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The
Epstein Files Have Become The Ultimate Disturbing Horror Movie. No Wonder We
Can’t Look Away
By Owen
Gleiberman
Feb 15,
2026 11:12am PT
In the
last decade, I’ve occasionally written pieces that compared what’s happening in
the world — specifically, in the Trump presidency — to something we’re used to
seeing on the big screen. Eight months into his first term, I wrote a column
entitled “Donald Trump’s Pop-Culture Presidency Enters Its Thriller Phase,” in
which I argued that Trump was “acting like an unhinged president out of a
movie,” and that his reckless threats against North Korea were designed to get
a cinematic rise out of us; it was saber-rattling as showbiz. Given how
disastrous and threatening his second term has turned out to be (no mere
cinematic posturing — a true descent into authoritarian terror and
lawlessness), such comparisons may now seem trivial and beside the point. I certainly
wouldn’t say there’s much about the Trump presidency today that “reminds me of
a movie.”
But I
will say that, insistently, about the Epstein files. Let’s be clear: The
Jeffrey Epstein story is a scandal of impossible momentousness. Right now, it’s
already looking like it could be Watergate times 10. It’s a saga of crime,
cover-up and corruption — not just corruption but bone-deep rot — that’s driven
by primal currents of fear and horror and victimization. The victims are real,
and there are many of them. Keeping the awareness of what they’ve been through
front and center is essential to approaching this story.
What I
want to talk about, however, is the way that so many of us have experienced the
Epstein story over the last two weeks — specifically, since Friday, Jan. 30,
the day of the second document dump of redacted files. Let me make a
confession: Ever since that day, I have been in the rabbit hole — that is, down
the Epstein rabbit hole on the Internet, where I have scarcely come up for air.
I am not, by nature, a conspiracy theorist (for the record: I believe Lee
Harvey Oswald acted alone). And in the occasional rabbit holes I’ve let myself
go down a bit, like the long night I spent in 2007, from about 1:00 a.m. to
6:00 a.m., in 9/11-was-an-inside-job land (by the time the sun came up, I had
snapped back to reality), I’ve learned how unhealthy and warped it can be to
give in to the desire to go through the looking glass.
But the
Epstein case is different. Simply put, there’s so much we don’t know. The story
is so disturbing and sensational in its criminality that it’s like a car
accident: horrific, but you can’t turn away. Through it all, we’ve been looking
at mere fragments of information, trying to poke around black boxes and black
bars. We have a government that wants to wall it off forever. I so wish that
this was Watergate, and that I was reading full-scale investigative reports
about it in places like The New York Times. But that’s not the world we’re in.
Like so many others, I’ve been trying to piece together the Epstein saga in
shadowy corners of the Web because that, for the moment, is the only way to
glimpse the reality, to grab onto the tips of the icebergs and see where they
lead.
For that
reason, the Epstein files story has now taken on the dimensions of a
labyrinthine dark thriller, one that promises to lead to a staggering
revelation at the end of the tunnel. The revelation, in this case, being two
things at once: the identities of those involved…and what they did. And it’s
the latter point that’s now starting to look darker than many of us could have
imagined. The movie question, the one of intense and unfathomable drama, is
this: How dark does this thing get? Is it “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” or
is it “Cannibal Holocaust”?
When you
explore the Epstein case on the Internet, you’re led to some very unsettling
theories and places. Some of it is speculative, some is attached to shards of
evidence, and the fact that so much of it exists in a gray zone between the
plausible and the uncanny is part of the unique quality of the case. It’s an
onion of evil that raises the following questions, almost in order: Are we
dealing, simply, with a convicted sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, who indulged
his criminal sexual pathologies and shared them with his ring of fellow
predators and associates? Since we know that he had surveillance cameras
everywhere (hence the thousands of hours of confiscated Epstein video, almost
none of which we’ve seen), was he involved in blackmail? If so, to what end —
financial or political? Or was he just using all of that for “leverage”? Was
Epstein working for the Mossad, or for Russian intelligence (Russia is
mentioned 10,000 times in the Epstein files; Putin 1,000 times)? Or both? That
Ghislaine Maxwell’s late corrupt media-baron father, Robert Maxwell, was
allegedly working for the Mossad raises the possibility.
But all
of this has been discussed for years. In recent weeks, the specter has been
raised of a disquieting new level of Epstein darkness. And that’s where the
“movie” I’m talking about becomes murky…but also where it changes character and
grows deadlier in its significance. For if that darker level is real, we could
be in the midst of the most world-shaking news event since World War II.
It’s been
said that the three million Epstein files yet to be released are the worst of
them: the most graphic and extreme. Do they contain images of the sexual abuse
of children? Children as young as 9 or 10? Or younger? Do they contain images
of torture? To even consider the possibility requires, in one’s imagination,
the entrance into a kind of horror movie. I say that because it’s just about
the only paradigm we have. Yet as you research this stuff, and come upon
stories of “elite” global aristocrats who have participated in child sex abuse
and child murder, you find yourself thinking, “My God, was QAnon onto
something?”
There’s a
powerful piece of data that backs up the idea that QAnon, as unhinged and
farfetched as its theories could be, was onto something. It’s been documented
that in the 1990s, with the rise of the Internet, the amount of sex trafficking
around the globe spiked in a significant way. That’s because the new technology
facilitated it. It is now a $150 billion industry. There are millions of people
who are trafficked around the world each year, and a number of them are
children. The question that’s almost too disturbing to ask is: Who are those
children trafficked to? It seems more than likely that they’re trafficked to
people of wealth and power. And it’s not as if those children are then
“returned”…to their parents, or orphanage, or wherever. They’re abused, and
then they — or some of them, anyway — disappear.
Jeffrey
Epstein was arguably the most powerfully connected sex trafficker in the
Western world. So it only makes sense to look at him and think that he might
have participated in that criminal circle of hell. That’s why the stray clues
we’ve seen so far in the Epstein files (references to children, and photographs
of them; references to torture) are so unnerving. It’s telling, to me, that up
until two weeks ago, almost no one had even heard of Zorro Ranch, the vast
compound Epstein owned in New Mexico. (It was isolated, because he owned miles
of the surrounding land, which he’d purchased at a fire-sale price.) It was as
sprawling a “getaway” as Little St. James Island, the Epstein compound we all
know about. But why is it never mentioned? The rumor — I’m speaking in rumors
because I have not read a report about this in The New York Times — is that
that’s where he oversaw his darkest activities. What went on at Zorro Ranch?
After Epstein’s death, the place was sold off and never treated as a crime
scene.
When you
go down the Epstein rabbit hole, you encounter stories and theories that can
seem outlandish, the majority of which are likely untrue. Here are just a few:
that Epstein’s death was faked, and that he is still alive (“photographs” of
him in Tel Aviv have been popping up; they are surely AI); that Stanley Kubrick
was murdered for laying bare the depravity of the global elite in “Eyes Wide
Shut”; and that the owner of a certain Washington, D.C., pizza parlor is a
member of the Rothschild family. This is all stuff that would make a good
suspense film.
Yet the
essence of the Epstein rabbit hole is that you begin to encounter “outlandish”
things that start to seem less outlandish. Like, for instance, the theory that
Epstein was murdered (there have been significant circumstantial questions
about what went on, with respect to guards and surveillance tapes, the night of
his death). Or the fact that Epstein ordered 60 55-gallon drums of sulfuric
acid delivered to his island, the invoice dated the same day the U.S.
Attorney’s Office in Manhattan reopened its federal investigation into him.
(That actually happened.) Or the haunting videotape I have seen online that
purports to show a well-known political operative torturing a child. Is the
video real? I cannot say. But a part of me says that I’m haunted by it because
it is real.
All of
this — true or untrue, confirmed or speculative — has the effect of making it
feel like we’re seeing a curtain slowly being drawn back, revealing the reality
we were living with without knowing it, the nightmare lurking behind our
everyday dream. Very “Rosemary’s Baby.” And to the degree that that nightmare
proves to be real, it could shake the very foundations of our society: our core
perceptions of power, and politics, and celebrity, and what members of the
“privileged” class feel secretly privileged to do. The videos in the Epstein
files are, of course, all too real, and if they’re ever released, the crimes
that are on them finally revealed, it could start to bring this ultimate
true-life mystery movie to a close, and in a way that stays shockingly true to
our movie-fed imaginations: by letting us see it all with our own eyes.
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