It's Time to Admit That Michael Tracey Has Been Right All Along: The "Epstein Files" Created a Moral Panic.
Independent journalist Michael Tracey has been much maligned for being one of the very few willing to do actual journalism about the ever-metastasizing mythology surrounding the disgraced sex offender
Last night, Congressman Ro Khanna decided to bring a special guest to President Trump’s State of the Union—someone who would really show Trump: Khanna’s guest was Haley Robson, “a survivor of Epstein’s abuse,” as he put it proudly on his Twitter.
This was supposed to show Trump, who the Democrats have routinely accused of covering up the Epstein files and his own alleged crimes in them. In an irony you just could not have made up, Haley Robson was by her own admission a recruiter for Jeffrey Epstein. Robson told police she was paid $200 for each girl she brought to Epstein's home. “I'm like Heidi Fleiss,” the Hollywood madam. Robson told cops.
Yup: The Democrats are literally cavorting with a sex trafficker because they think it hurts Trump. (It doesn’t.)
But this was par for the course with the Epstein files, a story which has metastasized into a full blown moral panic, with one journalist standing between us and pitchforks. His name is Michael Tracey.
Six months ago, in September of last year, three members of Congress—Khanna, Republican Thomas Massie, and then-Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene—put on a press conference to drum up support for their bill to release all the files the Department of Justice had on the disgraced sex pest Jeffery Epstein, who died in custody while awaiting trial in 2019. One by one, women with stories of being victimized by Jeffery Epstein, their family members, and their lawyers stepped up to the microphone to denounce the Trump administration for failing to release the files, which we were told were replete with the names of other men who had committed horrifying sex crimes. Epstein was not just a sex offender who died awaiting trial for his own crimes, but the mastermind of a “global pedophile ring.” There was a list of names of rich and powerful men—the Epstein “client list”—to whom Jeffery Epstein had trafficked underage girls in order to blackmail the VIPs, who were now being protected by Donald Trump, and justice for the victims could mean nothing short of the release of the full Epstein files.
The tone and narrative established at the press conference was very much in line with how the Epstein saga has been spoken about more generally in the mainstream liberal media. But when the speakers stopped to take questions, you heard a single voice of dissent. It was the independent journalist Michael Tracey, who had been invited to the press conference by Congressman Khanna, who attempted to pose a question about the source of much of what was being alleged about the existence of an Epstein list of pedophiles. That source was a woman named Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who had alleged among other things that Epstein had trafficked her to the lawyer Alan Dershowitz on no less than six occasions. This, it turned out, was not true, by Ms. Giuffre’s own admission. She later recanted the whole Dershowitz accusation, as well as accusations against Harvard professor Stephen Kosslyn, Jean-Luc Brunel, and others (Ms. Giuffree later took her own life).
“Why is it she should be regarded as credible?” Michael Tracey asked Giuffre’s lawyer, Bradley Edwards, who was standing at the podium.
But before he could get an answer, he was summarily thrown out of the press conference.
It was pretty startling. It was, after all, a press conference on accountability and transparency. And for asking a perfectly reasonable question, Michael—the press, doing the press’s job, albeit the only journalist who seemed interested in it—was forcibly ejected from the press conference.
I had Michael on NewsNation that night to discuss what happened, and for my pains I got a fraction of the vitriol Michael has had to put up with for over six months for the crime of being the only journalist willing to actually ask reasonable questions about what has morphed into a full-blown moral panic. I was called a pedophile protector, a pedophile shill, and a Mossad agent.
Well, now that the Epstein files have been released in all their glory, it’s time for everyone to admit it: Michael Tracey was right.
“Release the Epstein files!” was once something you heard from Right-wing podcasters (some of whom ended up quite high in the Trump administration). They were certain they would find evidence of their favorite conspiracy theory, that the Democrats are all a bunch of pedophiles. This country has a long and sordid history of moral panics around supposed child trafficking rings, so this wasn’t particularly surprising.
What’s surprising is what happened next: When Donald Trump won the election in 2024, you started to hear Democrats demand the release of the files, certain they would find sex crimes they could hang around Donald Trump’s neck. Absent evidence, they accused Trump of engaging in sex crimes repeatedly with Epstein, so much so that the lawyers of some of the most prominent networks had to step in and force on-air talent to read statements admitting that Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the Epstein context. This created a ravenous craving for evidence among the President’s opposition, and '“release the Epstein files” turned into a religious mantra. Everything President Trump did was to “distract” from the Epstein files—an issue that is truly not top of mind for voters, as poll after poll found. Some in the Democratic Party started calling the GOP the “Pedophile Protection Party,” even though many more Democrats were named in the files than Republicans.
In retrospect, it’s kind of obvious that something that deeply and easily politicized was going to be a magnet for conspiratorial garbage, which is exactly what the “Epstein List” always was. The central claim of the conspiracists—first on the Right-wing podcast circuit, then on the Left-wing cable news circuit—was that Epstein had been trafficking underage girls to the rich and powerful in order to blackmail them, possibly at the behest of some foreign government (Israel, usually, because Epstein was Jewish and had a relationship with one of the most unpopular Israeli politicians in the country’s history). But there was never any evidence that this was true. The entire claim about a widespread child-sex trafficking and blackmail operation that ensnared lots of VIPs, as Michael Tracey pointed out repeatedly, stemmed from Ms. Giuffre, who had been forced to recant.
As the moral panic around Jeffrey Epstein reached a fevered pitch, Michael Tracey was the only person willing to point out that a lot of the victims, especially those in the spotlight, weren’t even underage when they met Epstein; they were claiming Epstein “groomed” them as adults. (“Doesn’t the notion of grooming typically refer to children who are groomed by predatory adults?” Tracey asked one victim who met Epstein at 21. “You can be groomed at any age,” she said.) Tracey was the only one who questioned the narrative that there were thousands or even hundreds of victims, as people like Massie were insisting without evidence. He was the only one willing to point out that many of the victims had received millions of dollars in settlements, the only one to point out that many of the “survivors” were themselves recruiters, who in exchange for money, brought other women to Epstein.
None of that means that Epstein’s crimes aren’t awful, and certainly any powerful individuals who participated in those crimes should be exposed and prosecuted. The problem is, prior to the release of the files, there was no evidence that other men aside from Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell committed any crimes. There was a lot of innuendo. There was a lot of “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire!” There were a lot of people who maintained a relationship with Epstein even after he pleaded guilty to charges of procuring an underage girl for prostitution in Florida in 2008, which is admittedly gross. But there was no evidence that anyone else had committed a crime, certainly no evidence that anyone besides Epstein had engaged in sexual acts with a minor.
That didn’t stop the media from calling anyone who had ever met Jeffery Epstein—especially Donald Trump—of being a pedophile. As Matt Taibbi put it in December,
The Epstein saga is the worst-reported story of all time. The world’s leading news organizations on a regular basis print easily debunked untruths. Crucial details, like a federal case built on a recovered memory, the chief accuser being an epic fabulist, or nearly a billion dollars in civil claims won by “survivors” who themselves may be “professional recruiters” (as one victim put it to me), are left out of coverage. Almost all of the drama is concentrated in the expectation of revelations around things that still theoretically could be true, like underage hijinks with a Clinton or Trump, or an arrangement with the Mossad, but the absence of evidence of these things is rarely reported.
Just wait for the Epstein files to be released! skeptics were told. That’s where all the proof is!
Then Khanna and Massie got their bill passed, which forced the DOJ to release the Epstein files. And the released files confirmed everything Michael Tracey had ever said.
There was no list. There was no evidence of any sexual crimes committed beyond Epstein’s.
Not that you could say this on cable news!
Certainly, the files contained evidence of people maintaining relationships with Jeffery Epstein who should have known better. And former Prince Andrew was arrested—but though the media did its best to make it sound like he was arrested for a sex crime, he was brought in for questioning over “allegations that he shared confidential government information with Jeffrey Epstein.”
Where is the list? Who was blackmailed?
There was no list, of course. But that did not stop Congressman Khanna from making one up. Khanna took to the House floor and read out the names of six “wealthy, powerful men” who he suggested the DOJ was protecting by redacting their names.
But it turned out that four of these men were totally innocent. They weren’t even wealthy or powerful, just ordinary guys going about their lives until they were smeared as pedophiles by a sitting United States Congressman.
This is exactly why I was one of few who agreed with President Trump and opposed releasing the Epstein files. It just seemed totally obvious that this is what would happen: Completely innocent people would have their lives ruined by being named in documents that utterly fail to prove their guilt, yet will be taken as having done so by a braying mob in thrall to a moral panic. “Donald Trump’s name appears tens of thousands of times!” they gleefully cheered on cable news, leaving out that many of the mentions were demonstrably made up or even painted Trump in a positive light, like when he called the Palm Beach cops to thank them for arresting Epstein.
In masquerading as some kind of white knight, Khanna used the protection of the House floor to smear four random innocent men who could not defend themselves from his libel. As Jonathan Turley aptly put it, “Ironically, in denouncing how 'wealthy powerful men' are protected in a two-tiered legal system, Khanna pulled the ultimate powerplay — defaming four individuals with little concern of accountability. Ironically, Khanna succeeded in showing the ultimate example of the impunity enjoyed by 'wealthy, powerful men.'"
The obsession with Jeffery Epstein, who met the end he deserved, is so obviously political. Just as Republicans once hoped to tie Democrats to Epstein, now the Democrats are trying, without evidence, to hang him around Trump’s neck. It’s an elite obsession divorced from the concerns of everyday Americans. And it devolved into a full-blown moral panic.
It’s time to admit that Michael Tracey was right all along.
I don’t agree with Michael about everything—but that is exactly why he is so important as a journalist: He never lets the mob influence what he thinks. This is what journalism used to be—speaking truth to power. Now it’s just an over-educated mob of wealthy elites protecting the powerful on their political side, which, in the case of over 90% of journalists, is the Democrats. It’s why we need journalists like Michael Tracey more than ever.
Consider subscribing to his excellent Substack here.
It's kinda rich Ilhan Omar calling anyone else a pedophile protector. Considering she thinks the rapes of little girls by Hamas on October 7 were all justified.
It’s amazing how Robson gets away with it. In the original Palm Beach indictment she is listed as a co-conspirator. Even Julie K. Brown’s book has Haley as the ringleader of the whole Palm Beach incident. But because the media has gone full satanic panic of the 80s on this case, facts are irrelevant