The internet has a Ghislaine Maxwell problem, and it just got worse.
On February 4, X user @tupacabra posted a 74-second video that has since exploded across social media. The caption: “She’s the only person alive who knows EVERYTHING.” Within 24 hours, it had racked up over 8.2 million views, 38,000 likes, and 5,300 reposts. By internet standards, it was a smash hit. By any standard of decency, it was something else entirely.
For the uninitiated, a “brat edit” is a type of fan-made video inspired by the aesthetic of Charli XCX’s 2024 album Brat — neon-green text, rapid cuts, and a rebellious energy originally designed to celebrate pop stars. The internet has since repurposed the format for everyone from fictional villains to real-world criminals. This time, it landed on Ghislaine Maxwell.
What’s Actually in the Video
She’s the only person alive who knows EVERYTHING. pic.twitter.com/rkNikNUP8g
— TUPACABRA (@tupacabra) February 4, 2026
The video opens with the word “brat” repeating in neon-green text over a close-up of a young Maxwell — styled like a Charli XCX fan edit, the kind you’d normally see made for pop stars and fictional anti-heroes. From there, it becomes a full highlight reel of her life before prison. Maxwell and Epstein smiling together in the snow. Maxwell posing solo in a lavender top and gold jewelry. Maxwell walking alone in a red plaid suit. Then the images get heavier.
The infamous photo of Maxwell standing beside Virginia Giuffre and Prince Andrew. Maxwell and Epstein appearing to greet Pope John Paul II. A black-and-white shot of Maxwell grinning in a crowd. Bill Clinton walking a bride down the aisle — with Maxwell circled in the background among the wedding guests. The video even flashes the cover of Kaitlyn Tiffany’s book, “The Great (Fake) Child-Sex-Trafficking Epidemic,” as if to taunt anyone who’d dare question the narrative.
It’s slick. It’s unsettling. And 8 million people watched it.
She’s Not a Character. She’s a Convicted Sex Trafficker.
Let’s be painfully clear about who Ghislaine Maxwell is. In December 2021, a federal jury convicted her of conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually exploit and traffic underage girls. She is currently serving a 20-year sentence at a minimum-security prison in Bryan, Texas. She recruited children. She groomed them. She delivered them to a predator. That’s not lore. That’s a court record.
And yet, here she is — getting the fan edit treatment, soundtracked and aestheticized for maximum shareability.
8 Million Views vs. 3 Million Pages
The timing makes this even harder to stomach. Just days before the video took off, the U.S. Department of Justice released over 3 million pages of documents related to Epstein’s crimes under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Those documents have already triggered political fallout across continents.
Casey Wasserman, the chair of the LA 2028 Olympics, is facing calls to resign after flirtatious emails between him and Maxwell surfaced. Peter Mandelson resigned from the British Labour Party. Turkey launched a trafficking investigation. Prince Andrew’s name keeps coming up. Victims’ unredacted names and nude images were accidentally exposed by the DOJ’s own botched redaction process.
Annie Farmer, who testified against both Epstein and Maxwell, said she was “most of all angry” about how the release was handled.
But none of that got 8 million views. A brat edit did.
The Internet Keeps Choosing the Wrong Main Character
The backlash in the replies was swift. Many condemned the video for glamorizing a convicted child sex trafficker, pointing out the disturbing normalization that happens when crimes of this magnitude get filtered through trendy editing styles. Others reposted it to amplify unproven conspiracy theories about Epstein’s so-called “client list” — a list the DOJ has stated does not exist in the way the internet imagines it does.
Both reactions, ironically, accomplished the same thing: they made Maxwell trend. And this wasn’t even her first viral moment of the week. Days earlier at the 2026 Grammys, Grammy-winning songwriter Diane Warren walked the red carpet and was promptly confused for Maxwell by users on X — purely because of a similar haircut. A music icon’s biggest night, hijacked by comparisons to a sex trafficker.
What 8 Million Views Really Tells Us
There’s no law against making edits of terrible people. But there’s something worth sitting with when a convicted trafficker’s brat edit outperforms the actual evidence of her crimes in the public’s attention span. Three million pages of documents detailing one of the most far-reaching sex trafficking operations in modern history, and the internet chose the 74-second fan edit instead. It suggests we’ve built a machine that’s better at packaging monsters than confronting them. And that should bother all of us — whether we watched the video or not.
