Are what we are witnessing merely individual deviations, or are we living within a system that produces evil and protects it? Between Faust, who sealed a pact with the Devil, and Humbert, who falsified love to justify violation, stands Epstein as a witness to an age that no longer requires an external devil—only a human being who possesses money, power, and eloquence. This text is an attempt to read one of the darkest contemporary episodes through the lenses of literature, philosophy, and politics.
I do not know how to describe the emotions that overwhelm a person when viewing the images recently revealed in documents related to Epstein. Each time an image appears of a child or an adolescent surrounded by the faces of those men—like hyenas encircling their prey—or images of women unconscious, with no knowledge of what happened to them in those dark places, I feel a terrifying shudder cloud my insides. It is as though I am not living reality, but watching a film or a series depicting the ugliness of madmen and the injustice of tyrants.
In cinema, we wait for the ending to witness revenge against the oppressor, and this oppressor is often portrayed as a creature belonging to the underworld, to the bottom of society. We convince ourselves that harsh reality or marginality is what produces heinous crimes. But what is truly terrifying in the story of Epstein is that the “underworld” turned out to be the very top of the pyramid, not its base. As if the pyramid has been inverted, its base becoming its apex, carrying within it layered and accumulated atrocities. How was a single person able to build such a hierarchical structure of horrors, and make its summit the darkest place of all?
What is even more disorienting is that this atrocity seems to condense, in a single recurring scene, the essence of three major works of world literature: Faust, The Master and Margarita, and Lolita.
In Faust (1808), Goethe presents a world despairing of the limits of reason, where a man strikes a deal with the Devil: pleasure and experience in exchange for the soul. Seduction here appears as a deliberate act exercised by forces of evil. At the heart of the narrative stands Margaret, the innocent girl whose life is shattered as a result of a pact in which she had no part. She is the victim of an agreement she did not choose.
More than a century later, Mikhail Bulgakov wrote The Master and Margarita (published posthumously in 1966). Here, the Devil is no longer an individual intermediary, but appears in Moscow to transform desire into a collective theatrical spectacle. Woland does not seduce a single person; he places the entire city before a mirror of its own hypocrisy. Margarita, unlike Gretchen-Margaret, enters this world of her own will. Desire is no longer a secret sin, but a public performance.
Then came Lolita (1955) by the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov, marking a rupture: no Devil, no pact, no supernatural forces. Everything unfolds through language alone. Humbert Humbert does not merely seduce the child; he seduces the reader as well, through a deceptive and beautiful narration. Here, there is no need for the Devil—human beings suffice. Nabokov said of his novel: “Lolita is not a story about perversion, but about the loss of reality under the tyranny of language.”
From that point on, perversion became aesthetically presentable, and rhetoric capable of justifying crime. Doors were opened to deviant imagination, and Lolita became a symbol of violated innocence clothed in the language of love.
In the case of Epstein, however, we are no longer dealing with literary metaphor, but with a reality that reenacts the evolution of literature—only in reverse. There is no longer any need for a pact of the soul, nor for a malevolent intermediary, nor even for refined seduction. Desire has been transformed into a system. Perversion has become institutionalized, producing “Lolitas” without mercy, without voice, without protection.
As if Faust began with the pact, transformed in The Master and Margarita into a collective satanic dance, and reached completion in Lolita, where the human being himself becomes the Devil.
All of this leads us to a philosophical question: how did perversion become a system?
This structure can be read through what Foucault wrote about the body and power, or through Nietzsche’s description of punishment as a means of inscribing morality onto the body. The public squares that once witnessed bloody punishment in Europe have been replaced by private, isolated islands where domination is exercised silently. The scene has changed, but the logic of oppression has not.
Within this system, childhood becomes the most dangerous apex: the body easiest to discipline, the least resistant, and the most susceptible to erasure. But the issue is not childhood alone—it is an entire economy of bodies: women, children, the marginalized. They are transported, hidden, consumed, and then erased.
The questions are many:
Why does this filth prevail?
What has made pedophilia a recurring desire within circles of power?
Where did this power come from?
What did Epstein offer that caused political and economic elites to rush toward him?
How could one person transform corruption and depravity into something resembling a closed resort for influence?
Epstein may have vanished from the scene—life—but the network that enabled him remains alive. A system that reproduces itself, protects its members, and turns the law into a shield for power rather than a tool of accountability. In this context, crimes do not appear as exceptions, but as logical outcomes of a system that elevates protection above justice.
The questions grow even more dangerous when indications emerge of potential ties between Epstein and intelligence agencies. Even if such accusations remain within the realm of suspicion, their mere existence reveals the fragility of the boundary between crime and politics. When crimes against innocence are wrapped in silence and protected by security calculations, corruption becomes shielded rather than pursued.
But before drowning in hypotheses, the fundamental question remains: how were these crimes allowed to continue? How was their system protected in this way?
And more disturbing still: why does pedophilia, in particular, recur as a desire within elite circles?
We are not speaking of a fleeting deviation or a marginal lust, but of a descent into the abyss—the abyss of human evil in its purest form. If rape is among the most horrific of crimes, pedophilia is the mother of crimes: because it does not merely violate the body, but strips innocence, kills the soul, and turns the human being into a tool in the hands of those who possess everything.
What makes the crime even more atrocious is not the act itself, but the position of those who commit it: those who present themselves as guardians of the “civilized world,” teachers of values, preachers of morality, and engineers of humanitarian discourse.
At this moment, it is not only the victims who collapse, but the very meaning of ethics itself. The claim of civilization collapses when it emanates from the peaks of corruption.
The question is no longer: where is the Devil?
But rather: how did we arrive at a world that no longer needs the Devil at all?
Image source: TMZ, September 9, 2025