In my 20s I bought a book called Juliette.  It was written by the Marquis de Sade.  It was a nice hardback and 1500 pages, I recall.  I had gotten it at a deep discount from an overstock booklist I subscribed to and thought it was worth a look.

I was expecting a novel about the French Revolution with a bit of salacious content.  It was written back in the 1700s, so how bad could it be?  Pretty bad it turns out.  It was one graphic scene of depravity after another.  I mean graphic.

After a few pages of this it got repetitive and, frankly, boring.  I nearly always finish books I start but I only got less than 100 pages into Juliette and gave up.

Juliette sat on my bookshelf for decades, a big doorstop of a book, and nobody mentioned it. I eventually retired it to the small bookshelf in my office closet for oddly sized, and just odd, books. When I eventually donated it to a used bookstore I considered just putting it in the trash instead, something I had never considered with another book.

De Sade was a French nobleman, but his writings would land him in jail and later the insane asylum. He narrowly avoided the guillotine.  I wondered what compelled a person who was wealthy, powerful and intelligent to write so compulsively in ways that were so damaging to his own situation.

All of this reminds me of the Epstein Files.  Today it is admitted that nearly one million pages of documentation on, one assumes, the depravity of Mr Epstein and his friends, exists in a government database someplace.  This is the equivalent of hundreds, if not thousands, of copies of Juliette.  It seems unlikely any individual will ever read it all, even if they had the stamina.  But this brings up many more questions.

How could such a vast trove of files about one person not draw attention over the years?  Surely at this point it has been seen by hundreds, if not thousands, of law enforcement agents.  In addition all the participants, both victims and perpetrators, know the facts, at least partially, of what was happening around Mr Epstein.  This was obviously a well-kept open secret.

I also have to assume copies of this government data exist elsewhere.  I always assumed Mr Elon Musk’s ransacking of the US government’s many computer systems was just a large scale theft of personal data.  Would he also make off with a copy of the Epstein Files?  I have to figure it would be high on his list since Mr Musk has mentioned the files several times.  It would probably be the most valuable data ever stolen.

At this point the cat is really out of the bag.  There were rumors of large data uploads to Russian sites from DOGE, but I would have to assume Mr Putin has had a personal copy of these files for a long time.  And the DOGE employees probably made personal copies.  I know I would have.

And what of the complete lack of leakers over the decades?   Surely some officer or bureaucrat would have been so offended by this trove of documentation that it would have been leaked to the press or perhaps the erstwhile WikiLeaks.  Or at the very least used selectively by those in power to punish or persuade their rivals.  But there is no evidence of that ever happening.

So perhaps there were leaks, but they were squelched by the press and others.  This indicates an even larger conspiracy, which seems already pretty large.  At some point we may have to stop using the word “conspiracy”.  It would just be “business as usual”.  As far as Assange and WikiLeaks, perhaps they were just the crude Russian information gathering tool it was always rumored to be.

Lastly, whatever data the US Federal Government has, it probably pales in comparison to the data Mr Epstein himself collected.  Much of this would be video from his estates which were said to be wired extensively with “security” cameras.  What happened to this data is anyone’s guess.  I would assume Ms Maxwell has a copy stashed someplace safe and is using it to, frankly, stay alive.  Other copies are assumed to exist, given the high value and lack of security of this sort of data.

Which all brings me back to de Sade.  Perhaps Epstein was our de Sade, except he didn’t escape death at the hands of his jailers.  While de Sade’s writings were suppressed for centuries in various countries, they are widely available today, should anyone want to revisit the decadence of the aristocracy during the French Revolution.

It’s important to remember that the decadence of the French aristocracy led to a revolution, and a very bloody one.  So many high ranking officials, including Queen Marie Antoinette, were executed, the guillotine was invented to automate the process.  We can only hope for such efficient justice.