Trump, Epstein, and a Conspiracy of Incentives

How “reasonable decisions” can produce scandal-sized damage and why the most important question is what institutions do with what they know.

A scandal that began as a story about one man’s predation has metastasized into something larger: a test of how modern institutions behave when information is humiliating, politically radioactive, and costly. The Jeffrey Epstein case has always been about crimes against real people, many of them young, many of them vulnerable, and many of them harmed in ways that do not neatly fit inside courtroom transcripts. Yet the public conversation keeps drifting toward spectacle, name hunting, and factional score-settling, as if the only meaningful outcome is a list of villains and a list of celebrities.

Reality is more sobering and more urgent. A list of famous names can satisfy curiosity, but it rarely builds a system that prevents the next victim. What matters now is whether states and institutions treat these materials as a path toward victim identification, accountability, and structural reform, or treat them as a liability to be managed, delayed, and safely boxed away. For the people harmed in this story, the files are not entertainment and not closure.