Architectures of Impunity: A Critical Indigenous Feminist Analysis of the Epstein Archive

Abstract

This article develops a critical Indigenous feminist account of elite sexual violence as structural rather than exceptional, using the Jeffrey Epstein case as a point of departure. The “Epstein archive” refers to the expanding body of legal records, government disclosures, investigative reporting, and digital material concerning Epstein and his networks. Rather than analyzing these records comprehensively, the article examines what their circulation and institutional management reveal about elite power, and accountability. Drawing on critical Indigenous studies, feminist political economy, and settler colonial theory, it identifies extreme wealth, transnational mobility, reputational legitimacy, jurisdictional fragmentation, and institutional containment as interconnected architectures of impunity rooted in the afterlives of empire. The archive, it argues, both exposes violence and contains its political consequences, revealing the colonial and patriarchal structures through which elite sexual violence is organized, normalized, and protected.