The Work of Late Capitalist Sex Cults
A long dispatch on the vast depravity of the rich at the sad end of empire (and everything else)
The Orgy of Capital
1: “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks, until there is nothing left to suck but thin air.”
2: “Late one night the club was heaving, I saw a vampire move across the floor
Old and white with a silver cane lusting for youth in the mirror
And when I danced and saw you dance I saw a world where the dead are worshiped
This world belongs to them now they can keep it!”
I write this very long article merely as one among millions of humanzees still haunted by the theatre of cruelty, power, and pleasure that plays on a loop late capitalist society. In the scandals surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, I see not isolated aberrations, but symptoms of a deeper social pathology. Late capitalism, with its prodigious wealth inequalities and culture of consumption, has incubated a death drive that finds outlet in the most decadent and virally engaging excesses.
The allegations of elite sex cults and abusive orgies are not merely salacious gossip to titillate the lame-brained multitudes that once read (and perhaps still do read) the National Enquirer; they are dark mirrors reflecting the psychic malaise of a system in terminal decline. As I grapple with these events, I recognize in them an uncanny convergence of critical theory and conspiracy: the real and the hyper-real entwined in a nightmare logic of capital.
Consider this my personal reckoning with that convergence. I aim to show that what may appear as leisure or power display among the ruling class is, in fact, an orgy of capital’s own making — an orgy that serves domination as much as indulgence, and which portends the slow but inevitable self-destruction of a social order.
Late Capitalism and the Death Drive
In reflecting on these scandals, I must to Marx’s old chestnut that capitalism revolutionizes and unmoors every old restraint in pursuit of profit — “all that is solid melts into air”, as he and Engels famously wrote. In its late stage, capitalism has not only commodified labor and goods, but also desires, bodies, and even transgression itself. The normal logic of capital is expansion and excess without regard for human limits. Drawing on Freudian terms, it seems as if a death drive operates in today’s political economy: an insatiable impulse that pushes beyond the pleasure principle towards destruction. Even Adam Smith’s emblematic “invisible hand” — that cornerstone of classical economics — carries unconscious, nightmarish undertones. Smith borrowed the phrase from Macbeth, and as one astute commentator observed, “the Market turns out to be nocturnal and uncanny: a matter of fantasy and pulsion rather than reason… The Invisible Hand tempts us to surrender to desires that lay beyond the pleasure principle — even or especially if doing so would bring about our destruction. The Invisible Hand, in brief, is a figuration of the death drive.” In other words, behind capitalism’s sunny rhetoric of rational self-interest lurks a compulsion toward excess that can override even self-preservation. This deathly compulsion animates the indulgences of the ultra-wealthy — an engine of aggression and chaos masked by wealth’s glamour.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, remind us that Enlightenment rationality itself, when coupled with the capitalist imperative, can flip into a kind of mythic barbarism. They turned to the Marquis de Sade’s libertine novels (like Juliette) as an allegory: Sade’s enlightened protagonists use cold reason to systematize the pursuit of perverse pleasure, ultimately draining it of any genuine joy. One commentary on Adorno’s reading of Sade succinctly puts it: “Kant’s hierarchical system is no different from Sade’s orgies: ‘an organization of life as a whole which is deprived of any substantial goal’... It is not so much pleasure that is sought, but its regimented pursuit. In Sade, the libertines pursue all that is possible in fantasy in reality, none of which provides much pleasure and in fact turns out rather tedious… yet it must nevertheless be constantly applied, to force the object to correspond to an infinite production.” That image — relentless orgies yielding only boredom and necessitating further intensification — uncannily foreshadows the dynamic at play in the real-world sex rings of the rich. The ruling class, having exhausted ordinary enjoyments, seems driven to ever more extreme, taboo-breaking “experiences,” not even for pleasure in any simple sense, but as if obeying an economic commandment to maximize and exploit every intensity. Adorno’s juxtaposition of the philosopher Kant and the libertine Sade suggests that under certain conditions, pure instrumental reason (here, the logic of capital) and pure indulgence (the orgiastic cult of pleasure) converge. The decadent sex practices of these elites appear as the monstrous fusion of both — rational organization marshalled to serve irrational, nihilistic ends.
If Adorno gives us the image of endless orgies of domination, Herbert Marcuse gives us the vocabulary of Eros and Thanatos to frame why advanced industrial society might harbor such extremes. In Marcuse’s view, late capitalist society introduces a “surplus-repression” — more repression than necessary for basic social order — that in turn produces periodic compensatory outbursts of controlled indulgence (what he called “repressive desublimation”). The popular culture encourages sexual titillation and release only in commodified, superficial forms that keep people placated as consumers, phone-handing and goon-handing each long day’s journey into listless good night, but genuine libidinal freedom remains contained. The elites, however, operate under a different dispensation: their wealth grants them actual impunity to desublimate in the most brutal ways imaginable.
Marcuse had hoped for a non-repressive civilization where Eros (life instincts) could flourish creatively instead of being channeled into destructive productivity. Instead, what we witness in these cases is Thanatos (death instincts) interwoven with Eros in the cruelest manner — a showing that the “performance principle” of our society, which demands continuous exploitation and domination, has invaded the realm of sexuality completely. The perversion at the top is not a liberating escape from social norms; it is a hyper-concentrated expression of the system’s own inner logic of control, domination, and ultimately self-destructiveness.
Jean-François Lyotard, writing in the 1970s, coined the term libidinal economy to capture how political economy and desire form a single circuit. In a remarkably prescient passage, Lyotard imagines even intellectuals (himself included) as caught on a manic treadmill of production and jouissance: “extending the market and the trade in words… multiplying the chances of jouissance, scraping up intensities wherever possible, and never being sufficiently dead, for we too are required to go from forty to the hundred a day, and we will never play the whore enough, we will never be dead enough.” His hyperbolic words — “never… dead enough” – convey how capitalism’s drive for more, more, more warps into a drive towards nothingness, toward the negation of human limits. One cannot help but think of Epstein’s private island or Combs’s marathon “freak off” parties as theaters where the principals are likewise trying to fill an insatiable void, courting danger and death (be it through risk of scandal, physical harm, or moral oblivion) in pursuit of intensity. Late capitalism promises enjoyment without end, but what it delivers is often enjoyment without satisfaction, an addictive cycle edging ever closer to literal and figurative death. In these secret orgies and abusive rituals, that terminal logic shows its face.
Elite Sex Cults as the Decadence of Empire
It is tempting to view the Epstein-Maxwell and Diddy cases as something out of a lurid novel or a Stanley Kubrick film. Indeed, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut — with its portrayal of a wealthy secret society’s masked orgy — has often been invoked to frame these real events. There is a sense that life imitates art here, or perhaps that both are drawing from a deeper historical template. History provides many examples of decadent elites indulging in forbidden pleasures as their empires and fortunes reach a zenith (and teeter on the brink of decline). The Romans, at the height of empire, were alleged by contemporary and later-in-time critics to be notorious for exactly this kind of lavish debauchery.
I recall standing before Thomas Couture’s monumental painting “The Romans in their Decadence” at Musée d'Orsay and feeling a sobering resonance with our present. In the painting, splayed bodies of Roman nobles lie drunken and half-nude across a marble atrium, spent from an orgy; statues of worthies and gods loom above them, indifferent. Couture’s 1847 masterpiece was meant to illustrate how luxury and luxuria (in the Latin sense of profligacy) signaled Rome’s moral and political decline. The scene could well serve as an allegory for our neoliberal era’s ruling class. Luxury more ruthless than the sword broods over us, wrote the Roman poet Juvenal — a line Couture cited. The very surfeit of enjoyment, taken to extremes by those at the top, becomes a weapon against the social body and a harbinger of collapse.
One might object that drawing overbroad analogies to Rome1 or to Kubrick’s cinematic fantasies could oversimplify matters. Yet the parallels are instructive. There is a reason conspiracy theorists (and ordinary observers alike) have reached for Eyes Wide Shut or the trope of “Roman-style orgies” when discussing Epstein’s island or Diddy’s parties. It is because these narratives capture something real about the structure of power and pleasure involved. They provide a cultural script for making sense of the otherwise almost unbelievable fact (for normie humanzees, at least, as opposed to those of us more or less raised in the darkness) that respected businessmen, royals, or celebrities might participate in — or at least tacitly endorse — gatherings that resemble occult sex cults or slave auctions. I admit that as I sift through testimonies and trial evidence, I too feel the pull of those analogies. It’s as if our collective cultural unconscious knew all along that late empire would have its Caligulas, its secret rites, its hidden abuses cloaked in wealth. When we write about these modern elites, we do so with the awareness that we are also, in a sense, rewriting the old cautionary tales of Babylon, Rome, or Versailles: the powerful frolicking while the world burns.
Alexandra Kollontai, the Soviet feminist writing after the Russian Revolution, provides historical context for how sexual exploitation accompanies class privilege. In a 1921 speech on prostitution, Kollontai noted with searing anger that “the world of the bourgeoisie does not even spare children, forcing young girls of nine and ten into the sordid embraces of wealthy and depraved old men. In the capitalist countries there are brothels which specialise exclusively in very young girls.” Her words, a century old, could be describing Epstein’s criminal enterprise in almost exact terms. Epstein systematically recruited underage girls, some reportedly as young as 14, to be used by himself and others in his circle. Under capitalism, sex and power have long intersected in the most predatory way: wealthy men leveraging desperate and vulnerable young women (or girls) as consumable objects. Kollontai of course advocated the abolition of such exploitation through socialism, envisioning a society where sexual relations would be freed from economic coercion and “bourgeois possessiveness.” What Epstein did was not an entirely new aberration but rather a particularly concentrated, high-profile instance of an old capitalist sickness — the conversion of human intimacy into a commodity and a weapon of domination.
Poster laureate Jinx’s splendid Taylor Swift-scored take on the life and times of Ghislaine Maxwell. Listen!
Epstein and Maxwell
Indeed, no case illustrates the intersection of indulgence and domination more starkly than that of Epstein and his erstwhile business partner Ghislaine Maxwell, herself a woman of great privilege and a curious pedigree indeed. Epstein, a phony financier who resembled the late chef de cuisine Anthony Bourdain and curated an image of Gatsby-like mystique, in reality ran a decades-long sex-trafficking ring that ensnared dozens (if not hundreds) of underage girls and very young women. Maxwell, his longtime confidante and lover-turned-procurer, was essential in recruiting and grooming these girls. Together they created an environment that one victim described as “a web of trafficking and abuse” spanning high society on both sides of the Atlantic. It is crucial to note that Epstein’s abuse was openly secret for a long time. Many in his elite circles knew or at least suspected the dark reality behind his luxurious parties and private jet flights (tellingly nicknamed the “Lolita Express”). In fact, Epstein’s predation was, as Rosa Janis put it, a plain-sight crime that mainstream authorities purposely and purposefully ignored: “his pedophile sex trafficking ring was basically an open secret… numerous victims tried to come out... only to be met with apathy by mainstream media.” This complicity of silence allowed Epstein to operate with impunity — a key aspect of how power reproduces itself.
Sociologically, what Epstein offered to his powerful friends and clients was a kind of service: he provided a hidden zone where normal laws and morals were suspended for the sake of illicit pleasure and perhaps blackmail. His private island, Little St. James in the Caribbean, became infamous as the secluded playground for these activities. It’s jarring to juxtapose the island’s postcard beauty with the horrors that occurred there. Imagine the scene: a sunlit tropical villa, a constant stream of wealthy visitors (billionaires, politicians, royals, academics), and amidst it all, very young girls coerced into performing a host of degrading and (in the final analysis) pathetic sexual acts. The atmosphere was one of luxurious leisure, but underpinning it was coercion and terror — a true duality of indulgence and domination. Maxwell’s occupied a fascinating space. A woman of influence and the daughter of a quasi-criminal operator who died under mysterious circumstances, she acted as the gateway to abuse for other young women.
Physically attractive by various conventional measures, she has been aptly likened to a “Madame” or even a high priestess of a cult, who used her charm and social savvy to lure vulnerable girls with promises (money, modeling opportunities, connections) and then delivered them into Epstein’s web. What sociologist Sylvia Walby once termed a “patriarchal bargain” Maxwell must have made, trading her own dignity to share in Epstein’s power and lifestyle. Her conviction in 2021 for sex trafficking of minors offered a rare moment of accountability. Yet it felt painfully inadequate, given that “the vast bulk of [their] high-society contacts” – the men who participated in or enabled the abuse — remained unnamed and unindicted due to legal maneuvering. The trial carefully avoided implicating third parties, a fact that spoke volumes about how deep and protected this elite indulgence was.
One of those third parties was the increasingly bulldog-jowled Prince Andrew, the Duke of York and second failson of the late Queen Elizabeth II. He became, in many ways, the plump, ghastly face of the Epstein scandal’s reach into the highest echelons. Andrew’s friendship with Epstein and Maxwell was well-documented — photographs place him at Epstein’s New York mansion and even at Balmoral Castle (the Queen’s estate in Scotland) in Epstein’s company. And of course, Virginia Giuffre’s accusation that Andrew sexually abused her when she was a 17-year-old trafficking victim of Epstein led to a civil lawsuit which the Prince settled out of court. Watching Andrew’s infamous 2019 BBC interview (the so-called “car-crash interview”), I was struck by how nakedly power attempts to absolve itself. The epitome of a befuddled upper-class twit of the Monty Python taxonomy, his denials were evasive and, frankly, not credible to most viewers — he claimed to have “no recollection” of Giuffre despite a photograph of him with his arm around her waist (Maxwell smiling in the background).
The public outrage at Andrew’s entitlement and dishonesty forced the monarchy to strip him of official duties, a rare consequence for a royal. Yet I cannot shake the thought that, absent media scrutiny, Andrew would have faced nothing at all. Indeed, the Metropolitan Police in London declined to pursue charges, and U.S. prosecutors, constrained by Epstein’s death and political sensitivities, never named him as a target. The spectacle of a British prince entangled in a sex trafficking scandal underscores my thesis: these events are not just prurient scandals, but symptoms of a ruling class that has come to believe itself above all laws — natural, human, or divine. In Epstein’s domain, men like Andrew could act out desires that would normally be utterly unacceptable, confident that the state (and even the press for a long time) would look away. As a pair of writers for Marxist.com acidly commented, “with that sort of wealth comes an atmosphere of impunity in which such predators thrive.” Epstein’s only “real crime,” to the elite paymasters who allowed him to carry on as a sort of Gatsby-lite figure, was getting caught.
Epstein’s operation was built on stark inequalities — his billionaire friends and customers on one side, the underage girls from broken homes or poverty on the other. It was literally an exploitation of the daughters of the poor by the rich, an obscene inversion of what a just society would countenance. An essay in Cosmonaut Magazine hammered home the point: “the vicious exploitation of young girls is not only normal but at the very heart of the social hell that is capitalism. The labor that makes the lives of Jeffrey Epstein and the rest of his class possible is done by 14-year-old girls in sweatshops… They are beaten, raped, and murdered… It is this labor… that keeps the Inferno burning… All the members of the capitalist class… know that this kind of violent exploitation is what keeps the system they are at the top of afloat.” Epstein, in other words, merely internalized and mirrored the brutality of capitalist exploitation within his personal life. The article went on to call Epstein “a demon within a class full of demons” who actually profited from rape — not just by satisfying his own perverse lusts, but by blackmailing other powerful men with evidence of their participation. This chilling detail, if true (and there are hints in Epstein’s files that he did videotape encounters as leverage), would mean Epstein turned sexual domination into a currency of power. Even here, we see capitalist logic: sex as transaction, crime as business model. Although this should make us angry, it also crystallizes my argument: the elites are weaving their own destruction. By turning everything (and everyone) into an instrument for their pleasure or gain in a world that is running out of workers from which to extract value, they reveal the emptiness of their souls and the unsustainability of their rule. In the end Epstein died mysteriously in jail (many suspect assassination or “suicide” abetted by foul play, though these strange, Lee Harvey Oswald-like deaths are par for the course in our amnesia-ridden society), Maxwell is imprisoned and disgraced, and Prince Andrew lives in ignominy — these outcomes, however incomplete as justice, suggest that the system is slowly cannibalizing itself, sacrificing some of its own to maintain the broader facade. It might be too late in the day for most of us aging Xennials, but perhaps our heirs and assigns will catch a glimpse of what’s left in the decades to come.
“Freak Off” in the Hamptons
While Epstein and Maxwell present a clandestine, quasi-criminal underworld of elite island predation, the unfolding saga of Sean “P. Diddy” Combs shows how similar patterns can lurk right beneath the surface of the glitzy entertainment industry. Combs is, on paper, a very different figure — a hip-hop mogul, a chart-topping albeit mediocre performer, a media personality who is famous for being famous, a man who built a public image as the flashy, party-throwing “bad boy” of music. What initially came to light through a lawsuit by his former partner, the singer Cassie, soon snowballed into a barrage of accusations from multiple women and even men. By 2025, Combs faced an extensive federal indictment charging him with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and related crimes, painting a picture uncannily like Epstein’s operation.
The details, as reported, are harrowing. Combs allegedly hosted regular events known as “Freak Offs,” which prosecutors describe as days-long drug-fueled sex parties involving multiple prostitutes or coerced partners. Women and men were allegedly groomed, drugged, and forced to perform in these orgies for Combs and his inner circle. Physical violence features prominently: court documents accuse Combs of beating and even sodomizing victims who displeased him during these affairs. There are echoes of both Foucault and Sade here, especially the latter’s 120 Days of Sodom (more of a blueprint for a fun weekend for Epstein types than a shock document nowadays!) — a potentate exercising absolute power over bodies in a space sealed off from normal scrutiny. The Freak Off was essentially Combs’s private Artaud-style theater of cruelty, normalized among his entourage as the ultimate party. It is important to note that Combs, much like Epstein, allegedly recorded sexual acts during these parties. This raises the specter of blackmail or at least an archive of domination, reinforcing how control was the ultimate high being chased. In reading witness statements, I was struck by how a joke about “baby oil” that a comedian made, referencing Combs’s predilections, was known to prospective jurors even before trial. This suggests Combs’s excesses too were an “open secret” in certain fairly wide circles — whispered in the industry, hinted at in Black-oriented media, but never confronted until the legal system belatedly stepped in. So much of the worst excesses of elite life play out like this, joked or whispered about by sheeple and hoi polloi until one Icarus-like minor leaguer, a Diddy or Epstein, flies too close to the sun and must be ritually punished for his excesses to keep the entire sordid edifice intact.
Diddy’s public persona always glorified a kind of hedonistic excess: the all-night parties on yachts, the “White Party” in the Hamptons where champagne flowed and celebrities danced (names like Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Mariah Carey, and Paris Hilton graced his guest lists). It was portrayed as benign fun, the champagne bubble side of the American Dream. But the allegations suggest that behind that glossy façade was a nightmare of coercion and sadism. The same man who posed as the jovial “party king of New York” was, according to more than a dozen civil suits, a serial rapist and physical abuser. The cognitive dissonance is itself revealing: late capitalist culture blurs the line between celebration and exploitation. The celebrity party can easily shade into 120 Days of Sodom when shielded from accountability. The likes of Combs sit atop a cultural economy that fetishizes pleasure, youth, sex, and wealth — so it perhaps should not shock us that some will transgress every boundary to obtain those in extreme form.
One explosive allegation in Combs’s case brings queer theory into the mix. A male accuser, a music producer known as “Lil Rod,” claims that during one of Diddy’s parties, he was sexually assaulted by the actor Cuba Gooding Jr. — and that Combs not only failed to stop it but encouraged Gooding Jr. to continue the assault. This incident is astonishing on multiple levels. It suggests that Combs’s gatherings involved forced homosexual acts as a form of domination or entertainment. Eve Sedgwick’s analysis of homosocial desire comes to mind: Sedgwick argued that in patriarchal contexts, male bonds and power can be cemented through shared sexual exploits, sometimes blurring into homoerotic territory (often cloaked or denied). Here we have an alleged literal instance — a powerful straight-identifying man (Combs) facilitating a male-on-male rape by another straight-identifying man (Gooding Jr.) in front of onlookers. The assault becomes a show of power and a perverse “bonding” moment within the inner circle. Sedgwick’s notion of the closet as an “open secret” structure in modern power is chillingly apt. She wrote in The Epistemology of the Closet that “the closet is the open secret through which difference and inequality are both obscured and played out in front of our eyes in plain sight.” In Combs’s world, the closet may extend to the unspoken realities of sexual abuse and perhaps bisexual power dynamics that could never be acknowledged publicly in the hyper-masculine world of hip-hop. Instead, these realities become yet more fuel for paranoid speculation and jokes (hence the persistent rumors in the music industry about Diddy’s parties, which long preceded these formal allegations). It’s a sad illustration of Sedgwick’s point that ignorance and knowledge, secrecy and display, form a spiral in regimes of power and sexuality.2 Those victimized were likely pressured into silence (the closet of victimhood), while the perpetrators got to indulge without free of punishment, protected by their social capital and by society’s reluctance to believe such things happen “in the open.”
By early 2025, Combs was sitting in jail awaiting trial, denied bail as a flight risk, and a parade of former employees and acquaintances began turning on him publicly. A BBC News story on “the parties that led to Diddy’s downfall” bore the subtitle “He thought of himself as a king.” That phrasing caught my eye — it echoed precisely the theme of decadent sovereignty. In his domain, Combs operated like an absolute (albeit petty/minor) monarch, dispensing favors and horrors at whim. He even cultivated connections with actual royalty of culture (his parties being a nexus for celebrity networking). But now, as I write this, he faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison, his reputation irreparably destroyed. In that, I see a form of poetic justice, but also a validation of a Marxist analysis: as one writer quipped, “Capitalism… rewards those who act in a callous and cut-throat manner. In other words, the scum rises to the top.” Sean Combs’s success was built not only on his limited musical talent and above-average business acumen, but evidently (and likely primarily) on a ruthless exploitation of others in private. Eventually, some of that “scum” spilled into public view, and the system (to preserve itself) had to purge him, at least symbolically. We cannot rely on the capitalist justice system to consistently hold the depraved elite to account — “only by overthrowing the system that breeds monsters… can we deliver true justice”, as the aforementioned commentator concluded bluntly. Still, each high-profile exposé — Epstein, Maxwell, corpulent movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, truly fascinating cult leader Keith Raniere (of NXIVM), Combs, and surely more to come, albeit via a trickle of sacrificial lambs rather than a flood of the truly deserving baddies — chips away at the illusion that our ruling class is made up of deserving, respectable individuals. Instead we see a pattern: power leads to boredom, boredom results in corruption born of perversion, and perversion is thereafter exercised as a tool of power.
Power, Pleasure, and Social Control
Michel Foucault famously challenged the notion that power merely represses sexuality; instead, he argued that since the 18th century, power has produced discourses of sexuality, proliferating categories of perversion and soliciting people to confess and identify with their sexual inclinations. In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Foucault remarks on “spirals in which pleasure and power reinforced one another” within systems of control. He noted that power can create “devices of excitation” — essentially deliberately inciting certain pleasures in order to better regulate and surveil them. This resonates strongly with how the elite sex cult phenomena operate. These secret enclaves of indulgence are not outside the power structure; they are an extension of it.
The fact that Epstein’s and Combs’s abuses were tolerated for so long indicates that our institutions have tacit mechanisms to protect certain transgressions of the powerful. It is as if society allowed a safety valve: the wealthy could be “naughty” (to grotesque, almost upchuck-inducing extents) in private, so long as public order and bourgeois propriety were maintained in appearance. Meanwhile, unlucky goon-handing sheeple and other miserable, brain-damaged humanzees were to destroyed utterly for, say, murdering their children after said children caught them eating from a diaper while wearing panties (the extraordinarily loathsome Mark Redwine case, one of the saddest and lowest told in our benighted times).
Such an arrangement harks back to the Victorian hypocrisy Foucault described, where the facade of prudishness and Comstockery concealed a vast underworld of prostitution and pornography. Importantly, Foucault also observed that where there is power, there is resistance, and that the relationship of pleasure to power can induce a “frontier of contact” — the thrill of transgression is itself a product of the law one violates. For Epstein’s clients or Diddy’s inner circle, part of the lure was precisely that these acts were forbidden. The risk, the secrecy, the illegality were not bugs but features — intensifying the experience. In Foucauldian terms, the elites were finding “places of maximum saturation” of power-pleasure, zones where they could exercise absolute dominance (over minors, over women, over subordinates) and thereby achieve a kind of ecstatic affirmation of their social power. To wit: the cruelty was not incidental; it was the point. The pleasure of these elites was tied fundamentally to the experience of power, of having others at their mercy. This aligns with Sadean philosophy: true bliss for the libertine comes from the sense of total control and the degradation of the other, an insight Foucault captured when he discussed Sade and the way modern society “provided places of maximum saturation” for sexuality rather than erecting a simple barrier.
The work of Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick add further nuance to this analysis. Butler’s concept of performativity reminds us that gender and power roles are enacted through repeated behaviors. The macho posturing and “fronting” of someone like Diddy in public and the ritualized sexual dominance in private are connected performances — both asserting a hierarchy. Butler also wrote about the frames of recognizability: what counts as acceptable or intelligible behavior in a given context. Within the frame of a hip-hop video or a celebrity gala, playful sexual braggadocio is celebrated. The frame shift to a closed-door “freak off” reveals that the performance did not stop; it merely intensified beyond the acceptable limits. The same patriarchal script — women as objects of male pleasure, dominance as proof of masculinity — simply went off-stage, where its most violent potentials could be realized. Sedgwick’s examination of secrecy and disclosure (the above-mentioned Epistemology of the Closet) also speaks to the dynamic here. As mentioned, a lot of this sicko-shit exploitation was an open secret. That, in turn, produced a simultaneously closeted-in-the-open dynamic in a screen-obsessed and heavily goon-handing society at large, where anyone who tried to point out the emperor had no clothes (i.e., that respected rich icons were raping kiddos or coercing underage babes with the boldness of Genghis Khan’s raiders) risked being labeled crazy or malicious. Sedgwick notes how such dynamics “make you feel like you’re going mad when the power abuses taking place are denied or thrown back at you.”
Indeed, for years accusers of Epstein or Diddy were dismissed, settlements were hushed, jokes from the likes of Katt Williams (who has repeatedly claimed that Diddy offered him millions to take his anal maidenhead) were the only outlet. The broader public, lacking proof, either ignored rumors or indulged them as entertainment. This gaslighting effect — an overused extremely online term that became closely associated with hot take writer Lauren Duca in the mid-2010s that refers, in its original cinematic sense to a situation where obvious wrongdoing is systematically denied — feeds what Sedgwick calls paranoid knowing. It’s a mindset that expects betrayal and corruption everywhere (not without reason: it’s likely that none of us are paranoid enough). I confess to having felt a tinge of that paranoia myself, especially after Epstein’s death in custody in 2019, which was officially ruled a suicide but widely doubted. Jean Baudrillard might say the simulation replaced the reality at that moment: in the absence of transparency, the conspiracy theories (Epstein was murdered by powerful friends, etc.) felt “more real than the officially sanctioned reality.” This is a phenomenon worth exploring on its own.
Conspiracy, Hyperreality, and the Social Imaginary
The Epstein affair unleashed a tidal wave of speculation and conspiracy theories. Some were grounded; e.g., speculation that Epstein’s operation was tied to intelligence agencies running honey-traps — a theory not entirely implausible given Epstein’s mysterious wealth and connections and past bad actions by the CIA, Mossad, et al. all done for ostensibly good or even “the best” reasons, as former “spook” Thomas Braden opined ages ago in The Saturday Evening Post. Others veered into the fantastical: he was part of the Illuminati; his island had occult temples for human sacrifice; he froze his head and penis after death in a quest for immortality — and so on.
Normally, as a researcher, I distinguish sharply between evidence-based analysis and conspiracy thinking. But Jean Baudrillard complicates this distinction. In the postmodern condition, Baudrillard argued, the line between reality and its representation dissolves; we live in hyperreality, where signs and the accompanying portents (media narratives, symbols) take on a life of their own, sometimes outweighing the underlying reality. With the Epstein case, I saw that most people found the conspiratorial narrative more satisfying than the official narrative.3 Why? Because the official narrative (that Epstein acted largely alone, was prosecuted, then conveniently killed himself) felt incomplete and staged, a simulation of justice covering up a deeper truth that many powerful individuals were complicit and remained protected. Jean Baudrillard wrote about events like Watergate in the 1970s, saying that the scandal functioned as a “safe alarm.” By sacrificing one little crook, the big bad system proves its apparent integrity and thereby inoculates itself against deeper criticism. Likewise, many sensed Epstein’s arrest and death were a way to close the case, not to open the real can of worms. In Baudrillard’s terms, it was “the perfect crime” — not the murder of Epstein per se, but the murder of truth by a simulation of justice. Consequently, alternative narratives thrived: that Epstein was an agent of a vast secret cabal, maybe even the fictional “QAnon” cabal of satanic pedophiles. Baudrillard noted that in a media-saturated society “the Gulf War did not take place” by which he meant the televised, clean version of war divorced from its grim reality. Analogously, one could say “the Epstein scandal did not take place” in the mainstream media (at least not in its full systemic ugliness). That void was filled by the hyperreal discourse of internet sleuths and mythmakers.
I approach these conspiracy narratives with a critical eye, but I also attempt to analyze them as part of the social construction of capital’s fantasies and nightmares. The figure of the Illuminati or the elite sex cult resonates so strongly in the public imagination precisely because it captures a symbolic truth that official discourse evades: namely, that the ruling class is actually networking behind closed doors, doing unspeakable things, and getting away with it (many such cases). The Illuminati myth, with its all-seeing Eye symbol and its secret rituals, is a way for people to conceptualize the abstract and opaque power that governs their lives. In a grim sense, Epstein’s black book of contacts and Diddy’s VIP lists were a real-world analog: a secret society of the rich and famous bound by complicity in vice. The difference, of course, is that reality lacks the melodramatic cohesion of a single “Illuminati” organization. Instead, it’s a loose, often unconscious alignment of interests that somehow operate with greater coordination than any genuine “conspiracy” orchestrated by Ian Fleming’s villainous SPECTRE syndicate or Sax Rohmer’s insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. Nonetheless, the symbol of the all-seeing Eye in a pyramid has become shorthand for these intersecting oppressions.
Baudrillard would likely say that the conspiracy theories themselves become part of the hyperreal circuit of capital’s self-imagining. They are fantasies and nightmares through which society dreams the desires and fears generated by capitalism. One striking example is the QAnon movement,4 which is essentially a grand and somewhat silly fever-dream about elite pedophile rings and occult rituals leading to eventual deliverance (hence all the “plan trusting,” the silliest part of all since no one is coming to save any of us) — a narrative so extreme and dumb it loops back to a kind of primitive moral clarity (pure evil vs. pure good).
What’s fascinating is that QAnon spiked in popularity after Epstein’s crimes were exposed. Epstein was the proof of concept that made a previously fringe “satanic elite” narrative suddenly feel plausible to masses of people, particularly one, as many Marxist commentators noted, that could’ve been easily manufactured by any number of intelligence agencies to draw attention away from the systemic and insoluble badness of it all. This is Baudrillard’s “truth that is truer than true” — the hyperreal. The QAnon believers often say that Hollywood and the global liberal elite engage in child trafficking and blood-drinking rituals. While I categorically reject the more absurd elements of those claims as well as the “plan-trusting” soteriology that accompanies them, I recognize that they are symbolic renditions of an underlying real trauma: the very real trafficking of minors (Epstein), the very real exploitation of the weak by the powerful. These conspiracies are America’s collective nightmare version of class consciousness awakening, albeit in a distorted, hallucinatory form that means nothing and will accomplish nothing save perhaps for many more feverish rounds of phone-handing and goon-handing as one consumes the “slop” that will appear in a newsfeed that caters to such thinking. Such conspiracies take root because official culture has for too long gaslighted people into thinking the system basically works and leaders are basically good. When cracks like Epstein appear, the repressed knowledge of systemic evil floods back in exaggerated, stupid, and thoroughly unhelpful forms.
I find these highly formalized and branded conspiracy theories dangerous when taken literally, but I also find the fact that so many gravitate to them to be a welcome sign of cultural despair. The cultural theorist in me might say: the public is trying to narrativize the death drive of capital, trying to give it a name (Illuminati, cabal, etc.) and thus perhaps a target for expiation. Even the wild theory that Stanley Kubrick was assassinated for exposing an Illuminati sex cult in Eyes Wide Shut — a theory some believe since he died shortly after finishing the film, which is quite good but no Barry Lyndon or 2001: A Space Odyssey — speaks to this need to connect the dots. Kubrick’s film itself is an ambiguous text, but many viewers felt it must have been revealing something very real (why else would such a famed director devote his last film to it?). Thus we get the speculation that unseen powers edited the film or silenced Kubrick. These speculations are almost a compliment to the film’s accuracy in capturing a sociological truth.
Seated alongside my bear of a conspiracy-loving father (they were all equally true and equally false, in his estimation), I recall watching the ritual scene in Eyes Wide Shut — masked figures in a mansion, an eerily solemn orgy presided over by a red-cloaked grand master — and feeling unsettled: surely this was the lie that told the truth of elite existence. In truth, Epstein’s gatherings were not occult or formal like Kubrick’s fiction; they were tawdry and cruel. But mythologically, people understandably merge them. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Baudrillardian hyperreality has consumed the Epstein narrative: we have on one level the documented facts (already awful), and on another level a swirling vortex of symbolic extensions (from PizzaGate to Hollywood “eyes wide shut” parties) that sometimes drive real-world actions (vigilantes, online witch-hunts, etc.).
To me, the conspiratorial imagination is itself a symptom of late capitalism’s terminal phase. Lyotard wrote about the collapse of grand narratives in postmodernity — the idea that we no longer have a shared, credible story about the world (like Progress or Enlightenment or even Class Struggle for many in the not-so-bad old days). In that vacuum, “little narratives” and speculative tales flourish. The elite sex cult conspiracy is one such grand narrative in colorful drag: it explains everything (all evil emanates from a hidden group of puppet-masters). It’s false in its specifics but not in its intuition that something is fundamentally rotten in how power operates. These conspiracies actually highlight what critical theory has argued all along: that our social reality is constructed to hide the machinations of power, that ideology is a cover for exploitation, and that maybe only by imagining a total rupture (be it revolution or a Great Awakening as QAnon calls it) can people envision liberation. Where I part ways with the conspiracists is that they misidentify the culprits (scapegoating a handful of lesser goofballs from one political team or another, fantasizing about secret Satanists and other Looney Tunes-esque cartoon baddies) and thus miss the structural nature of the problem. The truth requires no reptilians at the earth’s core or gray aliens being autopsied in Roswell: ordinary capitalism suffices to produce horrors. Epstein didn’t need to be in the Illuminati; he was in the Harvard Club and the Mar-a-Lago Club and friends with billionaires and presidents of both parties — that’s damning enough. Our task going forward, as I see it, is to peel back the need for mystification and show that what is happening is simultaneously more banal and more profound: banal in that it’s people committing crimes of greed and lust as old as feudal lords’ droit du seigneur, profound in that it indicates a whole mode of society reaching a dead end.
Under Late Capitalism, We Are All Terminal Cases
Having waded through this morass of evidence and theory, I return to the premise I set out to explore. The decadent excesses of late capitalism — exemplified by elite sex cult practices — are not fringe anomalies but rather extreme manifestations of the system’s inner logic. This is not a dry academic puzzle; it is a glimpse into what Marcuse might call “the hell that man has made for man.” Jeffrey Epstein hosted forums on philanthropy and science while maintaining a private dungeon for rape. Ghislaine Maxwell was feted at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding even as she prowled for new teenage “recruits.” Sean Combs won Grammy awards and promoted a public image of Black excellence and entrepreneurship, even as he allegedly brutalized those Black men and women who trusted him in private. This schizophrenia of public virtue and private vice is not hypocrisy alone; rather, it is a feature of class society, which demands public order but permits private tyranny for those who wield enough money and influence.
Karl Marx wrote that capital comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” In the cases we’ve discussed, that is almost literally true. The wealth, the private islands, the yachts, the mansions…they were stained with the blood and tears of victims. One cannot separate the “respectable” accumulation of capital by these figures from the uses they put that capital toward. The ruling class has historically believed its wealth entitles it to own people — in slavery, in serfdom, or in waged labor exploitation. Now, in these late stages, some among them believe it entitles them to consume people — sexually, psychologically, completely. It is the terminal logic of ownership taken to its vile extreme.
Herbert Marcuse might say that we are witnessing the collapse of the performance principle into the death principle: a society that demanded disciplined achievement from everyone has, at the top, degenerated into one that pursues annihilation — of innocence, of limits, of the future itself. Indeed, if I may be so bold, I think these sex cults of the rich herald something beyond just salacious scandal: they are symbolic of how the capitalist ruling class, in its decadence, has chosen to write the epitaph of the system. History shows that when elites become too insulated, too arrogant, and too debauched, their legitimacy evaporates; polling of every sort confirms this, even if polls merely function to create the public opinion they purport to describe. The anger and disgust these revelations have generated among ordinary people of all political stripes is enormous. In a polarized world, one of the few things that unite many is the sentiment that “the elites are not only corrupt, they are wicked.”
Let me state it plainly: the basest impulses of the ruling class — cruelty, lust, domination — have been not eradicated by “progress” but turbo-charged by the resources of late capitalism and cloaked in its ideologies. The elite sex cult is both a real phenomenon and a metaphor for capital’s vampiric dominion: it is the logic of treating human beings as disposable objects taken to its stomach-filling (and stomach-churning) endpoint. In these cults, we see a ritual enactment of what capital does every day in less obvious ways (grinding lives for profit, objectifying persons, thriving on inequality). The Freudian death drive is evidenced in the self-destructiveness and excess for its own sake displayed by figures like Epstein and Combs: they had more than anyone could need, yet were compelled to push into perversion, even at the risk of personal ruin. It is as if, having conquered the world externally, they sought to conquer the last taboo internally, to feel something “real” in the most debased way, or to prove their invulnerability. But small fish like those two are not invulnerable. The orgasmic supremacy they chased turned into a noose that choked them (Epstein literally, Combs figuratively as he faces the kind of rough justice reserved for scapegoats).
The Work of Dystopia
A young person lies awake at night, face aglow from the smartphone’s screen. In the near-future America, millions share this nightly ritual — endlessly scrolling, wagering, and indulging in digital vice, their Phone Hand (PH) and Goon Hand (GH) trapped in a loop of cheap dopamine hits.
If late capitalism is indeed in its decadent, death-driven phase, we the humanzees/hoi polloi/sheeple must ensure that what’s left after it runs its course is not a plunge into barbarism but a leap toward some sort of emancipation, however uncertain and immiserated it might prove to be (one long-time friend sketched out his version of this sort of post-everything future here). We must refuse to avert our eyes (keeping them “wide open,” pace Kubrick) from the nightmares playing out among the elite, and instead confront them with collective action, legal accountability, and systemic change. The Eye of Providence on the dollar bill, a symbol of an omniscient gaze, must be re-appropriated: let our eyes be the ones that seek to hold the powerful to account.
By dragging their cultic sins into the light via public airings such as this, we affirm the very humanity and justice that their actions deny. And in doing so, we not only indict a few fallen celebrities or financiers, we indict the entire “society of the spectacle”5 that produces and permits such obscenity. The task then is to build a new society where power and Eros can coexist without domination, where a degree of material prosperity does not give license much less reason (largely out of boredom, it seems) to kill or rape, and where no one is above the law that is no law at all unless it protects the least among us. Until then, we live in the penumbra of a dying system, its partial twilight punctuated by the macabre fireworks of scandal — an orgy of capital that cannot end soon enough but will, alas, last far longer than most of us could ever dream.
Appendix: A Thick Description of Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones v. Sean Combs et al., No. 1:24-cv-01457 (S.D.N.Y. filed 26 Feb 2024)
I sit at my standing desk6, the PDF glowing in pre-dawn light,7 and find myself less a critic than a Geertzian legal historian deciphering an alien society. Page one of the Jones complaint already signals epistemic turbulence: the caption enumerates fourteen defendants — from Sean Combs and his son Justin, to Universal Music Group and “John and Jane Does 1-10” — and then, in bold capitals, the federal court appends a startling prefatory note: “THIS DOCUMENT CONTAINS HIGHLY GRAPHIC INFORMATION OF A SEXUAL NATURE… DETAILS OF SEX TRAFFICKING, AND THE ILLEGAL DISTRIBUTION OF GUNS AND DRUGS.” The law announces, almost apologetically, that the text it is about to host belongs to the domain of taboo. Yet the very act of filing renders the taboo public, and I realize that the complaint is less a petition than a ritual unmasking — a performance that forces the state to look at what polite industry gossip has long tried to disavow.
The inciting incident, set out in paragraphs 29-52, reads like noir cinéma: on 12 September 2022 a writers’ camp at Chalice Recording Studios erupts when a private dispute moves into an adjacent restroom; gunshots pierce the wall; Jones, seated two feet away, plunges into what he calls “a state of shock.” When the door finally swings open, both Combs and his son emerge untouched, while their friend — identified only as G — bleeds on the tile in a fetal curl. Jones alone applies pressure to the wound, begs onlookers to summon an ambulance, and ultimately escorts the victim to waiting EMTs. Combs vanishes deeper into the studio, pausing only to instruct everyone, Jones included, to tell LAPD that G was shot outside during a drive-by. The police, according to the pleading, accept the lie at face value; the morning after, blood still slicks the restroom floor until a private cleaning crew erases the scene. In a single sequence of forty-five numbered lines, the complaint reconstructs a miniature cosmology: gunfire, silence, compelled deceit, and the instant conversion of violence into legend. “Mr. Jones immediately went into a state of shock,” the text records, and I feel that phrase throb beneath every subsequent paragraph like a suppressed drumbeat — evidence that trauma is the metronome of this story.
From gunfire the narrative switches to narcotic logistics. Chief-of-staff Kristina Khorram, the document asserts, is “the Ghislaine Maxwell to Sean Combs’ Jeffrey Epstein.” Over thirteen months she commands butlers, chefs, and housekeepers to wear designer pouches stocked with cocaine, GHB, ecstasy, high-dose THC gummies, ketamine, mushrooms, and a pink MDMA-cocaine hybrid nick-named “Tuci”; her instruction is explicit: keep Combs “high off gummies and pills” at all times. Photographs embedded in the PDF — pouches unzipped on marble countertops, pastel capsules glinting under studio lighting — transform the complaint into a visual ethnography where fashion accessories double as pharmaco-political tech. Jones recounts how Khorram “forced [him] to carry Mr. Combs’ drug pouch against his will,” a detail that replays, in banal miniature, the ancient trope of cupbearer and king, except that the cup today is a Louis Vuitton sling and the wine inside is a nifty designer hallucinogen.
The drugs, however, are merely prelude. Paragraphs 150-170 unveil what Combs himself calls “Freak Offs,” gatherings that begin as listening parties and mutate into multi-day orgies. On 2 July 2023, at Combs’s Los Angeles home, Jones notes the presence of five under-sixteen girls alongside adult sex workers; Combs reportedly spikes DeLeón tequila with ecstasy, confiscates guests’ car keys, and films the proceedings. Screenshots show the mogul, shirtless, draping an arm around a visibly adolescent blonde; a red photographic filter renders the domestic interior almost womb-like in its glow, a colour palette that romanticizes what the text insists is criminal. Jones awakens near dawn, naked beside a prostitute, his phone’s camera roll populated with images he does not remember taking. The complaint distills his reaction into one sentence: “The presence of these underage women made Mr. Jones very uncomfortable.” The understatement, painfully polite in an otherwise lurid ledger, exposes a chasm between legal diction and existential disgust. No sexual act involving the minors is narrated — only their illicit inclusion — but the moral stakes are unmistakable. The scene is a Balinese cockfight inverted: here the violence is not rooster-against-rooster but the desire of adult cocks circling unprotected youth, and the stakes are not wagers but the law itself.
Thanksgiving 2022 on Star Island, Miami, offers a variation. Combs, allegedly “coked-up and naked,” summons Jones to watch him shower inside a transparent glass enclosure; moments later, Yung Miami’s cousin, uninvited, performs drugged-out oral sex on Jones in a hallway while Combs and attendants record the listless encounter. The complaint does not indulge in explicit anatomical description; instead it frames the scene as forced submission — evidence of sex-trafficking via coercion. Jones’s voice again appears, clipped: he was “extremely uncomfortable,” yet felt unable to resist.
January 2023 transports the reader to the U.S. Virgin Islands, where a yacht rented by Combs becomes floating microstate. Actor Cuba Gooding Jr., whose fame is based almost entirely on his football-playing character’s exhortation to super-agent Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) that he “show [him] the money,” allegedly fondles Jones’s thighs after Combs whispers that they should “get to know each other.” A single line — “Actor Cuba Gooding Jr. sexually harassing and assaulting Mr. Jones” — anchors the claim, while a redacted photograph in the complaint freezes Gooding’s hand mid-gesture. Here male intimacy is both enforced and denied, simultaneously bonding the powerful and humiliating the less powerful.
Violence is not episodic but systemic. Combs, according to paragraph 164, threatens to “eat [Jones’s] face,” displays unregistered pistols in bedroom closets, and boasts about bribing witnesses and jurors in the 1999 nightclub shooting that once sent rapper Shyne to prison. Head of security Faheem Muhammad is presented as fixer: Jones recalls Combs assuring staff to contact Muhammad if police ever intervene, and claims LAPD officers spent “hours” inside Chalice after the gunshot yet made no arrest. The complaint’s photographs — bloodied restroom tiles, CBS-News screen-grabs misreporting the shooting as “outside” the studio — testify to what the text calls “bogus” official narratives. Recall Adorno’s thesis: the more rationalised the security apparatus, the more brazen the caprice it shields.
Economic compulsion threads through every page. Jones produces nine tracks for The Love Album, lives in Combs’s residences, spends “months at a time” away from family, only to be offered $29,000 for thirteen months of labour. When he publicly demands royalties, Love Records A&R executive DeForrest Taylor bombards him with threats — screenshots attached — reminding him that Combs controls gateway after gateway in the music industry. Paragraph 166 lists the carrots withheld: $250 000 in equipment, a “Producer of the Year” Grammy, future projects, even the deed to a $20-million mansion on Star Island.
Corporate complicity receives its own exposition. Universal Music Group chairman Lucian Grainge and former Motown CEO Ethiopia Habtemariam attend listening parties “sponsored” by their companies; the complaint asserts they “knew or should have known” that minors and sex workers circulated while alcohol bottles laced with ecstasy flowed. The direct sponsorship of events, accompanied by the allegation of duty to monitor, transforms C-suite executives into structural enablers of what the pleading explicitly labels a RICO enterprise. When Habtemariam disappears for hours in Combs’s bedroom or when Grainge finances parties, the document frames those scenes not as gossip but as predicate acts of obstruction under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The law, in other words, attempts to knit together the scattered fibres of luxury branding, record promotion, and sexual exploitation into one juridical fabric.
Surveillance closes the loop. Jones alleges he possesses “HUNDREDS of hours of footage” of guns, drugs, assaults, and underage drinking because Combs habitually seized his phone to film. Paragraph 167 claims Combs has hidden cameras “in every room” of his homes; paragraph 168 speculates that these tapes include compromising material on record executives, politicians, and athletes. Whether or not the footage will ever surface, its rumoured existence cements Combs’s aura of invulnerability. In a world saturated with moving images, power does not merely act; it archives its own excess, banking shock as a future currency of silence.
The complaint closes with customary prayers for relief — compensatory damages, punitive damages, jury trial, &c. — but also an extended preservation notice warning defendants against “spoliation” of electronic evidence. That procedural epilogue reads like an exorcistic chant: by threatening sanctions for every deleted byte, the document tries to lock transient pleasures into immutable record. The law, having been forced to host Combs’s carnival, now demands that not one frame be scrubbed, as if permanence could retroactively impose morality. Good luck with all that.
Taken as a whole, the Jones complaint compresses a year of coercion into a legal instrument that also works as postmodern literature. Its factual pleadings, though couched in statutory language, pulse with narrative dread: a gunshot echoing in a studio restroom; drug-laced champagne effervescing under neon; teenage girls drinking from bottles they did not request; a yacht rocking beneath Caribbean stars while hidden cameras whir. It meticulously plots the geography of temptation and threat. Each paragraph seems to whisper the same refrain: hierarchy naturalises horror.
The complaint illustrates how the life-drives of creativity — Jones’s musical gifts — are captured, commodified, and inverted into death-drive rituals: forced closeness, filmic humiliation, the brandishing of firearms, the waving of unrealised Grammys. Lyotard’s libidinal economy throbs beneath the surface; Butler’s performativity finds grim echo in the scripting of Jones as both producer and object; Sedgwick’s open secret frames the industry’s whispered foreknowledge. When the pleading analogizes Khorram to Maxwell, it is not merely drawing a journalistic parallel but staging an intertextual moment where two infamous networks of trafficking fold into one archetype of capitalist depravity.
The Jones complaint, for all its legal precision, reads like an indictment of a dying civilization that has lost whatever capacity it once possessed (probably not much) to distinguish luxury from predation. Guns, drugs, underage bodies, Grammy plaques, real-estate deeds, corporate sponsors, and hidden cameras swirl together like the contents of one of Combs’s allegedly spiked champagne bottles. The foam on top may be chart hits and yacht photos, but the sediment below is terror. By presenting every detail — bloodstains on studio tiles, pink capsules in pouches, threats to eat a man’s face — as evidence, the text constructs a coliseum where status, desire, and fear strut and fret in spectacular code. Before closing the book on this wretched refuse, I am reminded that late capitalism’s most dazzling parties are often built atop a scaffold of enforced silence. The complaint, simply by entering the docket, cracks that silence, and in so doing becomes a bespoke abyss into which at least a few well-to-do denizens of our media-saturated empire must finally stare. What, I wonder, do they see gazing back at them?
Palate Cleanser
When I was just seventeen sex no longer held a mystery
I saw it as a commodity, to be bought and sold like rock n' roll
Day by day I plunged deeper into a world of cheap sensation
This held a great attraction for me and I dreamt of my own club
And when I danced and saw you dance I saw a gambling room in the back
With prostitutes skilled in the art of tango, lies, and exploitation
My club was open to all the brightest lights you ever saw
The darkest corners for having fun happy faces no questions asked
Late one night the club was heaving, I saw a vampire move across the floor
Old and white with a silver cane lusting for youth in the mirror
And when I danced and saw you dance I saw a world where the dead are worshiped
This world belongs to them now they can keep it!
I live alone and i walk the dark edge of the shoplights shadow
In each display a private hell, name your price you're up for sale
Nero fiddled while Rome burned, Caligula made his horse a consul and went mad, &c. In fact, much of what “everyone knows” about these emperors comes from hostile sources with axes to grind. Recent scholarship and reevaluations of the evidence suggest that Nero and Caligula, while hardly model rulers, were not the uniquely depraved monsters later historians made them out to be. The most salacious tales (Caligula committing incest with his sisters, or ordering his legions to attack the sea, or Nero dressing as a beast to rape men and women tied to stakes) come from Suetonius and Cassius Dio, writing decades after the fact under new regimes that needed the Julio-Claudian emperors to look bad. These biographers were effectively serving up ancient “tabloid” sensationalism. Caligula’s sudden shift from a promising young emperor to a paranoid tyrant, for instance, followed a serious illness, which might explain erratic behavior (possibly a neurological or endocrine disorder).
But contemporary accounts were few, and later Flavian-era writers filled the gap with lurid anecdotes, slandering Caligula to legitimize the new. Similarly, Nero’s reign (54–68 CE) saw notable achievements, such as a massive building program after the Great Fire of Rome, support for the arts, and successful diplomacy with Parthia, yet Tacitus, Suetonius, and later Christian writers paint him as a matricidal, anti-Christian Antichrist. Yes, Nero murdered family members, drove Seneca to suicide (though the old Stoic got a lot of mileage out of that final performance), and was a brutal autocrat, but the infamous “fiddle while Rome burns” line is a myth (he wasn’t in Rome when the fire started, and he actually organized relief efforts). The Senate understandably loathed Nero and Caligula for diminishing its power, and it’s largely their perspective that survives. In modern terms, these emperors were victims of a very successful posthumous negative PR campaign. None of this is to exonerate truly bad behavior on the part of these elites, but it’s a caution that our image of them comes filtered through extremely hostile (and often gleefully scandalous). The real Nero might have been less an Antichrist and more a flawed, narcissistic young man out of his depth, and Caligula perhaps an inexperienced 24-year-old ruler who suffered a breakdown in a system with few checks and balances save a fortuitous assassination.
I suppose I could dig back into C. Riley Snorton’s No One Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low, which I reviewed here and which is quite good, but I’ll leave that hard work to some other hardy spelunker of these depths. Had we but world enough and time, &c.
My friend Stephen W. might be the only exception to the rule laid out here.
Read that link, which contains some of my best reporting on the Q phenomenon.
Yep, that’s right.
Click there to download it. Some real banger images in that document!
I was asking myself this the other year. When all your needs are met, does everyone (or most) ultimately just want a private sex party? The mass forbidden? Is this the supreme goal in this society? That sounds awful!
I have nothing intelligent to contribute save for the fact that this was the crossover episode of crossover episodes that I never knew I needed.