September 5th, 2025. Social media commentators latch onto a vintage clothing reseller’s attempt to sell infamous sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s own monogrammed quarter zip sweatshirt. For the price of eleven thousand dollars, Instagram account @restricted.lifestyle claimed to have found the item in a Miami-Dade County thrift store before purchasing it for resale in their social media-based marketplace. The post combined their own photo of the garment alongside it being donned by the enigmatic sex criminal. The caption was simple: “1of1 worn JEFFREY EPSTEIN quarter zip museum piece fr…straight from Mar A Lago this piece is very controversial and iconic. 100 percent authentic size M.”
The Epstein case is a microcosm of institutional decay in contemporary America. According to a Reuters poll from February 16th, 75% of Americans believe the “government is still hiding information about the alleged clients of Epstein.” In addition, 69% of respondents agreed with the sentiment that the entire affair demonstrated “powerful people in the U.S. are rarely held accountable for their actions.” There is massive popular support for some sort of political response to the crime network led by Epstein – “release the files” has served as a rallying cry for social movements of all varieties opposing the Trump administration. Yet the people have little to no recourse.
Faced with undeniable evidence of horrific crimes, Americans formed a popular demand for truth. Despite considerable resistance, both full-hearted opposition from the Trump administration and the subtle delaying of investigative processes in Congress, a portion of the files have finally made their way to the public. However, the material is rife with redaction and investigators have poked holes in the methods used to conceal the identity of alleged victims. The breadth of released material is too broad, and redaction prevents true clarity in self-led investigations. The media fills this gap, dedicating itself to researching and disseminating truths gleaned from this mountain of paperwork. Press teams went to work, establishing fact and building a historical record of the past.
No longer is the News, a socially constructed representation of current events limited to expert reporters and editors. Social media has democratized reporting and thus, a new way to produce knowledge of current events.
Importantly, the historical record we now hold was not produced by the genius of investigative reporters alone. The role of the press in society has undeniably changed in a social media-driven world. Instead, the press took on a dialogic role as they uncovered new aspects of the case and communicated them to the public. Investigations are no longer exposés on events left in the past – they are ongoing feeds themselves, updated with the inputs of dedicated staff building off primary research and the contributions of others. With open, yet flawed, access to the files themselves, citizen investigators could help build the historical record themselves. No longer is the News, a socially constructed representation of current events limited to expert reporters and editors. Social media has democratized reporting and thus, a new way to produce knowledge of current events. With a profound sense of freedom and the liberty to share, how have Americans responded to the arguably biggest scandal of the decade? They have responded with both impassioned outcry and shocking complacence.
Social media reacted to the scandal as it erupted. Epstein was arrested in July 2019 on federal charges of child trafficking, according to a Justice Department press release. He was pronounced dead less than one month later. This reported death is central to understanding how the case has occupied such a large space in America’s public consciousness: an accused monster with known connections to the upper echelons of political and economic power committed suicide in detention despite 24/7 surveillance. Security cameras cut out for 60 seconds – the time in which Epstein attempted to hang himself. CBS News reported this shock as the first details emerged in Fall of 2019. The nationally known sex offender with ties to the country’s elite, presumably the producer of unknown quantities of blackmail material, died suspiciously in circumstances too convenient to seem true. Almost immediately, the refrain “Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself” trended on social media platforms, and was even used as an ironic punchline by a Golden Globes host, as reported by ABC News. This premise took on a life of its own; this retort was near universal and embodied a mountain of discontent with government. To go even further, this retort developed into a near self-evident truth through mass adoption and recognition of its connotation. No news outlet could confirm every detail of the situation, instead left to carefully lay out the details surrounding all relevant circumstances. The people themselves, both as rumor-spreaders and as citizen journalists, popularized this conclusion on social media.
How is truth produced and established? In a liberal democracy, an idealized perfection of the American system, the citizenry learns about its place in the world through interaction with a community exposed to information.
The “missing minute” was finally released to the public earlier this year, some seven years later. As of March 2026, federal authorities have still not explained how it was lost in the first place.
How is truth produced and established? In a liberal democracy, an idealized perfection of the American system, the citizenry learns about its place in the world through interaction with a community exposed to information. There are facts: clear, concrete things that happened that are clearly explained and reported. Importantly, there are also opinions on how to interpret and shape these facts into a narrative. In this theoretically perfect system, it is the job of the press to report these facts honestly and transparently, offering necessary commentary and analysis to build understanding. These narratives exist on a spectrum: they define the acceptable limits of debate in the theoretical public square. Interpretation outside the confines of social acceptability is rightfully dismissed as speculation or intellectual dishonesty. After all, it is not right to subvert truth to score cheap points in the marketplace of ideas. The base of free information is consideration and dissemination of analysis. Maintaining this equilibrium of acceptability requires that alternatives are pushed aside. Political scientist Joseph Overton termed his concept of an Overton Window to describe a mechanism for forming neutral, effective policy from the spectrum of public opinion. There is a range of acceptable positions centered around a sensible center, and this is where policy comes from – in theory, this center place, a compromise between all acceptable positions, is objective and fair to all.
Conspiracy theories are inherently oppositional. They oppose the hegemonic worldview, and this is their structural role.
Opinions that stray from this window, always cast as sensible, are not just extreme. Deviants can disagree with the analysis produced within the window and produce their own explanations, resulting in being cast as extreme. However, deviants also deny the facts of the case. Fact and interpretation are conflated; events dismissed as insignificant suddenly become central to all understanding; structural forces confused for individual actions. These realities become theory instead of fact. This lends credence to these interpretations’ pejorative nickname: conspiracy theory. One thing is obvious in the Epstein case: nobody truly understands what happened. And there are many, many possible theories to explain why.
Conspiracy theories are inherently oppositional. They oppose the hegemonic worldview, and this is their structural role. The relationship works in two ways: conspiracy theories describe a worldview that undermines a hegemonic understanding of how to properly interpret reality, while the mainstream viewpoint casts theorists as conspiracy peddlers to reinforce their position in the “center.” In this way, conspiracy theories describe a portion of the interpretations that fall outside acceptable debate. All conspiracy theories are necessarily “extreme” in some vein, but not all extreme views and world views are conspiracy theories.
Harrison Goodman Cohn ’26 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences.