The TikTokers Reading the Epstein Files So You Don't Have To | Vanity Fair

How TikTok turned a massive government document dump into a crowdsourced investigation.

“I’m Reading All of the Epstein Files,” Kayla, a 21-year-old realtor and hairstylist from central Texas, wrote in the onscreen text of a TikTok posted last month. “I’m not using the search function,” she continued in the video’s caption. “I’m going to go through every single file until I’ve seen them all.” Jeffrey Epstein had been dominating her feed, so while sitting out on her back porch in central Texas she decided to weigh in. Immediately, it got tens of thousands of views.

Kayla, who asked to be referred to by her first name only for privacy reasons, had been relentlessly consuming information about Epstein. Content creators like her are amassing thousands of followers by covering every disturbing detail in the documents.

Experienced public defender and former Survivor contestant Eliza Orlins posted that she has dug into tens of thousands of pages of the files, breaking down Epstein’s links to Elon Musk and Donald Trump, while true crime creators like JustInTheNickOfCrime, who has 1.8 million followers on TikTok, have been pulling apart details like which powerful people Epstein was affiliated with. These creators are racking up views and garnering hyper-dedicated audiences who are ravenous for every new twist in the case.

TikTok has become a go-to source for breaking news for years now, but the Epstein story has taken on a life of its own on the platform. It’s hard to overstate how captivated millions of people have become with the files through short-form videos. Creators have transformed the political controversy into a sprawling crowdsourced investigation where anyone can participate in trawling the files for information and potentially go viral off of their findings.

“TikTok is such a good home for the Epstein files story because it’s such a good place, not just for information, but for interpretation,” says Alex Turvy, a media sociologist and UX researcher. “You have everyone from [content creators] trying to explain the story, to people using it to make their political points, to people making AI content based on it. The Epstein files are raw material that can be used for anything across any side of TikTok.”

The first major trove of Epstein files was made public last December, when the Department of Justice published multiple batches of documents culminating just before Christmas. Then, on January 30, more than 3 million pages of documents along with hundreds of thousands of images and thousands of videos were released by the DOJ, the largest tranche of files yet.

Mainstream media organizations were quick to publish the files’ most significant findings, but TikTokers have continued to pore over the less public pages. One creator who posts under the handle AllegedlyReportedly and asked not to be referred to by her real name for safety reasons, says that “TikTok is giving people transparency.”

“With a lot of the media networks, there are higher-ups that allow or don’t allow certain things or people to be talked about,” she says. “Us on TikTok, we are just normal, everyday people with an interest in transparency and justice.”

Like many covering the files, the creator behind AllegedlyReportedly normally posts about adjacent topics like reality TV news, cults, and scams. She wasn’t surprised that true crime fans seized on the files early. “[The Epstein files have] everything that typically makes a true crime story go viral,” she says. “There’s connections and layers and financial and legal documents and interviews. All of the things that would be in a normal Dateline case, you have here.”

Women already make up the primary demographic for true crime content, but some creators said they were surprised how female-skewed the audience for their content has been. “A lot of people in my comments right now are women who seem concerned that this type of thing is happening and being swept under the rugs,” Kayla says.

Jessica Rauchberg, assistant professor in communication media at Seton Hall University, says that content creators simply garner more trust than the mainstream media right now. Rauchberg says that she’s seen similar behavior from TikTok users surrounding major celebrity trials like the Amber Heard–Johnny Depp defamation trial in 2022, or the Diddy trial last year. “It becomes this event [that] you can participate in, and it’s like you’re in the arena watching it all happen,” Rauchberg says.

But as we learned from those major cases, granting anyone willing to talk relentlessly about a subject for hours on end an overnight audience is probably not a good thing. Major celebrity cases have become useful tools for audience capture among the right. Some influencers who have gained their followings off the backs of big celebrity trials or true crime investigations like the murder of Gabby Petito, end up funneling their newfound followers into more radicalized spaces.

Jessica Reed Kraus, a prominent conservative influencer, initially gained fame for covering Britney Spears’s conservatorship and live posting about the Ghislaine Maxwell trial on Instagram. Now she has around 1.2 million followers on the app. The right-wing YouTuber Candace Owens has amassed millions of viewers with frequent coverage of pop culture news events like the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni case.

Lizzy, a 20-year-old college sophomore who asked to be referred to by her first name for privacy reasons, has been documenting her journey into the Epstein files under an anonymous account called lizzyreadsthefiles. She says she was once a Trump supporter, but like so many on both sides of the aisle, she now distrusts everyone with institutional and political power.

“I just lost complete faith in our political system,” she says. “People go to Fox who are Republican or CNN who are liberal, but people like myself want to get things straight from the source. We go to TikTok to find the truth.” A 2025 Pew Research study found that 43% of adults under 30 regularly get news from TikTok, up from 9% in 2020.

But Turvy says the truth is more elusive on TikTok than it might seem. He said that what’s happening on TikTok is more like “crowdsourced narrative construction.” Much of the content is less about facts and more “people building stories together using all this raw material they can pull from from the archives,” Turvy says. TikTokers have used the files to claim that 9/11 was potentially an inside job and that the elites are eating babies.

Some followers of the Epstein files deep dives on TikTok have compared it to fan-fiction lore. “This is starting to feel like the scp foundation,” one TikTok user commented on a video breaking down aspects of the files, referring to the long-running collaborative fiction project that centers around a fictional secret organization that captures paranormal beings and investigates unexplained phenomena.

A TikTok creator who asked to be referred to by the name Kate for privacy reasons, said that she began posting her own Epstein files investigations in part because she saw all of the wild conspiracy theories emerging and wanted to debunk some of the more absurd claims.

“My goal with my coverage is to show people that they actually don’t know anything,” she says. “We’re not a court of law, we’re in a court of public opinion and media literacy is something that’s extremely important.” She worries that some on TikTok are “turning a government release into a ghost story.”

Halina Newland, a 22-year-old content creator, advertising strategist, and model in New York City who has been posting about Epstein on TikTok said that the files were especially compelling because of their adjacency to the conspiracies that she and other members of Gen Z grew up seeing online.

“There were all these conspiracies that were super prevalent when I was online in middle and high school,” she says. “Everybody who said this stuff at the time was called crazy. Now we’re seeing the files confirm what a lot of people have been saying for years was true.”

Newland has attempted to monetize her videos about Epstein but said it has been very difficult. Several creators have said that some of their Epstein-related content has been taken down by the platform for misinformation, and therefore demonetized. But these creators said they aren’t doing this for the money, but rather because they feel like they have a duty to inform the public.

Turvy said that he doesn’t see people moving on from Epstein anytime soon, and he worries how off the rails things might go as AI becomes more pervasive. Already AI is being used to insert images of another crime victim, Junko Furuta, a Japanese high school student who was abducted, tortured, and murdered in the ’80s, into videos with Epstein. In reality, she has no connection to Epstein and was not pictured on his jet.

“There’s so much content [in the files],” Turvy says. “And it’s all coming out a time when we’ve never been able to trust visual content less.”

The TikTokers Reading the Epstein Files So You Don't Have To | Vanity Fair

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