This Tuesday it will be the turn of the House of Representatives – and, in particular, its Republican members – to show their flag with the vote to approve the Epstein Papers Transparency Act, which will allow Congress to ask the Trump administration to declassify the millions of documents relating to the case of the disgraced financier and his ties to power. But the first word did not go to politicians; went to survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring, orchestrated with the help of his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. They talked about it on a cold November morning in Washington during a press conference at the foot of the Capitol steps.
“I’m traumatized. I’m not stupid,” one of the survivors, Haley Robson, told US President Donald Trump, who had blocked the law’s progress for months. That changed on Sunday, when he allowed his party to vote in favor of the law, which is expected to pass unanimously before moving to the Senate. After that, Trump himself will have to sign it, which he promised to do on Monday.
“We’re hearing the administration say they intend to investigate several Democrats who were friends of Epstein. Please, President Trump, please stop playing this politics. This isn’t about you,” pleaded Jena-Lisa Jones, another survivor, referring to the announcement that the Justice Department will focus its investigations on powerful figures within the Democratic sphere, such as Bill Clinton, former Harvard president Larry Summers and mega-donor Reid Hoffman, all of whom were named in documents that were released under House oversight. Committee.
Jones, like many of the victims who traveled to Washington on Tuesday, showed a photo of herself before speaking, showing the moment she met Epstein and was abused by him. In his case he was 14 years old. “Show some class,” he told Trump. “I voted for you, but your behavior on this issue has been a national embarrassment.”
Jones, like the others, spoke alongside 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 accident in Australia, where she lived.
“For too long, survivors like me have been dismissed, silenced, told that our pain was exaggerated or invented. Let me be clear. This is not a hoax,” Sharlene Rochard said in another direct appeal to Trump, who has spent months dismissing the Epstein case as a “Democrat hoax.”
“The truth has been buried in sealed files and hidden documents for too long,” he added. “How can we keep America great if the principles on which the nation was founded – that power belongs to the people – are not protected? No one, no matter how rich or well-connected, is above the law. If we cannot face the truth, then we betray the very ideals that define us as a country.”
Threats against Marjorie Taylor Greene
Before the survivors spoke, three members of Congress addressed the press: the two who sponsored the bill, Democrat Ro Khanna (California) and Republican Thomas Massie (Kentucky), and Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene had previously been one of the most prominent faces of the MAGA movement on Capitol Hill until last week, when Trump attacked her, calling her a “traitor” in a series of posts on his social media platform, which Greene said led to threats and other intimidation tactics from the president’s supporters.
“I want to see every single name (on the Epstein list) released so that these women don’t have to live in fear and intimidation, which I’ve had a little taste of just in the last few days. They’ve been living it for years,” said Greene, who added that the survivors have “fought the most horrific battle that no woman should have to fight” against “the most powerful people in the world, even the president of the United States.”
“I was called a traitor by a man I fought for for five, no, actually six years, and I gave him my loyalty for free,” she added. “Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is an American who serves foreign countries and himself, a patriot is an American who serves the United States of America and Americans like the women who stand behind me,” she said, referring to the survivors.
If, as expected, the bill passes the House for a vote this Tuesday, it will move to the Senate, where amendments could be introduced to slow its progress before it reaches Trump’s desk, where the president is expected to sign it.
At that point, the Justice Department would be required to release millions of previously unreleased Epstein documents containing information about his sex trafficking ring and who knew or participated in it from the early 1990s until his death (ruled a suicide by the medical examiner) in 2019, while held in a maximum-security cell in Manhattan. The current question is whether the Justice Department will resist, arguing that the ongoing investigation is still ongoing. It all depends on whether the president’s orders to Attorney General Pam Bondi — to investigate Epstein’s ties to prominent Democrats — bear any fruit.
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