14. The Epstein Files: Whose Language and Perspectives Do You Want to Take?
Whose perspective do you want to take?
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Warning: incest, trafficking, rape
The House Oversight Committee released the contents of a 1990s era scrapbook made up of birthday wishes to Epstein from his friends. It is filled with sly innuendo, overt references to sex with young girls, the sale of girls and women, and shared proclivities. It also includes a suggestive, puerile note framed by the outline of a girls’ torso from Donald Trump in which he celebrates their “wonderful secrets. Trump has disavowed Epstein, but that’s irrelevant either way. A good time was had by all.
The only thing I could think of after reviewing the content was Brett Kavanaugh's 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearing in which Christine Blasey Ford testified that one of the most vivid and traumatic memories her sexual assault was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge’s "uproarious laughter."
Last week, members of the House Oversight Committee met privately with some of the women trafficked by Epstein. Speaking to the press afterwards, Representative Ayanna Pressley, who has spoken publicly about her own childhood sexual abuse and sexual assault in college, talked about the importance of listening to survivors’. She and other Democratic leaders continue to call for the release of the full Epstein files and many are focused on revealing a political cover-up. The women, who held a press conference afterwards, are now talking about releasing their own list.
Many people are claiming that the lawmakers’ meeting with survivors marks a turning point. I understand the desire. It’s important to listen to and support these women, to be hopeful, and to name names, but I’m super doubtful it’s a meaningful turning point.
Publishing the list is a necessary but very insufficient goal. As Rep. Pressley acknowledged after the meeting, we are looking at decades of institutional betrayal extending far beyond Epstein, Maxwell, or the men who assaulted the girls they sold. The victims know this, it’s why they are focused on the powerful friends and notable figures. If the list is published, many people will celebrate, feel relief, then turn their attention to other matters. They will be comforted by the “monsters” narrative that gives society a pass, leaving the systems responsible for producing and protecting individual aggressors more or less intact.
Can even call what happened institutional betrayal or a cover-up though? I don’t think so. What’s the cover-up, really, for instance? Don’t we know what we need to know?
Nothing was hidden. There were parties and jokes. Doctors who medicated girls, treated STDs and provided abortions. Global financial conglomerates that managed his money and processed transactions. Pilots who logged flight logs. Celebrities, pundits, ex-presidents, procurers, facilitators, clean-up crews, event planners. It was an “open secret” which just means people were colluding, throwing hundreds of girls away as they did. One of the only powerful people who spoke openly about Epstein is Melinda Gates who found him “abhorrent” and “evil personified,’ acknowledging that her ex-husband’s refusal to break with Epstein was a significant contributor to their divorce.
Rather than “cover-up” we should be thinking in terms of “cartel.” The Epstein case in particular is a paradigmatic example of patriarchy as cartel. His “product” was access to and sale of young girls, with impunity. His “distribution network” included groomers, assistants, co-conspirators, and facilitators. His “protectors” included the global and elite people and financial, educational, and justice systems that turned a blind eye, managed his money, and burnished his reputation. His "users” were men, most apparently elite and wealthy men. Even his death lends itself to the analogy. For many years, Epstein was protected by clients and a justice system that looked away from his crimes. This was true until protection was no longer viable after which protection turned into a strategy of containment in which he and Maxwell were sacrificed to maintain order.
Like cartels, his enterprise, its protectors, and its supporters worked together in complex, horizontally and vertically integrated ways to exploit others and protect their interests. As evidenced by the image produced by Trump above, one of many in a birthday book compiled for Epstein, they cheerfully celebrated their connections and the culture they mutually created.
A cover-up hides wrongdoing but a cartel is about organizing it. It suggests that institutions are fundamentally trustworthy; that they only fail when corrupted by secrecy. This is, given ongoing injustices and the fact that fear of retribution keeps most assault and trafficking victims from coming forward, vividly, demonstrably false. The language of cover-up, and “monsters,” allows people to believe that knowing the “monsters” names will solve a problem rooted in deviance, that the solution is greater transparency. Both, ultimately, endangers victims and potential victims.
Yes, people should be held accountable, and we should strive for justice for survivors, but systems have to be overturned and rebuilt and that has to also be a priority. We know, from long experience, that monsters and cover-ups do virtually nothing to achieve this goal.
In terms of what each of us can do as individuals, refusing to respect and perpetuate patriarchal perspectives on “scandals” has to be the bare minimum. Thinking “cartel” instead of “cover-up” forces us to shift perspective from one defined by fraternities so power (wealthy elites, influential lawmakers, revered religious institutions, powerful policing organizations) that benefit from being siloed to one defined by victims who experience all of these working together to protect privileges and entitlements. We can insist on society, the legal system, educational cultures, and religious organizations reorganizing themselves to center the perspectives of the vulnerable and not the powerful.
Patriarchy and Cartel Logics
Cartels are made up of individuals and organizations that collude, rather than compete, to control markets, reduce risks, and maximize members’ access to products, resources, and profits. All cartels rely on shared interests, unspoken rules of honor and silence, mutual support even as competitors, engineered protection through influence, intimidation, corruption and political power, and, lastly, violence or serious threats against those who resist or threaten to expose them. Drug cartels, for instance, not only sell drugs but also carefully regulate supply chains that include production, distribution, pricing, protection, and punishment. Oil cartels are the same. They don’t just drill wells but plan for scarcity, manage profits, and suppress competition.
When it comes to accessing children and women for sex in particular, there are producers (parents, families, schools, religious communities, traffickers). There are consumers (mainly men, across borders, ethnicities, ages, religions, and economic classes). There are various middlemen and enforcers (religious leaders, online forums, groomers, enablers, and "fixers.”) There are protectors (states, financial networks, judicial systems, law enforcement, religious institutions, media and cultural regulators, medical institutions, corporate and labor market norms, families.). As I wrote a few weeks ago, this happens, almost always, without explicit coordination and effort and, often, with the involvement of the law and justice systems.
Consider: Facilitated global demand for sex on demand. The collusive silence of “good people” well aware of “open secrets.” Functional institutional protection. Punishment of people who intervene, demand justice, or disrupt “supply.”
There are millions of Epsteins and millions more like his clients
Over more than a decade, I have used a system of google alerts to track news and research about sexualized coercion and abuse. What these alerts mainly show, in the aggregate, is how staggeringly unexceptional Epstein and his buyers were. There are roughly ten publicly named Epstein victims and it is estimated that hundreds of girls were trafficked. We don’t know the total number of abusers. Experts estimate that, in the U.S. alone, more than 150 children and adolescents are sexually assaulted every day, overwhelmingly by men they know who will never be held accountable for their rapes. Given that this number is based only on reported cases, the actual number is far higher. Boys and girls are assaulted as children, but girls more frequently and they don't age out of risk.
Adult women make up eighty-six percent of the 75,000+ rapes reported annually in the U.S., but, again, the majority of rapes go unreported. While younger women are more likely to be targeted, women are vulnerable at all ages. Last year in New York, for instance, a 38-year-old man attempted to rape an 80-year-old woman. The 75,000 number also doesn’t include rapes of incarcerated people, which are massively underreported and overwhelmingly male-perpetrated. Those rapes, of men by men, are also far less about sex and far more about status and power. That’s why we have to focus on the religious institutions, policing orgs, school administrations, medical associations, financial corporations, judiciaries, and industries that protect perpetrators. This includes families.
Many instance of sexual assault are incestuous. Incest in the US, for instance, is widespread (how widespread was not even fully realized until DNA testing services made it clear). Incest is endemic and vastly unreported. Is that a cover-up, too? No. It’s structural feature of patriarchal power in the family. We don’t even have reliable data for the rate of incidence because “privacy.”
Where do distinctions between “tradition” and “trafficking” collapse?
Epstein and Cardinal Timothy Dolan might seem to have nothing in common but they are connected through the New York State Child Victims Act, which allowed hundreds to bring sex abuse lawsuits against both the Roman Catholic Church and Epstein's estate. Dolan faced criticism for moving $57 million into a "cemetery fund" to shield it from abuse victims' lawsuits, but he could legitimately claim he followed church law and state requirements. “Trafficking" usually refers to compelling a person into forced labor or sex through force, fraud, or coercion. It’s usually the case that trafficked people are moved around to meet demand. What the Catholic Church did however was move abusive priests from parish to parish instead, effectively engaged in the trade of children through the resulting deception and abuse.
The Catholic Church abuse scandal is ongoing , but it is hardly unique. Conservative patriarchal religious leaders — Catholic, Evangelical, Muslim, Mormon, Jewish — selectively use sacred text literalism and purity mandates to sustain gendered power imbalances, shield members, and rationalize tolerable levels of violence. They often endorse child marriage and oppose bans, framing restrictions as attacks on parental rights and religious freedom. In the U.S. child marriage (any marriage where at least one person, almost always a girl, is under the age of 18) was legal in all 50 states until just five years ago 2018. While child marriage might seem rare or outdated to many people, it is still a contemporary reality for tens of millions of children, most of whom are girls, including in the U.S.
Powerful institutions have repeatedly provided moral cover for abuses, lobbied legislators, and framed women’s rights and resistance as dangerous attacks on their values, using arguments that mainstream media continue to give legitimacy to. All of this happens with state complicity and through the actions of legislators unwilling to act against powerful religious groups. In 2017, NJ Governor Chris Christie vetoed a ban on child marriage because it would "violate the cultures and traditions of some communities in New Jersey based on religious traditions." The result of all of this, across religions and borders, is the strengthening of systems designed to regulate men’s access to and control over women and girls who are, in the words of one lawmaker, "fertile and ripe"?
“Even the words “cover up” and “child marriage” center men and their power. From girls' perspectives, being transferred from one man's authority to another against their will in religious systems is structurally indistinguishable from criminal trafficking. Both involve coercion, grooming, exploitation, the denial of autonomy, and the exertion and abuse of institutional and systemic power. Seriously, the only way you can reject the idea that religious power along these lines doesn’t sanctifies abuse and launder rape beliefs is if you ignore children and girls. The outcome for them, over their lifetimes, is typically functionally identical to being owned and sold by criminals. Religious leaders and communities clearly routinely fail to prioritize children and women, making their decisions less about protecting innocents than it is about monopolizing what constitutes allowable, legitimate exchanges.
Purity cultures and trafficking both treat virginity as market value. What girls and women who escape these situations repeatedly say is that what is called “sacred” or “traditional” by institutions is experienced as cruelty, coercion, trauma, violence, rape, and commodification. Patriarchs are supposed to decide who can marry or have sex, when, at what age, and under what conditions. The man currently third in line for the presidency participated in a purity ceremony in which his young daughter pledged her virginity to him until marriage.
At the same time though, religious communities invested in purity cultures are also increasingly fighting child sex trafficking. The same purity and virginity norms they promote however drive lucrative and punishing trades in “untouched” girls everywhere. Who benefits from pretending “these aren’t the same.” The only way they aren’t the same is if you ignore the girls being traded and freely abused.
The internet: a powerful distribution system
To continue the analogy, internet platforms scale cartel operations by providing visibility, driving demand, making exchanges efficient, and protecting buyers.
Online, on the dark web, in encrypted networks, and using vanilla social media, interested men coordinate access to children and women, trade abuse tactics, and protect themselves and their identities. The 70,000+ men sharing rape tutorials in Telegram, the 32,000+ men uploading sexualized pictures of their wives to a Facebook page without their knowledge, the 100,000+ men posting sexually explicit images taken with hidden cameras. Internet infrastructure is how a South Korean community of men extorted women, including making victims carve the word ‘slave’ into their bodies. It’s also how AI-generated deepfakes of Taylor Swift being sexually violated were viewed more than 47 million times before being taken down (a good way to teach women that even the wealthiest and idolized can be exposed and consumed with little or no penalty.) This infrastructure is why 29.2M incidents of suspected online child sexual exploitation were identified in 2024. It’s the same infrastructure, today, that allows predators to talk about how they can acquire orphaned Palestinian children in Gaza.
Since the introduction of photography and video to the internet, Silicon Valley has become ground zero for access to children and women. The porn-fueled growth of the internet's early days, the attention/addiction based economic model, and the lack of risk oversight that are now endemic have substantial roots in online pornography markets. But explicit porn isn’t the primary issue anymore.
Content moderation systems and rules put in place by mainstream social media companies determine access, production standards, visibility, ladders of monetization, and what counts as free speech and censorship. They decide what kinds of female nudity and commodification are acceptable, profitable, visible, or suppressed; what counts as ‘real"‘ threat and abuse. In general, by emulating mainstream norms, each platform has devised its own rules for conflating female nudity with pornography and then regulating this content accordingly, often sacrificing women’s safety and freedom of expression as a result. Platforms decide what bodies can be seen, which images are amplified or shadow banned. Black, queer, and fat women are often marginalized, while pornified images of thin white women are algorithmically boosted.
Facebook (Facemash), YouTube (Nipplegate), and Snapchat were all founded and built around men actively seeking and providing access to sexualized images of women. Today, these are all systems in which users — especially women and girls — are pressured, incentivized, and effectively coerced into heightened sexual self-presentation. This doesn’t mean many people aren’t willingly and freely presenting themselves in these ways and it also isn’t a value judgement. I’m just saying that sexualized self-presentations are not always a freely chosen and that research shows that sexualized presentation, in children (girls and boys), teens, adults — is increasingly a requirement for visibility and financial success in the influencer economy.
In this sense, mainstream, social media has increasingly moved images of girls and women through a pipeline that ranges from mild, free exposure to increasingly explicit paid commodification. In the meantime, boys and men learn that pornified objectifying images are feminized, cheap, ubiquitous, and on-demand, conditions that turn them into lifelong “consumers” and predispose them to be rape tolerant. As a recent study of Twitch users explained, sexualized representations of women “shapes gender attitudes, dehumanizes women, and legitimizes violence against them.”
OnlyFans is a logical outcome
Enter OnlyFans. Most of the media attention has been laser-focused on supply: women as creators. It is recognized as a platform for sex work that, despite risks, is supposed to empower women. But what about demand? Sex work usually means that people exchange money for sexual acts, but that isn’t really what’s happening on the platform. The product being sold isn’t sex but women as pornified commodities. With the exception of some notable instances, what’s being sold isn’t sex but sexualized labor. No matter what the topic of conversation (which is incredibly banal and non-sexual), in terms of men's access to their sexual display, regardless of whether sex acts occur or not. Most men on the platform are married and talking to women about anything but sex. Yet, women’s entry ticket and success depend largely on nudity or semi-nudity as a condition of labor.
On OnlyFans, women are both producers and the product. They are not really being compensated for their work but for how they appear. The work – talking, performance, or parasocial intimacy is secondary to the product, which is ultimately giving men a temporary access to sexualized women that they feel is otherwise insufficient in their daily lives. Subscriptions regulate ongoing access and give users the illusion of possession, a soft form of rights over women’s presentation, attention, and presence. The rich part of all of this, however, is that this access, which really seems like a kind of drug, is an illusion maintained by OnlyFans management companies staffed primarily by South East Asian men impersonating women.
In supply chain terms, the platform is a middleman, taking a 20% cut. It also controls visibility and access through algorithmic moderation. The entire system is supported and protected by payment processes, banks, state regulators, and investors. State and corporate protection ensure men's consumer needs are met safely. Banks and regulators tolerate OF while criminalizing other forms of sex work—protecting the cartel arrangement. Consumers driving demand are mostly middle-aged white men who, the media often suggests, are lonely and in search of emotional connection. Male loneliness on OnlyFans sure looks a lot like pent-up demand for women who are sexualized and agree to transactional terms that aren’t questioned, ignored, renegotiated, or rejected outright. The target consumer – white, married men in their late thirties make up the main subscriber base – seem to feel undersupplied and entitled to frictionless access on terms, for example, that their wives are apparently not up for.
Women can both profit and be commodified
It may seem that describing creators as commodities is dehumanizing or denies women’s agency, but that’s not the case. None of what I’m describing negates the fact that women are signing up as creators and financially benefitting from OnlyFans, a platform that many describe as revolutionizing sex work. I’m also not saying women are born or are actual commodities, but that woman-as-commodity is an ontological status under patriarchy. Being seen as, understood, and treated as objects for exchange within society is a deeply rooted condition girls and women have to navigate from birth.
While being a creator means freedom from some types of male demand and access, they also create dependence on and exposure to new forms. Men get private, seamless, safe, destigmatized access on demand. No one cares if they are subscribers. While women creators are stigmatized and, for instance, risk, as many have been, being fired for their work. Meanwhile, app stores, financial services companies, and regulators, like the platform, all profit. The state benefits because the platform reduces street-based sex work and related public health, legal, and policing costs.
If you won’t do it, we’ll make you
If young girls, teen boys, and women won't go along and make themselves available in sexualized ways or provide access on those terms, then deep fakes and nudify apps, to shame, extort, threaten, and expose, do the trick. Teens are dying because of Ai “sextortion” scams and abuse. One report estimates that in 2024 the global deepfake AI market value was approximately $820 million. It is projected to reach $1.03 billion by 2025. The industry’s revenues and profits are overwhelmingly dominated by nonconsensual pornographic content, between 96 and 98 percent of which target women and children.
So, again, is all of this really being covered up? Where do we draw a line between institutional betrayal and pan-institutional collusion? How seriously do people want to take their anger? How far do they want to go to expose systems designed to normalize, enable, and protect abusers?
In the end, Epstein’s trade in girls ended not because his crimes were exceptional or egregious but because he was…unlucky. Bad timing, politics, and unwanted exposure overlapped until an investigative journalist’s relentlessness resulted in sufficient visibility that he no longer a sustainable risk. He was, in cartel terms, essentially sacrificed as damage control. His exposure and arrest were never meant to deliver justice to victims. To do that requires public and institutional recognition of how white patriarchal hierarchies and supremacist norms continue to shape culture, education, and justice systems. It requires a full-scale social commitment to changing them all.
Keep our eye on the ball: the complete reversal of these dynamics
Thinking of patriarchy as a cartel helps us see what “institutional betrayal” actually means. “Cover-up is about morality: “corruption,” “betrayal,” “bad” men, and “secrecy.’ “Cartel” is about political economy: supply chains, price-setting, protection rackets.
What’s happening still might involve corruption, but the corruption is a side effect. The horrifying behaviors and tragic outcomes we see are not random, nor the work of “monsters.” They are the effects of values and norms embedded in families, schools, religions, technologies, media, banks, and states.
Epstein’s prosecution and death won’t end the trafficking of girls. Revealing every single name on the list won’t bring back the lives of the women trafficked as girls. Donald Trump’s clearly being on the list will only be one more item on an absurdly long list of other examples and legitimate claims. The primary purpose, the most essential one right now, is delivering some sense of peace and justice for Epstein’s hundreds of victims, but we can’t stop there. Until we confront the depth and complexity of the system itself, very little will change. We will continue, as a society, as 𝙅𝙤 ⚢📖🏳️🌈 wrote last week, to teach, perpetuate, and tolerate the lies that sustain it.
Many feminists have covered this ground with rigor and brilliance (see this reading list for more), and continue to (see Kate Manne’s recent piece) and yet, here we are still because, in large part, as a society we can’t seem to cultivate the political will to go beyond men’s individual behaviors. We have to though if we want to keep pressing for the changes we need.
The question of what we do, individually, in the face of such an overwhelming problem that cuts across every institution and structure we live with, is a hard one. But, each of us can take concrete steps: Join school boards and advocate for comprehensive, progressive, age-appropriate sex ed. Don’t give rape myths a pass when they come up conversation, whether it's victim-blaming, questioning survivors' credibility, or excusing perpetrators' behavior. Make your home a place where children feel safe and can talk about uncomfortable situations without fear of punishment or doubt. Believe women. Believe young women. Believe children. Vote for people who support right and stronger protections for women and children. Lobby against platforms, content, and businesses that profit from sexualizing children and non-consensual depictions of women. Speak up loudly when you see harassment, even in "minor" forms. Refuse the politeness necessary to maintain the collective silences that protects abusers. In your religious, professional, and social communities prioritize safety over institutional reputation. Find faith communities with women leaders. Support people and organizations invested in changing these systems instead of focusing on individualized redress. Disrupting these everyday norms is critical to dismantling the people AND structures that enable widespread exploitation.
The ideas I’ve written about here are part of my upcoming book, All We Want is Everything, out in November. If you’ve found them useful and of further interest, please check it out. Preorders really help authors and are much appreciated!
Just seeing this now!! I will reach stack for others who might’ve missed it like I did. And I love the title of the new book.
What a necessary reframing. Thank you.