I don't think it's particularly surprising that his friends might have concluded that he isn't actually into underage girls, but simply accidentally ended up sleeping with a minor or two while having sex with hundreds of women.

I know a couple of people who spend excessive amounts of time and effort in order to hook up with lots of women. I don't particularly like either of them, but if one of them ended up facing statutory rape charges, my first assumption wouldn't be that they were deliberately trying to have sex with minors.

The charges faced by Epstein in 2008 must have looked so outrageous that it's not hard to imagine why those around him might have given him the benefit of the doubt, especially after the government basically let him off and communicated to everyone that his crimes weren't actually that bad.

There are some people aggressively misunderstanding me, I'm certainly not defending Epstein. I'm just offering a slightly more reasonable alternative theory than "everyone around him was a pedophile", which just seems fundamentally unlikely.