Not, to be clear, the noted Bad Pedophile, whose existence has been pretty static since roughly August of 2019. No, Rolling Stone went after the hundreds of other Jeffrey Epsteins living with that name in the United States. And if you want a quick bellwether for how that‘s going, take it as indicative that they could only get three of them to go on the record.
As revealed in the piece, each Jeffrey Epstein reacts to their private hell in their own way, with little apparent thought for wider Jeffrey Epstein kind. (None, for instance, reflect on the fact that they may be the last Jeffrey Epsteins, at least for a generation—because what Epstein parents would even land anywhere close to the J’s in the baby name book for the foreseeable future?) The one who works as a singer, for instance, is defiantly angry: He gaslights old folks who bring it up while he’s working, pretending not to know what they mean; at the same time, he recently insisted on performing under his full name again, shutting down MCs who tried to defray the instant tension with a “Not the bad one” gag. (He says it only makes the stigma worse.) Then there’s the warehouse manager, who has embraced that his life is now the punchline to a cosmic joke, with a “not invited to my yacht party” rejoinder at the ready, and a group email chain full of jokes about how his name stops him from getting laid And, perhaps saddest of all, the flooring company manager, who has accepted that he is no longer entirely a person at all, and instead a mere anecdote in the lives of others, reflecting on the joy his brother gets from telling people his brother’s name is Jeffrey.
And all of them, to a man, sound tired. They would all like to return to a life when “Jeffrey Epstein” was not a national name associated with both mysterious deaths and heinous crimes; they are sick of hearing their own name get said on the news several times a day; they are tired that the story never seems to go away. Some of them have called for the Epstein files to be released, simply because it might finally drain the narrative of the last of its life; another seems to have full-on embraced the Office Space joke of “Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.” None of them seem capable of envisioning a life in which their very name is no longer a source of comedy, or kneejerk references to a convicted sex offender. “It’ll never go away,” the singer remarks, noting that the ongoing mysteries surrounding Epstein’s life and death mean people will go on making things up about it forever. They are Jeffrey Epsteins, and they live in hell.
