This rant is devoted in loving memory to Virginia Giuffre, a woman who died speaking the truth about powerful men.
I lost my virginity in preschool. I don't know a worse way to start a post. Unfortunately, I also don't know a more appropriate way to start this one so, buckle up. I was a five-year-old girl trapped in a scary body that didn't fit my gender identity, and they were two Catholic priests who saw my existential turmoil as an opportunity for a good time. People keep telling me it gets better. Maybe they're right but I just keep telling them to go fuck themselves because I don't see how. It happened thirty years ago, and I still can't cross a church without risking a nervous breakdown. The hardest part of this ordeal however isn't the post-traumatic stress or the dissociative identities or the crippling flashbacks or the late-night crying fits. It's knowing that the priests who raped me did it simply because they could.
This is the number one thing that most people consistently fail to comprehend about sexual abuse. Sex has very little if anything to do with it. It is all about power. People who rape are chasing a far more heinous thrill than an orgasm. They're chasing the god-like feeling that comes from invading another human being like a third world country and the people who rape children are the ones who realize that these are the people who can be dominated and decimated the most easily and the most completely. Sexual abuse in this country is shockingly common, and your average perp isn't a pervert or even a sociopath. They are quite simply allowed.
Western culture is defined by violent conquest and towering social hierarchies. So, it really isn't all that shocking that nearly every western social hierarchy seems to become a den of rampant child abuse. Where I live, in central Pennsylvania, this hideous truth exists all around me. While the Catholic Church turned nearly every diocese in the state into a glorified hunting ground for pedophile priests, Penn State University afforded this exact same luxury to assistant coach Jerry Sandusky in exchange for a few winning football seasons. In both of these cases, the actual predators were relatively few in number, but the conspirators are still all around us; parishioners and bureaucrats, trustees and monsignors, a million little people choosing to defer to their prescribed betters and looking the other way.
Basically, an immense amount of power in a small number of hands affords a select few the ability to destroy lives recreationally while an obedient society enables them to do so. There is a term for this phenomenon, and it's called rape culture. This often talked about but rarely understood notion is far more than just a feminist trope; it is a toxic byproduct of post-colonialism and the moral rot it fosters. This culture of casual depravity affects everyone, but its impact on marginalized communities is downright systemic. The largest categories for sexual marginalization in this country and most countries are women and children with the numbers quadrupling every time you add another adjective like Black or Queer.
This is why feminism cannot be divorced from anti-colonialism or youth rights, and this is why the cross section of all of these movements pretty much defines my existence. This is also why I am an anarchist of the Foucaultian post-left variety. Every institution of power must be confronted and dismantled, from the prison to the school. And this is why the Epstein Files should not be rendered to the frivolity of partisan politics.
I see this case as an extension of the MeToo Movement. Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, and Bill Clinton belong to the same culture of recreational power violence as Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. This is a problem so much vaster than the antiquated left-right paradigm and yet we are allowing Democrats and Republicans, two elitist tribes riddled with predatory oligarchs, to control and naturally trivialize the Epstein narrative the same way they did with MeToo.
Republicans, at least until very recently, have told us that Jeffry Epstein was just one part of some vast liberal conspiracy that proves that anyone who isn't a virulent Christian nationalist is some kind of craven, George Soros saluting, pedophile choking the purity out of their brazenly objectified children. That narrative seems to now be on pause for the party leadership who have somehow overlooked the fact that the man they've built their flagging brand around is a former Democrat who spent the better part of fifteen years practically attached at the hip to Jeffrey Epstein. So, now the GOP is in the impossible position of having to decide how to avoid pissing off QAnon and the sexual-predator-in-chief those imbeciles deified without realizing that he was the 'big bad' in the one conspiracy theory they trafficked in with a grain of truth to it.
Meanwhile, the Democrats seem to be juggling similarly conflicting narratives. The first being that Donald Trump is the goddamn Devil; a man beast of unprecedented evil who is guilty of everything he's accused of. Much like QAnon's fixation with powerful pedophiles, this narrative has a kernel of truth to it that isn't so easy to dislodge from your teeth. The other narrative however is that everything shouted by right wing imbeciles on the internet is automatically a conspiracy theory that should be rejected completely as a matter of practice. This leaves Democrats torn between hopping aboard the same bus as Marjory Taylor Greene to score points with independents or impressing their bougie donor class by rolling their eyes and scoffing theatrically at the notion that Jeffrey Epstein is anything but another right-wing boogeyman.
What gets lost in this partisan shit-slinging competition is the goddamn victims. The hundreds of girls Jeffrey Epstein abused and trafficked to his friends are being manipulated all over again and often by the same people who manipulated them in the first place; rendered into faceless props for powerful people to posture on top of. It's sickening and to people like me it's actually pretty fucking triggering but just because various flanks of America's decomposing oligarchy have turned this spectacle into a circus doesn't mean that it doesn't matter. It means that we need to turn off the goddamn television, put down the iPhone and take a long hard look at what we know.
What we know about Jeffrey Epstein is that this was a man with virtually zero marketable skills beyond his strange ability to influence powerful people, an academically unremarkable college dropout who somehow went from perving on students at an elite academy he wasn't even qualified to teach at to being a billionaire financier to the stars. We also know that Jeffrey Epstein ran a vast underage sex trafficking ring procuring somewhere in the ballpark of 1,000 underage girls for a host of wealthy clients in Manhattan and Palm Beach between the years of 1994 and 2004 and in all likelihood much earlier and much later than that.
We know these things because federal prosecutors have told us as much and the victims have told us the rest. Yet somehow, this motherfucker had to be caught twice because the first time he got busted in 2006, he was inexplicably awarded a plea deal by a South Florida attorney and future Trump staffer named Alexander Acosta who allowed Epstein to serve a 13-month sentence for a 13-year crime in a luxury wing of a county prison that he paid to have built himself. It then took another fucking decade to shut down the still very much operational criminal empire of a listed sex offender and even then, out of the hundreds of clients the Federal Government admits that Epstein courted, not one has ever been prosecuted or even officially named.
What we know about our current president, one Donald J. Trump is that this is a man who has been accused of a wide variety of sexual predations dating back to the 1970s by over two dozen women. This has included multiple accusations of sexual assault and at least two counts of rape, one made by Trump's first wife in her 1989 divorce deposition was only retracted years later when she found herself in a lucrative business engagement with her ex-husband and the other, our current president was found liable for in a court of law. Donald now denies these crimes, but he has also bragged about them; being caught on tape bosting pompously about walking in on changing teenage beauty contestants and his god-like ability to grab women by the pussy.
We also know that Donald Trump had a very well-documented friendship with Jeffrey Epstein that lasted for fifteen years, nearly all of which coincided with Epstein's federally confirmed criminal conspiracy. Trump's name appears on the flight logs for a private jet Epstein was known to use as a flying brothel in spite of the fact that Trump already owned a private jet of his own. Epstein was also a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago where he and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell acquired a number of their underage victims who were working part-time jobs for Trump's resort. Epstein even introduced Trump to his current wife and at least one of his confirmed victims.
I can also tell you what I know about sexual predators both from firsthand experience and years of trauma therapy. I know that they frequently work in pairs. That they have an uncanny ability to be able to scope out one of their own just as easily as they can spot a victim unlikely to speak out or unlikely to be heard. I know that they get a twisted kick out of each other's depravity like worked up squash partners with each one upping the ante to outdo the other. I know that their filthy secrets and their ability to keep them are a major part of the game. And I know that they nest in positions of institutional power like jungle snakes in high trees, not just because they like the view but because these hierarchical institutions appreciate the services such serpents provide.
Everyone should know what I know because it is the only way to make it stop. It's the only way that it ever 'gets better.' This is why what we need now isn't more grand juries and oversight committees and special councils and excuses for powerful people to flex their partisan muscles. What we need now is total transparency. Release all of the files with only the victim's names redacted and release them directly to the public so America can know exactly what power looks like with no clothes on.
Jeffrey Epstein is not just a partisan boogeyman; he is something far more grotesque. He is a mirror of American power. Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* Someone to Die for by Belly
* Bad Mouth by Fugazi
* Violet by Hole
* Tryptic by Samia
* Suggestion by Fugazi
* Teenage Whore by Hole
* Stellate by Samia
* T&A by Blondshell
* Hate My Way by Throwing Muses
* Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle by Nirvana
* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey
