Why Everyone (including me) is Obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein

Laszlo Stein

Sequoyah High School, Pasadena, CA

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine at Sequoyah showed me a website called Jmail that he

and his friends had been glued to for days. If you don't know what Jmail* is, you're probably a healthy, well adjusted person with better things to do than look through Jeffrey Epstein's emails, photos, flight history, messages, and Amazon purchase history.

However I am not a healthy, well adjusted person and I wanted a break from doing my homework. So, after I was shown Jmail I found myself scrolling on the website for far too long. Let me clarify because any amount of time is too long. I was on Jmail for almost 30 minutes.

When I finally awoke from my Epstein induced coma, I wondered why my classmates and I are so obsessed with this man. This wasn't the first time I noticed Sequoyah's obsession with Epstein either. Only a few months earlier at a pitch meeting for The Barefoot Times someone pitched “Students Opinions on the Epstein Files” which was never reported. The short answer is that we as a society have always been obsessed with sex criminals, especially if they were somewhat famous beforehand. We were obsessed with Harvey Weinstein and Sean Combs, so what's different about Epstein? Why are we more obsessed with him?

Well, we've never had this much access to somebody's personal information, especially

somebody in contact with so many other important people. Epstein is interesting not only because he's a sex criminal but also because we can look at a life through a digital footprint. We can see what underwear he bought (Fruit of the Loom), the emails he received after he died, and that Michael Jackson was one of his top Spotify artists (most likely because of their shared interests).

That's what makes him interesting: the fact that we can see his life through his computer, the fact that we have access to a man's entire life including the most personal of information. My first thought was, “Shoot, everything my mom has told me about the media footprint wasn't complete BS”. What's going to happen to my information when I die? What information do I even have out there to be seen? Will it be seen by the world, or is that only a privilege that rapists get?

This thought led to another 30 minutes wasted as I searched through all my emails,

photos, messages and YouTube history. I thought about my brand of underwear** being known by the public, my most embarrassing ninth grade texts, and my 9,800 dick pics. Surprisingly, I felt almost unfazed.

What I discovered should have been comforting but was actually disappointing: I was nowhere near as interesting as Jeffrey Epstein, even without the sex crimes. He had been to more places than I had. He had bought, and probably read, more interesting books than I had. He had read Leibniz, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens and Shakspeare all in one year. Whereas I had watched Romeo and Juliet rather than read it because I found it too difficult. And he had more enlightened and interesting conversations than me. Suddenly I had one of the worst thoughts I’ll probably ever have: "How do I become as interesting as Jeffrey Epstein?” When I wondered if the answer was “rape,” I decided to close my Jmail tab.

*An internet archive of Jeffry Epstein's digital footprint, including his flights, emails, texts and more created by internet artist Riley Walz and web developer Luke Igel

** Tommy Hilfiger and Hanes