Epstein Forums

The police in Britain have arrested a former ambassador and a member of the royal family. French prosecutors are investigating the country’s culture minister. The former prime minister of Norway has been charged with “gross corruption.” And authorities in Latvia and Lithuania are looking into possible human trafficking.

The Epstein files, released by the United States Department of Justice, have yielded legal action in several countries as the police and prosecutors examine whether the files reveal that criminal laws have been broken.

Since the biggest tranche of files was made public less than a month ago, the search for criminal accountability is going on just about everywhere overseas that Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender, is known to have befriended the world’s wealthy and elite.

The Epstein scandal is genuinely American in origin, the story of a rich New Yorker accused of trafficking young women for sex. Ghislaine Maxwell, Mr. Epstein’s longtime associate, was a British socialite. But many of the people caught up in his web are Americans, including the current president, a past president and boldfaced names from Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. And it is Congress, under pressure from Mr. Epstein’s victims, that demanded the files be released.

Yet it is Europe where police and prosecutors seem particularly eager to examine the American documents as part of criminal investigations into potential wrongdoing.