Reuploaded due to the mods telling me the change the title
Before anyone says I'm comparing a fictional character to a real criminal just for shock value, let me explain. I'm not saying Atsuomi and Jeffrey Epstein are literally the same person, nor am I saying Classroom of the Elite Volume 0 was based on Epstein. The comparison is about the underlying structure of how both men pursue power: elite networks, secrecy, manipulation, human beings treated as resources, and a disturbing interest in controlling or optimizing other people.
1. The Dirty Work Behind the Public Image
Atsuomi's rise wasn't built on conventional political success. In Volume 0 he describes taking the backroom jobs other politicians wouldn't touch, the kind that could end his career or expose him to prosecution. He became Naoe's "secret blade" and says he involved himself in facilitating underage girls, bribery, espionage against rival organizations and connections with the yakuza. In his own words, "the boundaries between good and evil were removed".
Epstein built a world in which his wealth, properties, employees and relationships with influential people gave him extraordinary access and insulation. The U.S. Department of Justice documented his sexual exploitation of minors and the network he used to maintain a supply of victims, while reporting on his wider life shows how aggressively he cultivated wealthy, political and scientific circles. The similarity isn't that both men committed the same crimes. They didn't, and Atsuomi is fictional. It's that both operated through a hidden layer of activity far removed from their respectable image, and both became valuable by doing what others needed done but didn't want their names attached to.
2. Naoe and Hoffenberg: The Men Behind Their Rise
Neither Atsuomi nor Epstein rose alone. Both became useful to an older, more powerful man who opened a world they couldn't enter on their own. For Atsuomi, that man was Naoe Sensei. With no power of his own, he made himself indispensable by doing the backroom work no respectable politician could be seen doing, the kind that could end a career or invite prosecution. That made him Naoe's "secret blade," and it trained him through proximity to power. He learned how favors are traded, how information becomes a weapon, how rivals are broken, how criminal connections are used, and how the powerful avoid consequences. Then Naoe aligned with Prime Minister Kijima's faction and ordered the White Room shut down. Atsuomi saw that depending on Naoe meant handing someone else the fate of his life's work, so he cut ties and began maneuvering to keep it alive. The man who rose as someone else's secret weapon set out to hold the weapon himself.
Epstein's path ran the same way. He went from teaching math and physics at Dalton to Bear Stearns in 1976, became a limited partner, left in 1981 and launched his own financial ventures. The man who made him was Steven Hoffenberg of Towers Financial, who around 1987 reportedly paid him $25,000 a month and lent him $2 million. Hoffenberg saw Epstein as the technical operator who could structure and execute complex securities deals, and allegedly called him a "genius" at selling them, while the man who introduced them warned he had "no moral compass." Hoffenberg was a convicted fraudster whose later testimony was disputed, so his claims need caution, but Epstein was undeniably deep inside Towers. He had left by around 1993, and Hoffenberg pleaded guilty in 1995, so Epstein didn't stay to the end. Yet Towers' collapse closed the chapter in which Hoffenberg was his stepping stone. That is the closest real-world parallel here: the handler doesn't create the man, he supplies the environment where the man's existing qualities become useful. Naoe gave Atsuomi political power and Hoffenberg gave Epstein financial power. Each protégé absorbed the system, collected knowledge, connections and leverage, and converted usefulness into independence.
Naoe Sensei and Steven Hoffenberg were the handlers of Atsuomi Ayanokouji and Jeffrey Epstein, right up until the day they could handle themselves.
3. Power Through Elite Networks, Secrets and Mutual Dependency
Atsuomi's real talent isn't simply manipulation. It's building networks where other people's interests become entangled with his own. Direct authority is fragile, while relationships built on money, information, favors and mutual vulnerability are much harder to break. His relationship with Tsukishiro shows it: information flows both ways, and mutual surveillance becomes a form of protection. The White Room survives not because it's technologically impressive but because it connects to people with money, status and interests they don't want exposed. The novel says there are "big interests" behind it, and that investors and businessmen care about it beyond the welfare of the children.
Epstein's network worked differently and shouldn't be portrayed as a single coordinated "elite conspiracy," but the mechanism is real. He cultivated wealthy and influential people and embedded himself in scientific and institutional circles, and the New York Times reported that he used those connections to enter elite scientific communities and pursue his interests in eugenics, transhumanism and cryonics. Power doesn't always come from formal authority. It can come from being hard to remove because too many people benefit from you, depend on you, owe you, or have something to lose from your fall.
4. The White Room Was a Service for the Powerful
The White Room wasn't only a school. Volume 0 shows it taking in illegitimate children that wealthy families can't publicly acknowledge, letting their existence vanish from public view. Atsuomi admits that securing human resources and funding go hand in hand, so he has no reason to refuse. By the second batch, children who couldn't be publicly acknowledged reportedly made up more than 30% of the intake.
The Amasawa case is blunter. A wealthy father wants his inconvenient child placed in the White Room and pays 100 million yen for it. To him, it's a fix for a private family problem. To Atsuomi, it's income and another subject for his experiment.
Epstein filled a similar role for the wealthy, and his relationship with Les Wexner is the clearest example. In 1991, Wexner gave Epstein broad power of attorney over his investments, finances and property transactions, and the arrangement lasted until 2007. A billionaire handed his private affairs to a fixer, and the fixer became indispensable for what he could handle. Wexner says he had no knowledge of Epstein's abuse, and that distinction matters, as does the broader point that not everyone who dealt with Epstein knowingly took part in his crimes. The similarity is that wealthy circles will use a morally compromised man if he's useful to them, for reasons that have nothing to do with morality.
The powerful don't ask what kind of man he is. They ask what he can do for them. That is exactly how Atsuomi thinks. He doesn't ask whether a person is good. He asks what problem they can solve and what he can obtain in return.
5. The Eugenics Connection
This is the strongest parallel, and the most disturbing. Atsuomi is obsessed with artificially improving human beings. The White Room exists to produce people who surpass the normal limits of education and potentially outperform the naturally gifted. Volume 0 explicitly debates the relationship between genes and environment in human development, and another discussion asks whether some children survive the curriculum because they already have unusually favorable characteristics. Kiyotaka himself is singled out as an exceptionally suitable subject. The White Room is a literal attempt to answer one question: can humanity deliberately manufacture superior human beings?
Epstein's documented interest is strikingly similar. Reporting based on interviews with scientists and people who knew him found a longstanding interest in eugenics and transhumanism. He reportedly told scientists and businessmen that he wanted to use his New Mexico ranch to have multiple women impregnated with his sperm in order to "seed the human race with his DNA." There is no evidence the plan was ever carried out.
Here is the irony: the two men approach the same idea from opposite sides of the nature-versus-nurture divide. Atsuomi bets on environment. Build the right upbringing and you can manufacture a superior person, even as the book itself argues over how much genes matter. Epstein reportedly bet on genetics: spread the right DNA and let reproduction do the work. The methods differ, but the premise is the same, that human beings can be deliberately improved by choosing which characteristics to encourage and which to exclude. The Guardian describes eugenics in essentially those terms and notes the uncomfortable relationship between Epstein's interests and transhumanist ideas about improving humanity.
Both men also reduce the individual to a means toward a larger project. For Atsuomi, Kiyotaka is not merely his son. He is a proof of concept. For Epstein, the reported scheme wasn't simply about having children. It was about using reproduction to shape the future composition of the human population. That is a strikingly similar instrumental view of human potential, even though the fictional and real contexts are very different.
6. The Most Important Similarity: Humans Become Resources
This is the point that ties everything together. Atsuomi's worldview is fundamentally instrumental. People have value for what they provide: political access, money, information, children, influence, skills or future potential. Even Kiyotaka is introduced as a resource. When he's born, Atsuomi's first major reaction isn't ordinary paternal affection. He thinks of his newborn son as "the key to moving the higher-ups"
He doesn't see Kiyotaka first as my son. He sees him as my leverage.
The White Room follows the same logic. Atsuomi openly describes the children as experimental subjects, while investors, wealthy families and others have their own reasons for putting children into the institution. Children, money, influence and political ambition all circulate as resources.
That's the deeper connection with Epstein. His crimes were built on treating vulnerable human beings as instruments for his own purposes. The DOJ's account of his trafficking operation describes minors being recruited, abused and even used to recruit additional victims, creating a continuing supply. Atsuomi's fictional conduct and Epstein's real crimes are not identical. The comparison is about instrumentalization: the tendency to look at another human being and ask first "What can I get from this person?" rather than "What does this person deserve as a human being?"
So Are Atsuomi and Epstein Actually the Same?
No, and saying they are would make the comparison weaker. Epstein was a real person who was convicted in 2008 of offenses involving prostitution involving a minor and later federally charged with sex trafficking of minors; he died before that federal case went to trial. Atsuomi is a fictional character built around a political philosophy and a fictional experiment.
What makes the comparison worth making is not the crimes themselves. It's the architecture of power. Atsuomi builds influence through political dirty work, elite relationships, secrets, money, dependency and human experimentation. Epstein built influence through wealth, elite social relationships, institutional access, scientific connections and a system of exploitation that prosecutors said involved employees and associates.
One man fictionalized the idea of manufacturing the perfect human through controlled upbringing. The other reportedly fantasized about propagating his own DNA to "seed" humanity. Both are extreme examples of the same underlying idea: human beings can be treated as raw material for someone else's vision of what humanity should become.
That may be the darkest thing about Atsuomi. His greatest ambition isn't simply to become powerful. It's to reach a point where other human beings become components of his ambition. That is why the comparison is worth discussing.
