Early Saturday during SXSW, bleary-eyed festivalgoers walking through downtown Austin stumbled onto an unannounced art intervention: a “Jeffrey Epstein Walk of Shame” laid out along the 400 block of Brazos Street. A line of star-shaped decals, mimicking a scrappy sidewalk hall of fame, carried the names of dozens of wealthy and powerful people alongside QR codes. By that evening, several of the stars were already gone, and whoever put them there had not stepped forward.
Stars and QR codes on Brazos
The installation featured 31 star-shaped decals, each printed with a different name and a unique QR code linking to public documents and news coverage. According to the paper, the stickers were placed between 2 and 4 a.m. Saturday, in the quiet hours before downtown filled up again. One festivalgoer told the paper she was “really into it.” As reported by the Austin American-Statesman.
Echoes of a D.C. protest
The Austin stars were not a one-off. They closely mirrored a “Jeffrey Epstein Walk of Shame” that appeared in early March in Washington, D.C.’s Farragut Square, where similar decals used QR codes to send people to Department of Justice files and related records. When Hyperallergic checked out the D.C. site, at least one star, bearing Elon Musk’s name, had already been partially torn up just hours after the display went down.
Which names were taken down
The Austin American-Statesman reports that stars with the names of Donald Trump and Elon Musk had been removed from the Brazos Street sidewalk by Saturday evening, although other decals were still in place. The names on the stickers are drawn from publicly released records connected to Epstein. They are not criminal charges, but rather pointers sending anyone who scans the codes back to the underlying source documents.
Why the timing matters
Dropping the Austin version of the “Walk of Shame” during SXSW, when national media, tech insiders and thousands of visitors are clustered downtown, effectively amplified a protest tactic that started on the East Coast and steers attention toward newly released Epstein-related files. The D.C. installation was documented by The Washington Post, which highlighted how such interventions repurpose familiar public spaces to spotlight Justice Department documents.
Still unanswered
It is not yet clear whether city officials, SXSW organizers or nearby property owners were given any heads-up before the Brazos Street decals appeared, and no artist or collective has claimed responsibility for the Austin piece. Coverage of the D.C. version has shown that these sidewalk installations tend to be short-lived, with some stars peeled up within hours of going down. As noted by Hyperallergic.
