There is a particular kind of disillusionment that comes slowly at first, then all at once.
It starts with a seed. Something someone says offhandedly, a detail that doesn’t quite fit the image you’ve held of a person. You brush it past. You might even feel a little guilty for entertaining the thought. After all, this is the Queen’s favourite son. This is the celebrated founder. This is the beloved patriarch. The status alone functions as a kind of moral endorsement, something we absorb without ever questioning it.
But the seed has been planted. And once it takes root, it begins to illuminate evidence that was always there, waiting.
The unfolding of the Epstein network is doing exactly that for a great many people right now. Prince Andrew is perhaps the most visible symbol of a truth we find uncomfortable: that power, title, and proximity to legacy are not character references. They never were. We simply treated them as if they were.
This is not just a story about one man, or one royal family, or one network of the extraordinarily wealthy and influential. It is a story about a collective assumption we have held for a very long time, that brilliance confers goodness, that success signals virtue, that the higher someone sits, the cleaner their hands must be.
What the Epstein trials are forcing into the light is the cost of that assumption. And that cost has always been paid by the most vulnerable, the least powerful, the least believed.
There is something important happening right now. It feels, if you pay close enough attention, like the early tremors of a moral revolution. The architecture of silence that protected the powerful for so long is showing cracks. Survivors are being heard. Evidence is being examined. The idea that wealth and status place a person beyond accountability is being tested in real time, and it is failing that test.
This is not justice arriving suddenly. It is justice arriving eventually, as it always does, because what is done in the dark does not stay there. It never has. The timeline is never what we would choose. The delay is its own form of harm. But the reckoning comes.
The lesson, if we are willing to sit with it, is one that probably should have been taught far earlier, in every household, every classroom, every story we tell children about what it means to be a good person. Goodness is not a role. It is not a title, a net worth, a family crest, or a seat at the table of influence. It cannot be performed indefinitely without the performance eventually slipping.
Who you are when no one powerful is watching, who you are to the people who have no leverage over you, who you are to the child, the employee, the person who needed you to do right by them and instead became your secret: that is the measure.
No crown changes it. No company valuation changes it. No amount of public admiration changes it.
If you are a good person, stay in your lane. Do the work quietly and consistently. The noise around status and performance will always be loud, but it is temporary. Character, both the presence of it and the absence of it, has a way of outlasting everything else.
To every person who has been wronged in the shadows by someone the world called great: this moment, as slow and imperfect as it is, belongs to you.
The light gets in eventually.
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