House Judiciary GOP X account slammed for ‘morally bankrupt’ Epstein ‘Rickroll’ prank

The X account of the House Judiciary Committee Republicans has been widely condemned for pranking users with a link it claimed contained the Epstein client list, however, but was actually a Rick Astley music video.

Jeffery Epstein, an American financier, was convicted in 2008 of child prostitution charges. He died in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking charges.

The US Justice Department released additional files related to Epstein’s case on Thursday (28 February) over continued calls for documents relating to the disgraced financier’s client list to be published.

Over the years, Epstein met and was pictured with many notable figures, including Prince Andrew, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, and Donald Trump.

In the lead-up to the documents being released, the account for the GOP House Judiciary Committee posted on X/Twitter saying that the Epstein files had been released along with an encrypted link.

Rather than linking to related documents, the link took users to the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 pop hit “Never Gonna Give You Up” – a notorious prank known as “rickrolling.”

The prank is an internet bait-and-switch that first became prominent in 2007. It involves misleading a user by claiming a link contains important information, and is instead replaced with the music video.

The GOP House Judiciary Committee’s version of the prank received widespread backlash from hundreds of people who did not think a high-profile child sex exploitation case was a suitable topic for a juvenile joke.

“Depraved”

Several replies on the since-deleted tweet called the post “disgraceful,” with one person pointing out that it is a “serious matter with serious victims.”

“Really poor taste. This should be deleted immediately,” another user wrote, while a third said: “Why are you doing this? Is this a joke to you?”

A fourth user commented: “Oh my god, it’s a f**king rickroll. They rickrolled files about a paedophile who trafficked girls.”

Another quote tweeted the original post and said: “I don’t want to overstate this. But to think it’s even kind of funny — let alone appropriate — to Rickroll about hundreds of sexually abused children, you have to be one of the most morally bankrupt, depraved people alive. Whoever wrote this should be fired.”

US attorney general, Pam Bondi, who first indicated that the files would be released, said the Justice Department was “following through on president Trump’s commitment to transparency” by releasing the documents.

“What you’re going to see hopefully tomorrow is a lot of flight logs, a lot of names, a lot of information… it’s pretty sick what that man did,” she explained.