I have spent years listening to people describe what power did to them. Not the clean power of competence, or the quiet power of integrity. I mean the messy kind: the one that leaks into entitlement, secrecy, and the thrill of getting away with it. The recent Epstein files do not just expose a man. They expose a system of emotional anaesthesia, in which the suffering of girls and women becomes background noise to the ambitions of famous men.
When names appear that span ideologies and reputations, the usual tribal theatre collapses. Deepak Chopra to Stephen Hawking. Peter Mandelson to Noam Chomsky. Trump to Clinton. Gates to Peter Attia. Prince Andrew to Peter Thiel. I am not claiming every person mentioned is guilty of crimes. I am saying something simpler: proximity to predation can be socially tolerated in elite circles, and our culture keeps rewarding the ability to look away.
When Left and Right Stop Mattering
We love political labels because they soothe the nervous system. Left and right give us an illusion of prediction: I know who you are, therefore I know what you will do. The Epstein story punctures that illusion. When it comes to sexual abuse, ideology often becomes a costume, not a compass.
In coaching, I ask a blunt question: What part of you wants the world to be simple? Usually, the answer is fear. Fear of betrayal, fear of learning that the people we admired were never safe to admire. The Epstein files force an adult truth: moral failure does not have a party membership.
The Psychology of Predatory Power
Predation is rarely a lightning bolt. It is a slow build of permission. There is grooming, yes, but not only of victims. There is grooming of the environment. The group is trained to normalise oddities, to laugh off rumours, to treat discomfort as prudishness.
From a neuroscience lens, power can distort perception. When consequences shrink, the brain’s threat circuitry quietens, and novelty-seeking can escalate. Combine that with status, wealth, and enablers who treat boundaries as negotiable, and you get a kind of moral vertigo. The person stops feeling the ground of basic human empathy.
What chills me most is not the monster myth. Monsters are convenient because they are rare. What chills me is the familiar pattern: one person crosses a line, others notice, and the room decides that silence is a reasonable price for access.
The Files Are Mirrors, Not Just Evidence
Even when we condemn Epstein, we can still participate in the ecosystem that made him possible. We click, we gossip, we turn suffering into spectacle, we demand a neat “client list” as if justice were a celebrity scavenger hunt.
I once coached a leader who prided himself on being “objective”. He said, “I don’t do feelings.” His team lived in quiet dread. When we reached the core, he admitted, “If I feel it, I will have to act.” That sentence echoes when I read about those who stayed close to Epstein, or stayed silent around him. Feeling is inconvenient because it demands movement.
The Epstein files ask each of us: Where have you tolerated the intolerable because you were benefiting?
Why We Keep Protecting the Powerful
We are taught, subtly, that status equals safety. If someone is famous, educated, philanthropic, or brilliant, we grant them an emotional discount. We interpret warning signs as quirks. We call predators “complicated”. We call survivors “messy”.
There is also a deeper pattern: many of us are trauma-bonded to authority. We learned early that survival depended on pleasing powerful people, earning approval, avoiding punishment. So when a powerful figure is implicated, the nervous system defends them as if defending a parent.
This is why the conversation cannot stop at names. It has to move towards patterns: who gets believed, who gets protected, and who gets punished for speaking.
The Cost to Survivors: The Second Injury
For survivors, public scandal can be a second injury. The first injury is the abuse. The second is watching the world debate whether it counts. It is watching powerful men receive the benefit of nuance while girls receive the burden of proof.
Trauma is not only memory. It is physiology: hypervigilance, sleep disruption, shame that does not belong to the survivor but lodges in them anyway. When media cycles treat the Epstein files as a drama series, survivors can feel re-used.
If you have a history of sexual harm, hear this plainly: what happened was not your fault. Your responses, even the confusing ones, were intelligent attempts to survive.
Accountability Without a Witch Hunt
I am wary of two extremes. One is denial, the reflex to protect reputations at all costs. The other is bloodlust, the impulse to declare guilt by association and move on, satisfied that we have punished someone, somewhere.
Real accountability is slower and less theatrical than outrage. It is prosecutions where evidence supports them, safeguarding policies, institutional transparency, and the unglamorous work of funding survivor support. It is also cultural: teaching boys emotional literacy, teaching girls that boundaries are real, teaching all of us that charisma is not character.
As a coach, I care about repair. Repair does not mean forgiveness. It means truth-telling, consequences, and a future in which fewer people are harmed.
Elite Poison and the Cure of Discernment
I call the Epstein files elite poison because poison rarely harms only the intended target. It spreads. It contaminates institutions and the way we relate to fame itself. It tells young people that the real rules are hidden, and that justice is negotiable.
The counter-move is discernment. Discernment says: names in documents are not verdicts, and patterns of proximity to abuse are never neutral. It says power needs constraints, consent needs education, institutions need auditing, and communities need the courage to believe and to verify, both at once.
If the Epstein files have any redemptive value, it is this: they force us to choose adulthood. To stop outsourcing morality to ideologies, and start insisting on safety, dignity, and accountability, wherever power gathers.
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