The Department of Justice dropped over three million pages of documents about Jeffrey Epstein on January 30, 2026, and the internet has been sifting through them ever since.
Most of what has been uncovered is grim, a web of connections to some of the most powerful people in the world. But buried in this web of documents is a morsel so strange, so specific, that it almost sounds like it came from a stand-up comedy set. Almost.
It has come to light that Jeffrey Epstein once sent his girlfriend a homemade pornography video featuring characters from the horror video game Five Nights at Freddy’s.
Yes, that is right.
The 4chan Connection, When Jeffrey Epstein Shared Five Nights at Freddy’s Fan Porn
The email in question was sent on May 4, 2017, to Karyna Shuliak, who was Epstein’s last known girlfriend at the time. The email itself was remarkably sparse, with only a link to an animated GIF hosted on the online forum 4chan.
The animation was made using Source Filmmaker, a free software application originally developed by Valve that allows users to animate and render scenes using characters and assets from other games. In this instance, it appeared that someone had used it to produce pornography using the animatronic characters from the hugely successful horror game series Five Nights at Freddy’s, which was created by Scott Cawthon.
The subject line of Epstein’s email was: “amazing animations.”
That’s it. No personal message. No context. Just a link to NSFW fan-made pornography and two words in the subject line. When screenshots of this email first appeared on social media, it was assumed by most people that it was fake or a joke.
The notion that one of the most infamous people in modern criminal history took the time to email cartoon-character pornography to his girlfriend seemed utterly ridiculous. But Kotaku and other news sources were able to verify that the email, sent in 2017, did indeed contain a link to the exact 4chan post in question. The post itself had been made on the forum in April 2017.
Why Epstein’s Casual Digital Life is So Disturbing
The email is part of a broader set of Epstein’s digital communications that have now become public. Among those emails are other messages that also appear to show Epstein sharing similar fan-made content with Shuliak on multiple occasions.
While this particular revelation is nowhere near the most serious or consequential thing to come out of the Epstein files, it paints a deeply unsettling picture, not just of a man who trafficked and exploited young women, but of someone whose day-to-day life was filled with oddly mundane and deeply strange habits, right alongside the monstrous ones.
There is something about the casualness of it all that makes it stick. The way Epstein apparently stumbled across obscure corners of the internet, found content that most people wouldn’t even know existed, and simply forwarded it along with a two-word subject line. It’s the kind of detail that makes you sit back and realize how little the public truly understood about what was happening behind closed doors in Epstein’s world.
And, as it happens, the Five Nights at Freddy’s email is actually not even the only video game-related news story that Epstein is associated with. According to records, Microsoft actually banned Epstein from Xbox Live back in 2013 after the company discovered that he was a registered sex offender.
The Surreal Double Life of Jeffrey Epstein
So while he was out there networking with some of the richest and most powerful people in the world, he was also getting banned from an online video game service for being exactly who he was.
The extent to which the Epstein files will ultimately come to reveal their secrets is still very much up in the air. Millions of pages of documents are still being sifted through, and new information is coming out almost daily.
But if nothing else, the “amazing animations” email is a potent reminder that in every story about the power of the elite and the failure of the system, there are always smaller, stranger truths lurking just beneath the surface that are just as telling about the kind of man Jeffrey Epstein really was.
