On Sunday, the anti-trafficking organization World Without Exploitation released a P.S.A. featuring eleven of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. Each of the women holds a photograph of herself from around the age at which she first encountered the reviled sex offender. (“I was fourteen years old” . . . “I was sixteen years old” . . . “I was sixteen” . . . “Seventeen” . . . “Fourteen years old.”) The P.S.A. ends by directing viewers to call their congressional representatives to urge the release of the remaining Epstein files: “It’s time to bring the secrets out of the shadows.”
This plea may appear to have some momentum. Last week, the House Oversight Committee made public more than twenty thousand pages of documents subpoenaed from Epstein’s estate, and, in days to come, the House is expected to vote on a bill to open up a trove of Justice Department files related to Epstein. But, even if the bill passes the House, it may die in the Senate, or by a veto from President Donald Trump, or in the hands of Pam Bondi, the U.S. Attorney General.
Trump, after months of stonewalling on the release of the remaining Epstein papers, appeared to reverse himself over the weekend, posting to Truth Social, “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party.” He added, “I DON’T CARE!” But we know Trump cares deeply about anything that bears his name, and his name is all over last week’s tranche of documents. House Democrats singled out a 2011 e-mail in which Epstein called Trump the “dog that hasn’t barked,” and another message, from 2019, in which Epstein invoked Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago, and said that “of course he knew about the girls”—presumably referring to girls such as Epstein’s most prominent accuser, Virginia Giuffre, who was a teen-age locker-room attendant at Mar-a-Lago when she was first spotted by Epstein’s main accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. But Giuffre, who died in April, always maintained that she had never witnessed inappropriate conduct by Trump.
And, if Giuffre had made such allegations, it’s not clear that the President’s advocates would mind all that much. The conservative talk-show host and MAGA stalwart Megyn Kelly recently said that she knows “somebody very, very close to this case” who felt that Epstein “was not a pedophile.” Rather, Kelly went on, “He was into the barely legal type, like, he liked fifteen-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. . . . I’m just giving you facts.” A fifteen-year-old girl, if it needs to be noted, is not “barely legal”; there is no U.S. state in which the age of consent is lower than sixteen. In any case, Kelly continued, “There’s a difference between a fifteen-year-old and a five-year-old.” Insisting upon this difference may become more urgent, depending on what is in the D.O.J. files and whether they are made public.
The avalanche of e-mails, text messages, and court documents in last week’s House dump offers various revelations, but, at times, it can also induce a strange mental fog—a wintry mix of amnesia and déjà vu. It’s hard to pinpoint, amid the overwhelm, what you knew and when you knew it. Epstein’s many friends and associates may know the feeling.
I didn’t remember, for example, Epstein’s legal team arguing that he could not be accused of coercion or enticement of his many victims because the sexual assaults that occurred at his West Palm Beach home were “spontaneous.” I also did not recall his team asserting that, because two underage victims may have lied about their age when Epstein met them, “their testimony actually confirms his innocence.” It would seem hard to forget such things, but perhaps it was too difficult to believe them in the first place.
I likewise did not remember that, in 2004, Trump won a bidding war against Epstein for a Palm Beach mansion, an incident that may have precipitated a falling out between the old pals; I did not recall that local police began investigating Epstein for sex crimes shortly after the sale, or that, just four years later, Trump sold the property for more than double what he paid for it, to the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev. This is what is known, I believe, as the art of the deal.
