The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room recently came to Washington. The pop-up exhibition displays 3,437 bound volumes of 800 pages each — representing the Epstein files that have been released so far. I wondered what 3.5 million pages even looked like visually. I can answer that now: It looked like a sobering image of our vast collective failure.
The question is, how do we address the magnitude of that failure? What can justice mean for the survivors at this point? “Release the files” — meaning, release all the files — has become shorthand for this failure, a rallying cry that the people and institutions who failed to stop Mr. Epstein should be held accountable.
Though the files were ordered to be released by December 2025 after Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, what we’ve had instead from the Department of Justice is dumps of incomplete information with haphazard redactions.
Justice seems a long way off. It was particularly gutting to watch the journalist Katie Phang and the Epstein survivor Dani Bensky walk through the Reading Room and see Ms. Bensky calculate the sordid history that preceded her own 2004 victimization. “All they needed to do was station a police car outside of the mansion,” she said.
Even for those implicated, there’s been precious little real accountability. Mr. Epstein is dead. Jean-Luc Brunel, an associate of Mr. Epstein’s — charged with raping minors — is also dead (suicide, Parisian jail cell, 2022). Ghislaine Maxwell is imprisoned (however gently, in her minimum-security prison).
Meanwhile, for people who were connected to Mr. Epstein, the consequences have generally been slight. Some men, like Larry Summers, have lost their professional standing, while others, like Noam Chomsky, have taken reputational hits. A few — including Bill Gates and Woody Allen — have endured a measure of public shaming, but they don’t seem to have suffered much past a news cycle or two. President Trump continues to claim no wrongdoing.
Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank have each settled civil suits brought by Mr. Epstein’s victims, who accused the banks of facilitating or ignoring Mr. Epstein’s sex trafficking. In total, they’ve agreed to pay more than $400 million — a sum dwarfed by their profits, of course. The idea that payment equates to justice strikes me as not merely a cold feature of capitalism but an expression of our American tendency to conflate people’s wealth with their human value.
This conflation underlies the cynical calculation that financial institutions apparently made to do business with Mr. Epstein in the first place. Regulators have found that Deutsche Bank allowed suspicious transactions linked to Mr. Epstein’s account to proceed largely unchecked for years, despite the fact that the bank had deemed him “high risk.” JPMorgan’s staff raised concerns about Mr. Epstein as far back as 2006, seven years before the bank dropped him as a client. What if we demanded that these institutions not merely pay a settlement but repay every penny of profit? If you deliver enough of a return on investment, I guess you can stuff your hollow moral center with cash.
Talk to any woman who says she has endured any kind of abuse and you will be quickly rid of the notion that true justice requires only a monetary payoff. Alva Johnson — who sued Mr. Trump, stating that he forcibly kissed her while she was working for his 2016 campaign — told me: “It’s a constant reliving of something so horrific that happened, and no amount of money, truthfully, can ever make you whole.”
Ms. Johnson, who eventually dropped her lawsuit, is one of more than two dozen women who’ve accused Mr. Trump of sexual misconduct. The Reading Room is named after both men for a reason. Women like her are seen as “damaged goods,” she said. It can be difficult to find employment when you’ve spoken out about powerful men. She visited the Reading Room when it opened: “When I saw my name on the wall, it was like my heart just sank. It’s still so surreal, that this is your life.” (The president has disputed Ms. Johnson’s account and denied the allegations of sexual misconduct.)
I went upstairs to the third floor, where one side of the room represented Mr. Epstein’s victims with hundreds of candles, and the other held messages on index cards written by visitors. “Grateful, angry, heartbroken,” mourned one card. Another asked, hauntingly: “Who are we.”
The binders in the Reading Room should be understood as evidence of a global criminal enterprise that sold and transported girls and women. “The evil genius of traffickers like Epstein and Maxwell is that they created criminal liability for their victims,” said Martina Vandenberg, the president of the Human Trafficking Legal Center. Trafficking often works this way, even at the street level, by making victims collude in the crime by coercing them — with money or threats — into bringing in their friends or acquaintances.
The Epstein crimes still seem a live concern in Europe, which has been leading the way toward justice. French prosecutors have recently learned of around 10 new suspected victims of Mr. Epstein’s network. Norway is investigating a former prime minister and former diplomats in connection with their ties to Mr. Epstein. In February, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, King Charles’s brother, was arrested as part of an investigation into misconduct in public office over his ties to Mr. Epstein. These international pressures may be the catalyst for truly determining who colluded criminally with Mr. Epstein versus who merely orbited his universe.
In the United States, we must consider holding to account the men and women who enabled or turned a blind eye to Mr. Epstein’s crimes. I mean not just those who were directly engaged in the sexual assault of children, but those in financial institutions who ignored Mr. Epstein’s suspicious transactions and those investigators and law enforcement officials who failed to protect his victims or to hold him truly accountable for his crimes. For this, an independent investigation led by an international body would be ideal.
This could include another look at Mr. Epstein’s 2008 deal under Alexander Acosta, then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida. The deal allowed Mr. Epstein to serve just 13 months in jail and leave custody nearly every day to work out of an office. Such a soft sentence seemed to embolden him. After his release, he stepped effortlessly back into the upper echelons of wealth and power.
A congressional oversight committee is currently conducting an investigation into the Justice Department’s handling of its investigations into Mr. Epstein. Lawmakers have proposed legislation to lift the statute of limitations for civil claims on sex trafficking and sexual abuse. On the first day of Todd Blanche’s Senate confirmation hearing, Representative Thomas Massie introduced the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, which would allow state attorneys general to bring suits against the D.O.J. for noncooperation in the release of the files. These are promising, if meager, starts.
I stayed in the Reading Room for a little over an hour. One of Mr. Epstein’s survivors sat thumbing through a binder. (Given the D.O.J.’s slapdash retractions, the general public is not allowed to open and read the volumes.) Another survivor sat on a couch underneath the stairs turning pages, while two young children played beside her. Both of the women struck me as preternaturally silent, the kind of shocked silence you feel in the immediate wake of an accident, before reality sets in. By the time I left, the line to enter ran down the block and around the corner.
Even if the Department of Justice is done with the Epstein files, the public is not done with justice.
Rachel Louise Snyder (@RLSWrites) is a professor of creative writing and journalism at American University. She is the author of “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us” and “Women We Buried, Women We Burned.”
Source photograph by Patrick McMullan via Getty Images.
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