By Dr Shahridan Faiez
Jeffrey Epstein was not merely a criminal. He was a mirror.
His island, Little St. James, exposed more than personal depravity. It revealed a class formation – a stratum of extreme wealth and influence that behaves with impunity and entitlement, insulated from the moral and legal consequences that bind ordinary people. Epstein thrived not simply because he was cunning, but because he moved within circles where access substitutes for scrutiny and status softens accountability.
From that exposure emerges a concept: the Epstein Class.
The Epstein Class is not defined by a single shared crime. It is defined by shared insulation. It consists of ultrarich financiers who bend markets, tech-utopian billionaires who claim to redesign humanity, philanthropic moguls who steer public priorities through private wealth, highly influential policy advisers who rotate between universities, governments and boardrooms, and even royalty whose inherited prestige grants enduring social capital. They inhabit the same global cities, attend the same summits, fund the same institutions and rely on the same legal architecture.
Their defining trait is entitlement. Borders are conveniences. Regulation is friction. Reputation is manageable. When scandal erupts, crisis managers intervene. When outrage swells, time dilutes it.
Over time, this insulation corrodes something deeper: humanity.
The Epstein scandal forced the world to confront horrific crimes against young women and girls. Courts have determined Epstein’s guilt. Others associated socially or professionally with him have denied wrongdoing, and association is not proof of crime. Yet what the episode revealed was chilling – how extreme wealth can create environments where exploitation festers in proximity to power. When access shields scrutiny, abuse can hide in plain sight.
This erosion of moral restraint does not stop at the level of personal misconduct. It scales globally.
Writing in the 1990s sociologist Saskia Sassen anticipated this phenomenon in her theory of the “global city” — metropolitan hubs like New York, London, Singapore and Dubai that function as command centres of the world economy. These cities were redesigned to attract and protect mobile capital. Luxury towers proliferate. Tax regimes bend. Infrastructure is calibrated to mobility and investment rather than for the rooted community.
The global city becomes a citadel. Within these citadels, the Epstein Class circulates seamlessly. Wealth concentrates vertically; accountability disperses horizontally. Sassen predicted the emergence of a new, transnational professional class who functions as the enablers of the Epstein class. Lawyers arbitrate jurisdiction. Foundations launder reputation through philanthropy. Policy advisers draft frameworks that preserve flexibility for capital while tightening discipline on labour and the poor. Impunity becomes structural.
And when such a class turns outward to geopolitics, the consequences magnify.
In the ongoing Gaza crisis influential figures from the Epstein class across finance, technology and policy circles have publicly aligned themselves with Israel’s military campaign. Meanwhile, the devastation in Gaza has been documented and reported across international media and by United Nations agencies as war crimes and ethnic cleansing. In fact a United Nations Commission has found evidence of genocidal acts conducted by Israel against the population in Gaza.
To speak of genocide is not rhetorical indulgence; it is the terminology invoked by many human rights advocates and legal scholars assessing the scale of destruction and civilian death. Courts will determine legal definitions. But the humanitarian catastrophe – shattered hospitals, displaced families, mass casualties – is visible for the world to see.
Here the defining quality of the Epstein Class reappears: moral distance.
When wealth and influence are insulated within global networks, suffering becomes abstract. Civilian deaths become statistics in briefing papers. Entire populations can be discussed as “security problems.” Strategic alliances are defended with fluency; humanitarian horror is acknowledged, if at all, with detachment.
This is how entitlement metastasises. When one grows accustomed to moving above consequence – socially, financially, legally – it becomes easier to view women, children, and even whole populations as expendable variables in larger calculations.
The Epstein Class did not invent war. It does not command every army. But it benefits from – and often reinforces – a global system in which concentrated wealth and power operate without meaningful democratic tethering. It shapes narratives, funds institutions, influences policy and absorbs scandal.
Meanwhile, in the very cities that host it, inequality widens. Housing becomes unaffordable. Public services strain. Citizens are told to accept austerity while capital receives incentives. The metropolis ceases to be a civic commons and becomes a platform for extraction.
Little St. James was an island. The global city is an archipelago of privilege.
If we continue to treat each scandal, each atrocity, each humanitarian disaster as isolated events, we will miss the structure that binds them: a class insulated by wealth, entitlement and mobility, increasingly detached from the human cost of the systems it sustains.
The task before us is not merely moral outrage. It is structural transformation.
Cities must be reclaimed for citizens, not curated for itinerant capital. Democratic oversight must extend to transnational wealth. Philanthropy must not substitute for accountability. Policy must be anchored in public interest, not private influence.
Most importantly, we must reject the culture of impunity that allows power to float above consequence.
The Epstein Class thrives on insulation. It depends on our acceptance and resignation.
We must refuse both.
We must re-anchor wealth to responsibility. Re-anchor cities to their people. Re-anchor power to humanity.
Because when entitlement erodes empathy, and impunity erodes restraint, the victims are always the vulnerable – women, children, the dispossessed, entire populations caught in the machinery of war.
And silence is the final layer of insulation.
The work of citizens is clear: organise, demand accountability, and rebuild our cities so that power once again serves humanity.
Dr. Shahridan Faiez is the Chairman of Citizens International, a Civil Society Organisation based in Penang dedicated to internationalism, peaceful coexistence and global cooperation for a better world for all. (https://www.citizens-international.org/)
