Jeffrey Epstein

Matthew Petti | 2.5.2026 2:40 PM

My name is in the Epstein files. How could that be? When the FBI received its first tip about the businessman molesting teenage girls, I hadn't even been born yet. The first time I heard the name "Jeffrey Epstein" was as a confused college student in 2015, watching feminist classmates protest a talk by Epstein's defense lawyer.

But search my name in the Justice Department's Epstein Library, and there it is, linked to a PDF file. Did I travel back in time? Was I hypnotized to forget my involvement in the most infamous sex abuse scandal in modern times? Do I happen to have an evil twin?

The less scintillating explanation: The FBI was reading my articles. What caught their eye wasn't even Reason's coverage of the Epstein case, to which I extensively contributed. Instead, one of my articles about the feds surveilling a science fiction author in the 1980s ended up in an FBI compilation of news coverage about the bureau. That compilation also includes an article about Epstein, so it ended up in the case files, which the Justice Department released last week under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

I have always supported more transparency on the Epstein files. At its core, the scandal is about a politically well-connected man evading justice. And as I discovered last year while looking through the first batch of Epstein's leaked emails, those connections held the key to understanding a lot of political stories unrelated to his sex crimes.

Yet the reckless way some people are treating the Epstein files takes away from the........

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