{"id":12029,"date":"2021-05-20T00:00:15","date_gmt":"2021-05-20T07:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=12029"},"modified":"2021-05-25T05:06:43","modified_gmt":"2021-05-25T12:06:43","slug":"message-of-the-day-108","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=12029","title":{"rendered":"Message of the Day: Human Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Women Who Enabled Jeffrey Epstein<\/em>, Politico Magazine, May 14, 2021<\/span><\/p>\n

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Once and a while, a piece of investigative journalism is like an epiphany. It’s so illuminating that it changes one’s perception of reality and yet it seems so obvious as reality after its experienced.<\/p>\n

Tara Palmeri’s The Women Who Enabled Jeffrey Epstein<\/em> on the cover of last Friday’s Politico Magazine is such a piece.<\/p>\n

This is far past must reading. It must<\/em> be read.<\/p>\n

The Epstein story has been<\/a>, is and will be one of the stories of the century. Until his untimely (or timely) death in a prison cell, it was widely commented on as the<\/em> story about wealth and power over the powerless–that was about to reveal the extent of this rot as never before–involving the most powerful people converging in the orbit of Epstein, and the most powerless in one aspect of the worst of crimes, sexual abuse and trafficking of minors.<\/p>\n

The sheer scope of the abuse is more than mind-boggling–Epstein would often sexually abuse a few different girls every day, as young as 14 in what has been revealed so far. And the girls were trafficked to others as well.<\/p>\n

Palmeri chronicles how it was mostly women “who helped keep Epstein\u2019s massive sex-trafficking operation running for more than 20 years.”<\/p>\n

Palmeri writes “as a woman myself, I have been struck by the sheer number of women around Epstein, and many of the victims I\u2019ve spoken with say they feel especially betrayed by those who violated the unspoken rule that women protect other women, especially minors.”<\/p>\n

Tragically, that’s often not true. While women also sexually abuse children (and men), statistics say it is more often men doing the abusing, whether of girls or boys. But women more often physically abuse children, although a large cohort of men do too. And women are often the main enablers of child sexual abuse, from families to organizations.<\/p>\n

Those of us who are women, survivors, or both, have often found this to be particularly painful, as\u00a0Palmeri writes about feeling “especially betrayed.”<\/p>\n

Here’s an excerpt from\u00a0Palmeri’s piece:<\/p>\n

Dozens of these women worked for Epstein, formally or informally. If you think of this group as a pyramid, at the top sits [Ghislaine] Maxwell, a longtime Epstein employee and confidante who now stands accused of recruiting minors for Epstein and sex-trafficking a 14-year-old girl, charges she denies. Below her were women Epstein employed as assistants, who allegedly scheduled and managed dozens of minors for Epstein to abuse. There were also women … who brought friends to meet Epstein and received gifts or access to his wealth.<\/em><\/p>\n

These women aren\u2019t household names, even for people following Epstein\u2019s story. But his victims say they were key to grooming and deceiving them and allowing Epstein to operate with impunity. In fact, most of Epstein\u2019s victims were introduced to him through other women, according to the 12 victims I\u2019ve spoken with over the past year and a half, as well as dozens of allegations in court and in the media. Often, victims say, it was the women around Epstein who tried to make them feel comfortable, as if what they were experiencing was normal or harmless.<\/em><\/p>\n

Once Epstein began to face legal scrutiny, other women made it easier for him to rehabilitate himself and reemerge with his power and social cachet largely intact. Two women served as the lead prosecutors on his case when he first faced charges, in 2006, and were closely involved in crafting his federal non-prosecution agreement, plea deal and lenient sentence. For those without deep knowledge of the case, Epstein\u2019s short incarceration of 13 months in a county jail could be read as a signal that, whatever crime he had committed, it wasn\u2019t that bad. After his release, a number of female socialites and professionals helped to welcome <\/b>Epstein, by then a registered sex offender, back into elite circles. His abuse then continued, court documents assert.<\/em><\/p>\n

To point this out is not to excuse any of the men or prestigious institutions\u2014universities, banks, funds\u2014that also helped to protect Epstein, nor is it meant to hold women to a higher standard. But as a woman myself, I have been struck by the sheer number of women around Epstein, and many of the victims I\u2019ve spoken with say they feel especially betrayed by those who violated the unspoken rule that women protect other women, especially minors.<\/em><\/p>\n

Palmeri’s piece is breathtaking in its scope. It covers the rich, powerful and famous woman (Ghislaine Maxwell, currently in jail awaiting trial for sex-trafficking) who ran Epstein’s trafficking operation, the assistants, recruiters, the justice system, the socialites, professionals and journalists–all who enabled the systemic abuse and trafficking.<\/p>\n

It is also admirably nuanced:<\/p>\n

More than three years into the #MeToo movement, the Epstein saga offers an extreme\u2014and still evolving\u2014example of how complex questions of responsibility can get in cases of sexual abuse. In Epstein\u2019s world, women both were victims of a hostile environment and sometimes also reaped the benefits of their association with him, or worse. Still, exactly how Jeffrey Epstein got away with years of abuse remains an open question\u2014one many of his victims are still working to expose. Answering it requires understanding the complicated motivations and actions of the many women around him.<\/em><\/p>\n

And in the end it offers a clear-eyed judgment:<\/p>\n

If Epstein\u2019s house of cards was built by women, that means it\u2019s also women who can reveal the true extent of his crimes. …\u00a0To me, the fact that so many women know so much more, yet have stayed silent, might be the most depressing part of this story.
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Truly. But as Palmeri’s piece reminds so effectively, despite all the pressure and attempts to contain the story, not even Epstein’s death has stopped it, and more continues to be revealed, by courageous people, mainly women survivors, and principled journalists like Palmeri.<\/p>\n

As we’ve noted often, issues that we’ve avoided fully addressing as a society, such as hundreds of millions of children being sexually abused every year, and all the other issues that humanity must face to survive and deserve surviving, are going to be faced, one way or another.<\/p>\n

Here’s the article:<\/p>\n

“The Women Who Enabled Jeffrey Epstein”<\/a><\/p>\n

By Tara Palmeri,\u00a0<\/span>

From schedulers to socialites, they helped keep the late financier\u2019s sex trafficking scheme operating, or helped rehabilitate him after he faced jail time. Now some say they\u2019re victims.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Tara Palmeri is a POLITICO reporter and co-author of Playbook<\/a>. She was the host of the investigative podcasts Broken: Seeking Justice<\/a> and Power: The Maxwells<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

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It was a crisp, gray day in January 2020 when I stepped out of my Uber onto what looked like industrial wasteland, a concrete-scape <\/b>dotted with smokestacks and graffitied shipping containers. I pushed through the glass door of an old brick factory and found myself inside the pristine white walls of the Mana Contemporary arts center. In the lobby, I waited until a petite woman with jet black hair walked in with her Yorkshire terrier, Mozie.<\/p>\n

This was Rina Oh, and she had asked me to meet her at the studio space in Jersey City, New Jersey, where she paints and sculpts. A recurring subject of her art is Jeffrey Epstein, the well-connected financier who died in a New York jail cell in 2019, while being held on sex-trafficking charges<\/a>. Oh\u2019s studio featured an oil painting of Epstein\u2019s friend Prince Andrew as Bacchus, the god of wine, and, next to it, a painting of a nude Ghislaine Maxwell, who has been charged<\/a> with recruiting underage girls for Epstein, holding the forbidden fruit in what Oh calls the \u201cGarden of Sin.\u201d The tone of the paintings was neither critical nor celebratory\u2014just strange.<\/p>\n

Oh\u2019s fascination with Epstein is not abstract. She knew him personally\u2014as someone who was in a romantic relationship with Epstein that came to include finding other women for him to meet. Although Oh had never spoken to the press or to the authorities, she was willing to share her story with me for a podcast<\/a> I was working on about Epstein, called \u201cBroken: Seeking Justice.\u201d I wanted to understand what it was like to be part of his circle, and why she had done it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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Oh, now 42, told me she had met Epstein in 2000. She was 21 at the time and living in the New York suburbs with her parents when a friend introduced her to the man who would become what Oh described as a rich, older boyfriend. \u201cI found myself a really great art patron who\u2019s going to buy artwork from me,\u201d she initially thought. Epstein even offered to pay for her to attend classes at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and, for a time, secured a studio for her in SoHo.<\/p>\n

But it soon became clear Epstein wasn\u2019t just a boyfriend or a benefactor. \u201cThe whole thing got really sketchy when he started \u2026 asking me, \u2018Are there any cute girls in your class that you can bring over here?\u2019\u201d Oh told me. Oh might have been creeped out, but she complied with the requests: She told me she introduced three <\/b>young adult <\/b>women <\/b>to Epstein.<\/p>\n

Two of Epstein\u2019s accusers, in fact, say Oh did more than that. Marijke Chartouni, a friend whom Oh introduced to Epstein when she was 20, told me she was sexually assaulted by both Oh and Epstein in her first, and only, encounter with him. Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein\u2019s most vocal victims, who says she was recruited into Epstein\u2019s orbit by Maxwell<\/a>, also accuses Oh of violence. In a draft of a memoir filed as evidence in a defamation lawsuit<\/a>, Giuffre wrote that Oh \u201cloved bondage, whipping, hitting and cutting her sex partner with little sharp knives until they subdued [sic] to her punishment in agonizing pain.\u201d In an interview, Giuffre showed me a scar on her upper thigh that she said came from one of these sex acts. She was 17 at the time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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