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.
See Conclusion in Part 2 HERE
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.
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