Public discourse surrounding Donald Trump’s alleged connection to Jeffrey Epstein frequently rests on the implicit—sometimes explicit—claim that government-held “Epstein files” contain evidence that Trump engaged in illegal sexual activity with minors. Yet this claim faces a serious inferential problem: if authorities at the local, state, and federal levels—across multiple administrations and partisan alignments—have long had such evidence, the absence of investigation or prosecution demands explanation. The most plausible explanations do not support the allegation. What is more, the insinuations, which are driven by the desire to continue a partisan narrative to delegitimize Trump, are harmful to the many people who knew Epstein but did not participate in child molestation. That list may include Trump.
I am going to first interrogate the hysteria from the standpoint of criminal justice. I will then shift to a social psychological observation. On the criminal justice front, the accusations made against Trump are of a criminal nature and, as such, require prosecutors to put ducks in a row. To be sure, Democrats and RINOs (a few openly, more down deeply) couldn’t care less about whether Trump is guilty of crimes. What they seek is reputational damage to put Trump and the populist movement behind them and return to the status quo that MAGA disrupted. They care only that the voters believe Trump has done something untoward. They already have much of the public in a place where they perceive a picture of Trump surrounded by beautiful women as evidence of a crime, when in fact it’s merely evidence of what we already knew about the man: that he’s a billionaire playboy in the 1980s and 1990s. They see a video of him kissing an wife and, not recognizing her, think he is kissing a minor. They see pictures of him with his arm around his daughter and, not recognizing her, think he is drawing near a minor. They see his name on flight logs and think the plane was headed to Epstein’s island, unable to process entries that list Trump, his wife, and daughter, and the nanny, or bother to know that the flights were from Florida to New York, not to an island, or that one of them was one-way.
It is essential in doing the actual work of criminal investigation and working up an evidentiary and rational cause to pursue prosecution to distinguish between the possession of materials and the possession of prosecutable evidence. Investigative files often contain raw, unverified information: hearsay, names mentioned in interviews, photographs, travel logs, videos, witness statements, etc. None of these, individually or collectively, necessarily meet the legal threshold required to initiate criminal proceedings, particularly for crimes alleged to have occurred decades earlier. Criminal prosecution requires corroboration, credible witnesses, jurisdictional clarity, and material evidence sufficient to meet the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Association or mention is not evidence of criminal conduct. If this were true, then everybody photographed with Epstein would be the subject of a criminal investigation. Mick Jagger? Chris Tucker? Noam Chomsky? Child molesters? I hesitate to even mention their names in the context of a moral panic over a supposed widespread elite child trafficking operation.
The strongest argument against the allegation is institutional. Prosecutorial systems are neither monolithic nor perfectly coordinated. They involve numerous actors—career prosecutors, investigators, judges, and oversight bodies—often with divergent political interests. In this case, the divergent political interests could not be clearer. Nor are the convergent political interests that fuel the panic. The idea that credible evidence of sex crimes involving minors by a former or sitting president could or do exist and yet be universally suppressed across administrations of both parties strains plausibility. Indeed, the incentive structure cuts in the opposite direction: such a prosecution would be career-defining, morally unassailable, and politically advantageous to many actors. Democrats have this evidence. Why haven’t they moved to prosecute Trump?
Did you see Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ explanation for why they didn’t on Jimmy Kimmel the other night? It wasn’t a non-answer as many might suppose; it was designed to reinforce an assumption that the Biden Administration had nothing to do with the lawfare waged against Trump during the period between his occupancy of the White House. Does anybody believe that if Biden had evidence that Trump was a child molester, he wouldn’t have handed that information over to the DoJ? Of course, he didn’t need to. The DoJ already had that information. The Attorney General of New York, Letitia James, pursues a zombie case against the President, but doesn’t pursue him for sexual assault? Is this believable? The absence of such action strongly suggests not suppression, but insufficiency of evidence. No, not suggests—screams.
It is also mistaken to assume that a lack of public prosecution implies a lack of scrutiny. Prosecutors routinely evaluate allegations and decline to proceed when evidentiary standards cannot be met. If anybody doubts that investigators and prosecutors across multiple jurisdictions have not pored through these files, then they have very little understanding of how the criminal justice system works. Do they believe that the mass of people who loathe Donald Trump are going to protect him? They lined up to try and put him in prison for centuries—on the flimsiest of charges! The reality is that declinations to prosecute are often silent, particularly in politically sensitive cases and where many honorable people may be damaged reputationally or even put in harm’s way. The public is rarely informed of investigations that lead nowhere, especially when announcing them would unfairly taint individuals without a legal basis. That doesn’t mean they’re covering up crimes. It means that they’re performing their jobs conscientiously and professionally. Frankly, to think otherwise is a sign of a paranoid mind.
This is what in sociology we call a moral panic, mass hysteria, or mass psychogenic illness. This pattern of reasoning—where suspicion substitutes for evidence and absence of prosecution is reinterpreted as proof of conspiracy—fits squarely within the historical structure of moral panics. In such episodes, moral certainty precedes empirical verification, and institutional restraint is recast as complicity. I cover the phenomenon of mass psychogenic illness in several of my sociology courses. My go-to example is the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of the 1980s and early 1990s. When students see how millions of people could believe something as absurd as a transatlantic conspiracy to enlist daycares in Satanic rituals, they’re astonished. In this case, allegations of widespread child abuse by secret networks of elites were treated as self-evidently true despite a lack of implausible claims, inconsistent testimony, and physical evidence. Irrationally, members of the public reasoned that the absence of proof demonstrated the sophistication of the cover-up. When, years later, extensive (entirely unnecessary) reviews concluded that no organized satanic networks existed and that many lives had been destroyed by inference alone, the media dropped the matter.
The Satanic Panic was a few decades ago. But mass psychogenic illness is not a new thing. We can look centuries back to events like the Salem witch trials. These followed a similar logic. A woman was hanged because people believed in witches. We can expand the sample to include the numerous witch trials that occurred across Europe during the Middle Ages, where thousands were burned at the stake because people believed in witches, and accusations substituted for findings of guilt. This is how it works: accusations function as evidence, denials are treated as further proof of guilt, and procedural safeguards are abandoned in favor of moral urgency or political objectives. In every case of moral panic we examine, we find that the belief that “something so widely suspected must be true” overrode institutional skepticism and evidentiary discipline.
Modern moral panics differ in content, to be sure, but never in form. They rely on expansive interpretations of association, elevate suspicion to certainty, and dismiss institutional non-action as corruption rather than constraint. The invocation of disappearing photographs, excessive redactions, and secret files plays a similar rhetorical role to hidden covens, Jewish cabals, secret societies, or underground networks: it explains why proof is insufficient (cover-up!) while maintaining absolute confidence in guilt. None of this implies that elites are uniformly virtuous or that crimes never go unpunished. Rather, it insists that serious claims require serious evidence, and that institutions—however flawed—are constrained by legal standards that moral and partisan political narratives ignore.
But again, any video of Trump and women is now portrayed as proof of his supposed crimes. The video clip below, which has 120 thousand views on X, is from a November 1992 party at Mar-a-Lago. Recently divorced Donald Trump (his divorce from Ivana Trump finalized earlier that year) is seen dancing, socializing, and briefly kissing a woman amid a group of NFL cheerleaders, all women in their twenties, attending a calendar/promotional event tied to a football game weekend. The woman he kisses? That’s Marla Maples, Trump’s girlfriend at the time. They would be married the next year. She appears prominently in the footage, and her identity is confirmed. The video also briefly shows Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell arriving and observing from the sidelines. There is no illegal activity or minors depicted. It’s an adult party from the early 1990s. Ever been to one of those?
In the absence of prosecutable evidence, the most parsimonious explanation for the lack of action is not conspiracy, but insufficiency. Authorities across both parties know what’s in those files. They also know they do not have the evidence they need to prosecute Trump for criminal wrongdoing. Again, for Democrats and a handful of Republicans, that is not their aim. Their aim is the delegitimization of a President and a movement that stands in the way of their announced goal: the elevation of transnational corporate power over the people. There is no conspiracy there.
The Trump–Epstein narrative illustrates a broader epistemological problem in contemporary politics: the replacement of evidentiary reasoning with moral inference. Abandoning standards of proof invites injustice in the name of irrational certainty. History tells us that moral panics rarely end well. But there is no mass hysteria to end all mass hysterias. There will be more moral panics, and people will be swept up in them because a significant portion of the population is ignorant, and the undisciplined mind is prone to see patterns where none exist. This tendency of our species has led to the needless suffering of millions across time and space, and it has proved politically useful for those who manipulate the masses for their own ends. (See also Epstein, Russia, and Other Hoaxes—and the Pathology that Feeds Their Believability; The Future of a Delusion: Mass Formation Psychosis and the Fetish of Corporate Statism)
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