We Are All Epstein Victims

On March 8th, as every year, people across the world celebrated International Women’s Day. Yet this year felt different. A day meant to recognize the centuries-long fight for women’s rights was overshadowed by a simultaneous and relentless assault on them. There is no respite, no domain safe, from the misogyny that is becoming renormalized by a culture of fragile masculinity and neo-conservatism. As more evidence emerges of the institutional brutalization of female bodies and identities, one name continues to haunt women across the United States and beyond: Jeffrey Epstein.

This story is far from new. In fact, it is more than two decades in the making. To briefly trace the timeline, we begin with Epstein’s first conviction in 2008 for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Despite evidence pointing to a far more sinister reality, he was treated with extraordinary leniency, serving just 13 months in prison. He struck a deal with prosecutors in Florida (most notably, the state’s top federal prosecutor at the time, later, Trump’s Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta) to avoid federal charges that could have resulted in life imprisonment. Critically, this deal also ended the FBI investigation, which might have exposed other prominent names in connection with his crimes.

Upon his release, Epstein retained his properties and assets, despite his status as a level three sex offender in New York. For the next decade, victims fought relentlessly to overturn the federal non-prosecution agreement. During this time, one woman alleged that when she was 17, Epstein had “set up sexual encounters with royalty, politicians, academicians, businessmen and other rich and powerful men, including Britain’s Prince Andrew,” (AP News). While these women fought for justice and recognition, Epstein remained free.

In 2018, interest in the case was revived by a string of Miami Herald articles re-examining the shady deals involved in the state prosecution a decade earlier. In 2019, Epstein was finally arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges in New York. While he pleaded not guilty to all the charges, he would never stand trial. Jeffrey Epstein died mysteriously in his prison cell shortly thereafter, in what was officially ruled a suicide. After his death, his former girlfriend and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted by a New York City jury of sex trafficking minors and related charges for her role in recruiting and grooming underage victims.

Yet the saga was far from over. Evidence continued to suggest that Epstein and Maxwell maintained a long list of clientele for these children, made up of many of the world’s richest and most powerful figures. Public interest in the so-called “Epstein list” ebbed and flowed over the next couple of years, reaching a peak when Donald Trump suggested on the campaign trail that he would release all the government’s files related to the case. Once he was re-elected in 2024, pressure mounted to fulfill that promise, resulting in a string of performative and ultimately unsatisfactory file releases.

Then, in a rare moment of bipartisanship, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act late last year, requiring the Justice Department to release all of the relevant documents within 30 days. Now far beyond the deadline, the Justice Department still has not produced the full set of files. Despite heavy redaction, the files that they did produce dropped major bombshells on the American public. While any compassionate person would be affected by the files’ content, the full significance of what lay enclosed shook every woman, in the United States and beyond, to their core.

First came the evidence that many of the most influential men in the world participated in an elaborate sex trafficking ring of young girls. Then, disturbing accounts that pointed to Donald Trump raping and possibly being involved in the death of Epstein victims. Though not unexpected, it still stings every time we are reminded that the United States elected an alleged rapist and pedophile to the presidency before a woman. The corruption surrounding the investigation once again highlights how little protection survivors of sexual abuse receive from the justice system. No matter how many advancements we make in women’s rights, the richest and most powerful continue to impede them with near impunity.

But there were some less flashy revelations within the pages that told another disturbing story, detailing how some of Epstein’s clients were not only manipulating these young girls, but the image of femininity of every young woman in America. Here, a relatively unknown name enters the conversation: Leslie (Les) Wexner, the billionaire founder of L Brands.

Les Wexner was one of the recently unredacted names in an internal FBI document listing potential Epstein co-conspirators. He is a billionaire from Ohio who hired Epstein to manage his finances in the 1980s. His trust in Epstein went so far as to grant him power of attorney. The two maintained a very close relationship for decades until Epstein was allegedly caught stealing from Wexner. While Wexner claims ignorance of Epstein’s crimes, ongoing questions about their relationships, and extensive documented interactions do little to convince the public of his innocence. According to Forbes, “Wexner’s name now appears more than 1,300 times in the DOJ’s Epstein Library, frequently within emails, interviews and lawsuits dating far after 2008.” Further, the billionaire has long been regarded as a significant source of Epstein’s power and money.

But why are Les Wexner’s ties to Epstein noteworthy for women across America? At its height, his retail empire included brands such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Bath & Body Works, La Senza, The Limited, and Victoria’s Secret. Notably, all of the chains that made up Wexner’s retail and marketing conglomerate targeted women as their primary consumers. These were the companies that helped shape modern standards of femininity by marketing a narrow, highly sexualized vision of womanhood, often targeting young women and teenagers. Wexner stepped down from his role as CEO in 2021, likely due to his connections to the world’s most infamous sex trafficker, and iconic brands such as Victoria’s Secret (VS) cut ties with L Brands. But Epstein wasn’t the only alleged abuser connected to the retail chain. Wexner’s close friend and former chief marketing officer at L Brands, Ed Razek, has been accused of “nonconsensually groping Victoria’s Secret models and blackballing those who refused his advances.” Abercrombie & Fitch’s former CEO, Mike Jeffries, is currently facing sex trafficking and prostitution charges (Vox).

This raises a broader and more uncomfortable question: what happens when the same men who exploit and objectify female identities in their private lives are also the architects of the cultural ideals women are expected to embody?

The resurfacing of Les Wexner’s Epstein connection turns the spotlight back on the deeply rooted problems with cultural representations of women. As Vox senior correspondent Constance Grady has observed: “the late 1990s and early 2000s were a sexualized and then pornified era, and perhaps nowhere was this grim, compulsory sleaze as evident as it was at the mall.” What this suggests is that the image of femininity sold to us in our clothing and beauty products was constructed by men who see women only in their sexual roles. This role was then projected onto children and teenagers who inevitably consume these products.

It’s hard not to see a connection between the view of womanhood of men like Epstein and the fact that “mainstream Western beauty ideal in the United States both fetishizes the prepubescent female body and infantilizes the adult female body,” (Muir, p.1-2). Such pedophilic beauty standards tell us that wrinkles and body hair make us undesirable, and then sell us products to remove them. They romanticize children and teenage beauty pageants, of which America’s own President Donald Trump was a big patron. They convince us to perform an image of girlhood for an audience of men whose goal is to exploit, not empower. These standards did not emerge in a vacuum. They were constructed, marketed, and normalized by powerful men operating within industries tied to the same networks now under scrutiny.

This reality is suffocating, and it doesn’t stop there. The files show that Epstein’s network had roots in every industry. Dozens of researchers across the country solicited funding from Epstein, while academic institutions accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. World leaders filled the flight logs on his private jet. Powerful people in the film, music, and tech industries were among his biggest patrons, frequenting his private island for more than just snorkeling. Even after his 2008 conviction, many continued to engage with him. Apparently, the allure of power was enough for many to sacrifice the dignity of their daughters, wives, co-stars, and students. In some ways, these are the biggest betrayals of all. The repercussions of the Epstein files are thus not just the unmasking of pedophiles and rapists among the world’s most powerful, but also unveiling how easily everyone else will fall into line.

Since the first-ever celebration of Women’s Day in the US in 1909, there have been undeniable advances in women’s rights: from suffrage to reproductive autonomy to labor equality. Yet what is becoming increasingly clear is that the patriarchy did not disappear; it just changed forms. When women began to resist subjugation by political means, the mechanisms of male domination pivoted to entrench themselves in culture and institutions.

As women, we have long known the ways that powerful men weaponize their influence to brutalize our minds and bodies, but the sheer scale of what is being uncovered tells a story of manipulation far beyond what we could have ever imagined. The result is an internalization of patriarchal ideas, fed to us through the products we buy, the media we consume, and the politicians we support. And these values are not confined to women. There’s a reason why men disproportionately support Trump, idolize alpha-male womanizers like Andrew Tate, look down on women’s sports, and refuse to vote for a female president: they can feel their grip on domination slipping, and they’ll do anything to hold on.

While child sex-trafficking is the crime that might be recognized by a court of law, it is the beginning of the harm that Epstein and his network have inflicted. Across the country and the world, we want one thing: accountability. While it seems unlikely that the Department of Justice will act in this regard, recent actions by foreign governments (such as the arrest in the UK of the former Prince Andrew) and civilian backlash (including from within the MAGA base) offer some hope that justice may yet be served.

It will take a long time to heal from the institutional betrayal this scandal has exposed, and from the harm that this form of misogyny has inflicted on generations of women. We cannot allow Jeffrey Epstein to become another buzzword, another scandal in a never-ending cycle. Most of all, we cannot succumb to this administration’s attempts to distract and deflect. We must hold those in power accountable.

We are all Epstein victims, and we deserve justice.

Cover image: U. S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and Pinterest (Collage by Emma Weibel)