Jeffrey Epstein: Made for thriller flicks and text books!

Raju Korti
In the past week, an impression has rapidly gained ground in India that once the (in)famous Jeffrey Epstein Files are placed before the United States House of Representatives, there will be an institutional collapse of global proportions. The narrative here suggests that governments, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s, will be blown away. Apocalypse, earthquake, tsunami. The rhetoric writes itself.

The irony of such hyperventilation is that a significant slice of the files is already in the public domain. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released nineteen photographs last week and followed that with sixty-eight more. From a much larger cache of nearly ninety-five thousand photographs voluntarily handed over by Epstein’s estate.

And those names. Bill Gates. Noam Chomsky. Steve Bannon. Donald Trump. Add Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton from earlier reporting. Each accompanied by the predictable disclaimers that range from selective memory loss to convenient ignorance. The kind of excuse making that has been perfected over centuries. Several photographs even include redacted identification cards of women across continents. Russia, Morocco, Italy, the Czech Republic, South Africa, Ukraine and Lithuania. One batch reportedly features excerpts of sentences from “Lolita” scrawled across a woman’s body. A screenshot of a text exchange references girls being “sent” for someone identified only as j, with a price tag of one thousand dollars mentioned. The fact that committee Democrats describe the material as both graphic and mundane captures the bizarre duality of Epstein’s world. Mundane wealth. Graphic depravity.

What fascinates me is not the moral theatre but the man at the centre of it. Jeffrey Epstein’s journey reads like a fictional protagonist conceived by an ambitious potboiler writer. (I believe, it would have been right up James Hadley Chase's alley to write and portray his character.) A high school teacher of Physics and Mathematics who abandoned chalkboards for Wall Street, building a billionaire’s empire in properties. His Virgin Islands estate in the Caribbean remains the most visually (and infamously) documented, replete with hidden cameras, juvenile girls and a calendar of clandestine, amoral and lecherous activities involving some of the world’s most powerful guests.

His suspicious death only heightened curiosity. Democrats suspected foul play. His associates hoped his silence might bury their own associations. The public trawled through conspiracy theories with the devotion of amateur detectives. I am not here to judge. If anything, I marvel at how many fronts the man handled simultaneously. Networking with presidents and princes. Flying private jets. Managing finances. Ordering girls. Documenting everything. His ability to multitask would have made him a case study in versatility had his pursuits not been criminal and exploitative.

The Files qualify as perfect cinematic material. India has turned the word files into a cultural brand. The Kashmir Files. The Kerala Files. The Bengal Files. It feels inevitable that someone attempts The Epstein Files. In my mind, Akshaye Khanna, the current rage, could play Epstein, just to introduce the Indian flavour. The ensemble cast portraying the who’s who named in the files would make this a multi star project. A Pan American Indian crossover if you will. If Hollywood grabs it first, expect awards. If Bollywood does, expect embellishments. I volunteer to write the script for the Indian flick. A four-hour epic or better, a binge worthy serial with viewership rising episode after episode, for obvious and predictable reasons.

My curiosity also extends to his academic past. As a Physics and Mathematics student myself even beyond my engineering days, I find it amusing to imagine him teaching Newton’s Laws before breaking all social ones. Or juggling calculus and clandestine rendezvous. If nothing else, Epstein deserves a full-fledged chapter in text books on documentation for the painstaking way he archived photos, messages and communication. A man who collected details with methodical obsession and likely shared only with confidantes like Ghislaine Maxwell. Blackmail or insurance. One will never know.

And now, a question for our Indian doomsayers. No Indian name has surfaced. Anyway, not until the time of writing this blog. Are we witnessing evidentiary anticipation or political kite flying? If the latter, the winds are not exactly supportive. 

Yet even if half of what appears in the Files or on Wikipedia is accurate, Epstein secures his place under the sun. Not for greatness. Not for morality. But for the chilling combination of power, manipulation, exploitation and networking that allowed him to straddle elite circles and criminality with breathtaking ease. Posthumously though.

Even devils deserve credit where due.