Well that's the elephant in the room.  The entire political system has been controlled by blackmail networks since at least the middle of the last century.  It is the system.  For example, Trump was involved with the people doing it long before Epstein came on the scene (i.e. his involvement with Roy Cohn as a young man in New York).  Of course that's not to say that this whole system couldn't decay, and that one day these things are no longer the basis of black markets and blackmail, but that's going to take a while.  There is always the possibility that these things will again be legal and not particularly taboo, as they were before.