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At a certain point, this argument becomes too easy. The man is dead. The man was bad. There is only so much railing to be done against a bad, dead man, especially when his jailhouse death was entirely preventable, when he’d been on suicide watch just days before.
But already, less than 48 hours after his death, we’re already moving away from what the story should be about. We’re already moving into a
land of conspiracy theories, where the president of the United States retweets a baseless, bizarre hypothesis that Bill and Hillary Clinton were responsible for Epstein’s death.
Jeffrey Epstein should not be remembered as a man who once lent his private plane to President Clinton. He should not be remembered as a man who socialized with President Trump. The glittery trappings of his fame should be the footnote of his Wikipedia entry. The bulk of it should be the names of every victim — Jennifer Araoz, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Johanna Sjoberg — detailing all the things he did behind closed doors and with the help of enablers. Allegedly.
He doesn’t deserve to be a conspiracy theory. When you do what he allegedly did, you don’t deserve to be anything but paralyzed in your courtroom seat, as the world watches you go from powerful to pathetic, as your victims make it clear that your money and connections are incidental, that the girls you hurt were the heroes all along.
Monica Hesse is a columnist writing about gender and its impact on society.