Congress last November passed a law ordering the Department of Justice to release its unclassified investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and sex offender. The Justice Department has since disclosed batches of redacted documents. Stephen Stromberg, an editor in Opinion, convened the Opinion columnists M. Gessen and Lydia Polgreen to discuss what the public has learned from the files’ disclosure.
The conversation has been edited for clarity.
Stephen Stromberg: British police officers on Thursday arrested, then released Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, a brother of King Charles III. The grounds are unclear, although the police had said they were assessing reports that he had provided trade information to Jeffrey Epstein.
His case is one of the most spectacular in the Epstein saga. But many more people have been caught in the fallout. M., what do you make of the contents of the files and the reactions to them so far?
M. Gessen: A lot has already been said, correctly, about what these files tell us about how power operates. Epstein was an expert courter of the elite. He was a master of instant intimacy. He traded warmth and luxury for connections, connections for money, money for more luxury, luxury for more connections and so on, ad nauseam. His interests were broad and didn’t fit the political matrix we use to understand our world. He seemed just as interested in Steve Bannon as in Noam Chomsky, and they seemed similarly interested in him.
This is what interests me: I have just summed up — I think fairly — the public conversation in the wake of the release of the latest tranche of the files, and I have not even mentioned the young women and girls whom Epstein used as currency. When Epstein’s victims do come up, it is usually to ask the question: How did all these influential or wealthy men — and a few women — maintain their relationships with Epstein, in spite of what he had done to these girls? And the way this question comes up, the way it still leaves the victims out of the picture, contains the answer.
Stromberg: Lydia, are people focusing on the wrong things? Are there some aspects of this scandal you feel have received too much attention? Too little?
Lydia Polgreen: One of the indelible images to come out of the aftermath of the release of these files was the photograph of Attorney General Pam Bondi pointedly ignoring the Epstein victims who attended her congressional testimony this month. With her eyes cast down and face full of contempt, she refused to look at them as they stood and raised their hands in the hearing room. Bondi’s actions were shameful, of course, but it troubled me that I did not know these women’s stories and that even in a hearing ostensibly about the horrors they suffered, they existed as silent figures in a drama playing out around them.
I also think about how the drama over all these powerful figures, many of them boldface names, is a mirror of how the most mundane forms of sexual abuse unfold every day. Such abuse is so common and usually takes place in much smaller yet equally potent networks of power — the office, the house of worship, the family. The fixation on the consequences for the perpetrators and the networks of power they use to elude consequences looks similar to those any of us might see in our own lives.
Gessen: Exactly, Lydia. We need to stop talking about the Epstein story as a story about extraordinary lawlessness. It is a story of ordinary lawlessness. Most abuse of children, like most abuse of women, goes unpunished.
I was listening to our colleague Ezra Klein’s conversation with Anand Giridharadas, and at the moment when Ezra pointed out that Kathryn Ruemmler — a former Obama White House lawyer who, until her resignation a week ago, was general counsel of Goldman Sachs — was an expert on gauging risk, I thought: Well, that’s exactly it. A person who is very good at assessing risk knows that little risk accrues to abusing women and children.
Ruemmler’s resignation from Goldman Sachs was a major story, newsworthy precisely because she lost her job when she’d had the reasonable expectation of not suffering consequences for her association with Epstein.
Polgreen: M., this assumption of impunity has been very much on my mind lately. Over the weekend I watched a documentary called “The Alabama Solution.” It is a remarkable film about the abuses in the Alabama prison system and the heroic efforts of incarcerated victims to expose them. One man who had been convicted of breaking into an unoccupied building, a low-level felony, was serving a 15-year sentence and happened to witness guards beat his cellmate to death. Later he died in strange circumstances a month before he was set to be released.
I thought as I watched this: A guy who committed a basically victimless crime got 15 years in a horrific prison and ultimately dies there just short of his release date, while Epstein got 13 months for soliciting a child for prostitution and even then got to leave his cell on work-release almost every day and easily rehabilitated his reputation.
Gessen: Lydia, we are, as ever, watching the same documentary at roughly the same time. “The Alabama Solution” is extraordinary, very hard to watch — I had to stop several times — because it is devastating. And one of the most devastating things about it is the contrast between the powerless inmates, most of them Black, and the people who wield power, most of them white, whether they are prison guards or local politicians, who act with impunity.
Polgreen: Exactly. And I could not help but think of the victims in the Epstein saga as being similarly voiceless, powerless and ignored but also extraordinarily brave. It takes courage to stand up against the power and force that Epstein and his friends represented.
Stromberg: If the conversation around the Epstein files often misses the most important parts of the story, has their release been worth it?
Gessen: Well, we are here to correct that, right? Yes, I think transparency is always a good thing. But we, as the public, have to do our part. By which I mean: Stop measuring the impact by how much individual powerful people suffer at the hands of other individual powerful people and start, instead, looking at the structures that make this abuse possible.
This, naturally, brings me back to 2017 and 2018, the peak years of #MeToo. I think we made this mistake then: So many people were riveted by the spectacle of a few powerful men losing their jobs or their public standing. Some people called it a revolution. But a revolution changes the structures of power.
Epstein and his associates could have continued to abuse women and girls at the height of #MeToo. It does not appear, from the available analysis of the millions of released pages, that the #MeToo moment prompted Epstein’s associates to turn away from him. So the lawlessness continued to appear ordinary to them, even as so many women were saying that what had happened to them should not be accepted.
Polgreen: Seeing the powerful brought low makes for an extraordinary spectacle. But, as M. says, thinking back to #MeToo is instructive. It is one thing for a loathed Hollywood mogul with a longstanding reputation for abusive behavior to be held accountable. But as soon as the scrutiny moved down from the highest echelons of power to the kinds of workaday humiliations so familiar to our everyday lives, the backlash was inevitable. In a way, the fantastical elements of Epstein’s story — the private jets, the Manhattan mansion, the spooky islands — are simply window dressing for a very ordinary story that, when you strip out the glitz, happens every day. Powerful men exploit girls and women and protect one another from accountability and almost always get away with it.
At the same time, I think we can see quite obvious patterns in the consequences faced by the many different forces in this obscene drama, and those patterns tell us important things. One is that American political leaders seem all but immune to accountability. Aside from Alexander Acosta, the prosecutor who brokered the original sweetheart deal that gave Epstein an exceptionally light sentence, has any political figure in the United States paid the kind of price Peter Mandelson — the now-former British ambassador to the U.S. — or Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor appear to be paying? There has been some accountability for some American business leaders but less than in other countries.
Stromberg: M., how do you see the pattern of accountability?
Gessen: We think about politics and power as a sort of separate and, consequently, unaccountable universe. But let’s go back to the invisibility of the victims. It is not only an aspect of our public conversation but also a key element of the defense that Epstein’s associates — the ones who have bothered to defend themselves — have put forward: They didn’t know. They were in it for something else, like philanthropy or intellectual conversation or whatever, and they just didn’t see the abuse.
Even when the young women, as we now know, were physically right in front of them, they were invisible. And you know what? I believed at least some of these people. It is possible, even easy, not to see people’s suffering in front of your face. This ability not to see is an essential survival skill in America today.
I practice it on the subway most days, when I don’t look at the people who have been sleeping on the train in subfreezing weather. I practice it when I walk around homeless encampments near our office. I practice it when I send my son to school in New York City, where nearly one in seven students doesn’t have secure housing, and we continue with homework and sleepover talk as though this weren’t a thing.
The story of impunity that the Epstein files tell is not so much, or not only, a story about our political structures and elites as it is a story about how we have structured our society as a whole. We have built our society on a foundation of not seeing.
Stromberg: So where from here? I’ve been hearing from some in the law-justice space in Washington that disclosing all of the Epstein files might make it harder to fight sex crimes because people will be less inclined to participate in investigations if they fear that their words might appear in a public dossier. If we are to refocus on supporting victims — and on preventing women and girls from becoming victims — what do we do?
Polgreen: One consistent piece of commentary I’ve seen on the Epstein files is what extraordinary evidence was required for these girls and women to be taken seriously, let alone believed. This has been going on for a very long time, and had any kind of normal course of justice been followed, then there would be no public dossier. There would be a series of investigations, trials and verdicts, flawed and imperfect though they might have been. So a good place to start is taking very seriously the work of investigating allegations of sex crimes, no matter the perpetrator.
Gessen: Steve, you know what journalists say when they’re asked what to do: We don’t do prescriptions; we do the diagnosis. But I’ll make an exception. I think we — the journalists, at least — need to shift our gaze. Stop asking quite so much “Who is going to suffer consequences?” and start asking “Who is going to get repaired?” I can’t forget when a group of Epstein’s victims raised their hands when they were asked who among them hadn’t had the chance to tell their stories to the Justice Department. That needs to be our focus.
Stromberg: M., Lydia, thank you for joining me today.
Source photographs by Kypros and andriano_cz/Getty Images
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