What Jeffrey Epstein's Emails Really Expose: The System Itself

Over the past few years, Jeffrey Epstein has dominated our collective attention in ways that are both revealing and troubling. On the surface, the sustained focus on a wealthy sexual predator who trafficked children over decades seems like progress. Perhaps a sign that we're finally holding powerful people accountable. But look closer. This has unfolded during a backlash against survivors of sexual violence, a rollback of protections for women, and the systematic removal of women from positions of power. Research funding for gender equity has vanished. So what does our obsession with Epstein really mean?

Part of it is obvious: The details are sensational, and social media algorithms reward outrage. The names in those files read like a global directory of power: political leaders, billionaires, academics, celebrities. Everyone who's anyone seems to orbit this depravity. That explains the clicks.

But I want to suggest something else is happening. Something more profound. As a psychologist who teaches students to analyze complex social problems, I see us collectively engaging in what I call for in my classroom: a dual analysis, what Lois Weis and Michelle Fine termed as critical bifocality. We're learning to hold two truths, two ways of understanding the world, at once. And that terrifies the powerful.

Why We Blame Individuals, and Why That's Dangerous Now

Americans have been trained to see failure as personal. Lost your home in foreclosure? You must have been irresponsible. Can't afford groceries? You should have worked harder. This is the logic of capitalism, and it's everywhere.

Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error: We overestimate individual responsibility for others' suffering while excusing our own struggles as caused by circumstances. It's a cognitive bias that protects our self-esteem but destroys our capacity for solidarity.

This isn't just about one man's moral failure. It's about a system where wealth creates impunity. Where the rules simply don't apply.

Right now, this error is especially dangerous. Grocery prices are up nearly 30% since 2019. Jobs feel precarious as AI reshapes entire industries. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids are terrorizing communities, disappearing neighbors and co-workers. For millions in Appalachia and the Rust Belt—regions promised economic revival—things have only gotten harder. This is the case all over the country, no matter whether red or blue designations have been imposed on us by the pundits.

When we're scared, we want simple answers. We want someone to blame. The fundamental attribution error gives us that: blame the immigrant, blame the lazy, blame anyone but the system itself.

The Power of Dual Analysis

But here's what I see happening with Epstein: We're refusing that simple narrative. We're doing something more sophisticated, more dangerous to power.

We're using what I teach as the individual lens: Yes, Jeffrey Epstein made choices. Yes, every person who enabled him (the many who looked away, who benefited, who participated) bears individual moral responsibility. We must hold them accountable. Children were harmed. Yes, Megyn Kelly, they were children. That demands justice.

But we're also using the structural lens: What system allowed this to happen? What conditions enabled it? And here's where it gets uncomfortable for the powerful in the world, like Donald Trump, one of Epstein’s closest friends.

When the System Protects the Predator

In 2008, Jeffrey Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor. He served barely a year in the private wing of a county jail with work-release privileges, where he was able to leave 12 hours a day, and even the door to his cell was unlocked. Most Americans would have gone to federal prison. But Epstein had connections.

Fast forward a decade. Between November 2018 and July 2019, 10 years after his conviction, Larry Summers was texting with Epstein, seeking advice on how to seduce a female colleague he called his "mentee." Summers was former president of Harvard, former treasury secretary, one of the most powerful economists in America. And he was asking a convicted sex offender to be his "wing man" in pursuing a woman professionally vulnerable.

The correspondence ended July 5, 2019, one day before Epstein's arrest on federal sex trafficking charges.

This isn't just about one man's moral failure. It's about a system where wealth creates impunity. Where the rules simply don't apply.

The Numbers Don't Lie

The wealthy aren't just getting richer. They're extracting from the rest of us at an accelerating rate.

Today, the top 1% hold 30.5% of America's wealth. The bottom 50% (that's half of us) hold only 2.5%.

Imagine 100 of us in a room with a meal to share. It is a delicious platter of burgers and warm, salty fries that fills the room with a savory smell. All of us are hungry.

One person walks up and takes nearly a third of everything. They pile their plate high and walk away.

Nine more people step up and take most of what's left, about another third of the food between them.

The Epstein files are thousands of emails, each one a point of light illuminating how the system actually works. And it's terrifying to those who benefit from it.

That leaves 90 of us to divide the remaining third. But here's the thing: It's not divided equally. Forty people in the middle get modest portions. They have access to just enough to take the edge off their hunger. And the last 50 of us? We're left fighting over a few cold fries and some burger crumbs on the edge of the platter. That tiny pile is 2.5% of the meal that fed one person so lavishly.

The one person who took a third? They're not worried about the 90 of us who got less. They're counting on the 40 who got modest portions to blame the 50 who got crumbs. They're counting on all of us to fight each other instead of asking why one person gets to take so much in the first place.

It wasn’t always this way. Since 1989, the richest 1% have increased their share of national wealth by 34%. The bottom 50% have lost 26% of theirs.

This isn't about hard work or merit. The system is designed for extraction. You work every day. You show up. And still your debts deepen. Your loans grow. Your ability to build security evaporates.

Meanwhile, the wealthy fly on private jets to private islands where they commit acts of cruelty most of us can't imagine but all of us (except Megyn Kelly) agree are unlawful and immoral.

Why Trump Is Scared

The Epstein files are thousands of emails, each one a point of light illuminating how the system actually works. And it's terrifying to those who benefit from it.

Watch Trump's reaction. On November 14, when Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey asked about the files aboard Air Force One, Trump jabbed his finger at her: "Quiet! Quiet, piggy." Days later, he threatened ABC's broadcast license when reporter Mary Bruce asked similar questions.

This is the powerful suddenly being exposed, the curtain is lifting, and we see that these monsters are just tiny pathetic, greedy people. This is fear.

Trump campaigned in Appalachia promising economic relief. Eleven months later, he's proposed cutting the Appalachian Regional Commission by 93%, from $200 million to $14 million. In a region with 75 counties classified as economically "distressed," he's pulling the last federal lifeline.

The people who voted for Trump because they were promised someone who would fight the elites are watching those same elites protect each other. They're watching the system close ranks.

What Comes Next

The Epstein files aren't about one dead predator or even about the powerful men who enabled him. They're about a revelation that terrifies the ruling class: We're finally seeing the structure of division and dehumanization clearly.

This is why they are afraid: the 50 of us fighting over crumbs have far more in common with the 40 who got modest portions than any of us have with the one who took a third of the meal. The worker whose factory closed in Ohio and the immigrant whose neighbor was disappeared by Immigration and Customs Enforcement? We’re all being crushed by the same system. The rural Appalachian who can't afford medication and the urban renter who is being priced out? Same system. The young person drowning in student debt and the parent who can't afford childcare? Same system.

We can hold individual wrongdoers accountable AND dismantle the systems that enabled them.

The powerful maintain control by convincing us we're each other's enemies. Red versus blue. Urban versus rural. Immigrant versus native-born. But Jeffrey Epstein's private island wasn't divided by those lines. It was divided by one line only: those with enough wealth and power to do whatever they wanted to whoever they wanted, and those without.

The Epstein files show us something the powerful never wanted us to see: They protect each other. Across party lines, across industries, across borders, wealth creates a solidarity among the ruling class that transcends everything else. Larry Summers stayed loyal to Epstein a decade after his conviction. Trump's fear when reporters ask questions isn't about embarrassment, it's about exposure of that solidarity.

The question isn't just, "What will we do with what we know?" It's "Who will we do it with?"

The answer has to be each other. All of us who show up and work and still fall further behind. All of us whose neighbors are disappearing, whose communities are being stripped of resources, whose futures are being extracted by those private jets to private islands.

We can hold individual wrongdoers accountable AND dismantle the systems that enabled them. We can refuse the fundamental attribution error that asks us to blame our neighbors while ignoring who's taking the largest share.

This is the moment for clarity. This is the moment we refuse to unsee what's been revealed. This is the moment we recognize each other.

The 99% of us who aren't eating the majority of the meal? We have everything in common. Let's build with each other instead of for those who extract from us.