Too often, we in the media elite, journalists, writers and intellectuals – behave as though we inhabit a different moral planet. The Good Book instructs he who is without sin to cast the first stone. I write on a human problem that touches all of us, more visibly manifest in some than others. I have not come with a sack of stones. I arrive, equally humbled, at the feet of a question we must answer together: what does the Epstein scandal reveal about the nature of power, and the nature of us all?
Jeffrey Epstein (1953-2019) was an American financier who, for nearly three decades, used money, access, and carefully cultivated relationships with some of the world’s most powerful people (heads of state, royalty, Nobel laureates, and billionaires) to construct a network of extraordinary influence. Behind that façade of philanthropy and prestige, he was systematically trafficking and sexually abusing young women and girls.
The posthumous release of millions of pages of the US Justice Department files, naming associates, detailing methods, and exposing institutional complicity, has transformed Epstein’s story from a man’s crimes into a global reckoning with how elite power works. Over six million pages of documents, emails, flight logs, and testimonies have entered the public record.
Together, they expose one man’s crimes and illuminate the operating system of a global elite in their mutual dependencies and spectacular indifference to the very rules they publicly champion. These documents reveal a conspiracy in the cinematic sense, but something far more disturbing about a class grown so accustomed to its own impunity that it no longer notices the stench of its crimes.
Hannah Arendt, writing about the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1963, observed that the greatest evil is not committed by monsters, but by ordinary people, who, motivated by career prospects and the desire to belong, simply stop asking moral questions. The Epstein files are the Eichmann trial of our generation. Certainly, the crimes are not equivalent, but the mechanism is identical to that of ordinary, ambitious, respectable people who suspended moral judgment in exchange for sex, access, and simply stopped thinking.
Epstein built his machine on three levers: money (real and inflated), access (presidents, billionaires, Nobel laureates), and fear (of being blackmailed or discredited through the threat of releasing embarrassing information). The network was self-reinforcing.
The more visibly important people came to his dinners and took his flights, the more others assumed he was safe and useful, and the harder it became to see the wrong in being associated with him.
Many associates continued to correspond with him even after his 2008 sex-offence conviction. It became the moral collapse of a class whose normal operating condition has replaced ethical standards (“is this right?”) with reputational management (“can this be contained?”). C. Wright Mills identified this architecture seventy years ago. He described a “power elite” whose members rotate between corporate boards, government offices, and private institutions, sharing backgrounds, schools, clubs, and assumptions. Epstein’s social hub was so exclusive and so compromising that admission itself became the ultimate credential. Being there meant you had arrived somewhere the public could never follow.
And in that hub, the ideological divisions we are told define our world (left and right, secular and devout, nationalist and globalist) simply evaporated. Republicans dined with Democrats. Gulf princes relaxed with Israeli intelligence figures. The iron law of class solidarity became most manifest once you cross a certain wealth threshold and access, your primary reference group becomes the room itself, not your voters, your congregation, your readers, or even your nation.
The deepest shocks in the files are those whose entire public value rested on their consciences: the moral philosophers, scientists, journalists, and spiritual guides. They wined and dined, cashed the research grants, and then continued, from conference stages and television studios, to lecture the rest of us on accountability and the protection of the vulnerable. The Epstein files show, in unsettling detail, what it looks like when a class chooses personal reputation maintenance over character and universally accepted standards.
There is a reckoning embedded in the files that Western capitals have been slow to acknowledge. For decades, the transatlantic establishment has deployed the language of anti-corruption, rule of law, and human rights to lecture the Global South on governance failures and to position Western liberal democracy as the gold standard of civilization.
These files demolish that claim and reveal that when wealth and accountability diverge, every system produces the same structural and functional deviations, the same concealment and institutional protection of the powerful, and the same silencing of victims. The mechanism documented in Washington and New York is structurally identical to the one denounced in Nairobi or Islamabad. Nevertheless, the files are a cautionary X-ray for African elites who may be tempted to read this as an American story.
The Epstein scandal is not a Western peculiarity but a universal pathology that emerges wherever unaccountable power concentrates. An accountability collapse goes beyond one act of corruption. It is a layered architecture of denial, informal peer networks, secret deals that insulate the powerful from scrutiny, and the “bad apple” narrative that ignores the barrel.
The moral authority in this story belongs to those who had the least power and paid the highest price – the victims, the whistle-blowers, and the journalists who faced ruin for telling the truth. Everyone else, across continents and ideologies, stands somewhere on a spectrum of complicity from the knowing to the wilfully blind. The glass house is now visible everywhere, but is there anyone at the top willing to take responsibility and act?
Dr Richard Ikiebe is a Media and Management Consultant, Teacher and Chairman, Board of Businessday Newspaper
