The release of the Epstein files has been framed as revelation. Names. Associations. Who knew whom, who went where, who might be embarrassed. The coverage invites us to lean in, to speculate, to consume the story as scandal rather than evidence.
But nothing material has been revealed.
Jeffrey Epstein was a convicted child sex offender. His crimes were not speculative or ambiguous. They were established in court. What followed that conviction is the part we continue to avoid confronting: powerful men chose to rehabilitate his reputation rather than sit in the reality of the crimes he was found guilty of committing against children.
That choice matters more than any flight log.
Making a wealthy, well-connected man convicted of heinous crimes socially bearable was more palatable than reckoning with the trauma inflicted on his victims. Re-entry was easier than accountability. Access was preserved. Discomfort was managed. The harm was treated as an inconvenience to be smoothed over, not a rupture demanding institutional reckoning.
This is not an American aberration. It is a pattern Australians know well.
We are culturally fluent in discretion. We understand how reputations are protected, how institutions close ranks, how harm is reframed as complexity, and how “good blokes” are insulated from consequences. We know the language instinctively: let the process play out, don’t rush to judgement, there are two sides, this is complicated.
In practice, complexity often functions as delay. Delay becomes protection. And protection almost never flows to victims.
The public conversation around the Epstein files has already begun to slide into spectacle. Who attended what? Who might be compromised? Who looks hypocritical? This framing feels critical, but it is deeply familiar. It personalises harm while absolving the system that enabled it. It turns sexual exploitation into gossip and invites outrage without consequence.
Epstein did not survive socially because his crimes were hidden. He survived because powerful men decided those crimes did not disqualify him.
This is how power responds to violence that threatens its position. Not with ignorance, but with accommodation. Not with denial, but with management.
Australia has seen this logic repeatedly. Institutions encountering credible allegations of sexual violence or child abuse often respond by narrowing the frame rather than expanding accountability. Risk is assessed not in terms of harm to victims, but in terms of reputational fallout. The question becomes not “what happened to them?” but “what does this mean for us?”
In this approach, children and women are repositioned as liabilities. Their trauma becomes a problem to be contained rather than a reality to be addressed.
Many of the men who supported Epstein after his conviction have since expressed moments of solemn concern about child sexual abuse, and more broadly, gender-based violence. Statements were issued. Sincerity carefully staged. And yet the irony remains unexamined: the ecosystem that allowed them to thrive is inherently harmful.
This is not hypocrisy at the level of personality. It is structural. You cannot meaningfully oppose gender-based violence while participating in systems that rehabilitate perpetrators and marginalise victims once harm becomes inconvenient.
Gender-based violence does not persist globally because it is invisible. It persists because it is consistently deprioritised when it collides with power.
Ask why child sexual abuse and sexual violence remain entrenched despite decades of awareness campaigns, national plans, and public commitments. The answer is not a lack of knowledge. It is a failure of will.
Institutions know what violence looks like. They know how it escalates. They know when intervention is required. What they too often choose instead is discretion, delay, and deniability.
The most dangerous myth is that Epstein represents a failure of oversight.
He represents a success of protection.
If this moment is allowed to devolve into salacious gossip, we will repeat the very pattern the files expose. We will centre curiosity over accountability. We will turn children’s suffering into a backdrop for adult intrigue. And we will once again signal that power can absorb harm without consequence.
They did not not know.
He was convicted.
They just decided that preserving the world that worked for them mattered more than sitting with the damage done to children. That decision is not confined to one man or one country. It is the through line of how power responds to this violence everywhere.
The files are not a scandal.
They are a mirror.