In a world where hallowed news organizations transform into conservative mouthpieces and milquetoast late-night jokes are grounds for suspension, satirical headlines from the Onion can feel closer to real life than parody.
Now the site is taking on one of the most taboo subjects of all—disgraced sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein—in mockumentary form.
Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile is a 20-minute satire that’s half biopic, half true crime, and 100 percent dumb (complimentary). It launches in theaters in New York City, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and San Francisco for one day only on October 2; after that it will be available online. You can watch the trailer right here.
Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile is a 20-minute mockumentary that launches in select theaters on October 2.
Onion CEO Ben Collins says his writers decided to go big on Epstein once Donald Trump started acting “dodgy” when fielding questions about Epstein this summer. They pulled it together in six weeks.
“There's this big gap where information should be,” Collins says. They thought “it would be very funny to fill it with complete fucking nonsense.”
The mockumentary fills much of that gap with Trump himself. It opens with a fake voicemail from Epstein to Trump that heavily implies the president arranged his death. (Epstein died in prison in 2019; it was officially ruled a suicide.) “I just wanted to remind you that we’re best friends, and tomorrow I'm going to tell the whole world that you’re a pedophile, just like me,” the voice actor says over drone shots of the Manhattan skyline, Washington, DC, and the island where Epstein allegedly sex-trafficked minors. “Unless, of course, something bad happens to me tonight. But I’ll probably be fine.”
From there, Bad Pedophile skewers all the standard true-crime tropes. Talking heads ask hard-hitting questions like, “Was he ever even alive to begin with?” and “Was Jeffrey his first name, or was Epstein his last name?” In addition to the portrayals of journalists, lawyers, and former associates, they throw in a priest whose title is “pedophile expert.” To give you a hint of what satirical tack the Onion is taking, this is a world in which Epstein is described as an “all-American molester” whose accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell first met him through a classified ad seeking a “gross pervert assistant.”