Jeffrey Epstein Is Alive in Israel!? The Internet Really Wants to Believe It

JEFFREY EPSTEIN ALIVE IN ISRAEL!

Or so the internet would very much like to believe.

The latest round of speculation arrived with all the familiar trappings of a tabloid resurrection: a long-haired man photographed abroad, a Fortnite account allegedly active years after Epstein’s death, and a flurry of screenshots promising that this time the evidence really does add up. The image has since been flagged as AI-generated. The gaming account proves nothing. None of it survives even mild scrutiny.

But that entirely misses a much larger and revealing point. “Jeffrey Epstein is alive” is simply a much better story than “Jeffrey Epstein is dead.” Dead is an ending. Alive is a franchise.

Epstein’s death was narratively unsatisfying to many, many people. There was no trial, no public reckoning, no parade of powerful names under oath. The story cut to black before the audience got what it was promised. Conspiracies rush in to fill that void not because they are persuasive, but because they keep the plot alive. This is old tabloid logic. Elvis lived. Bigfoot roamed. Aliens crashed in New Mexico. The goal was never proof. The goal was possibility.

What has changed is distribution. The supermarket checkout lane has been replaced by the algorithm. The impulse is the same, but the stakes are higher. Tabloid thinking has migrated into political discourse, where suggestion carries more weight and repetition does the work of evidence.

The current iteration follows the formula perfectly. First, the image. Not convincing, just plausible enough. AI is the ideal modern tabloid technology: instantly shareable, emotionally suggestive, and deniable on demand. The fact that the Epstein lookalike photo carries a visible watermark identifying it as AI-generated does not kill the story. For believers, it extends it. Someone, somewhere, wants you to think it’s fake.

Then there is the Fortnite account. A username found in Epstein-related documents appears to match a public gaming profile showing activity years after his death. Screenshots circulate. This was “discovered” by an anon X account that goes by the user name TRUTHPOLE (!), then later quoted with exclamation emojis by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (!!!).

Timelines are stitched together. Fortnite Tracker, an unofficial stats site, is treated as forensic evidence. The logic is paper-thin, but it does not need to be thick. It just needs to circulate.

The third “proof” is the most revealing. Dan Bongino, while serving as Deputy Director of the FBI, insisted Epstein is dead and killed himself. In a functioning information ecosystem, that would narrow the range of plausible beliefs. Instead, it deepens suspicion. Bongino has spent years attacking institutional credibility and casting himself as an unreliable narrator battling a dishonest system.

He even admitted to not being an honest broker during a December appearance on Hannity, saying, “Listen, I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions. That’s clear. And one day I will be back in that space, but that’s not what I’m paid for now. I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.”

Bongino saying something now leads to many of his conspiracy-minded audience to now think the opposite. When someone trained to distrust authority hears certainty from a source they do not trust, it does not reassure them. It alarms them.

This is what epistemic collapse looks like. Agreement becomes suspect. Consensus becomes evidence of coordination. You cannot persuade people out of a worldview that treats disbelief as wisdom.

That worldview did not emerge organically. President Donald Trump’s sustained assault on “fake news” did more than discredit individual outlets. It taught millions of people that the very idea of a shared factual baseline was naïve. Once that lesson takes hold, every claim becomes provisional, every denial suspect, and every absence of proof another clue.

To be clear, none of this is real. The image is fake. The Fortnite account establishes nothing. Epstein is almost certainly dead. But conspiracies are not powered by facts. They are powered by desire, grievance, and the refusal to accept narrative closure.

That is the enduring consequence of making reality optional. Once institutional authority collapses, even the truth loses its ability to end a story.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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