This Tuesday it was the turn of the House of Representatives, and in particular of its Republican members, to vote to approve the Epstein Papers Transparency Act, which will allow Congress to ask the Trump administration to declassify millions of documents related to the case of the pedophile financier and his ties to power. But the first word was not for politicians, but for the survivors of the sex trafficking ring that Epstein created, with the help of his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. They spoke in the morning, a cold November morning in Washington, during a press conference at the foot of the Capitol steps.
“I’m traumatized, but I’m not stupid,” one of them, Haley Robson, said to Donald Trump, who for months hindered the progress of the law until last Sunday he gave his people permission to vote in favor of the law which should finally be approved unanimously before moving to the Senate. Even before Trump himself signs it, something will happen, as he promised on Monday.
“The government will start investigating Democrats who are friends of Epstein. Please, President Trump, stop playing politics with this,” asked Lisa Jones, referring to the announcement that the Department of Justice will focus its investigations on powerful figures in the Democratic orbit, Bill Clinton, former Harvard Chancellor Larry Summers, or megadonor Reid Hoffman, cited in documents released thanks to the House Oversight Committee.
Jones, like many of the victims who traveled to Washington this Tuesday, showed before speaking an image of herself when she met Epstein and he abused her. In his case, at 14 years old. “It’s not about you,” he reminded the president of the United States. “Show some class. I voted for you, but your behavior in this case is a national disgrace.”
Later, Wendy Avis pressed that idea: “None of us signed up for this political war. We never asked to be dragged into battles between people who never protected us. We are exhausted from surviving the trauma and the politics surrounding it.” Avis, like the others, spoke surrounded by a couple of dozen survivors, as well as the brother of Virginia Giuffre, perhaps the most famous victim, who committed suicide in April, a month after surviving a car crash in Australia, where she lived. Avis recalled that everyone had gone, paying out of their own pocket, to witness a vote that was often described as “historic”.
“For too long, survivors like me have been ignored, silenced and told that our pain was exaggerated or invented. But I want to be clear: this is not a hoax,” shouted Sharlene Rochard in another direct appeal to the president of the United States, who for months has dismissed the Epstein case as a “Democrat hoax”. “The truth has been hidden for too long,” he added, to take the Trumpist motto Make America Great Again (MAGA) and use it against its leader: “How can we maintain the greatness of the United States if we do not protect the principles on which the nation was founded, that the power lies in the people? That no one, no matter how rich or influential, is above the law. If we fail to face the truth, we betray the ideals that define us as a country.”
Threats to Marjorie Taylor Greene
Three lawmakers spoke before them, the two sponsors of the law, Democrat Ro Khanna (California) and Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was one of the most prominent faces of the MAGA movement on Capitol Hill until last week Trump attacked her, calling her a “traitor”, in a series of messages on his social networks, which, according to Greene, led to threats and other intimidation tactics from the president’s supporters.
“I ask that all the names (on the Epstein list) be published so that these women do not have to live in the fear and intimidation that I have been able to experience, just a little, in the last few days. They have been living like this for years,” said Greene, who characterized her determination (and that of the three other members of their ranks who voted for the House of Representatives to vote on the bill this Tuesday) as a “tenacious fight against the most powerful people in the world, including the president of the United States.”
“Now you call me a traitor, but let me explain what a traitor is: A traitor is an American who serves foreign interests and himself. And a patriot is an American who serves the United States of America and Americans like the women who stand behind me,” she clarified, referring to the survivors.
If, as expected, the bill passed Tuesday in the House of Representatives moves forward, it will move to the Senate for a vote, where amendments could be introduced that would hinder its path to Trump’s desk, where the president is expected to sign it.
The Justice Department would then be required to release Epstein’s millions of unpublished documents with information about his sex trafficking ring and who knew about it or participated in it between the early 1990s and his death (a suicide, according to the medical examiner) in 2019, while he was held in a maximum-security cell in Manhattan. The question now is whether the Justice Department intends to resist, arguing that judicial investigations are underway. It all depends on whether the US president’s orders to Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate the billionaire pedophile’s relationships with prominent Democrats bear fruit or not.
