I keep thinking about the women in the Epstein files. Not the names in headlines, not the men who get to keep their careers while the world argues about who knew what and when. The women. The ones who were children when this started for some of them. The ones whose entire lives got rerouted by men with money and men who wanted proximity to that money.
Here’s what nobody wants to say out loud. Survivors don’t get to heal on a timeline that matches the news cycle. The world moves on to the next scandal, the next document dump, the next politician’s name trending for a day. These women don’t get to move on. They live inside what happened to them every single day, long after the rest of us have scrolled past.
I can’t imagine what it feels like to watch your worst moment become a political football. To watch people argue about your abuse as a talking point, as ammunition against the other side, as proof of some conspiracy or counter conspiracy. You are the evidence. You are not a person anymore in that conversation. You’re a data point in someone else’s argument.
Seen and not seen. Heard and not heard. That’s the exact right way to put it. Everyone is talking about what happened to you. Almost nobody is talking to you.
This is what happens when greed and power intersect with total moral vacancy. Epstein didn’t act alone and he didn’t act in secret. People saw. People knew. People chose comfort and access over a child’s safety, over a young woman’s safety, over the truth. That’s not a failure of information. That’s a failure of character, at scale, by people who had every resource to do better and chose not to.
The world outside looks at these women now and thinks they’ve moved on because they have careers, relationships, faces that don’t look broken in public. That’s not the same as healing. You can build an entire functioning life around a hole and still feel the hole every day. Nobody gets back what manipulation takes. That’s the part people don’t understand. It’s not just an event that happened to you. It’s a rewiring of your ability to trust your own judgment, your own read on people, your own sense of when something is wrong. Manipulators don’t just hurt you once. They make you doubt yourself for years afterward, in situations that have nothing to do with them.
I hate manipulation more than almost anything else in the world because it’s cruel in a way that hides. It looks like charm. It looks like generosity. It looks like someone who says all the right things while taking everything that matters.
If writing this does one thing, I want it to be this: if you’ve been abused, if you’ve been manipulated, if you’ve been made to feel like your pain is a political inconvenience, you are not the data point. You are not the talking point. You are the only person in any of these conversations who actually knows what happened. That knowledge is not up for debate no matter how many people try to spin it into something else.
Coming forward should never have to compete with someone else’s narrative. It shouldn’t have to be convenient for anyone’s argument. It should just be believed, on its own terms, every time.
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