The Epstein Class: From America’s war on women to the assassination of Imam Khamenei

It is approximately 6:30 a.m. on August 10, 2019, inside the federal detention facility in Manhattan, United States. Two shift workers walk down the corridor to distribute breakfast. One of them unlocks a cell door. The man inside shows no response. Moments later, it was recorded in the official report that Jeffrey Epstein had died by suicide.

What unfolded afterward – a torrent of revelations about the corruption case, the swirling controversies, the high-profile names entangled in it, and the seemingly endless cascade of questions – became a story in itself. Yet a deeper question has remained unanswered: if Epstein was removed from the scene, what becomes of the “market” in which he played such a central role?

From a criminal case to a mechanism
In the summer of 2019, Epstein faced federal charges in New York of “sex trafficking” and “conspiracy to commit sex trafficking.” In an official statement, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York described the core of the case as the abuse of underage girls over a multi-year period.

But the “Epstein story” did not begin in 2019. A key turning point lies in the 2008 agreement in Florida: a deal that allowed him to evade federal prosecution and close the case through state charges and a significantly lighter sentence. Years later, the agreement became the subject of serious legal and media criticism. n 2019, a federal judge ruled that prosecutors had violated victims’ rights by keeping the agreement hidden from them – an indication that the affair extended beyond Epstein himself and implicated an entire system.

Why eliminating one person doesn’t end a network
Economists typically begin with simple concepts to explain illicit markets: supply, demand, risk, and substitutes. But organized crime is far more than simple economics; it is an adaptive system.
In security studies and network analysis, “leader decapitation” or “the hydra strategy” – focusing on removing the head of a network – has long been debated. Research into the unintended consequences of this approach suggests that eliminating a leader can lead to fragmentation, the emergence of new, more complex rivalries, and an overall increase in the complexity of the operating environment. Traces of this logic can be seen in the Epstein case: if Epstein served as a central node in a corruption network, his removal does not necessarily eliminate the “incentives” and “demands” of the elite or wealthy classes; it may merely push the network toward more dispersed and less traceable forms.

We are dealing with a specific form of demand: a demand for access, control, immunity, and experiences that are prohibited or scandalous in the public sphere. Individuals with wealth and influence purchase silence and protection through financial means, and use their institutional power to manage risk.

Human trafficking is an “organized market,” not an isolated aberration
To understand who the next human trafficker might be, one must step back from the Epstein case and look at the broader picture. The2024 UNODC Global Report on Trafficking in Persons contains several key findings directly connect to this case: the number of identified victims, after declining during the COVID-19 period, has risen again and has even surpassed pre-pandemic levels; women and girls constitute a large share of identified victims; and, most importantly, human trafficking is often carried out by “structured groups or loosely organized but coordinated networks” rather than a single individual. 

When crime operates as a network, an individualistic response – focused on one person – cannot solve problem. Despite the immense scandal surrounding the Epstein case, if the response remains limited to eliminating a single figure, the fundamental issue will continue to be ignored.

The question then becomes: where is demand produced?
In Western media narratives, Epstein is sometimes portrayed as an “exception” – a deviant man surrounded by a wide circle of current and former officials and well-known public figures in the West. A more systemic perspective, however, poses a different question: what enabled such widespread corruption to endure for so many years?
One answer lies in a “market-driven culture.” When no boundary is placed on desire, that same desire drives human beings toward a downward slope. Even within the Western intellectual tradition, warnings on this matter exist. Adam Smith, the Scottish economist, philosopher, and author of The Wealth of Nations, writes that proposals for regulatory rules made by merchants should be viewed with suspicion, because their interests do not always align with the public interest.

When greed becomes the driving engine of society, the outcome is an insatiable appetite: a desire for more experience, more power, and more control. The Epstein case places this question directly before a human rights–claiming order: if human dignity is a foundational principle, how do vulnerable human beings become commodities and how do exploitation networks persist at such a vast scale?

“Selective justice” and the crisis of moral credibility
In the international arena, the West conducts its politics through the language of human rights, imposing sanctions and exerting pressure. Yet domestically, when privileged classes and networks of influence violate human rights, it evades accountability.

The 2008 Epstein case and the hidden arrangement that enabled the victimization of a large number of innocent children stand as a clear example of this double standard: a gap between the “claim of justice” and the “reality of the West.” Even after his arrest in 2019, his death in prison – surrounded by ambiguity and, according to the Inspector General’s report, marked by surveillance failures and record manipulation – added yet another layer to this contradiction in the implementation of justice: the very institution meant to embody the authority of law itself, easily violated the most elementary legal protocols.

Today, the West seeks to pin the entire blame on a corpse.

 

Who will be the next Epstein?
If there is to be a next Epstein, it will likely not emerge from the same places we saw before. The 2024 report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime states that human trafficking changes form as global conditions shift, adapting itself to new environments. This means the next network will not necessarily resemble Epstein’s, even if its underlying logic remains unchanged.
First, recruitment and concealment become increasingly digital – from seemingly harmless advertisements and offers to closed online groups and new financial tools. Second, rather than relying on a single symbolic center, island, house, or name, networks disperse their nodes so that removing one “head” does not bring down the entire structure. And third, everything takes on a more legal appearance: charities, modeling agencies, recruitment firms, and high-end service providers.
If we view the root problem solely as crime, we will seek solutions only through police action and arrest. But if we understand where demand is fueled – from a market-driven definition of the human being in which enough is never enough – then efforts to close this market, without returning to ethical values and a life centered on human dignity, amounts to little more than relocating the scene of the crime rather than bringing it to an end.

From a Western perspective, the crimes of the Epstein network are narrated as the wrongdoing of an individual within a broader system – a system that is supposed to restrain personal deviations through judicial institutions and prevent corruption from spreading. Yet history has shown that, by failing to address the root of the problem, this mechanism is incapable of containing corruption, allowing it to re-emerge elsewhere in new forms.

In the Islamic perspective, the issue is viewed from a different angle – one that seeks, from the outset, to eliminate the conditions that give rise to such deviations. At the heart of this perspective lies the unequivocal recognition of woman’s inherent dignity as a human being endowed with rights; a principle that, when firmly established as the foundation, transforms any violation or exploitation from a mere “personal slip” into a clear transgression of a defined red line. In this same framework, the martyred Imam Khamenei repeatedly warned for years about this trajectory in the West:

 “What today’s Western political apparatuses are promoting is precisely the same jahiliyyah [pre-Islamic ignorance] that the bi’tha [mission] of the Prophet (pbuh) was sent to eradicate from the sphere of human life. The signs of that same ignorance can be observed today across the world, within this corrupt prevalent Western civilization: the same injustice, the same discrimination, the same disregard for human dignity, the same prioritization of sexual matters and needs.”

In an Islamic worldview centered on human dignity, every person possesses inherent sanctity and inviolability. Desire and self-interest, no matter how legitimate, have a ceiling: that ceiling is called dignity. In contrast, within an unrestrained market-centered culture, desire can reach a point where the other human being becomes merely a tool – a means for pleasure, power, or display.
The Epstein case can be understood precisely through this lens: it is the outcome of an appetite that knows no bounds once greed is normalized as the driving force of society, the very condition in which “enough” loses all meaning – an issue that Martyr Imam Khamenei warned against repeatedly for many years.

However, such warnings were not welcomed by those who were themselves beneficiaries of this extensive corruption. For if such a message were to reach Western public opinion and that public were ever to awaken, the legitimacy of the governing order itself would come under question. That is why the American–Zionist attacks on Iran on February 28 and the assassination of Imam Khamenei represented an attempt to silence a voice capable – through its steadfast defense of human dignity and women’s rights – of one day rescuing women from the clutches of Western hedonistic exploitation.

History, however, has repeatedly shown that assassination does not silence a message. Rather, it transfers it from one platform to a thousand platforms, amplifying a voice that was intended to be stifled across the world.