In Shakespeare’s tragedy “Titus Andronicus,” a general’s daughter, Lavinia, is raped by Chiron and Demetrius, two powerful princes. To prevent her from revealing their crime, her assailants carve out her tongue and amputate both her hands.
Lavinia has been on my mind as I’ve combed through countless emails between Jeffrey Epstein and his vast network. In them, tongue-severing swords take the form of threats, settlements and confidentiality agreements. But unlike Chiron and Demetrius, Mr. Epstein seemed to know that even these vows of silence can crack under pressure, that women can still speak out.
The recent release of millions of pages of court filings, correspondence and other records spanning decades show that Mr. Epstein had been developing a playbook on how to silence women since his conviction, in 2008, for soliciting a minor for prostitution (a polite way of describing the crime of paying a teenager in order to sexually assault them). These documents show how he cultivated a climate of skepticism around all women leveling accusations of sexual impropriety, not merely the girls and women he abused.
The mechanics of doubt revealed in the Epstein files — the strategies and tactics deployed by the powerful to erode survivors’ credibility — offer a rare glimpse into what the #MeToo movement was up against when it took off in 2017. The emails make it clear that the movement’s hard-won progress never stood a chance. Mr. Epstein seems to have understood that if he could wield his behind-the-scenes influence to encourage a belief that women and girls were unreliable, that perception was stronger than any nondisclosure agreement. If you can transform a person from a victim into a liar, you can cut out her tongue for good.
During the height of the #MeToo movement, a handful of high-profile men were prosecuted, many more were canceled, and a number of promising legal reforms were passed. In America, statutes of limitations for sex crimes were extended and definitions of harassment were expanded. Nondisclosure agreements intended to silence women were made harder to enforce. Police departments faced pressure to reduce the number of rape cases that are dismissed for lack of evidence.
But those reforms led to outcomes that were, in many cases, bitterly disappointing. As an academic researcher during that era, I spent time in police stations, prisons and courtrooms in North America, Europe and Africa documenting the aftermath of various legal reforms. In the wake of #MeToo, many of the places I worked registered upticks in sexual violence reporting alongside declining rates of prosecution. A conviction may be an imperfect measure of justice, but these trends suggest that the #MeToo movement had fueled a desire for consequences that was not being met.
In my work as a researcher, I documented the subtle ways that doubt clung to the testimonies of sexual violence survivors. In jails in Maryland and Ohio, I spoke to women who had called the police for help only to be detained and investigated as criminals themselves. In Nigeria, where feminist movements and subsequent legal reforms overhauled gender violence laws, I reviewed over 70 sexual violence case files, tracing how many survivors tended to be disbelieved because of their identities and biographies, which were given greater weight than the facts of their cases.
Burdens of proof are not borne equally. Women who are poor, not white, undocumented or otherwise marginalized have more to prove to offset the weight of the prejudices that chip away at their credibility. I found that for most survivors, when they tried to hold men accountable for their crimes, the slogans of #MeToo could not contend with their reality.
Doomscrolling through the Epstein files, I’ve found countless resonances to the stories I heard from the women in Maryland, in Ohio, in Nigeria. Mr. Epstein and his allies portray his survivors who are from poor backgrounds as frauds and thieves after money. Those with histories of trauma or substance abuse are dismissed as untrustworthy. Victims’ behavior is endlessly dissected and litigated. In an email from 2010, a contact notes that one of Mr. Epstein’s accusers smiled during a deposition. “Her OWN behavior in the depo disproves her allegations,” he wrote.
But it was Jeffrey Epstein’s use of the false rape accusation — the #MeToo boogeyman and the catalyst of the backlash to the movement — that stopped me in my tracks.
Available data shows false reports of this nature are exceedingly rare (generally between 2 and 5 percent), dwarfed by the estimated number of sexual assaults that are not reported to the police (around three-quarters of sexual assaults in the United States). Men of Mr. Epstein’s class are among the least likely to be prosecuted for false allegations — exoneration data in the United States shows victims of this sort of miscarriage of justice are disproportionately Black and poor.
Still, Epstein and many of his friends stoked fears around such allegations. In 2019, Noam Chomsky wrote to Mr. Epstein describing the “hysteria that has developed about abuse of women.”
In 2015, a rare false rape allegation made news — when Rolling Stone had to retract a story of a woman who claimed she was gang-raped at the University of Virginia. Mr. Epstein seized on the moment to push his view of sexual abuse accusers.
“Think about if there is a way to captialize” on the retracted story, Mr. Epstein wrote to the journalist Michael Wolff, in one of the many typo-ridden emails in the files. “These stories are made out of whole cloth.” The files suggest that Mr. Wolff did not respond, but that night he sent Mr. Epstein an email with the subject line “Are women bad for journalism?” In the email, he links to a column he wrote for USA Today that denounces the news media for continuing to point to sexual assault on campuses as a serious problem, even after the fallout from the retracted Rolling Stone story.
In court transcripts and private correspondence, Mr. Epstein and some of his associates describe some of Mr. Epstein’s accusers as frauds and thieves. They repeatedly call Virginia Giuffre, the most outspoken of Mr. Epstein’s victims, a “total liar” and a “serial liar.”
Ms. Giuffre, who died by suicide last year, first went public over a decade ago, claiming that Mr. Epstein had assaulted her when she was a teenager and that he had trafficked her to his powerful friends. There were dozens of underage victims identified by prosecutors in the 2007 case. After a mysteriously lenient plea deal protected Mr. Epstein from federal criminal charges, she and other victims came forward with civil suits.
Mr. Epstein enlisted the legendary Hollywood publicist Peggy Siegal, asking her to use her influence to encourage a news outlet to “champion the dangers of false allegations” of sexual assault. Ms. Siegal told him to rewrite the email “in better grammar” and then said she could send it to Arianna Huffington, the founder of The Huffington Post. (Ms. Siegal recently said she never sent the email.)
Ghislaine Maxwell, Mr. Epstein’s longtime companion, also worked to tarnish the reputation of Ms. Giuffre. In emails with a P.R. man, Ms. Maxwell, who is now in federal prison for sexually exploiting and abusing teenage girls, lists a mixture of true and uncorroborated statements about Ms. Giuffre: that she was a drug user with an outstanding warrant for theft, who had made previous sexual violence allegations and allegedly lied on an application for a visa to Australia. Ms. Maxwell also wrote that she’d heard Ms. Giuffre was into “witchcraft.” Of course, not one of those things would prove Mr. Epstein’s innocence.
The Epstein files include numerous confused references to witch hunts and the Salem witch trials, particularly as the #MeToo movement picked up steam. No one seemed to clock the fact that much like the moral panic about false rape allegations, historical witch hunts often reflected anxieties about women’s power in society.
By late 2018, when the Miami Herald published Julie K. Brown’s three-part investigation into Mr. Epstein — reporting that thrust the financier into the spotlight — the #MeToo backlash was already in full swing, with cries that the movement had gone too far reverberating through many industries. In the United States, defamation lawsuits were deployed as a tool to punish or silence survivors.
The files show that Mr. Epstein and his fellow travelers were eagerly tracking the backlash.
When one of the charges against Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced Hollywood producer, was dropped after a detective failed to disclose a piece of evidence, the filmmaker Woody Allen forwarded the news to Mr. Epstein.
“Yes,” Mr. Epstein replied. “Lets see if the accuser gets punished.”
“They never seem to,” Mr. Allen replied. “This is wrong.”
In September 2018, the psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Brett Kavanaugh — then President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court — had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers.
Before she testified, Mr. Epstein wrote to the former U.S. solicitor general Ken Starr, who worked closely with Mr. Kavanaugh and defended him after Ms. Blasey Ford’s testimony, expressing his sympathies with Mr. Kavanaugh.
“I’ve sat in kavanaugh seat 10 times,” Mr. Epstein said. “She can put on quite a show. Question ing her is an art form. If she begins to cry, not uncommon, or fabricate damage from the alleged interaction or worse , surgical care must be the order of the day.”
“Wise,” Mr. Starr replied. “Thank you.”
In one of many text exchanges with the former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon during this period, Mr. Epstein discusses using Mr. Kavanaugh’s hearing to fuel widespread perceptions of a #MeToo witch hunt. Mr. Epstein suggested that Ms. Blasey Ford’s testimony could be undermined if she were compared to privileged white women accusing Black men of rape — which, during Jim Crow, often led to those Black men being lynched.
Should strike a chord with the blacks,” Mr. Epstein writes. “Love that,” replies Mr. Bannon.
These exchanges can seem like the musings of a man merely reacting to the news to his friends. But Mr. Epstein’s friends were very powerful people who were friends with other powerful people. The exchanges can also be read as a man with the power to influence the course of women’s rights and choosing to wield it.
I find myself oscillating between feelings of validation and despair. The Epstein files confirm many of our suspicions and our deepest fears as feminists — the efficacy of regimes of silencing women, the fact that there are so many powerful people in our society who are creeps and liars and who can’t even spell-check an email. But there’s little satisfaction in being right, in knowing the truth.
In one of the emails Mr. Epstein received in October 2017, as the #MeToo movement was beginning to pick up traction, one of his survivors confronted him directly: “Honestly,” she wrote, seeming to view their relationship with a newfound clarity, “I would have preferred not to see all this and know any of it, staying in my idealized world. I would have been much happier I think. It’s so crazy how your perception of life changes when you start to acknowledge things like this.”
The proof in the files — the depth and scope of the project to cast doubt on survivors — has been made public at a time when there is no broad-based feminist movement to push for deeper change. If the problem we face is no longer a lack of evidence, where does that leave those of us who threw in our lot with a belief in the power of exposure? Perhaps another feminist movement might finally figure out how to target the deeper layers of our cultural fabric — the forces lurking beneath our laws, which shape whom or what we believe.
Because even now, with the latest tranche of high-profile names that appear in the files, many choose to believe that these people did not know. Jeffrey Epstein lied about his education, his investments, his philanthropy and the sources of his wealth. He lied to the women and girls he trafficked, promising them education, careers and better lives. It was public knowledge that he was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution for over a decade before his death — and yet many in his circle believed him.
Despite what Mr. Epstein and his friends would have us believe, #MeToo’s injunction to “believe women” was never meant to be an endpoint. “Believe women” asked us to figure out how to correct obvious disparities in who must prove what to whom. The liberal reforms that #MeToo produced were not up to that structural task.
By casting doubt over all those who report sexual violence in his private but influential circles, Mr. Epstein and his allies robbed his victims of their most powerful defensive weapon — the credibility of their testimony. Vows of silence can crack under pressure, or when circumstances change. In the end, Lavinia writes the names of her abusers in the earth of her father’s garden, a stick clenched between her teeth. Mr. Epstein understood that a liar can never speak, or rather, cannot be heard. Her testimony is reduced to the inchoate ramblings of a madwoman.
Claire Wilmot is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the London School of Economics and a freelance journalist.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post The Epstein Emails Show #MeToo Never Stood a Chance appeared first on New York Times.
