Prominent Brits are facing a reckoning over Epstein. In the US, not so much Arwa Mahdawi

[Uncle Joe]

After Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest, officials said ‘nobody is above the law’. Sadly that doesn’t seem true

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The discrepancy in Epstein-related fallout on both sides of the Atlantic hasn’t gone unnoticed, with a number of lawmakers calling it out. Skye Roberts, the brother of the late Virginia Giuffre, has also said the UK is doing far more than the US is. “I think that the king can hold his head high when he comes here saying: ‘I am doing the most that I can,’” Roberts said. “While here in the United States, our president has yet to even do even remotely the same.”

Why has there been so much more accountability in the UK than the US? One theory is that the British public have slightly less tolerance for bad behaviour. “It suggests to me we [in the UK] have a more functional media, we have a more functional accountability structure, that there is still a degree of shame in politics, in terms of people will say: ‘This is just not acceptable, this is just not done,’” the University of Manchester political science professor Rob Ford told the AP.

While that might be correct to some small degree, I don’t think Britain should be patting itself on the back too much. This is not a case of Britain’s accountability structures working well. Rather it’s a reflection of just how much Trump has exploded norms in the US and just how ingrained Epstein was with the US establishment and elites. According to one New York Times analysis, the Epstein files contain more than 38,000 references to Donald and Melania Trump, Mar-a-Lago and other related words. This isn’t to say that any of these references, some of which are unverified tips, are damning; Trump has said their relationship ended in the early 2000s. But there sure do seem to be a lot of links between the two men. Could the fact that Trump is more eager to talk about UFOs and the stock market than Epstein perchance have to do with the fact that the president of the US is desperately trying to cover something up? Certainly that’s what most people with a functioning brain think. More than half of Americans in a new Economist/YouGov poll said they believe Trump is attempting to conceal crimes committed by Epstein.

All this to say: get your act together, America. Two hundred and fifty years ago, you got rid of a king. Now, however, a country that likes to boast about its democracy has become a new sort of monarchy. An unelected ruling class lords itself over the rest of us from its modern castles. Its money shapes our politics and, with the media increasingly being controlled by billionaires, our opinions. And its privilege seems to offer complete protection from our laws.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/22/andrew-mountbatten-windsor-epstein-us-men