On March 2, a post on the Sims 4 subreddit flagged a newly uploaded gallery entry titled "NPC Children Townies", a Sims family featuring a model clearly based on Jeffrey Epstein surrounded by seven children wearing only towels. Kotaku contacted EA. EA responded. The specific upload came down. Case closed, right? Not even close.
The "NPC Children Townies" family was gone by 5:15 p.m. EST on March 2, roughly an hour after Kotaku reached out for comment. EA's statement called the content "wholly unacceptable" and pointed players toward the gallery's Flag This button. Standard crisis comms. What EA did not do was search its own platform for the other Epstein content that has been sitting there, in some cases since 2023, accumulating downloads.
One creation, simply titled "Epstein," features both the convicted sex offender and Ghislaine Maxwell. Its description reads "Great with kids." It has been downloaded over 1,000 times. It was still live as of the time of reporting. That upload predates the January 2026 release of Epstein's files by roughly two years, which means this wasn't a reactionary troll job tied to the recent news cycle. Someone built it, uploaded it to The Sims 4 gallery, and EA's moderation left it there long enough to rack up four figures in downloads.
The Moderation Problem EA Keeps Ignoring
Players on the Sims 4 subreddit were quick to point out the irony. EA has a reputation for aggressive content moderation in the gallery, the kind that flags builds for ambiguous reasons and removes creations that seem perfectly harmless. Yet a Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell duo with an explicit description about children sat untouched for over two years. "This is absolutely despicable," wrote one commenter. "This is just disgusting," wrote another. Several noted the gap between EA's stated standards and what actually gets enforced.
This is the pattern worth paying attention to. EA's response was triggered by a press inquiry, not by its own moderation systems catching the content. The "NPC Children Townies" upload was spotted by the community, surfaced by a journalist, and then removed. The older creations, which are more explicitly named and have a far larger footprint on the platform, apparently never tripped any internal wire. EA's statement encourages players to use the Flag This button. That's the company redirecting its own moderation responsibilities onto its user base.
The January release of additional Epstein files has pushed his name back into the news across gaming and beyond. A Pokémon Go PokéStop on Epstein's island was removed after players kept visiting it. Epstein's correspondence revealed connections to former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick. The renewed attention is real, and it was clearly the catalyst for the "NPC Children Townies" upload. But the Epstein and Maxwell duo predates all of that by years. Its continued presence on the gallery isn't a failure to react quickly to a news cycle. It's a failure of basic platform oversight.
EA has now been contacted about the remaining Epstein content. Whether that contact produces another round of targeted removals or an actual audit of the gallery is the question. Given that it took a journalist to get the first one pulled, the answer probably depends on whether anyone keeps asking.
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