JULY 8, 2026
American expat in Italy reflects on Epstein files after question from an 11-year-old student
Essayist Bob Brody, an American expat living in a small town in southern Italy, recounts being asked about the Epstein files by an 11-year-old student at the local middle school, Istituto Comprensivo Abele de Blasio. The released Epstein files reportedly comprise 3.5 million pages, 180,000 images, and 2,000 videos. The name of Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini appears in the files nearly 100 times, reportedly due to email exchanges with political strategist Steve Bannon about international politics.
Bob Brody, a consultant and essayist who lives as a full-time American resident in a southern Italian hillside town of fewer than 5,000 people, described the moment an 11-year-old student asked him whether he had read the Epstein files during a classroom session at a local middle school. Brody had volunteered to teach students about their family histories through parental interviews, but the session opened into broader questions about American life.
Brody said the boy's question left him "flabbergasted," noting the student posed it with a straight face and appeared genuinely curious. When Brody asked why the student had raised the subject, the child's answer was simple: "Because it's in the news. It's all over the place."
In his Washington Examiner op-ed, Brody used the exchange to question the scale of media coverage of the Epstein files. He stated that "the mainstream news media has overplayed its hand, hyperventilating obsessively over the Epstein files to a degree perilously close to pathological." At the same time, he wrote that whatever remains to be investigated about Jeffrey Epstein "should be investigated and investigated aggressively," describing Epstein and his accomplices as having committed "grievous, revolting, and unforgivable wrongs."