Students across the US have been playing a viral Five Nights at Freddy’s parody called Five Nights at Epstein’s, in which you operate surveillance cameras throughout the child sex offender’s Little St. James home to avoid being caught not only by Epstein, but by other figures mentioned in the files, such as President Trump and Stephen Hawking.
The game uses real photographs taken of Epstein’s home, as released by the DOJ.
As reported by Bloomberg, social media footage shows young boys and girls playing the game in classrooms from Utah to North Carolina, with videos on TikTok and YouTube amassing millions of views. Several platforms host the game to download online, but a fully playable web browser version of Five Nights at Epstein’s has proven the most popular, drawing almost 200,000 visitors in February alone.
Meta has begun blocking users from sharing links to the game to limit its reach, while TikTok stated that Five Nights at Epstein’s breaches its community guidelines, which prohibit engaging in the exploitation and abuse of children. Schools throughout the US are working in tandem to prevent access to the game, as it has been described as a “national trend” by one district, but several popular videos online have shown students how to bypass school security systems, making it exceedingly difficult for teachers to stop.
Five Nights At Epstein’s Web Browser Host Urges Students Not To “Bypass School Rules”
While it’s unclear where exactly the game originated from, it’s believed to have been developed by Evan Productions on itch.io, though the account no longer exists. Bloomberg discovered that @killlala1213 maintains the web browser version, though they stressed the “site doesn’t encourage anyone (especially minors) to bypass school rules, filters, or policies” and that you should “play only in a place where it’s allowed.”
However, some have taken issue not just with the fact that Five Nights at Epstein’s is being played in classrooms across the US, and that content restrictions are being bypassed, but that the game exists to begin with. Mary Rodee, a librarian at Canton Central School in New York, whose 15-year-old son committed suicide in 2021 after being ‘sextorted’, argued that kids are “becoming numb to really terrible stuff” and that experiences through a screen can be as traumatizing as real-life ones. Merve Lapus, father to a 13-year-old girl, likewise suggested that those playing the game seem “disconnected to the reality that there were real victims.”
Others argue that it’s simply a ‘meme game,’ pointing to the deluge of similarly crass old-school Flash titles that were available online in the early 2000s, and in the comments, some have asked the developer to add additional features and even Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislane Maxwell as a character, expanding on the game further. But as Jill Murphy, chief content officer of the children’s advocacy group, Common Sense Media, warns, reducing Epstein to a joke with games like these risks a “domino effect” that makes discussing sexual violence with young children even more difficult.
Indeed, Lapus claimed to have seen teenagers regularly laughing about the game in ways that are “almost dehumanizing to the victims.”
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