Investigative reporters at the Miami Herald documented not only the known horrors of Jeffrey Epstein’s reign of terror over young girls across the world, but also the complicity of figures throughout the political sphere.

The five-part series deserves to be read in full, but at its most basic level, it tells the story of the grossest miscarriage of justice in the most perfect union in the world. That Epstein effectively evaded justice points to a truth even uglier than flaws in our legal system: that the powerful will always defend the powerful above all else.