The women whom Jeffrey Epstein abused demand to be heard.
And their voices — long suppressed, but now emerging powerfully and with courage — could further fuel the maelstrom around President Donald Trump and aides who dig the scandal deeper each time they try to end it.
These are women who’ve been let down for years, at multiple levels, by a government that was supposed to keep them safe. Their families are victims, too, since abuse sows trauma through generations.
And it’s happening again as the Trump administration refuses to release files about Epstein’s life, which several of its members had promised to make public. CNN has reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi briefed Trump in May that his name was mentioned in the files, among those of other high-profile figures.
Trump has never been investigated or charged over anything to do with Epstein, whom he knew in the 1990s and early 2000s. The White House says Trump threw Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago because he was “a creep.”
But hardly anyone at the White House ever mentions the young women whom Epstein used and abused.
“What they really need is for it to go away,” Sky Roberts, the brother of one of Epstein’s most prominent victims, Virginia Giuffre, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Thursday.
“There’s a lack of transparency here and what we are not hearing is … we are not hearing the survivors’ voices coming through,” Roberts said. “This is a human issue, and I think we need to bring that back because we are dehumanizing survivors by not bringing justice forward.” Giuffre took her own life in Australia, where she lived, earlier this year.
In a sign of the administration’s political priorities, there were no Epstein survivors represented at a Wednesday night White House meeting that addressed the crisis, CNN reported. Those in attendance included Vice President JD Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel. The meeting was moved from the vice president’s residence amid a media storm.
The focus at those White House talks appears to have been about ending a political problem rather than alleviating any further agony for people whose live were blighted by Epstein and Maxwell.
One Epstein accuser, Annie Farmer, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Thursday that she had reached out to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche — who spent two days interviewing Epstein’s jailed accomplice Maxwell last month — but had not heard back. Some victims and their families view the meeting as a political maneuver to find a way to refocus attention away from Trump.
“I hate that it has been politicized the way it is because I think we lose sight of the bigger picture in that,” Farmer said on “The Source.”
“I think this is really about people using their power to harm others, and that is not a political issue,” Farmer said, referring to Epstein’s past conduct. “I think people on both sides care about the safety of children and I really hope that Trump understands that a message is being sent beyond just the individuals involved in this case to the wider community about the seriousness of these types of crimes.”
The question now is whether survivors and their families can coalesce as a political force as they seek to influence the administration’s decision-making — even if they are seldom mentioned by MAGA media.
Can they secure the recognition of which they were so often deprived by the justice system? Will their influence further complicate a controversy that the White House has downplayed and dismissed but that keeps growing? And could they add a new dimension of political exposure for a White House so far mostly concerned with extinguishing a scandal that is uniquely dangerous for Trump — because it opened a rift between him and his base? Could that increased attention even make it more difficult to for Trump to pardon Maxwell, if that is his intention?
It’s nothing new that the powerful are ignoring the victims.
It’s been running on repeat for years.
As young girls, these women were victimized by Epstein, a disgraced financier, in a sordid web of soliciting, abuse and underage sexual exploitation.
They were also victimized by Maxwell, his onetime paramour, who was sent to prison for 20 years for grooming Epstein’s young female victims — and abusing some herself.
They were victimized by a lenient Florida plea deal in 2008 that allowed Epstein, an accused sex trafficker, to escape federal charges and a possible long prison term. He used the time he got back to perpetrate more horrendous crimes.
They were the victims of justice denied when Epstein killed himself in prison rather than face trial.
A modicum of recognition arrived when Maxwell was convicted. But that vindication is under threat because of politics.
The conspiracy theorists who made this an animating cause of the MAGA right profess to care about child sex trafficking, but the coverage in fringe right-wing media rarely mentions the plight of victims themselves.
Now, top administration officials are using the power of the Department of Justice in a plan apparently designed to take the political heat off Trump over his past relationship with Epstein. The clue is in the name — the Department of Justice. It’s supposed to deliver justice to victims and to honor their suffering. Instead, it’s being used to protect a president.
When Trump was asked about Giuffre, he said he recalled that Epstein “stole” her, as if she were chattel, from his employ at the spa at Mar-a-Lago. The inhumanity of Trump’s remark prompted Giuffre’s family to first speak up, in a move that appears to have encouraged other families to come forward. “She wasn’t stolen, she was preyed upon at his property, at President Trump’s property … ‘stolen’ seems very impersonal. It feels very much like an object, and the survivors are not objects; women are not objects,” Roberts told CNN’s Collins last month.
Hardly anyone at the White House has publicly voiced concern for those dragged into some of modern history’s most notorious sex crimes.
The opposite is true. Trump, increasingly agitated as the Epstein fallout drowns out his presidency, keeps blasting the entire Epstein drama as a “hoax” in remarks that only makes the anguish worse. He even called it B.S. on Wednesday.
“It’s not a hoax,” Roberts told Burnett on Thursday, his voice breaking.
“I think it’s pretty clear that these survivors are not a hoax. These are people. It hurts. They are still healing. They had something taken from them that they can never get back.”
The White House has tried other ruses to make the scandal go away.
It has asked a judge to release grand jury testimony about the Epstein case, apparently hoping to slake demands for transparency by MAGA influencers. But the material is only a fraction of what the Justice Department controls. Then Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, interviewed Maxwell. Then, mysteriously, Maxwell was moved to a much more comfortable prison in a highly unusual show of leniency for a sex offender. This fueled warnings of a cover-up, since Maxwell has an incentive to help Trump politically: He has the power to pardon her or improve her conditions.
The contempt for the victims is “outrageous,” Jennifer Freeman, a lawyer for some of those abused by Maxwell, told CNN’s Collins on Wednesday. “When the voices are so strong from everyone else except for them. They’re not given any attention whatsoever.” Freeman lamented that those caught up in the Epstein political saga have been “ignoring the survivors over and over …. (in) one of the largest law enforcement failures in US history.”
The disrespect keeps on coming.
In an interview with Newsmax last week, Trump was asked why Blanche met with Maxwell. “We’d like to release everything, but we don’t want people to get hurt that shouldn’t be hurt, and I would assume that was why he was there,” Trump told Newsmax a week ago. His remark was ambiguous. But it seemed to prioritize people who came into contact with Epstein, including himself, rather than those who have already been hurt — the victims. CNN reported this week that audio tapes were made of the Maxwell interview and that officials are considering releasing a transcript.
There is no indication of wrongdoing by Trump in his dealings with Epstein, Maxwell or in any other area of the case. He has never been charged or investigated. But there is growing scrutiny over how often he’s mentioned in the Epstein files held by the Justice Department.
Some victims want all of the Epstein files publicly released so any men who associated with the accused sex offender must account for what they knew about his activities.
But they fear what will happen with Maxwell and the pardon that Trump keeps saying he has the constitutional authority to grant.
Such an outcome would be another betrayal of those who have suffered so terribly already.
