What the ‘Epstein Files’ tell us about conspiracy theories – and about skeptics

At the end of January 2026, the US Department of Justice published more than three million documents from the Epstein Library, colloquially known as the Epstein Files. As a result, international headlines have focused on the crimes the files contain, but also the litany of wealthy, powerful and well-connected (mostly) men who circled in Epstein’s orbit and indulged themselves with (at the very least) his financial support and luxury lifestyle. Among the headlines have been lurid claims about public figures – some true, some false – as rumour mills and conspiracist channels light up with screengrabs of the files’ revelations.

Where did the files come from?

To understand the impact of the Epstein Files, it’s important to first know their genesis. The short version of a very long and sordid story is that Jeffrey Epstein was an American financier, prolific human trafficker, serial child sex offender, and well-connected fixer for the elite and the establishment. While the exact source of his vast wealth is a matter of debate, he had been a figure around and in the centre of wealth and power in America – and therefore the world – for at least a decade before his investigation and arrest in 2006. In 2008 he was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment for the crime of procuring for prostitution a girl below the age of 18 – a single charge, for a single case.

Eyebrows were raised at how lightly he had been let off, not least because he spent his sentence in an unlocked cell, and after four months he was allowed to leave his prison on day release for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. This has since become known as the “sweetheart” deal, in its obvious leniency, with police accusing the state of giving him preferential treatment, and attorneys describing it as “the deal of a lifetime”.

Epstein was out on house arrest until August 2010, at which point he became a free man. And he evidently saw himself as free to return to the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed, resuming his relationships with the centres of wealth and power, and resuming his crimes against women and girls.

He was arrested again in 2019 on a series of sex trafficking charges. While in prison awaiting trial, he first tried to kill himself in July 2019, resulting in him being placed on suicide watch for a week, and then moved to a special housing unit. Two weeks later, on August 10, 2019, he was found hanging in his cell, with all the evidence indicating that he killed himself – despite what the internet and many thousands of conspiracy theorists will tell you.

Those conspiracy theorists are, in a way, key to what is happening now, because the rumours around the circumstances of his death were used as fodder for a cavalcade of ‘just asking questions’. For example, I’ve watched multiple interviews in which Joe Rogan speculates about the details of his death, anomaly hunting for any sign of something nefarious and suspicious. The phrase “Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself” became an internet meme. People who saw themselves as smart and clever would talk in knowing tones about gaps in footage, and reports of the bruising found on his body.

Rogan himself repeatedly brought up claims by forensic expert Dr Michael Baden, who said that Epstein’s body showed evidence of homicidal strangulation – though, it’s worth pointing out, Dr Baden never examined the crime scene nor Epstein’s body because Dr Michael Baden was the star of an HBO TV show, a man who also courted publicity by claiming that the evidence showed that both OJ Simpson and Phil Spector were innocent. Baden had also been hired by Epstein’s brother in order to prove his death was homicide, which would otherwise have been viewed as a potential cause for bias, except it agreed with things the conspiracy theorists wanted to be true, so it was fine.

One of the times Rogan raised this point about Baden was in talking to Kash Patel, the QAnon conspiracy theorist who was appointed by Donald Trump to direct the FBI. This was amid the growing calls from folk like Patel, who wanted the release of all evidence gathered by the FBI during the investigation into Epstein. For many, this call was part of their belief that Epstein’s crimes converged with the claims of the QAnon conspiracy theory, and that the files would show evidence of satanic-tinged paedophilia by senior democrat figures like Bill and Hillary Clinton. Others from a non-QAnon background joined those calls, including those who wanted light shone on the close personal friendship Epstein had with Donald Trump.

As a result of the growing calls for transparency, in November 2025 the Epstein Files Transparency Act was passed in the US, requiring the redacted release of the millions of documents, images and videos gathered during the investigation, including the many, many emails they found in Epstein’s account. Now that they were legally compelled to release those files, the US Department of Justice released… a very small batch of the files. When people pointed out that this was not complying with the law, the FBI found millions more files, which they said they would release. On January 30, an additional 3.5 million pages were released, of the total six million possible files. They were added to a searchable database on the US Department of Justice server, so the public could dig through it themselves. From here flows everything we have seen in the recent news.

Digging for dirt

Obviously, once the files were released, the first thing people did was search for whomever they expected to see in the database. As a result, a lot of people found that Donald Trump had been mentioned more than 1,400 times. This was not a surprise, because Trump’s close friendship with Epstein was already a matter of record, despite the various attempts to deny it over the years. Trump had previously given interviews calling Epstein “a terrific guy” who likes beautiful women as much as Trump does, “and many of them are on the younger side”. He famously penned a message in a book of birthday tributes to Epstein, in which he reminds Epstein that they have “certain things in common” and that “enigmas never age”, wishing that they continue to share their “wonderful secret”.

So, people obviously went to the files expecting to find evidence of allegations of sexual assault by Donald Trump. And what they found was evidence of allegations of sexual assaults committed by Donald Trump. That included one document detailing fourteen separate allegations of various sexual assaults committed by Trump against underage girls. However, the caveat there is that the allegations were detailed in 2025, from a tip line in which members of the public could contact the FBI to report crimes. Given how public the links between Trump and Epstein were by that time, it’s no surprise that there would be allegations to these tip lines, but these aren’t confirmed assaults. The document details some of the efforts the FBI made in order to verify the reports.

The fact is, given the redactions, we can’t know what the outcome of these tip offs were, or what level of credibility they had. It’s possible that the credibility was high and they were inappropriately dismissed, but it’s also possible that one of the most disliked figures in US political history was the subject of false reports to an anonymous tipline. Without more to go on, we can’t know, and I’d be wary of anyone who confesses certainty over Trump’s complicity based on the documents that are in this release (though, obviously, Trump’s culpability in other sex crimes, including the assault on E Jean Carroll, is a matter of public record). We can have our private opinions on the likelihood of Trump acting in consort with Epstein in committing crimes against women and girls, but the Epstein files are not evidence of that.

In a similar vein, there are claims that the files prove that Epstein and figures around him, including George Bush, were guilty of ritualistic and satanic murders, and even cannibalism. One viral claim viewed more than a million times included a screenshot from August 2019, detailing a victim’s account of being involved in a ritualistic sacrifice where their feet were cut with a scimitar that left no scar, while people killed babies and feasted on their entrails.

That file is indeed in the latest release… but it references an interview with an alleged witness from 2019, whose story seem highly fanciful – including that he was also sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and George Bush, while George Soros and Henry Kissinger watched. The FBI’s interviewer noted that the initial conversation and mannerisms of the witness suggested some degree of possible mental illness or emotional instability, and none of their story was backed up by any kind of evidence. The key here is that these files represent a broad range of things, from hard evidence of genuinely awful crimes to the fake tales of fantasists who were spinning yarns to the feds.

While some are looking to the false accounts of cannibalism and sacrifice that explicitly appear, others are looking to find the meanings hidden in plain sight, trained in the QAnon school of codes, symbolism, and baking breadcrumbs into narratives. You can imagine, then, what they thought when they came across an email from 2013 in which Epstein talks about making ‘jerky’, and how his friend is “working at a restaurant called Cannibal and cooks… wait for it… Beef Jerky and Steak!”.

In other emails he jokes with someone about “cream cheese”, in an email chain titled “Cream Cheese baby”, a redacted correspondent responds to an email we can’t see, with “I don’t know if cream cheese and baby are on the same level..”, to which Epstein replies “there are millions of babies, very little good vegatble cream cheese (sic)”. Is this proof, as some have speculated, that Epstein was eating the flesh of babies, and comparing it to cream cheese?

I would say obviously not, but it is proof that people who have decided on a satanic narrative to explain a very human abuser will pounce on anything to support that. It also shows that people are willing to manipulate the evidence to fit their chosen narrative or to chase online clout – including photoshopping cream cheese into an unrelated photo:

People looking for evidence to fit the narrative is the inevitable risk with a story as big, prominent and horrible as this one. On The Know Rogan Experience podcast, we sometimes get emails meant for Joe. After the release of the Epstein files, someone cc’d Joe in on an email they had sent to the billionaire Warren Buffett, which cited specific mentions of him in the Epstein files, reading:

Warren E. BuffetT,

You have been identified as an Epstein associate based on the official documents released by the Department of Justice of the United States of America.

Epstein’s friend asks Epstein to get an autograph of yours when he meets you next time. Reappearing in another document, another person calls herself Epstein’s female Warren Buffett.

Were you a position of Epstein’s too? Did you get the 30 girls? You attended dinner with him. Your wife was a secretary of Epstein. Epstein visited you during Annual Meeting of 2011.

How many times did you meet with Epstein? What did you discuss with Epstein? Did you just step down at the end of 2025 from Berkshire because you had known this coming all along? Why don’t you step up and support openly the release of all Epstein files UNREDACTED?

Did you order pizza and grape soda too? Did you eat children too?

This clearly is someone who has decided that Warren Buffett is bad, and has tried to use his mentions in the Epstein files to prove it. Even when those mentions amount to someone asking Epstein to get Buffett’s autograph if he bumps into him, and someone else describing themselves as the female Warren Buffett. This is desperate dot connecting, just to smear someone you dislike. It is not the only example. You may have seen that JK Rowling is in the Epstein files, for inviting a noted sex offender to the opening of her Harry Potter theatre show, The Cursed Child. Meanwhile, people were highlighting that soon after the files were released, the real-time traffic data for Rowling’s yacht had been scrubbed from a tracking website, with speculation that her yacht had visited Epstein island. I saw a lot of people sharing the fact that ‘noted defender of women’s rights JK Rowling must be a friend and associate of Jeffrey Epstein’.

Except, that’s almost certainly not the case. That premiere invite wasn’t a personal invitation from Rowling to Epstein – it was a promo sent to an entertainment publicist, and forwarded to Epstein. An assistant of Epstein’s asked for two seats to the premiere and celebratory dinner, without ever mentioning Epstein by name. He received tickets to the play, but not to the invite-only celebratory dinner, as his name was not on the guest list. No part of that process would have involved personal intervention from JK Rowling.

Also, there’s no evidence that Rowling’s yacht visited Epstein island… and even if it did, she didn’t buy that yacht until 2023, four years after Epstein’s death.

In my opinion, both of these examples are instances of someone trying to find evidence that the person they dislike was good friends with Epstein, in order to discredit them for the views and actions they already disagree with. And in both cases, those attempts cheapen the traumatic experiences of the victims by using them as fodder for personal dislike, however justified that dislike might be.

Speaking of people using the files to justify their dislike of public figures, there’s a viral screenshot of one of the files in which Elon Musk invited himself to a party at Epstein Island, parenthetically adding “Girls FTW!”, only for Ghislaine Maxwell to respond on Epstein’s behalf telling Elon they were actually busy and he had just missed Epstein. It went viral as proof that Elon was too cringe even for the world’s most notorious sex offender… but it isn’t a real file, it’s a fake document, it’s not in the release.

What is in the release is Epstein asking Elon when he’ll need a helicopter ride to Epstein’s island, and Elon responding to ask which day or night will have the wildest party. That is a real file. Is it evidence that Elon was engaged in child trafficking? I wouldn’t go so far – it could just be that Elon is terminally cringe in how he talks about socialising. That said, the email was in 2012, so it at least meant that Elon was comfortable asking the recently-released-from-prison child-‘prostitution’ procurer whether he could come to his wild party, and that is what we should be focusing on. When we look for evidence that Elon Musk was part of an elite paedophile ring, we overlook evidence that he was joyfully socialising with a famously convicted sex criminal.

My advice to anyone watching stories and claims circulate and go viral would be to not just believe what you’re told is in there and, before you share or repeat anything, check for yourself. It takes a moment. Don’t even trust the screenshots. It’s what I did when I saw the suspicious claim that, rather than redacting the names of victims, the FBI had taken such care to remove any incriminating references to Donald Trump that they’d even removed the word “don’t” from the middle of a sentence, because they’d done a search for “don t”. That sounded very unlikely, and so I checked… and it’s true.

Document “EFTA02440040.pdf – DataSet 11” is an email that responds to a message that contains the sentence “I was going to take polo lessons in Calgary by I <REDACTED> think my body can handle it”. But as it turns out, the email it was responding to is already in the files, named “EFTA01829530.pdf – DataSet 10“, where the sentence reads “I was going to take polo lessons in Calgary by I don’t think my body can handle it”.

So, they did remove the word don’t. And I can’t for the life of me think of a reason to do that, other than the coincidence that it is “Don T.”

Skeptics and the Epstein files

All of this is to say that I think the claims being made about the Epstein files are highly relevant to skeptics, because the conclusions we’re seeing aren’t all based on what’s in the files – not all of which are even real. But it’s also relevant for another reason, in that people who are or were involved with the skeptical and atheist movements are mentioned in those files.

In some cases, that’s peripheral and in passing – at one point, the speaker list for TAM 2014 is mentioned in passing, as Deepak Chopra discusses the nasty folks of skepticism who keep messing with his Wiki page. So, when you see Richard Saunders, Richard Wiseman, Susan Gerbic or Steve Novella in there, that’s why. It’s a drive-by, and doesn’t reflect badly on them at all.

Others are in the files for reasons more directly relevant to Epstein. I’m one of those people. I appear in the Epstein files 25 times. I’m there along with Mel Thompson, Jo Alabaster, and others. When Buzzfeed published a lengthy exposé on allegations against American physicist Lawrence Krauss, I was one of the people to go on record as a witness.

At the time, I mentioned what I had seen to the conference organiser, and to committee members of the Australian Skeptics; after Peter Aldous of Buzzfeed heard that I was a witness, I agreed to be named in the article. There were times when that felt like a hard decision, because of the weight of his celebrity and connections – and I say that as a man, who was not a victim and who has at least a modicum of profile within the same community. I can only imagine how hard it is for the victims to speak out, and I know several who wouldn’t speak out, for understandable reasons.

What we knew at the time was that Krauss was good friends with Epstein, having even defended him – Krauss told Daily Beast in 2011:

As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.

What we didn’t know until the files were released was that Krauss had talked to lawyers in an attempt to issue defamation threats to Mel Thompson, which Epstein advised him against, saying “so to be clear I will not fund… i cant [sic] participate in you damagin [sic] yourself”. Krauss also workshopped his attempts to “impugn” my testimony, and the testimony of other witnesses with a lawyer – something we know to be the case, because he forwarded multiple versions of those statements, along with tracked changes and comments, to Jeffrey Epstein for review.

I haven’t talked about this a great deal (not least because I have no well-connected billionaire friend to cover legal bills) but, on the few occasions I have, there has been pushback from a handful of men online, who refused to believe it even in the face of multiple eye-witness testimonies – including my own. Some of that pushback came from groups within (at the time) the atheist and skeptic movements of the UK, pointing to what they felt were inconsistencies between my eye-witness account and Mel’s – an attack line, we can now see, that had been originally written in consort with the world’s most famous paedophile.

Sadly, since those allegations were made public, organisations that would call themselves skeptical have continued to arrange public events with Krauss, even hosting awards evenings where he gave Richard Dawkins an award (or maybe he received an award from Richard Dawkins, or both – it’s hard to keep track), arranged by men who apparently cared more for their own chance to hobnob with someone famous than they were willing to care about the women in our movement. And that is a theme here, because Epstein got away with his crimes for so long because the men around him valued him more than the women and girls he harmed.

The actual story

Epstein was originally arrested for serious criminal acts and, while he did serve time, due to his money and his connections the charges were minimised down to a lesser-sounding offence, of which there was only a single case, the time for which he served from the comfort of his home. Upon release, he continued to enjoy the company of prominent men – some within the skeptical movement – at a point where there was no excuse for not knowing about his convictions, or for willingly associating closely with him.

Yet the people in his orbit apparently liked the lifestyle he embodied, and the brush with privilege his patronage afforded, and they didn’t ask questions because to do so might turn that tap off. At the point when they continued to associate with him, it is hard to see it as anything other than a choice they made to remain ignorant – or to pretend to be. And that choice actively makes things less safe for women in our community.

What the Epstein files cement is the fact that, yes, this was a real conspiracy – but not one that was conducted via code words about jerky, cream cheese, pizza, or hot dogs. It was grubby men, sliming their way around the international elite class, not caring that they were rubbing shoulders – and god knows what else – with a convicted and prolific sex trafficker, because they saw him as important and his victims as unimportant.

That is the story the Epstein files tell us, and it’s vital that through all of this we learn not to simply give a free pass to the perpetrators whose work we happen to admire, nor to scour and twist real tragedies as an attempt to smear and hang the people we dislike, and certainly not to treat traumatic accounts of grotesque criminality as lurid fodder for true crime intrigue. All that does is once again tell the victims of these crimes – and the similar crimes of other men, past, present, and future – that they do not matter.