump’s decades-long friendship with Epstein, including documented statements praising Epstein’s preference for younger women, has been minimized. Where is the global accountability?

In January 2025, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced it would not bring additional charges related to the Epstein case. What a performance. What a demonstration to the world that you can facilitate crimes against humanity without meaningful consequences.

The failure of Western moral authority

For decades, the dominant narrative positioned Western institutional frameworks as guardians of global morality, human rights, legal justice, and liberal values. But the Epstein case, like the ongoing genocide in Gaza that Western powers refuse to stop, exposes that this system has demonstrably failed its own proclaimed principles.

The structured world order that emerged after the so-called Western Enlightenment reveals itself as façade. Morality has been instrumentalized to build systems that benefit the few while exploiting the majority. Capitalism, nationalism, liberalism, all designed to profit from people while protecting elite existence.

This leaves an enormous void in how our world is defined and governed. The Epstein files make clear that what were dismissed as conspiracy theories secret networks of power operating outside democratic accountability, ritualistic exploitation hidden in plain sight are documented realities. The question is no longer whether such systems exist, but whether any mechanism exists to dismantle them.

What the files really tell us

Every grain of our humanity is being desensitized as we witness large-scale violence without accountability. The controlled release of the Epstein files serves a specific function: to normalize the monopoly of power operating within Western structures. We become accustomed to the revelation that our systems are corrupt. We accept that this is simply how power functions. Outrage becomes performance, then fades into resignation.

The entire concept of electoral politics is rendered futile in this context. You cannot vote your way out of structural corruption when it’s the same networks at the top, the same immunity for the connected, the same silence about foreign intelligence operations on American soil.

The Epstein case reveals that there have been, and will continue to be, many Jeffrey Epsteins in the United States and abroad. He was not alone. He was not singular. He was the visible manifestation of a dying Western world order and its shameless double standards.

Conclusion: Witnessing collapse

As a political sociologist trained to analyze systems, I am forced to a disturbing conclusion: we are not witnessing a system that can be reformed. We are witnessing its unraveling, a civilization in its final stages where crimes against humanity and the abuse of power happen openly, involving hundreds of powerful individuals, without meaningful consequence.

The Epstein files do not represent a scandal to be managed. They represent a structural revelation: that the post-World War II liberal international order, with its claims to moral authority and universal justice, has completely collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. What remains is raw power, operating without ideological justification, without institutional accountability, without even the pretense of equal justice.

My question is no longer whether we can hold these systems accountable. My question is what will emerge in the wake of their inevitable collapse, and whether we are building the intellectual and moral frameworks to imagine something beyond this corrupt order, or whether we are simply bearing witness to entropy.

The Epstein files are not a call to reform. They are an autopsy report on a world order that has already died, we are simply watching the delayed recognition of its death unfold.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.