On January 30, the Department of Justice released 3.5 million pages from its Jeffrey Epstein investigations — flight logs, emails, photographs, depositions spanning decades. The stated goal: transparency. The actual result: immediate catastrophe. Within 48 hours, victim advocates were calling it “the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in United States history.”
Thousands of redaction failures exposed victim names and unredacted nude photographs. The DOJ claimed they’d fulfilled their legal obligations while acknowledging they’d identified over 6 million potentially responsive pages. Rather than satisfying public demand for answers, the release supercharged exactly what it was supposed to quell: conspiracy theories about what powerful people are hiding.
This wasn’t an accident of poor execution. It’s a textbook demonstration of what psychologists call the transparency paradox — the counterintuitive reality that flawed attempts at openness often fuel distrust more effectively than saying nothing at all.
66% Believe the Government Is Withholding Information
A January 2026 CNN poll found that two-thirds of Americans are dissatisfied with how much the federal government has released about Epstein, with the same proportion believing authorities are deliberately withholding information. Only 6% expressed satisfaction with the disclosure. This represents a massive trust deficit that the document dump was explicitly designed to address, yet somehow managed to deepen instead.
The psychology behind this response isn’t mysterious. Research on government transparency and conspiracy beliefs shows that when people perceive a lack of transparency in decision-making, they develop stronger conspiracy mentality — which then increases belief in specific conspiracy theories.
The relationship is mediated: non-transparent government creates generalized suspicion, which fuels specific theories about cover-ups and hidden agendas.
Significant Events Demand Proportional Causes
Cognitive biases drive conspiracy theory belief more than logic or evidence. The “proportionality bias” leads people to believe that monumental events must have equally substantial explanations. A financier’s sex trafficking operation that potentially implicated powerful figures across decades feels too significant to be fully captured in any document release, no matter how massive. People instinctively seek explanations that match the scale of what they perceive as the underlying crime.
This bias explains why 3.5 million pages feels insufficient to many people while simultaneously overwhelming anyone trying to parse the actual content. The documents are simultaneously too much to process and not enough to satisfy suspicions. Those inclined toward conspiracy thinking focus immediately on what’s missing — the other 2.5+ million pages the DOJ identified but didn’t release, the redacted sections, the “lost” materials. Each omission becomes evidence of deliberate concealment rather than bureaucratic limitation or victim protection.
Flawed Transparency Confirms Existing Suspicions
Confirmation bias ensures that people interpret new information through the lens of pre-existing beliefs. When the Epstein files dropped with obvious problems — names that should have been redacted visible in photographs, inconsistent redaction standards, entire sections blacked out — people who already believed in a cover-up found validation. The errors weren’t seen as mistakes but as proof of hurried releases designed to protect certain individuals while sacrificing others.
Research on false beliefs and transparency perceptions demonstrates this dynamic clearly. People holding conspiratorial beliefs are more likely to perceive government communications as non-transparent, even when authorities provide extensive information. They also rely on their existing beliefs when explaining why they think governments are hiding things. The Epstein release created thousands of specific data points that conspiracy theorists could selectively cite as evidence while ignoring context or contradicting information.
The Moving Goalposts Keep Shifting
Perhaps the most predictable outcome: within hours of the release, attention shifted from what was disclosed to what remained hidden. Congressional representatives immediately called for access to unredacted files. Survivors demanded remaining documents. Social media exploded with claims about specific individuals whose names appeared in certain contexts but not others. The conversation moved from “release the files” to “release ALL the files” before most people had examined what already became public.
Conspiracy theories serve psychological functions beyond truth-seeking — they provide sense-making frameworks during uncertainty, restore feelings of control, and protect group identities. They’re also remarkably resilient to disconfirmation because they can incorporate contradictory evidence. Documents that seem to exonerate someone become proof of document manipulation. Transparency efforts become proof of cover-up sophistication. The goalposts don’t just move; they multiply.
The Lesson Beyond Epstein
The botched Epstein file release offers a case study in how transparency can backfire when execution fails. This matters beyond one scandal. Governments facing demands for disclosure about any controversial topic — pandemic origins, surveillance programs, corporate malfeasance — confront the same dynamic. Half-measures or flawed releases often generate more suspicion than careful silence followed by complete, well-executed disclosure.
The transparency paradox suggests that institutions need to get disclosure right the first time, or risk making conspiracy theories stronger than they were before attempting openness. In the Epstein case, the combination of massive scale, obvious errors, and acknowledged incompleteness created perfect conditions for distrust to flourish.