‘Furious’ and the rise of Epstein pop culture
(CNN) — Viewers who tuned into Hulu’s “Furious” might be forgiven for experiencing a sense of déjà vu: A billionaire with the initials J.E. is revealed to have sexually abused teen girls trafficked to him by a close female accomplice. His crimes, long covered up thanks to money and a network of powerful people, lead to a resolution in Monday’s finale that might breed, well, a little fury.
“Furious” creator Elizabeth Meriwether insists the Jeffrey Epstein case was merely a backdrop for her true goal of creating a show about the women hurt by men like him. “It was definitely in my mind, but I was never thinking like this is the story of that,” Meriwether said. “There’s a lot of predators to choose from in terms of things in the world that are news stories that have happened recently.”
“Furious” may not be a series explicitly about Epstein, but it’s among several recent TV shows and films that have taken obvious inspiration from the scandal to different degrees. On HBO’s “Industry” this year, a leading character began trafficking young women to the rich and powerful, following an arc that the show’s creators have said was directly inspired by Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. There were also two separate movies chronicling the downfall of (former prince) Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor from the scandal, Netflix’s “Scoop” and Amazon Prime Video’s “A Very Royal Scandal,” released in 2024 — the same year director Zoë Kravtiz released “Blink Twice,” a film about young women trying to escape being sexually abused on a billionaire-owned private island.
Pop culture, it seems, has found plenty to mine amid the horrors of the Epstein headlines.
“The story still has a lot of mystery to it,” said Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald investigative journalist whose 2017 and 2018 reporting on the Florida financier helped pave the way for his eventual 2019 arrest. Brown believes it’s these unknowns — Epstein’s connections among powerful people, how he was able to evade justice for so long and the exact circumstances of his 2019 death in a Manhattan jail — that have made it loom large over popular culture. “There are so many questions surrounding this story,” Brown said. “It is one of probably the world’s biggest mysteries right now.”
The central mystery in “Furious,” which was renewed for a second season last week, turned on whether killer Catherine Grace (Lola Petticrew) would take deadly revenge on billionaire Jay Easton (Peter McRobbie) for his past abuse of her and her dead friend, or on his daughter Emma (Hope Davis), who both facilitated and covered up his crimes. FBI agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) also had her sights set on Easton, having learned that among his collection of pedophilic material is a video of her when she was a child. Indeed, despite being a show that was originally framed as being about the hunt for a serial killer, it was the monstrous and well-connected Easton that emerged by the season end as the ultimate villain in “Furious.”
Meriwether said she has been surprised by the extent to which people would compare “Furious” to the Epstein scandal. She had initially been inspired by the 1987 movie “Black Widow,” about a cat-and-mouse chase between a female serial killer and the FBI agent pursuing her, not sex trafficking. Still, she can understand why the Epstein element has drawn such attention. “It tells me that there are other people out there that are feeling the way I feel and just kind of maybe needing something more,” she said.
“The justice system didn’t work at many stages of that story and the victims never really got any closure or ‘justice’ — and what would justice even look like?” Meriwether said. “I think that’s what really struck me.”
‘Ripped from the headlines’
Stories of the rich and powerful abusing women and children have been subjects in pop culture before Epstein became a household name, from Lynne Ramsay’s 2017 movie “You Were Never Really Here” to the 2014 first season of “True Detective.” But the Epstein case has been influencing entertainment for longer than some might realize.
In 2011, “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” aired an episode that was evidently inspired by Epstein’s 2008 conviction and sweetheart deal in a case involving soliciting minors. The episode involved a wealthy business mogul who had been abusing girls brought in to give him massages — much like the modus operandi of Epstein. Months after Epstein was arrested again in 2019, “SVU” broadcast another “ripped from the headlines” story in which a rich man who abuses girls with the help of his female assistant is able to buy his way out of trouble.
But that episode was criticized for a sensationalist ending in which the desperate father of two of the billionaire’s victims takes one of the detectives hostage. “The horror of the Epstein story is, for the show’s purposes, not quite horrific enough,” read an Atlantic piece by Megan Garber, who called the show “a series that took in the Jeffrey Epstein story and decided that what the story really needed, if it was going to make for good TV, was more drama.”
In taking inspiration from the Epstein case, creators also have an ethical responsibility to act with extreme sensitivity, according to Brown, the Miami Herald reporter whose work on Epstein was honored this year with a special citation by the Pulitzer Prize committee. She believes anyone who makes Epstein-related content — whether they be creatives or just commentators on TikTok — must proceed with mindfulness for his victims. “The most important piece of this that often gets forgotten by everyone is this is a crime that affected very young girls and young women,” Brown said. “I think you have to be very sensitive to what you present out there, knowing that there were real victims in this story who continue to be traumatized by this case.”
Among those watching “Furious” unfold has been Sarah Banet-Weiser, the dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt. She positioned the show among other post-#MeToo pieces of entertainment but said its clear Epstein parallels should also be considered amid signs that public sentiment is turning on billionaires more broadly. “There’s a lot of speculation about what it means that billionaires own these media platforms or that billionaires are pulling the strings in terms of trafficking, so there’s almost a helplessness,” Banet-Weiser said. “This gives us some kind of cathartic release to see that she’s going after a billionaire.”
That feeling, according to Banet-Weiser, also comes from a public sense that real justice has been elusive in both the Epstein case and the #MeToo movement more broadly. “The media’s super smart and savvy about picking up on cultural frustrations and trends,” she said. “So what do we do? We watch a show that is about something very similar as a way to feel like we’re involved in the pursuit of justice just by being audience members.”
Some of that catharsis is delivered in the final moments in “Furious,” when it’s revealed that Alice asphyxiated the ailing Easton shortly after he told her he loved watching her video. The act ensures he won’t face justice, but allows Alice to achieve some level of vengeance on behalf of herself, Catherine, and Easton’s other victims. There’s power in the act both for Alice and those watching at home — something emphasized by Catherine’s earlier words in which she describes how killing makes her feel as if she’s swallowing everything her victim has done inside herself. “I have all the f**king power in the world. And they don’t want us to have that,” Catherine says. “They want to take that from us, but I want you to feel it.”
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