The Epstein files, the ‘global elite’ and comforting fictions

Our Deputy Chair (Board of Trustees) and colleague Mannie Sher writes:

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The tendency to treat Jeffrey Epstein as a depraved outlier is understandable, but politically evasive. It allows institutions to express moral outrage while avoiding scrutiny of how power operates.

From a systems perspective, Epstein did not thrive despite elite structures, but within them. Networks built on prestige, secrecy and advantage are prone to a collapse of accountability. When reputational risk outweighs ethical responsibility, wrongdoing is not confronted; it is managed, contained and deferred. In such environments, those willing to operate beyond ordinary limits become useful, until they become dangerous.

This collapse of accountability is particularly stark where sexual boundaries are transgressed. Across multiple contexts, from child-trafficking networks to scandals within churches, governments and other elite institutions, sexual abuse has repeatedly functioned as both a product and a corrosive of institutional failure, eroding moral authority while binding organisations into silence and complicity.

 The familiar post-hoc insistence that “no one knew” is less an explanation than a defence. It preserves the comforting fiction that failure was individual rather than structural. Abuses on this scale require not only a perpetrator, but sustained institutional blindness: legal, financial, academic and political.

 If public confidence is to be restored, the lesson is not merely that bad actors exist, but that systems which prize access over accountability will generate them.

Reform begins not with scapegoating, but with examining how elites protect themselves from seeing what is inconveniently in front of them.

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A version of this letter was published as Letter of the Day on 6 February 2026 in The Times