Constance Grady | Vox

Me Too revealed a lot of villains. Why is Epstein the one we still care about?

2026-03-16T17:57:53-04:00

Undated pictures provided by the Department of Justice as part of the Jeffrey Epstein files. | Martin Bureau/AFP via Getty Images

As part of its ongoing release of the Epstein files, the Department of Justice has released three FBI memos relating to accusations of sexual assault against President Donald Trump. The news came days after Bill and Hillary Clinton were brought before the House Oversight Committee to testify about Bill’s connection to notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

All of this was perhaps only a matter of time. The right has long been as obsessed with how Clinton fits into the Epstein story as the left has been with the question of how Trump fits into it.

Both Trump and Clinton feature in the Epstein files. They appear in photos, grinning and tanned next to a smirking Epstein; they appear in magazines, giving admiring quotes about him. The persistent presence of both presidents in the Epstein story is part of what has given it such staying power.

Epstein’s story first became inescapable because of the Me Too movement. Yet while the Epstein story still has avid followers, the same cannot be said for the rest of the stories that dominated headlines in 2017 at the height of Me Too. Instead, we are in the midst of a full Me Too backlash.

Many of the gains the movement ostensibly brought have been either overturned or used as justification for an anti-feminist “correction.” Trump won his reelection bid in 2024 even after being found civilly liable for sexual assault; after his victory, the gloating phrase “Your body, my choice” trended on social media. High-profile men accused of sexual misconduct are being greeted with not just indifference but outright sympathy. In a 2025 poll run by The 19th, more than half of the men surveyed said that women should return to “traditional” gender roles like child-rearing and housewifery.

Yet Epstein remains a bipartisan issue, in large part because both sides can use it as evidence for a bigger narrative. It’s these metanarratives that explain why the Epstein story lingers when so few other Me Too stories have — and why Me Too had as much impact as it did in 2017.

The Epstein story first caught fire at the height of the Me Too movement

In 2018, the Me Too movement made Jeffrey Epstein — already a convicted sex offender, but little known among the general public — into a monster. Usually, stories about relatively unknown men doing terrible things to women are met with a muted response from the public, but that year, things were different.

Bombshell reporting that year from the Miami Herald revealed that as early as 2006, law enforcement had compiled mountains of evidence suggesting that Epstein had sexually abused dozens of underage girls. But wealthy, well-connected Epstein worked out a sweetheart deal with prosecutors that limited his sentencing to just 13 months in the county jail, pleading guilty to nothing more than two prostitution charges. He was also allowed to commute to work from jail while he was serving out his sentence, a privilege he allegedly used to sexually abuse more women.

The 2018 Epstein story met an audience primed to be angry at the abuses of monstrous men, and they really did get angry.

In the wake of the Herald’s reporting, Epstein was rearrested in 2019 and charged with sex trafficking minors. He was found dead in his jail cell later that year, before his trial could begin.

The Epstein story was a matter of public record before Me Too caught fire in 2017, but it took Me Too to elevate it to the level of common knowledge. Once Me Too had lifted it up, it would meet an audience bigger than the rest of the Me Too stories, including Larry Nassar, the other infamous pedophile of the Me Too exposés, but one who has been largely forgotten since his 2017 sentencing. Epstein had so many victims — at least 1,000 — and they were all children, regular anonymous little girls. Even people who didn’t care about the assault of Oscar winners cared about that.

“This case is about justice, not just for us, but for other victims who aren’t Olympic stars or Hollywood stars,” Epstein survivor Courtney Wild told the Miami Herald.

Over the next few years, the anti-feminist backlash would come for Me Too, but it never came for the Epstein story. Trump’s MAGA base spent years clamoring for the release of the Epstein files, and they now pronounce themselves severely disappointed by the mess his administration has made of it. Recent polling finds that more than half of Americans have heard about the Epstein files — more than have heard about the shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by immigration law enforcement — and they are concerned. “The whole Epstein debacle, I think that should have been out already months and months ago,” said one Republican man who regrets his vote for Trump during a recent focus group of voters who don’t follow the news.

In the midst of the Me Too backlash, Epstein stands alone: the monster nobody wants to redeem, the bogeyman the public never gets tired of hearing about. Long dead and with all the questions about his crimes left unanswered, his is the one Me Too story for which Americans writ large still demand justice.

The first reason for Epstein’s continued relevance might be the most obvious: Very few people have an interest in trying to clear his name. He has no stan army, no one monitoring his name’s appearance on social media so they can leap to his defense. He is also dead, so he cannot hire publicists or lawyers to muddy the waters around the accusations against him, like Justin Baldoni and Johnny Depp did.

As a result, we don’t see that many malicious narratives about how Epstein’s accusers are probably just in it for the fame and the money, or how the accusers have kind of a mean girl vibe so shouldn’t be believed. While enough of those narratives exist to make the lives of Epstein’s victims very difficult, they haven’t achieved mainstream saturation in the way that they did for Amber Heard and Blake Lively. The full horror of Epstein’s crimes can remain clear in the public view.

Then, too, there are all the persistent, only partially resolved questions around Epstein that seem to invite conspiracy. His death, alone in an under-surveilled jail cell shortly before his trial, has given rise to multiple theories that he was assassinated at the behest of an old friend who didn’t want Epstein to talk about what he knew. (An official autopsy determined Epstein died by suicide.) During his life, Epstein’s extreme wealth didn’t seem to match his public career as a money manager with just two known clients. (A New York Times investigation from last year seems to have solved that mystery: Epstein appears to have built his fortune via a series of petty white-collar scams like abusing expense accounts.) Finally, there’s the mystery of the charges against Epstein. He was accused multiple times of trafficking his victims to his wealthy, well-connected friends, including a former royal prince of Britain. Yet the government has never brought charges against anyone for that crime, which has led to endless theories that it’s because of the behind-the-scenes influence of powerful people.

How Clinton and Trump fit into the Epstein story

Both Clinton and Trump appear to have associated with Epstein for years. Clinton rode Epstein’s private jet multiple times in the early 2000s, writing in his memoir Citizen that he used his plane rides to help establish the Clinton Foundation. Clinton says he was never close to Epstein, and there’s little evidence to suggest they were. There are, however, a few pictures of Clinton in the Epstein files, including one in which he sits on what appears to be a private plane, embracing a young woman perched on the arm of his chair — enough to launch an avalanche of theories. Clinton has been accused of sexual violence, including rape, in other contexts, but none of Epstein’s victims have ever publicly accused Clinton.

Trump, meanwhile, had a longstanding and well-documented friendship with Epstein, although they appear to have fallen out sometime in the early 2000s. That friendship may or may not have included joint sexual assault: One unnamed plaintiff filed a lawsuit in 2016 alleging that Trump and Epstein raped her in 1994 when she was 13 years old, but she withdrew her suit for unknown reasons. The recent DOJ release shows that another woman told the FBI in 2019 that Trump and Epstein raped her in the 1980s when she was a teenager.

The flight logs, the pictures, the dirty jokes: There are so many suggestive details here, and so few concrete facts. These ambiguous, fuzzy connections are a conspiracist’s dream. A person might reason that Epstein escaped legal consequences for his crimes for many years because of his connections. And what if the most important of those connections happened to be the president who I don’t like? What are all these powerful people hiding from me?

Eight years of conspiracy theories about Epstein, Clinton, and Trump

The right began developing theories about Epstein and Clinton very soon after the Miami Herald’s 2018 story broke. Some of that was because Clinton and Epstein really did know each other, but a lot of it was simply because the Epstein story fit so well into the extant QAnon mythology about decadent elite pedophiles already developing on the outskirts of the right-wing internet.

For the left, meanwhile, the Epstein story was a Trump scandal from the beginning. The initial news hook for the Miami Herald’s reporting was that Alexander Acosta, the prosecutor who signed off on Epstein’s scandalous 2008 plea deal, was now a Trump official. Democrats called for Acosta to testify before Congress, and for the DOJ to launch an investigation into Epstein’s plea deals and release its records.

The persistence of the Epstein files even reveals why the Me Too movement was briefly popular on both sides of the political aisle.

After Epstein died and Trump left office, Democrats largely stopped demanding transparency (possibly because Ghislaine Maxwell’s case was still making its way through the courts). Trump’s allies were agitating on right-wing podcasts, and specifically wanted the names of Epstein’s alleged clients. “What the hell are the House Republicans doing?” Kash Patel, now the FBI director, demanded in 2023. “Put on your big boy pants, and let us know who the pedophiles are.”

Once in office, Trump declared the files a hoax. Maxwell’s case was over and done with, and Democratic politicians began once again calling for the files to be released. Trump dragged his feet until it became clear last year that Congress, with bipartisan support, was going to push the matter one way or the other.

Notably, while the right has looked pointedly away from Trump’s association with Epstein, the left appears willing to sacrifice Clinton if it means bringing down Epstein’s associates. Democrats joined Republicans in pressuring Clinton to testify before Congress. “It’s less about allegiances to, you know, individuals, and more about what’s best for our party and what’s best for this country,” Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) told Politico in February.

Now the Epstein files, such as they are, have been released to the public. And as journalists and activists sift through them, the outcry surrounding Epstein shows no sign of calming down. His story has become a myth, a parable that both sides of polarized America are desperate to claim.

On the left, the Epstein files detail how many men are abusing women and girls and getting away with it because we live in a country that makes it easy for them to do so. Epstein was a cautionary tale of what happens when victims aren’t taken seriously: a man who abused a thousand girls and left a mountain of evidence; who was found guilty of his crimes and got a slap on the wrist; who was surrounded by people who had every resource in the world available to them to do something about him but who never, ever did.

On the right, the Epstein files show how wealthy people with prestigious jobs who claim to have the moral high ground use their prestige to do awful, depraved things. They are a story about how many of the people we are supposed to respect are secretly doing terrible things, a story about the villainy of people like Epstein and Clinton, who will commit a sex crime and then tell you that actually, they were doing charity.

Seen through this lens, the persistence of the Epstein files even reveals why the Me Too movement was briefly popular on both sides of the political aisle. On the left, Me Too may ostensibly have been a story about the problem of sexual violence everywhere in American life (hence Me Too, as in, it’s a common enough problem that all women know about it). On the right, Me Too was a story about finally taking down those hypocritical liberal elites in Hollywood and media, who were doing things that normal people would never do.

Both of these stories speak deeply to the concerns of Americans of all political persuasions. Advocating for survivors of sexual assault is not always easy in a culture that is not generally inclined to believe or support victims, and sustaining interest in a movement like Me Too is difficult when sexual violence is just so pervasive. Staying committed to a larger narrative about the shadowy forces of evil you’re voting against is a lot more compelling. Who would ever get tired of trying to take down a president?

The 50-year struggle to get Best Casting into the Oscars

2026-03-12T17:03:31-04:00

The Academy Award for Best Casting is the first new category to be added the Oscars in more than two decades. | Emma McIntyre/WireImage

On Sunday night, the Academy Awards will confer their first trophy to a casting director. The award for Best Casting is the first new category to be added to the Oscars in 24 years — and it’s doing its part to remedy the Oscars’s abysmal record on gender.

Since the Academy Awards began in 1929, 82.2 percent of winners have been men, with women making up just 17.8 percent. Time hasn’t helped even the split out as much as you might think. Of this year’s nominated class, 67 percent are men and 33 percent are women. Unbelievably, this is the highest proportion of female nominees on record, matching the high-water mark established in 2021.

Adding casting to the Oscars almost certainly means adding female nominees. “About 75 percent of casting directors are women,” says Lana Veenker, president of the International Casting Directors Association. This year, four of the five nominees for Best Casting are women.

As is so often the case with women’s work, casting is often invisible labor. It tends to happen well before the rest of the film-making process, behind closed doors. It’s for that reason, advocates say, that it’s taken so long to get a casting-specific Oscar.

“By its nature, casting needs to be confidential,” says Destiny Lilly, president of the Casting Society. “So a lot of people who are in other disciplines don’t really see how the casting process happens.”

“We’ve been the only heads of department [credited in the main titles of a film] that didn’t have an Oscar category for years,” Veenker says.

The new Oscar has been a long time coming. The Casting Society was first founded in 1982 with the goal “to work to make a casting Oscar a reality,” Lilly says.

Casting directors started being admitted to the Academy as nonvoting members around the same time. In 1996, the Academy rejected a motion to create a specific casting director branch, and went on to reject similar motions twice more until 2013, when the casting branch finally came to fruition.

“The governors of that casting branch really were the ones who were instrumental in making the Oscar a reality,” Lilly says.

They would have a powerful ally in David Rubin, a veteran casting director who was elected president of the Academy in 2019. “He helped lay a lot of the groundwork,” Veenker says. “From what I know, it was a long process, involving a lot of heartbreak over many years.”

The hope is that the new award will help spotlight and celebrate the specific skillset that casting directors bring to the table.

“The best casting feels invisible. It’s when you can’t imagine anyone else playing those roles.”
Lana Veenker, president of the International Casting Directors Association

“What casting directors are doing is going to theater, they’re going to showcases, they’re watching little indie films that are appearing in festivals that aren’t on people’s radars,” Veenker says.

She points to the work of the casting director Nancy Bishop, who worked on 2020’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. “When they needed someone to play Sasha Baron Cohen’s daughter, she had to find an Eastern European actress who could believably pull off everything that he needed her to do in the film,” Veenker says. “The actress that she found [Maria Bakalova] was someone that she had seen in an indie film at a Karlovy Vary film festival in the Czech Republic, who was also somebody that a colleague of hers knew who had just recently come out of theater school in Bulgaria. A casting director is going to be able to know about that.”

But casting directors don’t just discover new talent; they also find ways to make audiences see familiar figures in a new light. Lilly points to Best Supporting Actress frontrunner Amy Madigan in Weapons. Madigan is best known for roles like the supportive, despairing wife in Field of Dreams, but in Weapons, she transforms herself to bone-chilling effect. “People know her work very well,” Lilly says, “but seeing her do something completely different in that way can be really exciting.”

When casting is done really well, Lilly and Veenker agree, audiences won’t notice it at all.

“It’s the kind of art that people really notice when they think it’s not good, but is almost invisible when it is good,” Lilly says.

“The best casting feels invisible,” Veenker says. “It’s when you can’t imagine anyone else playing those roles. It just all works together, like a big puzzle that fits together perfectly.”

Correction, March 12, 1:30 pm ET: A previous version of this post misstated the name of the Casting Society and the Karlovy Vary film festival.

How Epstein’s biggest financial client shaped millennial teen culture

2026-03-11T15:21:19-04:00

A tween shops at Roosevelt Field Mall circa 2001. | Photo by James Leynse/Corbis via Getty Images

The 2000s saw what was perhaps the final generation of American mall teens, before the malls became laser arenas and windowless housing developments. The teens who inhabited them believed themselves to be sophisticated; they learned what a blowjob was in middle school from the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Their jeans were low and their thongs were high, their hair was ruthlessly flat-ironed, and their perfume smelled like vanilla frosting. They bought all their favorite things from just one man.

Les Wexner was the most influential mall tycoon of the late ’90s and early 2000s. As CEO of L Brands, Wexner oversaw The Limited and The Limited Too, Bath & Body Works, Express, and — most crucially for millennial teens — Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch. Wexner’s brands defined what it meant to be a cool young person in that era, and did it so successfully that Wexner became very, very rich on the backs of his devoted adolescent customer base. The defining aesthetic of a generation was the result of his vision.

All of which gets a little concerning when you consider just how many men who worked for and with Wexner have been accused of sexual misconduct involving very young people — starting with Jeffrey Epstein.

Two “greeters” in 2002 at an Abercrombie & Fitch store in Denver.

Kathryn Osler/The Denver Post via Getty Images

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Wexner and Epstein’s “gang stuff”

Wexner started The Limited in 1963 with a $5,000 loan from his aunt, and by the 1990s, he had transformed his single store into the flagship of a multimillion-dollar conglomerate. Around the same time, he took on Epstein as his money manager. For many years after that, he would be Epstein’s only public client.

There’s little evidence to suggest that Wexner participated in Epstein’s crimes, but their intimacy has long been suggestive and confusing. The two were close enough that Wexner gave Epstein extraordinary amounts of control over his personal fortune, including power of attorney.

Wexner has never been charged in connection to Epstein. A 2019 FBI memo lists Wexner as a potential Epstein co-conspirator and notes that a subpoena had been served, but allowed that “there is limited evidence regarding his involvement.” In February, Wexner testified before Congress that he knew nothing of Epstein’s abuse of girls and young women.

Regardless, Wexner appears to have known that Epstein traded on his connection to Victoria’s Secret to target and assault aspiring models in 1997. While we don’t know what Wexner did in response to this news, their relationship appears to have withstood it.

They eventually had a falling out related to Epstein’s 2007 solicitation charges, which led Wexner to discover that Epstein had misappropriated family funds. According to reporting from the New York Times, “instead of reporting the theft to the authorities or bringing legal action against Mr. Epstein, they opted for a private settlement. In early 2008, Mr. Epstein returned $100 million to the Wexners.” The Epstein files contain an unsent and undated letter from Epstein to Wexner in which Epstein writes, “You and I had ‘gang stuff’ for over 15 years,” and adds that he has “no intention of divulging any confidence of ours.”

It appears that Epstein wasn’t the only bad actor surrounding Wexner. Ed Razek, former chief marketing officer at L Brands and a close friend of Wexner’s, has been accused of nonconsensually groping Victoria’s Secret models and blackballing those who refused his advances. Mike Jeffries, the former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, is awaiting trial on sex trafficking and prostitution charges, having allegedly targeted young men who modeled for Abercrombie, worked as the stores’ infamous shirtless greeters, or aspired to do any of the above. Bruce Weber, a photographer who shot many of Abercrombie’s famously edgy ads, has been accused of sexually exploiting male models.

Wexner’s persistent presence in the Epstein story is often overlooked, as he’s not a household name in the way that President Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Bill Gates are. Still, Wexner’s influence is undeniable because his companies were so central to the prevailing aesthetic and ethos of the 2000s. When I was a teenager in those years, every girl I knew got her first bra at Victoria’s Secret, and most of my classmates either wore or aspired to wear Abercrombie’s jokey graphic T-shirts. The companies that made up L Brands were as fundamental to the experience of being a millennial adolescent as speculating over the state of Britney Spears’s virginity was.

The compulsory raunch of the 2000s mall

its first collection aimed at teens. | J. Vespa/WireImage for Alison Brod PR" data-portal-copyright="J. Vespa/WireImage for Alison Brod PR" /> Wexner’s brands defined what it meant to be a cool young person in that era. | Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images" />

Wexner’s brands were not neutral purveyors of clothing. They defined culture and were architects of what was cool, which is to say they provided teens, tweens, and young adults with an ideology of what is acceptable and desirable, and what is not.

At L Brands mall stores, being cool meant being thin (neither Victoria’s Secret nor Abercrombie was what we would today call “size inclusive”). It also meant being white. Abercrombie infamously refused to hire people of color to work the sales floor and sold numerous racist T-shirts, while Victoria’s Secret dressed white models as “sexy little geishas” and Black models in jungle-themed lingerie.

Perhaps most importantly, though, at L Brands stores, what was cool was what was raunchy. The late 1990s and early 2000s were a sexualized and then pornified era, and perhaps nowhere was this grim, compulsory sleaze as evident as it was at the mall.

In her 2025 book Girl on Girl, the journalist Sophie Gilbert describes Abercrombie’s trendy, envelope-pushing raunch circa 1999. As Gilbert writes:

The Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly’s Christmas issue that year, titled ‘Naughty or Nice,’ featured nude photo spreads, mentions of oral sex and threesomes, and an interview with the porn actress Jenna Jameson, in which she was repeatedly harangued by the interviewer to let him touch her breasts. The publication provoked outrage in the media, but the company’s strategically sexual marketing to its teenage consumer base was sound: A 2000 Time story reported that sales had increased sixfold in just six years.

Meanwhile, Victoria’s Secret televised its annual Fashion Show for the first time in 2001. In 2002, the brand launched Pink, its first collection aimed at teenagers. Pink joined the Fashion Show in 2006, featuring young models in barely there lingerie, clutching cheerleader accessories and stuffed animals.

“Les was pretty excited about Pink, and so it got a lot of attention,” a former CEO of Victoria’s Secret said of Wexner in a 2022 documentary. “He saw an opportunity, and he likes to exploit an opportunity.”

All of this is to say that the people who taught young millennials how to be cool were people with a history of inappropriate conduct around the very young. In that case, it is perhaps not a coincidence that the cool to which they taught teenagers to aspire was a pornographic kind of cool.

We’ve spent much of the past 10 years unpacking the baggage of the 2000s: all that sleaze, all that casual misogyny, all that fat-shaming, all that cynical, performative raunch — and at the same time, that intense fixation on innocence, on purity, on virginity. The contradictions have troubled me so much that I built a whole essay series around it. Over time, what I’ve found strangest about the raunch-purity paradox of those years is that it felt so compulsory, as if there were no other options outside of the binary with which we were presented, no other way to be a person that had worth.

You had to diet yourself as thin as possible, because the Abercrombie low-rise jeans required it, and you had to navigate people (often adult men) reacting to your partially exposed Victoria’s Secret underwear, because the thongs required it. Complaining about any of the above felt like a waste of time: It meant you would come off as humorless and uncool and behind the times, and anyway, what other options did you have?

As millennials move through their 30s and 40s, we’re still making sense of the misogyny and racism that was normalized by adults in our teen years. At this point, it’s worth asking the question: Did the people who did this to us do it on purpose? Were we simply watching capitalism in action? Or was it something closer to being groomed?

What the arrest of former Prince Andrew can teach us about power and abuse

2026-02-19T16:47:03-05:00

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor back when he was Prince Andrew, at the Requiem Mass service for the Duchess of Kent, at Westminster Cathedral on September 16, 2025 in London, England. | Aaron Chown/Pool/Getty Images

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, younger brother of King Charles III and a former British royal prince, was arrested Thursday morning in the UK over suspicions that he shared confidential information with the notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. The latest batch of Epstein files appears to show Mountbatten-Windsor, at the time serving as an official British trade envoy, forwarding confidential emails to Epstein.

Mountbatten-Windsor was stripped of his royal titles last year in the midst of a mounting scandal over his association with Epstein, including accusations of sexual assault. His arrest is unprecedented in the UK, which has never before arrested the brother of a sitting monarch. In a statement, King Charles described his brother’s arrest as “the full, fair, and proper process” of the law at work, adding that law enforcement has his “full and wholehearted support and cooperation.”

The arrest of a former prince and member of the royal family — one who has still never faced legal consequences for his alleged abuse of a teenage girl — holds enormous symbolic importance in the public’s ongoing pushback against Epstein’s cadre of wealthy, powerful men. At the same time, as someone far down the line of succession and not particularly close to the king, Mountbatten-Windsor is, as royal family members go, expendable. Tracking his downfall offers us a precise illustration of exactly how much power you need to stay immune to the criminal justice system — and what happens as your power and relevance slips away.

The prince of scandal

In her 2022 opus The Palace Papers, royal watcher Tina Brown writes that “there is no doubting” that the late Queen Elizabeth II had an “especially soft spot for Andrew,” her third child. While Mountbatten-Windsor has always been scandal-prone, fond of shady real estate deals and palling around with many wealthy men of dubious character, Elizabeth installed him in the lavish Royal Lodge, with 99 acres of land and a swimming pool. Unlike other members of the royal family, famously including Prince Harry, Andrew paid no rent for his housing.

As Andrew’s scandals grew more serious, Elizabeth did not waver. In a 2015 affidavit, Virginia Giuffre accused Mountbatten-Windsor of sexually assaulting her when she was 17. She provided a damning photo as proof: a picture of her at 17 with Mountbatten-Windsor’s arm around her. Reportedly, Elizabeth sent for her son and demanded he explain himself. After he assured her that the story was made up and that the photo was doctored, Elizabeth decided not only to believe him, but also to throw her full support behind him. The same year, she made him a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order — what Brown describes as “her highest gong.” The British press dropped the story for years.

Then the burgeoning Me Too movement put Epstein back in the spotlight, and brought Mountbatten-Windsor with him. In 2019, Mountbatten-Windsor stumbled through a notorious BBC interview with the journalist Emily Maitlis in an attempt to clear his name. He succeeded only in making himself look incredibly guilty. “The Duke of York claimed on Saturday night that he could not have had sex with a teenage girl in the London home of British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell because he was at home after attending a children’s party at Pizza Express in Woking,” the Guardian reported the next day, going on to describe the alibi as “startling.”

The public response to the interview was so negative that Mountbatten-Windsor was finally forced to step back from his duties as a public royal. Elizabeth, however, wasn’t ready to give up on him yet. “Mother and son held onto the belief that, after the passage of time, Andrew could be returned to the fold with a reduced role rather than full banishment,” Brown writes in The Palace Papers.

King Charles’s reign

As the queen faded, so did Mountbatten-Windsor’s ability to outrun his scandals. In January 2022, Mountbatten-Windsor settled a lawsuit with Giuffre out of court and, “with the Queen’s approval and agreement,” was stripped of his military titles and agreed to stop using his prestigious HRH honorific. Later that year, Elizabeth died. Charles took the throne, and he apparently did not agree with his mother about the advisability of keeping his brother around. The king has also long been vocal in his belief that the royal family should make its public image less sprawling, with fewer balcony photo ops featuring distant cousins and great-aunts, and fewer minor royals who require expensive upkeep and get involved in embarrassing peccadilloes.

Last April, after more than a decade of publicly fighting Epstein and his associates, and with few legal victories to show for it, Virginia Giuffre died by suicide. In October, her memoir was posthumously published, featuring a detailed account of multiple alleged assaults at Andrew’s hands when Giuffre was 17 years old. Shortly afterward, Charles stripped Mountbatten-Windsor of his royal titles and moved him from the Royal Lodge to an unnamed cottage on the king’s private estate of Sandringham. Now, as the declassified Epstein files make their way to the public eye, Charles is cooperating with law enforcement on his brother’s arrest.

In the British royal family, all power flows from the crown itself. The closer you are to the crown, the better off you are. Mountbatten-Windsor is currently eighth in line to the throne, which is not a strong position. When his mother was queen, he benefited from her favor, but the current monarch does not appear to have any special soft spot for him.

Last November, Brown reported that Charles was attempting to be careful with Mountbatten-Windsor’s demotion, as a matter of national security. “If Charles were not to pay his brother’s bills and ensure a certain level of comfort, Andrew would have only his secrets to sell,” Brown wrote on her Substack, Fresh Hell. It now appears that Mountbatten-Windsor sold his secrets to his pedophile friend a long time ago. He has no currency left with which to operate. In the meantime, Virginia Giuffre is dead, and a number of Epstein’s surviving victims were recently outed by the US Department of Justice, which published their unredacted names and nude photos. Of all the powerful people complicit in the abuse of these women, will any who aren’t considered expendable by their institutions ever face justice?

Correction, February 19, 2026, 4:50 pm ET: A previous version of this post misstated the birth order of Elizabeth II’s children.

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a million times edgier than Emerald Fennell’s

2026-02-18T09:38:01-05:00

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie as Heathcliff and Catherine in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. | Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

You come into a movie based on Wuthering Heights with certain expectations.

Emerald Fennell has been clear that she considers her “Wuthering Heights” — pointed quote marks and all — to be a fantasia, not a straight adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. “It could only ever be an attempt to take a tiny piece of the book and make sense of it,” she said in a recent interview. Still, as a matter of basic fact, Wuthering Heights is a story of passionate, obsessive love between two monstrous sadists, and Fennell’s version of the story is so very showy about how sexy and dark it plans to be. So you would think that the tiny piece of the story she’s trying to make sense of would be the part about the sexy sociopaths in love.

Fennell’s film opens with the sounds of a body writhing in what the audience at first believes to be sex, but soon learns are actually death throes. Its ostentatiously perverse production design is filled with rooms wallpapered with flesh-colored leather, complete with veins and moles; long, lingering closeups of moist slug trails; characters outfitted in full red latex skirts or transparent cellophane drapery. It is a film that palpably wants to be thought of as kinky — a storytelling mode that should mesh nicely with Brontë’s bleak, merciless world.

Brontë punishes her readers for even liking her characters. Its most charismatic and compelling characters, the doomed lovers Heathcliff and Catherine, are also two of its greatest monsters. Feral and violent, Brontë’s Heathcliff and Catherine ruin lives and inflict wanton amounts of pain for the sheer sport of it all, but they also love each other overwhelmingly, ferociously, enough to tear down the world all around each other. Reading about them, it’s both difficult to wish them well and impossible not to feel that they really should be together. That contradiction is what creates the tension that powers the reader through this brutal, bleak book, with all its misery and squalor.

Yet puzzlingly, Fennell chooses to delete this source of tension from her version of the story. Her Catherine and Heathcliff are beautiful blameless horndogs, to the point that they resemble the lovely personality-free characters in Nicholas Sparks films, beset by tragedies for which they hold absolutely no responsibility. Fennell neuters her monsters, and that is the one fault from which Wuthering Heights can never recover.

The perverse power of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff and Catherine do not begin their lives as villains. In Brontë’s novel, they are first neglected children. Catherine is the spoiled daughter of a wealthy, isolated family on the English moors, and Heathcliff is the racially ambiguous foundling her father brings home from a visit to the city. At first, the pair live as brother and sister; they are educated together and, after their lessons, run across the moors like animals, considering “the after punishment” to be “a mere thing to laugh at.” But after Catherine’s father dies and her brother Hindley takes over the house, he jealously demotes Heathcliff from fellow brother to servant, leaving him uneducated and impoverished.

Did Brontë have more stories to tell?

Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis at age 30, leaving behind only Wuthering Heights and her poetry. But scholars have long been haunted by the possibility that she might have been working on a second novel when she died. In a letter sent shortly before her death, Brontë’s publisher wrote that he “shall have great pleasure in making arrangements for your second novel,” and that Brontë is “quite right not to let it go before the world until well satisfied with it.” If Brontë was corresponding with her publisher about a second book, the thinking goes, she must have been well into it.

So what happened to this mysterious manuscript? No trace of the novel has ever been found. The persistent, never-confirmed rumor, however, is that Brontë’s sister Charlotte, of Jane Eyre fame, destroyed the manuscript to protect Emily’s reputation. Victorian readers were shocked enough by the bleakness of Wuthering Heights. Whatever was in the second book might have been even more brutal.

The tragedy of the novel all unspools from that first act of abuse. When Catherine comes of age as a member of genteel society, she decides that although she loves Heathcliff, she cannot marry him because he is socially below her. Instead she marries a rich but weak man who she can dominate and control. At the same time, she covers up her intense and passionate nature, ensuring her fits of rage only ever happen at strategically chosen moments.

Heathcliff, heartbroken, disappears for three years and then returns mysteriously rich, polished, and determined to exact his revenge. He drives Hindley into an alcoholic depression that eventually leads to his death, and then takes custody of Hindley’s house and child and sets about degrading each as vividly as possible. He marries Catherine’s sister-in-law and abuses both her and their child. A mere hundred pages into the novel, he has become so sadistic that he is strangling a puppy with a handkerchief.

Catherine, in her turn, is violent with her servants, her husband, and her sister-in-law whenever she feels she can get away with it. She eggs Heathcliff on, delighting in his rages. “He’s more myself than I am,” she says, meaning, among other things, that all the monstrous urges Catherine must hide and sublimate in herself, Heathcliff is free to enact. After Catherine dies, Heathcliff goes to great lengths to draw her daughter into his clutches, where he can rage at her.

By the time Catherine and Heathcliff are adults, they are so palpably awful that it is difficult to care for them at all. But Brontë dares you to keep reading, lavishing her most beautiful prose on these wretched, miserable people. “Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” Catherine says of Heathcliff as she resolves not to marry him. “Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad!” cries out Heathcliff to Catherine’s ghost after she dies.

There is such vitality to their characters that the story goes flat on the page whenever they are not there, terrorizing everyone around them. They are the reason the world of Wuthering Heights is so awful and oppressive, and the contradiction between their passion and their cruelty is what makes the book dynamic and unforgettable. Without that tension, it would never have remained beloved or relevant for long as it has.

Blaming Nelly Dean

Wuthering Heights. | Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures" data-portal-copyright="Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures" />

In Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” the great monster is not Heathcliff or Catherine, or even Catherine’s brother Hindley. (Fennell chooses to combine Hindley with Catherine’s father in a perfectly reasonable consolidation of characters.) It’s Catherine’s maid, Nelly.

In Brontë’s novel, Nelly Dean is one of the central narrators. She grows up with Catherine and Heathcliff and works as a maid in Catherine’s house after her marriage, with a close view of all the horrors that are enacted there. We learn Catherine and Heathcliff’s tale because Nelly is recounting it to Heathcliff’s new tenant, so that the whole novel becomes one story nested inside another, in a sort of matryoshka doll of trauma.

Nelly, tartly sensible and with little tolerance for her employers’ dramatics, is ostensibly one of the few sympathetic characters in a novel containing precious few of them — Charlotte Brontë described her as “a specimen of true benevolence and homely fidelity.” But there’s an ambiguity to her storytelling that has led some readers to consider her an unreliable narrator, and perhaps ultimately the villain of the whole piece. She keeps silent when she learns that Heathcliff has disastrously misheard Catherine, with the eventual consequence that he runs away, and she refuses to take Catherine’s final illness seriously until it is too late for her to be saved. Would things have gotten so bad, some readers demand, if it weren’t for Nelly?

Fennell signals early on that she will be following this reading. She inserts a new scene in which Catherine’s eventual husband, Edgar Linton, listens to Isabella Linton (in Brontë’s story, Linton’s sister; in Fennell’s, his ward) explain the plot of Romeo and Juliet. “I don’t really like the nurse,” Isabella declares, before going on to argue that all the needless death and bloodshed of Romeo and Juliet could have been avoided if only Juliet’s nurse had been more responsible.

Drawing parallels between Juliet’s nurse and Catherine’s maid, Fennell comes down hard on Nelly over the course of her film. Any mistake Nelly makes is recast as a mean-spirited and deliberate act of vengeance on people who are hotter and more interesting than she is. They are also, in Fennell’s version of the story, whiter than Nelly — Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity is erased while Nelly becomes a woman of color, in a strangely nasty bit of not-quite-color-blind casting. At the end of the film, Edgar Linton declares the maid a “torturer” and condemns her for the rage hiding within her.

The whole thing is oddly reminiscent of Fennell’s vapid Saltburn, in which the rich and beautiful are revealed at the end to be virtuous and correct, while the poor are scheming social climbers. Fennell has a fondness for subversion, but somehow she seems to always end up subverting her way to the most conservative position possible.

It’s absolutely possible to come to the conclusion that Nelly is unreliable or even villainous within a good faith reading of Brontë’s novel. One potential consequence of such a reading that is congruent with the emotional tone of the novel might be to remove the comfort of a fully likable character from this harsh, bleak landscape, and to allow ourselves to experience the horror of a world in which everyone is ruthless and wicked out for themselves. Fennell, instead, uses it as an excuse to reveal that Catherine and Heathcliff bear no fault at all for what befalls them, and that all of the tragedy was a result of Nelly’s meddling — a sort of Joker apologia for them, if it were already Batman canon that the Joker was pretty sexy and glamorous and had a tragic backstory.

Watching Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” there is no point at which you are asked to sit with the discomfort of finding a monster more interesting and lively than their prey. At no point are you asked to look at someone doing something terrible, and remember that they used to be a child who was treated badly.

Brontë’s Cathy beats her servants, her horses, her husband. She flies into uncontrollable rages and plots to destroy her enemies. Fennell’s Cathy offers the occasional mean girl putdown, swiftly belied by her beautiful tear-swollen eyes, which reveal her true purity of heart. She is not so much passionate and angry as she is pragmatic and a little bit petty.

Brontë’s Heathcliff slowly and systematically bankrupts his abuser and then ruins the man’s son. Fennell’s Heathcliff kindly cares for his adopted father in his broken old age. Brontë’s Heathcliff tortures the feckless Isabella’s puppy, then seduces her and abuses her and their child. Fennell’s Heathcliff mostly stares in confusion as Isabella writhes in pleasure on the end of a dog’s leash, having not only enthusiastically consented to the treatment, but in fact instigated it. When onscreen Catherine tells Isabella that Heathcliff will eat her alive, the moment feels absurd: The audience knows by this point that Isabella is an oversexed weirdo who will do whatever she wants with reserved, pliant Heathcliff. (In fact, she does.)

No adaptation must be absolutely faithful to its source text in order to be good, but it has to do something. It has to have an energy, a source of tension, a reason to exist. But having excised the tension of Brontë’s novel from her film, Fennell replaces it with absolutely nothing. Instead, you are asked only to watch beautiful people engage in mild BDSM play upon the beautiful moors, and then die through no fault of their own.

All that gleefully perverse production design made promises, and she follows through on absolutely none of them. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” reaches no heights at all.

How the left taught the right to hate white women

2026-02-23T11:57:16-05:00

Tens of thousands of marchers participate in New York's second annual Women's March to protest against President Donald Trump on January 20, 2018, in Midtown Manhattan. | Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

A new villain has emerged in right-wing discourse: the Affluent White Female Urban Liberal, or AWFUL.

Talking heads on Fox News and right-wing YouTubers describe AWFULs as smug, entitled, and even “a cancer on the nation.” AWFULs, their argument goes, are the reason that ICE activities in Minnesota have become so violent. These women are driven by their sexual frustration; their lack of real problems; their empty, childless lives. ICE Watch is full of them. Renée Good was one, which is why her death, while tragic, is ultimately not the fault of the man who shot her.

The acronym appears to have emerged around the end of the Biden years. In 2024, the Washington Examiner was bemoaning the influence of AWFLs (no U) on the mayor of Alexandria, Virginia, and musing over whether this demographic was “so annoying and repulsive that they’re driving centrist voters, particularly men, away from the Democratic Party.”

The idea appeared to be that rich white liberal women had gotten too preachy, too virtue-signaling. They wanted people to wear masks and get vaccinated during the Covid pandemic. They marched and protested over the death of George Floyd. They kept talking about the climate crisis. How annoying!

Liberal men did that too, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that all of this behavior felt feminine; it reminded people of their moms, who, by their nature, are not cool. The Washington Examiner cited the Democratic strategist James Carville, who theorized that Democrats were dominated by “too many preachy females.” The party’s talking points, Carville told the New York Times in 2024, were all, “‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.’ The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’”

The AWFUL label emerged into the mainstream in January, after the shooting of Renée Good. Conservatives rushed to position not just Good, but also her entire demographic, as the villain of the encounter. There was, right-wingers agreed, something about how smug these women were; they needed to be taken down a peg.

Fox News’s David Marcus described Good and other liberal white women as “organized gangs of wine moms,” adding, “The video of Good and her partner heckling and, let’s be honest, goading ICE officers with an obnoxious smugness that makes most people’s skin crawl, is just one of many. We see these self-important white women doing it in video after video after video, taunting cops, insulting journalists or even bystanders, often with a weird and disturbing glee.”

That there’s no equivalent term for the white liberal men resisting ICE points to the fact that misogyny is at the core of the right’s problem with AWFULs. But it’s also worth noting that they got this playbook from the left. The AWFUL script is a direct copy of the progressive disdain for white women in the past decade.

The right is going after white women because the left showed them how to do it. Here’s how they got here from there.

Evolution of an acronym

2017: The first Women’s March makes headlines.

2018: The second Women’s March is plagued by stories of the misbehavior of white feminists. Meanwhile, social media posters start making fun of Karens.

2020: The Karen meme goes mainstream.

2024: Prominent Democrats start arguing that liberal women are making the party look bad. Meanwhile, conservatives start talking about what a problem AWFULs are.

2026: Renée Good is killed, and the AWFUL meme breaks containment.

How Karen got deradicalized

The AWFUL’s immediate antecedent is the Karen: similarly white, female, and entitled. A meme that emerged around 2018, before exploding in 2020, showed a parody of the kind of woman who is rude to service workers, racist to people of color, and always wants to speak to the manager.

The Karen meme was, in part, used by people of color to describe a real problem with white women using the cover of their race to be abusive toward Black people, an evolution of the Miss Ann and Becky tropes. It was used to refer to women like Amy Cooper, who called the cops on a Black bird watcher, and Lisa Alexander, who called the police about a Black man writing “Black Lives Matter” in chalk on his own house: inarguably racist incidents that deserved to be called out and named.

But there’s another layer to the Karen meme that is rooted in a disdain for women in general.

As Aja Romano laid out for Vox in 2020, part of the reason Karen is called Karen is because of a Reddit user who became internet-niche-famous for posting long, bitter rants about his ex-wife, Karen. Other Redditors compiled the Karen lore into the subreddit r/FuckYouKaren, which then overlapped with the independently developing Karen meme to become a place where people posted stories about women they deemed to be Karens misbehaving in public. At the root of the meme, then, is one man’s invective toward his ex-wife: not exactly someone punching up.

As the Karen meme grew to be more popular, it began to lose its edge. Many of those who spread it did so not because they cared about racial politics, but because they were excited to have a new word they could use to insult any woman they found annoying, no matter her race or politics or whether she ever tried to talk to the manager.

In the Guardian in 2020, Hadley Freeman described posting on what was then Twitter that she thought there were sexist, ageist, and classist undertones to the Karen meme. Soon, she said, her replies were filled with “men gleefully calling me a Karen (‘OK, Karen’) and telling me to make them a sandwich.” Freeman added, “Do I really need to spell out the sexism of a meme about a woman’s name that took off from a man griping about his ex-wife and has become a way of telling women to shut up?”

Progressives turn on the feminist in the pussy hat

As Karen rose in prominence, so too did her close cousin: the white feminist.

Criticism of white feminism, like criticisms of Karen, originated in communities of color. But while Karen was openly awful to Black people, the white feminist was more prone to microaggressions.

The central critique was that mainstream feminism prioritized the experiences and needs of white women. White feminists, in particular, had a history of ignoring the ways in which multiple axes of oppression intersect and exacerbate each other.

“White Feminism exists to promote the comfort and safety of middle-class and affluent White women,” wrote Black feminist academic Monnica T. Williams in 2019. “At its core, it is a racist ideology that claims to speak for all women while ignoring the needs of women of color and suppressing our voices when our agendas and priorities don’t align.” Among other things, Williams called out the failure of mainstream feminism to fight for better health care for Black women, who die in childbirth at three times the rate of white American women, or acknowledge the way the criminal justice system disproportionately impacts women of color.

Williams argued that the 2017 Women’s March was particularly guilty of ignoring the concerns of women of color, and she was not alone in that analysis. While some described it as “the most diverse march for women’s rights ever,” many women of color said they didn’t feel welcome. Even the pink pussy hat — the march’s most enduring icon — became a symbol of division (because not all pussies are pink, and not all women have pussies).

As the criticisms of white feminism entered the larger conversation, they — much like the idea of the Karen — lost their political edge. If anyone wanted to communicate that they thought the ladies in pink pussy hats protesting against Trump were kind of annoying, the phrase “white feminist” was right there.

“Let’s talk white women, shall we?” comedian Bill Burr said in his Saturday Night Live monologue in 2020. “The way white women somehow hijacked the woke movement, generals around the world should be analyzing this. Just to refresh your memory, the woke movement was supposed to be about people of color not getting opportunities, the advance that they deserved, finally making that happen. And it was about that, for about eight seconds. And then somehow, white women swung their Gucci-booted feet over the fence of oppression and stuck themselves at the front of the line. I don’t know how they did it. I have never in my life heard so much complaining from white women!” Burr burst into faux sobs. “‘My life is so hard with my SUV and my heated seats. You have no idea what it’s like to be me.’”

The initial criticism of white feminism was intended to draw attention to the way both misogyny and racism affect women of color. But it also gave cover to plenty of people who were delighted to use it to dismiss any woman concerned about her own oppression as oblivious and annoying.

As Democrats headed into the 2024 election with a woman of color as their candidate, they found themselves in an odd position: Feminism, which had seemed such a political win circa 2017, was now a liability. It was too blinkered and tame for the progressive left, and too radical and threatening for the right. Who wanted to be like those awful women with the pink hats? Everyone knew they were cringey and unfashionable, complaining over nothing.

The Karen-AWFUL switcheroo

The AWFUL meme pulls off one of conservatism’s favorite tricks, what you might call the “reverse racism” maneuver: It takes critiques used by the left to describe a structural power dynamic, and then reverses the power dynamics to claim that, in fact, it is the right who is being oppressed by those snobby elitists on the left.

The Karen meme is rooted in an unkind stereotype of a conservative white woman: suburban, unfashionable, anti-vax, rude to service workers, with lots of annoying kids. The AWFUL meme, in turn, is rooted in an unkind stereotype of a liberal white woman, pulling from both the white feminist and the earlier era of anti-feminist critique: shrill, angry, virtue-signaling, either childless or just a bad mother.

In each case, the meme’s leftist roots offer cover to the people who are using it. It was fine to make fun of the Karen because she was rude to working-class people and abusive to people of color. Ostensibly, you weren’t mocking her for being a woman; you were mocking her for her racism and classism. When progressives take jabs at white feminists, they’re ostensibly not mad because these are women complaining about their problems, but because they are oblivious to the struggles of people of color.

In turn, the people now deriding AWFULs are not explicitly bothered that they’re women protesting in public. They’re simply making fun of these women for being liberal scolds who lord their wealth and social capital over the brave blue-collar ICE workers they are protesting against. It’s the same type of social cover that the Karen meme offered, appropriated and rejiggered to support a conservative worldview.

In each case, we’re meant to believe that it’s just a coincidence that the annoying, clueless, and bigoted people being mocked just happen to be women. But it’s notable that Karen’s male counterpart, Ken, never got as much attention as Karen did. And while conservative commenters don’t seem thrilled about white liberal male protestors, they have yet to give that demographic a catchy little acronym. They smeared Alex Pretti as a violent radical, but they showed perhaps even more disdain in their smearing of Renée Good as an annoying radical.

The overlap in all of these memes about white women is entitlement. If used sincerely by people who genuinely care about racial justice, the memes could be taken as a meaningful critique of white female complacency. When used in bad faith, they start to look a lot more like discomfort with seeing women have opinions in public.

None of this is to say that white women are beyond reproach, or that they can never be complicit in classism and racism. But it is notable how frequently legitimate criticism of white women coming from communities of color turns into an excuse for left-leaning white men (or other white women) to tell women to shut up and stop complaining — all of which gives cover to conservatives when they want to tell women to go back to the kitchen without sounding like chauvinists. That doesn’t actually help the people of color, whom everyone claims to be so outraged on behalf of.

What might be most helpful here is to turn back to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, or the idea that people from different identity groups experience oppression in different and sometimes overlapping ways. Crenshaw originally developed intersectionality as a legal theory, to push courts to understand that women of color experience discrimination both on the basis of their sex and on the basis of their race, rather than just one or the other. In other words, intersectionality was meant to give us a language for talking about more forms of oppression, not to tell some oppressed people to be quiet.

So the next time a fun new word about how annoying a certain kind of woman enters the zeitgeist, perhaps consider: Is your goal in using this word to make a critique of structural racism in the US? Is using this word the only way you show up for people of color? Or are you more interested in telling a woman you don’t like to shut up?

Woke isn’t dead. Bad Bunny’s halftime show proved it.

2026-02-10T11:52:00-05:00

Bad Bunny performs onstage during the Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show at Levi's Stadium on February 08, 2026 in Santa Clara, California. | Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

As the NFL sent out a final marketing blitz for Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday, the official Democratic Party X account shared a picture of Bad Bunny in front of the American and Puerto Rican flags under the text “All-American halftime with Bad Bunny.” It didn’t sit right with one Republican.

“Unpopular: Republicans need to unite and get on better messaging because this branding is fantastic and allows all dems to get behind it. Also – super aesthetic,” wrote the political commenter and country singer Alexis Wilkins on X, quoting the post from @TheDemocrats in her message to her 88.2K followers.

Wilkins, who is dating FBI director Kash Patel, continued her argument on X the next day, after Bad Bunny’s show had already become a much-viewed and much-discussed sensation. She hadn’t watched, she said, but that wasn’t the issue. “My point was that we can’t give the left an inch of the ground we gained in the last election. … We all thought Bad Bunny was going to come out in a dress that said ICE OUT – but he didn’t. This would’ve all been easier to message if he did. They’re pulling the unity trope and we can’t let them have it.”

An important clarification on my post last night: I didn’t watch Bad Bunny’s performance at all. My point wasn’t the show.

My point was that we can’t give the left an inch of the ground we gained in the last election. They’re clearly going to cosplay as people who “love…
— Alexis Wilkins (@AlexisWilkins) February 9, 2026

As Wilkins fretted over how the American public would receive the halftime show, President Donald Trump was already venting his outrage on Truth Social.

“The Super Bowl Halftime Show is absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!” Trump posted. “It makes no sense, is an affront to the Greatness of America, and doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence. Nobody understands a word this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting, especially for young children that are watching from throughout the U.S.A., and all over the World.”

Embedded in both Wilkins’s unease and Trump’s fury was the same concern. Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show was an undeniable smash from one of the most popular entertainers in the world right now. It was also undeniably concerned with the dignity and humanity of residents of Bad Bunny’s native Puerto Rico and all of Latin America — which is to say, it had “woke” themes. And that didn’t stop it from being a hit at all! What might that mean for the culture wars?

The phantom vibe shift

After the 2024 election, a narrative developed among members of American media. The “vibes” (loosely defined) had “shifted,” they said, and America was no longer interested in entertainment or celebrities that were “woke” (also very loosely defined). Now, for the first time since the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it was the right’s turn to define culture.

“Here’s how bad the Democrats fucked up: Trump is cool now,” said Bill Maher last January, as Trump took office. Emboldened, billionaires who spent years paying lip service to liberal causes began openly courting Trump, corporations gutted their DEI policies, and hot young people gave gleeful quotes to magazines about how excited they were to be able to use slurs in public again.

As Ezra Klein noted in the New York Times last January, the shift didn’t seem entirely justified by Trump’s narrow electoral win. “Trump’s cultural victory has lapped his political victory,” Klein wrote. “The election was close, but the vibes have been a rout.”

Yet, a year into Trump’s administration, it seems less clear that the vibes are still in Trump’s favor. The cultural success stories of the past year have included Sinners, a crowdpleasing blockbuster that is also a parable about the horrors of racial appropriation, and Heated Rivalry, a genre romance about two gay hockey players struggling against the homophobia of the NHL. The Grammy for Album of the Year went to Bad Bunny himself, marking the first time a Spanish-language album won the award. The biggest political star of 2025 was New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, an avowed socialist who managed to win over Trump himself. Meanwhile, JD Vance is getting booed at the Olympics, and even the manosphere podcasters who helped propel Trump to victory in 2024 have been criticizing the policies he’s enacted in office. “Are we really gonna be the Gestapo, ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?” Joe Rogan asked in January.

It certainly doesn’t appear that Americans en masse are falling into fits of patriotic rage about the idea that the Super Bowl halftime show was sung mostly in Spanish; the complaints appear to be coming from the usual suspects, like former Real Housewife Jill Zarin and YouTuber Jake Paul. Viewers also don’t even seem to mind the political message that was on display. As Izzie Ramirez explained for Vox, the whole routine was a love letter to Puerto Rico and a celebration of Puerto Rico’s identity as a culture in its own right. It would have been in character for Benito to take it farther (he likes to play with gender norms in his outfits, and he began his Grammy exception speech last week with the words “ICE out!”). But the message came across anyway, in part because the existence of a person of color speaking Spanish at an “all-American” event like the Super Bowl is seen as inherently “left” by some people.

Ultimately, though, Benito ended his performance with two messages: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love,” and, “Together, we are all America.” Those are both strong, popular ideas that lots of people in the US agree with and that it would feel almost perverse to take issue with.

Meanwhile, the right offered counter programming that didn’t have nearly the same cultural impact. Turning Point USA, the conservative campus organization that was the brainchild of the late Charlie Kirk, ran a concert billed as “The All-American Super Bowl Halftime Show” (the same language that Democrats would wink at when they posted their Bad Bunny ad). The show’s most prominent entertainer was perennial Trump supporter Kid Rock, who appeared to lip sync at least part of his set.

Trump, with his animal instinct for where the public’s attention is drifting, did not post about the All-American Halftime Show once. Early estimates have it drawing 18 million views. Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, in contrast, is projected to have gotten 128 million.

If an event as plainly, brutally capitalistic and unconcerned with social justice as the Super Bowl can bring a cheering, joyous audience to its feet with a show celebrating the vibrancy of Latino culture — even as the Trump administration is violently arresting Latino immigrants without due process and claiming to be doing so at the behest of the American people — well, is the anti-woke vibe shift truly over? Did it even ever happen at all?

Last year, we witnessed a slew of billionaires excited that Trump’s win gave them an excuse to stop pretending to care about social justice, while irony-poisoned groypers felt emboldened to have splashy parties where they could shout their beloved slurs as loudly as they pleased. But that didn’t mean that the entire country had suddenly embraced the cruelty of Trumpism. It doesn’t mean that they are willing to ignore the power of an incredible groove because the lyrics sung over it are in Spanish. And it doesn’t mean they have soured on the idea of love beating hate. In fact, they seem to find it especially compelling and worth celebrating when the consequences of the Trump administration’s xenophobic hatred are playing out in the streets right now, in plain view of everyone.

Trump’s supporters are real, and they are committed. But it’s worth considering that perhaps American culture never truly belonged to Donald Trump at all.

Why is Trump so obsessed with the Kennedy Center?

2026-02-04T12:04:49-05:00

Workers affix signage adding President Donald Trump's name on the facade of the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in December 2025. | Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

President Donald Trump announced Sunday that he will be shutting down the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for two years starting in the summer. Trump claims the shutdown, which comes after a series of high-profile boycotts and cancellations, will allow him to perform “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding” that will make the Kennedy Center “the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World.”

It’s worth digging into why Trump has gone to such lengths to reimagine the Kennedy Center. While the Center is prestigious and a diplomatic asset, most presidents before Trump have been content to leave it to its own devices while they focus on more volatile political matters.

Trump, meanwhile, has fixated on the Kennedy Center ever since he got himself installed as chair last February in an unprecedented campaign. (US presidents have the right to appoint people to the Kennedy Center board, but none have ever served as chair, which is the person in charge of overseeing the Center’s finances, governance, and programming.). He has put his name on the building on top of John F. Kennedy’s (possibly illegally). He has demanded a new “anti-woke” direction to the programming and installed himself as host of the annual Kennedy Center Honors (the broadcast had historically low ratings).

As dozens of artists and celebrities have canceled their planned performances at the Kennedy Center, and ticket sales have plummeted, Trump has only doubled down on his plans to control the Center. “America will be very proud of its new and beautiful Landmark for many generations to come,” he declared on Truth Social on Sunday evening.

The Trump administration is currently embroiled in multiple scandals, including the horrors of federal agents’ actions in Minneapolis and Trump’s as-yet unexplained appearance in the Epstein Files. His approval ratings are tanking. Yet Trump appears content to delegate handling of those matters to his lieutenants, and instead focus on what he cares about most: the nation’s performing arts center. Why does he care so much?

I’ve written before about the opportunity this takeover gives Trump to have his revenge on the theatrical world, which made its disdain for him clear during his first term in office. But it also offers Trump a chance to fulfill a romantic old dream of his.

In 1970, a 23-year-old Trump became a co-producer on a Broadway show called Paris Is Out! apparently with the goal of making producing his full-time career. “He had done his homework, and that was unusual,” his co-producer told the New York Times in 2016. “Most of the people who put up money for shows just wanted to meet girls and go to parties, but he wasn’t like that.” But the show was a flop, and Trump never produced anything again.

Instead, he became a fixture at Broadway openings and theatrical events. As early as 1992 — the same year his then-fiancee Marla Maples made her Broadway debut — Trump was toying with the idea of making a musical of his own life. In 2005, he announced that The Apprentice would be adapted as a stage musical, a plan that never reached fruition. When he turned to politics, he made a habit of blasting Andrew Lloyd Webber at campaign rallies. (Lloyd Webber has asked him to stop.) During his first term, according to a former White House press secretary, one of his aides was assigned to play him show tunes whenever Trump was about to fly off the handle.

At the Kennedy Center, Trump has been able to indulge his inner theater kid. Leaked audio of his first meeting with the board as chair found him waxing poetic about a memorable visit to see Cats on Broadway. “All of a sudden the lights go on and you see these people moving so incredibly, like nobody can move except a professional dancer,” he marveled. He considered Betty Buckley, who originated the featured role of Grizabella in Cats, a revelation. “Of all the great voices and stars, bigger stars than her, she had the best voice,” he said. He made a point of saying that he tended to be a purist when it comes to recasting Broadway shows. “Oftentimes it seems the original is the best,” he mused, like any teenage Hamilton fan ready to throw down for Phillippa Soo’s Eliza.

If his renovation turned bulldozing of the East Wing is any indication, Trump’s “rebuilding” of the Kennedy Center is likely to be drastic — another chance for the president to reshape federal buildings to his own preferences; another chance for the man who plastered his name across shoddy gilded towers around the world to put his name on a new building. But it also gives Trump a chance to put his stamp on a world that he has plainly always loved, and which has, just as plainly, never really loved him back.

Why is America so horny for gay hockey jocks?

2026-01-14T10:54:44-05:00

The two heated rivals at the heart of Heated Rivalry.

To outsiders, the phenomenon of Heated Rivalry could not seem more impossible: A show about two rival hockey players is one of the most popular shows on HBO Max. Not only that, but these two puck buddies have a lot of sex. There has never been a moment in history when the world has been more obsessed with gay, Canadian, softcore porn.

Since the show premiered in late 2025, stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie have been on every red carpet and in every photoshoot, and they’ve talked to seemingly every entertainment publication in existence. They’ve amassed millions of social media followers overnight. (Their co-stars have become hot Hollywood commodities, as well.) And at this Sunday’s Golden Globes, an awards show that brings together the biggest movie and TV actors on one stage, all eyes were on the two heated rivals.

The intensity of their stardom and how quickly the pair have ascended all raises the question: Why? What is it about Heated Rivalry that everyone loves? What itch is this smutty hockey show scratching? Does the world simply thirst for hockey butts?

To get a better perspective on the show’s popularity, I asked Vox’s book critic and senior correspondent Constance Grady for some help explaining the popularity, the intensity of that popularity, and why it is and isn’t at all surprising that women, in particular, are powering the gay hockey smut moment that we’re living in.

Constance, please tell me what you thought of Heated Rivalry. Have you read the books?

I have to start off by admitting that Heated Rivalry is one of those things that is close enough to the stuff I like that I thought I should enjoy it, but then I simply did not.

This is how I feel about confetti/funfetti cake. I like all the things that constitute confetti cake — vanilla, celebration, icing, buttercream, sugar, cake — separately, but it just doesn’t work for me.

Heated Rivalry is famously inspired by Real Person Fanfiction, specifically hockey RPF, which is big enough to be its own genre. (We’ll get into it.) I like love stories, and I like fan fiction, so I was ready to be as obsessed with Heated Rivalry as everybody who watches it seems to be.

But I think I simply read too much fan fiction to be surprised by the structure of the story! It is a very tropey narrative, which you expect from a romance. In book form, that’s part of the pleasure of the genre. Onscreen, though, I found myself craving more surprises and more specificity in the way the characters developed and the way they approached their relationship.

Also, all the time jumps made me feel like I should be doing math, and that stressed me out.

Key takeaways

Even though Heated Rivalry is a story about the yearning, burning love (or lust) between two male hockey players, women are an integral part of its popularity success.
While not as popular as heterosexual romance, gay guy smut is actually a very robust and popular subgenre.
Despite liking all the individual ingredients that make up funfetti cake, Vox senior correspondent Alex Abad-Santos has yet to taste a funfetti cake he enjoys.

This makes total sense. If you look at the structure of the first couple of episodes, it goes from time jump, to gay sex, to getting harangued by parents, to time jump, to gay sex, and on, and on. It’s not like there’s any interesting progression either, because the through line is that they’re just kinda texting?

I will push back a little on the idea that there’s no progression. The sex scenes are what bear the weight of the character development, which is something I think the show does pretty elegantly. (There’s a great analysis here.) Within that context, the time jumps are part of the tropiness of it all. It’s like the show is saying, “Why waste time on anything that’s not the love story?” I simply wanted the progression to surprise me a little more.

But even though you weren’t a fan, it’s still an undeniable hit. Did that surprise you?

Yes, and no! I am not surprised that Heated Rivalry has an obsessive fan base, but I did not expect it to garner as much mainstream attention as it has.

Women have been writing love stories about queer men — and inserting those stories into the media they read and watch — for a long, long time. In Japan, the “Boys’ Love” genre — fiction about two beautiful boys in love, generally created by and for women — is absolutely huge, and it has been since it emerged in the 1970s. In the US, we usually date the obsession back to the advent of Kirk/Spock slash fan fiction around the same time, when Star Trek fan writers began exploring the idea that Kirk and Spock’s friendship might have romantic undertones. There’s been a massive underserved audience just waiting for a love story like this one for literal decades. It makes sense to me that they would pick up on it and champion it.

I did not expect that, like, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie would be the stars of this year’s Golden Globes. (HBO didn’t either, which is why Heated Rivalry came out well after this year’s nomination period closed. Even if the Globes were willing to bend their rules for a Canadian-produced show, they physically couldn’t have done it.) It wasn’t all that long ago that the idea that women are into stories about men in love would lead to fascinated tittering about how, after all, men like girl-on-girl action, too. And here we are with gay hockey RPF at the center of the mainstream! I genuinely would never have expected it.

I suppose one can never underestimate the power of women who want to see some hot guys in love with each other.

Was the Heated Rivalry series already popular in book sales? Was this simply just a matter of popularity crossing genres (with TV having a bigger audience, of course)?

Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series, of which Heated Rivalry is book two, was popular enough before this to get name-checked in a Washington Post article about hockey romance, but the scale was totally different. Heated Rivalry is a New York Times bestseller now for the first time. (It’s unusual for genre romance to make the New York Times bestseller list, because a lot of the genre’s sales go through channels the Times doesn’t track or doesn’t weigh heavily.) Vanity Fair found that, since the end of 2024, library holds on the book have gone up 10,534 percent. (!)

There was certainly a fan base waiting for this show. But, I don’t think anyone could have expected that it would blow up the way it has.

One of the things that struck me is that there’s a very large number of women obsessed with gay guy smut. Heated Rivalry would not be as big if women weren’t interested. Is gay guy smut a popular genre for women readers in the book world?

Gay guy smut is so popular that there are whole books trying to understand and explain why it is so popular. There’s a lot of nuance to why different women are so into it, but one pretty central idea is that gay guy smut allows a woman the pleasure of reading a romance without having to deal with all the social baggage that comes with women’s bodies. Internalized body hatred, weird kinks, gendered power dynamics — it all gets neutralized. What’s left has room to become a lot freer and more compelling.

I want to ask: Is gay guy hockey smut particularly popular? And as a subgenre, is gay guy smut the most popular of all the smuts?

I would not say male-male romance outsells hetero romance. Romance is a big, booming world, one in which queer romance occupies a healthy niche, but the biggest sellers there do tend to be heterosexual.

Sports romance, however, is also a healthy niche, and hockey romance is the undisputed king of the subgenre. In the traditional publishing world, hockey romance novels are big enough that professional hockey players have been making TikToks about reading them since well before Heated Rivalry hit HBO.

In the fan world, almost every fan writer I have ever followed ends up writing hockey RPF at one point or another. “We’ve lost another one,” is what I text my fic-reading friends when that happens.

So what’s the deal with hockey? Why not tennis, or lacrosse, or baseball? Is it the butts?

Some hockey romance fans have argued that it’s because hockey is so violent. It’s the only sport that not only still allows fighting, but also has a detailed code of conduct involving when and how to start fighting. To put such macho guys into a narrative that is by its nature about emotional vulnerability — well, there’s a nice frisson of tension there.

These two are EVERYWHERE!

| Getty Images for Moët & Chandon" data-portal-copyright="Getty Images for Moët & Chandon" />

That makes sense. Going back to what you said about the how gay romance allows women to remove themselves: Gay hockey smut also seems like a way to explore traditional ideas about masculinity (e.g., physical strength) and allowing yourself to find eroticism in those ideas without tying it to the men (particularly straight ones) who are responsible for making it so toxic.

Absolutely. A lot of the eroticism in Heated Rivalry comes from the sublimation of Ilya and Shane’s competition on the ice into the bedroom, so that the sometimes violent aggression of the game becomes neutralized and sexy. If that’s the fantasy you want to play with, there’s a certain appeal to simply erasing any nagging worries about how bad physical violence between men and women can get.

And finally, the Winter Olympics are coming up. Do you think there’s any sport that has the chance to out-gay hockey this year?

Listen, if physical peril is what makes for a great love story, the sports romance fandom should seriously be throwing more consideration behind bobsledding.

I will be tuned into the (relatively) straight sport of ice dancing.

Grok’s nonconsensual porn problem is part of a long, gross legacy

2026-01-13T16:16:55-05:00

For the past few weeks, Elon Musk’s Grok AI bot has been generating pornographic images of women and underage girls, without their consent, at an astounding rate. A recent Bloomberg analysis found that Grok creates 6,700 such images per hour, or more than one per minute. On Friday, X at last put some minor guardrails on the tool, with a new policy that only paying subscribers can use Grok to generate or alter images. On the standalone Grok app, however, anyone can prompt Grok to generate new images, meaning the deepfaked porn continues.

Grok has long been one of the more suggestive of the major AI models, with “spicy” and “sexy” settings that can be toggled on and off. While employees have warned that the bot is being used to generate child sex abuse materials, Musk has remained committed to the idea that Grok would be the sexiest AI model. On X, Musk has defended the choice on business grounds, citing the famous tale of how VHS beat Betamax in the 1980s after the porn industry put its weight behind VHS, with its larger storage capacity. “VHS won in the end,” Musk posted, “in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉.”

There is a certain amount of truth to Musk’s take. The porn industry tends to reward early adopters, and the money to be made in porn means that it has impressive leverage when it comes to choosing between two competing and incompatible forms of technology.

Yet the idea that porn as an industry, neutral and amorphous, settles tech wars doesn’t show us the whole truth. It would be more accurate to say that the technologies we use to generate and share images are, more often than not, shaped by people distributing images of women’s bodies — often with dubious consent from the women themselves. In that sense, Grok’s abilities are par for the course.

Porn didn’t only help VHS win over Betamax. The industry has also been linked to the mainstreaming of Super 8 film (easy and convenient for amateur filmmakers), the development of streaming video (private and easily accessible), the development of web payments (comes with paywalled streaming video), the development of web analytics (good for the complex business transactions of adult streaming), and the victory of Blu-ray over HD DVD. (Like VHS, Blu-rays held a lot more data than its competitors, which is especially attractive in the porn market.)

Then there were the systems of image distribution that developed outside of porn as an industry. A surprising amount of them revolved around people trying to share sexualized images of women’s bodies as quickly as possible — only in these cases, the people whose images getting distributed weren’t necessarily consenting adults who were getting paid for their trouble.

Sometimes the innovation was more or less harmless. Google Images was developed because so many people went searching for pictures of Jennifer Lopez in her famously low-cut Versace gown in 2000, a distinction Lopez has treated as a feather in her cap. In this case, Lopez wore the dress to a high-profile event and wanted to be seen and talked about, so it’s reasonable to assume consent.

Other times it got cloudier. The impetus for YouTube came when developers wanted to watch Janet Jackson’s 2004 wardrobe malfunction and were frustrated that it took so long to find video of it on the internet. Jackson has always maintained that she did not intend for her breast to be seen on national TV, so here, we’re dealing with nonconsensual nudity.

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg’s progenitor for Facebook was Facesmash, a Hot or Not rip-off developed to compare the women of Harvard University’s student body to farm animals. The intent here was less to create nonconsensual pornography than it was to perform a sexualized humiliation of nonconsenting women — an act that turned out to be so popular that it overwhelmed Harvard’s servers the night it launched.

So Musk is not entirely wrong when he says that technologies with what he euphemistically refers to as “spicy mode” tend to do well. A more accurate phrasing, however, might be to say that in our misogynistic society, objectifying and humiliating the bodies of unconsenting women is so valuable that the fate of world-altering technologies depends on how good they are at facilitating it.

AI was always going to be used for this, one way or the other. But only someone as brutally uncaring and willing to cut corners as Elon Musk would allow it to go this wrong.