Time to put the tinfoil back on but this is my hunch:

Hazing culture used to be rampant and completely in the open. Often people would be forced to do degrading, humiliating, and incriminating things in order to enter into membership of whatever group it is.

So it might just be some stupid stuff to join a frat or a sorority, or it might be doing something like killing your first civilian in order to join a police gang or committing war crimes to be counted as a fully-fledged member of a military unit.

Part of the function of hazing is to create a closed culture with everyone having dirt on everyone else so that nobody snitches on the others or steps out of line somehow.

I don't believe for a second that it has actually gone away, any more than I believe that hazing culture never made it's way into politics (unless you're arguing that it started in politics and then filtered its way down...)

I think it's completely within reason to suspect that Epstein and Maxwell were running a sort of hazing ring alongside their other bullshit. In fact, I think the operations or the functions they performed all kind of blurred into one.

Given how they both treated their victims, if you've heard the victim testimonies, they would prey upon people, groom them, worm their way into their victims becoming dependent upon them in some fashion, and they'd sort of drop weird and creepy acts on their victims out of the blue. If I'm not mistaken, I think there are some of the victims (who weren't as central to the case) who got scared off when Epstein or Maxwell did creepy shit - they noped out. Epstein and Maxwell seemed to get their kicks from manipulating, coercing, and forcing their victims to transgress stuff like their boundaries and cultural norms and laws. (Obviously Epstein and Maxwell got their kicks from transgressing the boundaries of their victims too.)

It's not a stretch to imagine they were doing this to adults in high society too. Maybe someone gets a little bit financially dependent upon Epstein or they get a bit wooed by Maxwell or they need them for access to a major figure in their field, that sort of thing. And then they start pushing that person by transgressing boundaries, a little bit at a time.

The adults who are principled nope the fuck out (side note: in no way am I trying to imply that I think Epstein's child victims were principled/unprincipled by noping out or not when I say this). The ones who are predators, would-be predators, and the ones who have flexible morals get brought in closer to the circle bit by bit.

All the while this is happening, Epstein and Maxwell are collecting dirt on people and the closer someone is to this, the more access and favours they get provided with, and the more dirt is collected on them.

My hunch is that it was a big ring of rich, powerful, and influential people with Epstein and Maxwell at the centre but probably with someone else actually at the top, like the CIA, and if you wanted to go far then you could sell your soul to the devil and jump on the Epstein/Maxwell escalator to bring yourself to a position of having more power or influence in your field.

Of course the people who do this are now owned by Epstein's operation and so if the person at the top of the operation doesn't like some of the things that you're doing/saying/writing about, Epstein gets in contact with you and does something like threatening to go public with his recordings of you doing illegal shit that would absolutely ruin you permanently. Or a favour is required from you so it's extracted by the same method.

Because of this, I think that there's probably a certain amount of people who are Epstein associates that were either still being courted by Epstein and Maxwell or who were already influential in their field so they weren't part of that inner circle of creeps but those influential orbiters were still used as part of the operation to lure in others with the promise of access to this orbiter.

I wonder if the creator of The Simpsons, who got a foot massage from Virginia Giuffre on Epstein's plane, ever did anything more than that later. I wonder if that was one of the early things they'd drop on someone to see how the person would responded before they would push things a little bit further. Maybe it starts with a foot massage and the next time it's a full-body massage and then the next time... yeah.

I wonder how many people turned down the offer for a foot massage. I wonder how many people noped out. I wonder how many people didn't.

I'm not saying this lets the people you respect/admire that are known Epstein associates off the hook but when someone like Chomsky says that he only ever used Epstein for his financial services I could imagine that he could have been an orbiter just as much as he could have been a part of the inner circle.

Just about everything in this comment is speculation so don't take it as fact.

I guess to put it in the simplest terms, I think Epstein was a particular type of groomer who liked to see people transgress and be transgressed upon, to see people degraded and humiliated, to have people dependent upon him in as many ways as possible so they couldn't say no. I think he found someone who had the same grooming tendency in Maxwell. (Hence why there was that comment from Maxwell about them being "soulmates" or something like that despite not dating for very long and not being married/romantically involved, if I'm recalling correctly?). I think they ran an operation where they carried out these grooming urges, definitely on their known victims, but likely on adult marks as well. I think they probably collected a lot of other groomers along the way. I reckon they turned a whole lot of people into groomers and drew out their abusive tendencies by creating a permissive environment and fostering these tendencies. I reckon they would have collected dirt on their adult marks unwittingly through lying, intoxication, and trickery as well because seeing someone transgressing their own boundaries without their consent would have given Epstein and Maxwell a thrill.

I think it was basically like a big network that was like a secret society of creeps who would lure people in with favours and essentially haze them then use this as leverage over that person and to lure in more hazing victims.

This is basically what Virginia Giuffre was forced into doing to recruit other child victims of Epstein/Maxwell. I think it fits their MO.

And I think they were collecting dirt for a big player like the CIA or Mossad.