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The release of theJeffrey Epstein filesin early 2026 wasn’t just a scandal about one man. It was an unexpected window into the hidden architecture ofAmerican corporate power.
When the U.S. Department of Justice published more than 3 million pages of documents on Jan. 30, 2026, most of the media focused on thefamous names. But the files also revealed something broader and more troubling. Epstein’s network had infiltrated the boardrooms of hundreds of major U.S. companies, with clear consequences for corporate misconduct affecting employees and the broader business culture.
I’m ascholar of corporate finance and governancewho has studied the vast reaches of Epstein’s business connections. Fellow economistsMarina Gertsberg,Ekaterina Volkovaand Ifound thatthe disgraced financier effectively wired corporate America into a denser, more tightly interconnected network. Companies with more Epstein-connected directors registered measurably worse governance failures over time, regardless of their size or the prominence of their executives.
There’s a bigger point as well. Networks that appear valuable because they provide access and connectivity can also encourage a social environment with serious governance problems. The Epstein files revealed a network that was hidden, vast and tied to clearly disqualifying conduct.
The vast majority of corporate connections to Epstein went unreported by the media. Following the files’ release, journalists understandably focused on the most prominent and sensational cases. In the two weeks after the news broke, my colleagues and I found that fewer than 1 in 4 companies with Epstein-connected directors were mentioned in the news.
Our research went much further. We searched the entire document load for the names of every CEO and board member who served at a publicly listed U.S. company between 2006 and 2026, which totaled 92,698 individuals. We then used artificial intelligence to classify each document match, distinguishing meaningful contact with Epstein from accidental mentions.
What we discovered was striking. More than 2,000 public-company directors had direct contact with Epstein, either through emails or in-person meetings. Of these, about 1,000 were part of five or more communications, the threshold we used to identify the most tightly connected individuals. And we found that companies with more Epstein-connected directors experienced much worse governance over time – measured through negative media attention about executive misconduct, fraud and corruption.
Usingdata from RepRisk– a company that systematically tracks corporate misconduct across media, regulatory and NGO sources – we discovered that every time a board added a director who had meaningful Epstein contact, it was associated with about 1.7 more governance failures per year. In addition, there were 3.4 more incidents that breached theenvironmental, sustainability and governancepledges of the director’s company.
Some of the best-known cases underscore this finding. Jes Staley, whoprivately described Epsteinas one of his closest friends, resigned as CEO of Barclays in November 2021 after the bank disclosed a regulatory probe into that relationship and found he had misled investigators. Barclays thenclawed back 17.8 million British poundsin awards, or about US$24 million, and the U.K. watchdog Financial Conduct Authority fined and banned him from working in financial services.
Another example is Leon Black,who stepped downas chairman and CEO of Apollo Global Management in 2021 after an independent review found he had paidEpstein $170 millionfor tax and estate-planning advice, far more than initially disclosed. Apollo restructured its governance in the process.
There are also instances at the company level where connections to Epstein were followed by governance failures: Deutsche Bank paid a$150 million regulatory penaltyfor compliance issues tied to Epstein’s accounts, whileJPMorgan Chase settled survivor claimsfor $290 million.
The effects were strongest for the most intensive connections. Directors who had documented in-person meetings with Epstein were 2.5 times more likely to be accused of misconduct, with 5.2 total incidents a year per connected director.
These aren’t just correlations. When an Epstein-connected director died during the period we studied – an event outside any firm’s control – their company subsequently saw a big drop in misconduct incidents in the years that followed. In short, this relationship reflected something real and causal, not just that badly governed firms were more likely to tolerate such connections in the first place.
