By Ben R. Williams
As I was reading highlights from the latest pile of Epstein files that the Justice Department posted last week (then deleted and then reposted in a further redacted form), I found myself thinking about Bill Cosby.
When I was a kid, I loved watching The Cosby Show and Picture Pages, Cosby’s children’s show where he would walk you through drawing things (I even had my own Mortimer Ichabod Marker so I could draw along). I loved Bill Cosby.
And then, of course, the allegations began to come out, and more and more women came forward, and they all had extremely similar stories of the horrible things Bill Cosby had done to them.
I didn’t want to believe it. To quote one of my favorite films, Bill Cosby seemed like an overflowing cup filled with the very cream of human goodness. How could he have done these terrible things?
But at a certain point, when more than 60 women come forward and all tell the same story, you have no choice but to believe it.
When you read the newest batch of horrors from the Epstein files, there are a couple of things you can’t help but notice. The first is that the contents of these new files are disgustingly depraved. There are accusations of human trafficking, rape, murder, and more. Jeffrey Epstein’s world comes across as some unholy combination of the Hellfire Club and Caligula’s Palace cranked to 11 and blown up to an international scale.
The second thing you’ll notice is that the files are a who’s who of exactly who you would expect: Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Steve Bannon, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Alan Dershowitz, and — among plenty of others — Donald Trump, listed over and over again.
Now, I don’t believe every single thing in this latest file dump. A large portion of the new files are summaries from an FBI tip line. But if even five percent of the claims in these new files are true, it points to a horrifying picture of an elite class of billionaires and politicians who were intimately involved in a secret world of child sex trafficking and murder. And now, many of those same people are in charge of the very government that would normally be tasked with prosecuting these crimes.
To make things more horrifying, there are even more files that have yet to be released, which suggests that what we’ve seen so far isn’t as bad as the stuff that Trump’s Justice Department is still sitting on.
This is a level of depraved criminal behavior that makes Watergate look like Barack Obama’s dijon mustard scandal, and we have yet to even understand the full breadth and scope of it. We may never have the full picture.
Of course, some will still believe it’s all a hoax, just a bunch of fake news designed to bring down Trump, despite the fact that most of the accusations against Trump that are emerging in the files date back to the 1990s, a time when he had no TV show, no political capital, and was little more than a punchline on VH1’s “I Love the ‘80s” who occasionally shilled stuffed crust pizza. The man had about as much cultural cache at the time as Mr. Belvedere. Why would he be mentioned in the files thousands upon thousands of times? How many pieces of evidence must one ignore to convince themselves that Trump had no affiliation with Epstein’s human trafficking ring?
Of course, everyone is innocent until proven guilty. But what are we supposed to do when our nation’s Department of Justice is spending millions in taxpayer dollars to circle the wagons around the guilty and protect them from prosecution?
I have no idea. But from what I’ve seen, it looks like we mostly just try to ignore the growing realization that our nation is run by a cabal of demented, murderous perverts and get back to talking about the important stuff, like Chappell Roan’s daring outfit at the Grammys.
