The problem with talking about the Epstein affair is that it reduces the scandal to the Epstein affair. A story with a beginning and an end. And that is precisely what every privileged person implicated in this kind of case is counting on. Because yes, this type of thing existed long before Epstein. But more importantly, it is still happening right now, and it will never stop if we are not capable of facing the truth and putting a definitive end to this category of crime. So please, rather than limiting ourselves to the tip of the iceberg, the more accurate framing is to call this what it is: the sexual exploitation of the poor by the rich.

Sex networks and blackmail are as old as power itself

There are some very important questions that every mainstream outlet has forgotten to ask, whether deliberately or not. How long have the powerful been using vulnerable people as a source of pleasure, as a blackmail tool, or as a marker of their own impunity? How long have organized networks been recruiting teenage girls from underprivileged backgrounds to deliver them to the men who run the world? How long have the majority of these men been sleeping soundly after what they have done? The answer is simple and unbearable: Forever! Here is a brief sample of a few documented historical cases, just to give you a small sense of how deep this goes.

It was Solon himself, the great Athenian lawmaker of the 6th century BC, founder of Greek democracy and towering figure of Western civilization, who created the first state-run brothels. He saw it as a public health measure. Inside these establishments were the pornai, enslaved prostitutes who were often teenagers. They were sold by their families or captured to supply networks whose strings were pulled by pimps and politicians alike. In Athens, no fewer than two hundred distinct terms existed to describe the various categories of sex workers. This was not a fringe phenomenon. It was a full-blown state industry. At the banquets of power, educated courtesans circulated, listened, and reported back what they heard. The very first sex scandals on historical record are therefore just as old as the political class itself.

In ancient Rome, things went a step further. The historian Suetonius documented how Emperor Tiberius, who retreated to the island of Capri from 27 AD onward, organized the abuse of minors in his private villas through a network of recruiters. An inaccessible island, beyond the reach of any law, open only to the master’s guests. Political adversaries were compromised there and then kept in line under threat of having their perversions exposed. Two thousand years back, and it is the exact same manipulation scheme as Epstein’s. The exact same technique, operating at every level.

Pope John XII, who reigned in the 10th century, was accused in his own time of having turned the papal palace into a site for the exploitation of children. After him, Benedict IX was elected pope in 1032 at the age of twenty. What he subsequently did in the Lateran Palace was described by his contemporaries, who called him “a demon from hell in priest’s clothing.” His primary crime was the large-scale rape of underage boys. But these two popes were not anomalies. They were simply the visible product of a centuries-old system. American historian Dyan Elliott documented this phenomenon in The Corrupter of Boys, published in 2021. In her book, she explains how young boys were raped by clerics for centuries. Each time, the hierarchy buried the cases. Each time, the victims were condemned to silence. And the rule was consistent: a cleric was only prosecuted when the scandal was too large to suppress. The Church was therefore, for a thousand years, the largest protection network for pedophilic predators in Western history.

Alexander VI, pope from 1492 to 1503, made the Borgias the most feared family in Europe. What is usually remembered from his reign are the poisonings, the political murders, and the Vatican orgies. But all of that obscures the core of it! Alexander VI used his own daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, from childhood onward as a tool of matrimonial alliance. She was first betrothed at nine. Married for the first time at thirteen. Then repudiated, remarried, repudiated again, according to her father’s political needs. She was never a person. She was a bargaining chip. Meanwhile, her brother Cesare Borgia recruited young women from destitute families for his father, who were presented at the infamous Banquet of the Chestnuts in 1501, where teenage girls were forced to prostitute themselves for the pleasure of the pontifical court. Attendees were subsequently bound by what they had seen and done there. The kompromat was not yet called kompromat, but the principle was identical.

In the late 19th century, a flourishing trade organized itself across Europe and the United States, known as the White Slave Trade. Teenage girls from poor backgrounds were recruited by organized networks with the promise of work as a domestic servant or seamstress. They were then delivered to luxury brothels frequented by the aristocracy and political figures. In 1885, British journalist William Thomas Stead published an explosive investigation in the Pall Mall Gazette titled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. He documented how thirteen-year-old girls were purchased for a few pounds sterling and delivered to wealthy clients. The investigation triggered a national scandal and forced the British Parliament to raise the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen. But everything the investigation failed to establish publicly, British intelligence knew perfectly well: that members of Parliament were among the regular clients of these networks. And as if by coincidence, nobody was ever prosecuted for it.

In 1963, the United Kingdom was rocked by the Profumo affair. John Profumo was Secretary of State for War in the Macmillan government. He was having an affair with Christine Keeler, a nineteen-year-old woman. Keeler had been recruited by Stephen Ward, a society osteopath who specialized in supplying young women from vulnerable backgrounds to the inner circles of British power. Ward organized parties where teenage girls and very young women without resources were made available to ministers, aristocrats, and diplomats. Among the regulars was Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet military attaché. British intelligence knew. And once again, they let it go! When the scandal broke, Profumo resigned and Ward was prosecuted alone. But by an unfortunate coincidence, he died of a barbiturate overdose the night before the verdict of his trial. Meanwhile, the young women he had exploited received no compensation whatsoever. And needless to say, the high-profile clients were never troubled. The playbook was already perfectly established: the middlemen go down, the powerful walk free.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a woman named Fernande Grudet ran from Paris the most influential luxury prostitution network in the Western world. She was known as Madame Claude. She recruited young women from modest backgrounds, often underage at the point of first contact. She trained them and prostituted them to heads of state, business executives, and royalty. Her girls moved between Paris and New York, Tehran and Riyadh. But what her clients did not know, or pretended not to know, was that Madame Claude worked for French foreign intelligence. Every encounter was therefore documented. Every secret gathered. Every deviation recorded. And the intelligence gathered fed directly back to the French state. Her clients thus automatically became potential blackmail targets. Madame Claude was protected for decades, until the 1970s when she was finally prosecuted for tax fraud. But she went into exile in Los Angeles and was never tried for what actually mattered. She died in 2015. Her archives have never been made public. Make of that what you will.

Jimmy Savile was for fifty years one of the most beloved public figures in the United Kingdom. He was a television host and presenter of Top of the Pops on the BBC. He was a personal friend of the royal family and of Margaret Thatcher. Throughout his career he collected honors at the highest level, right up to his death in 2011, where he was celebrated and decorated one final time. But a year later, the grim truth came out. An official investigation revealed that he had raped and sexually assaulted more than 450 victims over six decades. The majority were children and teenagers. He operated in psychiatric hospitals where he had obtained unlimited access, in boarding schools, in BBC studios, and even in the corridors of the British Parliament. Dozens of people knew. The BBC knew. The hospitals knew. Police had received complaints. And nobody spoke up! Savile was never touched during his lifetime. After his death, none of his accomplices or protectors were ever prosecuted. He took his secrets to the grave, and the British establishment breathed a sigh of relief.

The Westminster scandal was not about a single man. It was about an entire institution. Between the 1970s and 1990s, members of the British Parliament sexually abused children and teenagers. Some operated in children’s homes in Wales, notably Bryn Estyn, where boys placed there by the state were delivered to networks of predators with direct connections to Westminster. Investigations were opened. Witnesses came forward. But the files disappeared. In 2014, the British government admitted that more than 100 sensitive documents related to these cases had been lost or destroyed. An official report published in 2020 concluded that senior political figures had indeed been shielded from prosecution for decades. No names were ever made public. No charges were ever brought. The victims had grown up in state-run homes. They had no one to defend them. They therefore had no access to justice, and received no compensation.

In 1996, Belgium was shaken by a case that would become the defining European symbol of impunity within pedophilic networks. Marc Dutroux was an unemployed electrician. He abducted, imprisoned, raped, and killed young girls between 1995 and 1996. Two of them starved to death in his basement while he was in prison on an unrelated charge. What turned this sordid criminal case into a state scandal was what investigators discovered next. Dutroux was not working alone! He was part of a network. Witnesses described organized parties in private villas where children were delivered to wealthy and influential men. But police officers actively sabotaged the investigation. Magistrates were removed from the case. Evidence disappeared. An overzealous examining judge was dismissed. All of Belgium took to the streets in 1996 during the White March, where 300,000 people demanded the truth. Dutroux was ultimately convicted in 2004. But the alleged organizers behind the network were never officially identified. The files relating to them remain classified. It is simply a disgrace for Belgian justice.

In 2011, a French judicial investigation exposed an organized prostitution network centered on the Carlton Hotel in Lille. Young women and minors were recruited to attend private parties. Among the identified clients were Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, along with police commissioners, lawyers, and businessmen. DSK was placed under formal investigation for aggravated pimping. The case made headlines around the world. What received far less coverage was what followed. DSK was ultimately acquitted in 2015! His defense argued that he was unaware that some of the women present were prostitutes. The matter of minors involved was also quickly buried. The organizers of the network received very light sentences. The Carlton case illustrates a consistent principle: the more powerful the client, the less he is held accountable.

Sean Combs, known as Diddy, was for twenty years one of the most powerful figures in the American music industry. He ran Bad Boy Records and threw the most sought-after parties in New York and Los Angeles, which gave him access to high-ranking politicians and billionaires. But in 2024, the FBI raided his properties in Los Angeles and Miami. What agents found was documented in the indictments. Dozens of victims, including minors, had been paid to attend organized parties called “Freak Offs,” where participants were filmed without their knowledge. Hundreds of video recordings were seized. Diddy was arrested in September 2024 and indicted on charges of sex trafficking, racketeering, and extortion. The indictments explicitly described the use of these recordings as a blackmail tool against public figures. Over 120 plaintiffs filed civil suits. Among the names cited in proceedings were politicians, artists, and businessmen. Most of their names remain under seal. The case is still ongoing. Slowly drowning in the daily news cycle that saturates our memory.

Tiberius on Capri. The popes in the Lateran Palace. The Borgias in the Vatican. Ward in London. Madame Claude in Paris. Dutroux in Belgium. Epstein in New York and the Caribbean. Diddy in Los Angeles. The names change. The centuries change. The pattern does not. Minors recruited from poverty. Powerful men protected by their networks. Middlemen sacrificed when the scandal overflows. Archives that vanish. Victims who stay silent. And powerful men who sleep soundly the next morning. Epstein invented nothing. He merely industrialized and modernized certain methods. And as if by coincidence, he died in prison before his trial. Just as Ward died the night before his verdict. Some deaths have a way of always being convenient for the same kind of people.

Why do the powerful cross every line?

Power does not corrupt instantly. It does so gradually. And for many, the process begins well before they reach power. In privileged families, in elite boarding schools, in grandes écoles and prestigious universities, one certainty is transmitted from childhood. Rules are for the lower classes! The social elevator has been broken for a long time. Those who are born into privilege know they will keep it. That early certainty is the breeding ground for everything that follows.

The first mechanism is sycophancy. A powerful man is rarely contradicted. His staff agree with him. His associates flatter him. His subordinates fall in line. Little by little, reality warps. What would be immoral for an ordinary citizen becomes a normal prerogative for the one who governs, decides, and owns.

The second mechanism is escalation. Money is no longer enough. Power is no longer enough. Legal privileges run dry. Transgression therefore becomes the only territory left unexplored. It also becomes the ultimate marker of domination, proof that the rules applying to everyone else do not apply to you.

The third mechanism is the circle of accomplices. A man alone hesitates. But surrounded by peers doing the same thing, what he does becomes normalized. What would be unthinkable in isolation becomes routine among equals. Every participant becomes an accomplice. Every accomplice becomes a guarantor of silence. This circle is why these networks last for decades without anyone speaking up. It is not a question of loyalty, but of survival.

The fourth mechanism is the middleman. An Epstein, a Stephen Ward, a Madame Claude. Someone fluent in the codes of high society handles the recruitment and the logistics. They simply present it as a service among people of the same world. The middleman dramatically lowers the barrier to acting out because they transform a transgression into a premium service. In doing so, they completely depersonalize the victims. It is no longer a child or a teenager; it is a service like a private jet or a table at an exclusive restaurant closed to the public. And above all, it automatically builds a file on every client. Not necessarily by conscious design at first, but because it is a form of protection for the middleman and the network. Epstein filmed everything. Madame Claude reported everything. Ward transmitted everything. The organizer is never just a pimp. They are the keystone of the entire system.

The powerful are statistically psychopaths

This is not a metaphor. This is not a figure of speech. Clinical studies confirm it. Psychologist Robert Hare, who developed the most widely used psychopathy measurement scale in the world, estimated that psychopaths are four times more prevalent in leadership positions than in the general population. Oxford psychologist Kevin Dutton compiled a ranking of the professions with the highest concentration of psychopaths. Unsurprisingly, CEOs top the list. Politicians follow. A study from the University of San Diego estimated that 12% of corporate executives display clinically significant psychopathic traits. And this is not an accident! It is simply the result of a neoliberal system that actively selects for these traits, on the premise that a lack of empathy is supposedly a competitive advantage. Absence of remorse accelerates decision-making. The ability to manipulate without guilt opens doors. So what we call “leadership” looks clinically like functional psychopathy. And inevitably, a psychopath in power does not perceive the suffering of his victims. For him, it simply does not exist within his field of reality. That pattern explains everything else.

Why do powerful predators target minors and vulnerable people?

The question seems simple. The answer is too. An adult can say no. An adult can testify. An adult can take legal action. A minor from an extremely precarious background has none of those resources available. They have no money for a lawyer. They have no network to make themselves heard. They often have no family to believe them or defend them. And on top of all that, they carry the weight of shame. In our current system, accusing a powerful man generates the very real fear of designating yourself as the guilty party.

Social, family, and economic pressure push toward silence. The predator knows this! He therefore chooses his victims knowingly, because a child or a teenager is the ideal candidate for someone who wants total control and zero risk of retaliation. Clinical studies on sexual abusers of minors reveal something else. Around 50% of predators in positions of power display an incapacity for healthy relationships with other adults. Which means that behind the facade of power lies a profound inadequacy. A narcissism that masks a bottomless insecurity. An emotional immaturity that makes them incapable of tolerating the equality inherent in any genuine adult relationship. Because an adult can resist, contradict, and demand. A vulnerable child, on the other hand, can only endure. And that is precisely what these men are seeking above all else. Not desire. But total control, which provides them physical and psychological gratification through the sensation of domination.

Why are these men afraid of women?

There is a truth that the mainstream media, obedient to their masters, never formulate because it is too humiliating for those concerned. These men pay for sex because they cannot do otherwise. Let’s be honest about this. Have you seen the face of Trump? The face of Prince Andrew? The face of Musk? These are not men a free, sharp-minded woman would choose to spend an evening with. The main reason being that they are simply not likable, thanks to their oversized egos. In the end, all they have going for them is money and power. And every one of their defects strung together is a genuine repellent to any person with a functioning mind. Whereas a normal man with a sound head and genuine empathy has absolutely no trouble attracting people without resorting to domination.

When it comes to seduction, all these powerful men who think themselves irresistible have taken some massive rejections that they never got over. And over time, the frustration that builds up creates a need for revenge. You have the money, the fame, the power. And despite all of that, the women you actually desire want nothing to do with you. That particular humiliation is unbearable for a narcissist. So they buy relationships because unfortunately money can make that possible. And in these circles, they do not call it prostitution. They say call girl. They say escort. It sounds better. It lets them look at themselves in the mirror under the illusion that nothing can resist them.

Here is an example for fun: you are a woman and a man approaches you at a bar. The moment introductions are done, he only talks about himself. To explain, among other megalomaniacal ramblings, that he wants to dig a tunnel between America and Europe and establish a base on Mars to found what looks suspiciously like a Fourth Reich with himself as supreme leader. Instinctively you know you are dealing with a massive psychopath and that you need to get out. I forget the name of that particular creep, but I believe he is someone who possesses an absolutely obscene level of wealth and who begged Epstein to invite him to his island. On a separate note, just a side remark: Trump had absolutely no need of Epstein to reveal his own depravity. His documented use of prostitution and a rape conviction are more than enough to establish that on their own.

And there you have the mechanism that patriarchy has maintained for millennia. Behind the domination, behind the networks, behind the private islands and the pontifical palaces, behind the escorts and the minors recruited from poverty, there is fear. A visceral fear. The fear of free women! Contrary to popular belief, patriarchy is therefore not a system of domination built by strong men. It is simply a protection system built by men who are afraid. Afraid of being rejected. Afraid of being judged. Afraid of being equals. Afraid of being devalued. Whether they are billionaires, politicians, showbiz stars, or religious dignitaries, predators are always the same cowards. Those who could not seduce through their human qualities. Those who decided one day that it was simpler to buy or to coerce. For them, patriarchy is a collective insurance policy against an ignoble truth they are incapable of facing.

We need a different model of society to move beyond relationships built on domination

Honestly, we cannot keep going like this! It is not possible! We are in the 21st century and at some point we have to stop reproducing the same destructive patterns. First of all, after everything laid out in this article, I hope you have understood clearly that the Epstein affair is only the tip of the iceberg. Because if you look at the percentage of rape complaints that are actually filed, it is well below 10% on average globally. To which you have to add the vast majority of complaints that are dismissed without follow-up. But when it involves powerful people who have the means to apply pressure and bury cases, the numbers are even lower. Without forgetting all the cases of domination that are consented to purely out of financial necessity or through blindness in the face of fame. Against these staggering estimates, nothing will change as long as we are collectively incapable of breaking free from a model of society built 100% on domination and patriarchy. Otherwise, this will keep going on and on. And barely has one Epstein fallen than another has already taken his place. At greater or lesser scale, in every part of the world.

So the solution to get out of this is very simple. It is called anarchism. Because for any self-respecting anarchist, broadly speaking, all power is an abuse of power. And this is probably the moment where you are going to say: “Sure, that sounds great on paper but in real life it cannot work!” If you think that way, it is because you have been conditioned to believe that nothing in this world can function without a boss. Which could not be more wrong. It is therefore time to change your operating system.

Take Linux as an example. It started with Linus Torvalds putting out his famous call for people to join his project. Years later, Linux is a massive global success! And yet, all of it was built through completely self-organized collaboration. To this day you can contribute to Linux in whatever way feels most appropriate to you, with no need to go through bosses or ask for permission. And what about our friend Linus in all of this? Is he in the Epstein files? Spoiler: no! The files he appears in are code comments in the kernel 🙂 Is he a celebrity? No, he is just someone people respect for his work and his level of expertise. In short, what anarchism calls a natural leader. Logically, as opposed to the self-appointed leader who directs you solely because he owns the money and the means of production.

Of course, you might say that self-management works for free software but not for other kinds of projects. Again, nothing could be more wrong. Self-management works perfectly well under one single condition: that the project itself is solid and genuinely beneficial.

On the other hand, since capitalism is overflowing with garbage projects, it naturally takes the slavery of wage labor to keep them running. But we will have the chance to come back to how self-management actually works in a future article. In the meantime, you can always read our article on cooperatives.

Conclusion: Action is the antidote to despair

To wrap up: limiting yourself to outrage over what the powerful do will change absolutely nothing. So if you genuinely want things to change, start by circulating this information. You have already read this far and we are really glad you are here. That is a first step. But it is not enough. Now, at minimum, take a few seconds to share this article widely. You can also print it, republish it, or even take this subject and turn it into a podcast, a video, or whatever else you can think of. The important thing is simply that these ideas keep moving. Because that is the only way out of this very old story of human beings being exploited by a minority of humans who believe they have every right to do so. Personally, this is not the world I want for myself, and even less for my children. And I assume you feel the same way. So take stock of everything you can do at your own scale to help shift mentalities. Because if you do not do it, the media certainly will not. In the end, there are no small gestures. There is only what you do or do not do to make another world possible. And finally, hope to hear from you here or on our networks. See you soon for what comes next.