This week, a peculiar rumor picked up steam: Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced sex trafficker with connections to a plethora of the world’s most powerful men, is still alive. Why? It appears that a Fortnite account believed to be his was online as recently as last year. Today, because we live in a world gone mad, an official Epic account let conspiracy-addled X The Everything App users know that, no, this is not the case.
"This was a ruse by a Fortnite player,” said the official Fortnite Status account in response to a since-deleted tweet echoing the conspiracy theory. “A few days ago, an existing Fortnite account owner changed their username from something totally unrelated to littlestjeff1, following the revelation of littlestjeff1 as a name on YouTube. These Fortnite trackers only display your current name, not any prior changes to it."
“Littlestjeff1” is a handle that appears over 20 times in the Epstein files, albeit largely in association with Epstein’s YouTube account. Additionally, at one point in 2019 Epstein appears to have purchased $25 worth of Fortnite V-Bucks. This, plus an Israeli flag next to a correspondingly named player’s profile pic on unofficial Fortnite stat site Fortnite Tracker, was enough to convince many that Epstein was alive, well, and farming victory royales in Tel Aviv – confirming, in their minds, heaps of other rumors that Epstein never actually died. (Officially, Epstein died by suicide in 2019. Unofficially, well…)
“We have no record of the subject's email addresses referenced in the public document existing in the Epic account system,” the Fortnite Status account added. “Since the public document releases, people have created Fortnite accounts with similar-looking email addresses and user names.”
Epic CEO and prolific poster Tim Sweeney also weighed in.
“Someone's been having fun renaming their Fortnite account,” he wrote, “but it's recent and not connected to the email addresses in the archive.”
Extremely cool living in a society where public trust has eroded to the point that an official account of a video game for kids needs to wash its hands of a mess made by the massively corrupt oligarchy. Fortunately, this is absolutely the last time something like this will happen. Surely nothing weirder or stupider will happen next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, and the week after that, and the week after that, and–
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Nathan Grayson
