Jeffrey Epstein: Apologies and brand repair

When Jeffrey Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting a minor for prostitution, members of his elite network issued public statements disavowing him. Read against the private emails subsequently released, those statements function as what Nicholas Tavuchis terms accounts, dressed in apologetic vocabulary. Drawing on Marcel Mauss, this article argues that the obligations binding elites to Epstein, and Epstein in turn to figures such as Leon Black, made genuine disavowal costly. The article introduces the concept of the ‘brand repair apology’ as a defensive manoeuvre rooted in the contemporary anthropology of branding. Epstein's own attempt at brand repair, through manipulation of search results and Wikipedia entries, was thwarted by an investigative journalist and a community of unpaid volunteer editors determined that a powerful man should not rewrite his own history.