What the Epstein Network Tells Us About Power, Complicity, and the Psychology of Betrayal
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. Last week, I promised an episode about what happens to us when we lose our heroes. That means we'll be talking about the Epstein Files this week, the people named in them, and what that does to us psychologically when those people that we've admired, followed, or in some cases built our intellectual or spiritual lives around them turn out to have participated in or deliberately ignored systemic crimes against children. So if that's something that triggers you in any way, this might be an episode you want to skip.
Leslie Poston:If you want to face reality with an unflinching eye, let's keep going. Before I get into the psychology, I need to spend a moment being unflinching about what the Epstein Files actually represent, because one of the things we'll discuss later is how thoroughly our culture has trained us to soften this. What the files describe is not a scandal or a controversy or a complicated situation involving flawed but brilliant men. It's a decades long record of the systematic rape and trafficking of children and the network of powerful people who made that possible. The people named didn't stumble into proximity with something ugly.
Leslie Poston:Many of them knew, and some of them participated. Others looked away, deliberately, which in a network like this is its own form of participation. And the institutions that housed their reputations universities, publishing houses, religious organizations, media companies, philanthropic foundations, in many cases knew enough to act, and they chose not to, because protecting institutional prestige was worth more to them than protecting children. This has been going on for decades, and that's not rhetorical emphasis. It's documented in legal cases, settlements, non prosecution agreements, and in the named individuals who have faced no consequences as far back as the nineties or earlier.
Leslie Poston:Epstein was arrested, quietly handled, and returned to operating. The people who helped him maintain that network continued their careers, speaking engagements, book deals, and academic appointments. Some of them are still in those positions now. There's also a eugenics dimension here that I covered in-depth in our episode Everyday Eugenics, and it's directly relevant. Epstein explicitly framed his predatory behavior in eugenicist terms, speaking openly about wanting to seed the human race with his DNA, about using teenage girls and very young women as reproductive vessels, and about the genetic superiority he believed he and the men in his orbit possessed.
Leslie Poston:The belief that certain people are more valuable than others, that brilliance or wealth or social position confers rights over those with less power is the ideological substrate that made this network possible and kept it protected. The victims were young, poor, and often from marginalized communities. The perpetrators and enablers were wealthy, credentialed, and connected. And that asymmetry was the whole architecture, and it maps directly onto the eugenicist logic we've discussed before. The title of this episode makes you a specific promise.
Leslie Poston:It's not just about what happened in the Epstein network. It's about how something this sustained, this widely known inside elite circles, kept operating for decades without meaningful consequence? That's a psychological question, and research gives us real answers, although they are considerably more uncomfortable than the thought limiting catchall belief that those people are just uniquely evil. Fisk's research on power and social perception shows something counterintuitive. The more power you have, the less attention you pay to other people.
Leslie Poston:Not because powerful people are necessarily cruel, but because their position doesn't require attentiveness. The powerless become expert readers of the powerful because they have to be. The powerful stop reading other people carefully, because nothing in their environment demands it. Think about what that means inside a network like Epstein's. The academic, spiritual leaders, cultural figures who moved through those dinners and those properties weren't attending carefully to who else was in the room, who was serving them, or who might have seemed uncomfortable.
Leslie Poston:Their position didn't require it. And Fisk's research tells us this isn't a character defect. It's a predictable consequence of occupying positions where other people's inner lives are simply less salient to you than your own goals and relationships. The structure of elite social life selected systematically for people who were least equipped to notice what was happening right in front of them. And that's the situational architecture, but there's another layer underneath it.
Leslie Poston:One that makes the Epstein network so specifically disturbing to people who admired some of the figures caught in it. Research from Benagy on implicit cognition shows that people with genuine, conscious commitments to equality and justice routinely make decisions that contradict those values, not because they're lying about what they believe, but because stated values and automatic cognitive processes run on different tracks. And the automatic track does considerably more of the driving than most of us ever want to acknowledge. And this is something that's so hard to metabolize about someone like Noam Chomsky advising a convicted child sex trafficker on media strategy, or Deepak Chopra maintaining a years long friendship with a man he knew had been accused of sexually assaulting a 13 year old. These aren't men without stated ethical commitments.
Leslie Poston:Chomsky built a career on speaking for the powerless against the powerful, and Chopra's entire brand is consciousness, healing and love. Banaji's research doesn't let us dismiss the contradiction with they must have secretly known and not cared. It asks a harder question. How do people with genuine, explicit values consistently act in ways that betray them? The answer is that the gap between our stated beliefs and our actual behavior is larger than we're willing to see, especially when our social environment is organized to make the dissonance invisible.
Leslie Poston:Epstein's network did that work deliberately. The social consensus inside those rooms that this was an interesting man with some legal difficulties in his past functioned exactly the way social consensus always functions: as a cognitive shortcut that nobody recognized as a shortcut when it was happening. When everyone around you is treating something as normal, your brain processes that as information, not as proof, but as evidence, and evidence accumulates. And this is what decades of looking away actually looks like in the research, Not a coordinated conspiracy of people who knew exactly what they were protecting, a distributed system of motivated not knowing. Powerful people who weren't attending to the people around them, self identified ethical people whose implicit cognition was running interference on their explicit values, and an elite social environment that provided constant reinforcement for the comfortable interpretation over the accurate one.
Leslie Poston:None of that makes it acceptable. Understanding the mechanism behind it isn't the same as excusing the outcome. Epstein's victims were raped and trafficked and had their suffering minimized for decades, while the men around their abuser were having dinner and comparing philosophies. Fisk and Benagi's research again tells us that this is how ordinary human psychology operates under specific structural conditions. And that means if we want different outcomes, we need structures that are actually harder to look away from, not just more individuals with better character.
Leslie Poston:You might have noticed that these monumental files aren't necessarily being talked about by people you know as much as you'd expect. The reason so many people feel confused, ambivalent, or strangely muted about these revelations rather than simply and clearly furious isn't accidental. We've all been conditioned toward that response for a long time. Media culture has spent decades training us to process predatory behavior by powerful, culturally prominent men as complicated. A human flaw to be weighed against their contributions to society.
Leslie Poston:This framing has become nearly automatic. The news framing for abusive men, for example, is usually, despite these allegations, while his personal conduct was controversial, we must separate the man from the work. This language asks us to perform a cost benefit analysis that we would never apply to anyone without cultural capital. Christian cultural dominance in American life has compounded this in ways worth naming plainly as well. Forgiveness theology, when applied to powerful men who rape women and children, functions as a suppression mechanism.
Leslie Poston:The emphasis on grace, redemption, not judging, or the complexity of a sin are not neutral theological positions. They reliably benefit perpetrators and burden survivors. The research on institutional responses to abuse, including landmark studies on the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention, documents a consistent pattern. Forgiveness doctrine is applied urgently to the accused and skeptically to the accuser. Institutions that prioritize their own continuity use whatever tools are available to manage threats to it, and forgiveness theology is an extraordinarily effective tool.
Leslie Poston:Research on moral disengagement gives us even more vocabulary for what's happening in the broader culture. Moral disengagement describes the mechanisms people use to selectively suspend their ethical standards: euphemistic labeling, displacement of responsibility, distortion of consequences, and dehumanization of victims. And we can see every single one of these at work and how the Epstein story has been covered. Calling rape, sexual misconduct, centering perpetrators' distress, emphasizing what we can't know, framing victims' backgrounds in ways that subtly redistribute responsibility, calling children younger than 15 young women to imply that that child could consent. These aren't just rhetorical choices.
Leslie Poston:They're reliable pathways to moral disengagement, and most of us have been swimming in them for so long that recognizing the outrage we're actually entitled to on this can feel like an overreaction. But I promise, it's not. This is where parasocial relationship research and cognitive dissonance research become relevant. And if you want a deeper grounding in either of those, we've done full episodes on both, and we've talked about them consistently through the previous 100 plus episodes of PsyberSpace. The short version: we form real psychological bonds with public figures whose work matters to us, and those bonds are processed by the brain similarly to real relationships.
Leslie Poston:When someone at the center of that bond is revealed to have caused serious harm, the loss is real, even if the relationship was one-sided. Researchers studying what happens to fans and followers after a public figure's moral exposure have documented something called para love shock, a genuine grief response that people may feel they're not entitled to because they never knew the person personally. But they are. What makes the Epstein Network particularly destabilizing is the scale. This is not one person turning out to be different from their public image like a JK Rowling.
Leslie Poston:It's a cross institutional network implicating academia, media, religion, philanthropy, politics, and finance simultaneously. Losing one admired figure is a wound. Losing a web of them, anchored in the very institutions we use to evaluate credibility and trustworthiness, that starts to feel like a structural collapse. That lands on top of the cognitive dissonance that we're all already experiencing, trying to resolve the contradiction between who we believed these people were and what the files are showing us. There's also an identity dimension.
Leslie Poston:Many of us didn't just passively consume these figures' work. We recommended it, quoted it, built parts of our intellectual or spiritual frameworks out of it. And when the person falls this way, the question stops being only whether they were bad and starts being what our endorsement says about us and whether our judgment can be trusted. That shame is worth addressing directly. Predatory people within elite networks frequently are genuinely compelling in specific domains.
Leslie Poston:That's often precisely how they maintain access and cover. Being drawn to someone's ideas is not a moral failing on your part. The ability to perform a trustworthy public persona while causing private harm is something these individuals often cultivate deliberately and are protected in cultivating by the institutions around them. The Epstein story is not a story about victims as an undifferentiated group. Gomez's work on cultural betrayal trauma and Bryant Davis's research on trauma recovery in marginalized communities both point to the same structural reality.
Leslie Poston:The victims in this network were disproportionately young, poor, and from communities already failed by multiple systems. And the systems that they turned to for help failed them again. The non prosecution agreement that let Epstein walk in 2008, for example, wasn't just a legal failure. It was a message, received clearly by every survivor involved, about whose suffering the system was actually organized to protect. That's why the psychological literature on trauma recovery is so consistent on this point: accountability is not optional for healing it's structural.
Leslie Poston:Herman's research identifies public acknowledgment as one of the core requirements for survivor recovery Not just personal processing, but the community confirming out loud that what happened was real and that what happened was wrong. Fried's institutional betrayal research shows that when trusted institutions fail to respond proportionately, the damage to victims is measurably worse than the original trauma alone. Proportionate accountability means prosecution without deference to wealth and status, civil remedies that don't require survivors to outspend institutions, and professional consequences for everyone who participated in or enabled a child rape network. It also means refusing the complexity framing media will keep offering. That balance, cultural contributions, weighed against participation in the rape of children, doesn't exist.
Leslie Poston:The reason we're repeatedly asked to find it is that an appropriately calibrated response would be devastating to a lot of powerful people. Recognizing that the ask itself serves specific interests is part of being clear eyed about what's happening. Psychological recovery from this kind of disillusionment isn't linear, and a tidy list of steps right now would be dishonest about how hard it is. What it does look like over time is separating idealization from admiration and learning to value someone's contribution in a specific domain without making them a total moral proxy and without needing them to be a container for your broader hope and human goodness. The research on what heroes do for us psychologically suggests the idealization is part of what makes falls like this so catastrophic.
Leslie Poston:That doesn't mean stop admiring people. It means building a relationship with admiration that can survive the reality that human beings are capable of serious harm, sometimes simultaneously with real contributions, and that our institutional systems are not reliable filters for character. It also means grieving honestly. This is a loss of people whose work mattered, of frameworks built on their credibility, of a version of the world in which the institutions we trusted were doing what they claimed to do. Grief that moves through tends to clarify, and grief that gets suppressed, especially because we don't feel entitled to it or because culture around us is asking us to perform being reasonable in the face of unreasonable acts, tends to calcify into either cynicism or continued denial, neither of which serves us or the people who are actually harmed.
Leslie Poston:And it means staying appropriately angry. Because your anger right now is proportionate. Children were raped. Adults in positions of power knew, and protected the network, not the children. And that's been going on for decades.
Leslie Poston:The appropriate collective response to that is not equanimity. It's clear eyed persistent demand for accountability, for the individuals named, for the institutions that sheltered them, and for the cultural systems, including media and religion, that spent years teaching us to modulate our response to exactly this kind of harm. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. It's been a bit of a tough episode this week, so thanks for hanging in. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off.
Leslie Poston:As always, until next time, stay curious, and keep those eyes wide open for what's going on around you.
Creators and Guests
