Jeffrey Epstein's Sexual Scandals Are Distractions From the Real Threats

Laura Hollis
Wed, 03 Dec 2025 18:26:58 -0800
Opinion

A few weeks ago, commentator Peggy Tierney wrote a Substack piece in which she referenced a long article — a profile piece — written about Jeffrey Epstein in 2014 by well-known author and journalist Michael Wolff. According to Tierney, although the article was intended to polish Epstein's public image, it was never picked up by any publication but nevertheless somehow ended up in parts of the "Epstein files" that were released earlier this year by the House Oversight Committee.

The countless articles, books and media documentaries about Epstein have fixated on his insatiable sexual appetites and predilection for teenage girls, as well as his willingness to provide the services of those very young females to some of his friends and colleagues. That lens on Epstein's life — and the nonstop public outrage it has generated — could easily lead one to conclude that the primary purpose of his existence was to serve as a wealthy and somewhat eccentric pimp for the world's elites.

Wolff's article, however, reveals otherwise. As gross as that behavior may have been, the teenage-girl sex stuff was a mere pastime, and fixating on it is a dangerous distraction.
Updated: Thu Dec 04, 2025

A few weeks ago, commentator Peggy Tierney wrote a Substack piece in which she referenced a long article — a profile piece — written about Jeffrey Epstein in 2014 by well-known author and journalist Michael Wolff. According to Tierney, although the article was intended to polish Epstein's public image, it was never picked up by any publication but nevertheless somehow ended up in parts of the "Epstein files" that were released earlier this year by the House Oversight Committee.

The countless articles, books and media documentaries about Epstein have fixated on his insatiable sexual appetites and predilection for teenage girls, as well as his willingness to provide the services of those very young females to some of his friends and colleagues. That lens on Epstein's life — and the nonstop public outrage it has generated — could easily lead one to conclude that the primary purpose of his existence was to serve as a wealthy and somewhat eccentric pimp for the world's elites.

Wolff's article, however, reveals otherwise. As gross as that behavior may have been, the teenage-girl sex stuff was a mere pastime, and fixating on it is a dangerous distraction.

The true threats from Epstein and his sycophants lay elsewhere.

Wolff starts out astonished that Epstein's Florida convictions for sex with minors did not deter the powerful people who sought him out. Wolff writes that Epstein's meetings with the world's movers and shakers "somehow stayed private or secret ... not out of any formal or stated restrictions, but because, in some sense, it would be very hard to explain just what you're doing there with a brazen sex offender in a guffaw-inducing home flaunting all moderation. And yet, defying disgrace, and tolerating his tone deafness — or mocking attitude toward the zeitgeist — so many come. Gladly. Willingly. Feeling that his invitation is quite an extraordinary privilege."

Who were these visitors to Epstein's salons — his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach, his apartment in Paris, his private island in the Caribbean, his lushly appointed private jets?

Heads of state and other political leaders, of course; Wolff mentions former President Bill Clinton, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, former Qatari foreign minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and a high-ranking member of former President Barack Obama's administration who asks not to be named.

But also the uber-rich. Bill Gates, Wolff says, was a "frequent visitor" and a "key advisor" to Epstein. Gates was only one of many billionaires who sought Epstein out. Rob Baron (of the billion-dollar Baron Fund) pays homage. PayPal founder Peter Thiel comes for lunch. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin ride to a TED Talk on Epstein's Boeing 737. Wolff describes a recent dinner as something out of a "conspiracy theorist's fantasy": six tech entrepreneurs worth hundreds of billions of dollars between them, sitting around Epstein's dining room table "trying to figure out how to ... shape the world to their liking."

Epstein was only too happy to help. His expertise, according to Wolff, was "hyper wealth." Wolff quotes Epstein as saying, "In the past, only governments had this kind of money, money of a reality altering scale. ... Now you have legions of people (with) vastly larger fortunes than Rockefeller or Carnegie had at their disposal, or might even have imagined."

So, Epstein helped them decide how to give to charitable causes?

Au contraire.

Epstein elaborated, "(I)t used to be that the rich, reaching a certain point of philanthropy, merely hoped to help make the world a better place; now they want

to change the world."

And how better to do that than to implement government policy on a global scale?

Interestingly, Brin's ex-wife and former Democratic Party vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan just gave an interview with conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey in which she talks about exactly this. Shanahan describes how she and other wives of the small handful of "tech mafia" billionaires in Silicon Valley (some of whom were almost certainly among the six at the dinner party Wolff described 11 years ago) were duped into thinking that the enormous donations their families and enterprises were making had charitable purposes, but were really part of the Klaus Schwab/WEF/Davos crowd's "Great Reset" — a movement designed to restructure the governments and economies of the planet into a planned, top-down command-and-control model with a small cadre of self-appointed leaders at the top in possession of everything, and everyone else crowded into "15-minute cities," with life's essentials rationed on the basis of social credit scores.

Shanahan explained how billions of dollars were funneled into nongovernmental organizations, purportedly for charity but really to implement policy. The constant refrains of "social justice" and "climate change," she says, were fabricated ruses designed to appeal to progressive women seeking personal validation through philanthropic work; wives and mothers too overwhelmed (and too medicated) to discover that the "charities" were coverups for global power grabs.

In that vein, Wolff's summation of Epstein's role is telling. He says, "Epstein's position in this ... is not as a philanthropist but as a sort of adviser or guru or brain — a rich whisperer — making him ... arguably among the most influential people you've only heard of for reasons that have nothing to do with his influence."

BOOM. There you go.

Those who don't believe Epstein committed suicide are certain he was taken out because he had "dirt" on men for whom he procured sexual services. Perhaps. But it seems more likely that the threat was not so much the potential exposure of the sexual exploitation per se but rather the possibility that all the revealed smut would undermine the longer-term political, economic and social objectives of Epstein's cohorts and advisees.

Either way, all the names in the "Epstein files" should be released. They all need to be exposed, not so much for their sexual inclinations but for their authoritarian aspirations.

It's worth mentioning that there are plenty of others who are just as set upon taking control of the world's governments, militaries, economies, agricultural and other production, and who had zero interest in Epstein, his opinions or his minions. They are just as dangerous, because they, too, see themselves as the rightful rulers of the planet. Whether or not they have sexual depravity in their background, they are exploiting all the power and financial resources available to them and using the same neo-Marxist and envirofascist propaganda to achieve their goals. They, like Epstein's fawning coterie, must never acquire the power they seek.