Sacred Cloth and Secular Rot: Why the Houthis and Russia Are Obsessed With Jeffrey Epstein
The DOJ released three million pages. Moscow, Tehran, and Sanaa knew exactly what to do with them
It's hard to miss the Houthis' sudden fixation on the Epstein files. In their telling, Epstein Island and Netanyahu's "New Middle East" are not separate scandals but parts of the same "Zionist project," coordinated across different geographies.
It sounds absurd until you see the pattern. Within 48 hours of the DOJ releasing over three million Epstein documents, authoritarian media ecosystems from Moscow to Sana'a had processed the same raw material into different weapons. The Houthis weaponized it against Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and their domestic Islamist rivals. Russia weaponized it against Zelensky. Iran used it to accuse Trump of murder while attempting to de-escalate a nuclear confrontation with him. What was interesting for me was seeing how these files exposed which regime considers its real enemy right now.
I will start with the Houthis, who did the most elaborate and creative work, overstretching the truth to reach those included and those who were silent.
Epstein, long associated with sex trafficking and elite impunity, ran what many investigators believe was a kompromat operation: a system designed to lure influential figures, compromise them, and record the evidence. For the Houthis, this reading was a gift. It confirmed everything they already believed about how power works in the region.
The Houthis naturally zoomed in on Saudi and UAE relations with Epstein, then expanded outward. Al-Thawra, the Houthi flagship daily, ran an editorial framing the documents as proof of civilizational war. Mohammed Al-Farah, a Political Bureau member, announced that the “New Middle East” project Netanyahu promotes is “in essence an extension of the Zionist project on Epstein Island.” A political cartoon by Kamal Sharaf showed Trump physically blocking a folder labeled “Epstein Files” while victims’ hands reached out from behind it. They attacked Tawakkol Karman, a Nobel laureate affiliated with the Islah party, for her silence.
Emails in the DOJ files showed a UAE businesswoman had shipped pieces of the Kaaba's kiswa, the sacred black cloth covering Islam's holiest site, to Epstein's Florida mansion in 2017. The emails are real and have been widely reported in the media. Aziza Al-Ahmadi, a UAE-based businesswoman, coordinated with Abdullah Al-Maari in Saudi Arabia to ship three pieces of the kiswa via British Airways between February and March 2017. One piece came from inside the Kaaba itself, a second from the outer covering that had been in use, and a third from identical materials but never deployed. The unused piece allowed the shipments to be declared as "artwork" for customs.
In one email, Al-Ahmadi described the cloth’s religious significance to Epstein. “The black piece was touched by a minimum of 10 million Muslims of different denominations... they walk around the Kaaba seven rounds, then everyone tries as much as they can to touch it, and they kept their prayers, wishes, tears, and hopes on this piece.”
The correspondence continued after the kiswa arrived. When Hurricane Irma hit Epstein’s island in September 2017, Al-Ahmadi sent messages asking after his safety.
The kiswa is replaced annually during Hajj and distributed under strict official supervision to institutions and dignitaries, never to private collectors and certainly never to a convicted sex offender in Palm Beach.
Houthi paper, al-Maseira framed this as “doctrinal betrayal.” The sacred cloth, carrying the prayers of millions of pilgrims, ended up in a pedophile’s mansion while ordinary believers faced restrictions on visiting Mecca. The UAE and Saudi Arabia, in this framing, had participated in the desecration of Islam itself. Al-Thawra called Saudi Arabia “the Horn of Satan.” The moral authority of the Iran-backed Houthi group, whose officials are under UN sanctions for systematic sexual violence, was borrowed for the occasion.
The Houthis also attacked domestic rivals. Tawakkol Karman, the Nobel laureate affiliated with the Islah party (the Houthis’ main Islamist opposition) was called out for her silence on the documents. Her Western-funded human rights work was exposed as selective. If she cared about victims, where was her voice now?
For the Houthis and the ecosystem they belong to, truth is purely instrumental. The files matter not for what they reveal, but for what they can be made to do.
The Houthis’ Epstein material was also not merely conspiratorial. It was theological. One widely circulated poster framed the files as an “American-Zionist scandal” and then pivoted immediately into Qur’anic exhortation, asking how the Islamic الأمة could “submit” to such rulers. Epstein was not treated as a crime to investigate, but as a civilizational sign, absorbed into a sacred narrative of humiliation and resistance.
Houthi media also seized on the Yemen-linked correspondence in the files, pointing to emails between Jeffrey Epstein and the late Yemeni businessman Shaher Abdulhaq, and folded it into a far more expansive ideological claim. In one video segment, the movement portrayed the newly formed Presidential Leadership Council itself as an “Epstein council,” alleging that its structure had been “tailored in Epstein’s dark rooms” before being unveiled from Riyadh as a façade for an American-backed project to fragment Yemen. The leap was unmoored from evidence and completely absurd, but useful for them. Epstein was a convenient narrative instrument through which domestic rivals could be cast as puppets and geopolitics reframed as civilizational conspiracy.
The Houthis weren’t the only ones fighting their local wars through Epstein.
Russian state media covered the files heavily. One revealing example came from RIA Novosti columnist Viktoria Nikiforova (she’s sanctioned by the EU for her propaganda), who treated Barack Obama’s absence from the released material not as exculpatory, but as suspicious, an implied sign of elite protection without evidence. She peddles what she describes as “Republican theories” about the Bidens and Obama’s absence from the files, then widens into a familiar authoritarian conclusion: that both parties are hopelessly compromised and American politics is irredeemably corrupt. In this conspiratorial grammar, even silence becomes evidence, and scandal becomes a vehicle for delegitimizing the system itself.
Russia’s more distinctive move was to fold Epstein into Ukraine. RIA published a March 2014 email where Epstein told Ariane de Rothschild (a name that carries its own conspiratorial freight) that "the coup in Ukraine will provide many opportunities." Epstein-Rothschild correspondence about Maidan fit into Russia’s core narrative about Western-backed coups. ” Other Russian-state outlets discussed what the files revealed about Zelensky’s “competence to govern.” A sex trafficking case became evidence for a theory in 2014.
The Russian-aligned sphere extended further. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, amplified by Russian mouthpiece Tsargrad, suggested the timing of the release was meant to pressure Trump on Iran. His comparison was the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which broke just before Clinton bombed Kosovo. Dugin went further. In a piece titled "Pedophile Presidents and the Epstein Files," he called the release proof that "this civilization has signed its own sentence." Epstein, he wrote, was a "personnel department for world government" where candidates "passed through certain rituals, including abuse of minors, murder, and cannibalism." This is the end of the West.
Meanwhile, Iranian Kayhan, the hardline daily close to the Supreme Leader, ran this headline: “Trump is drowning in sexual corruption; he likely also killed Epstein!” IRNA framed the story as “Epstein’s ties with power-holders; Israel’s influence over U.S. politicians.” Fars News ran “Chain failures, hard days for Trump and Netanyahu.” Tasnim pushed the cover-up angle: “Several Epstein files disappeared, including a photo involving Trump.” For Iranian domestic audiences, this is useful. It shows a morally corrupt administration and a morally corrupt system, Republican or Democrat. An empire struggling with its own rot. In other words, the man threatening you is drowning.
In a similar vein, Hezbollah’s media chimed in. Al-Manar called the scandal “a mirror of the American system and the intersections of power, money, and wars.” Al-Ahed ran “Heavyweight names in Epstein documents... apologies and resignations.” The focus was on Ehud Barak, Israel’s former Prime Minister, whose documents showed multiple stays at Epstein’s New York apartment, and Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, who resigned from the Labour Party after $75,000 in apparent Epstein payments surfaced.
Here is something that was not reflected anywhere in Russia or the Axis media. The same DOJ files that Russian state media mined for anti-Western ammunition revealed Epstein's network included Russian-connected operatives. Masha Drokova, a former leader of Putin's Nashi youth movement turned Silicon Valley investor, exchanged over 1,000 messages with Epstein, introducing him to figures like Serguei Beloussov, who helped launch Russia's state quantum computing program and whose company, Acronis, was banned from U.S. intelligence contracts in late 2025. Kremlin spokesman Peskov once praised Beloussov for paying his 'debts to the Motherland.' Poland reopened an inquiry into Epstein-Russian intelligence links based on the same documents. While RIA was shopping through the files for a 2014 email about Ukraine and Dugin was pronouncing the “death of Western civilization,” those same files suggested Russian intelligence-adjacent figures were embedded in the very network they were pretending to judge from the outside.
What Russia, Iran, the Houthis, Hezbollah, and others are doing here is not complicated. They are turning Epstein into a unit of ideological production, a verdict against Ukraine, against the West, against anyone who still believes the other side has moral standing. In America, the same files are being pulled into the open for a different reason. People want accountability. Outside the United States, the files function differently. They are not a demand for justice. They are a resource. Authoritarian ecosystems treat Epstein less as a crime than as proof of civilizational corruption.
But here is what these regimes miss. In most countries, those pages never see daylight. They are sealed, buried, or quietly destroyed. The fact that this is public, contested, investigated, argued over, that journalists are combing through it and citizens are demanding consequences, that is not the rot. That is the fight against it.
In fact, suppression of information is the rule. Campaigns like #اوبه (“Beware”) urge Yemenis to watch what they say, warning that disclosure can aid America and Israel. Ideology moves outward as accusation and inward as discipline. A Houthi activist, later reposted by Nasr al-Din Amer, a senior figure in the movement’s media apparatus, circulated an illustration in which America becomes “Epstein Island,” a blood-drinking trap for migrants, captioned with a warning that U.S. immigration and customs officers will “kill you or drink your blood.”
None of this is surprising. The West gets deconstructed endlessly, and fine, there’s plenty to work with. But these same systems never turn the lens on themselves. Russia doesn’t talk about its influencer who corresponded with Epstein. Iran doesn’t allow this kind of scrutiny. The Houthis don’t demand accountability from their own allies. The critique only flows one way. And here’s the thing about moral rot: if it exists, it exists everywhere. It doesn’t stop at borders. The same systems that produced Epstein exist in Moscow, in Tehran, in Sanaa. Power protects itself the same way everywhere. But acknowledging that would require looking in the mirror. So instead, they consume Western scandal-like content, endlessly, hungrily, while producing none of their own. In essence, this is not moral clarity, it’s just a strategy designed to influence their own populations and reinforce a coalition that holds together not through shared values, but through shared enemies.
The Houthis have a theory about Epstein. So does Russia. So does Iran. So does Hezbollah. The theory is always the same: the other side is rotten. The mirror stays covered.
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