THE LEAKY BUCKET: Why the Ghost of Epstein Still Haunts the USVI Cloud
By John McCarthy/V.I. Free Press Staff
In the United States Virgin Islands, we don’t call it a ‘data breach’ or a ‘catastrophic failure of witness protection.’ We call it an ‘irregularity.’ It’s the polite word we use for the systemic rot that allows the names of Jane Does to be ‘copy-pasted’ out of a DOJ PDF while the family of a dead scientist has to defend his honor against viral memes.
The recent Daily Mail scoop involving Stephen Hawking isn’t a triumph of journalism; it’s a monument to St. Thomas’s technical sloppiness. Because someone in the Attorney General’s office didn’t know how to properly ‘flatten’ a document, the digital ghosts of Little Saint James are now free to roam the internet, unredacted and unashamed.
Current AG Gordon Rhea may be smiling for the cameras, promising a new era of transparency, but he is currently piloting a ship that was built with digital holes. When the ‘Epstein Files’ were finally unsealed, they didn’t just reveal secrets; they revealed that the USVI’s legal ‘shredder’ was actually just a highlighter pen in the hands of a ghost.
The Leaky Bucket: Part II — The Real Victim
“The viral frenzy over a world-famous physicist is a convenient distraction for a much darker ‘irregularity.’ While the internet debates a physicist’s itinerary from 2006, the reality is that the USVI DOJ’s technical incompetence has functionally doxxed dozens of Epstein’s actual victims.
Because a clerk on St. Thomas failed to properly ‘flatten’ the digital files, the names and home addresses of Jane Does—women who were promised the shield of government protection—were served up on a silver platter to anyone with a ‘copy’ command and a Twitter account. It is a profound betrayal of trust that no amount of smiling press conferences can fix.
We are seeing a territory that wants to play in the big leagues of international justice but is still using a Little League IT department. If Gordon Rhea wants to truly exorcise the ghost of Epstein, he needs to start by firing the people who think a black highlighter tool is a security protocol. Until then, the USVI remains a ‘leaky bucket,’ where secrets aren’t kept—they’re just poorly hidden.”
Post Mortem
In the end, it doesn’t matter if the face on the left is the man you think it is. In the USVI, everyone is a placeholder until the next ‘irregularity’ surfaces. We are a territory of high-stakes litigation and low-stakes data entry.
Whether it’s a phone company billing a ‘John Francis’ at an address that doesn’t exist, or a Department of Justice that thinks a digital highlighter is a witness protection program, the message is clear: The ghost of Epstein didn’t need a key to get out of the vault. He just needed someone on St. Thomas to hit ‘Copy’ and ‘Paste.’