Epstein media circus doesn’t centre victims

BBC News reported yesterday that the US Department of Justice has had to remove thousands of documents related to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, as they have compromised the identities of women who have been victimised by the elite-run web of sexual violence, abuse, and exploitation.

The outlet further stated that the “flawed redactions” of the Epstein Files have made nearly 100 survivors vulnerable, with the women’s lives “turned upside down.” However, the mainstream media circus around the release of the files is conveniently diminishing both the horror and scrutiny of these atrocious crimes, as well as the accountability of the powerful figures responsible for them.

One thing is clear. The release of the Epstein files was certainly not to protect the victims and survivors of Epstein’s depraved network. The women and girls who bore the brunt of these atrocities have been sidelined even in the official reveal of their experiences.

Epstein files: accountability should be in the interests of victims, not their abusers

According to BBC News, on Friday 30th January two lawyers for Epstein’s victims insisted that a New York federal judge order the DOJ to remove the website holding the files. They stated that the negligent release was:

the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in United States history.

At the Canary, we agree wholeheartedly.

This US-led failure to redact identifying images and names of victims has made the complete removal of such content the only viable response. Once again, women around the world are left feeling exposed and vulnerable, while so-called efforts to ‘protect women’ operate instead to shied powerful perpetrators of abuse. Yet again, a manipulative and abusive system has retraumatised the very women it was ostensibly meant to serve.

Given US President Donald Trump’s appearance in the files, photographed with Epstein’s so-called “harem” of young girls, too little attention focuses on the fact that rich, powerful men once again seem able to deter and deflect true accountability. Anyone who has experienced abuse knows this all too well: men often act without recognizing – or admitting – the harm they cause.

Women have had enough

Unfortunately for those powerful patriarchal arseholes, many women see straight through it and are at the end of their tether. They remind us that unless we dismantle the structures and hierarchies of power, the abuse will never end. As a white woman, I believe it is essential that white Western women confront our complicity – whether intentional or not – and come together in solidarity against all abuse. This means rejecting the Western patriarchal scapegoating of ‘brown men’ and confront the reality that white men have inflicted – and continue to inflict – vast harm. Abuse is about power; not race.

We wrote recently on the practice of Nazi-like eugenics amongst Epstein and his ilk of superior, privileged rich boys. Discussing the characteristics of the men who have assumed powerful positions in politics and business, our own Robert Freeman wrote:

All this is ultimately the product of an economic and political system that practically guarantees the most poisonous humans imaginable rise to the top. Capitalism rewards the most ruthless and domineering among us, not the kindest and most compassionate.

Those attracted to being a CEO — with the ability to control potentially thousands of lives — are unlikely to be good people. Once there, wealth grants them the ability to evade the law and control the political realm. With greater power comes greater impunity, and an already degraded soul rots still further. It’s a system that selects for, then refines, the worst traits of our species.

The Epstein documents have produced an outpouring of fury, and an increasing clarity to the realisation that an entire system needs to be dismantled and reconstructed into something less misanthropic. We’ve had enough warnings by now of “Nazi like” reprobates controlling our lives. An imminent return to something akin to Nazism looms unless an alternative course is pursued urgently.

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Not all men: But it is all women

There is a reassuring factor for women that yes, it is not ‘all men’. Nevertheless, many women with platforms have demanded that we no longer center reassuring men that we aren’t ‘demonising all of them’. Instead, they insist that we finally center the very valid truth that whilst it might not be all men (thankfully), it is all women and girls.

All women and girls are likely to experience abuse or its consequences at some point in their lives. This truth is depressingly clear: the Epstein scandal proves that abuse does not occur in isolation – it spreads widely, thrives systemically, and men carry it out overwhelmingly. Even women and girls who never experience abuse firsthand live alongside its effects: they support survivors, navigate fear, and adapt their lives to avoid risk. The problem does not lie in individual morality alone; power structures actively enable abuse to continue and minimise its consequences, leaving no woman untouched by its impact.

It is time we empathise and choose to empower women and girls, not continue this toxic cycle of even the reveal of abuse not centring the abused.

The Canary’s Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu put across this argument powerfully and poignantly in a post on Instagram:

Dr Shola: ‘we will shut this shit down’

Where are the white women? I’m looking, but I can’t see. Let me put my glasses on. I still don’t see them. You see, my shattered eye, we’re just wondering where the white women are following the release of the Epstein files. Because I don’t see white women protesting on the streets. I do not see white women collectively, undeniably being visible and vocal in exercising their white power, white fragility, and white tears to hold to account powerful white men that have subjected and deliberately targeted white women and white girls for rape, sexual molestation, sexual abuse, and sex trafficking. Where are the white women? How are white women so collectively silent and performatively powerless.

Let’s break it down. Where are your bastions of white femininity? The protectors of the white female body? Where are your white female politicians and your white female media personalities? White female commentators? You know, those advocates of anti-Muslim, anti-Islam, anti-immigration because we have to protect the women and children where they are right now because everything seems quite crooked. We’re the white women who take to the streets protesting and demanding that white women and children be protected from the asylum seekers and the refugees and the immigrants and they do not even give an iota of that same energy to powerful white men who pose a greater significant risk to their bodies than asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants.

Where are the white women whose white peers have unjustly sent black men to their deaths by state execution, either by the police or by the state because they have lied? Huh? Oh my God, I’m just as scared to say black man. Where are your white peers against a powerful white man that have targeted you for rape and sexual abuse? Where are the white women who exercise white power on a daily basis to say to black men, no, you don’t work there. No, you don’t live there. You don’t belong here. Where’s that white power now against a powerful white man? Now I’m not talking about the white women who’ve been doing the Lord’s work, speaking out against these powerful white men and have endured all kinds of persecutions including character assassination, who’ve been actively anti-racist, who’ve been unequivocally against the patriarchal power structure. Now I stand with them in solidarity.

Now I’m talking to you multitudes of white women who excuse the inexcusable, defend the indefensible because you’re telling us it was never about protecting white women and children. You see the stats don’t lie. White men commit the most sexual crimes, rape, sexual abuse of children, and sex trafficking. That’s the fact. The fact also is that the problem are men. Yes, not all men. But you see, if we work together collectively, white, black, and brown women, against a patriarchal power construct that protects the men who commit these crimes, we will shut this shit down.

As Dr Shola powerfully states, it is time for women and girls everywhere, regardless of ethnicities or religion, to come together.

We must find our humility and refuse to continue being the continual playthings of patriarchal men.

Featured image via the Canary