Why did Jeffrey Epstein designate a remote Caribbean island as the centre of a global network that attracted a privileged elite of influential figures and celebrities? What enticed prominent members of the global establishment across politics, finance, fame, intelligence and power, including men and women and even members of European royal families, to retreat to a seventy acre island equipped with independent infrastructure, destined to become a black hole swallowing reputations, staining them with scandal and threatening the fate of governments and institutions around them?
Small islands surrounded by water grant those who own or control them an overwhelming sense of possession and absolute authority over their domain. They offer ideal refuges for escaping constraints, evading obligations and suspending the authority of values that govern societies on the distant mainland.
It is no surprise that this effect can be deployed in multiple directions. Some islands become sites for unrestrained indulgence that may descend into grave sins and the moral vices of the age. Others may be allocated to extreme forms of nihilistic behaviour, far removed from the rule of law, charters of rights and the ethical norms that shape human conduct.
Island characteristics have also made them suitable as prisons of oppression, places of exile, camps for the marginalised or penal colonies. The lure of the island has at times inspired similar models on land.
Defunct colonial authorities once exiled revolutionary leaders and heads of national movements to remote islands, isolating them from their people and severing their influence over the masses.
Robben Island in the southern hemisphere was one such penal colony. It later became known as the prison island where Nelson Mandela spent most of his long captivity before the collapse of the apartheid regime. It has since transformed into a diplomatic and tourist site, as well as a protected natural reserve.
Among the infamous penal colonies was Devil’s Island, under French authority and located near the coast of French Guiana in Latin America. Its isolation made it an ideal prison and place of exile.
When the administration of President George W Bush in 2002 sought to circumvent American legal frameworks governing detainees and deny certain categories of prisoners their recognised rights and human dignity, it turned to a maritime site it operates at the southernmost edge of Cuba.
The Bush administration found its solution in Guantanamo Bay. The naval base, leased by the United States since 1903, became a convenient mechanism to transfer hundreds of prisoners from Afghanistan and strip them of their prisoner of war status and the legal protections applicable on American soil. The territory, effectively detached from Cuba, provided legal ambiguity.
Among those detained were children and minors, some reportedly as young as thirteen. Practices of abuse and torture reached the point that some detainees died, far from media scrutiny.
Guantanamo soon entered history as a symbol of exceptional violations seeking refuge in a space removed from the legal standards and accountability of the rule of law.
The underlying message is that even modern democratic systems, which proclaim commitments to values and accountability, may attempt to shift systematic violations beyond the reach of oversight, creating spaces and mechanisms not governed by domestic principles.
Agencies officially tasked with operating in secrecy often enjoy broader discretion abroad, echoing the cinematic “licence to kill” granted to James Bond and other fictional intelligence operatives. Each film concludes neatly, rarely prompting audiences to question the authority to kill, detonate or conspire exercised by the hero without hesitation, reflecting certain traditions within intelligence culture.
The appeal of islands as spaces for excess in the shadows has surfaced repeatedly. In December 2018, the Danish government announced plans to convert a remote island into a detention centre for asylum seekers it refused to integrate.
The proposal revived disturbing memories associated with totalitarian, fascist, racist and colonial regimes that relocated systematic abuses to peripheral zones, away from scrutiny.
Copenhagen sought to confine those deemed undesirable on the uninhabited island of Lindholm in the Baltic Sea, a site containing stables and facilities for incinerating animals infected with contagious diseases. The stated aim, as expressed by Denmark’s then immigration minister Inger Stojberg, was that they should “feel unwanted”.
While Denmark ultimately failed to implement the Lindholm plan due to objections, a broader reality has taken shape in camps supported by the European Union to contain asylum seekers on peripheral islands and border zones.
Designating isolated camps on remote islands or border regions effectively separates these displaced populations from the privileges of the European mainland, partially conceals their humanitarian suffering and distances them from public attention. It is deemed preferable to relocate their hardship to southern Mediterranean countries through bilateral arrangements that transfer conditions of deprivation and exploitation elsewhere.
The scale of this reality was exposed when a massive fire in September 2020 destroyed the Moria camp for asylum seekers on the Greek island of Lesbos, displacing 13,000 people. European officials visited the site and expressed concern, yet the fundamental situation remained largely unchanged, despite modest improvements to infrastructure.
According to the official narrative, Epstein died, yet his model remains viable. Some islands surrounded by water, or spaces replicating their isolation on land, remain witnesses to grave distortions in a world that proclaims its values while betraying them in practice.
The allure of islands and isolated enclaves continues to occupy the minds of certain influential elites, whether as destinations for those they wish to exclude, or as hidden retreats where they construct private worlds shielded from laws, regulations, values and public anger.
The phenomenon does not end there. There are also “virtual islands” built on land, in carefully enclosed palaces and fortified estates equipped with surveillance systems. These spaces form self contained worlds detached from their surroundings, reserved for the privileged who may not disclose what occurs within.
Some elites seek to avoid scrutiny of their lavish lifestyles and cultivate a sense of exclusivity and superiority over the broader society. They pursue gated residential communities surrounded by walls, cameras, security protection and closed gates, closely resembling the model of the isolated island.
This capitalist compound model has proliferated in countries marked by poverty and deprivation, where informal settlements coexist with enclaves of privilege. The stark visual contrasts between the favoured enclave and its impoverished surroundings often become apparent only through aerial imagery.
The paradox of the compound phenomenon is that even leaders of former communist regimes adopted similar privileges while ruling in the name of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. In East Germany, a luxurious residential complex for ruling party leaders in Pankow and Waldsiedlung Wandlitz near Berlin exemplified this contradiction before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The strategy may extend further, confining entire societies within what resembles an isolated island through suffocating sanctions. Cuba remains an example of this approach, as decades of American sanctions have left visible scars on its social and economic landscape, forcing reliance on self sufficiency and an economy of scarcity.
Collective punishment does not require surrounding waters. On the Mediterranean coast, a policy of chronic blockade has transformed the Gaza Strip since 2016 into a fully isolated enclave, bounded by the sea on one side and walls, fences, watchtowers and artillery on the other.
More than two million Palestinians, most of them children and mothers, have been subjected to conditions that turned Gaza into an open laboratory of severe deprivation, including restrictions on water, food and medicine, alongside widespread destruction inflicted by war and genocide.
On Epstein’s Caribbean island, fantasies of an illicit paradise intertwined with realities of exploitation, humiliation and coercion imposed on minors lured into a space shaped by powerful networks. Prominent elites were implicated in concealing this concealed world from the societies around them.
The exposure of the network after prolonged concealment does not mean it was an isolated case. One lesson of the major scandal is the importance of recognising how collusion can weave webs of transgression and exploitation where power, wealth and influence converge. In such spaces, leading perpetrators seek ideal refuges for excess, while publicly preaching morality, governance, transparency and the defence of women’s rights and the rejection of child labour, as revealed in the files that shook global consciousness despite heavy redaction.
Epstein died according to the official account, yet the pattern he embodied persists. Some islands surrounded by water, or spaces that replicate their isolation voluntarily or forcibly on land, remain enduring symbols of profound imbalances in a world that celebrates its charters and declarations while permitting enclaves of transgression, sanctuaries of sin, sites of exile and zones of blockade to endure.
