The Epstein trials aren’t about one monster. They’re about the congregation that kept the temple running.
We give these people power. Not because they take it, because we hand it to them. We see the performance, the polish, the pedigree, and we decide: this person is untouchable. This person gets to operate outside the ordinary rules of decency.
And then we act shocked when they do exactly that.
But here’s the part that breaks something fundamental: the women who looked away. The women who knew. Who heard the girls. Who saw them arrive and leave. Who processed the logistics of abuse like it was catering for a dinner party.
How do you watch baby versions of yourself disappear into rooms and come out changed?
I want to understand it. The psychology, the survival mechanisms, the complex trauma that makes someone choose complicity over protection. But understanding doesn’t soften the horror. Maybe they were numb. Maybe they’d convinced themselves it wasn’t what it looked like. Maybe their own survival depended on not seeing what was right in front of them.
Or maybe, and this is the thing that makes you question everything, maybe some people just don’t feel what we think everyone feels.
The world continues. We scroll past the headlines. We return to our routines. Most of us are in profound denial about what’s happening all around us, every day, in networks of power we can’t even see. This isn’t about one island or one billionaire. This is about systems of complicity that touch all of us: directly, indirectly, in ways small and catastrophic.
Every revelation cracks humanity open a little more. Layer after layer, the truth emerges, and it’s beyond comprehension. We’re forced to a T-junction: How do we engage with a world that operates like this? Do we look away, like so many others did? Do we pretend the cracks aren’t spreading?
Or do we sit with the unbearable question: If I’d been there, in some adjacent room, what would I have done?
We want to believe we’d be different. That we’d speak up, blow the whistle, refuse to participate. But the Epstein trials show us something more terrifying than individual evil.
They show us how many people it takes to enable it. How many turned away. How many saw enough to know, but not enough to act. How many benefited just slightly from proximity to power and decided that was worth the price of silence.
You can call them all kinds of names. Monsters, enablers, cowards.
But they’re us. They’re what happens when enough of us decide that our comfort, our security, our place in the hierarchy matters more than the children in the next room.
The trials will end. Some people will go to prison. The news cycle will move on.
But the question remains, sitting in your chest like a stone:
What are you looking away from right now?
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