The Onion Made an Absolutely Unhinged Jeffrey Epstein Mockumentary

About a third of the way in, we hear another fake audioclip, this time portraying a Department of Justice official telling Maxwell in a 2025 interview, “We need you to help us cover up some of Donald Trump’s crimes.” (The Justice Department released redacted transcripts of the actual Maxwell interview last month.) This is when Bad Pedophile takes a sharp turn to chronicle the relationship between Trump and Epstein. It would be a shame to spoil a sequence this ridiculous and sublime, so I’ll leave it at that.

Like any good satire, the mockumentary’s sharpest moments are flecked with bits of truth. While it has Epstein working at a fictional Deep State, it also calls out his allegedly real relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world, including Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton—throwing in a few extra “allegedlies” in the process. And of course it claims that Epstein, “a pedophile in the prime of his life, with decades of molesting still in front of him,” didn’t end his own life but was killed in a “botched government-sanctioned assassination,” complete with “over 34,689,652 minutes” of missing surveillance footage from his jail cell. The latter is a nod to the footage that was cut from the “full raw” surveillance video from the only working camera near Epstein’s Manhattan jail cell on the night before he was found dead in August 2019.

The release of Bad Pedophile will be more limited than was originally planned. Collins says a movie theater company was set to launch the mockumentary nationally but pulled out in the wake of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s death. The publication had to scramble to find an alternative.

“It does show you, this moment, if you are trying to get a merger through or something, or some sort of business from the government, or if you’re just afraid of the ire of the president, the only real way to get stuff out there is independently,” says Collins. “If you see Jeffrey Epstein’s name and your immediate thought process is, ‘Oh, this might offend the president,’ that’s not the problem of people making a joke. It’s the problem of a broken and insanely failing society.”

Despite promising to be more transparent about releasing the so-called “Epstein files” during the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump has since done an about-face. According to The Wall Street Journal, he was told he was named in the files, although it’s unknown in what context. In a Truth Social post in September he described the case as the “Democrat Epstein Hoax.”

As the Epstein saga continues to unfold, there’s no telling when the public will have access to all of the pertinent information. In the meantime, at least there’s the Onion.

“In the last year, we’ve been able to say a lot of stuff that other places are afraid to say,” says Collins. “We’re going to keep doing it.”