| On Sunday, the Boston Globe’s Ideas section published an essay from me that I hope will spark some constructive discussion and debate. The piece is available at the Globe’s website for subscribers, but the Globe has allowed me to reprint the piece in its entirety for newsletter readers. The text and links below are identical, though this version has different graphics and illustrations. |
| This is an important, complex, and controversial topic, and you may be inclined to strongly disagree with my position. My only request is that you read the piece all the way to the end — it should only take you about 15 minutes — before forming your conclusions. |
| I’m grateful to the Globe and the editors of the Ideas section for agreeing to run this piece, which may challenge many readers’ preconceptions, and for giving me the space to make the argument at length. |
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 | | The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House 427-1 and the Senate by unanimous consent in November 2025. |
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| IN APRIL, a 25-year-old man named Edward Juul Rod-Larsen died by suicide in Oslo, Norway. You have probably never heard of him, but his death appears to have been the first — and, one hopes, the last — caused by the US government’s release of the Epstein files. |
| Rod-Larsen was the son of Norwegian diplomats who had large financial dealings with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. There were no allegations of wrongdoing against the young man himself, but he had drawn the attention of Norwegian media outlets, social media sleuths, and international tabloids, which reported that Epstein’s will had left him millions of dollars, that Epstein had helped him apply for coveted internships, and — of particular note to some — that his parents may have taken him to Epstein’s island as a child. He died several days after Norwegian and French police announced a joint investigation into Epstein’s questionable financial relationship with his parents, whose lawyers sharply criticized the public scrutiny and sordid innuendo that had enveloped him in his final months. |
| The death of Rod-Larsen complicates the record of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was supposed to expose men who had engaged in child sex trafficking with Epstein and whose crimes had been ignored by the Justice Department under both the first Trump and Biden administrations. One of the law’s cosponsors, Representative Ro Khanna of California, said the release of the files would expose a “rape island, where rich and powerful men were abusing young girls with impunity.” The other cosponsor, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, accused those who opposed the law’s passage last year of “running cover for an underage sex trafficking ring.” Advocates for the law also claimed that releasing the files would promote broader objectives of accountability and transparency. |
 | | What the law’s sponsors said the files would show |
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| It has been nine months since the Justice Department completed its release of the evidence, but the benefits have been much less compelling than advertised, and it’s time to admit an unpopular fact: The law was a bad idea, and it should not have been passed. |
| The release of the Epstein files has produced gripping revelations about how elites consort with one another, but a key claim made by lawmakers and other advocates for disclosure — that the Justice Department’s files would expose a hidden child sex trafficking ring — has not been substantiated. And the law has not otherwise provided the justice or the clarity that was promised. Since January, many people have been criticized and in some cases professionally punished for associating with Epstein after he was convicted in 2008 of procuring a minor for prostitution and solicitation of prostitution. But virtually all of those relationships were already known from public reporting. The fallout seems to have had more to do with public and political pressure than with releasing new information. |
| The costs — most of which have been obscured from public view or, like the death of Rod-Larsen, ignored by lawmakers and advocates — have significantly outweighed the benefits. |
| The disclosure broke with long-established criminal procedures that generally require the Justice Department to keep its investigative files confidential unless the government presents that material as evidence in a criminal case. At that point, the defendant has the opportunity to test the government’s case and cross-examine witnesses before an impartial judge and jury pursuant to the rules of evidence. The victims never get full access to the government’s investigative files. The disclosure law was designed to balance the cross-cutting interests of the victims, the government, and the public, and to treat crime victims equally across cases, regardless of differences in public attention or interest. |
| The Epstein law ultimately required the diversion of an extraordinary amount of Justice Department resources, including weeks of document review by hundreds of Justice Department prosecutors whose work on countless active federal criminal investigations was slowed or entirely halted during this period. (I contacted Khanna and Massie for interviews about the costs and benefits of the law; Khanna declined, and Massie’s office did not respond.) |
| This is not the standard of justice we aspire to in this country. The presumption of innocence has been turned on its head. We have countenanced an ethos of guilt by association. And we have allowed a free-for-all driven by the indiscriminate release of millions of unvetted pages of documents collected by investigators, including emails, photos, and summaries of witness interviews containing salacious allegations that may or may not be true. |
| In the tragic case of Rod-Larsen, no one actually knows why Epstein made the unusual bequest, but some people speculated on social media that perhaps his parents had taken him to Epstein’s island as a child to be molested and that perhaps the money in the will had something to do with that. If these grave and unsubstantiated allegations were true, that would be a horror, of course. But we have considerably more evidence for another kind of victimization: Rod-Larsen looks like an innocent bystander whose life was cut short as the result of an ill-conceived law. |
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 | | Federal prosecutors investigated Epstein’s potential co-conspirators years before Congress passed the law. |
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| WE SHOULD START with a simple but crucial point: It has been more than half a year since the Justice Department completed its release, but no one in Congress or the media has credibly identified any other men who participated in the child sex trafficking masterminded by Epstein and his coconspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. This surprises many people, but it makes some sense given the relevant facts and law. |
| According to the government’s allegations against Epstein and the proof at Maxwell’s trial, their abuse of minors ended sometime around 2005. That is when police in Palm Beach, Fla., began investigating Epstein, after the family of a 14-year-old girl accused him of sexually abusing her. In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges of solicitation of prostitution and procuring a minor for prostitution. He continued to abuse women, but he turned his focus to those in their late teens and early 20s. |
| As a legal matter, it is substantially more difficult to prove federal charges of sex trafficking involving adults. When the case involves minors, prosecutors must establish only that the victims engaged in sex for money. But when the alleged victims are adults, prosecutors must also show that they did not consent to the transaction — that they were instead induced to do so by force, fraud, or coercion. |
| Epstein may very well have been aware of this distinction and for precisely this reason changed his behavior following his conviction. This also helps to explain why the Justice Department never charged Epstein or Maxwell with any misconduct occurring after 2005 and why the people who associated with Epstein in the years after his conviction can maintain that they did not know the full extent of his crimes. |
| Many people still believe that there is a group of powerful men who participated in Epstein’s child sex trafficking whose names have yet to be revealed, and it is hard to blame them. For one thing, lawmakers and advocates keep making provocative and unsubstantiated claims to that effect. |
| Others find it impossible to believe that Epstein and Maxwell operated alone when they were abusing young girls. They didn’t. Epstein and Maxwell had help recruiting minors, but those associates were women who claim to have been victimized themselves. That fact gives rise to a host of difficult questions — both legal and moral — but lawmakers and advocates have largely ignored them. |
| For years, many people have taken for granted that Epstein “lent out” young girls to other men and, as a result, that identifying and charging those men with sex crimes would be relatively straightforward if the Justice Department were willing to pursue them. Federal investigators, however, tried and failed to corroborate this claim, according to an internal memo written by line prosecutors in December 2019 that was released as part of the Justice Department’s production of documents. One prominent accuser, Virginia Giuffre, alleged that other women joined her in sexual encounters with other men at the direction of Epstein and Maxwell, but at least two of those women have disputed her account, and none of the other victims who were interviewed at the time “described being expressly directed by either Maxwell or Epstein to engage in sexual activity with any other men,” according to the memo. |
 | | In a memo dated Dec. 19, 2019, federal prosecutors in Manhattan concluded that they could not corroborate the claim that Epstein had “lent out” his victims to other men. |
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| The Justice Department was not the only interested party whose assessment was that Epstein and Maxwell had for the most part acted alone. A lawyer for Epstein’s victims who had spent nearly 20 years on the case reached a similar conclusion based on the evidence he had seen over the years. He told a media outlet last summer, before the law passed, that “Jeffrey Epstein was the pimp and the john. He was his own No. 1 client.” |
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 | | More than 500 federal prosecutors spent months reviewing and redacting the Epstein files for release instead of handling their normal responsibilities investigating and prosecuting federal crimes. |
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| MEANWHILE, the release of the files has incurred many costs, even setting aside the death of Rod-Larsen. |
| Epstein’s victims have had to deal with threats and attacks — in part because of the Justice Department’s careless failure to redact some of the documents — without getting the revelations that they were promised by lawmakers and advocates. |
| The release of the documents was supposed to put years of Epstein-related conspiracy theories to rest and clarify the facts, but instead it has compounded the rumors and innuendo with entirely new conspiracy theories and internet junk that will contaminate our politics and culture for the foreseeable future. Malign foreign actors have falsely tied Epstein to the Dalai Lama, President Emmanuel Macron of France, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, among other prominent political and cultural figures who have been swept into the maelstrom. Meanwhile, the old conspiracy theories — that Epstein was killed in jail, for instance — have not died despite newly available evidence to the contrary. This is all unfortunate but not surprising given what we know about conspiracy theories, human nature, and the internet. |
 | | Malign foreign actors and social media users have used the Epstein files to produce entirely new conspiracy theories and internet junk implicating a wide array of political and cultural figures. |
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| The release of the Epstein files will also impede federal law enforcement efforts in future high-profile criminal investigations. The federal government often gathers an extraordinary volume of material in complex criminal investigations, including documents with sensitive or embarrassing information that is irrelevant to the underlying crimes; statements from unreliable or dishonest witnesses who falsely implicate or impugn other people; and information about cooperating witnesses who could be put in danger if, as in the case of the Epstein files, their involvement became public knowledge. |
| Before the Epstein law, the government took great pains to keep information gathered during criminal investigations out of public view unless that material was introduced during an actual criminal case. Now, innocent people may hesitate to cooperate or volunteer information to the Justice Department in high-profile cases that they believe may later attract the attention of Congress and result in the disclosure of highly sensitive information that was never supposed to become public. |
| The release of the Epstein files also diverted an enormous amount of prosecutorial resources that cannot be recovered. More than 500 federal prosecutors, including at one point nearly every prosecutor in the Manhattan US attorney’s office, spent months reviewing and redacting the documents for release instead of handling their normal responsibilities investigating and prosecuting federal crimes. In at least some instances, those responsibilities likely included investigating ongoing sex crimes and child sex abuse cases, which means that the release of the files effectively slowed those investigations and prolonged those victims’ suffering. |
| This is an uncomfortable fact — that the commitment of unprecedented federal law enforcement resources to the production of the Epstein files almost certainly came at the expense of hundreds if not thousands of other crime victims — but it was also unavoidable. Members of Congress portrayed the Epstein law as a straightforward proposition — the Justice Department simply needed to release the documents in its possession — but they allocated no money for the exercise and effectively obscured the sizable opportunity costs from public view. |
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 | | Democrats have said that the Epstein files will figure prominently in their oversight agenda if they win back the House of Representatives in November, but there are many other subjects competing for their attention. |
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| DEFENDERS OF THE LAW tend to fall back on several points, but these do not hold up well under scrutiny. It is true, for instance, that many rich and powerful people socialized and worked with Epstein after his 2008 conviction, but we knew that already. It does not establish that these people — as politically varied as Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and Howard Lutnick — knew about the full extent of Epstein’s misconduct (a point that they have all contested) or that the limited benefits of publicly castigating them for this has exceeded the considerable costs of the law taken in its totality. |
| The law aimed to identify criminals who participated in Epstein’s crimes, but we have instead been treated to allegations of guilt by association, on the theory that people in proximity to Epstein must have known about the scale of his private misdeeds. It is of course true that they knew (or should have known) about Epstein’s 2008 conviction, but the government’s incredibly lenient treatment of Epstein at the time suggested that his conduct was limited in scope and that the evidence against him was weak. That assessment turned out to be terribly wrong in hindsight. But it was not until public reporting in 2018 spurred questions about the lenient treatment that people began to sharply reevaluate what they thought they knew. |
| This argument — that the people who socialized with Epstein must have known about the extent of his crimes — is also hard to take seriously given that members of Congress themselves do not do much better at evaluating the character of the people in their proximity. The serious allegations of sexual misconduct against Eric Swalwell, the former Democratic congressman from California, and the serious allegations of domestic abuse against Max Miller, a sitting Republican congressman in Ohio, are just two recent examples. |
| The Justice Department’s disclosure has spurred a number of investigations by foreign governments, but in the case of figures like former Prince Andrew in the United Kingdom, there has been little in the way of new information about their alleged misdeeds that we did not already know. Congress and the Justice Department already had confidential ways of disclosing this evidence to foreign governments, including by sharing information pursuant to mutual legal assistance treaties. Moreover, most of those investigations concern alleged improprieties by public officials in office (receiving gifts from Epstein or sharing confidential information with him), not the alleged child sex trafficking that led to the passage of the law. And of course, it remains to be seen whether any serious criminal charges will result. |
| Advocates for the law also argue that the Justice Department is improperly withholding millions of pages of documents, but that claim is misleading. It is based largely on comments made at a press conference in January by Attorney General Todd Blanche, who said the department had initially collected six million pages and then withheld millions of pages that were irrelevant to the Epstein case. This is standard practice when lawyers collect documents for production, and there is nothing inherently nefarious about it. (You might also wonder why Blanche would have volunteered this information to the media during a live press conference if it was evidence of a cover-up.) |
| Democrats have said that the Epstein files will figure prominently in their oversight agenda if they win back the House of Representatives in November, but there are many other subjects competing for their attention: the violent and unprecedented immigration enforcement crackdown that continues to result in people dying in the streets and in federal custody, the indiscriminate gutting of the federal workforce by Elon Musk’s DOGE, and the seemingly endless forms of enrichment being pioneered by President Trump and his family, to name just a few. In at least some of those cases, a well-conducted congressional investigation could produce evidence of criminal misconduct that should be prosecuted by the next administration. |
| Khanna and Massie recently proposed a second Epstein transparency law, but at this point it is better understood as a tacit admission of failure than an effort to promote the public interest. Their bill would allow private parties and state and local prosecutors to sue the Justice Department for its shortcomings in compliance with the first law. It would also require the Justice Department to share its full set of files with state and local prosecutors upon request. This is likely to create more conflict and confusion, not clarity or justice. |
| Congress did not need to dump millions of pages of contextless documents into the public domain in order to get answers for the American public, which remains just as confused and angry today as it was last year, and Democrats should not double down if they retake one or both chambers of Congress. If they want to pursue the matter further, they should set up an Epstein Commission led by a well-respected former federal prosecutor with a professional staff, resources, and a mandate to review the Justice Department’s investigation behind closed doors and report back to Congress and the public on its findings. That would take this work out of the public domain — where it never belonged — and allow Congress to provide the American public with a professional, independent, and nonpartisan review of the facts and the Justice Department’s investigation. |
| The Epstein Files Transparency Act was well-intentioned, but it was a mistake that has not achieved its stated objectives, and it has consumed scarce government resources and public attention at a time when many other pressing and ongoing issues warrant the attention of Congress and the public. It may also have contributed to the tragic death of a young man. It’s time to move on. |
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CREDITS
All graphics and illustrations by Open File.
Top: Adapted from photos by Navin75 (1, 2).
The law: Adapted from the enrolled bill.
Quotes: Rep. Thomas Massie on X and the House floor; Rep. Ro Khanna at a U.S. Capitol news conference and on Channel 5.
Magnifying glass: Adapted from documents released by the Justice Department.
Memo: From a memo released by the Justice Department.
Document wall: Adapted from documents released by the Justice Department.
Collage: Adapted from photos of Mark Carney, the Dalai Lama, Ellen DeGeneres, Leonardo DiCaprio, Nikki Haley, Jay-Z, Hakeem Jeffries, Erika Kirk, María Corina Machado, Emmanuel Macron, Zohran Mamdani, Pusha T and Volodymyr Zelensky.
Capitol: Adapted from a photo of the Capitol and documents released by the Justice Department. |
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