Disappearing Bodies - Epstein, ICE, Gangster Capitalism
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Disappearing Bodies: Epstein, ICE, and the Hidden Architecture of Gangster Capitalism
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Disappearance under neoliberal fascism does not operate through a single institutional or aesthetic form. Alongside the spectacular violence of ICE raids, militarized policing, and the public staging of racialized terror exists a quieter, long-standing mode of disappearance practiced by elites and insulated from democratic scrutiny. The case of Jeffrey Epstein exposes this hidden register with disturbing clarity. What unites these seemingly distinct regimes of disappearance is not only the violence they enact but the way they are consumed. ICE raids circulate as viral footage, cable news spectacle, and partisan theater. Epstein’s crimes reappear endlessly as podcasts, Netflix docuseries, continuous news alerts, and conspiratorial gossip. In both cases, atrocity is converted into content, stripped of historical depth and severed from the economic system that produces it. Gangster capitalism survives not simply by disappearing bodies, but by transforming disappearance into consumable spectacle.
Where contemporary fascist governance increasingly places violence on full display, externalized and dramatized as a public pedagogy of fear, Epstein’s operation depended on secrecy, misogynist terror, and the systematic annihilation of social conscience. This was the hidden violence of gangster capitalism, planned and executed in the exclusive spaces of the ruling class—billionaire townhouses, private islands, elite restaurants, and country clubs—where zombie politics thrives through greed, domination, and an anesthetizing language that renders cruelty banal and power obscene. At the core of this cultural and political cesspool is what Melinda Cooper calls a class of “billionaire patriarchs of the American far-right [who] want to rule an economy of masters and servants.” This anesthetization is crucial. Violence that once provoked moral outrage, if not shock, is now folded into the rhythms of everyday media consumption. Raids become clips. Survivors become case studies. Abuse becomes trivia. Under this regime, suffering is neither denied nor confronted; it is endlessly circulated without consequence, producing familiarity rather than outrage.
Epstein’s victims did not vanish into detention centers or public raids. They disappeared into private aircraft, gated estates, citadels of private wealth, and transnational circuits of wealth and influence, shielded by dense entanglements linking oligarchs, politicians, intelligence services, and global finance. Global sex trafficking operated as a system of pleasure, profit, and risk for a billionaire class convinced that money confers immunity from law, justice, and consequence. This ruling caste of ghouls is sustained by a state that treats the disappearance of migrants, the cold-blooded killing of citizens, and the spread of concentration camps across American soil as legitimate instruments of governance. Within this logic, civic resistance to fascism is rebranded as domestic terrorism, exposing dissenters to surveillance, disappearance, or death. The Epstein case reveals the other side of this machinery: how women are made to vanish into chambers of sexual terror, lured by fraudulent job offers, trapped by lies and manipulation, and, at times, seized outright by force.
In this sense, ICE and Epstein share a final, chilling convergence: both are narrated as aberrations rather than expressions of a corrupt and exploitative system. ICE abuses are framed as policy excesses or rogue enforcement. Epstein is rendered an exceptional monster, detached from the financial, political, and intelligence networks that sustained him. This isolation is ideological. It prevents systemic recognition by recoding structural violence as scandal, misconduct, or spectacle—events to be consumed, debated, and forgotten rather than understood as endemic to gangster capitalism itself.
This is not a departure from the politics of disappearance but its upper register of the workings of gangster capitalism—run by the rich billionaire class. Both ICE enforcement regimes and Epstein’s network were allegedly sites of human trafficking; both enacted extreme cruelty; both were grounded in whitesupremacist, patriarchal, and racialized logics of disposability. The distinction lies not in violence but in visibility: the authoritarian state now stages disappearance as spectacle, while elites have long perfected disappearance under the cover of respectability, secrecy, and impunity.
What is newly unsettling is not simply what these revelations expose, but how easily they are absorbed. Irony functions here as a technology of moral evacuation, dulling judgment and shielding elite brutality from sustained reckoning. Yet the deeper danger lies elsewhere. Epstein does not interrupt this argument; he completes it, exposing gangster capitalism as a toxic system that disappears bodies through both overt terror and hidden privilege, through raids and secrecy alike. When disappearance becomes entertainment, accountability collapses. The public is trained to binge on cruelty rather than trace its causes. This is how gangster capitalism governs affect: by producing endless scenes of horror while foreclosing the possibility of structural understanding.
To confront this machinery requires more than reform, exposure, or moral revulsion. It demands a clear-eyed understanding of how power operates across its visible and concealed dimensions—and a politics willing to name gangster capitalism itself as the enemy. Any viable form of resistance must therefore aim not to humanize this system, but to dismantle and overthrow it before disappearance becomes the final, normalized condition of political life.
*I want to thank Rania Filippakou for helping me think through many of the ideas in this article.
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The Pathetic Nature of the Dominant Class in the West: Epstein’s Friends Are Cowards
Trump’s meeting with Andrew, which Epstein described as “funny”, telling Bannon that the latter’s accuser had come from Mar-a-Lago. Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
As the United States government releases more of the emails and messages from and to Jeffery Epstein, increased evidence is available that proves correct the young girls who said that they had been raped by Epstein and his circle. It has also validated the dogged investigative journalism of Julie Brown (Miami Herald), whose ‘Perversion of Justice’ series in 2018 unveiled the deals that Epstein got from powerful men in Florida. Brown, who began her investigation in early 2017, spoke to eighty potential victims, some as young as thirteen. The stories she uncovered led her to Virginia Giuffre, who had moved to Australia; Giuffre became a public spokesperson for the young girls who had been exploited by the Epstein ring, which included Andrew Mountbatten (the former prince). Brown’s book, Perversions of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story (2021), and Giuffre’s book, Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice (2025), are essential documents alongside the trove of emails and messages from and to Epstein. They tell us the stories of the young girls who faced the atrocities on the Epstein archipelago.
Sexual violence has a profound and long-lasting impact on young children, shaping not only their childhood but the course of their lives as they grow up. Many survivors must live with deep emotional wounds, including fear, shame, guilt, and a loss of trust in others, often compounded by silence or disbelief from people around them. As they age, these experiences can lead to serious mental health challenges such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and increased risk of self-harm or substance abuse. One survey found that a third of women who had been raped contemplated suicide, while it is certainly true that the rate of suicide amongst childhood victims of sexual violence is far higher than of those who have not been violated in this way. Virginia Giuffre, who killed herself at the age of 41, was no exception. The effects of sexual violence on children do not simply fade with time; without support and justice, most young children carry the trauma into adulthood.
The girls appear in the government documents as Jane Doe, anonymous to protect their identities. But they know who they are. They are like Virginia or Courtney Wild or Jennifer Araoz, faced with insurmountable odds to get their stories known and believed, and to feel that there has been some justice against the criminals that ruined their lives. Most of the time, few people listen to you, few believe you, and the justice system turns away when powerful men are involved.
Other children in other places face other Epsteins who have not yet been caught. There is never only one Jeffery Epstein. He is not a unique monster. Epstein was an ordinary bully, who learnt how to manipulate people for money and for power, and to allow him to provide them with a buffet of opportunities to violate the tenderness of young people. If we started to list the many people who have been convicted of similar crimes from around the world, the list would be longer than imaginable (including those in war zones who prey on young children for sport, and those such as Charles ‘Abbey’ Mwesigwa and Christiana ‘Christy Gold’ Uadiale who trafficked young women into the Gulf Arab states, and then the sex trafficking rings in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia). The young girls and boys who sit in metal containers or in decrepit hotels or in fancy Dubai homes to face things that they can never imagine and that they should never have to experience – we will never know their names or know about their Epsteins and their Andrews.
A Ruling Class of Cowards
Wherever she is, in whatever universe, Virginia must have beamed to see the rascal Andrew horrified that he – the first royal in 400 years – was being taken into custody (his distant ancestor, ten generations ago, Charles I was beheaded in 1649). His face in the car, his eye reddened by fear, is an image that gives every abused child vindication.
Andrew continues to deny any wrongdoing. So do all the other men who participated one way or another in Epstein’s world. The US Department of Justice refuses to redact the emails that might indicate the names of the guilty men, and most of the victims are far too afraid to testify clearly and consistently about the violence. Because the Miami officials shut down their investigation in 2008 due to the Epstein plea deal, no co-conspirators faced investigation. Epstein and Maxwell apparently paid in cash – no paper trail, no corroboration, no further investigation.
We know that young girls faced terrible crimes. That much is admitted by the facts. We know that important men committed these crimes or at least knew about these crimes (how could they have gone to Epstein’s New York home and not seen the evidence on the walls – as art?). We have read emails and messages where these men joked about the abuse of young girls (‘cute girls are real’, wrote Deepak Chopra, and Epstein wrote of Bill Gates and ‘Russian girls’). But none of these men, not one of them, admitted to having been part of the abuse of the young girls. Gates’ team said that the allegation is ‘absolutely absurd and completely false’, while Chopra said that he used ‘poor judgment in tone’ in his email. Andrew has been forced into the interrogation room largely because he slipped government secrets to Epstein, but perhaps – we will find later – that the investigators might ask him about the girls. No one else will face investigation because the evidence is hearsay, there is no victim alleging specific crimes, and there is no remaining corroborating evidence. Epstein is dead, and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell is silent in prison.
Epstein, they say, committed suicide. This is an old tradition amongst ruling elites from the suicide of Seneca the Younger (in 65 CE) because he conspired against the emperor, to the suicide of Wei Zhongxian (in 1627) for corruption against the Ming Dynasty in China, to the suicide of Asano Naganori (in 1701), the daimyo of the Ako Domain who killed himself on the orders of the Tokugawa shogun, and to many, many more of their ilk. Perhaps Epstein’s death was more like that of the disgraced viziers of the Ottoman Court who were silently strangled with a silk cord and buried hurriedly in the dark of night (or he is in Israel, as some on the web suggest). But one way or the other, Epstein is gone.
The rest are gutless. They believe, as they ought to believe, that they will get away with it and be eventually rehabilitated. Bill Gates, the great humanitarian; Deepak Chopra, the great healer; Bill Clinton, the great charmer.
I want to rent a satellite. I want to put a giant speaker on it that can be heard all around the world. I want it to broadcast Patricia Lockwood’s 2013 poem, Rape Joke, or at least these stanzas from the end:
The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn’t know, like what else would a rape joke say? The rape joke said YOU were the one who was drunk, and the rape joke said you remembered it wrong, which made you laugh out loud for one long split-open second. The wine coolers weren’t Bartles & Jaymes, but it would be funnier for the rape joke if they were. It was some pussy flavour, like Passionate Mango or Destroyed Strawberry, which you drank down without question and trustingly in the heart of Cincinnati Ohio.
Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.
Can any part of the rape joke be funny. The part where it ends — haha, just kidding! Though you did dream of killing the rape joke for years, spilling all of its blood out, and telling it that way.
The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.
The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.
The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny.
Admit it.
The admit it is asked of the listener, to admit that the Pet Sounds gift is funny. But there is another person to whom the phrase is addressed. To the ‘rape joke’. Admit what you did. Just say it. Say it once, not for yourself, but for the person who was raped by you. Have the guts to admit it. But you won’t because you come from a ruling class of cowards who admit to nothing.
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