Conspiracy theories only flourish with more Epstein evidence

The release of an enormous cache of files about the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein might have been expected to quell conspiracy theories about his crimes and the government’s knowledge of them. Instead, it is spawning a generation of new ones.

Conspiracy theorists, foreign influence operatives and trolls armed with artificial intelligence are seizing on the millions of haphazardly redacted materials, released last month, to cobble together new, speculative stories.

One debunked claim, concocted using emails and receipts, suggested that Epstein was alive and playing video games in Israel. (He died by what authorities said was suicide in 2019.)

A series of social media posts that emanated from China tried to connect the Dalai Lama with Epstein, based on emails in which Epstein discussed attempts to set up dinner with the exiled Buddhist leader. In a statement, the Dalai Lama’s office said it was “unequivocally” untrue that the two had ever met or agreed to interact.

Others are duping people with hoaxes on social media, where reality is easily masked or mimicked. While the files contain photos and videos of Epstein with children, fake ones that were altered or generated using AI are also spreading. So are spoof emails, made to look like those in the cache.

Usually, conspiracy theories feed on an absence of information, not a glut. But the Justice Department’s release of more than 3 million pages, 2,000 videos and 180,000 images has done little to smother baseless speculation or fabrication.

The trove — and the ease of access to it — has made Epstein even more of a target for both the tinfoil hat contingent and the armchair true-crime aficionados. The files lay out evidence of real abuses, which only drives online sleuths to search for more.

“These disclosures are being taken to be evidence that something even larger remains concealed,” said Jenny Rice, a digital studies professor at the University of Kentucky. “It’s like proof that there’s more proof somewhere else. It means there’s a gap that remains for the narratives to grow bigger and escalate.”

In the United States, new conspiracy theories are coming from across the political divide — continuing a cross-aisle fascination that intensified after President Donald Trump’s attempts last year to deflect interest in the scandal.

On the right, high-profile accounts including former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s and Tucker Carlson’s shared a wide variety of unproven conspiracy theories, including speculation about code words for pedophilia and cannibalism, Epstein’s death and Trump’s purported role in “taking down” Epstein.

Left-leaning accounts circulated different theories, often accusing the Trump administration of having a hand in Epstein’s death or of covering up his misdeeds to protect the president. The left-leaning users who amplified conspiracy theories were generally less prominent than the right-leaning accounts that did the same. Greene and Carlson did not respond to requests for comment.

The cache itself is unreliable; the Justice Department noted that it “may include fake or falsely submitted images, documents or videos.”

Several conspiracy theories sprang from unconfirmed tips with dubious origins that were published in the government’s searchable database. Some of the documents include scanning errors and formatting quirks, such as an email that seemed to refer to a “sexy and cute, =9yo,” an abbreviation of “year old.” Three other copies of the email in the tranche identify the subject as “19yo.”

In an environment with bountiful data, conspiracy theories can thrive when believers are primed to see what they want to see, said Quassim Cassam, a philosophy professor at the University of Warwick in Britain and an author of a book about conspiracy theories.

“If you have already decided who the bad guys are or what is really happening, then informational overload makes your life easier because you have so much raw material to work with,” he said in an email.

The theories themselves are wide ranging. The documents breathed new life into a conspiracy trope: that Epstein’s death was faked. Influential right-wing users on X repeated the rumor after the government disclosed Epstein’s YouTube handle, as well as an email about Fortnite, a popular multiplayer video game. Online sleuths discovered the same username on Fortnite, with signs that it had recently been active, and assumed that it, too, belonged to Epstein.

Fortnite described the misinterpretation as “a ruse by a Fortnite player,” saying that after Epstein’s YouTube screen name was made public, a Fortnite account changed its handle to match. The company said it had no record in its system of Epstein’s email address, which the government also divulged.

The document dump also included hundreds of references to pizza, leading several popular conservative commentators to revive Pizzagate, a debunked conspiracy theory from 2016 about a child sex-trafficking ring operating out of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C.

Foreign governments have also seized on the documents in an influence operation.

Days after the latest document drop, a network of bot accounts linked to a Russian disinformation campaign known as Storm-1516 began posting videos on X and TikTok. They impersonated real news organizations and tried to connect Epstein to France and its president, Emmanuel Macron, according to the French government and researchers who operate as an alliance known as Antibot4Navalny, after the former Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Among the false posts: a fake report made to look like an article from Reuters claiming that a French territory in the South Pacific had become the new “Epstein Island” and a fake article made to look like one from France 24 claiming the recently deceased actress Catherine O’Hara had maligned Macron.

Another fake video, made to look as if it had come from Al Jazeera, said Epstein was the mastermind behind a Ukrainian child sex-trafficking operation. There is no evidence to suggest, as these posts do, that Epstein conspired with Ukraine’s government to run any trafficking operation.

The account that posted that one, which claimed to be based in Sugar Grove, Illinois, had no followers but garnered more than 370,000 views on the social site X in what researchers said was a sign of inauthentic bot activity. The posts have since been removed from TikTok but remain visible on X.

“Russian actors know very well what topics are making the news in our country, and their strategy is to instrumentalise and amplify this,” wrote Léa Surugue, a spokesperson for Viginum, the French government agency that monitors foreign influence operations, in an email.

A new campaign linked to the same Russian network appeared on Tuesday, targeting Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany.

AI has turbocharged the false narratives about Epstein. In Britain, an apparently artificially generated image of him with Nigel Farage, a far-right politician, made the rounds and was posted and then deleted by a rival British political group.

Fabricated images also showed Epstein with Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, as a child with his mother, filmmaker Mira Nair. Despite being debunked by researchers and the mayor, the content spread widely.

“It is incredibly difficult to see images that you know to be fake that are patently photoshopped and AI generated and yet can reach across the entirety of the world in an era of misinformation,” Mamdani told reporters.