Since the Trump administration released over three million documents from the Jeffrey Epstein case file on January 30, the scandal has continued to unsettle public opinion. All eyes have turned to the New York financier who ran an international network of sex trafficking and child sexual abuse.

Marc Crépon, professor of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, analyzes how this sexual abuse scandal has put our society to the test. The director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) has written numerous books on violence, including Le Consentement meurtrier (Murderous Consent). After the writer Gabriel Matzneff was accused of raping minors, he published Ces temps-ci. la société à l’épreuve des affaires de mœurs (“These Times: Society Put to the Test by Sexual Scandals”), an essay in which he examines the extent of society’s past complacency in the face of such sexual violence.

In what way is the Epstein scandal a test for our societies?

The Epstein case exposes a system of using and exploiting young girls, reduced to the status of sexual objects and made available to the powerful. It is obvious that such a sex scandal puts society to the test, not only because it confronts it with its past silence, but also because it carries with it several traps. The first is the slide into conspiracy theories, assuming that all those in power are sexual predators – when in reality, it was not a vast network, but rather a pool in which young women were offered to very specific individuals who benefited from the “in-kind” favors Epstein provided. The second trap is to focus solely on the perpetrators, forgetting the victims and the ways in which sexual violence destroyed their lives.

How do you explain the fascination with Epstein and his connections?

We are astonished by the scale of the complicity and the rape culture at the highest levels of society. Jeffrey Epstein was first convicted in 2008 [sentenced to 18 months in prison] for soliciting prostitution of a minor. These were extremely serious crimes, yet that did not deter a number of people from maintaining relationships with him. Continuing to associate with Jeffrey Epstein in full knowledge of the facts amounts to a complete minimization of his crimes.

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