Much of the national discussion around the Epstein case has focused on the political drama. But as the Opinion columnist Lydia Polgreen and the contributing Opinion writer Molly Jong-Fast remind listeners, this is a case about the “conspiracy of silence” that perpetuates sexual violence against women. In this episode, the two writers explore the intertwining paths of the Epstein saga and the #MeToo movement, the challenges of accountability and whether this moment could mark a change for American culture and politics.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Lydia Polgreen: Molly, you just came back from D.C., where you were at a press conference of Epstein survivors on Tuesday. We’re taping this on Wednesday morning. So I wanted to talk to you about where the Epstein saga sits in the broader arc of #MeToo and the movement that has stumbled along the way, and what it says that three of the four Republican members of Congress who first broke ranks with Trump were all women.
Before we get into the broader context, let’s talk about the press event that you went to. It sounds like it was quite a scene.
Molly Jong-Fast: So I think it’s worth pulling back and looking at Tuesday. Tuesday was a day that, for Donald Trump, was right out of “Macbeth.” We saw a president who had successfully gotten away with a lot of stuff and all of a sudden, Jeffrey Epstein, like Banquo’s ghost, comes back. Trump is hanging out with Mohammed bin Salman, doing a press conference in his golden Oval Office, and at the same time these women are doing a press conference right outside of the Cannon building — and you have this ghost of a story that has come back once again.
Now, the discharge petition goes right through the House that same day, and it goes to the Senate and it passes the Senate, and it is a very sort of Shakespearean moment of a problem that Donald Trump had, and we don’t know how big a problem. We don’t really know what’s in those files. So he certainly behaves like someone who does not want those files to be released. It comes back to him, and it’s a very cinematic and also morally important and atrocious moment.
Polgreen: One of the things that’s really striking about this whole saga is that this has been going on now for two decades. Jeffrey Epstein first kind of gets into legal trouble about 20 years ago. He does a little bit of time, very soft time. And this was all before the #MeToo movement started — the #MeToo movement, I should say, became a big public phenomenon with the exposure and, ultimately, the downfall of Harvey Weinstein, thanks to reporting by some of our colleagues.
The scope and scale of the Epstein crisis coming at a moment when it seems as though there is this kind of sentiment that #MeToo has gone too far, you know, that men weren’t being allowed to be men. So it’s been really interesting to see the way that this whole case has unfolded and the politics around it have unfolded. How have you seen the #MeToo of it all as you’ve watched this happening?
Jong-Fast: Well, that was why I thought we should talk, was because I think of you as someone who is also following this — like these rapid cycles of progress and reversal, and progress, reversal, progress and reversal. So the moment I would take away from that press conference was one of the survivors, and I think it’s Annie Farmer, talked about how she and her sister had called the F.B.I. under Clinton and said, We have this thing we want to report, that they had hung up on her. And it was just, for me, the sheer magnitude of different administrations, different parties, all having been in some way responsible for an F.B.I. that did not take these women seriously.
Tape of Annie Farmer: In 1996, when my sister Maria bravely blew the whistle on this group by reporting to the F.B.I. what Epstein and Maxwell did to both of us, they hung up the phone on her, and there was no follow-up of any kind. Bill Clinton was president. In 2006, the F.B.I. came to us, finally interviewed us, and asked us both to be witnesses against Epstein. We were very anxious, but we agreed. And then we didn’t hear back from them due to their infamous sweetheart deal. George W. Bush was president. In 2015, when the D.O.J. was sent a FOIA request for Maria’s F.B.I. files, and they were denied, as they have been many times, Barack Obama was president. In 2019, when Epstein died in prison due to either negligence or foul play, Donald Trump was president.
And she said: I think of all the people, all the girls who got hurt during the period when we were trying to raise the alarm.
Polgreen: Yeah, I mean, that’s one of the things that has really struck me about the Epstein case and about #MeToo more generally, is a lot of people think about #MeToo as starting with Harvey Weinstein.
Jong-Fast: Right.
Polgreen: And that kind of opened the floodgates. But in fact, #MeToo was first popularized by Tarana Burke, who is a Black American activist. And it was inspired by the many conversations that she had with teenage girls about the terrible experiences they had with sexual abuse and harassment. What that really highlights for me is that so much of this conversation about Epstein and about this vast conspiracy of pedophilia — you think about controversies like Pizzagate, and the QAnon belief that there were powerful Democratic leaders who were trafficking children out of a pizzeria in Washington, but all of that obscures the fact that sexual exploitation of girls and teenagers in this country is endemic.
Surely it happens among power brokers, but I think for most people, their connection to a situation like this is actually something that they’ve witnessed in their own life. And the conspiracy feels more like a conspiracy of silence of powerful men, wherever they happen to find themselves. Like the powerful man might be the head of a family, or it might be the head of a company or of a small business.
Jong-Fast: Right. Your boss at the Taco Bell — there’s a power dynamic there.
Polgreen: Exactly. So I think that one of the reasons that — I mean, it’s just really striking to me that #MeToo took off once it became clear that this broader societal problem that was bubbling below the surface starts to be written about at the very top of society, talking about the big power brokers. And I think there’s something similar happening with Epstein.
I’m really struck by the fact that three of the four Republicans who signed on were all women. And two of the three have spoken publicly about their own experiences, in the case of Nancy Mace, of sexual assault and domestic violence. For Lauren Boebert, definitely domestic violence. And for Marjorie Taylor Greene, I think a sense that in this kind of chauvinistic Washington, she’s being pushed around, she’s getting belittled, she’s told what she can and can’t do — and I don’t want to read too much into it. But you sort of have to think, like, these are women of a certain age who have ——
Jong-Fast: Our age.
Polgreen: Our age, exactly — who know what the score is and have surely seen in their own lives, their own friends, their own communities, case after case of teenage girls who’ve been exploited or been pressured into having a relationship with a man who’s too old for them. All those kinds of things that we know, all the way up to horrific childhood sexual abuse. So I think that there’s something about this saga and the role of these three women that is just totally fascinating. It just delves into this thing that connects it to people’s life experience.
Jong-Fast: And it’s funny because as someone who covers politicians, I have become so cynical of everyone’s motives. Especially over the last decade of Trumpism, it’s hard to think that these people want what’s best for anyone. Really, honestly.
Polgreen: That they don’t have some cynical ulterior motive, that it’s about preserving their own power or whatever.
Jong-Fast: Exactly. Especially Marjorie Taylor Greene, who really did say a lot of crazy stuff over the last eight years.
Polgreen: And has some very odious beliefs. Right?
Jong-Fast: Very! But what I do think is interesting is when I was there, you could see that these victims feel very connected with Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Polgreen: Huh, that’s fascinating.
Jong-Fast: Yeah. I mean, you really could see — because they’re not faking it. In fact, one of them was like: I voted for Trump and you’ve betrayed me. Not quite that, but basically that, and so they were not faking it. And the other thing that I want to mention about the victims is: these women, and remember, there are probably hundreds of women — I mean, this was years and years of abuse. But these women had not been together before. So that first press conference, when the discharge petition got started, they had a real camaraderie, and they started talking about reading a list. They talked about it again on Tuesday. I haven’t seen any reporting about this, but one of the victims said, you know, Marjorie said she’ll read a list of our names, and Representative Pramila Jayapal said she would, too.
So there really is an appetite for information. So even if the Trump D.O.J., which really does serve at the pleasure of Donald Trump at this moment — as you can tell from Pam Bondi’s general acquiescence on every point — these names, there really is a feeling these names are getting read.
Polgreen: So there’s a kind of desire to put this out into the world and make it into something that’s part of the congressional record. That’s part of the overall sweep of these events.
And just coming back to these three Republican women in Congress, they really were under a tremendous amount of pressure. And given the level of pressure that they’re under, it’s remarkable that they held up. But it’s also interesting to me to think about the arc of #MeToo and the arc of how we went from this moment where there was this tremendous pressure for accountability and then, quite quickly, a feeling that it had gone too far.
Jong-Fast: Yeah, quite quickly.
Polgreen: And admittedly, the gamut of people who got caught up in #MeToo, there were truly onerous ogres, like ——
Jong-Fast: Harvey Weinstein.
Polgreen: Like Harvey Weinstein, or you look at somebody like Kevin Spacey, who very clearly had a long track record of if not criminal behavior, then very serious harassment against young male actors over many years. But then, as time progresses and it starts to catch up with figures like Al Franken, the Democratic senator from Minnesota and former comedian — I guess he’s still a comedian — and Aziz Ansari, that was one of the most edge cases that I think turned a lot of people off #MeToo.
It’s funny because I do think — you mentioned this earlier — there is this kind of cyclical nature to these things where there’s accountability, there’s a sense that this cannot go on. And then there’s a backlash. So where do you think we are in this cycle?
Jong-Fast: Yeah, it’s such a good point. I had for a long time believed that this was the nature of modern life and technology, and that it was the failing of tech. I don’t know why. I had this whole theory in my head that it was a failure of technology. But I actually now think, if you think about the book “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,” Susan Faludi’s seminal Bible of the sort of war against feminism. I mean, I actually was rereading it again.
Phyllis Schlafly and the Equal Rights Amendment: I feel like that’s a very similar story, in a way. The Equal Rights Amendment, a piece of legislation that would have guaranteed women equal rights, and the pushback to that and those years where they had passed it through the Congress but couldn’t get it ratified by the states. There was this concerted effort by conservative women to show that they didn’t need it. And I feel like there — it feels like a similar kind of pushback to movement.
I don’t want to be wrong, and I feel like whenever you want to try to predict the future or whenever I predict the future, I’m always wrong. I’m always told that predicting the future is bad podcasting. But that said, now I’ll predict the future: It does feel like an important moment.
Polgreen: And I think that what’s crucial is in these moments, they need to be able to connect to the experiences that ordinary people have in their own lives. It’s not just about the shadowy group of financiers and media moguls and elite university professors who have this kind of old boys network who are helping each other out at the highest levels of society.
This is something that’s happening in every social context. And all of that is happening kind of silently. The women who are experiencing it are like: Oh, wait, it’s happening there too. And that I think — again, #MeToo, that was the kind of origin and momentum of the movement.
Jong-Fast: I want to ask you a question.
Polgreen: Yeah.
Jong-Fast: So I think there’s an element to this which is privilege, and I’m going to tell a very quick story. During #MeToo, a friend of mine said, well, no one ever #MeToo-ed me. And I said: You come from a fancy family; nobody’s going to #MeToo you because they know your mom. And I wondered: When you look at these victims, like, one was picked up at Mar-a-Lago for massage, or she was a spa attendant ——
Polgreen: Virginia Giuffre.
Jong-Fast: Virginia was a 16-year-old spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago. These women were disenfranchised enough so they didn’t have a powerful mom they could call.
Polgreen: Yeah, yeah. And I think that that’s a huge part of the story. Again, this connects back to the ubiquity and just how common this kind of sexual exploitation is of young women. Again, not by fancy rich people, although that certainly happens, but by people that are close to them.
I think there have been a number of stories that have come out about how these teenage girls who ended up in Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein’s clutches had previous experiences of being exploited. Again, not by somebody with a private island and a Manhattan townhouse, but by somebody close to them. And that is sort of the painful reality of how these things work.
I want to talk a little bit about this question of accountability, because I think there’s been this sense that Trump never ultimately pays a price for what he does. He’s Teflon Don. He always manages to get away with it. Do you think this time will be different?
Jong-Fast: So it’s funny because if you think about Epstein in 2007, it looks like the walls are closing in, and then he signs this nonprosecution agreement with Alex Acosta. In 2008, he does a year in couture jail where he basically sort of walks in, walks out — he’s doing this, he’s doing that. It’s in Palm Beach. I think that’s the way it works with a lot of powerful men. I would say people, but it’s really men. Because even powerful women, they tend to get held accountable. I’m thinking about Martha Stewart and James Comey. A lot of people would not have gone to jail for what Martha Stewart went to jail for.
A lot of powerful men, it’s like — sometimes the process is imperfect, but eventually it happens. And when Trump was out of office, he did end up adjudicated by E. Jean Carroll. He did end up owing millions of dollars.
So I do think that this accountability thing — it happens; sometimes it takes a couple of pushes. I also am not a person who believes that the arc of history just stops. I think it keeps going.
Polgreen: And it’s kind of gross because the answer to the question of should there be accountability should just be yes. Rather than who’s going to get hurt? Which side is going to get more hurt by it?
But there’s been a lot of talk about Epstein and the circles that he ran in, that this is actually going to affect more Democrats than it is Republicans. I mean, I don’t know about that. But I have a slightly different view, which is that I think it’ll actually be a really good thing if this whole network and constellation of powerful men who are part of this, in varying degrees — some of them not criminal, some of them just creepy, some of them just really bad judgment. I think if all of those figures, regardless of what their politics are, are swept away and pushed into retirement and sent off to live out the last of their days in some kind of shame, that that would not necessarily be a bad thing.
And I would say it’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially for the Democratic Party. You need this renewal. You need new figures who are untouched, who were never part of these awful power games and networks that they used to play. I almost think of it as being a little bit like the dividing line between Democrats who opposed the Iraq war and those who voted for it. It’s an imperfect analogy, obviously, a different situation. But I think that there was something really healthy about that, becoming, in effect, a kind of litmus test to have a clear moral point of view about whether the Iraq war was a huge mistake or not.
So I don’t know. Thinking about accountability lessons, like who goes to jail and more in terms of how our culture and politics shift at the end of this? I don’t know. That feels like a real possibility coming out of this.
Jong-Fast: It’s funny because we’re friends besides being colleagues. And I always think of you as a person who has, in their head, moral questions — I mean, nobody is perfect, but who in their head is constantly sort of thinking of the moral implications of things. Which I hope that’s not — I hope this is not my own fantasy of you. And I too am often. Not because I’m so great, but because I got sober when I was 19, and so I’m always thinking about the moral implications of something: Will this make you feel so bad that ultimately you’ll start drinking? That kind of thing.
And so you have to wonder, like, these people all knew: He was on the registered sex offender website. Because I remember I once found the app and I was looking at it and I pushed Central Park and he came up. So he was a registered sex offender on the registry.
Polgreen: Who lived not that far from you?
Jong-Fast: Not that far, no.
Polgreen: And your kids?
Jong-Fast: Yes, and my kids. Though, of course, they never would have gone for any of the kids who were private school kids.
Polgreen: Yeah, of course.
Jong-Fast: Because they knew that they couldn’t. And that I think is such an important point. You and I both, I think, want to talk about the layers of privilege and wealth. The one thing that Donald Trump, I think, ever said that was a benefit to society was: The system is rigged. And of course he wanted to rig it more for himself, but about that one thing he was correct. But I do think the moral question of whether you are going to the home of someone who’s a registered sex offender, like the Woody Allen dinner parties — you have to know.
Polgreen: Yeah, there’s no denying it, that you know. It’s clear that some of the people involved here chose to stay in warm and affectionate contact with Epstein long after they knew. And that, I think, is where ultimately the accountability is just going to be undeniable. And I say: Sweep them all away.
Jong-Fast: Yeah, I do, too. I also agree with that point. You know, Bill Clinton’s in there. Bill Clinton was president in the 1990s and it was a very different time for how we think about powerful men.
Polgreen: Oh, yeah. Obviously, and you know, our mutual friend Monica Lewinsky has lots to say about that.
Jong-Fast: Yes. She really does.
Polgreen: You obviously have had a lot of conversations and talked to a lot of people, and there is this sense that this Epstein saga has split Donald Trump’s coalition in a way that nothing else has. Why do you think that is? What is it about this particular story that has led to such a profound cleavage?
Jong-Fast: So I think it’s two parts. One is that they were radicalized on Pizzagate. In 2016, when Donald Trump was running for office, WikiLeaks kept releasing these emails. I actually went back and looked this up: emails from John Podesta to his brother Tony about pizza, and he was talking about a walnut sauce, because they’re both big cooks. And these emails were interpreted to be child sex trafficking.
This was the very beginning of Trumpism, right before Trump got elected the first time. So I think you had a base that had an origin story that was: Donald Trump is going to end a sex trafficking ring. Then fast-forward to QAnon 2020. Trump is making overtures toward QAnon when he’s running for re-election. He’s saying the storm is coming. QAnon, again, a follow-up of Pizzagate — there is a cabal of sex-trafficking powerful men and that Trump is going to bring them down.
Here we are, fast-forward, we are in 2025. There is actually — yeah, it’s a cabal. There’s a cabal of powerful men. There’s a ringleader: Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine. But there clearly are many people — who are, I think, mostly men — who are doing this. And so you have a base that’s radicalized on an origin story that turns out to be true.
Polgreen: That’s that classic line, right? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Sometimes conspiracies turn out to be true; it’s just that instead of using obscure, coded language of walnut sauce and pies, it’s very direct: I’m trying to hook up with this hot lady. Jeffrey, what’s your advice? And there is something sort of sad and banal and, frankly, kind of tragic about that.
Jong-Fast: And speaking of sad and banal, the other thing I would say, just as an underlying thing: I personally would be more gratified if it were a return of #MeToo that dissected the MAGA movement, if it were women’s rights that came in and did it. But you have to realize that what’s also bubbling below the surface is a movement that has been promised for about 10 years, that Trump was going to make things cheaper. And he hasn’t. In fact, things have gotten more expensive. And that he was going to do things like bring back coal jobs and bring back manufacturing.
So some of this is — as much as in my own belief system I would like it to be that finally the women are winning, there’s also, I think, an underlying dissatisfaction that is stoking the flames.
Polgreen: Well, Molly, I think we should leave it there. Thank you so much for talking with me. It was great to see you.
Jong-Fast: It was so great. Thank you for having me.
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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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