On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed legislation forcing the Justice Department to release more information about the Jeffrey Epstein case — bowing to political pressure and votes from the House and Senate for the release.
It all happened days after Trump stunningly reversed his stance on releasing the files, which he had tried to stymie for months.
“We have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat hoax perpetrated by Radical Left lunatics to deflect from the great success of the Republican Party,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late Sunday.
On Friday, Trump claimed on social media that Epstein — the disgraced New York financier who died in 2019 after being charged with sex trafficking minors — “was a Democrat, and he is the Democrats’ problem.”
But that’s not quite the case. Before his fall, and even after he served jail time, Epstein moved among elites from both sides of the aisle.
While there’s no evidence that any of the men engaged in Epstein’s sexual abuse of young girls, the more than 20,000 emails released by the House Oversight Committee last week show he corresponded — or was spoken about in intimate terms — with figures across the political spectrum. They include liberals such as President Bill Clinton and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, as well as conservatives like Trump himself; Peter Thiel, the Republican mega-donor and tech executive; and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former senior counselor.
The Epstein sex-trafficking scandal has never been a partisan issue. It has always been about how powerful men — regardless of their political affiliation — have treated young, vulnerable women, and in some cases children, as interchangeable commodities for their own sexual gratification and abuse.
The emails give us a glimpse into how ‘untouchable’ elite men believe they are, experts say.
While the sexual exploitation of girls and women by powerful men is nothing new, it’s rare to get such an unfiltered look at how little regard elites have for morality or the law, said Leigh Gilmore, professor emerita at Ohio State University and author of “The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women.
“If you asked most people what they think of pedophilia, they would say it is shocking, outside the norm,” Gilmore said. “It is behavior they would condemn if they saw it or knew about it.”
The Epstein emails show something very different: In the most elite realms of business, politics and academia, it appears many people saw, tolerated and participated in harming vulnerable teenage girls, some just out of middle school, as of it was nothing, Gilmore said.
Through the emails and other documents, “We can learn new lessons about how elite men bond through sexually abusing children and getting away with it,” she told HuffPost. “The emails offer a window on that ugly world and the people in it who prefer to consider themselves untouchable.”
The chummy messages ― which include a number of emails from wealthy and powerful men thanking Epstein for a fun time ― show how Epstein raised his profile through buddying up with elites.
“To some, he offered illegal sexual access to vulnerable girls,” Gilmore said. “That, in turn, gave Epstein leverage over the men.”
Their dismissiveness toward women is evident even in how they talk about women they considered their girlfriends. In one 2015 email to New York Times finance journalist Landon Thomas Jr., Epstein bragged about a 20-year-old he dated in 1993 ― Celina Midelfart, a Norwegian heiress ― and “that after two years [he] gave to donald.”
Trump has done everything in his power to distance himself from the scandal, but photos, videos and an alleged letter suggest a close friendship with the convicted sex trafficker.
That particular email about Midelfart hit a nerve for Stacey Williams, a former model who dated Epstein and was introduced to Trump, who she claimed groped her.
“It screams about, you know, the mindset of these men,” Williams told CNN’s Erin Burnett last week. “You know, the same two men who did what they did to me when Jeffrey Epstein walked me into Donald Trump’s office to be groped by him. Clearly, we are these objects, these trophies, and it’s deeply misogynistic. It’s horrifying.”
In the 2020 documentary, “Surviving Jeffrey Epstein,” one sexual assault victim described feeling like a “human baton, passed from one person to another” during her time with Epstein and his inner circle. Another talked about being “groomed” to be a “personal sex slave” for Epstein.
Before her suicide last April, Virginia Giuffre— one of the most prominent survivors of Epstein’s abuse ― said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” to rich, powerful men in the sex offender’s circles.
Experts say Epstein and Trump share the same dehumanizing way of talking about women.
In the trove of emails released last week, 1,600 of the 2,324 email threads mention Trump, according to a review by The Wall Street Journal. In various messages, Epstein says Trump “knew about the girls” and that one of Epstein’s alleged victims “spent hours at my house” with the future president.
Epstein’s tossed-off comments about “giving” Midelfart to Trump appear to mirror an inside joke Joel Pashcow, one of Trump and Epstein’s mutual friends and a Mar-a-Lago member, made in Epstein’s infamous 50th “birthday book.”
On Paschow’s page, there’s a photo of Epstein holding what The Wall Street Journal described as “a poster board-sized check for $22,500.” Presented to him by Pashcow, the faux check is made to look as though Trump had sent it to Epstein. The caption said it was for a “fully depreciated” woman that Epstein sold to Trump.
When the president has brought up Epstein, he has often used similarly dehumanizing language to describe the victims. In July, while explaining how he ended his friendship with Epstein, Trump flippantly claimed that the sex offender had “stole” Giuffre from her job at the Mar-a-Lago spa when she was 17.
After Epstein was arrested and charged with sex trafficking of minors in July 2019, Trump claimed everyone in Palm Beach knew him, and he personally was “not a fan.” This July, he called Epstein a “creep” that we’d all be better off forgetting about.
If Trump knew something of Epstein’s lewd behavior and banned his former friend from his clubs because of it like he’s claimed, it speaks to the culture of secrecy that such men benefit from, said Bonny Shade, a sexual assault survivor, and speaker on sexual violence and prevention. No one looked out for the girls, and no one was willing to blow Epstein’s cover.
“Epstein and the men he surrounded himself with didn’t evade accountability for so long by accident,” Shade said. “They did it because systems built by powerful men protect powerful men.”
Sexual violence is a crime of control, and our culture continues to privilege male comfort over female safety, Shade added. “Women get exploited, dismissed and forgotten. Men get do-overs.”
There’s a number of do-overs in Trump’s own administration. In his second term, the president ― who was accused by two dozen women of sexual assault and rape ― filled his cabinet with men who have faced similar sexual misconduct allegations.
One of those men, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his nomination for attorney general, but remains a fixture in Washington. Just last week, The New York Times reported that the woman at the center of the former congressman’s sexual misconduct allegations fits the Epstein-favored victim profile to a T: underaged, living at homeless shelters while working at Burger King and using a sugar dating website to raise money to pay for braces.
This isn’t just a story of powerful men, though. The Epstein case shows that women can be just as callous in their treatment of sexually exploited girls. There was Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, who recruited and groomed the girls, and was allegedly present for ― and even participated in ― some of the sexual encounters. But there were also female assistants who lured cash-strapped local teens with promises of good money or even modeling opportunities if they would simply give their billionaire client from Palm Beach a “massage.”
The girls were paid and then threatened with retaliation, including harming their families, if they exposed Epstein or Maxwell.
“Girls were seen cynically as objects to be used, swapped around and discarded,” Gilmore said.
Some of them appeared in a powerful PSA released Sunday, put out in an effort to encourage Congress to release all files associated with Epstein.
“This is me when I met Jeffrey Epstein,” they say in the clip, showing photos of themselves at ages 14, 16 and 17. All of them just kids.
When they told their stories to the police as teens, their voices didn’t matter. Perhaps now they will. And perhaps, Shade said, this moment will finally spark a broader conversation in our culture about the root causes of sexual violence.
“Sexual violence is the only public health crisis where we focus on reacting instead of preventing, even in a post Me Too world,” she said. “That’s because we never address the root cause: Men are not taught about consent, sexual violence, or how to respond when someone discloses harm.”
Women and girls need to be believed, and men need to be held accountable, Shade said. Otherwise, small violations snowball into larger crimes, as the Epstein case demonstrates.
“With an assault happening every 74 seconds, it’s more likely than not that a survivor is telling the truth,” she said. “We need to believe them and respond with care, not with questions about the validity of their story.”