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.”
About a third of the way in, we hear another fake audioclip, this time portraying a Department of Justice official telling Maxwell in a 2025 interview, “We need you to help us cover up some of Donald Trump’s crimes.” (The Justice Department released redacted transcripts of the actual Maxwell interview last month.) This is when Bad Pedophile takes a sharp turn to chronicle the relationship between Trump and Epstein. It would be a shame to spoil a sequence this ridiculous and sublime, so I’ll leave it at that.
Like any good satire, the mockumentary’s sharpest moments are flecked with bits of truth. While it has Epstein working at a fictional Deep State, it also calls out his allegedly real relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world, including Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton—throwing in a few extra “allegedlies” in the process. And of course it claims that Epstein, “a pedophile in the prime of his life, with decades of molesting still in front of him,” didn’t end his own life but was killed in a “botched government-sanctioned assassination,” complete with “over 34,689,652 minutes” of missing surveillance footage from his jail cell. The latter is a nod to the footage that was cut from the “full raw” surveillance video from the only working camera near Epstein’s Manhattan jail cell on the night before he was found dead in August 2019.
The release of Bad Pedophile will be more limited than was originally planned. Collins says a movie theater company was set to launch the mockumentary nationally but pulled out in the wake of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s death. The publication had to scramble to find an alternative.
“It does show you, this moment, if you are trying to get a merger through or something, or some sort of business from the government, or if you’re just afraid of the ire of the president, the only real way to get stuff out there is independently,” says Collins. “If you see Jeffrey Epstein’s name and your immediate thought process is, ‘Oh, this might offend the president,’ that’s not the problem of people making a joke. It’s the problem of a broken and insanely failing society.”
Despite promising to be more transparent about releasing the so-called “Epstein files” during the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump has since done an about-face. According to The Wall Street Journal, he was told he was named in the files, although it’s unknown in what context. In a Truth Social post in September he described the case as the “Democrat Epstein Hoax.”
As the Epstein saga continues to unfold, there’s no telling when the public will have access to all of the pertinent information. In the meantime, at least there’s the Onion.
“In the last year, we’ve been able to say a lot of stuff that other places are afraid to say,” says Collins. “We’re going to keep doing it.”
