“where are you? Are you ok , I loved the torture video,” reads one email, allegedly sent by Jeffrey Epstein in 2009. The reply, from a redacted address, states: “I am in china I will be in the US 2nd week of may.”
Her face hovering over a screenshot of the exchange, a TikTok creator claims the timing aligns with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s schedule, before speculating that the word “torture” could refer to documented abuses of Palestinian detainees. The video has drawn close to 700,000 views.
Another TikTok pushes back. Netanyahu met Chinese officials in Jerusalem — not Beijing — during that period, the second creator notes, his head resting on a pillow. The flight itinerary of the British politician Peter Mandelson flashes onto the screen, then cuts to a news clip of Sen. Lindsey Graham visiting Beijing. Graham once used a BlackBerry, that TikToker adds, pointing to the email’s “Sent from my BlackBerry” signature as potential evidence.
“Somebody is going to unearth something that’s going to crack it open,” he tells viewers.
In the comments, speculation metastasizes. “It was Bill Gates,” one user writes. “my instinct says musk,” adds another. A third replies: “No your prejustice does.”
No one was right; the address belonged to Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem.
The latest trove of Epstein files released by the Department of Justice includes over 3 million documents, images, and videos obtained from probes into sex trafficking allegations against the financier and convicted sex offender. Despite heavy redactions, the files appear to bear witness to a degenerate ruling class for whom the law was optional, either partaking in or willfully ignoring his sex trafficking enterprise.
TikTok creators have swarmed the files. Thousands of clips — amassing millions of views — attempt to decode cryptic emails, dig around FBI tips, and theorize on redacted names. In the comments, people swap file numbers and repeat the call to arms: “We are unredacting.” Creators span the political spectrum and descend from various niches: true-crime enthusiasts, news junkies, conspiracy theorists, mom bloggers, wellness gurus.
The #EpsteinFiles tsunami collapses the boundaries between digital vigilantism, conspiratorial thinking, and the warped incentives of the attention economy. Whether this visibility will translate into legal accountability remains unclear. Yet beneath the spectacle lies something harder to dismiss: a genuine groundswell of outrage at the abuses detailed in the files, held together by an overarching sense that traditional justice isn’t coming, even as Congress begins reviewing the unredacted files.
Why TikTok is flooded with Epstein Files clips
Long before online sleuths began combing through the files, powerful institutions had already shown a tendency to look away.
Epstein reportedly left a severed cat’s head and a bullet on the doorstep of Vanity Fair’s editor-in-chief in the early 2000s to scare off coverage of his abuse. At ABC News, anchor Amy Robach was recorded in 2019 saying the network had “quashed” her earlier Epstein investigation (ABC claimed that there was not sufficient corroboration for broadcast), and critics have argued that initial coverage by The New York Times downplayed the scope of Epstein’s network and the systemic failures that enabled him. So, when Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown first approached former Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter in 2017 about his Epstein investigation, he was unresponsive. It’d been 12 years since he’d opened the case.
“He was convinced that a lot of media had squashed the story and he was fed up,” she told WNYC. “Somebody’s going to call your publisher and the next thing you know you are going to be assigned to the obituaries department,” she said she recalled him saying.
But Brown persisted. Her 2018 investigation revealed that Epstein had abused dozens of underage girls and secured a secret, extraordinarily lenient 2008 plea deal that shielded him from federal prosecution, exposing systemic failures within the justice system. The latest files show the FBI received 290 tips relating to Epstein and his associates, and even considered charging co-conspirators but didn’t.
Her reporting led to the arrests of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell on new sex trafficking charges in 2019 and 2020, respectively.
To this day, Maxwell is the only person who has been charged in connection with the network, and she refused to answer questions in deposition before Congress on Monday, vowing to talk, and clear President Donald Trump of wrongdoing, only if he grants her clemency.
Despite Brown’s intrepid work, years of ignored police appeals have fed a broader suspicion that institutional newsrooms shield the powerful. That mistrust is measurable: Less than a third of Americans say they trust newspapers, television, and radio to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly,” according to a 2025 Gallup poll.
Into that vacuum, social media has stepped, not just as a forum for commentary, but as a heretic newsroom — one primed to treat any perceived conflict of interest as proof of collusion.
The DOJ’s latest release appears to show emails between celebrity doctor Peter Attia — who CBS News recently appointed as a new correspondent — and Epstein. In one message, Attia seemingly wrote: “Pussy is, indeed, low-carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.”
Creators were quick to surface the emails and point out Attia’s recent media ties.
“Frankly, there’s just too many files.”
“I don’t think mainstream media will report on the stuff that we’re reporting on social media, because at the top, they’re all connected with the same people,” claims Nemo, a New England-based creator who asked to be identified by his first name.
The question of trust aside, the smartphone-wielding public outnumbers dwindling journalists. The same week of the release, The Washington Post announced it was laying off one-third of its editorial staff, the latest in a flurry of newsrooms to reduce its workforce. Plus, reporters face a higher journalistic standard, giving creators the advantage of speed for posting claims, both founded and completely unverified. Accelerating the urgency of social media posts is paranoia about the sudden, sporadic disappearance of files from the DOJ database.
“Frankly, there’s just too many files [for reporters]”, says TikTok creator Mick McElhinney, 36, from Syracuse, New York, who spends three or four hours reviewing the files daily.
“I had to stop reading these major institutions because I realized they were way behind the ball,” he says.
But, for better or for worse, TikTok content creators tend to be unmoored from journalistic standards and legal risks, so their content isn’t simply surfacing who features in the files.
For example: Broadcast from the car, one creator speculates that there’s a connection between journal entries from an alleged rape victim mentioning private-equity investor Leon Black and an ongoing lawsuit alleging he sexually assaulted a minor, claims which he denies. Another line of inquiry: Creators are attempting to locate Epstein’s last girlfriend, Karyna Shuliak, a 36-year-old Belarusian dentist. Documents reveal that two days before his death, Epstein gave $100 million to Shuliak.
When sleuthing goes wrong
This kind of sleuthing is known as digital vigilantism — a form of crowdsourced justice-seeking that relies on the “weaponization of visibility”: broadcasting a target’s personal details online for reputational harm.
But while this kind of sleuthing can result in actual justice (see, for instance, the internet detectives who hunted a cat-killer in the Netflix documentary Don’t F**k with Cats), there are examples like Sunil Tripathi. In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, Tripathi, a 22-year-old Brown University student, found himself the object of the subreddit r/FindBostonBombers. What started with grainy surveillance footage escalated to false viral tweets announcing that police had identified Tripathi as a suspect. In fact, Tripathi had died by suicide more than a month before the bombing.
What began with the FBI asking the public for clues “morphed into a much uglier digital witch hunt, one where the crowd’s fears, prejudices, and suspicions were given credence,” Forbes wrote at the time.
Unlike that case, however, the DOJ’s Epstein files document the state’s failure to prosecute perpetrators — both in what they contain and the very act of their release. Rather than usurp law enforcement, Epstein vigilantes would argue they’re doing detective work the DOJ won’t. And unlike Tripathi, the individuals TikTok sleuths target are elites, inverting the power dynamic of one man against an angry mob.
In some ways, this activity echoes the internet’s founding philosophy: to function as a “society against the state,” encouraging the “overthrowing of hierarchies,” as French sociologist Benjamin Loveluck writes.
In the case of Epstein, “the issue of accountability must be tackled by the masses,” as put by the authors of a recent article published in the Pakistani Journal of Regional Studies Review examining the files as a remedy for governance flaws. Public scrutiny — including what they describe as “digital activism” — ensures that “no human, wealthy or mighty, can escape examination,” they bullishly argue.
The risk, however, may be uneven accountability as a result of how the files are released.
The Epstein files have been heavily redacted by the DOJ, and there’s no telling exactly who exchanged some of these emails with the infamous sex offender.
“New Brazilian just arrived, sexy and cute, 19yo,” a 2013 email to Epstein reads, sent from someone at a Paris modeling agency — but the sender’s name was redacted. An anonymous sender thanks Epstein for a “fun night” in 2014, adding: “Your littlest girl was a little naughty.”
The redacted dossier “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) wrote on X in December, following the first release.
The gaps leave room for speculation, from the informed to the outlandish, with their plausibility left to viewers to determine. For example, one theory circulating on TikTok claims the DOJ allegedly used “control+f” redacting of “Don T” based on what appears to be a redaction of the word “don’t.”
A list of alleged co-conspirators from a 2019 FBI investigation is unevenly redacted — leaving TikTok to throw out names in an attempt to fill in the gaps.
This blend of shocking revelations and cryptic redactions means that the line between interrogation and conspiracy is blurring.
In one email exchange, Epstein brags about his “aquarium full of girls,” adding: “some are like shrimp , you throw away the head and keep the body.”
One creator, armed with a handheld mic and ring light, speculates that this implies the decapitation of a victim, in a video watched 1.3 million times. “It was a cannibal holocaust,” the caption reads. In the comment section, some suggest it’s “clearly a joke” about only caring for the body, not the person, prompting dozens of replies like “wake up…they ate babies.” These exchanges are typical across “#epstein” TikTok.
It’s emails like these that feed into other theories. Hundreds of clips speculate that mentions of “pizza” and “grape soda” are coded words for pedophilia; supporters of the debunked “pizzagate” conspiracy theory claim vindication. Meanwhile, dozens of TikToks surface the same clips of Epstein with facial blisters, with green screen talking heads suggesting it’s evidence of kuru, a fatal disease caused by cannibalism. The more likely explanation? Herpes.
One of these clips has 7.5 million views. In two videos, different creators recite identical stories claiming their dad knew someone with kuru.
Other rumors include: Did Maxwell abduct missing British girl Madeleine McCann? Are those tables pictured built from babies? What about the lamps — could they be made of human skin?
Adding to the mix is the distribution of AI and false files, pulled from various corners of the internet. An image of raw chickens and a dead body on a cutting board has been viewed millions of times — despite being a piece of art from 2003. False AI-generated images appeared to show New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a child with his mother and Epstein, originating from a parody X account.
“There’s very explicit, damning things, there’s things that might be dark humor, there’s things that could be lies, and then there’s just a lot of really weird conversations that are divorced from the context in which they were produced,” says Alice E. Marwick, director of research at Data & Society. “It is very easy to misinterpret anything online when the utterance is divorced from intent.”
“It is very easy to misinterpret anything online when the utterance is divorced from intent.”
While these theories may be outlandish, such theorizing also makes sense. The files blend oddities — an in-house dental chair — with flashes of real horror, like an anonymous email with a redacted image attached that simply states “Age 10.” Suddenly, the unthinkable feels within reach.
The viral speculation surrounding the 2021 disappearance and homicide of Gabby Petito illustrates how crowdsourced justice on TikTok can slip into chasing engagement.
“While some videos prompted calls to police, many users shared speculation in hopes of being first to crack the case — and earn praise for doing so,” writes Bethan Jones of Cardiff University in a 2022 article about the Petito case published in The International Journal of Communication Ethics.
The TikTok algorithm works by boosting the most shock-factor content, rewarding virality over truth. This ensures that “scores of these videos are pushed into users’ ‘for you’ pages regardless of whether the person posting the video is involved in the case, is providing accurate information or is simply furthering a conspiracy theory,” Jones adds.
“The algorithm forces you to make a certain type of content, otherwise nobody would ever see it,” admits Shelli Fleming, 36. The Missouri mom of four spends up to eight hours a day sifting through the files hunting for TikTok content. Her primary goal is “advocacy for the victims,” while also “challenging whatever the mainstream narrative is,” she says.
“It’s hard, though, because in a certain aspect, I have to create content that is going to get views.”
“I have to create content that is going to get views.”
When Fleming first started her channel last summer, covering “true crime, cold cases, stuff like that,” the goal was to make money, she says.
“To monetize one-minute-long videos, it has to be pretty intriguing,” she says. Her Epstein videos speculating on what the files reveal have amassed over 5 million views and generated thousands of dollars.
“People keep coming back for it,” she says.
In addition to the risk of spreading conspiratorial thinking, turning the files into short-form video content risks retraumatizing the victims and profiting from their abuse.
Across TikTok, creators are distributing intimate images, videos, and descriptions of victims without their consent. Survivors have voiced outcry over the many instances in which the DOJ has failed to redact their identities.
Some creators have tried to identify a redacted image of a young girl they believe is the daughter of a high-profile couple in Epstein’s orbit. After finding the now-adult woman they speculate once sat on Epstein’s lap, sleuths have begun posting unsolicited comments on her social media — effectively dragging a private citizen into a viral investigation without evidence or consent.
TikTok’s algorithm also rewards content that shocks and angers, meaning the most graphic files receive the most engagement — lucrative for whoever uncovers them first.
Sociologist Nicole Bedera, author of On the Wrong Side and cofounder of the anti-violence consulting group Beyond Compliance, disagrees that this approach leads to accountability.
”People keep coming back for it.”
“When people see really violent content, they will pause for a moment before they move off of it, even if they don’t want to consume it, as sort of a trauma response to what they’re seeing. Those types of videos are not going to be the ones that lead to any kind of reckoning,” she says. Bedera recommends consuming Epstein content only from creators with a track record covering sexual violence.
Yet woven through the mass circulation of diary entries, body parts, and police reports is a genuine desire from many creators to use visibility as a form of retroactive justice — a collective want to excavate truth from systemic corruption. For participants, this work feels meaningful: a decentralized investigation driven by outrage and a dream of accountability.
Virality vs. accountability
“But for this type of vigilantism to work, it can’t just be throwing a name out there and hoping that the right thing will happen,” says Bedera. Instead, she argues, a coordinated online movement must be directed toward removing high-profile perpetrators from positions of power, not just exposing them.
The concern is that the online whirlwind of rage won’t be channeled in ways that translate into justice offline. Much of the content reflects a tone of deep institutional mistrust and disenfranchisement.
Creator McElhinney, from Syracuse, says watching the surge of federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota — including the shooting of a Minneapolis man by federal agents that has driven nationwide protests — was one of his motivations for creating Epstein-related content. To him, these are not isolated phenomena but symptoms of the same political corruption and elite impunity.
“The bad actors are the ones that are in control of the prosecutors,” he says. “The people of this country are not treating this information as prosecutorial evidence — they’re treating it as intel in a low-grade war, where things are already boiling over.”
Marwick, who studies how conspiracy theories spread online, says the current political climate — shaped by high-profile incidents of federal force and ongoing public protests — may widen the gulf between online outrage and legal accountability.
“When they’re shooting random American citizens on the street, it’s very hard to believe that there are checks and balances. We live in a time where the rule of law is tenuous, which is scary for those of us who always assume that that was immovable,” she says.
But there are signs some content may already be helping to deliver a reckoning offline. In one TikTok shared Monday night, amassing over 50,000 likes, the creator describes sending a list of file numbers to the members of Congress reviewing the unsealed documents.
On Tuesday, Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-FL) posted callouts across social media asking which files he should view unredacted. His Reddit post, since deleted, received almost 3,000 replies. But among the PDF numbers was skepticism about what comes next.
“Are you going to tell the public any of what you see in the files or is this not going to actually help expose things?” wrote one user. “Please come back after you’ve viewed the files,” urged another.
With lawmakers unveiling redacted names, the question is whether this moment becomes another binge-and-forget true-crime hype that fades away — or the start of the long, bureaucratic grind required for accountability.
“This is a trial-by-media case. I do not believe that people are going to be judicially prosecuted,” Fleming says. “But as long as the public and viewers are still interested in the content, I think it’s worth talking about.”
McElhinney pledges to make broadcasting these crimes “a lifelong task,” in what he considers to be “the worst conspiracy in human history.”
