Sisterhood Could Be Powerful

I tuned into Wednesday’s Capitol Hill press conference featuring survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s decades of sex trafficking, out of a sense of solidarity but with no expectation of breaking news. I discovered what was news to me anyway.

More than 100 victims were expected to turn out and I easily counted dozens; eight spoke. “Minor number one” in federal complaints against Jeffrey Epstein came forward publicly, and movingly, for the first time. Brazilian immigrant Marina Lascera dropped out of high school at 14 to provide Epstein with “massages” for $300, in order to support her mother and sister. It turned into regular sexual abuse.

“Every day I hoped he would offer me a real job…an assistant? That day never came. I had no way out…until he finally told me I was too old for him,” Lascera said today. She was 17. When girls like her got too old, the survivors’ attorneys explained, that’s when Epstein and Maxwell began to traffic them to men who were fine abusing the older but still barely legal girls. I didn’t know that. At least four of the witnesses who spoke said they were recruited at 14.

The women and their attorneys came to Washington to support an effort by GOP Representative Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna to force a House vote on releasing the Justice Department’s Epstein files. You’ll recall that Donald Trump ran on making the files public, back when his minions insisted they’d implicate powerful Democrats. When he got into office, and Attorney General Pam Bondi found the files contained many mentions of Trump—they might have been perfectly innocent mentions—suddenly the files weren’t important. Bondi released a stringently redacted version and even right-wingers cried cover-up. The White House has been digging out of this hole ever since.

Massie has three Republican cosponsors—Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and Lauren Boebert. He only needs two more to force the vote. (All 212 Democrats have signed on.) But Trump immediately called today’s Epstein allegations “a Democrat hoax,” and the White House said that signing on to Massie’s bill would be viewed as a “very hostile act to the administration.” Another way of saying it: Republicans who do so might well face primary challenges.

Hours later, they had no new supporters. But that’s not to say it’s over.

I was struck by survivor Lisa Phillips, an model Epstein recruited with promises of career help, announcing that in the absence of government action, the increasingly bonded group of survivors “will confidentially compile the names we all know were regularly in the Epstein world. Stay tuned for more details.” I look forward to that.

Survivors’ attorney Brad Edwards offered an odd piece of news that at least I didn’t know before: Real estate mogul Donald Trump, not yet a politician, offered to help him, back in about 2009, with his case representing survivors. That was confusing; Epstein had just received a sweetheart deal^[3] from then–US Attorney Alex Acosta, pleading guilty to only two counts of procuring an underaged prostitute, even though Edwards as well as state and local law enforcement had put together a much broader case, with many more victims, involving much more serious crimes. (Epstein served just over a year at a minimum-security prison where he had the daily right to come and go.) Why would Trump try to help in 2009? What could he do? Edwards wouldn’t say.

Edwards also refused to answer a question about whether there were any public figures among the Epstein friends and associates in the government files (or in his clients’ calendars). Understandably. He gave a more intriguing answer when someone asked if there is any reason to believe Epstein had intelligence ties (which is why Acosta was rumored to have let him off easily). “I’d say look at the CIA, FinCen [financial services crimes], the SEC, the FBI. Do your jobs,” he said at the press conference today.

Some of Epstein’s victims also suffered for his crimes. Haley Robson, recruited at 16, admitted Epstein made her a deal—she could give him regular $300 massages, or she could recruit her high school friends to provide them. Tearfully, she said she chose to recruit others. When the stepmother of a classmate told police about Epstein’s predations, Robson, then 18, was treated like his collaborator, not his victim: “The police treated me like a criminal. I was portrayed by the press as a predator.”

Lascera spoke movingly about why releasing the files was so important to her, personally. Like other victims, she doesn’t remember a lot of details of her trauma. “The government is still in possession of the documents,” that she said could help “put the pieces of my own life back together.” She went on: “There are people out there who know more about my abuse than I do. I know the same is true for many of these women.”

Outraged by the suppression of the Epstein files, these women seemed even more angry about something else: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche (Trump’s former personal attorney) sitting down with Maxwell for two days of softball interviews, and then assigning her (with a Bureau of Prisons waiver, as she’s a sex-offender) to a minimum-security prison near family in Texas.

Several described Maxwell’s despicable sucking up to Trump in her conversation with Blanche. If you haven’t read or listened to it, you should. The New Yorker’s Ruth Marcus described it this way^[4]: “To read the three-hundred-and-thirty-seven-page transcript—even more, to listen to the audio of Maxwell’s soft voice, her British accent sanded down by decades in the United States—is to be horrified, even enraged, by Maxwell’s brazen airbrushing of her conduct, and by Blanche’s placid acceptance of her rendition of events.”

Maxwell told Blanche that Trump “was always very cordial and very kind to me,” praised “his extraordinary achievement in becoming the President,” and lamented that “the President got swept into some of this unnecessarily.”

And she tried to dismiss the rumors, some of them fueled by Trump’s own comments and playboy-photo history, that he was part of Epstein’s sexual/social entourage: “I actually never saw the President in any type of massage setting. I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way. The President was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”

But according to Maxwell’s victims on Wednesday, it wasn’t just what she said but also how she said it. Listening to “Maxwell’s soft voice, her British accent sanded down by decades in the United States,” in Marcus’s words, was also “triggering” to some of his victims. “She got this airtime and platform. Her voice was elevated way before our voices were elevated here today,” said survivor Teresa Helm, who was recruited by Maxwell. “And the same calm, manipulative voice that she had — so polite, there, that day with Todd Blanche, was the same polite, coercive, manipulative voice that I heard as she was grooming me to then send me off to the home of Jeffrey Epstein, where he would assault me.”

There were odd disruptions of the event. Eight warplanes flew overhead to honor a deceased Polish soldiers. Capitol Police loudly warned people away from the press conference when the crowd got too loud. Some ringer asked a disparaging question about the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, whose brother represented her Wednesday, and the survivors shouted him down.

“Virginia Roberts Giuffre is an American hero,” Edwards said. “Most of these women are here because of Virginia Roberts Giuffre,” said another survivors’ attorney, Brittany Henderson.

As the group took questions, many reporters focused on the notion that the survivors could create their own “Epstein list” or client book, as Lisa Phillips suggested. (I’d have asked that too.) Their answers highlighted the burden borne by survivors of sexual abuse. Some survivors, their attorneys said, don’t really want their abusers’ names to become public, out of fear. The lawyers also said that based on their discovery in these many cases, they have an Epstein-Maxwell list too. “Why do we have to say the names when the government knows the names?” Lisa Phillips asked. “They can release the names if they want to. We are scared to say the names.”

Henderson jumped in: “If someone wants to see the list to prosecute people, sure.”

Someone asked Marina Lasceda if she’d like to send a message to Trump. She had a perfect answer. “Listen, I don’t want to send a direct message to him. I’m already scared enough. Just pass the vote. Listen to us. This is not a hoax. It’s not going to go away.”

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