I Analyzed 1,500 “Pizza” Mentions in the Epstein Files. Here’s What I Found.

Mother Jones illustration; Getty; Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office/ZUMA

Less than two months before his arrest on sex-trafficking charges in 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was on top of the world—at least going by his iMessages.

Over the course of three days in May, he fired off more than 60 texts to his powerful besties. A self-appointed expert on any topic, Epstein sparred with a cocky Steve Bannon over Trump’s first-term trade war with China and discussed Bannon’s recent trip to Norway.

For reasons we’ll perhaps never know—Bannon didn’t get back to me—their banter turned to the political leanings of a mass killer.

“Did you tell Norwegians that the child murderer was a lefty radical?” Epstein asked Bannon—presumably a reference to Anders Breivik, the far-right extremist who killed 77 people in the country in 2011, most of them teenagers. “Yes yes yes,” Bannon replied. “Went over well!!!”

Epstein noted the killer “gave a Nazi salute” and claimed he’d also made an antisemitic crack comparing Jews and pizza: “The pizza doesn’t scream when you throw it in the oven.”

This joke, if you can call it that, isn’t about pizza, not really. But it is one of nearly 1,500 mentions of “pizza”—literal, figurative, or just plain strange—across more than 10,600 pages culled from the Epstein files that are breathing new life to an old conspiracy. Internet sleuths have seized on the appearance of the word “pizza” in the files as code for children, just as they did during Pizzagate, the thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that spun the WikiLeaks release of Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta’s emails into false claims that Democrats ran a child-sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, DC, pizzeria. The use of “cheese pizza” in those emails was first suggested by a 4chan user to be coded language for “C.P.” or “child porn,” while “pizza” itself was used to mean girls, alongside other supposed shorthand terms tied to pedophilia.

“What the fuck is pizza? How far does this go? How come this never got released before? What is happening?”

This has convinced some readers of the Epstein files that Pizzagate was “right this whole time” and that Epstein was involved. Tucker Carlson tweeted that “it looks like Pizzagate is basically real.” Talking about the Epstein files, the world’s biggest podcaster, Joe Rogan, complained: “What the fuck is pizza? How far does this go? How come this never got released before? What is happening?”