The Agency Gap: How Progressive Narratives Reproduce Racial Essentialism in the Epstein and Combs Cases

By: Oded J.K. Faran and Walter E. Block

When high-profile figures fall from grace, we tell ourselves we are simply following the facts. We parse the allegations, weigh the evidence, demand accountability. But beneath the surface of these discussions runs a deeper current, one that shapes not just what we think about specific cases but how we think about culpability itself.

Consider two men who have dominated headlines for alleged sexual misconduct: Jeffrey Epstein, the financier whose crimes sparked international outrage, and Sean “Diddy” Combs, the music mogul now facing serious federal charges. Both cases involve accusations of predatory behavior. Both involve powerful men and vulnerable victims. Both have generated intense media scrutiny and public debate.

Yet for all their similarities, the framing could hardly be more different. And that difference tells us something uncomfortable about how contemporary discourse assigns responsibility.

Epstein became the archetype of the calculating mastermind, complete with conspiracy theories about shadowy networks and deliberate manipulation. Combs, by contrast, is more often discussed through the lens of industry culture, structural pressures, and endemic toxicity. One man is granted near-supernatural agency; the other is contextualized into partial absolution. This split is not accidental. It reflects what might be called the agency gap in contemporary progressive discourse: a tendency to assign full moral responsibility to some suspects while subtly diminishing it for others, not based on evidence but on identity. And while this framing positions itself as anti-racist analysis, it functions as racial essentialism in activist clothing.

The Epstein Mythology: The Scheming Puppeteer

Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes were monstrous. His 2008 plea deal was a travesty. His suicide (or possible murder) in federal custody remains a scandal.¹ But the public narrative around Epstein has metastasized into something stranger than the facts warrant: a conspiracy-theory-laden portrait of a man pulling strings across continents, manipulating global elites, running a blackmail operation worthy of a Bond villain.

Journalist Vicky Ward, who covered Epstein for Vanity Fair in 2003, noted that even before his death, “he was turned into a myth… people projected onto him their worst fears about power and corruption.”² The myth persists. QAnon-adjacent narratives cast Epstein as the nexus of a global pedophile cabal. More mainstream accounts still lean heavily on imagery of intentional orchestration, hidden motives, and machiavellian foresight.

Some of this is deserved. Epstein did cultivate relationships with powerful men. He did exploit legal loopholes and institutional failures. But the aura of omnicompetent scheming owes less to the evidence than to an older archetype: the manipulative, cosmopolitan outsider. As historian Deborah Lipstadt has documented, such imagery has deep roots in antisemitic tropes about Jewish duplicity and hidden control.³ When Epstein is described in language that emphasizes cunning, networks, and shadowy influence, it is worth asking whether we are analyzing a criminal or dressing up an ancient prejudice in modern garb.

The Combs Framing: Victim of the Machine

Sean Combs faces serious accusations: sexual assault, sex trafficking, racketeering.⁴ The allegations span decades and involve multiple accusers. Yet the dominant framing in progressive media has been noticeably different. Combs is often situated within “the culture of hip-hop,” “the music industry’s exploitation,” or “toxic masculinity as a structural problem.”

A Rolling Stone analysis of the charges against Combs devoted significant space to the “predatory environment” of the entertainment business, noting that “power dynamics in hip-hop have long enabled abuse.”⁵ The Atlantic framed the case as exposing “an industry that valorizes dominance and control.”⁶ These observations are not wrong. But they are also not unique to Combs. The same structural critiques could apply to Epstein’s world of finance, academia, and elite philanthropy. Yet no one writes, “Epstein exposes the toxic culture of hedge funds.”

The implication is that Combs, unlike Epstein, is at least partially a product of his environment rather than its architect. This is the language of diminished agency, the suggestion that external forces bear some explanatory weight. And while context always matters, the selective application of context is bias.

The Progressive Paradox: Anti-Racism as Essentialism

The tragic irony is that the left, which rightly critiques racial stereotypes, has reproduced them through this wildly unequal framing. Assigning hyper-agency to Epstein while contextualizing Combs is the absolute opposite of anti-racism; but a new form of racial essentialism: some suspects are schemers, others are merely shaped by their circumstances. One is the puppet master, the other a figure moved by larger forces.

Legal scholar Randall Kennedy has warned against what he calls “racial apologetics,” the tendency to explain away individual wrongdoing by members of marginalized groups through structural arguments, while holding members of dominant groups to stricter standards of personal responsibility.⁷ This is not justice. It is condescension. Denying someone full moral agency is a form of infantilization, the assumption that they lack the capacity for autonomous evil. Conversely, exaggerating agency into conspiracy myths is demonization, the assumption that malice is inherent, diabolical, purposeful and omnipresent. Both essentialist moves treat identity as a predictor of culpability and undermine the principle that individuals should be judged by their actions, not their demographics.

What a Consistent Standard Would Look Like

A truly egalitarian approach would treat all suspects as autonomous moral agents unless evidence proves otherwise. It would not launder old prejudices through new jargon. It would not assume that a Jewish financier is a scheming manipulator or that a black music mogul is merely a product of structural dysfunction. It would not excuse anyone’s crimes through identity, nor inflate them through stereotype.

Structural connections exist in every arena of power and influence. One could easily have analyzed Epstein as a product of elite cultures systematically insulated from legal accountability, of prosecutorial failures rooted in deference to wealth, and of institutional systems designed to protect those with connections to power. That framing would be no less accurate than the structural critiques routinely applied to the entertainment industry. Yet it remains largely absent from mainstream discourse about Epstein.

This absence is truly revealing. Structural analysis is not being applied on the basis of evidence, but deployed selectively according to which narrative fits preexisting emotional and ideological frameworks. On one side, there is the ancient fear of the scheming outsider, the cosmopolitan manipulator who operates through hidden networks. On the other, there is the legacy of intergenerational guilt and the emotional appeal of narratives that emphasize systemic oppression over individual culpability.

In Epstein’s case, the mythology of individual malevolence satisfies a visceral need for a villain who embodies calculated evil. To contextualize his crimes within broader failures of elite accountability would dilute that narrative, spreading responsibility too thin across institutions and systems. It is emotionally unsatisfying. It does not provide the clarity of a single bad actor.

In Combs’s case, the structural framing serves a different emotional function. It allows progressive commentators to position themselves as opponents of systemic injustice while softening the moral weight placed on an individual from a historically marginalized community. The implicit logic is that to hold Combs fully accountable without structural caveats would be to ignore the forces that shaped him, and thus to participate in a kind of cultural insensitivity or historical blindness.

What this reveals is not a principled commitment to structural analysis, but rather its selective deployment to align with pre-existing biases. If the goal were genuine consistency, we would either apply structural critique universally or withhold it universally. Instead, we apply it where it resonates emotionally and withhold it where it conflicts with entrenched narratives.

This is not a call for “colorblindness” or pretending that context does not matter. Social structures shape opportunity and behavior. But they do so for everyone. If we are willing to contextualize Combs within the music industry, we must be equally willing to contextualize Epstein within the failures of prosecutorial discretion, elite impunity, and institutional negligence. If we emphasize Epstein’s individual agency, we must do the same for Combs.

The alternative is a moral framework that reproduces the very hierarchies it claims to dismantle: one in which some people are granted the dignity of full personhood and others are reduced to symbols, whether of victimhood or villainy.

The Test of Consistency

So far, we have focused our attention upon only two men. Is it possible to extrapolate from this small sample to a larger statistical universe? Unfortunately, it is.

Since April 2023, Sudan has been engulfed in a civil war that conservative estimates suggest has killed over 62,000 people, with U.S. Special Envoy Tom Perriello testifying that the death toll may be as high as 150,000.⁸ More than 12 million people have been displaced, making it one of the largest humanitarian catastrophes in modern history. The conflict features systematic ethnic violence, mass sexual assault, and deliberate starvation as weapons of war. Yet where are the 31 Harvard student organizations that held Israel solely responsible for the events of October 7, 2023?⁹ Where is the global outcry proportionate to the scale of suffering?

Climate activist Greta Thunberg, who organized multiple flotillas carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza in 2025,¹⁰ has been conspicuously silent on Sudan’s catastrophe. Her foundation made a general donation to refugee causes in 2022 that mentioned South Sudan among other conflicts,¹¹ and she posted once in support of Fridays for Future Sudan against military oppression in April 2022.¹² Yet there have been no flotillas, no dramatic protests, no sustained campaigns for Sudan comparable to her Gaza activism. Ironically, her June 2025 flotilla to Gaza rescued four Sudanese refugees fleeing Libya, yet this encounter with Sudan’s suffering sparked no pivot toward addressing that crisis.¹³

The pattern reveals itself starkly. Media organizations that devoted endless coverage to Gaza have largely ignored Sudan. Student activists who mobilized en masse for Palestinians have remained dormant for Darfur. The international community that demanded immediate ceasefires in the Middle East has offered tepid statements about Africa.

Why? The explanations offered invariably circle back to structural factors: Sudan lacks geopolitical significance, media access is limited, the conflict is complex. Yet these are not explanations but excuses. Gaza presented its own complexities, its own access challenges, its own geopolitical entanglements. The difference is not in the objective difficulty of coverage or advocacy. The difference is in the assignment of moral agency.

On the macro level, we see an analogy to the micro cases of Epstein and Combs. This is not an equivalence, of course, but the parallels are difficult to deny. In one case, a community defending itself after a terrorist attack is assigned near-total agency and therefore near-total blame. In the other, a community experiencing genocide is stripped of agency and therefore stripped of attention. The asymmetry seems to have little to do with facts on the ground. It is entrenched in preconceptions about who acts and who is acted upon.

It is an insult to Combs, and to black Africans in Sudan, to in effect deny them agency, free will, and responsibility. It reduces them to passive objects of historical forces, incapable of moral choice or meaningful action. Conversely, it is an offense to Epstein, and to Israel, to exaggerate their agency into omnipotent malevolence, particularly when the latter is defending itself against terrorism. Both distortions serve the same function: they allow us to avoid the uncomfortable work of treating all people as equally capable of both good and evil, equally deserving of both context and accountability.

If we truly believe in equality before the law and equal moral standing, we must abandon the essentialism that assigns scheming to some and circumstance to others. Otherwise, we are not fighting bias. We are just updating it for a new audience.

¹ U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, “Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Efforts to Prevent the Death of Jeffrey Epstein” (November 2023).

² Vicky Ward, “The Talented Mr. Epstein,” Vanity Fair, March 2003.

³ Deborah E. Lipstadt, Antisemitism: Here and Now (New York: Schocken Books, 2019), 97-112.

⁴ Indictment, United States v. Sean Combs, S.D.N.Y., Case No. 1:24-cr-00542 (filed September 2024).

⁵ Mankaprr Conteh, “Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs and the Reckoning Hip-Hop Has Long Avoided,” Rolling Stone, November 18, 2024.

⁶ Spencer Kornhaber, “The Diddy Allegations and the Music Industry’s Abuse Problem,” The Atlantic, December 2, 2024.

⁷ Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime, and the Law (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 19-23.

⁸ Sarah Elizabeth Scales et al., “Sudan’s civil war has left at least 62,000 dead by our estimate,” The Conversation, October 14, 2024; U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Testimony of U.S. Special Envoy Tom Perriello, May 1, 2024 (stating death toll estimates range from 10,000 to as high as 150,000).

⁹ J. Sellers Hill, “Harvard Student Groups Face Intense Backlash for Statement Calling Israel ‘Entirely Responsible’ for Hamas Attack,” The Harvard Crimson, October 10, 2023 (34 student groups originally signed; number fluctuated to 31-33 as some withdrew).

¹⁰ Freedom Flotilla Coalition, June 2025 Gaza Freedom Flotilla; Global Sumud Flotilla, August-September 2025.

¹¹ The Greta Thunberg Foundation, “Humanitarian aid to people impacted by armed conflicts,” 2022 (mentioning South Sudan among other conflicts).

¹² Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg), “We urge everyone to join the International Day of Solidarity with Sudan,” X (formerly Twitter), April 6, 2022.

¹³ “Gaza aid ship with Greta Thunberg on board rescues four refugees from Mediterranean,” The Irish Times, June 6, 2025.