National Step Down Day

If You're an FOE (Friend of Epstein), It's Time to Come Clean

I’m proposing a new American holiday: National Step Down Day, to be observed annually on March 2nd.

Before you scroll away, hear me out. We need this. The country needs this. The news cycle needs this. Because right now, the Epstein files are producing a new resignation approximately every 37 hours, and the American public simply cannot sustain this level of moral whiplash without developing some kind of collective neck injury.

For the informed thoughtful citizens familiar with this whole deplorable saga, you can skip this next section. But, in case you’ve been living in a self-induced protective bubble (say, on your own private island free from the distraction of acting like a decent human being), way back in January (what feels like decades ago), the Department of Justice released over three million pages of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein—the convicted sex offender who managed to befriend roughly half the world’s powerful men before dying in federal custody under circumstances that remain, shall we say, “suspiciously convenient.” The files include 180,000 images and 2,000 videos, which is more content than Apple+ has produced in the last decade, and significantly more disturbing.

Since then, the resignations have been coming in like Amazon returns after Christmas, except instead of unwanted sweaters, people are returning their careers.

Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard and former U.S. Treasury Secretary? He’s announced (yet again) he’s stepping down from public life. Gone from Harvard. Gone from OpenAI’s board. Gone from basically everything except, presumably, his retirement home. The emails showed Epstein referring to himself as Summers’ “wing man”—a phrase that, in the context of a convicted sex trafficker, takes on implications I’d rather not contemplate before lunch.

The head of Goldman Sachs’s legal department, Kathy Ruemmler? She’s resigned after emails surfaced showing she’d referred to Epstein as “Uncle Jeffrey” and accepted gifts from him including a Fendi bag. Goldman Sachs clarified that Ruemmler “regrets ever knowing” Epstein, which is a sentiment I suspect she shares with approximately four hundred other people currently updating their LinkedIn profiles.

Brad Karp, chairman of one of Wall Street’s most powerful law firms, stepped down after emails showed he’d asked Epstein for help getting his son connected with Woody Allen—which, and I cannot stress this enough, is asking one problematic person to introduce your child to another problematic person. It’s like asking your meth dealer for a recommendation for a good painkiller.

Tom Pritzker, billionaire executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels, retired and said he’d “exercised terrible judgment” in maintaining contact with Epstein. The head of Dubai’s largest port company was replaced. A Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist at Columbia resigned. Slovakia’s national security adviser resigned after texts surfaced in which he and Epstein discussed women, with Epstein generously offering ‘You can have them both. I am not possessive. And their sisters.’ The adviser later told Radio Slovakia, ‘When I read those messages today, I feel like a fool.’ Just a fool? That seems a tad lacking.

Norway’s former prime minister has been charged with “aggravated corruption.” A Norwegian diplomat resigned after it emerged that Epstein’s will left ten million dollars to her children—ten million dollars!—which is the kind of bequest that raises questions no Christmas card can answer.

Prince Andrew—sorry, former Prince Andrew, since he was stripped of his royal titles—was arrested on February 19th. Peter Mandelson, the former UK ambassador to the United States, was arrested on February 23rd after emails showed he’d told Epstein, upon learning of his sex trafficking sentence, “I think the world of you.” He later described Epstein as “muck that you can’t get off your shoe,” which is quite the character arc from “I think the world of you” to “shoe muck” in under two decades.

And then there’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who told a podcast last year that he’d cut off all contact with Epstein after a single uncomfortable encounter in 2005. “That’s my story,” he said. “A one and absolutely done.” Except the files show he was still communicating with Epstein in 2012, had co-invested with him in a technology company, and had apparently sought directions to Epstein’s Caribbean island for his boat captain. When confronted at a Senate hearing, he admitted to having lunch on the island. “A one and absolutely done” is doing a remarkable amount of work in that sentence.

Even the chair of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, Casey Wasserman, is under pressure to resign after emails showed him writing flirtatious messages to Ghislaine Maxwell, including asking when he could see her “in a tight leather outfit.” Chappell Roan left his talent agency. Abby Wambach left his talent agency. He’s selling the entire company, which is the corporate equivalent of changing your phone number after a bad breakup.

A CBS News contributor—a health influencer named Peter Attia—had to resign from a job he hadn’t even really started yet, after emails surfaced in which he’d written to Epstein about the macronutrient content of... you know what, I’m not going to quote it. Let’s just say he combined dietary science with vulgarity in a way that would make his mother deeply uncomfortable.

And it’s not stopping. Every morning, Americans wake up, check the news, and discover that another titan of industry, academia, or government has been revealed as a person who somehow forgot they used to socialize with a convicted sex trafficker.

The resignation statements have become their own literary genre—a kind of haiku of regret:

I deeply regret / my lapse of judgment back then. / I’m a “distraction.”

This is where National Step Down Day comes in.

The problem isn’t that these people are resigning. The problem is the pacing. We’re getting one resignation every day or two, stretched across months, creating an atmosphere of perpetual low-grade moral crisis that’s exhausting for everyone except cable news networks and Jake from State Farm commercials, which are thriving .

This is inefficient. This is un-American. We are the nation that invented drive-through banking, one-click purchasing, and the turducken for Pete’s sake. We do not do things slowly!

So: March 2nd. National Step Down Day. Everyone who maintained a friendly relationship with Jeffrey Epstein after his 2008 conviction for soliciting sex from a minor—everyone who visited the island, accepted the gifts, sent the emails, took the meetings, co-invested in the technology companies, and has been holding their breath for the last two months hoping their particular batch of correspondence hasn’t been digitized yet—steps down. All at once. Same day. Like a flash mob, but for accountability (and human decency!)

Why March? Several reasons.

First, March is an action verb! Forward, march! March into truth. March into facts. March into justice. March into the unemployment line with your Fendi bag and your memories of Caribbean lunches you now deeply regret.

Second, March is a boring month. Nothing happens in March. February has Valentine’s Day and, apparently, an endless supply of Epstein-related arrests. April has Easter and Tax Day. March has... well, St. Patrick’s Day, which is really just a holiday about wearing green and making questionable decisions, so it’s thematically appropriate. But otherwise, March is just sitting there, empty and available, like an open calendar slot at a therapist’s office. Which, coincidentally, many of these people are going to need.

Third, and most practically: everyone has had enough time. The files dropped January 30th. By March 2nd, you’ve had thirty-one days to delete your own emails, consult your lawyers, update your resume, and practice saying “I deeply regret my association” in the mirror until it sounds almost sincere. No more excuses. No more “I’m reviewing the matter.” The matter has been reviewed. It’s you. In the emails. Being friendly with a sex trafficker. Step down.

How will this work you ask? I envision a streamlined process. The government establishes an online portal—lets call it StepDown.gov—where participants can submit their resignations efficiently. The portal will feature:

Dropdown menus of pre-approved resignation statements, including:

“I deeply regret my lapse in judgment.”

“I am stepping down to avoid being a distraction.” (Currently the most popular option, used by approximately 73% of all Epstein-adjacent resignees. At this point, “distraction” is doing more work than any word in the English language since “collusion” in 2018.)

“I never witnessed any illegal behavior.” (The classic. This is technically possible in the same way that it’s technically possible to tour a meth lab and only notice the nice countertops.)

“My association with this individual was strictly professional.” (Professional what, exactly? No, don’t answer that.)

And my personal favorite, submitted by an actual person in an actual resignation: “I exercised terrible judgment in maintaining contact.” Past tense. “Exercised.” As though bad judgment were a fitness routine since discontinued.

The portal would also include an AI “Statement Generator” for those too busy to craft their own expressions of remorse. Simply input your name, your former title, and the nature of your Epstein connection (dropdown options: “dinner parties,” “island visits,” “co-investments,” “flirtatious emails with his accomplice,” or “all of the above”), and the system generates a press-ready statement in the blink of an eye.

This is faster than the current system, which involves weeks of denial, followed by a strategic leak to a sympathetic journalist, followed by a “carefully worded statement” crafted by a crisis communications team billing $900 an hour, followed by an actual resignation three weeks later when it becomes clear that “carefully worded statement” wasn’t enough because the internet found more emails.

I’ve been tracking the resignations. As of this writing, we’re averaging roughly one major departure every 48 hours. At this rate, with an estimated pool of—let’s be conservative—several hundred people who probably need to have a very uncomfortable conversation with their boards of directors, we’re looking at approximately two years of rolling resignations.

Two years! That’s longer than most Netflix series. That’s longer than my marriage would have lasted (if I’d married crazy Gwen after that one eventful frat party)(though to be fair, she also exercised terrible judgment, specifically in dating me).

National Step Down Day compresses all of this into a single, magnificent, cathartic news cycle. One day. One massive wave. CNN can split the screen into forty-seven boxes. The stock market would briefly resemble a staircase going exclusively down. HR departments across Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the Ivy League would simultaneously burst into flames, not literally, but hopefully more than metaphorically.

Then, on March 3rd: clarity. Clean slate. We’d know exactly who stepped down and who didn’t, which itself will be informative. The people who didn’t participate in National Step Down Day would face a very simple question: “So you’re telling us you weren’t in those three million pages?” And the American public, freed from the tyranny of daily resignation drip, could return to its normal activities, like speculating whether Ghislane Maxwell was replaced by a clone and is living in a south american country with no extradition treaty.

I should pause here, briefly, because underneath the absurdity of resignation statements and PR-managed departures, there are real victims. Young women who were trafficked, manipulated, and abused by a man who weaponized his wealth and connections to ensure that the most powerful people in the world had a vested interest in looking the other way.

The reason these resignations matter—the reason National Step Down Day matters, if anyone actually took me seriously, which they should but won’t—is not because it’s entertaining to watch powerful people squirm. It’s because for decades, these connections provided cover. Every dinner party attended, every email exchanged, every co-investment signed after 2008 sent the same message: This man’s behavior is not disqualifying. And that message had consequences for real people.

So yes, I’m making jokes about dropdown menus and pre-written statements. But the reason the jokes work is that the actual behavior is outrageous! These aren’t people who accidentally liked a problematic tweet. These are people who maintained active, friendly, sometimes financially intertwined relationships with a convicted sex offender and then, when millions of pages of documentation made this impossible to deny, expressed shock that anyone found this concerning.

They didn’t forget they were friends with Jeffrey Epstein. You don’t forget that. They were just hoping we wouldn’t find out.

National Step Down Day simply asks them to stop hoping and start packing.

For those planning to participate, I offer the following practical guidance:

All resignations should be submitted by 5:00 PM Eastern on March 2nd. This gives the evening news enough time to compile the full list and gives Wolf Blitzer time to rehearse.

Please clean out your office the night before. There won’t be enough security guards on March 2nd to escort everyone out simultaneously, and the last thing we need is a bottleneck in the lobby of Goldman Sachs.

Keep your farewell emails brief. “It has been an honor to serve” is fine. “I look forward to spending more time with my family” is acceptable, though your family may not share the enthusiasm. Under no circumstances should your farewell email contain the phrase “I never witnessed any illegal behavior,” because at this point that phrase is essentially a confession.

Do not post about your resignation on LinkedIn with the words “excited to announce my next chapter.” This is not a next chapter. This is the last chapter. The book is over. The publisher has recalled all copies.

But don’t go getting all depressed. Several industries are actively hiring people with a demonstrated history of poor judgment and proximity to scandal. I’m told there are openings in cryptocurrency, AI ethics consulting, and the United States Congress.

Look, I know National Step Down Day isn’t going to happen. The powerful don’t resign on schedule. They resign when the PR math no longer works in their favor. They resign when the cost of staying exceeds the cost of the golden parachute, when the board’s lawyers start using phrases like “fiduciary liability,” when their Wikipedia page has been edited so many times in one week that it triggers an automatic review.

But a man can dream. And in that dream, March 2nd arrives, and across the globe, in boardrooms and corner offices and palatial estates and one very specific Caribbean island that everyone apparently visited but nobody seems to remember clearly, powerful people look at their phones, read the date, and think: It’s time.

March 2nd. National Step Down Day. Mark your calendars.

Or don’t. These folks clearly have trouble remembering their own schedules anyway.

Forward, march!

P.S.: We’re not mentioning you-know-who. Not because we’re afraid of being disappeared, but because some people’s relationship with accountability is so complicated it deserves its own column. And possibly its own Netflix series (but that’s a matter for 2028).