for about one This decade, President Donald Trump has managed to reignite the conspiracy theory revolving around disgraced financier and registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. They profited from conspiracy theories; They were one of the factors motivating him to come into office. It has only been in the past few weeks — spurred by the release of new Epstein documents and the public defection of GOP lawmakers — that the complex web of misinformation has spiraled out of Trump’s control.
It all started with QAnon. It’s hard to overstate how trivial QAnon was when Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene began posting about it in November 2017, when she posted a video praising Q as a “patriot.”
The movement was led by “Q”, who claimed to be a government insider and who posted top secret intelligence information in posts known as “drops” on the anonymous message board 4chan. Q presented a baseless and untrue conspiracy theory that a cabal of Democrats and Hollywood elites were behind an alleged global sex trafficking ring.
Already, Jeffrey Epstein was one of the major characters of the QAnon universe.
Epstein was first mentioned just two weeks after QAnon began in late October 2017 and was referenced dozens of times in the nearly 5,000 posts written by Q over the next three years. Like all good conspiracy theories, it contained a grain of truth: The fact that Epstein pleaded guilty to charges of soliciting prostitution in 2008 meant that QAnon supporters felt emboldened to believe every wild allegation made by Q.
I learned about QAnon in early 2018 but I didn’t write about it until September of that year. At the time Greene began promoting it, several years before she was elected to Congress, the conspiracy was in its infancy with a handful of dedicated followers.
Trump was soon presented as the hero of this narrative, working against the “deep state” to expose these monsters and bring about a “storm” that would expose the gang and lead to the public execution of everyone from Epstein to Clinton. (No, really.) Trump, who has claimed that his relationship with Epstein ended around 2004, used the QAnon community to his advantage. Trump famously praised his followers before the 2020 election, and endorsed Greene’s congressional campaign after she won her primary.
Epstein had become a kind of shorthand for those trying to explain those within QAnon to outsiders. Q repeatedly returned to the subject of Epstein, claiming that the disgraced financier had a “dungeon (under the temple)” with “sex and torture chambers” on his island.