We’re Missing the Point on the Epstein Scandal
We are spending our time talking about the wrong people.
Last month, the Deputy U.S. Attorney General met with Ghislaine Maxwell and her attorney in Tallahassee, Florida. The private meeting was unprecedented. Todd Blanche, the former personal attorney for the President of the United States, who was given a top ranking role at the Department of Justice, met with the convicted child predator on behalf of the administration.
The DOJ didn’t meet with the victims, mind you — they met with the assailant. And on Friday, news broke that Maxwell had been transferred to a minimum-security prison in Texas, which could signal that Trump is on the verge of issuing a pardon.
According to a poll out last week from the Economist and YouGov, the majority of Americans are outraged about the Epstein coverup. MAGA and Trump are trying to say this is a partisan witch hunt. The talking heads keep talking about Trump and Epstein, flight logs, photographs, and Epstein Island. And in the process of all of this, we are all becoming desensitized to the term “pedophile” and we are losing the point.
Back in 2009, I joined the Office of the Florida Attorney General as then-AG Bill McCollum’s press secretary. For some history, now-U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi was elected to the seat vacated by McCollum in 2011. When I started with that office back in 2009, I had no idea how much that job would change me and shape my worldview going forward.
McCollum had one major priority when he was Attorney General of Florida — he wanted to save and protect children from online predators. McCollum started a cybersecurity unit in his office that investigated child pornography and the sexual solicitation of minors online. This office worked closely with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), the FBI, and local law enforcement to investigate, arrest, and prosecute those who abused children.
(It is prudent to share here that Bondi removed this unit from the oversight of the Attorney General’s office and moved it to the FDLE. It is also important to note here that Epstein’s arrest coincided with Bill McCollum’s term as Attorney General, but the case was handled by DOJ, not the state. McCollum’s office had no involvement with the Epstein prosecution or his sweetheart deal).
At the time I started my job, I was a new mom. I had just given birth to my precious first son a year before I joined the AG’s office. The cybercrime mission was one I felt passionately about.
Obviously, when there is an investigation into child pornography and sexual abuse of a minor, the information isn’t widely shared around the office. The number of people involved with that level of sensitive information is incredibly small to protect the victims, but also because viewing child pornography is a crime in itself and is traumatizing to see. The only people with awareness of these investigations were the investigators, the prosecutor, law enforcement, the Attorney General, the chief of staff, and the communications team.
As the press secretary, I was unfortunately part of all of those briefings because I had to write up the press release and brief the media. Going into work, I never knew what I was going to be exposed to on any given day.
One day, I came into the office to learn that we had arrested a man for creating child pornography involving a two-year-old — A. TWO. YEAR. OLD. — hogtied in bondage. Another day, I arrived to learn that law enforcement, acting on a warrant for child pornography, accidentally entered the wrong house and caught a grown man in bed with his daughter who was pre-pubescent. There was a case of a mother who drugged her own children and brought them to Alabama to have sex with a grown man she met online. Thank GOD that man was law enforcement and it was a trap.
One morning I walked in, my cell phone was taken from me, and I was brought into a room with our team while a warrant was executed at the house of the Commanding Officer of Pensacola Naval Air Station’s home. His son had been trading child pornography online.
These are just a handful of the hundreds of stories that happened over my tenure at the Office of the Attorney General. After every day where I would have to hear these stories and answer questions about them to the media, I would come home from work drained, depleted, and emotional. I would take my own precious, innocent, tiny little human I created in my arms and hold him, rock him and cry for hours. How do you do such devastating things to such innocent beings?
THAT is the point. THAT is what we are missing in the Epstein discussion. The victims and the horrid things that were done to them should be the focus of this conversation. This shouldn’t be about politics or partisanship. We shouldn’t care about protecting donors, politicians, the wealthy, or the powerful. We are spending our time talking about the wrong people. The victims, what happened to them, and how we can ensure this never happens again are who and what we should be discussing.
We are missing the inhumanity of what was done to CHILDREN. Not young women. These were young girls. Innocents. This wasn’t just grown men making young girls uncomfortable (although that, in and of itself, is a major issue). No, this was the raping and sodomizing of children. One of the survivors who worked at Trump’s spa committed suicide because of the atrocities committed against her. Others are broken beyond repair and no amount of time, money, or therapy can ever reclaim their innocence, their childhoods, their faith in humanity, their comfort in their own bodies, and their mental health, all stolen from them by rich and powerful men simply because they could.
Regardless of who you voted for or what your politics are, we should all be able to agree that victims deserve justice. Americans have a right to know who was involved in these horrific crimes against children. For the GOP to try to allow anyone on that list to avoid accountability re-victimizes survivors and tells America’s children that they are expendable in service to the wealthy and privileged.
Ryan Wiggins is Chief of Staff of The Lincoln Project. Subscribe to her A More Perfect Union Substack and follow her on X at @Ryan_N_Wiggins and on BlueSky at @Ryan-N-Wiggins.bsky.social.
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This one hits hard.
Thank you for a fine essay. Knowledge of this case does indeed change one's world view.