“I was 13 years old when I met Jeffrey Epstein,” the woman says in the ad, a chilling introduction to her story of abuse by the wealthy and well-connected sex offender.
The woman, Marina Lacerda, goes on to chastise Senator Ashley Moody, a Republican on the ballot next week, for voting against a measure to compel the Justice Department to release all of its files on Mr. Epstein.
“Ashley Moody, whose side are you on?” Ms. Lacerda, who is 38, demands in the ad. “Ashley Moody, how can you put your political career above abused children?”
The ad itself is not unusual in this midterm campaign. After months of impassioned debate over the release of the files, candidates across the country are facing scrutiny for their votes on that issue and their support from donors associated with Mr. Epstein. Television or digital ads mentioning Mr. Epstein — some of which include misleading claims or lack important context — have aired in 63 congressional races this year, totaling $76 million as of Thursday, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm.
What’s unusual about the ad featuring Ms. Lacerda is its target. Ms. Moody represents Florida, where Mr. Epstein orchestrated a sex trafficking ring out of his longtime estate in Palm Beach, among other places, according to a federal indictment. But Ms. Moody has avoided the political fallout from Mr. Epstein’s crimes that has dogged some other elected officials — most notably, President Trump, who railed against a “Democrat hoax” before he reversed his position and supported making the files public.
Ms. Moody, a cautious politician who gives few interviews outside Fox News, does not appear to have made any public remarks about Mr. Epstein since her appointment to the Senate in January 2025 by Gov. Ron DeSantis. She faces Angie Nixon, a Democratic state representative running an upstart campaign in a Republican-leaning state, in Tuesday’s election.
“I call her the invisible senator because she is very under the radar in a way that most officials at her level are not, and it helps her avoid scrutiny,” said Cheyenne Hunt, executive director of Reckoning Action, an advocacy organization for victims of sexual misconduct.
When Ms. Moody arrived in Washington, the Trump administration was facing mounting pressure across the political spectrum to release all of its documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 while facing charges that he sexually exploited and abused dozens of girls. Several of those victims, including Ms. Lacerda, lobbied on Capitol Hill for the release of the files, hoping to hold Mr. Epstein and those who had ignored or enabled his crimes accountable.
In September 2025, Ms. Moody — along with 50 other Republican senators — blocked an effort to force a vote on releasing the files. It was attached to the defense budget by Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader from New York, to try to pin down Republican members. But two months later, after a near-unanimous vote by the House to release the files, the Senate agreed to the bill by “unanimous consent,” meaning senators did not participate in a formal roll-call vote.
The ad airing in Florida incorrectly claims that Ms. Moody “cast the deciding vote to block the release of the Epstein files.” (An ad attacking another Republican senator, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, also falsely accuses him of casting “the deciding vote” to keep the files hidden.)
The Florida ad does not mention the Senate’s action in November 2025, which moved the legislation to President Trump’s desk for his signature.
“These false attack ads are a desperate attempt to slander Ashley Moody’s indisputable record of fighting and delivering for sexual assault survivors, including voting to release the Epstein files,” said Joanna Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Anyone who says otherwise is peddling disgusting lies and using survivors as political pawns.”
A new super PAC backed by Steve Pajcic, a lawyer and former Democratic legislator in Florida, had spent $2 million as of Thursday on the ad, according to AdImpact.
Mr. Pajcic defended the ad, saying Ms. Moody “voted against the young girls who were sexually abused.”
Ms. Moody’s spokesman in her Senate office, Will O’Grady, issued a brief statement that said: “Senator Moody supported passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.” He did not respond to questions about why Ms. Moody ultimately thought the files should be released or whether she had ever met with any of Mr. Epstein’s victims.
A spokesman for Ms. Moody’s Senate campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
One of the rare instances in which Ms. Moody weighed in on the Epstein case was in 2019, when she was the attorney general of Florida and Mr. DeSantis ordered a probe into Mr. Epstein’s participation in a work-release program a decade earlier.
In 2008, despite allegations of widespread sexual abuse, Mr. Epstein cut a deal in which he pleaded guilty to two felony solicitation charges in state court. He served only 13 months in a Palm Beach County jail and, under a work-release program, was able to spend 12 hours a day, six days a week, in his private office.
The arrangement was widely condemned as a “sweetheart deal.” And after Mr. Epstein was indicted on tougher federal charges in 2019, Mr. DeSantis called for a criminal investigation into the earlier case.
The day after, Ms. Moody signaled her support for the inquiry. She said she could not find any court orders authorizing Mr. Epstein’s participation in the work-release program. “That is absolutely something that will be part of the investigation,” she said then.
Two years later, the investigation cleared Palm Beach County law enforcement officials of any criminal wrongdoing. It was conducted by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which reports to the governor and the cabinet, of which Ms. Moody was a member.
Kathy Castor, a Democratic representative from Tampa since 2007, called Ms. Moody’s seemingly hands-off approach to Mr. Epstein’s case “very strange” since human trafficking was at the center of her agenda while serving as attorney general.
“There seems to be this disconnect, because here’s one of the biggest cases of human trafficking right in our backyard, and the survivors deserve so much better,” Ms. Castor said. “They deserve bipartisan support, and I can’t recall her saying anything about the Epstein case.”
On Thursday, Ms. Castor appeared in Tampa with a truck known as the “Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Bookmobile,” containing 2,500 pounds of printouts of the files released by the Justice Department.
The files contain many references to Mr. Trump, who socialized with Mr. Epstein until the early 2000s. The president has denied any wrongdoing in connection with Mr. Epstein’s crimes.
The truck has visited more than a dozen cities in recent weeks, and it is spending the final days before the election in Florida, where the investigation into Mr. Epstein first began two decades ago.
The effort is sponsored by two little-known nonprofit groups, the Institute for Primary Facts and DEFIANCE.org.
Ms. Lacerda and another survivor of Mr. Epstein’s abuse, Sharlene Rochard, joined Ms. Castor at the Thursday event.
“We’re trying to educate people about this horrifying story of abuse because I don’t think the public really understands the scope of it,” Ms. Rochard said. “Trump called us a Democratic hoax, and we’re not a hoax. We’re real people.”
Patricia Mazzei contributed reporting.
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