In fact, the main true-crime element missing from Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile is the structural audience conditioning, where heavy-handed cliffhangers and artificial maybes keep you tuning in by planting uncertainty. While its talking heads repeat “allegedly” between every other word and initially pose ridiculous questions (“Was he ever even alive to begin with?”), the mock-doc is mainly one of clarity. Here, Epstein’s heinous crimes and top-level connections are as obvious as the “government-sanctioned assassination” that took place during the “34,689,652 minutes” of footage missing from his cell’s security cameras. Embedded in this goofy version of events is an affirming obviousness, freed from the fear of litigation that clouds much of the serious coverage around Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. When Epstein drives O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco to Pedophile Island, it’s just another nod to the overwhelming evidence of guilt caught up in a media storm.
That lucidity separates Bad Pedophile from the films that gave it its barely exaggerated style. Cheap and lurid stock footage, trashy Photoshops, boneheaded experts, excessive hopping around a timeline to draw links between past and present—these are the hallmarks of a cookie-cutter industry still finding ways to drag old headlines out into 90 minutes. It’s gotten so bad that the subgenre was recently deconstructed by a full feature film, the Sundance documentary Zodiac Killer Project. Director Charlie Shackleton’s self-reflexive essay turned his would-be streaming smash (that fell through at the last minute) into a movie about these films’ templated framework and shared visual language. The bitter result is as cynical and snide about its standard-issue aesthetic as Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile is gleeful.
Both are meta projects, commenting not only on their subject matter—the Zodiac Killer and the guy who apparently got all his birthday cards from the Zodiac Killer—but on the industry that seeks to exploit them. Both jab at the narrative hand-holding deployed by this kind of second-screen cinema, Zodiac in its explanation of how B-roll footage is chosen and Jeffrey Epstein by being subtitled Bad Pedophile. Both look dark, gray, and grim. Zodiac Killer Project makes it clear that its source material was intentionally chosen for being conspiracy-minded fodder, not meant to provide answers but to spark online debates—the perfect foundation for a viral tabloid.
In the other direction, Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile takes the platonic ideal of a trashy true-crime conspiracy and provides nothing but over-the-top answers. Where the genre survives off manufactured mystery, the spoof thrives on silly certainty. Yes, Epstein was working at a place called the Deep State. Yes, he was flying around celebrities who signed into his plane’s guestbook and checked boxes indicating that they were pedophiles. Yes, Trump had him murdered and yes, the Department Of Justice told an incarcerated Ghislaine Maxwell that “We need you to help us cover up some of Donald Trump’s crimes.” The lack of ambiguity is part of the gag, directed both at form and content.
It’s hilarious and satisfying in equal measure, just as the joke is on both Epstein and a media landscape more intent on rubbernecking than investigating. As these documentaries’ tropes are dragged into the harsh spotlight and as their bullshit—whether that means being willfully obtuse to the truth or overly credulous to nonsense—is dissolved by satirical acid, the subgenre reveals itself as a bigger and easier target than a man whose name is forever synonymous with “criminal pervert.”
