Harry Storm
When I visit New York, I like to walk around Manhattan, in part because it’s one of the few places where you can find tiny movie houses showing international or otherwise obscure films. The last time I was there, I stumbled into Monsoon Wedding, an Indian movie that I enjoyed very much.
Fifteen years later, the son of the film’s director, Mira Nair, was elected the current mayor of New York. More recently, Nair herself made headlines when she appeared in the recent release of the Epstein Files by the U.S. Justice Department.
Ahhh, the Epstein files. Sometimes the mind boggles. The most recent release included 3 million pages of documents, not to mention tens of thousands of photos and videos. That’s just the most recent release. And there’s still more to come. Countless well-known people – politicians, businessmen, celebrities and even royalty – have had their reputations dragged through the mud – some legitimately, many unfairly – for being associated with Jeffrey Epstein, however fleeting that association was.
Epstein’s private island is reputed to have been a den of debauchery involving underage girls. And there is no doubt that many very famous and/or very rich people, including former president Bill Clinton,, tech moguls Bill Gates and Elon Musk, and most notoriously, then-Prince Andrew, among many others, were closely associated with Epstein at one time.
This has prompted a huge and growing public outcry calling for the guilty to be punished. Epstein himself was serving an 18-month term in prison for sex trafficking when he was found dead in his cell in 2019. His suspicious death in prison, purportedly by suicide, added jet fuel to the rumours of what happened on the island.
In Nair’s case – as in many others – the latest file release revealed that only that she had attended an “after party” for a film at the townhouse of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s sidekick and partner in crime, now serving time in federal prison for her role in sex trafficking.
That’s it. Nair attended a party. She never went to the notorious Epstein Island. Yet she and her son are already facing torrents of abuse because of the alleged link. Almost immediately, AI generated photos of Naim, Mamdani and Epstein began to circulate. This is the world we now live in.
I am no fan of Zohran Mamdani or his politics. Quite the opposite, in fact. But the abuse he and his mother are already facing based on her attending a party where no wrongdoing is alleged to have taken place is just the latest sign that having your name associated with the dreaded Epstein, however casually, can be extremely damaging.
Even President Trump, who once said he could shoot somebody in Times Square and his popularity wouldn’t diminish, has lost support as a result of his association with Epstein, however innocent it may have been.
In this social-media driven, accusatory and self-righteous time, any link, however tenuous, with Epstein likely will results in thousands of accusations of being a “pedo,” never mind that Epstein was never accused of pedophilia, which the National Institutes of Health defines as “a sexual interest in prepubescent children [that] is empirically linked with sexual offending against children.” Epstein was accused of trafficking underage girls (ephebophilia, which is bad enough), but not prepubescent children.
That hasn’t stopped anyone, however remotely associated with Epstein, being referred to as pedos by thousands, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of self-righteous keyboard warriors.
The surname Epstein, once most associated with former Beatles manager Brian Epstein, has now become as close to a dirty word as a name can get. Public anger at him and those associated with him, however tenuously, shows no signs of abating, and both real and imagined tales of misdeeds in the “Epstein files” are likely to circulate for the foreseeable future.
The online crowds figuratively screaming pedo and baying for the heads of anyone even tangentially linked to ‘Epstein have turned him into the real-life equivalent of Emmanuel Goldstein, the fictional character in George Orwell’s 1984 whom the totalitarian “Big Brother” regime labelled an “enemy of the people” to focus and divert public anger and hatred onto him. In our non-fictional world, the anger about Epstein has taken on Goldstein-esque dimensions.
The widespread rage over Epstein, whether justifiable or not, could have been used, as Goldstein was, by the powers-that-be to divert massive discontent about the creeping authoritarianism in our societies now manifesting as censorship, state intrusion and misapplied policing.
If only so many of them weren’t on the list.
