A Theory of the Epstein Files as #MeToo Two

By Dan McLaughlin

Saturday, February 14, 2026

 

In 2017, the #MeToo movement erupted into full public view, with the Harvey Weinstein scandal as the driving wedge for the defenestration of a large number of prominent people (nearly all of them men) from high positions, typically for patterns of sexual abuse and predation towards subordinate women that had gone on for years. Why then? At the time, I had a theory:

 

In the climate of 1998-2000, “sexual harassment” meant “Bill Clinton,” the sexual harassment and affair-with-starstruck-young-subordinate story that had transfixed the nation for two years and dug the entire world of liberalism into a defensive crouch against female accusers of powerful liberals, complete with a theory of “compartmentalization” under which a man who did good for the movement could be forgiven his private sins, regardless of the trail of women he’d treated as disposable…

 

But now, while the mores of Hollywood may not have changed, the partisan climate had. Stories about Fox and Trump make it fashionable again for liberals to be against this sort of thing. In that sense, Weinstein isn’t totally wrong that right-wingers are behind his downfall, but not the way he thinks. There is finally a bigger target to whom he can be sacrificed.

 

Lo and behold, we are having another moment with the Epstein files. Consider the widening list of people losing jobs, careers, and good names over their involvement with notorious sexual-predator ringleader Jeffrey Epstein, which includes:

 

·         Larry Summers taking a leave of absence from teaching at Harvard and resigning from OpenAI’s board;

 

·         Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor being stripped of his title as a British royal, and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson’s charity being closed;

 

·         Peter Mandelson resigning as British ambassador to the United States and quitting the Labour Party, followed by Morgan McSweeney resigning as Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff for recommending Mandelson, and the leader of Labour in Scotland calling on Starmer himself to step down;

 

·         Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem out as chairman and CEO of Dubai-based logistics firm DP World;

 

·         Brad Karp stepping down as chairman of BigLaw firm Paul Weiss;

 

·         Kathy Ruemmler quitting as Goldman Sachs’ chief legal officer and general counsel;

 

·         Slovak national security adviser Miroslav Lajcak resigned;

 

·         Mona Juul, the Norwegian ambassador to Jordan and Iraq resigning, following the resignation of her husband Terje Rod-Larsen as president of the International Peace Institute in 2020;

 

·         Peter Attia, a “CBS News contributor and longevity expert stepped down as the chief science officer of David Protein, a protein bar brand, and is no longer an adviser to the sleep technology company Eight Sleep”;

 

·         David Ross resigned as a department chair at the School of Visual Arts in New York;

 

·         French former Culture Minister Jack Lang resigned as president of the Paris-based Arab World Institute;

 

·         In Sweden, Joanna Rubinstein resigned as chair of Sweden for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees;

 

·         New York Giants owner Steve Tisch is under investigation by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell;

 

·         Super-agent Casey Wasserman has lost clients such as soccer player Abby Wambach and singer Chappell Roan.

 

What you will notice, especially in the U.S. and the U.K. but even in the cultural precincts of continental Europe, is that these are disproportionately left-of-center figures or leaders of left-of-center institutions (not accidentally, quite a few of them are figures of the center-left hated for various reasons by progressives). Why is that? Why now? Why didn’t you see all the same Democratic politicians and liberal media entities and Democratic pundits and flacks who are publicly obsessing about the Epstein files now doing so in 2021-24? (And why are there still some people, such as LinkedIn founder and Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman, who seem untouchable?) I think we all know the answer: suddenly, this is not a relic of the Clinton era but a cudgel against Donald Trump (which can also be used against Trumpworld figures such as Howard Lutnick). So, people who were safe from scrutiny when Joe Biden was in office are now sacrificed for the greater good. Put another way: for many on the left side, a sin is not a sin unless the most prominent person doing it is a Republican. Then, it’s time for a moral panic.

 

Moral panics can be healthy and overdue, or they can be excessive and misguided. The #MeToo movement was both, at times, and that can be true here as well. Many of these people ought to be ashamed of themselves and should have faced consequences long ago, but also, we are definitely at risk of wrecking some careers over fairly tangential ties to Epstein. Moral standards, after all, should not depend upon who is in power, and neither should our capacity to distinguish between the truly guilty and those who are guilty only by association. But the point here is: we can see what they’re doing.