Epstein’s Victims Won’t Let Trump Push Their Story Aside

Opinion|Epstein’s Victims Won’t Let Trump Push Their Story Aside

On Wednesday, as one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims spoke outside the Capitol, pleading for government candor, fighter jets roared overhead, briefly drowning her out. Thomas Massie, the rogue Republican congressman who’d organized the news conference along with the Democrat Ro Khanna, found the timing suspicious.

“That flyover, I believe, was scheduled after this press conference was announced,” he told a scrum of reporters afterward. Massie had no evidence that the planes were meant to disrupt speeches by the Epstein survivors he’d helped bring to Washington, where they were lobbying for a bill mandating the release of the Epstein files. But his speculation spoke to the gulf of distrust between him and the administration. “There will be no limit to the weapons of mass distraction that the White House will apply to try to make this go away,” he said.

A key political question now is whether Donald Trump and his allies will succeed. Earlier this year it seemed like the Epstein files were creating a genuine crisis for the president, with some of his most ardent supporters infuriated by his refusal to release the documents. In recent weeks, however, the MAGA movement has largely fallen in line. As Matt Gertz reported in Media Matters, much of the right-wing media has stopped talking about the story. And most Republicans, fearful of crossing Trump, want nothing to do with it. “I have heard congressmen as recently as yesterday in a closed meeting say, ‘Don’t know, don’t care,’” said Massie.

Wednesday’s dramatic news conference was an attempt to make them — or at least their constituents — care. One after another, women who were preyed on by Epstein spoke about their desperation to see the files. Haley Robson described the anguish caused by ever-metastasizing Epstein conspiracy theories and endless Epstein news cycles, and her hope that releasing the files could finally put the case to bed.