After Jeffrey Epstein’s highly publicized 2019 arrest for sex trafficking, questions lingered about how his pattern of abuse had remained hidden in plain sight.
The friendships with rich and powerful men, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and Prince Andrew, came under renewed scrutiny; headlines trumpeted alleged travels in the so-called Lolita Express, the airplane reportedly ferrying underage girls to Epstein’s private island.
After the reams of coverage on this case, including an Epstein documentary on Netflix, it seems there is nothing new to uncover. But the new three-part Peacock documentary 'Epstein’s Shadow' places the whole sordid case in context through its focus on Maxwell’s life and trajectory.
The documentary never loses sight of the fact that the Epstein case was, as a victim’s attorney points out, a sexual Ponzi scheme. And though it didn’t involve ritual brandings, the similarities between the Epstein trafficking case and the NXIVM cult are striking.
In particular, both featured a similar dynamic between the orchestrator of the sexual abuse, Keith Raniere in NXIVM, Epstein here and the woman lieutenant helping to carry out the recruiting and normalizing the abuse, Allison Mack for NXIVM and allegedly Maxwell in the Epstein case.
If NXIVM operated through warped self-help philosophies, in the Epstein case, the institution of ultra-rich white heterosexuality was the system through which Epstein and Maxwell came together, and through which they perpetrated and covered up their alleged abuse.
Toward the end, the documentary raises questions about whether Epstein was a Mossad agent (he had been involved in international arms dealing) and if that could be connected to his death or the influences that allowed him to operate undetected. (A former CIA operative points out that it’s not necessarily the theory that he was murdered that should encourage suspicion, but more that he was allowed to kill himself under the prison’s watch.) There’s similar speculation about Maxwell, because her father also had ties to international spying.