There’s a post circulating on social media that got me thinking, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. The idea is simple on the surface but goes pretty deep when you sit with it. The post was drawing a comparison between how quickly Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein were prosecuted and held accountable, versus how slowly, how carefully, how reluctantly anyone seems to be moving when it comes to the names connected to Jeffrey Epstein. And I think there’s something to that. I’m not claiming to have all the answers here. This is just me thinking out loud, sharing observations, and trying to make sense of something that feels deeply inconsistent in ways that deserve to be talked about.
Let’s start with what we actually saw happen. Bill Cosby, one of the most beloved entertainers in American history, a man who had built a reputation as America’s dad, was prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned. Harvey Weinstein, one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood, a man who had made careers and broken them for decades, was also prosecuted and convicted. Both of them were taken down publicly and decisively. And while I absolutely believe that accountability was warranted, and I want to be very clear about that, I also think it’s worth asking why the machinery of justice moved so swiftly and so decisively in those cases, and why that same machinery seems to be moving through quicksand when it comes to the Epstein files.
Because the Epstein network, by most accounts, involved far more people, far more documented connections, far more evidence of systemic abuse across a very long period of time. And yet here we are, years after his death, still looking at heavily redacted documents, still hearing that names are being protected, still waiting for accountability that feels like it may never fully come. So what’s the difference? What makes some people easier to sacrifice than others, even among the powerful?
I have a theory. And again, this is just an observation, not a declaration of fact. I think even within elite circles, there is a hierarchy. And I think some of the factors that determine where someone sits on that hierarchy have everything to do with race, perception, and proximity to power in ways that are uncomfortable to say out loud but important to examine.
Take Bill Cosby. He was without question a prominent, wealthy, influential man. But he was also a Black man operating within a system that has a long and documented history of moving faster and harder against Black men when accusations arise. That doesn’t mean the accusations weren’t credible, because they were, and there were many of them, and he should have been held accountable. But it does raise the question of whether his Blackness made it easier for the system to move against him, easier to cast him as a villain, easier to strip him of his legacy and lock him up. The machinery moved quickly, and I don’t think race was irrelevant to that speed.
Then there’s Harvey Weinstein. His case is more complicated, at least in terms of how I think about it. Weinstein is a white man. But he is also Jewish. And his name, Harvey Weinstein, is recognizably Jewish in a way that I think matters here. Now I want to be thoughtful about how I say this because I’m not trying to reduce anyone to their identity or make sweeping generalizations. But I’ll be honest. For a long time, before I ever looked him up, I assumed Harvey Weinstein might be a person of color, or at least mixed race. Something about his first name felt racially ambiguous to me. And when I actually looked at photos of him, I was surprised to learn he was a white man. I don’t know exactly what that says, but I think it says something about perception, about how we categorize people, about how names and assumptions work in our minds before we ever see a face.
And within certain elite circles, Jewish identity, regardless of skin color, has historically placed people in an ambiguous position relative to power. Not outside of it, certainly not persecuted in the same ways as communities of color in America, but not entirely inside either. Not fully protected. And I think that ambiguity, that slight distance from the very top of the hierarchy, might be part of why Weinstein became someone who could be sacrificed. He had enormous power. He wielded it terribly. He deserved to face consequences. But there were also people above him, people more protected than him, who were not facing the same scrutiny, and that asymmetry is worth noticing.
Both Cosby and Weinstein were elites. But they were, in my observation, lower on the totem pole than they may have appeared. And when it became convenient, when the cultural moment demanded a reckoning, they were the ones thrown under the bus. The machinery of accountability ran them over. And I think the people who orchestrated or at least accepted those outcomes did so in part because sacrificing Cosby and Weinstein felt manageable. It didn’t threaten the very top of the structure. It actually reinforced it, by giving the appearance of justice while the real power remained untouched.
Now, the Epstein files. Jeffrey Epstein had a name that, to me, reads as white passing. Yes, he was Jewish, but his name doesn’t carry the same immediately recognizable markers. He operated at a level of wealth and access that was extraordinary even by elite standards. The people connected to him were not just powerful, they were the kind of powerful that transcends politics and industries. And that seems to be exactly why accountability has moved so slowly. Because actually going after those names doesn’t sacrifice a lower-tier member of the club. It threatens the club itself.
And that’s where it gets really interesting to me, because one of the names that appears in the Epstein documents, unredacted, is Donald Trump. And a lot of the other names, many of them, remain redacted. Trump himself has said he’s trying to protect his friends. That’s a strange thing to say, when you think about it. If your own name is out there in the open, if you’re already exposed to whatever scrutiny comes with that, why would your instinct be to shield other people’s names? What does that dynamic actually look like? Do those people have something over him? Are they above him on the same totem pole he’s allegedly sitting at the top of?
Because here’s where my thinking gets genuinely curious. Donald Trump is the sitting President of the United States. He is in his second term, starting in 2025, and here we are in February 2026. He has arguably the most powerful title in the world. And yet I can’t shake the feeling that even he might be lower on the totem pole than certain people whose names remain hidden. That even the presidency doesn’t put you at the very top of the hierarchy that actually matters.
And I think there are reasons why Trump might not be fully protected the way some others are. One of them, and I say this with full awareness that it sounds strange, is his appearance. Trump is a white man. But he famously tans himself in a way that gives him a very orange complexion. And that’s a choice. An ongoing, deliberate choice. Why does a white man, someone who benefits enormously from white privilege in the most straightforward sense, spend so much time and energy making himself look like he is not entirely white? I’m not trying to be dismissive about it, but it is a genuine observation. It almost reads like someone who, consciously or not, is uncomfortable simply being what he is. Someone who is trying to complicate the picture of himself in ways that are difficult to fully articulate.
And then there’s the question of proximity. Trump is from New York City. He came up in one of the most diverse, multicultural cities in the world. And even if his personal history there is complicated, and it certainly is, the perception of someone deeply embedded in New York carries a certain cultural weight that is distinct from, say, someone who grew up in a more insular, more homogeneous environment. And now, in his second presidency, Trump has made a point of surrounding himself with Black and brown allies, figures who support him, figures from communities that are predominantly made up of people of color. And yes, that’s about politics. But perception doesn’t always follow logic. To certain people, certain very powerful and very quietly influential people, that proximity might read as insufficient whiteness. As a kind of cultural contamination that makes Trump less of a pure insider than he appears.
And I think that might make him, at some point, sacrificeable. Just like Cosby. Just like Weinstein. Not because his race is the same as theirs, not because his experiences are comparable to those of Black Americans or Jewish Americans who face discrimination, but because even within elite hierarchies, someone has to be at the bottom. Someone has to be the one who gets thrown to the wolves when accountability comes calling and the real power needs to remain hidden.
This is not me saying Trump doesn’t deserve scrutiny. He does. His name being unredacted while others remain hidden is itself something that should be examined carefully. But the pattern I’m noticing is that the people who get sacrificed, even among the powerful, tend to be the ones who are just slightly outside the inner circle. Slightly less protected. Slightly easier to explain away.
Jeffrey Epstein’s network, whatever it truly looked like, involved people who are apparently so far inside the circle that not even a sitting president seems willing or able to touch them. And that says something genuinely frightening about how power actually works. Not the power we see on television, not the elections and the press conferences and the bills being signed. The other power. The one that apparently has no name attached to it that anyone is willing to put into print.
What I keep coming back to is the original observation, the one from that social media post that started all of this for me. Cosby and Weinstein were held accountable faster and more decisively, with what appeared to be less institutional resistance, than the people connected to Epstein have been. And the question of why that is, the honest examination of that question, leads to uncomfortable places. It leads to conversations about race and perception and the invisible hierarchies that exist even among the elite. It leads to the recognition that justice is not blind, that it has preferences, and that those preferences often correlate with where someone sits relative to the people who control the mechanisms of accountability in the first place.
I want to be careful to say again that I am not drawing a moral equivalence between the experiences of people of color and the experiences of wealthy white men who face legal consequences. Those are not the same thing. The systemic discrimination that Black Americans and other communities of color face is real, documented, and profoundly different from whatever political exposure a wealthy president or a Hollywood producer faces. What I am saying is that the same biases that shape that discrimination also shape the way power is distributed and protected among the elite. And sometimes those biases result in someone being thrown under the bus not because they’re the worst offender, but because they’re the most convenient sacrifice.
The real question, the one that doesn’t have a comfortable answer yet, is whose names are still hidden. What do those names represent? What would change if they were made public? And why, given all the political will and institutional power that various parties claim to have, does accountability in this particular case keep getting delayed, deflected, and diffused?
I don’t know the full answer. But I think the structure of who has already been held accountable, and who hasn’t, tells us more than we’re usually willing to admit about how the whole system actually functions. And until we’re willing to look at that honestly, including the uncomfortable parts about race and perception and insider status, we’re probably not going to get very far in understanding why the Epstein files look the way they do.