The Epstein Files, an extensive collection revealing the extent of Jeffrey Epstein’s misconduct, comprises over three million pages of documents, approximately 2,000 videos, and around 180,000 images. The release of these files has severely damaged Western civilisation’s carefully constructed façade of respectability, exposing its warts, hypocrisy, and darkest truths.
This comprehensive data dump was officially released by the US Department of Justice, under the authority of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, aiming to shed light on the allegations and connections surrounding Epstein. First charged in 2006 for sexual abuse of minors, Epstein received an extraordinarily lenient plea deal in 2008—an early demonstration of elite immunity within the American justice system. He resurfaced in 2019, charged with federal sex trafficking, only to be found dead in a New York jail under circumstances officially ruled a suicide but widely questioned.
Epstein was not a marginal criminal operating in the shadows. He was a systemic predator, enabled and protected by the system.
Who enabled Epstein’s sin enterprise, and why was it protected? He was a financier without a transparent business model, a social climber without clear credentials, and a benefactor to powerful institutions without accountability. Yet he moved effortlessly through the highest corridors of Western power. His aircraft, infamously known as the ‘Lolita Express’, ferried some of the world’s most powerful individuals to his private island and residences.
Epstein was embedded in US political culture, not as an outsider but as an insider—hosting presidents, funding universities, advising billionaires, and socialising with royalty. His role was of a connector—a facilitator within a system where influence trumped ethics.
The files mention political figures like Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, Bill Richardson and Ehud Barak. Business elites include Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon, Howard Lutnick; cultural and intellectual figures include Michael Jackson, Stephen Hawking, while the royalty are Norway’s Crown Princess Mette-Marit, Britain’s former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
Appearances and names in the files do not necessarily imply criminal guilt. Yet the sheer density of power surrounding a known sexual predator exposes a disturbing normalisation of proximity to evil within Western elite culture.
One of the West’s most loudly proclaimed virtues is equality before law. The Epstein Files demolish this claim. Perhaps the most chilling revelation of the Epstein Files is the ease with which predatory behaviour coexisted with respectability.
This normalisation did not occur in a vacuum. It emerged from a broader cultural trajectory in the West—one that increasingly divorces freedom from responsibility, desire from restraint, and rights from duties.
Biological gender itself has been problematised. The commodification of the human body—especially the female body—has been repackaged as liberation. When such values are normalised, the result is not emancipation but exploitation. Epstein is not a deviation from Western modernity; he is its logical consequence.
The corruption uncovered by the Epstein files exemplifies the widespread decay within the US social-politico fabric. Around 40 per cent of young Americans today struggle with isolation, depression and loneliness, contributing to an alarming rate of 400–600 mass shootings annually.
In 1960, only 13 per cent of Americans lived alone; by 2022, the number had surged to 29 per cent. Divorce rates oscillate between 40 and 80 per cent, and one-third of American youth reportedly prefer to avoid living with their parents, leaving the care of the elderly to the state. In 2019, the US government spent nearly $1.5 trillion on elderly care, a figure projected to double by 2029.
The West is undeniably caught in a moment of hubris, facing its own moral reckoning. History taints its reputation with bloodshed and coercion, from the brutal executions during the Inquisition—where millions were burned alive, tortured, or condemned as heretics or witches by the Church—reminding us of a dark past that still echoes today. Across the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand, rich indigenous cultures were systematically destroyed. Dalits, tribals in India and Blacks in the US were often stripped of their identities and traditions through missionary campaigns that promised dignity but delivered cultural erasure. The Epstein Files belong to this long continuum of moral hypocrisy.
The Epstein scandal fits into a long pattern of institutional protection of sexual predators, most infamously within the Christian Church. The 2004 John Jay Report, commissioned by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, identified 4,392 clergy accused of sexually abusing minors between 1950 and 2002.
Even more damning was the finding that Church authorities repeatedly chose concealment over accountability—transferring accused priests instead of reporting them. The mechanism was always the same: silence, intimidation of victims, destruction of evidence, and moral evasion.
Unfortunately, many countries—including India—have long been trapped in this Western moral framework, mistaking it for modernity. Colonial conditioning taught elites to view Indic civilisation as ‘backward’ and Western norms as universal.
It is therefore significant—and heartening—that India is slowly reclaiming its Sanatan civilisational compass, not as nostalgia but as ethical clarity.
If Indian civilisation can be distilled into a single organising principle, it is the Bhagavad Gita’s doctrine of Karma Yoga: Karmanye Vadhikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana (You have the right to action alone, never to its fruits).
This is not fatalism; it is moral discipline. In Indic thought, duty precedes entitlement. Rights are not demanded; they emerge naturally when duties— ‘dharma’ are fulfilled.
The Epstein Files are not merely about a criminal network; they are a civilisational indictment. They reveal the hollowness of a moral order that speaks incessantly of rights but neglects duty, celebrates freedom but detests restraint, and preaches virtue while nurturing vice. India need not gloat. It must learn—and remember—that civilisations do not collapse only from external attacks; they decay from internal paradoxes and hypocrisy. India’s task is unambiguous: not to imitate the West but to build on its own civilisational inheritance—rooted in karma, dharma, restraint, and moral accountability.
(Balbir Punj is a senior columnist and former chairman of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication.)
