Feminism Versus Trump and Epstein
We already knew that Jeffrey Epstein had sexually assaulted and exploited dozens of girls and young women, that he had done so openly, that his dehumanization of the vulnerable had not prevented a whole lot of rich and high-status men (and women, but mostly men) from socializing with him even after his trial and conviction, that in the courtroom and elsewhere many of his victims have spoken out, that journalists have published hundreds of stories about his crimes, that his procuress Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison for sex-trafficking children.
But whether the president of this country, the one who is supposed to sit atop our nation of laws, participated in these crimes is what the clamor about releasing the Epstein files is about, that and the other criminals who may still be at large. What we already know is that Trump knew exactly what Epstein was up to and alluded to it in various ways over the years, and that he's been found liable in a civil court for rape in an incident unrelated to Epstein and charged with sexual assault by many other women. The monster in charge of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., likes to pretend that we need to run tests on already-tested, already-proven-safe vaccines to see if they're safe; the idea that we need to see what's in the files to know if Trump is a predator and a criminal and a misogynist has some of the same agenda of delay and decoy.
But it's also clear that there is likely something in the files that further incriminates him. This is why a thousand FBI agents frantically scoured the files earlier this year to find mentions of him (an outrage that has not received nearly enough attention), why he had public meltdowns this summer about the issue, why Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice, which had already been reorganized to protect him rather than us, to twist the law to that end rather than uphold the law, had to be forced by an act of Congress to release the files. And why they have failed to obey in full.
Yesterday the Epstein files were and were not released – the Department of Justice dribbled out a small percentage of the total, much of it censored. That is, not only were the faces and bodies of young women who may be victims/survivors blacked out, but so were a host of men who were not victims and did not deserve to have this protection. While there was lots of Bill Clinton in the newly-released files, one account of what's in the files said there were no mentions of Trump; another account said there were two such mentions.
The New York Times had just published an excellent overview piece on Trump and Epstein's long, close friendship: "For nearly a quarter-century, Mr. Trump and his representatives have offered shifting, often contradictory accounts of his relationship with Mr. Epstein, one sporadically captured by society photographers and in news clips before they fell out sometime in the mid-2000s. Closely scrutinized since Mr. Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell during Mr. Trump’s first term, their friendship — and questions about what the president knew of Mr. Epstein’s abuses — now threatens to consume his second one. The controversy has shaken Mr. Trump’s iron hold on his base like no other."
The suppression of truth is, in this case, itself a crime, noted Thomas Massie, the Kentucky congressman who co-authored the bill to release the Epstein files, and who has been a staunch voice much of this year for truth and for victims. Massie said on social media: "Unfortunately, today’s document release by @AGPamBondiand @DAGToddBlanche grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law that @realDonaldTrump signed just 30 days ago. A future DOJ could convict the current AG and others because the Epstein Files Transparency Act is not like a Congressional Subpoena which expires at the end of each Congress."
Had there been truth all along, there might not have been so many victims. A man who rapes or otherwise brutalizes women and children gambles on the inequality of voice between him and his victims, and throughout most of history he has won. That is, these crimes take place in a society in which some are powerful, some are almost powerless, and that power consists in no small part of being treated as important, credible, having a voice in the arenas of power – the legal system, the media, the financial system – and having rights that need to be protected.
Powerlessness consists of being treated as insignificant, having no voice in those arenas, or being discredited, disbelieved, shamed, blamed, and dismissed if she does try to speak up. Of a thousand forms of not mattering. We already know this story. Some of us have lived it. A lot of us have lived it. We read all about how Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein and so many others like them used the power differential to silence victims with threats, discrediting, nondisclosure agreements, and more. We've seen campaigns of hate directed at women who speak up about their abuse by celebrity men. We have seen how there are systems in place to perpetuate and expand this system of silencing and protection. Now the federal government is a protection racket for an abuser who is tied to this criminal and these crimes. The Justice Department is trying to prevent the victims from getting justice.
In one stunning story whose capstone came yesterday, the files released yesterday included confirmation that Maria Farmer, a young artist lured into Epstein's world by a pretense to support her art that turned into sexual assault by Epstein and Maxwell, had indeed gone to the FBI in 1996 to report Epstein. There was no follow-up by the department. Had there been, Epstein's next twenty-plus years of rape, terrorization, and trafficking might never have happened. But the FBI chose not to take seriously the charges by a young woman about a wealthy, powerful man, even though she was a firsthand witness and a victim. And then that young woman, like so many others, so many countless others, was treated as a liar, a person unqualified to bear witness, a person who should not be listened to. She wasn't. The child rape and other crimes continued. Mike Baker, in the screenshot below, talks about her reaction when he told her he'd just found the document that confirms her account. She wept.
Feminism has been a long campaign to give women equal rights, to make us equal in society, under the law, and in access to power. It has radically changed the social landscape and of course it has also not yet changed it nearly enough. Undoing something so embedded in this culture for so long – not centuries but millennia – is not a failure if it has not finished the job in a matter of decades. People who do not think feminism has done much forget how different things were before that wave washed over everything. The very language to identify sexual harrassment and marital rape had yet to be coined, and marital rape was not a crime (likewise, domestic violence was a more neutral term for what was then called wife-beating, and feminists delegitimized it and invented the domestic violence shelter). Women were largely banned by law and custom from almost all positions of power. The justification was our supposed physical, intellectual, and moral inferiority and our lesser value.
Which meant that women were not believed about rape, were blamed for rape, were shamed for rape, were terrorized and punished and ostracized for speaking up, and were often told that they were attempting to ruin a man's life rather than that he should face consequences for violating theirs, because his life mattered more than hers. That inferiority extended to the only recently partially dismantled idea that women are somehow more unreliable, subjective, delusional, vindictive than men, and therefore less to be believed when the subject is rape or related gender violence. There is no other crime in which the victim is so routinely treated as the guilty person to be put on trial.
All this was a form of silencing that protected perpetrators and made women and children more vulnerable to violence and abuse. The Epstein case is a prime example. Clearly all those Ivy League academics and captains of industry saw him dragging young women and girls from place to place, leering and joking and in some cases offering them up for rape and sexual exploitation by other men. The predator formerly known as Prince Andrew is almost the only one to be seriously punished for it, though it has been nice to see Harvard's Larry Summers face some minor social and professional consequences for his misogynist email exchanges with Epstein (which makes me wonder if Obama is rethinking his appointment of this creep to his cabinet).
What has happened over the past dozen years is a shift in the credibility, audibility, and consequence of women and girls testifying about sexual abuse, and a shift in how seriously the society takes those crimes (because they were until recently often dismissed or leeringly snickered about, as is clear in the Epstein birthday book). I wrote about this in my 2020 memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence: "At the beginning of 2013 a dam broke. Behind it were millions of women’s stories about sexual violence, violence made possible by their inaudibility and lack of credibility and the inconsequentiality of their stories. Torrents of stories poured forth. ... Violence against bodies had been made possible on an epic epidemic scale by violence against voices. The existing order rested on the right and capacity of men to be in charge — of meaning and of truth, of which stories mattered and whose got told, as well as of more tangible phenomena (money, law, government, media) that maintained the arrangement. And it rested on the silence or silencing of those whose experiences demonstrated the illegitimacies of the status quo and those atop it."
Rape is a peculiar crime. It is an assertion that the rights and pleasures of the perpetrator matter infinitely, and those of the victims not at all. It can for the most part only take place in a society which makes the perpetrator matter more than the victim. So it is both ritual enactment of and enforcement of inequality. Feminism has broken some of the silence and brought in more equality, which is why crimes committed decades ago by men who had impunity at the time have in recent years sometimes been prosecuted, belatedly, but effectively.
The rules are changing – which is not to say they are changing enough, that we are at the victorious end of a quest for justice and equality, just that we have made some progress. And, of course, some backlash. But I do not believe that the backlash overwhelms or reverses the progress. It has been profound to see men who believe ardently that women too have certain inalienable rights and champion them, who have unlearned some of the myths about rape that were part of rape culture, who have championed justice for victims and abusers.
And it is undermining loyalty to Trump as nothing else has, and it is an important part of how the Trump regime and the Republican Party are falling apart before our eyes. This does not mean that the Trumpists are powerless; they are flailing and grabbing for all the kinds of power that they can. Trump appears to be disintegrating, rotting, collapsing before our eyes, mentally and physically, and Republicans in Congress – first of all with the vote to release the Epstein files – are breaking from him. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, once his most loyal MAGA follower, has broken with him and denounces him regularly. The Epstein files seem to have been his breaking point. Breaking point in the loyalty of so many right-wingers, and maybe a mental breaking point for him. I welcome this breakage. I welcome what belated, flawed, imperfect version of justice may yet come.
And I say again what I have often said for a long time: thank you feminism.
I ran across an extraordinary passage by George Orwell that, like so much he's written speaks to our moment of crisis from his. In 1941, as Britain stood almost alone against European fascism in the Second World War, he declared, "Two incompatible visions of life are fighting one another. ‘Between democracy and totalitarianism,’ says Mussolini, ‘there can be no compromise.’ The two creeds cannot even, for any length of time, live side by side. So long as democracy exists, even in its very imperfect English form, totalitarianism is in deadly danger. The whole English-speaking world is haunted by the idea of human equality, and though it would be simply a lie to say that either we or the Americans have ever acted up to our professions, still, the idea is there, and it is capable of one day becoming a reality. From the English-speaking culture, if it does not perish, a society of free and equal human beings will ultimately arise. But it is precisely the idea of human equality – the ‘Jewish’ or ‘Judaeo-Christian’ idea of equality – that Hitler came into the world to destroy. He has, heaven knows, said so often enough. The thought of a world in which black men would be as good as white men and Jews treated as human beings brings him the same horror and despair as the thought of endless slavery brings to us."
The Trump regime aspires to at the very least authoritarianism and maybe totalitarianism. It is committed to radical inequality between white and nonwhite people, and those who believe in democracy and equality have been valiant in pushing back as ICE attacks not just refugees and immigrants but anyone brown enough or Black enough to look like one. Members of the administration, including JD Vance speak as though the nonwhite population of this country can be whittled down to return this country to the kind of white majority and white supremacy it had when Trump was just a spoiled rich boy in Queens. Short a full-on blitzkrieg ethnic cleansing, it can't, and the future of this country is a nonwhite majority.
Orwell wrote at a time when gender inequality was so normalized and institutionalized it was largely invisible and not the sort of stuff to show up on lists like this. But the Trump Administration, whether it's the attack on reproductive rights, Pete Hegseth's attacks on women in the military, the dismantling and demonization of diversity-equality-inclusion programs, is also attacking women and seeking to return us to a status of extreme inferiority. The regime is headed by Jeffrey Epstein's best friend, who surely thought there would be no consequences for his decades of dehumanization of women that has continued with his creepy comments, lecherous and hateful, about women this year. You could paraphrase Orwell to say, "The thought of a world in which women would be as good as men and treated as human beings brings him horror and despair."
Keep bringing it. And once again, thank you feminism.
