What the Impact of the Epstein Files Is Telling Us

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

There’s no serious question, I think, that the Epstein files, released by a dilatory Trump Administration only after the passage of an act of Congress they tried to prevent, have already proven the most consequential database revelation in history. Criminal processes have begun against a former British Prince, a former Norwegian prime minister and the former British ambassador to the US. People have lost their jobs as chairman of Hyatt Hotels, managing partner of Paul Weiss, general counsel of Goldman Sachs, senior professors at Harvard and Columbia, chief of staff to the UK prime minister, consultant at CBS News, national security adviser in Slovakia and as CEOs of the World Economic Forum and ports operator DP World. Political figures in France, Spain and Sweden have been forced to surrender public roles.

Less consequence has so far attended disclosure of lying to a congressional hearing by the Secretary of Commerce and unverified assertions of child sexual assault by the President of the United States. I wondered aloud eight months ago whether Trump’s Epstein woes were just beginning, and I think that suggestion has aged well. But even without that, the record of impact is enormous, and has, admittedly at long last, been swift. This week I want to discuss what about the Epstein files, and the way they were disclosed, has made them so significant. It is a story, I think, that is very much one about how the press works, and sometimes doesn’t.

Important contrasts

We should perhaps begin by contrasting the impact of the Epstein files with the more limited effects that accompanied such data disclosures as those in the Panama Papers (2016) and the US tax files which the person later convicted of the leak has said he gave to ProPublica in 2019 and which were published beginning in 2021. It’s true that the Panama Papers toppled the prime minister of Iceland and a candidate to return to high office in Pakistan, as well as officials in Argentina, Spain and Ukraine. And as someone who had some responsibility for the ProPublica series, I very much hope its detailed proof of the huge tilt in our tax system in favor of the ultrarich will one day contribute to meaningful reform.

Why have the Epstein files already spurred more change? A big part of the answer, I would submit, was because of the open source nature of the disclosed documents. While the Panama Papers were made available to a consortium of news organizations, that group was basically limited to one major outlet per country. In both that case and the ProPublica tax files, access to the database had to be limited including out of concerns that sources might be revealed (even as we didn’t know who our source at ProPublica was), and that innocent people and legitimate privacy interests could be compromised by untrammeled access to data that had been entrusted to the newsrooms receiving the leaks. No such concerns were present in the Epstein case once Congress had mandated disclosure.

 

Of course, it’s important to note, as others have, that the release of the Epstein files near the dawn of agentic AI has greatly facilitated press inquiries into the data, and in particular made “big data” journalism accessible to many more newsrooms. If these millions of pages had been released, for instance, shortly after Epstein’s death in 2019, many fewer newsrooms would have had the capability to canvass them, and even those that did would have been in a far weaker position to do so than they are today.

And a recent historic analogy

That said, it may also shed additional light to compare what has happened with the Epstein disclosures to a very different and earlier moment, but one with the same sort of wide-ranging effects. That was the #MeToo disclosures of 2017-18. (And before you say that Epstein and #MeToo got so much attention because they both dealt with sex, note that much of the behavior bringing people down in the current Epstein scandals has nothing to do with sex: examples range from Brad Karp to Howard Lutnick to Peter Mandelson to Kathryn Ruemmler.)

Here’s the common thread: While triggered by more conventional investigative reporting by the New York Times and the New Yorker, #MeToo became a systemic shock rather than just a story about an evil Hollywood producer because it was picked up by newsrooms everywhere, who found analogous stories on their own turf, on multiple beats, in many far-flung places.

This has been the case with the Epstein files as well. It is no discredit to the amazing Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald—the single journalist who has done more than any other to bring the Epstein story to this point—to note that she would almost certainly not have recognized the significance of some of the stories in other nations, and in disparate companies, that have come to light with the files in recent months. This is the power of crowd-sourcing, and when extended to a crowd of journalists it can be incredibly powerful indeed. Among other things, that power overcame the cynicism that comes so naturally to journalists looking at others’ scoops.

I don’t want to leave my reference to Julie K. Brown without joining those expressing the hope that the Pulitzer Prize Board, when it meets on April 30 and May 1, will finally award her a special citation in lieu of the Prize she has not received during her almost decade now of work on this story. If such citations can go to Ray Bradbury and Bob Dylan, they can surely honor this critical landmark journalistic work.

Lessons to be learned

What should those of us not on the Pulitzer Prize Board learn from the phenomenon of the Epstein files? For anyone who in future comes into possession of a newsworthy database, I think the most important lesson is how important it would be, if possible, to open-source it. The multiplier effect on impact will almost surely justify the effort.

For those in newsrooms not the initial recipient of the data, the multitude of important Epstein stories should serve as a spur, a reminder that new tools have turned what were once regarded as unwieldy “data dumps” into treasure troves for the many rather than the few.

Finally, for all of us readers, let the Epstein files serve as your latest reminder, if any more were needed, that the greater the attempts by powerful people to keep records secret, the more you should look sympathetically on efforts to bring them to light.

Leave a comment