Europe is holding its Epstein creeps accountable. Why can’t we?

The slow drip of the U.S. government’s still grossly incomplete release of its files on late financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has nonetheless become a who’s who of Planet Earth’s rich and famous — from billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk to cultural icons like filmmaker Woody Allen and, of course, two presidents.

The average American paying any attention to this global bonfire of the vanities probably barely noticed this name: longtime British politico Peter Mandelson, who most recently served as the U.K.’s ambassador to the United States.

Across the pond, it was another story. The Fleet Street tabloid press went wild over revelations that Mandelson — a key insider in the ruling Labor Party, long known to have been one of Epstein’s globetrotting pals — maintained his close ties even after the American’s 2008 child-prostitution conviction, writing Epstein in 2009 to hail his release from jail as “liberation day.”

But unlike the fallout in the United States, Mandelson’s Epstein problem didn’t end with some embarrassing headlines. Back in September, when an initial batch of Epstein’s emails went public, Prime Minister Keir Starmer — Mandelson’s longtime ally — immediately fired his friend from his ambassador’s post in D.C., and the scandal has only intensified.

Last week, Scotland Yard investigators raided Mandelson’s two U.K. homes in a reported criminal investigation into whether the government official leaked secret and sensitive financial information to Epstein around the time of the Great Recession in 2008. (Headline in the tabloid Sun: “Police rummage through Mandy’s drawers.”)

Meanwhile, Americans watching Britain’s rush to hold a powerful man to account for his unconscionable relationship with modern history’s most notorious sex creep are probably all asking the same thing.

Wait, you can do that?

Here in the land where Epstein sex-trafficked scores of underage girls — including the U.S. Virgin Islands hideaway now known as “Rape Island” — the sound of any type of justice or accountability for the financier’s powerful confederates has been an ear-splitting silence.

Since Epstein’s mysterious August 2019 death in a Manhattan federal jail cell, only his longtime companion and procurer of young women, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been criminally charged and convicted, and she has been moved by her longtime friend Donald Trump’s Justice Department to a low-security prison where she reportedly gets special perks.

» READ MORE: Epstein’s emails are the end of America as they ruined it | Will Bunch

Most of the corporate CEOs, company or university board members, NFL team owners, scientists, etc., etc. etc. who maintained close Epstein ties even after his 2008 state conviction on lurid crimes with minors have faced no sanctions, or just minor ones. Last week’s news that Brad Karp — chair of the powerful law firm Paul Weiss, already under fire for a controversial deal with Trump to head off a lawsuit with pro bono legal aid — is stepping down over revelations of his Epstein contacts stood out because it was such a rare nod toward accountability among U.S. elites.

This is why the reaction in Europe to Epstein’s close ties with some of its top leaders ought to be a wakeup call for the United States and our own rotten system of justice.

The Epstein accountability party isn’t just breaking out in Great Britain, although our cross-Atlantic ally has led the way ever since the artist formerly known as Prince Andrew was booted from the royal family as allegations mounted that he took part in some of the illegal sexual activities on Epstein’s island.

Despite the aggressive moves against Mandelson and the ex-royal now called Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, some observers think Starmer’s already tottering Labor government could collapse amid questions over what did it know about Mandelson’s Epstein connection, and when did it know it. A pointed headline in the Guardian newspaper bluntly summed up an increasing prevalent U.K. viewpoint: “Deceit, betrayal and a scandal that demands historic change."

But the fallout has spread well beyond the British isle. When it came out that Joanna Rubinstein, a Swedish U.N. official, visited Epstein’s island in 2012 and that Miroslav Lajcak, national security adviser to Slovakia’s prime minister, discussed “gorgeous” girls in emails with the financier, both of them quit their jobs.

Imagine that.

Norway, much like the U.K., has been rocked to its core by revelations that so many of the nation’s elite leaders had Epstein ties. That even includes the nation’s crown princess, Mette-Marit, who had a running, jovial email conversation with Epstein that included such mundane matters as teeth whitening. More seriously, Norway’s economic crimes unit — yes, some countries actually have such a thing — has opened a corruption investigation into former Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland’s relationship with the disgraced U.S. money man.

There’s more. Latvia, Lithuania and Poland have also announced their own investigations. In particular, Poland is digging into mounting evidence over associations between Epstein and Russian intelligence — an existential matter for a nation that’s been overrun and dominated by its eastern neighbor in the past.

In the United States, officials seem more likely to investigate chemtrails or what happened to Amelia Earhart than conduct a serious probe of whether Trump’s former friend was with the Russians, too.

Rob Ford, a professor at the U.K.’s University of Manchester, told the Associated Press that Europe has “a more functional media, we have a more functional accountability structure, that there is still a degree of shame in politics, in terms of people will say: ‘This is just not acceptable, this is just not done.’”

And that goes beyond Epstein. Also last week, French authorities raided the Paris office of U.S. citizen and world’s richest person Elon Musk’s social-media giant X (formerly Twitter) as part of a sweeping probe into the site’s allegedly unlawful data extraction as well as the recent scandal involving its AI platform Grok spreading child sexual-abuse material. The UK is also investigating Grok.

Musk’s X is, of course, headquartered in San Francisco, but no one expects the FBI to burst into his office — not after the electric-vehicle magnate donated a staggering $288 million in 2024 to push Trump back into the White House. (Although California’s Democratic attorney general has begun an investigation.)

The time-lapsed released of the Epstein files hasn’t yet produced a smoking gun concerning his close friendship with Trump, but the fact that lurid tips to federal authorities about the two-time president don’t seem to have been really investigated speaks volumes about the utter lack of elite accountability on this side of the Atlantic.

The true meaning of the Epstein Files may be less what it says about any specific sex crime — horrific as those may be — and more what they show about how the most powerful men in this country understood they can get away with anything.

Indeed, it now feels like the 1970s Watergate scandal that looked at the time like the height of accountability — Richard Nixon was forced to resign the presidency, while 48 of his allies were convicted of crimes — was actually the end. Nixon’s subsequent pardon by Gerald Ford — which emboldened the disgraced ex-POTUS to declare that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal” — was like a bat signal for elites that their brief moment of responsibility for their actions was over.

There were virtually no criminal charges for the economic crime of the 21st century, the Wall Street-driven collapse of the global economic system in 2008. And the lack of justice is bipartisan. Prosecution of white-collar criminals in the United States hit an all-time low under Joe Biden, even before Trump began his obscene spree of pardoning the wealthiest crooks.

It was grotesque when the Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that presidents can’t be prosecuted for crimes that are “official acts,” yet that seemed pretty obvious after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney got away with their illegal torture regime. Who do you think we are, Europe?

If the Epstein scandal “demands historic change,” as the Brits put it, then that change has to be a newfound drive to somehow renew the spirit of ‘74 — as in 1974. The assault on the foundation of American democracy that is the Trump regime — with its billion-dollar White House corruption, brutal and murderous immigration raids, perversions of criminal justice, and much more — won’t be cured just by Republicans losing a couple of elections, assuming that free and fair balloting can even take place.

The small-d democratic government that finally ends this nightmare must do the hard work that Biden and his miserably failed attorney general Merrick Garland did not do the last time. Immigration agents who maim and kill, government officials enriching themselves, and all other crooks — especially those now being exposed in the Epstein files — must be prosecuted, convicted, and sent to prison.

Maybe that’s not the American Way. But there’s a whole wide world out there that is doing things a lot better.

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