Summary of this article
The meme-storm around the Epstein files is a spectacle in which trauma, crimes, and rape are flattened into content.
Every rape trial is a pornography of violence.
Self-censored, sanitised language further distances the crime and its trauma from people
A woman scrolls through Instagram to stumble upon a mail screenshot carousel. One mail discusses a girl being choked, another about beheading and eating, and a couple seemingly hinting at rapes of children—all from Epstein files. One mail reports baby teeth being removed, allegedly, to prevent them from biting attackers. Another mail suggests playing a mother’s voice to ensure babies ‘suck harder’.
Immediately below, a reel pops up. It talks of Epstein’s aura, it is a collage of Epstein surrounded by girls, filters added for extra glamour, him surrounded by celebrities with pop music.
The jarring roller coaster leaves the woman shutting off the app and needing a deep breath.
‘Epstein doesn’t like Pune, discuss for 5 marks,’ reads a tweet, captioned ‘what your thoughts’ and followed by crying-laughing emojis. Another reel, gigachad-style, declares, ‘Kuch bhi kaho, bhai me aura toh tha’. A news anchor concedes he may be a paedophile, but insists he was, after all, a powerful power broker. Several conservatives, most prominently US president Donald Trump, have dismissed the files as ‘boring’.
These are only fragments of the meme-storm that now engulfs the Jeffrey Epstein case—a spectacle filling television studios and smartphone screens, where trauma, crimes, and rape are flattened into content.
Since December, the US Department of Justice has released batches of what are popularly called the Epstein Files—millions of documents, emails, photographs and videos tied to the convicted paedophile and his network. Reportedly six million files reportedly exist; over half have entered the public domain. Names include—Bill Gates, Noam Chomsky, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, a UAE sultan, and many others. Several exchanges are too graphic to repeat. Some allude to cannibalistic rituals involving babies; others to the rape of children as young as eight. One email suggests a woman was killed during a ‘kinky’ assault and buried on a golf course.
Above all, the material reveals a network steeped in impunity—power insulating power, erasing victims.
And yet humour, minimisation, and justification follow.
“What is being done with these memes, and politicians and journalists using dismissive language, is a complete erasure of victims and the trauma,” says Professor Ayesha Kidwai, linguist with Jawaharlal Nehru University.
For Kidwai, the fixation on ‘big names’ and leaks is a diversion from justice. People are too hooked on who could have performed these heinous acts and how. “It is only a crime if you focus on the victim, not on his emails or how he communicates with his co-conspirators. There is huge interest in catching perpetrators, but not as a societal move to achieve justice. As long as we stay in Epstein’s world, only the names of perpetrators will be visible. We live in a powerful world where power dictates the treatment of children. We have to move beyond it.”
Professor Geeta Punhani, who retired from Delhi University, sees a broader erasure—not just of Epstein’s survivors but of women’s shared trauma. “Everything today is meme material, scandal. Hats off to the journalists in the late 90s and 2000s who pursued this case so diligently, but the trauma is simply not on the forefront.” The Epstein files, she argues, must be read as a symbol as much as scandal. “Most crimes, globally, happen at home. We see news of one- and two-year-olds raped by uncles and cousins and we move on. The moment a woman is born, she becomes a sexual commodity, and a commodity can easily become meme material.”
Media sensitivity has improved in recent years, but early coverage in the 2000s was harsher. Virginia Giuffre, among the most vocal survivors, was repeatedly labelled a ‘prostitute’ by UK outlets. Headlines proclaimed that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was involved with an ‘underage prostitute’. Only later did public discourse discover that a child or minor cannot be a sex worker but is, by definition, a victim of assault and trafficking.
“Virginia was called a prostitute, and Andrew was found guilty of having sex with an underage prostitute. Then the story became about Andrew. The royal scandal. The rage is missing. These are children, we forget that,” Kidwai says.
Today the vocabulary is more polished, but the logic endures. “Every rape trial is a pornography of violence. This is what Pratiska Bakshi says,” Kidwai notes. When discourse centres on victims, she argues, it gestures towards justice; when it centres on perpetrators, it reasserts power. “Both the crime and the survivor vanish, and the narrative can be repackaged.”
What makes someone read about a raped child and think: perfect meme material?
Clinical psychologist Megha Kalra locates the impulse in conditioning. “A person doesn’t turn 30 and suddenly realise they like violence or rape jokes; the conditioning begins in childhood. Perhaps there is little understanding of empathy towards women; perhaps they are desensitised by family or news. Did they see fathers dominating mothers? Did they see neighbours get away with such behaviour?” she asks.
Punhani adds that not all viewers consume these reels alike. Many women see horror; some young men see aspiration. “Power attracts corruption. These people managed to get away for so long. Even now, the material goes viral yet no accountability exists.”
The ‘why’ of rape’s memeification is still being theorised. A 2022 Dublin University paper, Internet Humour and the Normalisation of Rape Culture, examines post-#MeToo meme culture and describes a ‘himpathetic’ logic—after philosopher Kate Manne—where sympathy tilts towards powerful men. For instance, in 2015, Brock Turner was found guilty of raping a woman on college campus in Stanford University. However, despite being found guilty, both lawyers and the media spoke fondly of his talents as a swimmer who could win medals for the USA. During the trial, several questions were raised on the woman being drunk, Brock making a mistake, and great swimming future being put at risk.
Something similar happens around Epstein discourse. His network is often spoken about, many headlines read ‘disgraced financier Epstein’. They rarely use ‘paedophile’ or ‘child rapist’.
Meanwhile, right-wing influencer Nick Fuentes has argued that because some victims were 15 to 17, Epstein was not a paedophile, suggesting they were ‘not entirely blameless’. In India, a news anchor recently insisted that while Epstein was a convicted paedophile, his influence as a power broker must not be forgotten—even amid emails alleging cannibalism and child rape.
For Kidwai, language itself sedates outrage. ‘Paedophile’ does not viscerally register ‘child’ for many; the suffix ‘-phile’ connotes love, as in bibliophile. The term frames the perpetrator as aberration rather than aggressor. “You can call him a paedophile and a power broker, and dismiss it. We need to call him a child rapist—that will invoke a much stronger reaction.” Words when framed more academically, she argues, permit distance from the violence. Another trend on Tik Tok and YouTube is calling rape ‘grape’ and paedophile ‘PDF file’. This self censored, sanitised language further distances the crime and its trauma from a general viewer. The ‘safe for work’ language erases the rape, the paedophilia, the suffering of the victims and survivors.
The Dublin paper likewise notes that memes conceptualise sexual violence as ‘sexy’ or ‘just sex’, filtering assault through male desire and entitlement. Women’s bodies are assessed for desirability; survivors’ experiences recede.
“What the media needs to do is call them children,” argue both professors and the psychologist—something rarely done. Instead, focus shifts to celebrity glamour and networking. “He looks like a Hollywood celebrity, surrounded by celebrities; the focus is on his power broking. This defers attention from the actual acts of rape and child trafficking—kharid farokht. That is what he did and Indian media at least should use that language,” Kidwai says.
Such linguistic camouflage creates the distance in which memes flourish. The files could represent thousands of victims, yet hearings and headlines fixate on perpetrators. Virginia’s claims were once presented as outlandish; the criminal remains central. “Women are not just namers of perpetrators. How much focus do they get internationally? What happened to them? The story is about purpose, not about the children.”
Nor, Kidwai insists, are the Epstein Files an aberration; they have merely been elevated into global spectacle—something impossible, a result of some monsters, not real. Consider Prajwal Revanna, grandson of former prime minister HD Deve Gowda, accused of raping hundreds of women and filming them; an alleged pen drive contained 3000 videos. During that news cycle, search trends reportedly surged for the footage itself. Investigations by The News Minute found women’s gynaecological exams being sold on porn sites. Other reports have flagged high Indian search queries for gang-rape videos.
“The same language and social media persist. Once on screen, horror becomes consumable, even news of rape can become pornography, same as the reels because it is all on screen Kidwai contests.
Even phrases such as ‘underage women’ create distance. “I cannot get over the phrase ‘underage women’,” she says. Society performs selective moral panic; money sanitises. Buying ‘so-called underage women’ becomes transaction, not atrocity.
There is an allure to the lifestyle. The moral question is, how do you stop being attracted to the spectacle of the event? Desensitisation is at work. A teen watching this, or young women in general, see that this is not news, there is no justice, there is no point to the system—they will be silenced by rape and its representation. They will never be seen as people.
You tell boys, says Kidwai, aspiration is driving a Lexus on a sunny beach. Sexual violence is a necessary accessory of being rich and powerful as evidenced by the glamourisation of Epstein’s life. Rape jokes are not limited to reels—they are everywhere: Hindi movies for instance. For the longest time, the idea of rape being a joke has persisted in movies and in stand-up comedy. “ Now, news reaches us through social media—both news and reels and jokes, delivered scroll after scroll. Survivors are treated as objects: supplied or raped, but ultimately erased,” she adds.
For survivors—of Epstein and of countless unnamed cases—such coverage can re-traumatise. Kalra warns of flashbacks, reliving events, spirals into distress.
In the end, Epstein won, argue both professors. His life dissected in horror by some and in awe by others, yet he and his co-conspirators remain largely unaccountable. “The fact that there are rumours that Epstein was killed—okay, so who killed him? Any of the rich and powerful, possibly, not the victims. Not the survivors. Even if he killed himself, it still remains Epstein’s world.”
It is a voyeuristic perversion, she says before sighing with disbelief at the situation.