The answer might surprise you.
By Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
If you have been following the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files — the millions of pages of court documents, FBI records, and investigative materials made public by the Department of Justice beginning in early 2026 — you might find yourself asking questions that feel almost too dark to speak aloud: Is the world suddenly full of monsters? Are there more people without conscience than we ever understood? Have we been living among hordes of child sex predators all along, smiling at them across conference tables and voting booths, mistaking their charm for leadership and their ruthlessness for strength?
You are not alone in asking. And the questions deserve serious answers.
Here is what the science tells us, what the most clear-eyed journalists covering this story believe, and why the path forward — while not easy — is more visible than it might appear.
First, What Are We Talking About When We Say “Evil”?
Before we can ask whether there are more evil people in the world now than there used to be, we need to get precise about what we mean. Evil is a catch-all term many of us use to describe people whose behavior points to more precise Dark Triad personality traits as defined by psychology.
Most people use these words interchangeably, as general-purpose labels for anyone cruel, manipulative, or without apparent conscience. Psychologists are more specific. These are distinct personality profiles, each with its own characteristics, though they frequently overlap and reinforce each other in the same individual. People like Jeffrey Epstein and, many argue, Donald Trump, possess all three.
A psychopath is someone fundamentally lacking in conscience. No guilt. No shame. No remorse. They understand intellectually that other people have feelings, but those feelings register as data to be exploited rather than as experiences deserving of respect. They experience other human beings primarily as instruments. Psychopathy is neurological in origin — identifiable through brain scans showing structural differences in the regions responsible for empathy and moral emotion — and researchers consider it a permanent condition rather than a curable one.
A narcissist is someone with an exaggerated and unstable sense of their own superiority — grandiose in public, often deeply insecure underneath — combined with a hunger for admiration so consuming that it overrides any genuine concern for others. Narcissists are not simply vain. They are capable of causing serious harm to the people around them while remaining entirely focused on how those people reflect back on them.
Machiavellianism — the third point of the triangle — describes the cold, calculated, strategic willingness to deceive and manipulate others for personal gain, without guilt and without moral limit. The name comes from Niccolò Machiavelli, the Renaissance political philosopher whose work was interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as a manual for ruthless statecraft.
Together, these three profiles make up what personality psychologists call the “dark triad,” a cluster first formally identified by psychologists Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams in a landmark 2002 study. People high in all three traits are not merely unpleasant to be around. They are, research consistently shows, disproportionately likely to seek power, to acquire it, and to use it in ways that cause serious harm to others — often for decades, in plain sight, before anyone with the institutional authority to stop them decides to try.
So, Are There More Dark Triad Personality Disordered People Among Us Than Ever Before? Because It Sure Seems Like It.
Harvard psychologist Dr. Martha Stout, in her landmark 2005 book The Sociopath Next Door, established what remains one of the most cited figures in the field: approximately 4 percent of the human population — one in twenty-five people — meets the criteria for sociopathy, characterized primarily by that fundamental absence of conscience. They feel no guilt, no shame, no remorse at a biological, brain-based level. (Stout uses the term "sociopath" to describe the psychopathic end of the dark triad spectrum, and while minor distinctions exist between the two terms, for purposes of this article we will treat them as interchangeable. I’d like to acknowledge that neither “psychopath” nor “sociopath” appear in the DSM, the official diagnostic manual used by clinicians, and both fall under the umbrella of Antisocial Personality Disorder. There is still some debate about all these terms in the psychology profession, with some saying psychopathy is more hard-wired, and sociopaths more prone to impulsivity and rage, but regardless of what we call it, the behavior is evil.)
One in twenty-five sounds alarming. But Stout also found something that rarely gets quoted alongside that statistic, and it is one of the most important findings in the book: the number varies dramatically depending on where you live and how your society is organized. In Taiwan, where communal values and collective accountability are deeply embedded in the culture, the figure drops to less than 0.2 percent. In the United States, where individualism is celebrated, where winning is treated as its own moral justification, and where charm is routinely mistaken for character, the rate is twenty times higher.
The biology, Stout argues, may be relatively stable across human populations. But culture either activates or suppresses it. A society that glorifies winning at any cost — that rewards charm over integrity, treats conscience as weakness, and confuses ruthlessness and brutality with strength — is essentially a greenhouse for dark triad behavior.
So, no. We did not create more psychopaths. But unregulated extractive capitalism, combined with a deeply individualistic, militaristic, classist, racist, xenophobic, colonizing and imperialist patriarchal society merely creates the conditions in which people with Dark Triad personality traits thrive. We are living through a moment in history when such people have been handed them the keys to many of the world’s most powerful institutions in many parts of the world, most notably in the United States, Israel, and Russia.
Why Power Attracts Predators
This brings us to the second piece of the answer, which comes from British psychologist Adrian Furnham’s 2010 research into personality and leadership. Furnham found something that will be immediately recognizable to anyone who has spent time inside a corporation, a legislature, a religious institution, or a powerful media organization: dark triad traits are directly and consistently associated with the acquisition of leadership positions.
To seek power is a structural feature of how these “evil” personalities operate. People high in dark triad traits are more willing to manipulate, more comfortable with sustained deception, and unburdened by the empathy and self-doubt that slow the rest of us down when we contemplate doing harm. They read social situations with predatory precision. They are frequently charismatic in the specific register that gets mistaken for visionary leadership. And crucially, they are willing to do things to get ahead that people with functioning consciences simply will not do. So they advance, while the rest of us are still deliberating about whether it would be fair.
The result is a clustering effect. One Jeffrey Epstein — a man who, by all accounts, exhibited the full dark triad profile in its most extreme form — is not representative of the general population. But one Epstein, operating at the intersection of enormous inherited wealth, political access, and the deliberate cultivation of compromising information about powerful people, can draw dozens of other compromised individuals into his orbit. What looks like a world overrun with predators is more accurately described as a small, dense, deliberately constructed network — one that positioned itself at every point of institutional leverage it could reach.
Most of us do not have dark triad traits, and this makes it difficult to comprehend and accept that those who DO exhibit them are irredeemable. Those of use without such traits often have a naive belief that everyone can change with enough kindness. Our very empathy and compassion allow those without such things to rise to dominance over us. This, in turn, can make it seem like “everyone” is a sicko, because the people most often in the headlines…ARE.
The Epstein Files and the Architecture of Impunity
Which brings us to the most important and most uncomfortable question raised by the files themselves: why are we seeing so many of them now, compared to the past? The answer is disturbing. In the past, dark triad personalities in power tended to HIDE their depravities because they knew there would be consequences if they came to light. But we are living through a moment in which such monsters have consolidated power at the top of nearly ever institution in the United States that might hold them accountable, and when that happens, such people actually take pleasure in displaying the full spectrum of their depravity to the public, because it traumatizes us. They like that. This doesn’t mean there are more of them now than ever before; it means they have finally, after playing a very smart, very evil long game, arranged the chess pieces where they want them, to enact maximum harm.
Journalist and scholar Sarah Kendzior has spent years — long before mainstream media would touch this story — documenting the Epstein network and its deep entanglement with American political and financial power. Her books, including They Knew, laid out in documented detail what many in positions of institutional power either refused to see or actively worked to conceal. For her trouble, Kendzior was dismissed, minimized, and called alarmist. She was, of course, right.
Kendzior’s argument about the timing of the files’ release is one that deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed. She contends that the documents are public not because accountability is winning, but because the networks they expose have consolidated sufficient power — across politics, media, finance, law enforcement, the judiciary, and technology — that exposure itself has become affordable. They are not afraid of what we will do with this information, because they have spent decades ensuring that the institutions capable of acting on it are either compromised, captured, or rendered inert. Partial exposure, in this reading, is not a crack in the edifice. It is a bold and brutal demonstration of how solid the edifice has become.
They were also waiting, Kendzior argues, for one more development: the maturation of artificial intelligence capable of generating realistic video, audio, and photographs that are functionally indistinguishable from authentic documentation. In 2018, law professors Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron named a phenomenon they called the “liar’s dividend” — the ability of bad actors to dismiss authentic evidence as AI-generated or fabricated, exploiting the mere existence of deepfake technology as a shield against accountability. The mechanism is simple and devastating: you do not need to prove something is fake. You only need to make enough people uncertain enough to disengage. As Chesney and Citron warned, this dividend grows larger as the public becomes more aware of synthetic media — because the awareness of fakes becomes the very tool for dismissing the real.
The Women Who Will Bring The Monsters To Justice
If all of this feels overwhelming and terrifying, that’s by design. An overwhelmed and terrified populace has less power to do anything about the monsters among us.
And yet: Power that feels total, under patriarchy, has a glaring blind spot. It underestimates the abilities of women. And the brightest spots of hope for me right now are the the women who are battling this machinery, with kindness, compassion, optimism, and total fearlessness.
Earlier this month, two young New Mexico state representatives, Albuquerque’s Marianna Anaya and Santa Fe’s Andrea Romero, shepherded into law the creation of the Epstein Survivors Truth Commission — a legally established, well-funded state-level mechanism to investigate the massive corruption and coverups in the Epstein nightmare as it unfolded here in New Mexico. This commission was built, by necessity and with determination, entirely outside the corrupted federal institutional architecture the cabal controls. It represents exactly the kind of ungovernable development that totalizing power structures have always, historically, failed to anticipate.
Then there is Angela Clemente. Clemente is a forensic intelligence analyst, paralegal, and private investigator who has spent more than a decade following the thread of a sex trafficking ring operating out of Portsmouth, Ohio — a ring that, the Epstein files now strongly suggest, was connected to the larger Epstein network. She filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the FBI. When the bureau refused, she sued. She’s still going.
Ellie Leonard is a mother of four from New Jersey who, when the Epstein files were released, sat down at her computer and started reading. Then she started publishing what she found, on Substack, digging into connections that larger newsrooms were too slow, too captured, or too cautious to pursue. When asked why she does it, her answer is simple and devastating: she is putting four children into the world, and she does not want to see something like this happen again.
And then there is the growing ecosystem of former corporate journalists who’ve gone independent as an act of resistance against the evil machinery — including the one writing these words. We are going directly to readers and viewers, with no gatekeepers, no advertisers, and no publishers with complicated relationships to complicated people.
This all terrifies the dark triad bros. It’s why they are working like mad to buy social media outlets and, well, this platform here. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who pushed for the recent right-wing takeover of TikTok, called the social media platform one of his most important weapons, describing the takeover as one of the most important things in his agenda.
Why Women Are Leading the Way Out
Look again at who is doing the bulk of this resistance work. Marianna and Andrea, the politicians. Angela, the investigator. Sarah, Ellie and Alisa, the independent journalists. Martha, the research psychologist. Virginia, Maria, Annie — the survivors speaking out.
This pattern is not a coincidence, and it is not merely inspiring. It is a structural observation with a structural explanation.
The institutions the Epstein network captured — finance, politics, corporate media, law enforcement, the judiciary, technology — are institutions that have historically excluded, marginalized, and dismissed women by design. Which means women had less investment in protecting them, less to lose by standing up to them and going around them.
Patriarchal power seeks to dismiss voices like ours by resorting to tired sexist tropes. Kendzior was called hysterical. Clemente diminished in mainstream news articles with terms like “self-styled muckracker” and “former model.” The survivors were called liars, and worse. I’ve been called “crazy” by more than one powerful male editor or Hollywood producer when I refused to play along. Even TikTok, where women were converging to discuss real systemic abuses and problems, was deliberately portrayed, for a time, as nothing but “dumb teen girls dancing in their driveways,” when in truth it was a powerful platform for female voices of dissent and power, like comedian and actress Lisandra Vasquez, who parodies the complicit women of the Trump adminstrataion mercilessly and to great impact.
So, no. There aren’t more “evil” people than ever before. They are simply more visible because of their own hubris. They have chosen to be visible, because the feel impervious to consequences.
They are, however, wrong.
Women of conscience banding together will be the ones to save us from these monsters. It won’t be easy, and it won’t be fast. But it will happen. Salvation will not come through infiltrating the system, but from surrounding it. Because the very system we seek to dismantle taught us how to save ourselves and one another.
We are not without proof of concept. In June 2024, Claudia Sheinbaum was elected president of Mexico by the largest electoral margin in that country’s history — a scientist, a policy architect, and the first woman ever to lead a nation where femicide rates are among the highest in the world, where narco-cartel entanglement with government has been a fact of life for generations, and where women have been systematically excluded from power for five centuries of colonial and post-colonial patriarchy. She did not infiltrate that system. She and the women who voted for her surrounded it, overwhelmed it, and changed it.
We can, and must, do the same.
