Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
A recent episode of the #PRethics Community podcast on LinkedIn – co-hosted by Mary Beth West, Jared Meade, and veteran Atlanta broadcaster Melissa Carter – examined what the files reveal about how public relations expertise was recruited, deployed, and paid for in service of one of history’s most documented cases of serial abuse and power-brokering.
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The release of millions of pages of Jeffrey Epstein’s files by the Department of Justice has created an uncomfortable moment for the public relations industry – one that the industry is, by most visible measures, choosing to ignore.
That silence is itself a story.
Melissa Carter, who spent years in morning radio before moving into media consulting, brought a perspective from outside the PR industry that cut through much of the professional defensiveness the topic tends to generate.
Her framing was blunt: “I have yet to see anybody really pay the price for it except for the girls.”
Before the Epstein files can be processed as a PR industry story, they have to be processed as a human one. Carter argued that the industry – and the public broadly – has largely failed that first test.
“If you have no punishment for something that is so horrific,” she said, “then either people don’t think it’s horrific, or people are going to get complacent – like, well, it doesn’t matter anyway, because who cares about these files. Nothing’s being done about them. We wanted them released, and then they’re released, then nobody does anything about it.”
That complacency has a structural driver. The files implicate people with enormous institutional power – corporate CEOs, political figures, media personalities. Holding those people accountable requires institutions that are themselves independent of that power. In the PR industry’s case, that independence is compromised by exactly the financial relationships the files are beginning to expose.
The files are voluminous – three million pages released so far, with millions more still under review at the Department of Justice, and significant redactions throughout. But the currently available material contains documented evidence directly relevant to the PR industry.
At least two PR firms with active membership in major U.S. public relations trade associations received documented payments from Epstein. The figures run well into the tens of thousands of dollars. The evidence includes email records and billing documentation, now publicly searchable through the DOJ’s own file search tool.
Beyond individual firms, at least one major PR conglomerate has its name appearing across multiple file references, including in connection with a senior board member whom Epstein was actively attempting to recruit to a closed-door convening of global power brokers. An offshore financial transaction in the range of $50,000, clearly attributed to that conglomerate in Epstein’s own records, raises additional questions the conglomerate has yet to address publicly.
The now-dissolved firm Bell Pottinger also appears in the files, providing reputation advice to Epstein in the years following his 2008 guilty plea. That plea, to a charge involving the sexual abuse of a minor, is the baseline fact against which all subsequent PR engagements must be measured: these were not firms caught unaware by a client’s hidden misconduct. The misconduct was on the public record.
Carter offered a framework for thinking about the social tolerance extended to powerful figures that has direct implications for how PR professionals vet prospective clients.
During her years in morning radio, she recalled putting a version of this question to her audience during the Michael Jackson controversy: “If he lived next door to you and he wasn’t Michael Jackson, but he had the same accusations, would you allow your kids to go over there and play? And most people said no.”
Her point was not about guilt or innocence in any specific case. It was about the logical inconsistency that fame introduces into moral judgment – the way institutional power and celebrity create exemptions that ordinary community standards would not permit. The same inconsistency operates in corporate and PR circles: clients whose names and networks represent revenue potential receive the benefit of the doubt that would never be extended to an unknown prospect.
“People’s logic is thrown out the window,” Carter said. “People are not outraged – and this should be something that we should be so ashamed of.”
One line of defense that has surfaced in response to the Epstein files – that many of the victims were present voluntarily – drew a sharp response from Carter that is worth the PR industry’s full attention.
“They’re children,” she said. “We can’t just one day say they’re children and the next day say that they wanted to be there. Under eighteen is treated differently than over eighteen because the courts understand that these children may be influenced rather than them having their own free will established.”
The legal system’s recognition of this distinction – embodied in juvenile courts, statutory definitions of consent, and the basic architecture of child protection law – is not a technicality. It is a foundational ethical commitment. A communications industry that helps powerful figures blur that distinction, soften that language, or redirect public attention away from it is not practicing public relations. It is participating in harm.
The New Yorker recently published a profile of Peggy Siegal, a high-profile Hollywood publicist with documented ties to Epstein. The piece prompted significant reaction within PR circles – not least because the profile itself appeared to be an extended exercise in the kind of reputation rehabilitation Siegal’s profession traffics in.
“The fact that women have been complicit in this, too. I mean, the Ghislaine Maxwells of the world or the Peggy Siegels of the world, we could rattle off a number of other names of women who economically benefited by the setup of what they were participating in. So women have to be held accountable too, to the extent that they were knowingly participating,” shared West.
The article’s structural failure was instructive: it ran at length before arriving, almost as an afterthought, at the experiences of the victims whose exploitation sat at the center of the story. The framing centered on the publicist’s own grievances – the damage to her career, her self-image as a hard-working single mother, her apparent incomprehension of why her Epstein association carried lasting consequences.
That framing is not incidental. It is what reputation management, deployed without ethical guardrails, actually produces. And the decision to participate in the profile at all – to seek rehabilitation through a high-profile magazine feature rather than through genuine accountability – reflects a fundamental misreading of what crisis communication can and cannot do.
The profile did not rehabilitate. It compounded.
Courts of law operate on a foundational principle: every accused person is entitled to a defense, and legal representation does not imply endorsement of a client’s conduct. That principle is essential to the rule of law.
Public relations operates on no such principle – and that is not a limitation. It is a professional advantage.
Meade put it directly: “”Everyone deserves to tell their story, but not everyone deserves to have me be the one who tells it for them.””
PR firms are not appointed by any court. They can, and must, exercise judgment about who they represent and what they do on a client’s behalf. That discretion is not a burden – it is the feature that distinguishes an ethical practice from a mercenary one.
The implicit logic visible in the Epstein files – that access to his network of corporate CEOs and institutional players was worth the reputational and ethical risk of the engagement – represents exactly the short-term transactional thinking Carter identified as the underlying disease. “We need to get into long-term thinking rather than short-term thinking,” she said. “It’s always: where’s the quick buck? Where’s the quick attention? That’s what I’ll do, and I’ll deal with it later. And that’s dangerous thinking.”
No major PR trade association has convened a task force to examine the industry’s documented connections to Epstein. No grievances have been filed against the firms whose billing records appear in the files. No speakers have been removed from conference rosters. No membership consequences have followed.
The industry’s silence is not the absence of a position. It is a position.
One explanation is straightforward: trade associations depend on membership dues and conference sponsorship revenue. When the members implicated are also significant revenue contributors, the institutional incentive structure points toward silence. That is precisely the dynamic that allows reputation laundering to persist inside professional bodies that claim ethical authority they are unwilling to exercise.
A human trafficking clause has recently appeared in at least one major PR trade association’s code of conduct outside the United States – a detail that should give the industry pause.
“It never would have dawned on me that in the PR industry, we need to have a human trafficking clause,” stated West. “It’s almost like, ‘Well, we’re going to have an anti-murder clause’… because if it’s not in writing, then someone’s going to find a workaround and think that it’s okay.”
The explicit prohibition suggests that real cases have arisen involving PR firms and human trafficking. A current federal case in the Southern District of New York involves a major PR firm accused of generating sports-washing content designed to suppress coverage of what is alleged to have been a human trafficking operation tied to a major international construction project.
That is what reputation management looks like when it operates without conscience.
Carter’s broader cultural argument – that the Epstein files represent not an aberration but a continuation – connects directly to the PR industry’s relationship with its own history.
“History is told by the people who were the most aggressive,” she observed. “There are plenty of examples that we don’t find in history in which people did the right thing – which people were a peaceful, inclusive society. Those were not the stories that we hear.”
PR, in its institutional form, is part of the mechanism by which certain histories get written and others get suppressed. Epstein understood that. The files show him actively cultivating relationships with communications professionals precisely because he understood the power of narrative control. The PR industry’s current silence on what those files reveal is itself a form of narrative control – one that serves the same interests it has always served.
Carter’s point about feminine leadership traits also carries weight here: “Feminine traits are what we need, because there is way too much aggression and way too much abuse of power.” The power structures the Epstein files expose are not incidentally male-dominated. They are constituted by the specific combination of aggression, transactional loyalty, and impunity that has historically defined the upper reaches of institutional power – in entertainment, finance, politics, and in the PR firms that serve all three.
An industry serious about its professional standing would take several steps it has so far declined to take.
It would conduct keyword searches of the publicly available Epstein files – something the DOJ has made technically straightforward – and identify which member firms, individual practitioners, and board members of industry associations appear in those records.
It would convene transparent public discussions about the documented connections. Not crisis communication exercises, not image management – genuine professional accountability conversations.
It would establish and enforce meaningful criteria for client vetting, not as aspirational guidance but as conditions of good-standing membership.
And it would acknowledge, publicly and without hedging, that public relations expertise was actively sought and deployed as part of a systematic effort to shield a man from the consequences of crimes he had already pleaded guilty to committing.
Former US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote that sunlight is the best disinfectant. The Epstein files are sunlight. More pages are still being processed. The question for the PR industry is not whether this story will develop further. The question – as Melissa Carter framed it – is whether the people with the power to act are willing to use it, or whether they will remain complacent until the cost of complacency exceeds the cost of accountability.
That calculation, in her view, has an obvious answer. The industry has yet to make it.
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