Three years before Jeffrey Epstein was first investigated for a sexual crime by Palm Beach Florida police, a Vanity Fair journalist observed, in a feature piece with the prophetic title “The Talented Mr. Epstein”, that in the upstairs office of Epstein’s nine story Manhattan townhouse, lined with 18th century black Portuguese cabinets and a nine foot ebony Steinway “D” grand piano, was to be found a copy of the book The Misfortunes of Virtue (Justine) by the French libertine, the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814).

Epstein had laid it out clearly as a strategic piece of stagecraft and also as a mischievous advertisement: In Sade’s novel, Justine is a 12-year-old girl who sets off on a trip through France to learn virtue and instead is subject to sexual exploitation and abuse by monks, a rich gentleman and other “sadistic” male torturers.

Sade is remembered today less for his most famous writings, Justine and 120 Days of Sodom, than for his reputation as offering a private theater of cruelty where privileged men could indulge their forbidden desires under a veneer of philosophy and high taste. He wrote about domination and the subordination of women, but, while his workwas considered obscene, modern scholars, even feminists such as Angela Carter, have argued that Sade was engaged in a radical critique of contemporary sexual and social power structures.

Carter observed that while Sade’s writing was violent and pornographic, it also served as a radical critique of the sexual and social power structures of revolutionary France. She framed Sade as a “moral pornographer” who used obscenity to analyze the power dynamics between the sexes. Sade believed that the new revolutionary republic was just as oppressive as the old regime. The tension in these contrasting perspectives reveals a key to understanding the meaning of Jeffrey Epstein’s legacy.

The dark allure of influence

A massive trove of over 3 million pages of documents, 2,000 videos and 180,000 images, including emails, photographs and correspondence related to Jeffrey Epstein, was released by the US Department of Justice and the House Oversight Committee in late January and early February 2026. They constitute a nauseating catalogue of sycophancy, cruelty and misogyny.

Everyone is focused on Epstein’s depravity, but more interesting is the way they highlight the extraordinary hunger among late-20th and early-21st-century elites for a hidden space in which they could suspend the norms they spent their public lives pretending to uphold. If the Paris libertines of the late 18th century had their châteaux, salons and forbidden bestsellers, America’s donor class had access to a Virgin Islands foundation, a Manhattan mansion, a private jet and a small private island, among many other properties.

Epstein’s reputation was not based on the fact that he was rich or lecherous, since those features have been attributed to the rich and famous as long as celebrity has been an obsession of mass culture. Rather, once Epstein had made his money, he did not remain satisfied with the usual trophies of the newly arrived — bigger planes, fancier yachts or art pieces — that others desire. He built something more strategic, a small, flexible foundation and self-cultivation as someone with both scientific and humanistic interests. He then used that constructed persona to lure in a semi-secret court of intellectuals, politicians, financiers and celebrities. A foundation buys something much more valuable than expensive toys; it buys you influence.

The complex web of philanthropy and influence

Epstein’s main philanthropic arm, the Jeffery Epstein VI Foundation, “VI” for Virgin Islands, was established in 2000 in the same Caribbean jurisdiction where he based many of his businesses and owned his private Caribbean Island, Little Saint James. The foundation’s board included Cecile de Jongh, the wife of the then-governor of the US Virgin Islands, a detail that illustrates the formula: money equals proximity to power equals legal and ethical protection.

The VI Foundation’s official mission was to fund “cutting-edge science and science education.” In practice, it operated as both a checkbook and a calling card. Epstein pledged tens of millions to elite universities and research centers. The most famous example was $9 million to Harvard, including a $6.5 million commitment to Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, which was ultimately only partially fulfilled, but enough to place Epstein’s name at the center of a prestigious research initiative and to grant him an advisory role on university committees. 

Through this and similar gifts, some routed through other vehicles, some quietly anonymized, Epstein cultivated a network of scientists and technology experts, including theoretical physicists, AI researchers, geneticists and roboticists. His VI Foundation backed international work on AI, brain science and futuristic robots. Epstein also sprinkled smaller grants on local Virgin Islands charities: a mental health clinic, youth programs, even animal welfare groups. These comparatively minor donations functioned as political grease, building goodwill in a territory whose laws and regulators he depended on, while his headline gifts went to institutions that conferred prestige on the East Coast and beyond.  

The scientists, students and patients who benefited from Epstein’s money were usually not complicit in his crimes. There is no evidence that the VI Foundation’s grantees, as individuals or as a group, knew about, much less participated in, Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation. The point is that by creating the appearance of a serious, high-minded philanthropic agenda, Epstein purchased something no amount of visible luxury could buy: a place inside the collective brain of the elite.

To be invited to his townhouse was to find oneself in a room that looked like a parody of a New York Review of Books launch party. Nobel laureates traded bon mots with hedge-fund managers, movie stars were seated next to cabinet officials and tech founders, spiritual gurus, literary publicists and the occasional ex-prime minister mingled. The currency traded was visibility and access.

The recent email dumps show just how transactional this ecosystem was. They are full of the kind of correspondence you would expect from any donor network, requests for gala tables, pitches for new theaters, speculation about Saudi arms deals and quantum computers, but charged with the added frisson of Epstein’s notoriety and the intimacy of his circle. Some sought money from him, while others funneled money and introductions to him. He, in turn, dispensed access to his digital Rolodex, his planes, his islands, his image as a man who could make things happen and who rarely said no. From a distance, it looked less like a Bond villain’s lair than like something older, French hostess Madame de Goeffrin beamed up to the 21st century.

Libertinism and moral exemption in high society

The comparison to 18th-century France is not facile. Heirs to the Sun King, the court of Louis XV and his grandson were infamous for bifurcated morality. In public, Catholicism and royal authority demanded rigid observance. In private, aristocratic men and the women dependent on their favor constructed a parallel world of mistresses, brothels and secret clubs where the very taboos upheld in the daylight were gleefully violated at night.

The libertines of that era produced a whole literature of apology and celebration for their lifestyle. Sade, imprisoned in the Bastille and then in asylums for his extreme pornography and alleged crimes, turned sexual transgression into a metaphysics. If God is dead, then power and pleasure are the only real currencies. His noble characters, bored by ordinary vice, required ever more elaborate cruelties to feed their lust.

The appeal was not merely sex but rather the sense of exemption from normal rules, an exemption that proved one’s status and power. To be an insider to libertine culture was to understand that the sermons and catechisms of the church, and the bourgeois insistence on decency, were all a kind of theater. The real life of the ruling class happened in the shadows.

Epstein’s life and relationships suggest he knew this history, or at least intuited it, and enjoyed seeing himself in that lineage. His three-volume bound 50th birthday album with personalized greetings, assembled by Ghislaine Maxwell, contains bawdy and cruel jokes from scores of prominent people. The emails and party guest lists that have emerged in the files display off-color jokes, explicit musings about “girls,” and the casual tracking of who had which yacht, which villa, which art collection. The Wall Street Journal’s description of the files as making Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities look “genteel” is less about criminality than about tone; the preening, the moral vacancy, the sense that nothing outside the game of status accumulation was quite real.

One email from Deepak Chopra to Epstein, unearthed in the latest tranche, crystallizes that mix of glibness and appetite. He writes, “God is a construct, but cute girls are real.” The line is juvenile, but precisely for that reason, so revealing. The guru of mind-body wellness casually inverts metaphysics to flirt with a convicted sex offender. He was not alone.

Recently released records show that Chopra was in contact with Epstein between 2016 and 2019, trading emails about public figures and attending dinners with people like Woody Allen. Many of these correspondences, including his, may involve nothing more than bad judgment and vulgarity. But they point to a deeper truth, that in every generation, the people who preach balance and virtue in public still seek out private spaces where those rules are suspended.

The American paradox: public virtue, private taboo and Epstein’s sanctuary

What makes Epstein uniquely American is the particular historical moment in which he built his empire of influence, the 1990s and 2000s, years that saw the rise of what was first called “political correctness” and then, more broadly, a therapeutic, HR-managed public culture. The early 1990s were defined by the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings, which forced workplace sexual harassment into national consciousness.

Universities built entire bureaucracies around stifling codes of conduct and speech. Corporations hired diversity trainers and forced employees to attend sensitivity training. The Clinton impeachment pivoted on sex and lying about sex. So-called “family values” became a mantra of both Republican campaigns and Democratic defensiveness. Public life was shot through with sexual righteousness and the language of harm, trauma and propriety. It appears quaint now, but George W. Bush was elected partly to restore “honor and dignity” to the White House.

In the digital age, mass-market pornography migrated from below the news store counter to the browser. The Playboy mansion gave way to internet webcams, and cable television mainstreamed shows and jokes that would have been unthinkable in earlier network eras. America’s libido did not vanish; it was displaced, driven out of official spaces, channeled into highly commodified, legally insulated industries, and wrapped in shame.

For a certain cohort of lawyers, financiers, academics and media figures who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, this new dispensation felt constricting. Many had grown up with or at least in the fading afterglow of counterculture sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and now found themselves living amid unwelcome taboos, some progressive, some neo-Victorian, without any corresponding private world in which those taboos could be easily broken.

Here lies one of the keys to Epstein’s attractiveness. He offered not just luxury and sex, but a place where powerful men (and some women) could drop the stiff, careful personas that late-20th-century Anglo-American culture required of them. His planes and island functioned as zones of deniability and permission. The donor meetings, “science” seminars and off-the-record dinners were the front rooms of a house that had back rooms to which only a “lucky” few were invited. For special guests, the taboo was the feature, not the bug.

It is telling that many of the figures most embarrassed by the new documents are not outright villains but instead people whose brands depend on some form of respectability: wellness influencers, big-firm lawyers, tech philanthropists, global-governance mandarins. The emails expose not only their proximity to a criminal but the gap between their public images and their private appetites.

Navigating public morality and private vice in America and Europe

If America’s elites turned to Epstein for a kind of outsourced libertinism, their European peers often developed parallel structures within their own political cultures. France has long treated the intimate lives of its leaders as a private matter. François Mitterrand maintained a second, secret family during his presidency; when his illegitimate daughter showed up at his funeral, much of the French press treated the spectacle with a shrug. 

Later, President François Hollande’s motor-scooter rides to visit an actress lover were tabloid fodder but not, for most French voters, disqualifying. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s “bunga bunga” parties, which blended showgirls, young women and off-color jokes, became a national spectacle; his brazenness was part of his populist appeal (and an early model for US President Donald Trump).

This is not to say Europe has been free of sexual scandal, or that its elites have been kinder to the vulnerable. The mass-abuse investigations into Catholic institutions in Ireland, Germany and elsewhere, the British grooming-gang inquiries and the Gisèle Pelicot mass rape case in France, among others, laid bare long-running patterns of exploitation. In some instances, these inquiries culminated in national commissions, official apologies and attempts at collective reckoning. In some respects, European politicians have been held to a higher standard than those in the US.

In the UK, Peter Mandelson, a former ambassador to the United States, was fired, and Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has come under renewed pressure as a result of the file dump. Ironically, the number of scandals under the Trump administration, sexual and otherwise, has made Americans almost numb to outrage.

The difference is not that European elites behave better, but rather that their public cultures have traditionally drawn the line in a different place. Consensual adult infidelity, long-term affairs and even relationships with much younger partners have often been treated as a matter for families and the boulevard press, not prosecutors or human resources (HR) departments. America, by contrast, makes little distinction in its rhetoric between private vice and public fitness. Business leaders and politicians (unless your name is Donald Trump) can be hounded from office for an affair without any allegation of nonconsent.

This divergence is not as stark as it once was. France’s response to #MeToo was initially ambivalent, but the movement has had real effects there, as in Spain, Britain, Sweden and elsewhere. Still, the United States remains notably more Puritan in its public sexual morality than most of Western Europe. That Puritanism breeds both openly moralistic politics and private workarounds, such as the “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” the anonymous escort, the VIP club, the private yacht and, for a small subset of the very rich, someone like Epstein. In that sense, Epstein’s operation is recognizably transatlantic, an Anglo-American version of the old French and Italian systems in which power confers space to misbehave, and scandal is something to be swept into the realm of “private life” until it can no longer be ignored.

Epstein’s manipulation of wealth, influence and deception

What truly distinguishes Epstein from the archetypal libertine, however, is not just his setting but his method. Sade was a marquis whose power was inherited. Epstein was a striver whose origins were middle-class and provincial. He worked first as a teacher, then as a trader and money manager, moving through the lower and middle ranks of finance. His tool for entering the world of the very rich was precisely the thing that defined late-20th-century American power: philanthropy as a front.

The Germans have a word for Epstein: a Hochstapler, a social climber and fraudster. A friend of his, the CEO of Tiffany, Ross Monckton, observed of Epstein, “You think you know him and then you peel off another ring of the onion skin, and there’s something else extraordinary underneath. He never reveals his hand … He’s a classic iceberg. What you see is not what you get.”

The donor class in America is a caste unto itself, created not just by wealth but by participation in a particular set of rituals, such as charity galas, naming rights, advisory boards and campaign bundling. This world has its own currencies and its own hierarchies. One can be worth billions and still be a nobody at Davos, or a peripheral figure at Aspen. Or one can give a charity $10,000 and sit on a board with genuine bigwigs. That world is fluid. Epstein was not averse to using what he knew about the powerful as leverage. Some of his fortune might have been due to blackmail. In the recent email dump, one finds evidence of Epstein threatening benefactors like the billionaire Les Wexner, with lines like “I owe a great debt to you, as frankly you owe to me,” adding ominously that he “had no intention of divulging any confidence of ours.”

Epstein exploited all of his advantages, sexual and otherwise. His VI Foundation and related entities enabled him to join the club without matching the largest gifts. By focusing on a specific niche, frontier science, especially in mathematics, AI and genetics, he bought a disproportionate share of attention from a relatively small but symbolically powerful group of people: Nobel-level scientists, Ivy League presidents, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) lab directors, and the intellectuals and journalists in their orbits. Some needed his money. Others liked the flattery of being courted by someone who presented himself as a polymath investor, a man who could talk string theory in the afternoon and campaign strategy in the evening. He possessed desirable and nonpublic information.

There were also those, like wellness celebrities and certain tech founders, who saw in him a way to launder their own aspirations. Epstein’s connections eventually ran to a higher level of politics. He could make introductions to presidents and prime ministers for people who needed access. There is no proof that he was on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the Mossad, but the many tantalizing clues left behind that he worked as an asset for various intelligence services make a lot of sense. He had the kinds of contacts and intel that spies covet.

The latest email caches confirm the asymmetry of Epstein’s relations to power. Scientists are thanking Epstein for his support and encouragement in their AI research. Media figures and lobbyists are looping him into threads about Trump, Saudi money and Saudi arms deals, clearly seeing him as a node in a larger power web. Epstein had ties to Saudi Arabia’s royal court and was in contact with individuals close to and with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). There are invitations to awards shows and festivals, campaigns to place him at the right table next to the right director or star.

Many of these correspondents were not asking to fly to his island or use his massage table. They wanted introductions, donations or simply a chance to be close to someone they believed had pull. For them, Epstein’s sexual deviance was not necessarily the selling point. In some cases, it was a reputational risk to be minimized or ignored. But for others, the deviance was the real draw.

Power rarely travels alone. It travels along with sentimentality, cruelty, generosity, boredom and a Nietzschean aspiration to feel that the rules do not apply to select Supra-individuals. The Epstein files, incomplete and heavily redacted as they are, make this dichotomy visible in ways that are often excruciating. The messages are full of juvenile mockery about “girls,” using human trafficking code words like “pizza,” “grape juice,” “Chanel,” or “Snow White.” The files reveal assessments of women’s bodies in language that reduces human beings to anatomy and availability. In the vocabulary of one popular wellness influencer caught in the blast radius, this was “just banter.” For others, it was “locker-room talk,” as Donald Trump’s handlers once repackaged his own vulgar comments. The phrase is meant to reassure us that boys will be boys, and words are not actions.

Yet in Epstein’s case, the deeds were real. The “locker room” had an actual lock, with verifiable victims whose stories of coercion, grooming and violence have been documented in court cases and investigative reporting. The most recent United Nations report on global trafficking underscores that sex trafficking overall is on the rise worldwide. Epstein’s operation was not an aberration, but an extreme link in a much larger system of exploitation.

Elite connections and compromised choices

What the new materials add is a context for how tempting that link was for some in the elite. They capture a range of attitudes: the fawning, the blasé, the vaguely curious, the opportunistic. To be included in the Epstein’s Files does not, by itself, mean crime. Many names appear only in a single email, or in Epstein’s own messages to himself. But alongside those incidental contacts, there is a smaller inner circle, people who continued to see, defend or do business with him long after his 2008 conviction for procuring a child for prostitution.

Some, like Woody Allen, were men already targeted in the culture wars. Accused in the early 1990s of molesting his adopted daughter, a charge he has always denied and for which he was never criminally charged, Allen became a symbol of an era’s failures to take children’s testimony seriously. By the 2010s, he found himself shunned by studios and festivals. Today, he makes films only in Europe. For a public figure like Woody Allen, Epstein’s continued hospitality would be both a risk and a kind of perverse refuge, one disgraced man lending comfort and introductions to another.

Others, like former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, arrived with sterling institutional credentials and left badly singed. Summers’ appearances in the new emails, cordial, bantering, too cute by half, are a textbook illustration of elite myopia, a belief that proximity to a known sex offender could be managed as a private embarrassment rather than a public scandal. When those correspondences surfaced, Summers expressed regret and stepped back from some high-profile roles, but the damage to his and Harvard’s moral authority had already been done.

There are also the tech billionaires and philanthropists — most prominently Bill Gates — who acknowledged that their meetings with Epstein after his conviction were grave errors. Gates has said he approached Epstein to discuss philanthropy and was wrong to do so. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, has similarly apologized for facilitating and attending gatherings where Epstein was present. Elon Musk continues to deny accusations that he had anything to do with Epstein, despite a message found in the recent email dump asking, “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”Musk characterized such correspondence as “a distraction” that could be “misinterpreted” by detractors to smear his name.

For some of these men, Epstein’s dark charisma likely lay as much in his promise of influence as in the sexual theater around him. He could arrange meetings, suggest investments, donate to pet causes and provide an environment in which the usual constraints of corporate public relations (PR) and institutional decorum fell away. Yet it is hard to avoid the sense that at least part of the attraction was precisely his willingness to go where others would not. He stood out as brazen in a world of timid titans.

A new Gilded Age and populist fury

The timing of the latest document release is not incidental. It lands in what many have called a new Gilded Age, in which the yawning gap between the very rich and everyone else has become impossible to ignore. The same period saw Trump win the highest office in the land despite, or perhaps because of, boasting about grabbing women’s genitals and shrugging off multiple sexual-misconduct accusations. At the same time, the culture witnessed the rise and partial ebb of #MeToo, the largest public reckoning with sexual abuse and harassment in modern American history.

If #MeToo was often framed by the political right as the grievance of “angry feminists” and an example of cancel culture, the Epstein Files have a more bipartisan, even cross-ideological appeal. Social media reactions to the latest leaks have an almost revolutionary tone, a digital storming of the ramparts.

For many younger Americans — Gen Z, younger millennials, the underemployed and debt-burdened — the Epstein network confirms a suspicion that had already hardened into cynicism, that the rich and powerful live by different rules. The spectacle of lawyers, wellness gurus, academics and moguls hovering around a convicted sex offender for access and advantage looks, from the outside, like evidence of a rigged system. The rich and the powerful never pay for what they do. Populism of both the left and right is the result.

The political system, so far, has offered only partial answers. Epstein is dead. His collaborator, Ghislaine Maxwell, is in prison. Civil cases have produced settlements and some measure of accountability. But there is no independent commission charged with fully parsing the files, no formal truth and reconciliation process, no promise that everyone who ever requested a flight to the island will be hauled before a public tribunal. The redactions and gaps in the record fuel conspiracy thinking, but they also reflect the reality that the legal system is not designed to resolve every moral question.

This gap between public rage and institutional response is itself part of the story. California Representative Ro Khanna, who introduced the Epstein Files Transparency Act, called on Congress to haul in every single person who emailed Epstein about visiting his island, saying, “The American people are frustrated with the rich and powerful getting a different set of justice.” Epstein is less an anomaly than a symbol, not just of male predation, but of class impunity.

It is tempting, in the face of all this, to focus exclusively on the roster of names and their individual sins and stupidities. Who was at dinner? Who flew when? Who wrote “cute girls are real”? The files lend themselves to this sort of scavenger hunt. The dark fun involves watching the high-brow brought low.

But as with earlier waves of scandal, from Watergate to #MeToo, there is a risk that the obsession with individual downfalls will obscure the conditions that made those downfalls possible.

The structural enablers of elite abuse

Epstein flourished because he exploited at least four structural features of modern elite culture. First. a philanthropic system that trades money for access and moral cover. The donor class is invited, even begged, to treat their giving as a path to virtue. Institutions know that some of their benefactors are dubious; they accept the bargain anyway, often reassuring themselves that the money will be put to good use. Epstein did not invent this arrangement; he simply exploited it.

Second, a public discourse about sex that combines moralism with repression. America’s mix of religiosity, litigation and media outrage makes it hard to talk honestly about adult sexuality, power and desire. That pressure does not eliminate bad behavior, but rather drives it underground. Some people who spend their days policing language in conference rooms will look for opportunities at night to say and do what they can’t at times when people are watching.

Third, a global economy of trafficking and exploitation that treats the bodies of young women and girls as commodities. Epstein’s operation tapped into broader flows of vulnerability: runaways, migrants, poor teenagers. The UN’s finding that sex trafficking is rising globally suggests that, absent systemic change, there will always be an Epstein or someone like him ready to monetize that market demand.

Finally, a culture of elite impunity, in which reputations are protected by networks of lawyers, PR firms and institutional allies. The names in the Epstein files are a cross-section of this ecosystem, people who can expect, in most circumstances, to avoid the worst consequences of their actions. When justice does arrive, it is often partial, delayed or depersonalized, as settlements without admissions, resignations without clear reasons and apologies that use the passive voice.

If there is a lesson in the contrast between Epstein and, say, the grooming-gang inquiries in Britain or the Pelicot case in France, it may be that some societies, under sufficient pressure, are capable of treating sexual abuse not just as a collection of individual crimes but as a systemic failure. They commission reports, revise laws and, at least, claim to seek a kind of national deliverance. Whether the United States will ever mount a comparably comprehensive reckoning with the culture that enabled Epstein remains an open question.

After Epstein: reckoning or repetition?

Epstein is gone. Maxwell sits in a federal prison. Archives are being pored over; pundits and politicians are virtue-signaling and displaying outrage. Yet the underlying arrangements that made his world possible are, in many ways, intact. The philanthropic complex still offers the wealthy a path to soft power and air-brushed reputations, even if due diligence departments are marginally more cautious. Global sex trafficking remains profitable; encrypted apps and the dark web have replaced some of the email channels that boomers like Epstein used. Pornography and commercialized “sex work” are growing industries whose labor conditions remain deeply compromised. Who knows what new methods of exploitation will occur with the turbo-charged power of AI?

Meanwhile, the cultural pendulum swings back and forth. #MeToo has spawned both reforms and backlash; a muscular online “manosphere” offers young men a set of misogynist scripts that would not look out of place in a Sade plot, stripped of elegance. Dude-bro culture is alive and well in finance, tech and politics, even if its public presentation has been smoothed and focus-grouped.

The risk, as with all moral panics, is that Epstein will be remembered primarily as a monster, a freakish outlier whose biography can be safely quarantined from the rest of us. That is the opposite of the truth. He was, in many ways, a concentrated expression of broader patterns of male entitlement, of class privilege, of the seductions of secrecy, and of the uses and abuses of philanthropy.

The paperback copy by the Marquis de Sade seen in Epstein’s office was, whether he intended it or not, both a secret confession and a sleight-of-hand. Like Sade, Epstein was a libertine who mistook his own appetites for a kind of higher philosophy, who thought that because he could act without consequence, his actions had some larger meaning. But where deade belonged to an old regime that fell to the ire of the masses, Epstein belonged to a new one that has yet to face its own revolution.

The question the Epstein files leave us with is not simply “Who else was on the plane?” or “Which guru wrote which gross email?” It is whether a culture that has outsourced its conscience to HR policies and its moral imagination to social media can find a deeper, more honest way to think about sex, power and money, one that neither demonizes desire nor indulges the powerful in believing they are above the law.

Until it does, there will always be another island, another jet, another man with a foundation and a client list, eager to offer the next generation of elites tantalizing objects of desire, no longer so obscure.

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.