Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile Lampoons the Crap that Got Us Here

That was the scene yesterday at St. Louis’ Chase Park Plaza Cinema (the closest show to me, 90 minutes away), where a 1:15 p.m. screening I attended was mostly full in the middle of a workday. Prior to the show, the crowd at this independent theater was serenaded by the theater’s resident organist, who is in his 70s and has been doing this for decades, as if to remind us all of the simpler times that have been ripped away from us by exactly the kind of junk media diet The Onion’s two films are satirizing. Jason Hall, Operations Manager at Chase Park Plaza Cinema, said the decision to exhibit the movie came about after another manager heard about the situation, and the theater jumped on the booking.

“Some believe the [major theater] chains were being too sensitive to the social and political climate that followed shortly after the Charlie Kirk assassination,” Hall said. “Keep in mind that this absurdly over-the-top satirical comedy has nothing at all to do with Kirk or with gun violence. It’s about the most notorious pedophile in history and touches upon his ties to the most elite members of the world, including Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and, of course, Donald Trump. Some folks have the strength, fortitude and maturity to take a joke. Some don’t. They instead cry foul and drop baseless lawsuits in courts across the nation.”

Reflecting on a controversy he said should not be controversial, Hall said both sides of the political spectrum have seemingly forgotten that satire is protected free speech, and that anybody who takes The Onion’s film too seriously should “consider visiting a therapist.”

“Like it or not, The Onion has a way of shining a bright light on social and political matters, exposing truths about subjects while simultaneously poking fun at the people involved, targeting hypocrisies and nonsense with sharp intellectual comedy,” Hall said. “We dig that, support that, and feel we are a happy home for that kind of content.”

Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile is hilarious, scathing, an extended running gag that across 20 minutes brutalizes the sort of low-effort, stock-footage-replete, swooping-timeline-graphics documentaries that are now on every single streaming platform. If you took a cutting from any of the credulous, “Are aliens real??”-type TLC or History Channel trash, planted it in good Midwestern soil, and watered it with Brawndo, this is the sort of abomination that would burgeon out of the ground. Jacob Oller over at The A.V. Club has the blow-by-blow of this scathing sendup of just how obvious it is that some of the most powerful and unaccountable people have taken part in unspeakable crimes (allegedly). A few glimpses: A Catholic priest is introduced with a title identifying him as a “Pedophile Expert,” one reporter for the Pedophile Island Tribune realizes she is the only non-sex-slave on the island, and Epstein reportedly has at least one thing in common with male ducks.

Less reported on is Sex House, the reality TV parody that was first produced by The Onion way back in 2012 and which is running after Bad Pedophile as a kind of B-movie. The 7-minute episodes are all available on YouTube.

Reality TV is the sour soil that gave us Donald Trump in the first place—his inexplicable fame stems in large part from his show The Apprentice, and it provided him the kind of empty name recognition that was enough for him to run for president in 2016. It is a form of entertainment that finds the lowest common denominator and then somehow aims even lower. Reporting on the abuses of cast members, the shows premised entirely on lying, and even just the reckless endangerment of all involved, are all evergreen. Why is this still legal? Why does anybody tolerate it?

Sex House is such a perfect time capsule of ’00s-’10s reality TV that it should be essential viewing for students of the future—the B-roll music alone is unsettlingly on the nose. The show dumps a bunch of young horny people in a house with the directive that they are to have sex—there’s also Frank, who won a contest and is decades older than everybody else. Nothing in the Sex House works, the cast has no chemistry (except in one very bad case where they do), and the producers are simply not feeding the cast. Everybody is being held hostage, being sexually harassed by the producers and the randomly-appearing host, and brutalized if they try to escape. Questions of how this is legal or why the cast tolerate it are out the window from the start. It all ends with the producers having completely abandoned and forgotten about the cast, who have taken to a life of subsistence farming—one of whom has had a baby. The ending is too darkly funny to even relate here.

Sex House, from 2012, really is the best possible pairing with 2025’s Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile. We are living in a world where conspiracy theory and personal agendas animate our politics, where coverups of wrongdoing have never been more perfunctory. Exhibited side-by-side, it is impossible not to draw a line between The Onion’s two productions, which are both about media that stultifies at best and causes active harm at worst. By playing the jester, pointing to these glaring issues and laughing, The Onion is being more direct and honest about them than mainstream media at this point.

At least Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile makes it all a little easier to laugh about.