Gitmo or bust: Have Epstein’s sexual predators been punished enough?

Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of 'Midnight in the American Empire,' How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream.

9 Feb, 2026 14:56 / Updated 14 minutes ago
For all the lives they ruined, the actual criminals have faced remarkably little in the way of retribution

Now that the child molester Jeffrey Epstein is gone, and the Epstein files have been released, what fate awaits Ghislaine Maxwell and others remains to be seen.

Given the typically brief life span of sensational stories, in just a matter of days or weeks the Epstein saga will be filed away under ‘Forgotten’ where it will receive only cursory attention from future historians and political pundits alike.

That’s a tragedy for the obvious reason that not a single sexual deviant, aside from Epstein’s child trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, is currently in jail for the crime of having sex with children.

This week I was lectured by a friend for allegedly glossing over the fact that “reputations have been destroyed” by the release of the Epstein files. Yes, Bill Gates, the argument goes, had to endure the pain of a divorce when his wife Melinda decided she had heard enough smutty gossip to continue in the relationship. The files were particularly harsh on Mr. Gates, who, it is alleged, had sexual relations with Russian prostitutes and acquired a nasty STD.

Desperate to keep the disease to himself, he inquired how to get antibiotics to secretly administer to his former wife. Whether the trick worked we may never know, but it certainly did not save the doomed marriage.

And then there is the shocking fall from grace of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, the younger brother of King Charles, who was forced to relinquish all royal titles and privileges, effectively isolating the man from his family and probably many friends.

While it is certainly painful to undergo a divorce, or suffer the trauma of familial abandonment, none of that equals the pain of knowing that you are going to be deprived of your freedom for many years alongside total strangers. Aside from capital punishment, hefty jail time is the ultimate punishment for child molesters.

Incidentally, there may be some people at this point who would argue that Jeffrey Epstein was not only locked away in prison, he ultimately – so the story goes – managed to somehow kill himself in a cell that was specially designed to prevent exactly such a thing from ever happening. So for the record, I’m open to the idea that Mr. Epstein not only never committed suicide, nor was he murdered, but he is very much still alive, probably chilling on a beach near Tel Aviv somewhere, sipping pina coladas in close proximity to some of the best plastic surgeons money can buy. But I digress.

In fairness, I should include the argument made by my friend who believes that Mr. Gates et al have suffered enough torment for their vile deeds: “Imagine! You’re the noble and mighty climate warrior / genius Bill Gates, and you have just been exposed as a total lowlife creep who may or may not have raped and killed children at parties,” my anonymous friend proclaimed. “I guarantee you, jail or not, this guy is in Hell right now! He has been brought low before the eyes of the whole world and even worse – his ex-wife!”

While it is a rather convincing argument, I think Ghislaine Maxwell would be just one of millions of people to disagree with that assessment. In fact, let’s not overlook the glaring fact here that the only person currently serving any jail time for the rape of girls just happens to be a WOMAN! Why is nobody talking about this? Where is there a Me-Too parade when you really need one? Yes, Ms. Maxwell, 64, has committed some truly heinous crimes in her time, many of which we will never know about, but how can that explain away the fact that there is not a single male criminal serving hard time along with her.

Actually, forget about the “hard time” part. Even in the worst circumstances, the people who took advantage of teenage girls on Mr. Epstein’s Pedo Island will never get a glimpse of what life is truly like in real prisons, where you share a cell with a number of other men of questionable psychological condition, many of whom do not take kindly to child molesters. In fact, the yearly life expectancy of perverts in prison, unless they are sequestered away in solitary confinement, can often be counted with the fingers on one hand.

Just like Ms. Maxwell, who was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in prison, any pedophiles among the rich and famous will serve out their sentence in the midst of relative comfort and ease. Maxwell, the former British socialite and daughter of the late Robert Maxwell, a former media mogul, is serving out the remainder of her prison sentence at Federal Prison Camp, Bryan (FPC Bryan), a minimum-security prison for female inmates where the average sentence is 5 years or less. In other words, Maxwell is not struggling to survive among hardened criminals. In fact, among other things, according to the Guardian, Maxwell is “provided custom-made meals, access to a puppy and as much toilet paper as she wants.”

Naturally, there is speculation whether anyone in the Trump administration authorized the pampered treatment. It’s important to remember that the Epstein scandal has dogged Trump for many years and has hit a fever pitch during his second term. Indeed, many people, even those within the MAGA movement, are outraged that the Epstein files have not netted a single red-blooded male behind bars.

Back in 2020, when the Epstein story was just breaking, I had proposed a place to send the child molesters, which still seems like a decent idea almost six years later: Send them off to Guantanamo Bay detention facility, a brutal American-owned camp located in a forsaken corner of communist Cuba that is uniquely qualified to handle the worst of the worst criminals in the world.

What I wrote back then still stands today: “With the threat from Al-Qaeda noticeably on the wane, and vacancies now available, this seems like the ideal holding facility. That is, unless Ghislaine Maxwell should suffer the same unfortunate fate that awaited her late partner in crime, Jeffrey Epstein. That possibility must be prevented at all cost. The victims of pedophilia deserve no less than to know that their childhood tormentors are languishing away on a miserable island in shark-infested waters of their own making.”