And there is, of course, Lolita—a complicated consideration of child sexual abuse that has been generally metabolized, over the decades, as a simple justification of it. “I was a daisy-fresh girl and look what you’ve done to me,” the girl whose given name is Dolores seethes, plaintively, in Vladimir Nabokov’s book; Lolita, however, as a transcendent kind of trope, is not angry at her abuser. She is not capable, indeed, of much emotion at all. Lolita the archetype, instead, functions as a foil to the (straight) men who encounter her. She is tempting, seductive, justifying. She is thoroughly male-gazed. Girl, you’ll be a woman soon. Soon, you’ll need a man.

Read: A brief history of the open secret

There is a teasing quality to many of these pop-cultural treatments of the underage woman, just as there was a teasing quality to Epstein’s claims about the historical contingencies of sexual taboos: They take refuge in a dark kind of satire. The Hollywood-sanctioned explorations of sexual relationships between middle-aged men and teenage girls are not endorsing those relationships, they insist. They are merely asking what things would be like if laws hadn’t been written as they were, if norms hadn’t settled into their current and contingent shapes. The works tend to treat the girls as simultaneously available and inaccessible—and primarily as vehicles of self-discovery for the men who are the films’ true stars. The stories they tell belong to the guys who are sad and frustrated and misunderstood; the girls serve as mere accessories to those stories. They call to mind what the journalist Vicky Ward, who has been reporting on Epstein for years, recently told the Times: Most everyone in Epstein’s orbit mentioned “the girls,” she said, but “as an aside.”

The logic of Lolita hovers as a specter over Epstein’s story. His private jet was widely known as the “Lolita Express.” He flaunted the girls as if they were furniture—making a display, reports suggest, of their youth and their vulnerability. But the girls’ childishness asserted itself, as well. Alfredo Rodriguez, who worked as Epstein’s butler in the mid-2000s, told a Palm Beach detective investigating the Epstein case that he had suspected the girls in Epstein’s orbit were underage in part because, as the detective summed it up, “they would eat tons of cereal and drink milk all the time.” The lead illustration for Brown’s extensive 2018 report on Epstein in the Miami Herald—the one that helped lead to the new indictment that was brought against him this summer—features an image of Epstein, rendered in color, surrounded by black-and-white headshots of four of the girls who have accused him of abuse. Some of them, in the photos, are wearing braces.

These are the people whose lives and whose dignity Epstein was mocking when he compared his crimes to the stealing of a bagel. This is what his version of that dully familiar standby, the open secret, looked like. Epstein took refuge in a culture that revolves, still, around the whims of the wealthy and the straight and the male. He found protection within the networked strain of impunity that for so long kept the secrets of, among so many others, Bill Cosby and R. Kelly and Harvey Weinstein. Epstein lived in a culture, he knew all too well, that is not yet accustomed to putting girls at the center of the story. The rest of the Gigi song goes like this: Thank heaven for little girls / Thank heaven for them all / No matter where / No matter who / Without them / What would little boys do …