Brown’s insight is a potent one: the real moral hazard behind ultra-high-end luxuries such as private plane travel is the way they stand for exclusive access. An invitation to travel by private plane symbolizes inclusion in what C.S. Lewis called “the Inner Ring”: the aspirational set, the ones in the know, the insider group within which everyone longs to be included. And among the infinite poisons leaking from the Epstein scandal into every level of public life, one of the most noxious is the moral inversion at its heart.

Private-jet luxury is, ultimately, about an Inner Ring of comfort and snobbery; the Epstein story, though, presented a far headier temptation. The private jet filled with extremely young girls, known as the “Lolita Express”, represented corruption in the fullest sense. For this Inner Ring, the initiatory ritual required at least tacit assent to if not active participation in the sexual abuse of very young girls. The defilement of youth and innocence was the point.

And this moral inversion cuts to the heart of the modern world. For Epstein’s network simply took the training-wheels off a moral outlook that has come, by degrees, to govern the entire modern West: one that does not simply reject but actively seeks to desecrate the older, Christian value-system, in pursuit of a morality of power, violence, and individual desire.

One of the earliest and frankest exponents of this moral inversion was also, and not by coincidence, also a trailblazer in the literature of ritual sexual abuse: the Marquis de Sade. Justine (1791), written during one of his numerous stints in prison for sexual crimes, details the suffering and eventual death of Thérèse, a homeless 12-year-old orphan girl, who keeps trying to be virtuous but receiving only violence, cruelty, and sexual torture at the hands of everyone she turns to for help. The message, exhaustively hammered home by de Sade’s characters through lengthy interspersed passages of philosophical debate, is that the world is fundamentally godless and amoral, and there exists no governing force save power, violence, and untrammeled individual desire.

It is, in the precise sense, a satanic worldview. Justine was banned by Napoleon, and did not appear in English translation until the 20th century. But especially since the Sixties, de Sade’s radical libertinism and rejection of all moral constraints has come, by degrees, to appear almost ordinary. So much so that, in recent decades, it’s begun to look as though at least some segments of contemporary society view Justine less as a provocation than as an instruction manual.

I doubt the perpetrators in Britain’s euphemistically named “grooming gangs” have read the Marquis de Sade. But his pitiless libertarianism has, by now, seeped into the Western groundwater, not least via the entrancing image-making vector of the global porn industry. In some respects, of course, especially the widely acknowledged ethnopolitical dynamic to the crimes in some areas, these gangs are bound up in specifically British pathologies. But I also suspect that if my benighted country ever manages a full reckoning of these atrocities, we will find many parallels with the Epstein network — not least in the victim profile, and also, perhaps, the function of the abuse itself.

Just as in Justine, at the heart of these crimes is the pitiless exploitation of vulnerable girls desperate for love and protection. Girls in care, or with cruel or chaotic homes, absent or abusive fathers. Girls who had already experienced been molested. As Julie Bindel shows in a recent investigation of London’s rape gangs, the most salient feature of victims is often less their ethnicity than their lack of trusted, loving adult care.

The same went, too, for Viriginia Giuffre. In Nobody’s Girl, she describes a childhood scarred by abuse at the hands of everyone who should have cared for her. She alleges that her father sexually molested her from the age of 7 to 11, including trading her to a family friend. As a result of this, her behavior worsened so much she was sent to a deeply abusive “treatment center” where she was once forced to eat her own vomit.

It is, like Justine, a miserable litany of abuse: after escaping this setting she lived a semi-itinerant life, punctuated by routine rape at the hands of strangers and acquaintances – before, eventually, she was returned to her father. He then found her employment at his workplace, Trump’s Mar-A-Lago club in Florida, as a towel attendant — only for her to be spotted and groomed there, by Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. “For 10 years,” she writes, “men had cloaked their abuse of me in a fake mantle of ‘love’. Epstein and Maxwell knew just how to tap into that same crooked vein.”

Some are already seeking to discredit her story; there are defamation lawsuits, and Prince Andrew, with whom she claims to have had sex three times, called her a “fantasist”. Who is right? Speaking of the efforts by some literary critics to downplay the Marquis de Sade’s colorful personal life, the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin remarked in Pornography that whether or not you think he did anything wrong is really a question of whether whether or not you are generally inclined to believe de Sade or the women who accused him of sexual abuse.

Radical feminists might also note out that the unhappy story Giuffre maps — the pattern of abuse, neglect, and desperate longing for refuge with trusted parent-figures — is one that reappears with grim regularity among rape gang survivors. Giuffre recounts how Ghislaine Maxwell seemed a warm mother figure to her — but also, from the very first “interview” aged just 16, forced her into sex with Epstein, and later his and Maxwell’s wealthy friends, while herself sometimes joining in.

Suggested reading

The Epstein cliffhanger

By David Mamet

There is an unnerving parallel in Justine, in the passage where Thérèse is rescued, or so she thinks, from prison by Mme Dubois, a murderer — only to find Dubois coercing her to join the gang by offering to protect her, before shrugging or even joining in, as the male gang members sexually abuse her. The Marquis de Sade’s cold message of amoral power-worship, and remorseless crushing of compassion, is summed in the ruthless words message the gang gives Thérèse about her predicament: “[Y]ou must serve either our pleasures or our interests; your poverty imposes the yoke upon you, and you have got to adapt to it.” It’s hard not to think of the working-class girls groomed, raped, and ignored for years, or simply dismissed as “slags”. Whether the abusers drove taxis or flew by private plane, the profile of the girl was similar; the recruitment was through simulated affection and care.

And the use to which the victims are then put follows the same profoundly evil pattern. I choose the word “evil” carefully, as I mean specifically acts that set out intentionally to negate, to destroy, and to desecrate. Whether in the ultra-luxurious setting of Epstein Island, or on squalid mattresses in crumbling British provincial towns, the group-based sexual abuse of very young girls functioned as a form of social bonding, through ritual de-humanization of the desperately vulnerable.

Giuffre describes her own treatment as a thing, as Epstein and Maxwell passed her around “like a platter of fruit”. She also describes wishing for the evacuation of her selfhood: during sex, she says, Epstein subjected her to “so much pain that I prayed I would black out”. And she recounts how her abusers simply saw this as part of her job. When, she alleges, one former minister choked, beat and bloodied her, Epstein, merely said coldly: “You’ll get that sometimes.” Like the rapists in a de Sade story, Epstein simply viewed it as his right to make her suffer at will, simply because he was powerful and she was not. And as in de Sade, her torment was intended to be anti-morally instructive: a means of reinforcing the conspiratorial unity of the Inner Rings that practiced these secret, shared acts of cruelty and libertine, amoral defilement.

Again: like the de Sadean moral worldview, this kind of group bonding is satanic in the precise sense of the word. It is also extraordinarily potent. We can reasonably suppose the Inner Rings thus fostered continue to endure, whether — in Britain — among the rape gangs that remain active to this day, or among the Epstein elite. Indeed, the degree to which Prince Andrew, now no longer the Duke of York, has been hung out to dry, likely attests more to his relative political irrelevance than to the depth of his corruption, extensive though this doubtless was.

More from this author

The triumph of Gisèle Pelicot

By Mary Harrington

Like Harry, Andrew is a junior “spare”. With tastes as extravagant as his natural abilities are sparse, he has spent his life humiliatingly scrabbling and tin-rattling to make up the shortfall. He is embroiled in the Epstein corruption for the same reason he has always been a royal liability: he wants a lifestyle well beyond his capacity to earn legitimately, and is thus a dear friend to anyone with the money (and the jet) to keep him in the Inner Ring style to which he’d like to remain accustomed.

It is not difficult to imagine a parasite of this caliber viewing the thoughts and feelings of trafficked teenage girls as being of roughly the same importance as those of the maids who cleaned his hotel suite. Giuffre claims that Andrew acted “as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright”. Andrew himself has always strenuously denied these encounters, though Giuffre later took him to court in a case the prince settled in 2022, for an undisclosed sum, without admitting liability.

Virginia Giuffre died earlier this year, reportedly by suicide. Meanwhile, the ongoing shadiness surrounding the whole Epstein network, the mysterious suicides and disappearing video footage and all the sordid rest of it, leaves one wondering how much of the Inner Ring remains intact even as ex-Duke of York Prince Andrew writhes in the media spotlight.

So should we greet this all, glumly, as vindication of the pitiless de Sadean worldview, and its rejection of any refuge or compassion for the victim? Is it true that there’s really nothing but power and desire? I think not. Giuffre’s story is subject to all manner of challenges and attempts at revision. She cannot push back; she is dead. But though she didn’t manage to bring down the entire Inner Ring, I think Giuffre was, ultimately, stronger than those who sought to dehumanize her. Her insistence on having her story heard, on being understood as a person, serves as the most potent rebuttal of all to the de Sadean morality of pure, pitiless power and desire.

Her abusers took Justine as their moral template, and sought to consolidate their Inner Ring by ritually reducing living humans to mere objects. It is a profound evil; the networks thus produced are still with us, as is de Sade’s godless libertarianism. But Giuffre’s insistence, in Nobody’s Girl, on having her story heard was her final act of defiance, of stubborn humanity. The depth of pity and anger her story has inspired, and the shockwaves it is still producing, on its own stands as proof that the Marquis de Sade was wrong.

We all know this happens, because we’ve see it in others – even if we’re too young to have experienced even twinges of it ourselves. I was reminded of the process as I watched the further descent into grumpy old-manness of Bret Easton Ellis.

The author of American Psycho has been giving interviews to publicise his first non-fiction book, White. This is a full-throated assault on the culture that Millennials have brought into the world. It’s an account of the world of snowflake censoriousness that makes all discussion of almost anything almost impossible. The world of feelings over facts. The world of ‘cancelling’ people if they have ever emitted the wrong view.

But there’s a problem. While we might recognise Ellis’s descent into curmudgeonliness, it cannot be allowed to pass without censure.

Further reading

The bitter truth about Millennial burnout

By Peter Franklin

Let’s not forget that Ellis did not make his name by writing a succession of polite social comedies. Nobody would have called him the EF Benson of his day. On the contrary, right from one of his earliest novels, The Rules of Attraction, Ellis’s shtick was to give no-holds-barred portrayals of drug-fuelled, empty, hedonist and indeed nihilistic culture, force it between the covers and then shove the results down his readers’ throats.

His commercial success suggests that people loved it. There is, after all, a great market in American literature for a particular form of nihilism, perhaps that form the late Allan Bloom once described as ‘American nihilism’, that is nihilism with a happy ending.

As it happens, Ellis’s career only really hit the stratosphere when he was able to marry precisely this sort of nihilism with a plot. In American Psycho the nihilism was at least propelling the narrative somewhere. The moment someone kills someone, the reader wants to know if that murderer is going to be brought to justice. They want to know if they will kill again. And it is in the nature of violent murder fiction that there is some reward each time for the writer who is willing to take the violence to the next level.

Further reading

It's no crime to come late to Dostoyevsky

By Douglas Murray

In its day and for its time Ellis did that. He dragged the corpses to places beyond where they would normally be. And with it, was an unmistakeable note of something, which if it wasn’t misogynistic, then was certainly something that enjoyed dancing close to that line.

His audience lapped it up. Indeed, the extremity and the pornography of the violence in American Psycho paved the way for depictions of it elsewhere – on television and film. As a result, people’s attitudes towards it were dulled. And each subsequent iteration had to break a new taboo. Thus did a writer enrich himself as he soiled his audience.

But what, precisely, did Ellis think would follow? Did he presume that the next generation would perform variations on his theme: more novels about sex and drugs with a little meaningless violence occasionally thrown into the mix? Did he think they’d find increasingly imaginative ways to pervert his genre?

No wonder he was disappointed with how they turned out, as he mistakenly failed to note that periods of extreme debauchery and free licence are inevitably followed by counter-movements of puritanism.

Further reading

The righteous anger of youth

By Gerard de Groot

Hence Ellis’s general mood as he does the rounds with his book, busily bemoaning a whole slew of things about the Millennial generation. In her superb interview with him in The Times last weekend, Decca Aitkenhead got him to make a number of excellently perceptive comments, in one of which he pointed out that Millennial culture is really an oxymoron.

“What is it?” He asked. “There’s no writing. None of them read books.”

Some will hold such statements to be useless – because they are too sweeping. But there is a kernel of truth, as well as a grandiosity, to his claim. It’s not that Millennials don’t read books, nor that Millennials don’t write them. But it is true that anyone who believes they are right have no especial need of books. Given that books are – to date – perhaps the most reliable transportation device our species has come up, then Millennials with their clear sense of direction will, therefore, have less need of them.

This generation, destined to rebel against libertinism and nihilism, must develop a very clear sense of purpose. It cannot adopt the luxurious and decadent position of going wherever words and ideas take it. Rather it can go on journeys only if those journeys are likely to take it to the places it has already decided to be the correct destinations.

Further reading

Why does everyone have it in for the Puritans?

By Giles Fraser

Which brings me back to puritanism. Millennial culture is nothing if not puritanical. It finds people on tracks that they should not be on and castigates them. Conversely, it identifies the true and correct paths that people should be on and praises them for staying there.

I have an enormous amount of sympathy with Ellis’s criticisms of this new generation, its hypersensitivity and boringness. I can stay for these criticisms, and many more. But along the way, a question has to be asked. What is it the younger generation has rebelled against? And who are the cultural figures who have set the stage for precisely this sort of backlash?

Criticism of the new generation is fine and good – and probably quite necessary. But this does have to start with a degree of self-reflection from that generation who – and this is particularly woeful for those of us who thought of them as enfants terribles – we must now describe as the old.