Jeffrey Epstein is not interesting because he was uniquely immoral, but because he was not.
Sounds wrong? Please bear with me.
The documents unsealed last year, commonly referred to as the Epstein files, did not arrive as a single revelation. They emerged slowly, through court orders tied to a civil case — heavily contextual, often frustratingly incomplete. They include depositions, correspondence, flight logs, and references to influential people: former presidents, royalty, and billionaires. Much of it was already known in outline. What was new was the normalcy of it all.
Epstein died in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted two years later for her role in facilitating his abuse network. That is the legal closure, at least formally. But the moral story is far less settled.
I am not convinced by the argument that if such incidents happen to a child in a madrassah in a small town in Punjab, it is less monstrous. It is heinous when it happens in a church in London, or by a poor labourer in Kasur, or by a Western elite with a private jet. Abuse of children is not cultural or geopolitical, nor is it some moral tug-of-war between the West and East. Evil is evil is evil everywhere.
But what differs in the Files is not the act but the thick, impenetrable insulation around it.
The files expose Western hypocrisy, but perhaps even that is a charge that is too easy and too indulgent. Hypocrisy is human. What appears more durable is global elitism, which remains one of the most cohesive forces in the modern world. It crosses borders with ease. It survives scandals, absorbs shock, and returns to form. Nations fracture, religious ideologies thin out, and moral consensus collapses. Elite protection, however, remains remarkably intact.
Epstein was not protected by the American state as such. He was protected by class. He was sheltered by the quiet understanding that some people are too connected to fail loudly. The legal system did function, but selectively, slowly, and with extraordinary deference to reputation. Public figures whose names surfaced in association were not automatically guilty of crimes, and many denied wrongdoing. That distinction matters legally. Socially, however, it revealed something else. When wealth and influence gather in one place, accountability becomes cautious.
This deference is not uniquely Western. What is striking is how efficiently it operated across institutions that otherwise claim to be adversarial: politics, academia, finance, and media. Spaces that publicly critique one another often privately overlap. We have seen versions of this at home. When the Islamia University Bahawalpur scandal broke in 2023, arrests were made, and investigations promised, but apart from laypeople on social media, other powerful actors in the country moved quickly into damage control. The details might differ in such cases, but the pattern does not.
The question is no longer whether the West lives up to its ideals. The question is whether we are willing to build systems that live up to ours
Why this matters to South Asia, especially Pakistan, is that we have long treated Western moral authority as both benchmark and referee. Colonial rule brought the so-called rules of civilisation to the Indians. British administrators and writers routinely described pre-colonial societies as barbaric and savage. We were animals to be improved.
Independence did not fully reverse that inheritance. We still wait for Western courts, media, or universities to confirm what we already know before we trust our own moral instincts. When Western scandals break, they shock us more than local ones — not because the crimes are worse, but because the authority committing them was presumed higher.
Think of our own moments of horror. The rape and murder of Zainab Ansari in Kasur in 2018 shook the country. There was rage and grief among the people, and the perpetrator was caught and executed. We immediately, and rightly, called ourselves broken. But when similar evil surfaces in the West, we find ourselves saying that no society is immune, that even the most developed nations have their flaws. There is a quiet reluctance to believe that the ‘goras’, the custodians of modern morality, could be capable of the same darkness we so readily condemn in ourselves.
Watching Western authority wobble confirms suspicions and allows us to say they are no better. But it also lets us avoid harder work. Western hypocrisy becomes an alibi. If their system is compromised, too, perhaps no system works. Perhaps silence is inevitable. Perhaps power always wins.
Yet the Epstein files suggest something narrower and more unsettling: that power is also incredibly disciplined, united, and coordinated.
Elite networks are not conspiratorial in the dramatic sense. They are sustained through philanthropy, patronage, art, academia, and shared discretion. When one node becomes dangerous, settlements are reached, and associations are quietly distanced. We also recognise versions of this in our part of the world. Protection moves through biradari, political party links, old school networks, and the phone call that “sorts things out”. The poor are offered hush money. Families are reminded that they have vulnerable daughters at home and that parents should think of honour. Cases are withdrawn.
The Epstein moment shows its limits within academic elites as well. Feminist language flourishes easily when confronting abstract injustice or distant villains, but it weakens near wealth. It becomes procedural and cautious. That does not invalidate feminist struggle, but it does expose how badly it needs institutions that are willing to act without permission from power.
For centuries, Europe called the rest of the world uncivilised while building empires through extraction and violence. Today, the moral vocabulary is more refined, more inclusive, more progressive. Yet the old question lingers: who is civilised when power protects itself first?
I have personally written before about how stories shape belonging, about how Punjabi folklore or Indian ornament carry ethical worlds within them. Those worlds were not perfect, but they were local, enforced by community, and intelligible to those who lived inside them. The crisis we face now is not that we lack morality. It is that we are so eager to measure ourselves against a Western template that we neglect to strengthen our own.
The Epstein files will continue to circulate, in millions of files as they already have, creating shock and then fading away. If that is true, then the takeaway for us is not to consume the scandal, but to examine our own arrangements. To ask whom we protect. Whom do we silence? Which reputations do we preserve at the expense of truth? Politically correct moral language means little if it bends at the sight of influence.
The question is no longer whether the West lives up to its ideals. The question is whether we are willing to build systems that live up to ours.