No Man Is Righteous, Not One

Note: This column mentions acts of depravity that might be disturbing. Read at your own risk.

“Your princes are rebels…. There is no end to their treasures…. Their land is filled with idols.” — Isaiah 1:23, 2:7-8

Regarding recent disclosures, and in light of redactions, some questions arise.

Did Microsoft founder Bill Gates contract a sexually transmitted infection from a Russian prostitute? Did JPMorganChase executive James Staley rape underage girls while they were dressed in Disney princess costumes? Did Prince Andrew, duke of York, watch Ghislaine Maxwell torture a prepubescent girl with electric shocks? Does former U.S. President Bill Clinton “like them young,” as millionaire sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein claimed? Did Epstein traffic women to Steve Tisch, co-owner of the New York Giants football team?

These are only some of the eyebrow-raising oddities that have bounced around the major news outlets since the turn of the new year, as all manner of the “cultural elite” — billionaire financiers, high-level politicians, entertainment execs, tech entrepreneurs, top-selling rock stars, popular media personalities — have been implicated in the nefarious and disturbing predations of Epstein and his girlfriend Maxwell. How far-reaching is the scandal? Maxwell is the daughter of the late British uppercrustman Robert Maxwell, a politician and owner of, among other companies, MacMillan, Inc., publisher of widely circulated education textbooks. Yes, the Epstein gang’s tentacles reached even into kids’ classrooms — and in more ways than one. Billionaire Leon Black allegedly paid Epstein hundreds of millions of dollars over the years for “financial advice” — including advice on how to buy the silence of his former mistress, one of several women who have accused Black of sexual assault. Black, apparently an associate of pedophiles, is a former CEO of Apollo Global Management, which owns Lifetouch, an outfit that specializes in student portraits, photographing America’s schoolchildren.

Do you have kids in school? vote in elections? keep money in a bank? use a computer? follow sports? listen to music? watch movies? read books or magazines? play the lottery? eat fruits and vegetables? Not even these innocuous, everyday activities are untouched by high-profile pedophiles, rapists, and other types of perverts (or their jet-set associates) who’ve recently had their predilections exposed to the light. Their noxious fingerprints are smeared across virtually every aspect of American life.

It gets worse if you care to speculate about the people who visited Epstein on his private island, Little St. James, dubbed “Pedophile Island” by those in the know, or who rode his private jet (complete with massage service courtesy of underage flight attendants — allegedly), dubbed the “Lolita Express.” (Lolita was the title of a 1955 novel about an older man who sexually abuses a 12-year-old girl.) It’s a veritable who’s-who of the influential, wealthy, and well-connected. The lengthy list includes Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, venture capitalist Reid Hoffman (cofounder of LinkedIn), astronaut John Glenn, Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey (who was accused of sexually harassing prepubescent boys and later came out as homosexual), astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, magician David Copperfield, current U.S. President Donald Trump, former Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor and left-wing activist Noam Chomsky, right-wing media mogul and former Republican strategist Steve Bannon, violinist Itzhak Perlman, comedian Chris Tucker, and the aforementioned, ever-present Clinton, whose name and image appear all over the Epstein Files, released this January by the U.S. Department of Justice.

As for the rest of us, our initial incredulity can easily become indignation. We want to see heads roll. We want to see the mighty cast from their thrones. We want to see their temples of iniquity burned to the ground. In a word, we want justice. But — let’s admit it — we aren’t likely to get that satisfaction, not in this world, at least. We can shout into the wind and raise our fists in anger, but to what avail?

The implications of the Epstein Files are enormous, and not for the faint of heart. Epstein was a known sex offender; in June 2008 he pled guilty to one count of soliciting prostitution and one count of soliciting prostitution from someone under the age of 18. He was sentenced to 18 months in jail, most of which he served in a cushy work-release program that allowed him to go to his office during the day. In 2019 Epstein was arrested again, this time on federal charges of sex trafficking. In 2021 his accomplice, Maxwell, was convicted of sex trafficking, conspiracy, and transporting a minor for illegal sexual activity. She’s still in jail. But it’s always been assumed that there’s more to their story than these “official” charges suggest. The rumors surrounding the couple never ceased, and they and their wealthy co-conspirators and clientele are alleged to have engaged in mass murder, kidnapping, cannibalism, sex slavery, torture, child sacrifice, and occultism. Depending on your willingness to entertain vast conspiracies, the Epstein Files either confirm or debunk these allegations. The court of public opinion leans one way, while the facts themselves are elusive — or redacted to the point of being indecipherable. The obscuring curtain has been only partially lifted.

So, what use is our righteous anger if in these United States, the ostensible land of the free, we the people labor under a ruling class populated mostly by untouchable perverts, a Teflon cabal of pure evil? Sure, a figurehead or two might take the fall — Prince Andrew has been arrested, Staley has stepped down, and Tisch is attempting to transfer his stake in the team to his children — but those seem like merely propitiatory gestures. The system endures, as those who watched the clerical sex-abuse scandal unfold understand all too well. Back then, a pack of sacrificial wolves was defanged and some were caged to quell the public clamor. A few predator priests were defrocked; fewer went to prison. Early indications are that it will be so with the Epstein gang.

If you want an ecclesiastic parallel, look no further than Theodore McCarrick, who, like Epstein, fell to ignominy. We were told McCarrick was the worst of the worst, but the Lavender Mafia that nurtured him and advanced his career lives on, directing events and proposing promotions from deep in the shadows. McCarrick’s lieutenants, even those we know of, remain in positions of power and retain their privileges. The same is true of the secular version that operated from apartments in Manhattan, ranches in New Mexico, compounds in Miami, and islands in the Caribbean. The worst of the worst, Epstein, has been dispatched, we are assured. Yes, but what about the network he inhabited? Not a word have we heard. Even the most suspect, Bill and Hillary Clinton — never known as the most trustworthy of people — can plead ignorance before the U.S. Senate and glibly glide back to their pleasure domes and “charity” functions.

Even then, both McCarrick and Epstein avoided due process for their crimes. Sure, McCarrick was defrocked and lost his liberties to fly around the world, gladhand dignitaries, enjoy haute cuisine, and distribute envelopes of ill-gotten cash, but he was diagnosed — conveniently, for him — with dementia and avoided prison time. Epstein spent nary a month in jail while awaiting a federal trial before he committed suicide (or was “suicided”), seven years before the Justice Department released (redacted versions of) his emails, personal photos, and flight logs, and the extent of his influence was (somewhat) ascertained. Both McCarrick and Epstein quietly exited stage left.

Epstein, for the most part, operated out of public view, funneling money, women, and girls (and possibly boys) to the rich and powerful. If he has a contrasting counterpart, who better than Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers union (UFW)? Like Epstein, Chavez rose from obscurity, though not to aggrandize himself with (or blackmail) the elites but to fight for the rights of the laboring underclass. Chavez (1927-1993), a Catholic, was a very public figure, revered in the culture and classrooms of California and beyond. The boycott he led of Central Valley grapes was critical to the raising of the wages and standard of living of poor Mexican-American farmworkers. So towering a figure was this man of diminutive stature that schools and streets across the Golden State bore his name. Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. President Obama declared a federal holiday in his honor (March 31). Joe Biden displayed a bust of Chavez on his desk in the Oval Office during his presidency. Chavez even had a navy ship named after him. This man who advocated for the poor along dusty backroads and scorching fields had earned the respect and admiration of the high and mighty across the land, not to mention the little people whose lives he helped improve.

But, like Epstein, Chavez had a predilection for women and girls. According to a bombshell New York Times exposé (March 18), two of his underage victims, who are now adults, say Chavez “sexually abused them for years when they were girls.” One of them “attempted to end her life multiple times by the age of 15” due to the shame and trauma he caused her. Times reporters Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes “uncovered extensive evidence to support their accusations and those raised by several other women.” The allegations, they say, are “part of a larger pattern of sexual misconduct” by Chavez, who “also used many of the women who worked and volunteered in his movement for his own sexual gratification.”

One of those women was Chavez’s most prominent female ally, Dolores Huerta, a cofounder of the UFW. Chavez allegedly raped her on at least two occasions in the 1960s. She gave birth to two of his children, she admitted, whom she passed to other couples to raise. Why? So as not to jeopardize “the movement.” For decades, Huerta’s overriding concern was to preserve the status quo, the Chavez machine. That includes the institutions that grew out of the movement, such as the UFW, the Cesar Chavez Foundation, and the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which in 2024 combined for a total of $298 million in assets and $56 million in revenue. There were structures, offices, reputations, legacies, followers, donors, and mucho dinero at stake. Huerta, now 96, didn’t want to kill the cash cow — not even, it seems, for the sake of her own offspring. Hence, the decades-long coverup of sexual malfeasance, in which children are, as per usual, disposable.

Sound familiar?

It should, again, to anyone who remembers the clerical sex scandals of 2002 and beyond. If there’s an ecclesiastic parallel here, then all the pervert priests can be summed up in Chavez, and all the permissive prelates personified by Huerta. The union organizers can play the role of parochial and diocesan staff, who may or may not have been aware of the crimes and their coverups, while rank-and-file union members play the part of largely innocent and ignorant parishioners. Swap out the Boston Globe for The New York Times, and the cast is complete. And the world gets to watch the tragedy unfold, as municipalities and school districts scramble to wipe Chavez’s name and legacy from the public square.

Is there a lesson in this sudden flurry of revolting revelations? In the case of Chavez, we might conclude, cynically perhaps, that there are no heroes in this world. There are only sinners of varying degrees who occasionally do heroic things. After all, that’s what the Bible tells us: “There is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins” (Eccl. 7:20), and “All men, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin, as it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one’” (Rom. 9-10).

We must, therefore, exalt no man, no matter how heroic he may seem. None of us can see into another’s heart, and few of us are privy to what goes on behind closed doors — unless and until the whistleblowers or investigative reporters render their accounts, and the predators and profiteers are forced to give up the jig. He who appears to be a hero from afar could be a horror to those near to him — as was Chavez, by all indications. (That the UFW was quick to distance itself from its founder and cease all public celebrations of him should tell us something, as should the fact that almost nobody has risen to Chavez’s defense.) All heroes are flawed. Some heroes are frauds.

In the case of the Epstein cabal, we must also recall our Scripture: “The whole world is in the power of the evil one” (1 Jn. 5:19). Ever so will it be until the Son of Man returns. In the meantime, our instructions are clear: “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is a shame even to speak of the things that they do in secret” (Eph. 5:11-12). Wealth and power often lead to the inversion of priorities and the corruption of morals. It’s a deadly combination.

We would be wise to re-evaluate our allegiances even to noble causes and their leaders, to our pet programs and favored personalities — especially those who earn the acclaim of the princes of the world — lest we be cast into disconsolation should our idols fall. The path of history is littered with their debris.

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