Groomer Panic for Thee, Impunity for Me

Pride proms get outrage. Billionaires get excuses. The Epstein fallout is exposing the real protection racket

Good morning! It’s a comparatively quiet Trump day, which usually means one of two things: either nothing is happening, or everything is happening somewhere else. Today, it’s very much the latter. While Trump himself appears to be conserving energy (or oxygen), the Epstein files continue to detonate across governments, law firms, academia, and now even the Olympics, exposing what looks less like a scandal and more like a sprawling mutual-aid society for powerful men who assumed accountability was for other people.

Start in London, where Prime Minister Keir Starmer is fighting for political survival after admitting he knew something about Peter Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein before appointing him as Britain’s ambassador to the United States, just not, he insists, the “depth” or “darkness” of it. Newly released DOJ documents suggest that darkness included leaked sensitive materials, money exchanges, and grotesque, buddy-buddy correspondence long after Epstein’s conviction. Starmer has apologized to Epstein’s victims, stripped Mandelson of party membership and his House of Lords seat, referred him to police, and promised transparency, then been stopped by investigators asking him not to release evidence mid-probe. It’s a mess, and it’s destabilizing a government less than two years old. The takeaway isn’t that Starmer is uniquely bad at judgment; it’s that Epstein’s shadow is long enough to knock over sitting prime ministers in 2026.

Cross the Atlantic and the same shadow just claimed another scalp. Brad Karp, the longtime chairman of elite law firm Paul Weiss, abruptly resigned after emails showed him socializing with Epstein years after his 2008 conviction, praising him as an “extraordinary host,” and asking favors for his son. Paul Weiss didn’t blink when Karp cut a deal with Trump last year rather than challenge an unconstitutional executive order other firms fought and won, by the way, but the Epstein files flipped the risk calculus. Institutions will tolerate a lot. They will not tolerate becoming part of the Epstein story.

And if anyone is still clinging to the idea that Epstein was a lone monster, today’s reporting should put that fantasy out of its misery. Newly released emails show Epstein actively tracking the #MeToo movement like a sporting event, ranking which powerful men were “down,” “up to bat,” or “whacked,” deriding women who came forward, and quietly advising accused men on legal and PR strategy. From Harvey Weinstein to Charlie Rose to Brett Ratner to Lawrence Krauss, Epstein functioned as a behind-the-scenes consigliere for men facing consequences, swapping notes with lawyers, journalists, publicists, and political operatives. Instead of a social circle, think of it as a bunker for predators.

The Krauss emails are especially revealing and nauseating. Epstein reviewed draft apologies, suggested cross-examination strategies, mocked accusers, and helped frame the physicist’s defense as a persecution narrative. At one point Krauss bragged that a woman on a conciliation committee was “old… not some young metoo bitch.” These are the people who later complain about “cancel culture.” What they mean is that the private systems that once protected them stopped working.

As if to underline how global and shameless this network was, reporting out of Ukraine shows Epstein and his associates working modeling pipelines in Kyiv and Odesa, arranging flights and luxury hotel stays, discussing real estate in Lviv, and even fantasizing about exploiting “sophisticated corruption” around Ukraine’s 2019 election. There is no evidence implicating the Ukrainian government, but expect bad actors to try anyway. The documents tell a simpler story: Epstein did in Ukraine what he did everywhere else, because impunity travels well.

And now the fallout has reached Los Angeles, where pressure is mounting on LA28 Olympic Committee Chair Casey Wasserman to resign after emails with Ghislaine Maxwell, dating back to 2003, showed sexually explicit exchanges during the period when Maxwell was trafficking young women. Wasserman has apologized, but local officials aren’t buying it. Their point is brutally straightforward: you don’t get to preside over an Olympics that celebrates women’s participation while minimizing ties to a convicted human trafficker. Either the Epstein files matter for leadership, or they don’t.

Which brings us, neatly and bitterly, back to yesterday’s story about the Coos County Pride Prom, and to Coos County Commissioner Rod Taylor, who has worked very hard to present himself as a moral authority while attacking local LGBTQ+ youth.

For perspective on that posture: when I’ve emailed Commissioner Taylor with basic questions about his claims and conduct, he has repeatedly declined to answer them. Instead, he has chosen to respond with condescension, calling me “cute” and “silly,” telling me I “can’t handle truth,” and, in one instance, bragging about his sexual prowess rather than addressing the substance of my inquiry. This is the man positioning himself as a defender of children and community standards.

At the same time, Taylor openly supports Donald Trump, a man with a long, well-documented social history with Jeffrey Epstein, and who has been found liable by a jury for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll. Those facts are not rumors, conspiracies, or “political attacks.” They are matters of public record.

Just yesterday, far-right activists were whipping themselves into a frenzy over a community dance for LGBTQ+ teenagers, accusing organizers of “grooming,” projecting sexual menace onto kids doing nothing more radical than wanting to exist safely and joyfully. Today, those same political forces are conspicuously quiet as document after document shows real trafficking, real abuse, and real elite protection networks operating in plain sight for decades.

The far right does not obsess over Pride events because they are dangerous. They obsess over them because they are powerless targets. Queer kids don’t have armies of lawyers, billion-dollar firms, diplomatic immunity, or Olympic boards to shield them. Epstein’s circle did, and that’s why the moral panic always flows downward, never up.

What we’re watching now isn’t justice in the clean, cinematic sense. It’s something messier and more revealing: accountability through disclosure. Resignations, police referrals, institutions scrambling to amputate leaders before the rot spreads further. Governments wobbling, law firms recalculating, and global brands discovering that “we didn’t know” doesn’t play well when the emails are right there.

Trump may be hiding from the press today, but the ecosystem that protected people like Epstein, and that continues, even now, to protect Trump, is anything but. For once, the silence isn’t reassuring. It’s the sound of doors closing behind people who assumed they would never be forced into the light.

The hypocrisy is impossible to miss. In town halls and school board meetings, the right demands purity tests from teenagers at a Pride prom. In the national press, they manufacture moral panics out of drag shows and library books. But when the evidence points upward toward billionaires, diplomats, law partners, Olympic power brokers, and a former president with deep, documented proximity to Epstein, the outrage curdles into excuses, evasions, and silence.

That double standard is the real story. Accountability is reserved for the powerless, while impunity is built for the connected.

Maybe that’s the only way to end a morning like this: with the reminder that life keeps insisting on itself, even as institutions scramble to manage yet another scandal instead of confronting what it reveals. I’ve been fighting off a touch of cold or flu, but Marz is convinced the best medicine is a chilly morning romp, no matter how many layers I’m wearing or how little interest I have in being spiritually awakened by freezing air before coffee.