We’ve now combed through hundreds of thousands of files, photos and videos.
They stretch back decades but their effect has been immediate. All week we have said that being mentioned in the files is not evidence of wrongdoing, and that remains a true and important point.
But the release has permanently tarnished reputations and, at the very least, raised questions about supposedly clever people’s judgement.
It has cost Peter Mandelson his seat in the Lords, and who knows what will come of the police investigation now launched. And it has left many others with questions to answer.
There is no evidence to suggest wrongdoing by the tech moguls Bill Gates and Elon Musk, for example.
But the files show that both, like Mandelson, associated with Epstein after his conviction for child prostitution. Sarah Ferguson took her daughters to meet Epstein in Miami the week after his release for that very offence.
Sarah Ferguson has previously said her involvement with Epstein was “a gigantic error of judgment”.
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Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor‘s long and close relationship with Epstein does not need recounting.
Some, like Mandelson, have argued that they didn’t have the full picture of Epstein’s crimes. But the files also show that many people refused to have anything to do with Epstein after his conviction.
They didn’t need to know every detail to understand, like Melinda Gates did in just one meeting, that Epstein was “evil personified”.
We do now have the full picture, or as full as we can hope for, and it is bleak.
It is the experiences of the survivors – or victims, because not everyone survived, like Virginia Giuffre who died last year – that haunts the documents.
Much of the files look dry and methodical, including one which details some witnesses interviewed by authorities, but on closer inspection you can see it is their high schools that are listed; all are 17, and between them they were abused hundreds of times.
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Or the victim who took a pen to the title of her journal, “Flights of fancy”, and altered it to read “Flights and yachts of horror”. Or the testimony of Lisa Phillips, who spoke to Sky News this week:
“One of the young girls came to the door and said, you know, Jeffrey’s ready for his massage and, I argue with the girls for a little bit because I don’t want to do a massage.
“I went with the other girl who brought me to the island. I went into the room to do this massage, and the massage turned into a sexual assault.”
The great and the good visited that same island, or they sought invitations. Unlike Lisa, they had a choice.
