Late last week, the Department of Justice released another heavily redacted drip feed of files tied to the criminal investigation and subsequent death of Jeffrey Epstein, a man convicted of such heinous sex crimes that his name has practically become synonymous with the idea. The files, which started releasing in late 2025, have implicated numerous globally powerful figures including Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the latter in brutally embarrassing fashion (both maintain their innocence).
But sprinkled throughout the files are references to Epstein’s banned Xbox Live account, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Five Nights At Freddy’s porn, the concept of microtransactions, and even specific people like ex-Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, former Rockstar North president and founder of MindsEye studio Build A Rocket Boy, Leslie Benzies, and current Rockstar president Sam Houser.
Aftermath reached out to Kotick, Benzies, and Houser for more information but did not receive responses as of this publishing. Being included in the files doesn’t mean that a person has committed a crime.
Kotick and Houser have not commented publicly on the matter, though Mark Gerhard, co-CEO of Build A Rocket Boy, issued a “cease and desist” notice in the MindsEye Discord server to YouTuber Cyber Boi immediately following the latter's video titled "Leslie Benzies is in the Epstein Files." The video has since been deleted. A detailing of sexual assault allegations against Benizes contained in the Epstein files remains live on Insider Gaming (Houser, according to a document in the files, was allegedly aware of the situation).
In a statement to Kotaku, Benzies denied the allegations: “These allegations are false, I had a 3 months consensual relationship with this person, and I have never met Jeffrey Epstein, nor have I ever visited his island, his properties or travelled on his plane. Any suggestion otherwise is misleading,” he said.
The files also contain evidence that Kotick exchanged emails with Epstein and others in his circle, but thanks to the US government’s decision to redact and decontextualize them in an obvious effort to sow confusion and discord, it’s unclear if Kotick ever met directly with Epstein or visited his island. Epstein tried to schedule dinner with Kotick (and, at one point, Woody Allen) in November 2012 in New York. In an email sent on November 18, 2012, Epstein suggests that Kotick, at least, spent some time with him. "bobby Kotick came over last night„ hes great," Epstein wrote to Next Model Management co-founder Faith Kates, who stepped down last year following a different batch of Epstein emails. Kotick, meanwhile, said to Epstein that he wished “would [sic] could have stopped by the island” in December 2012 following a trip to the Caribbean. The two continued to correspond in 2013, with Epstein messaging Kotick in May to say “my russian guest missed your arrival yesterday” and Kotick replying “And I missed her. Ill see you both next trip.” (It is unclear to whom they were referring.)
Also in May 2013, Epstein emailed Kotick an unhinged missive about edutainment that seems to have originally been written by self-proclaimed “hacker, inventor & technology futurist” Pablos Holman after Epstein mentioned to Holman that he was meeting with former Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education Joel Klein. Here it is, in its entirety:
Play "Medal of Honor" or "Call of Duty" and you will learn war history. Here's what I've been thinking.
Video games are already great at teaching. If they don't assess your level and put an appropriate challenge right in front of you, the game fails. Challenge too hard and you get frustrated and quit playing. Too easy and the game is no fun. That is exactly what a good teacher or tutor would do. Fundamentally the thing that works is a 1 to 1 student teacher ratio. Even if you have a shitty teacher or tutor, you will learn a lot because that person gets to know you and challenges you at your level. That doesn't scale, but computers do. So we have to use computers to replace teachers – or at least augment them.
Today's video games don't try to teach stuff we care about. Well, except for shooting bad guys. The best scheme I've come up with so far is to use X-Prize or something like it to co-opt the existing video game industry. Give out a prize to the game that comes up with the best way of teaching kids anything from a normal school curriculum. Let them pick whatever they want to teach, any grade level, and just incorporate it into their product. That's the way to get the most brains and the most users for the least money. You want to skip convincing educators and parents about this stuff and just go straight for the kids.
Imagine you are looking at a door in a video game. It has some squiggly symbols printed on it. Little munchkins walk up to that door and say “Konichiwa.” The door opens and they are greeted by a hot princess with big tits and a thong. The door closes in your face. You are going to fucking learn to read and pronounce Kanji.
Unleash that on 5th grade boys and then next thing you know, you'll have an entire generation of bilingual kids speaking Japanese to each other behind the backs of their parents and teachers.
Edutainment is for pussies. It doesn't work. Once kids catch on that you are trying to teach them something they shut down. We have to keep the boobs and guns and profit. You see how much money video games are making these days? Fuck educational reform. We need educational subversion!
The next day, Kotick replied: "X prize is a good idea but key is real world rewards. Learn to read: earn cell phone minutes, iPhone credits, virtual items in games."
Epstein forwarded Kotick’s message to Holman, who reacted by saying, "I'm all for indoctrinating kids into an economy. You gotta love how his [e]xample for 'real world rewards' is 'virtual items in games.'"
Many have suggested that this means Epstein played a pivotal role in convincing Activision to embrace microtransactions, but this appears to be a massive overstatement; for one, Holman and Kotick were the ones making the lion's share of the above suggestions – not Epstein. For two, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 had just introduced microtransactions prior to the conversation, and Call of Duty: Ghosts would push things further in that direction a handful of months later.
In 2018, an Epstein advisor suggested spending a large sum on Activision stock in hopes that Call of Duty could challenge Fortnite for the battle royale throne, but it seems like Epstein and his accountant, Richard Kahn, decided against it (and later mocked the advisor for it).
Epstein maintained his fascination with games in the years following, emailing back and forth in 2016 with Bitcoin Core contributor Jeremy Rubin about the latter’s idea of a creating “an intellectually sti[m]ulating game where women outperform men,” which, in his mind, would either “provide evidence of universal inferiority which would inform you (society) to not invest in gender diversity as much” or, if the experiment was successful, would help them "learn more about how to get value out of fema[l]e employees." In response to the question of whether any such games already existed, Epstein replied: “motherhood game? card games, video games= hacking. all are games . same result. . poetry. game ma[y]be :).”
If you’re not already seeing the pattern, it’s clear that Epstein and his associates saw games as mechanisms for profit, coercion, and control, a throughline that persists in his association with two key figures in Gamergate and the surrounding bedlam: Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon.
Based on available files, Epstein expressed interest in Thiel and his surveillance company, Palantir, as early as 2012, but correspondence between the two began in 2014. Then, in May 2016, Epstein messaged Thiel saying that he "would have gladly share[d] your expenses for the gawker suit" and invited him to dinner with Noam Chomsky, of all people (it is unclear if this dinner ever took place). That suit, of course, led to the collapse of Gawker Media and the sale of its many sites – of which Kotaku, a major Gamergate target (and the former employer of all five members of Aftermath’s core staff), was one. This would send ripples through the worlds of media and journalism for years to come, leading to a press defanged by the threat of legal annihilation.
The next month, shortly after the June 2016 referendum that kicked off Brexit, Epstein emailed Thiel, saying "brexit, just the beginning" and then, in response to Thiel asking what he meant, "return to tribalism. counter to globalization. amazing new alliances. you and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, and as i said in your office. finding things on their way to collapse, was much easier than finding the next bargain."
(ICE now relies on data from Palantir to figure out which neighborhoods to raid.)
Bannon catapulted himself into the public eye in 2012 by taking over Breitbart – a far-right publication and core Gamergate legitimizer – and then parlaying that right-wing revitalization effort into a 2016 gig as CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Prior to all that, however, Bannon worked as CEO of Internet Gaming Entertainment, a World of Warcraft gold seller. Epstein maintained his fixation with virtual currency when the two met and began collaborating closely in 2017, with the two emailing about using crypto to fund a “populist/nationalist coalition” that could “stave off” Time’s Up – aka the #MeToo movement – “for [the] next decade plus."
Epstein and Bannon would go on to message throughout 2018 and 2019 about various attempts at reshaping the political landscape. Bannon bragged that he had figures and groups like far-right Italian politician Matteo Salvini, Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and right-wing UK politician Nigel Farage dangling from his puppet strings. Epstein, in turn, waxed grandiose of “twenty thousand hackers. showing up at the same place. . .. they will be sharing ideas on hacking crypto ex[c]hanges, voting booths, medical records, crypto wallets," which piqued Bannon’s interest.
But, as Garbage Day points out, this doesn’t mean Epstein, first and foremost a career scuzzball, and Bannon, who flunked out of the White House during Trump’s first term and became a (briefly imprisoned) podcaster, were responsible for any of what was to come.
Based on the emails to which we currently have access to, populist politics, online disinformation, cyber warfare, and cryptocurrency were all just scaffolding for his work as a financier and sex trafficker. A way to destabilize the global order, make connections with the world’s elites, and continue enriching himself and preying on vulnerable young girls. Reading through his messages, it’s clear that he was someone who was learning to speak the language of social media and far-right populism at the same time everyone else was.
…
Were Epstein and Bannon really building a crypto-funded far-right coalition of pro-Russian dictators across Europe? Or were they just LARPing as kingmakers with each other over email? And does the distinction even matter if other powerful figures seemed to believe in their project?
It is nearly impossible to not get pulled deeper down the rabbit hole while reading through Epstein’s emails. Because, whether or not he did directly influence elections across the globe, he was trying to. And he had the means and the access to believe he could.
The Epstein files, in their current incomplete and piecemeal form, are if nothing else a useful demonstration of how obscenely powerful people talk to each other – how they seek to exert control and the levers they pull on to do so. These objectives are not implied; they’re stated outright. Resulting class solidarity among the hyper-wealthy is unconstrained by laws, boundaries, or industries. If something can be used to amass more power, it’s on the table. This, obviously, includes video games and the internet, which have played an increasingly pivotal role in securing the far right’s grip on numerous institutions and governments over the past decade.
It is no coincidence that monstrous crimes against women and children lie at the heart of this deleterious trend, whether Epstein himself succeeded at tilting the global balance of power or not. Far-right ideology begins at home, with the familial unit. However, under this framework family is not treated as a community to be nurtured, but as property to be owned and controlled. The option for a patriarchal man to violently abuse people – including children – is a core appeal of the ideology, which is why far-right politicians and personalities have spent years trying to normalize rolling back laws around abortion, consent, marriage age, and spousal abuse.
The point of the project has always been to consolidate power in the hands of a select few; now we’re seeing exactly who those few are and what they intend for it to look like. And while some politicians in other countries are suffering consequences as a result of their association with Epstein, our biggest wigs and fattest cats remain comfortably at the top of the food chain. The larger system that turned a blind eye to this – that enabled it via both action and inaction – seems more interested in plucking innocent people off neighborhood streets than investigating or prosecuting those mentioned in the files. But people across the country are pissed – with even Trump’s base starting to shimmy out from underneath his thumb – and that, at the very least, is the beginning of something. How it all ends is up to the many, not the wealthy few.
Luke Plunkett
