Why they keep getting away with it

Yesterday, the House Oversight Committee released a trove of documents from the estate of the deceased financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The star of the show was a book of letters, photos, and drawings that Epstein’s partner, the convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell, had collected from Epstein’s friends and family to celebrate his 50th birthday.

Within this birthday book is the now-infamous birthday letter that said “may every day be another wonderful secret” and appeared to be signed by Donald Trump. The White House has already denied that the signature is really Trump’s handwriting, and Trump is suing The Wall Street Journal for defamation for first reporting on the letter’s existence. But the friendly relationship between Epstein and Trump—as well as Epstein’s friendship with former President Bill Clinton and a host of other famous, wealthy, and powerful individuals—cannot be denied. Many of their names and contributions are in the birthday book, too.

One drawing from Epstein’s birthday book that has gone viral since yesterday is so crude as to be stomach-turning. It features an illustration of Epstein in 1983 with young girls next to an illustration of Epstein in 2003 with, presumably, the same girls as young women in their twenties. They are wearing thong bikinis and massaging Epstein. One of them appears to be either masturbating him or performing oral sex on him. The caption says “what a great country.” The drawing also includes the “Lolita Express,” the nickname for Epstein’s private jet. Many people have compared the building in the background to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, where the president recently stated that Epstein “stole” employees from him. One of them was Virginia Giuffre, Trump appeared to confirm, who accused Maxwell of luring her from Mar-a-Lago into Epstein’s orbit when Giuffre was just 16. Giuffre died from suicide earlier this year.

The Epstein story is grotesque and never-ending in its horrors. But it doesn’t just pull back the curtain on Epstein’s abuse and his circle of participants and enablers. It also reveals a lot about our broader rape culture, the societal conditions that actually incentivize sexual abuse and treat abusers and their enablers with impunity.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley, an award-winning journalist whose book The Lasting Harm documents her reporting on Maxwell’s criminal trial, compared the drawing to the words Jess Michaels remembers Epstein saying before he sexually assaulted her: “In some of the places I’ve been, you wouldn’t just have one masseuse… you’d have three — one for the head, one for the feet and one right in the middle.”

Osborne-Crowley also wrote the following, which speaks to how I’ve been feeling about the public reaction to Epstein in 2025:

Part of rape culture is the glorification of sexual abuse, which we see in this birthday illustration. The dates indicate that the women on the right are adults, but as Osborne-Crowley wrote, “the image makes clear that he has groomed these victims from childhood over the course of twenty years.” In a political moment where association with Epstein has been leveraged against Trump and former President Bill Clinton (which, to the credit of most Democrats, I haven’t seen anyone try to defend), the implications here have been widely seen for what they are.

But they haven’t been taken seriously by everyone, and another pillar of rape culture—victim-blaming—continues to rear its ugly head. One example is the Instagram stories of Jessica Reed Kraus, a self-identified independent journalist with over 470,000 Substack subscribers. Kraus, who spreads a lot of conspiracies and specializes in undermining high-profile victims of sexual violence, has since used her stories on Instagram (where she has 1.3 million followers) to invalidate the experiences of Epstein survivors.

In stories, Kraus derided the idea that adults can be groomed (they can be), attacked specific Epstein survivors by name, and wrote things like “‘I was raped 25 times on the island’ Maybe stop boarding the flights that take you to [sic] island” and “Participating in a sexual experience at 26 with two other adults is called a threesome not rape.” Lest you think Kraus is just an influencer who built her Substack fame off attacking Amber Heard, she’s also one of the first people the White House handed “Epstein Files” over to, and she’s been a close associate and promoter of RFK Jr.

Kraus’ commentary is particularly egregious, but it also reflects a lot of what people really think about survivors and abuse. That’s why her Substack is so popular.

And even with everything we know now about Epstein and his crimes, there is still a palpable desire to separate the sexual abuse from the company Epstein kept. In a July opinion for The New York Times, journalist Ezra Klein wrote “If you forced me to give you my best guess, I think this guy had a lot of powerful friends, and that he was a predator and a pedophile, and those sides of his life were mostly separate.”

This “best guess” isn’t backed up by what Epstein’s victims have told us or what the investigative journalism into his crimes has surfaced time and time again. Back in 2019, numerous reports detailed allegations that Epstein involved his victims with his wealthy clients, some of whom he had close personal and professional relationships with. There was the allegation that Epstein referred a young college student to massage billionaire couple Glenn and Eva Dubin, along with his other friends and associates. Epstein advised former Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner, and a woman filed a police report in the 1990s alleging that Epstein raped her in Wexner’s Ohio mansion. Wexner’s name, alongside people like Leon Black and Alan Dershowitz, were among the “Friends” in Epstein’s birthday book.

The instinct to separate sexual violence from public-facing life and sequester it as a part of one’s private life undergirds battles feminists have fought for decades to ensure that things like a husband raping his wife is actually considered a crime. It wasn’t one in all 50 states until 1993. We are now at a point where Trump is publicly calling for domestic violence to not be considered a crime.

Rape culture is one of the primary reasons why Epstein was able to get away with his crimes for decades and why many of his closest associates have yet to face the same level of scrutiny as Maxwell. Influencers like Kraus keep this rhetoric at the tops of people’s Instagram feeds and in their recommended Substacks and are courted by the White House to do so. Even people who support Epstein’s victims can fall into the trap of reaffirming the idea that sexual violence has to be hidden from others, when in reality, it’s an open secret. The culture and machinery that protected Epstein still exists, with perhaps no greater evidence than Trump’s re-election. And if we want to end this culture, we have to call it out.

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