Memes and moral bankruptcy
Do you know how upset I have to be about something to re-activate my long-dormant Substack?
You open Instagram. In trying to toggle between your homepage and your direct messages, your finger clicks the reel tab, which Instagram recently moved to the spot where your DMs used to live. The first thing you see is an AI-generated fancam of Jeffrey Epstein as Iron Man. Charlie Kirk also makes an appearance as Captain America, and Trump and Diddy can be seen in several background shots. It has hundreds of thousands of likes. The comments are full of praise for this “AI gem.”
If you’ve been on the internet in the last few months or keep up with national news at all, you’ve undoubtedly come across one of the many tranches of heavily redacted Epstein files that have been released in waves by the U.S. Department of Justice. I’m willing to bet, if you’ve been exposed to those, you’ve also been served memes about them.
In many ways, this isn’t shocking. Memeing serious current events is not a new phenomenon, and it’s one that I myself have at times participated in. But as the releases have grown more and more disturbing, it’s clear that joking about any aspect of this case is an affront to survivors and helps launder the long-term perception of Epstein and his associates.
The inconsistent rollout of the Epstein files to begin with both prolongs survivors’ suffering and inures the public to its contents. Dr. Stacey Patton noted that this is a deliberate strategy meant to manufacture public, if not consent, then helplessness.
“Here’s the thing: the slow drip of the Epstein files isn’t about justice. It’s about conditioning. We’ve been watching information about elite criminality being released in fragments. Some names today. Some documents next month. A headline here. A shrug there. This strategy trains the public to metabolize horror in manageable doses. Not to act, not to demand, but to absorb so that all this evil just gets turned into background noise,” Patton wrote.
Survivors have written multiple letters to the DOJ urging them for the wholesale release of the unredacted files. The Epstein Transparency Act, which almost unanimously passed both the House and Senate in November, requires the DOJ release records related to Epstein and his criminal enterprise within 30 days, a deadline which has long since passed.
On January 18, survivor Haley Robson, in a letter to U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman, urged the court to enforce the DOJ’s compliance with the ETA. Thus far, she said, the Department has failed to make public the most important documents concerning the case, and has left many names of Epstein associates redacted in the releases. While the names and emails of powerful people continue to be redacted, the names and identifying information of survivors do not receive the same protections.
“As survivors, this failure is not merely procedural — it is deeply personal,” Robson wrote. “Continued noncompliance perpetuates the same secrecy that allowed these crimes to continue unchecked for years. It reinforces the painful and all too familiar message that while the law governs ordinary people, it does not govern the government and the wealthy, powerful individuals whose actions enabled widespread abuse.
More recently, on Jan. 30, another group of survivors signed a letter condemning the piecemeal manner in which the federal government has been releasing the files, calling it “a betrayal of the very people this process is supposed to serve.”
“Virginia Roberts Giuffre alone reported many abusers connected to Epstein’s network, yet the public still does not have the full truth about who enabled him, who participated in his exploitation, and who has been shielded for years. Hundreds of women have come forward with additional reports like hers. The scale of this failure is staggering and indefensible,” according to the letter. “The Justice Department cannot claim it is finished releasing files until every legally required document is released and every abuser and enabler is fully exposed.”
…cue the memes!
Humor normalizes things. Just look at what’s happened to Charlie Kirk in the months after his death. People lost their jobs for posting anything less than reverent in the immediate aftermath of his murder, but now for many his life and work have been reduced to a punchline, a new slang word, an AI-generated song.
Something similar is happening with Jeffrey Epstein. At first, most of the jokes were related to the bizarre composition of his emails and the casual, brazen manner with which he and his associates discuss child trafficking and sexual abuse. But with each new tranche, the memes have been getting edgier and more exculpatory. Posters have even started editing “satirical” email exchanges that have been confused for real messages, an astonishing affront given the plethora of stranger-than-fiction authentic exchanges — is downplaying their severity really worth several thousand likes?
Child sexual abuse is, for pretty much anyone who doesn’t have direct experience with it, incomprehensible. Hell, it’s incomprehensible for those who have been through it. And though healing is possible, it’s a lifelong process. For the most part, I’m a high-functioning person, but every once in a while something will happen and my C-PTSD tightens its grip, constricting me and reminding me it will never go away entirely. One year ago while I was watching a movie with my ex, a domestic violence scene triggered a psychogenic nonepileptic seizure, unfortunately not my first. I have recurring dreams every few months that I get back together with my abuser, even though I haven’t seen or heard from him in around 15 years, and I wake up fearful, in a cold sweat. Whenever I start seeing someone new, I develop an unconscious but hard-to-shake fear that they will harm me, which makes me nauseous whenever I’m around them. And unfortunately, having experienced CSA has not shielded me from nonconsensual sexual encounters in adulthood — sadly, in fact, the majority of sexual assault survivors are revictimized at some point during their lifetime. All of that to say: I can empathize with the survivors whose healing processes and pursuits of justice are hampered and made light of at every turn.
But you shouldn’t have to be a survivor of sexual violence or an Epstein accuser to be outraged by the way people talk about him and his crimes online. When we all have access to everything terrible the world has to offer in the palm of our hands, it’s hard not to numb ourselves to the horrors, but unfortunately, if we want anything to change, it will involve a surge of feeling. And while I don’t think constantly engaging with trauma porn is the solution, it doesn’t help anyone to make light of, or turn away from, the problems.
“Each survivor has already paid a tremendous price,” Robson wrote in her letter to the DOJ. “Coming forward has required extraordinary courage, exposing ourselves to public scrutiny, retaliation, and lifelong emotional consequences. We did so with belief in our government and trusting that when Congress passed this law, the Executive Branch would honor it. Instead, we are met with continued delay, silence, and ongoing protection of identities that should no longer remain hidden.”
In posting, sharing, and liking memes and AI edits of Epstein, the public is doing just as much as the federal government to obscure the true nature of the case and help the perpetrators who are still at large — because Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell did not act alone — to evade justice.
this is amazing!! disgusting how the world is run by these men and we can’t even read their names
I like this