Epstein Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg: The Trump Protection Machine and the Epidemic of Violence Against Women

On July 2, the jury delivered a guilty verdict on some of the charges against music mogul Sean Combs for his decades of horrific sexual abuse of women with the help of his extensive staff and deep pockets. He's also accused in many civil suits of sexual abuse of adults and minors. It seems like everyone promptly forgot about Combs when the facts about financier Jeffrey Epstein's decades of horrific sexual abuse of at least a hundred girls and women, with the help of his extensive staff, deep pockets, banks, and elite connections – including to Donald Trump – became the next front-page ruckus. 

In June, movie producer Harvey Weinstein was found guilty in a New York retrial for some of his decades of horrific sexual abuse of women, with the help of his extensive staff, top lawyers, the film industry, some ex-Mossad agents, and of course his deep pockets. In February a federal appeals court upheld the conviction of rapper R. Kelly's 30-year prison sentence for racketeering and sex trafficking, last year his other 20-year sentence was also upheld, for producing child pornography and enticement of children for sex. Of course his deep pockets and extensive assistance had also been factors in how he too was able to abuse girls for so long. 

One of the reasons the epidemic of violence against women is so unacknowledged is because cases like these are talked about individually, and often treated as though they are shocking aberrations rather than part of a pervasive pattern that operates at all levels of society. These tycoons had the capacity to pay a lot of other people to facilitate their crimes and then help them cover them up and then lawyer up when that didn't work; in other words they had a lot of help. (Among the many things Epstein and Trump shared are the legal services of former Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who denies allegations he had sex with women under Epstein's control, and former Solicitor General under Bush Jr. Ken Starr, who was later forced to resign his top position at Baylor University for, as one victim put it, letting the school become "a hunting ground for sexual predators" by protecting assailants rather than victims.)

The first time Epstein was charged with crimes his lawyers and Florida officials negotiated a deal that protected him and the elite men in his circle. Molly Olmsted at Slate notes that Florida prosecutors violated victims' right to know with the 2008 deal that so compromised former Florida Alex Acosta when it was later revealed that he was forced to resign as Trump's labor secretary. Furthermore, she writes, "The plea deal effectively shuttered an ongoing FBI investigation into whether there were other guilty parties—possibly other wealthy and powerful people—and guaranteed Epstein and any co-conspirators immunity from federal prosecution."

In response to a lawsuit from Epstein victims claiming "that the largest U.S. bank turned a blind eye to the late financier's sex trafficking," JP Morgan Chase paid out $290 million a few years ago. I wrote in 2019, when Epstein had just been arrested and was still alive, "Maybe one of the reasons rape has so often been portrayed as 'a stranger leaps out of the bushes' is so we’ll imagine rapists acting alone. But in so many cases rapists have help in the moment and forever after, and the help is often so powerful, broad, and deep—well, that’s why we call it rape culture."

One reason this violence is so unacknowledged is that it is in the most literal sense not news – there are tides of hatred and violence against other groups that ebb and flow, but violence against women is global and enduring, a constant rather than an event. Another is that law enforcement and the legal system have often been more interested in protecting perpetrators, and society has often normalized and even celebrated violence against women.

Imagine that we had no word for cancer and no recognition of the varieties of ways it manifests, so that we just had occasional lurid news stories about strange and sometimes fatal growths in various parts of various people, not connecting the versions in brains to the versions in prostates and breasts (and of course if we didn't recognize the common denominators we couldn't develop diagnoses and treatments or address root causes). Feminism has in fact offered a diagnosis, steadily, for decades and centuries: that the cause is misogyny and the violence is intended to perpetrate the inequality, exploitation, and subordination of women. But the one-case stories avoid this recognition by treating something ubiquitous as exceptional and isolated. 

The only thing exceptional about Jeffrey Epstein's crimes was their scale and maybe the complexity of the international financial, transportation, and other systems he used to traffic, control, abuse, and silence victims. The nature of the crimes was ordinary and common. In the United States, there's a rape every sixty-eight seconds, a woman is beaten by an intimate partner every nine seconds, and about two thousand women are murdered by men every year, and while more men are murdered annually than women, the majority of women murdered are murdered by partners or former partners. Globally a woman or girl is murdered by her partner or family member every ten minutes. A high percentage of human trafficking worldwide is of women and girls for sexual exploitation. 

Child sexual abuse is also a pervasive problem. Here's an Arizona report from June on border patrol officers charged with, in one case, raping a middle-school child he abducted for the purpose, another with " 24 felony charges, including 10 counts of child sex trafficking," and a third officer with 15 felonies, including 14 counts of sexual conduct with a 16-year-old between December 2024 and April 2025, and one count of "sexual exploitation of a minor" for apparently photographing or filming her. While I was writing this, a copilot was hauled off a commercial airliner in San Francisco to be arrested for child pornography.

My opening paragraphs cited two Black musicians and two Jewish moguls whose attacks on women and girls made recent news, but I could have found examples from the hundreds of cases of sexual abuse of women, girls, and boys by ministers of the Southern Baptist Church. NPR reported in 2022 that, "the Southern Baptist Convention's Executive Committee mishandled allegations of sex abuse, stonewalled numerous survivors and prioritized protecting the SBC from liability." I could have reported on the appalling sexual abuse cases by Catholic clergy that extend far beyond the United States and far back in time. I could have brought up Giselle Pelicot in France, whose husband and dozens of other rapists were sentenced in December for sexually assaulting her her while she was drugged into unconsciousness. Or the grotesqueries of Andrew Cuomo's campaign of sexual harrassment and groping while he was governor of New York, followed by his persecution of those who spoke up.

I could have brought up that both US and Canadian residential schools for Indigenous children are being exposed as former students who were sexually abused in them find the space to speak up. There is also an epidemic of rape and murder of indigenous women, in part because the perpetrators correctly assess that they are less likely to be caught and prosecuted when they target this population. There's even an acronym, MMIW, missing and murdered indigenous women, because the violence is so pervasive.

Epstein targeted poor and neglected girls and then brought over girls and young women from other countries with promises of modeling careers, apparently seeking the least protected and most vulnerable. But if these crimes makes someone think only the poor or marginalized are impacted, Princess Diana's brother Charles, who's the Ninth Earl Spencer, recently published a memoir about the chronic sexual abuse, including bare-bottom beatings for the headmaster's pleasure, at his elite boarding school in England.

The pretense that we will find out whether or not Donald Trump is a sexual predator if the Epstein files are released is itself a kind of cover-up since we already know he is – though I'm all for finding out exactly what it is he's so frantic to hide. He was found liable for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll in a 2024 civil trial and has been credibly charged with groping, grabbing, and assault by numerous women. His first wife retracted her allegation that he violently raped her, but the claim seems compelling, the retraction was apparently made under pressure. His worse than creepy behavior around the teenage girls in beauty pageants he managed is well-documented, as are his lecherous comments about female children and his closeness to Epstein. Trump biographer Michael Wolff, who interviewed Epstein extensively, said last fall that Epstein had shown him photographs suggesting both that Trump knew about Epstein's exploited girls and participated in exploiting them.

Now, like all the rapists mentioned in the first paragraphs of this essay, Trump has a protection machine at work – one without precedent. Our own federal government funded by our taxes is striving to protect Trump from whatever's in those files. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the lower house of Congress has adjourned Congress to protect Trump from Democratic measures meant to force Republicans to vote on releasing the Epstein files. Many high-level officials are serving not the we the people but Trump the Frantic.

As The Hill reports, "Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says he has received information that Attorney General Pam Bondi 'pressured' about 1,000 FBI personnel to comb through tens of thousands of pages of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and flag any mention of President Trump." A thousand workers pulled off their official jobs --this extraordinary effort only makes Trump look like he has a lot to hide.

But in another sense the whole society is hiding something: that this violence is everywhere and it deeply shapes – or misshapes – our society. The statistics I cited above address the victims of specific crimes. But all girls and women are impacted by the awareness that so many men want to harm us and these crimes could happen to any one of us. This violence affects the choices we make about where to go and when, what jobs to take, when to speak up, what to wear. The threat of violence and actual violence by some men against some women and girls establishes female vulnerability and fear and disempowerment far more broadly. Because society has largely required us to alter our lives to avoid this rather than altering society to make us free and equal. This violence is an engine of inequality that benefits all men insofar as being more equal than others in this respect is a benefit. (There's a good case to be made that it's not, in deeper ways, in the solidarity of no one is free until everyone is free and in what men give up to be in patriarchy, and in how men who've fully embraced it impact us all.)

The piecemeal stories--"here is this one bad man we need to do something about" – don't address the reality that the problem is systemic and the solution isn't police and prison. It's social change, and societies will have changed enough when violence against women ceases to be a pandemic that stretches across continents and centuries. Because men no longer desire to commit these crimes and no longer believe they have the right to dominate and control women or that they are likely to get away with it. It's social change that involves men. Violence against women has often been framed as a women's problem women can solve on our own, but we can't.  

I see men joining us in talking about the extreme cases, the big news stories --sometimes – but only very rarely if at all about the pervasiveness of the problem, the fact that it's everywhere, that the rape culture underneath it all is woven all through society. What does it say that so much culture is shaped by such predatory criminals from Weinstein to Combs? That so many are in our politics, committed to protecting inequality and exploitation, even if they're not committing the crimes themselves? Systemic problems require systemic responses, and while I'm all for releasing the Epstein files, I want a broader conversation and deeper change.

p.s. Voices of victims, courtesy of Jezebel. https://www.jezebel.com/since-no-one-else-seems-to-care-lets-remember-epsteins-survivors