The Conspiracy That Wasn’t

On January 30, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice published a staggering new tranche of Jeffrey Epstein material: over three million additional pages, plus thousands of videos and a vast pile of images—part of what the Department says is a total release of roughly 3.5 million pages under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Almost immediately, everyone did what everyone always does when “the files” drop: they hunted names, screenshotted fragments, stitched narratives together, and treated the internet like a jury box. But even major outlets covering the release have warned that the dump is chaotic, heavily redacted, and incomplete in ways that make confident conclusions difficult—while victims and advocates have criticized the process for exposing survivors while leaving many alleged enablers opaque.

All of that is worth saying up front, because it establishes the only responsible posture: humility. These documents contain noise, typos, half-context, and—according to the government itself—materials that may be unreliable or require careful interpretation.

And yet, even with all that noise, something clear has emerged for Latter-day Saints: this release was a stress test for decades of anti-Mormon conspiracy storytelling—and the conspiracy didn’t show up.

The test conspiracy-peddlers didn’t expect to fail

For a long time, a certain genre of anti-Mormon commentary has insisted on two overlapping claims:

1. That there is a uniquely large, uniquely hidden sexual abuse problem inside The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, driven or protected from the top; and
2. That senior leaders are “globalists” quietly entangled in elite power networks—exactly the kind of networks epitomized by Epstein.

To be plain: there have been horrific abuse cases involving members of the Church, and those cases deserve honest reporting—not dismissal.

But the claim at issue here isn’t “abuse exists” (it does, tragically, in every sizable institution). The claim is that the Church’s top leadership is part of a shadowy sexual corruption on one side, global influence schemes on the other.

If that were true, this was the moment it should have detonated.

Instead, it didn’t.

A worldwide net—and nothing where critics promised a catch

The whole point of an Epstein document dump, in the public imagination, is that it catches people from “all kinds of quarters.” And it has: major coverage has focused on public figures, political operators, and celebrity relationships; the whole world is sifting and speculating.

So what about the Church? Where are the receipts that a certain corner of the internet has promised for years?

In the Utah-adjacent reporting that’s surfaced from the latest release, the most concrete “Mormon-world” items being discussed are mundane and geographically local—things like travel notes involving Park City, and paying a likely victim’s tuition for Brigham Young University–Idaho, and someone writing to Epstein mentioned Elder Dale G. Renlund was presenting at a health conference.

Whatever one makes of those items, they are not what the long-running narrative promised. They do not amount to evidence that senior Church leaders had relationships with Epstein, much less evidence of sexual impropriety.

If you tell the world for decades that senior Church leaders are entangled in the very elite sexual machinery the Epstein story represents, then the largest public release of Epstein-related material should show it. Instead, it shows, at most, the kind of peripheral, often banal “Utah shows up in a massive dataset” traces you’d expect when you dump millions of pages spanning years and continents.

The “most damning” line—and why it still doesn’t land

Critics have understandably tried to elevate a single muddled excerpt—circulating online from an email labeled “EFTA02437604”—as the long-awaited smoking gun. In that excerpt, Epstein appears to write (in a typo-riddled sentence) about “wayne owens … from utah,” references “pons and cold fusion,” and includes the phrase “had [to/ot] meet with the head of the mormon church.”

Epstein suggested in 2009 that in 1989, when he argued against funding cold fusion research, he met with the “head of the mormon church,” presumably because such funding would have gone to Utah.  

No name for who he meant. The memory is twenty years old. Not even a claim that the meeting was desired by church leaders. And the topic was mundane decades before Epstein’s sexual abuse networks were known. 

I imagine some will attempt to squeeze continued criticism out of the line. But what we have been promised by the anti-Mormon conspiracists for years clearly did not exist. In fact, the Church and its leaders have remained so clear of Epstein and its associates that it should broadly be seen as a positive for their moral character. 

Why this should change the conversation—on both sides

If you’re a critic, this moment is an invitation to intellectual honesty. The Epstein files—massive, messy, and full of all kinds of names—were supposed to be the hammer blow. Instead, they have not delivered what the most confident anti-Mormon allegations promised.

And if you’re a believer, this moment is not an excuse for a victory lap. There are real victims who must remain the focus of care and attention. And remember, the data remains partial and contested. We shouldn’t claim this means more than it does. 

Some narratives survive precisely because they are structured to be unfalsifiable. But this nearly unprecedented drop was exactly where we should have seen the evidence. And it wasn’t there. Combined with the Associated Press’ push to find sexual abuse in the Church for several years, which only found a few tragic, isolated cases, perhaps it’s time to move forward on a more grounded narrative. Latter-day Saints who preach virtue, honesty, and sexual restraint, largely if not perfectly, practice what they preach. 

The Epstein files—whatever else one thinks about this sprawling, troubled, often infuriating release—have provided a rare public opportunity to compare conspiracy claims against a truly enormous body of material. And when it comes to the most sensational anti-Mormon accusations about senior Church leaders—secret globalist schemes, Epstein ties, sexual impropriety—the result is not “finally, we got them.” 

The result is: nothing. At the end of the day, behind all the sturm and drang was just normal people. 

That doesn’t make the Church above scrutiny. We all have much work to do in continuing to help victims in every corner. But perhaps we can now do it based on the truth. It should make everyone—members and critics alike—more reluctant to trade in insinuation when the moral stakes are this high.