One popular shorthand for the Epstein story is “pedo elite.” But not all his johns are pedophiles and not all the women he trafficked were children. On that narrow point, his lawyer and occasional Lolita Express passenger, the odious Alan Dershowitz is correct: Epstein was not exclusively trafficking minors. From what we can tell, many of his victims were young women in their late teens or early twenties – procured, processed and trained by Epstein, then pimped out to men whose dirty little secrets might later prove useful for Jeff.

To sit with the files over days and weeks, as we have at the Freakshow, is to soak up Michel Houellebecq’s nihilistic analysis of global sex capitalism. These supercilious smirking men with stratospheric self regard have such contempt for what they regard as lesser beings – pretty young women, and more specifically the emotionally manipulated, reduced, and trafficked females whose humanity they are incapable of acknowledging.

Rank misogyny and casual social and legal collusion in the abuse of young adult women are the root of the Epstein saga. DIY investigators, spectators, conspiracy theorists, Q Anons and their MAGA brethren fixate on child abuse, insisting the victims must be children, rather than females of any age.

But why? Is there really a magical line of fortitude and resilience against abuse and manipulation that female humans cross between the ages of 16 and 18?

The insistence that female humans of any age be pliant dolls connects Epstein and his johns. If the victims happen to be under the age of 18, maybe better for malleability, but the acceptable age range in their kink is not textbook pedophilia. Their game is garden-variety commodification and pornification of females.

The unredacted list of recipients of Epstein females – Leon Black, Kimbal Musk, Tom Pritzker, Joshua Fink, Steve Tisch, Roger Schank, Henry Jarecki, Jes Staley – is long, and grows longer by the hour as Congressmembers review the files and press for more names to be made public. Taken together, the revelations expose the brazen lie Kash Patel – our FBI “director” – spewed, perjuring himself when he testified under oath before Congress that the files did not reveal any men besides Epstein abusing women.

These men prefer young but not necessarily underage. Youth is important to these desiccated trolls, but they don’t seem to be seeking out children. Beauties are always referred to as “girls.” The ugly ones, as Donald Trump so often likes to point out, are always women.

To concede that the victims were often not children complicates the narrative. It ventures perilously into the “sex worker” debate that has divided feminists for decades. In the “sex-positive” feminist camp, the sex worker is presumed to have agency – to have decided that selling her own flesh is a smart business move. The Epstein files challenge that assumption.

There are many references in the post-2012 documents to agreements Epstein made with women, which seem in at least some instances to have been formal or quasi-legal. Some of Epstein’s women were in fact regarded as sex workers, as this exchange with his pal New York Giants owner Steve Tisch – asking whether an Epstein woman is “pro or civilian” – suggests. Epstein shot back telling him to discuss it by phone as “I dont [sic] like records of these conversations.”

Yes, it is true that some of the women appear to have benefited financially from the hellish transactions. A handful of hardy Russian post-Soviet entrepreneurs, like Masha Drokova and Lana Pozhidaeva, emerged from Epsteinland as coronated queens with Silicon Valley fortunes.

Here is an exchange between Epstein and one of the self-commodified, ambitious Russians:

So far so good. But I now invite the sex worker support system to join us in reading the Epstein files with an eye to the concept of agency. The vast majority of now-public communications between Epstein and the women in his brothel, global harem, indentured servitude penal colony reveal shocking levels of psychological abuse, manipulation and sadism that seem to deprive them of confidence and self-respect – the building blocks of agency. Street pimps could do no worse.

The Epstein files reveal how the “cogs of the wheels of power are oiled by porn-saturated misogyny,” Helen Rumbelow wrote recently in the London Times. Epstein – like Trump with his pageants or predatory French freakazoid Jean-Luc Brunel with his “models” – got off on molding females to his pornified specs. He was a sadistic Pygmalion too: manipulative, peevish and cruel, attentive to “disobedience” and what he thought of as ingratitude. He relished expressing disappointment in misspelled, dashed-off angry messages to the young women.

They were always failing to follow his directions, breaking promises, lying, making excuses, whining, immature, ungrateful, spoiled brats, etc. In one long text exchange, he berates a young woman as lazy, childish, stupid and tells her “my girls in New York” can take art classes. They get that privilege, he explains “as a RESULT of their dedication, truthfulness, and doing as they are told. you didn’t, dont. And continue to whine, so you have what you deserve [sic].”

Epstein exercised a cruel pimp level of control over their most intimate concerns too, and sometimes issued veiled physical threats. In one exchange with an Eastern European newcomer, Jeff lectured her about how to treat her ovarian cysts, and then casually told her he didn’t want her to end up like his friend Ruslana Korshunova (also trafficked) who jumped out a window. He asks when her next period starts and tells her to take birth control. He finishes the conversation saying she should send him a sexy photo as a "thank you" and tells her it's "TIME TO GROW UP".

Here is another exchange with a different young woman in the same vein.

Again and again, the pattern repeats: emotional degradation packaged as mentorship. It is time to accept that labeling Epstein and his pals as simply “pedophiles” is to separate them from the greater sick herd to which they actually belong. When we pay attention only to the children, we disregard how this saga is part of the degrading miasma in which a generation of women struggled to work, get law degrees, and enter politics. The pantsuited mini Hillaries everywhere in DC, the rising numbers of women in college, in law and medical schools, and in corporations and law firms, were always subverted by the true relationship of women to power revealed in the Epstein files.

Yes, some women thrived in this era. Epstein pal Kathy Ruemmler, for example, could – until recently – grace any female empowerment conference dais to recount her stellar career path from Obama’s White House counsel to a $25 million a year job at Goldman Sachs.

Epstein and his pals let a few women like her – “cool girls” – into the outer sanctum of the club. They got to keep their clothes on, dignity intact. Epstein called Ruemmler an “arch feminist who is my greatest defender.” Ruemmler is on record teasing Epstein about trading “one of [his] Russians” for a comp and joking that he was her “Pygmalion.”.

Way to be a role model, Kathy! You go, girl!

Meanwhile, back at the mansion, her friend Jeff was ripping the confidence and self-respect out of one young woman after another.

For the strong of stomach, the documents offer hundreds of snapshots of the moral and emotional damage Epstein meted out while grooming women for his network of masters-of-the-universe. He may even have countenanced violence: The latest batch of files contain harrowing allegations by four women against Leon Black, of gruesome assaults with a similar MO.

Black has denied them but the allegations keep coming out. Incredibly, Jay Clayton, the man appointed chairman of Apollo, Black’s hedge fund, after Black resigned over the Epstein connection, now serves as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Manhattan – the same office that was investigating Black.

A deep loathing of women was always part of the deal with these men. Here is how Epstein talked to a 22-year-old Russian woman he appears to have trafficked to Black (who eventually became her “principal,” in the lingo the men used for, apparently, ownership or responsibility for a trafficked adult female):

Here he is complaining to another redacted young woman about how many ways she has “disappointed” him:

Here he accuses another woman – apparently Italian – of “childish tantrums,” to which the woman replies that survival is her “only mission in life” and “I’m already destroyed mentally”.

“Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,” Australian feminist Germaine Greer once opined. Reading the Epstein files will remove the blinders from your starry eyes.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow