The National Failure at the Heart of the Jeffrey Epstein Story

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It is a great challenge to pay sustained attention to any one of the onslaught of moral or legal indignities unfolding in this moment. The failure, however, to continue to talk and think broadly about the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and those who participated in them—a story that has dipped in recent weeks—would be a spectacular national oversight. There is still an opportunity to see this story for what it really is: a decadeslong abdication of institutional and personal responsibility, brought to light by a handful of dedicated journalists^[2] and the breathtaking bravery^[3] of once isolated, ignored vulnerable women. To think about this solely in terms of which powerful man could be tomorrow’s headline if carefully hidden information and evidence comes to light would be to fail these women altogether. Again.

So far there has been a specific and appalling omission at the heart of the continuing, and at one time relentless, Epstein coverage. It often is wielded as a kind of roving “gotcha” narrative, in which we the public are encouraged to wait with bated breath for the drip-drip-drip revelation of the next big name to be outed as having been connected to Epstein and the one after that—Elon Musk^[4]! Peter Thiel^[5]! Prince Andrew^[6]! Bill Gates! Steve Bannon^[7]! Bill Clinton^[8]! Peter Mandelson^[9]! Alan Dershowitz^[10]! It then devolves into a sordid game of whether the man in question visited the island, got the massage, flew on the jet, as if the primary goal here is to pick off offenders until [holds breath] something finally implicates Donald Trump himself.

Everything about this framing is wrong. It disserves the only people who actually matter—the survivors—who have come together to decry the wholesale repeated failures of law enforcement, government, media, and public attention. These survivors expressly do not believe that this whole tragedy was the sole responsibility of a single villain, Jeffrey Epstein. Or even that of only Epstein and his convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who lured hundreds of them in and has been participating in an outrageous dance with the Trump administration in which she gets a platform to spew her self-serving justifications and lies, on top of an immeasurably improved lifestyle—in exchange for what, we do not know. No, the survivors correctly understand that the Epstein-Maxwell ordeal must be viewed through a massive reframing of our legal system’s devastating collective failures when it comes to them: This is not a whodunit so much as a What kind of society are we?^{[11][12][13][14]}

Epstein’s victims number about a thousand^[15], which means that the amount of people who were complicit in their mistreatment—who knew of, facilitated, benefited from, and implicitly condoned^[16] a massive multidecade system of terror and sexual abuse—was not in the twos or threes or tens or twenties. It means that there were exponentially more people^[17] in positions of tremendous power and influence^[18] who either willfully ignored the exploitation of girls and young women, or basked fully in it.

If the #MeToo revolution was meant to stand for anything, it should have been a reckoning not with bad apples and cartoon villains but with an entire culture that believes that girls and incredibly young women must secretly want to be trafficked, exploited, and abused, or else why would it happen. It’s precisely the societal normalization of sexual abuse of those most vulnerable to predation and the ways in which they are seen as ultimately discardable that remains the abhorrent underbelly of these acts, allowing them to flourish in plain sight. If that is the case, the proper way to think about the scope of the Epstein files isn’t as a series of made-for-TV revelations about which bigwig stood in the ballroom abusing an actual minor, but rather as an understanding that everyone knew and nobody cared, or at least that nobody cared enough to speak up to protect these particular victims. And even when people did speak up—victims, their families, even law enforcement, as some did as early as the 1990s—the federal government wielded its power to shut them down and give Epstein a remarkable pass that allowed him to continue his abuse, even while wearing an ankle monitor.

Time and time again, we have acceded to the winking, birthday-book gentleman’s agreement that young women exist to pleasure powerful men. The message sent is that when guys are left to their own devices, the trafficking of girls is just a fun and harmless thing they need to do. Just like locker room talk makes it all OK. And that if and when women resist, or attempt to escape, or seek redress, their vulnerability and shame—and powerlessness compared to these men—will be used to gaslight, further isolate, and threaten them.

What is also lost in this nothing-to-see-here (except the big, shiny names of potentially implicated powerful men), no-harm-no-foul narrative that people conveniently tell themselves are the young lives utterly shattered by cultural complicity and a lack of individual moral responsibility. For each victim groomed and abused at the hands of Epstein, Maxwell, and their accomplices—or by others elsewhere who also commit these kinds of predatory violent acts—is an aspiring and hopeful future^[20] of a girl or young woman painfully derailed, snuffed out. It will take the Epstein-Maxwell survivors, who were as young as 14 when they were trafficked, a lifetime to deal with the trauma and devastation^[21] of what they suffered. All along, there were countless adults who could have stopped this train from destroying their young lives, yet failed to act. These were not victimless crimes—at least a thousand individual lives were upended while too many people passively watched it all unfold.

This current scandal—about documents that are being kept under lock and key by the very same people who came into office promising to release them—is not the only time girls and young women have cried for help and been silenced (think Larry Nassar, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby), but it may be the most widely known example of a sprawling conspiracy of silence, isolation, bullying, and legal cover-ups of the same. Which means we owe it to these victims and survivors of other past and future sexual abuse to desist from the celebrity rubbernecking and look at the bigger lessons to offer a true moral reckoning here. What we should be talking about and thinking about is how it is that not only the pedophiles and perpetrators, but the enablers and all of the quiet accomplices, have long been accepted and tolerated in our victim-blaming, boys-will-be-boys culture. We shouldn’t allow the focus to remain on those distancing themselves from the dead perpetrator (I went to the island, but I only ate sushi!) or wrapping themselves in the learned helplessness of men who know every tick and swipe of the New York Stock Exchange but are just men letting off some steam when the booze starts to flow.

Last Friday, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian sentenced Sean Combs (P. Diddy) to 50 months in prison for two prostitution-related offenses after years of brutally beating, drugging, sexually abusing, and threatening two women for years. At sentencing, Subramanian explicitly noted: “The conduct occurred for over a decade and with tremendous frequency over that time period. … Why did it happen that long? Because you had the power and the resources to keep it going. And because you weren’t caught.” Because Epstein also had power and resources, Virginia Giuffre, who as a teenager was sex trafficked by Epstein and died by suicide in April of this year, will never see justice. But for the remaining victims, both those who have come forward and those who have been too afraid, the time has come. Justice can still be achieved if we center the survivors, listen to their stories, and heed their demands for the system to work against the powerful—because, especially when it comes to this, no man should be above the law.^[26][27]

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