6 min readFeb 24, 2026 12:23 PM IST
First published on: Feb 24, 2026 at 12:23 PM IST
By Debangana Chatterjee
Douglas Kelley, who briefly served as chief psychiatrist at the Nuremberg Prison, attempted to psychologically define “evil” by locating it within a particular group of Nazi men. He failed, not because he lacked expertise, but because evil does not always reside neatly within monstrous individuals. Evil is often cultivated through acts of power and extends beyond the Nazis, implying that evil is not merely a psychological anomaly. So, the inglorious saga of Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted paedophile and indicted sex trafficker, is not an aberration, but a power-facilitated structural reality.
Epstein operated within a nexus of power, normalising a world hospitable to many Epsteins and producing evils that appear ordinary and banal. This world is not merely unsafe for women and children; it is deeply exploitative of racialised and marginalised populations. Yet, this status quo rarely appears extraordinary because its values are so deeply internalised. If Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” described the bureaucratic thoughtlessness that enabled Nazi crimes, what we witness here is the banality of power in global politics. It erects a structure of complicity, making exploitation appear routine, allowing Epsteins to proliferate.
Epstein, here, represents a disconcerting symbol of power. He continued raping minors and women on his secluded Caribbean island, reportedly known as “Pedo Island”, named by the locals after his paedophilic acts. He continued committing these crimes year after year, all the while introducing powerful people to each other, securing their favours, and building a reputation for philanthropic investments, especially in scientific research. His acts were at best a public secret — known yet unacknowledged. While his violence bore its cruellest weight on the bodies he violated, he was structurally protected by an intricate circuit of secrecy and silence that willfully ignored his deeds. A quiet nonchalance emerges, here, from the most ordinary practices of power, normalising an architecture of exploitation that enabled his sustained sexual predation.
In the aftermath of the Epstein revelations, public discourse has focused on moral outrage against the acts of individual depravity and widespread elite corruption. The post-scandal “contentification” around Epstein remained fixated on the names of the world elites, revealing their connections and proximity. From politicians to academics, billionaires to actors — the list indeed reveals the darker side of the elite playbook across the globe, even cutting across ideological divides.
While it is important to hold some of the world’s most powerful individuals answerable, a momentary step back from this moral reflection prompts us to ponder: What if these names were replaced by others? Would it have changed the outcome? The answer is an emphatic “no”, and therein lies the root problem: The world of politics that surrounds us.
Epstein is not an exceptional individual, nor is his network of the world elite an aberration. Treating Epstein and his elite friends as monstrous anomalies risks obscuring the deeper structures, rooted in colonial extraction, capitalist accumulation, and masculinist entitlement that let him thrive, flourish, and function with impunity. This global structural triad renders violence necessary to organise power and stabilise systems. At its heart lies the extraction of labour, bodies, land, and capital.
These structures are institutionalised through political and financial networks, intelligentsia, diplomatic circuits, and intelligence establishments. Epstein was a power broker, circulating within the world of intelligence and national security. Together, the intelligence infrastructure and the national security narrative function as contemporary instruments of colonial governance. While the former erects a system of surveillance, the latter shields the networks of power from public scrutiny.
His reported proximity to Israel’s intelligence establishment, including the Mossad, becomes particularly notable in this context. His purported alliance with Israeli imperialism is not merely geopolitically significant. Amidst a continued Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and in light of its historical precedence, it reflects the structural embeddedness of an all-encompassing colonial control. It reinstates Epstein and his power brokerage at the core of an architecture of control. Epstein treated bodies as controllable assets, much as colonial regimes have treated the bodies of the colonised.
Such bodies are rendered cheap and disposable, recalling the logics of slavery. Behind this lies an unbridled profit motive and a circuit of capitalist accumulation. While capitalism structurally keeps extracting value out of labour, Epstein kept extracting value out of sexualised bodies. It is no coincidence that the Epstein files include a long list of billionaires — a cohort of the elite managerial class that scales abuse and protects the perpetrators by legitimising certain narratives.
The most intimate expression of this architecture of abuse lies in Epstein’s direct masculine control over the bodies of women and children. Epstein’s acts reveal the eroticisation of domination in the form of systematic sexual abuse. This is not simply about the gender that his victims belonged to. Here, gender works as a cultural glue, paving the way for gendered entitlement, entwined with the exploitative mechanisms of colonialism and capitalism. This explains how women like Ghislaine Maxwell, his main accomplice, could inhabit and reproduce these structures of masculine domination.
Epstein exposés mark a moment of episodic visibility, laying bare how the ordinary institutional and social mechanisms structurally protect such monstrosity through law, politics, and narrative. This structure persists quietly, even when the scandal fades. Treating Epstein’s violence as an isolated scandal is a recipe that evades structural accountability, rendering international politics morally toothless.
The writer is assistant professor (Social Science), National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru
From politicians to academics, billionaires to actors — the list indeed reveals the darker side of the elite playbook across the globe, even cutting across ideological divides. 
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