Jessica Winter
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.
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