Jeffrey Epstein’s Victims Are Again Being Wronged by Donald Trump’s Circus

The contours of the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein scandal are defined by two suicides: one famous, and one relatively obscure—but the true moral heart of the controversy. Epstein’s apparent suicide in prison in 2019 is course a major reason his scandalous life continues to be the subject of hot political debate. Given all the mysterious details that surround this event (the falsified records, the altered video tapes purporting to show that no one entered his cell, and the disputed autopsy results), many people reasonably refuse to accept the official verdict, recently reaffirmed by Donald Trump’s administration, that Epstein killed himself.

But Epstein’s death is ultimately a forensic matter, one of settling the factual question of murder or suicide. Much more morally troubling was an event that received far less press attention: the suicide earlier this year of Virginia Giuffre at age 41. In 2000, when she was 17 years old and working as spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago (Donald Trump’s resort), Giuffre was recruited and groomed by Ghislaine Maxwell to be part of Epstein’s sexual entourage. Epstein and Maxwell recruited not just Giuffre but countless other children and young teens. Giuffre was a central figure in the criminal case against Epstein in 2008 (which ended with a sweetheart non-prosecution agreement), the 2009 victims’ suit that kept the case alive, and the second criminal case against Epstein in 2019. Giuffre also accused Prince Andrew of the United Kingdom of abusing her, which ended in the prince paying a settlement, although Andrew continues to deny the charges.

As Giuffre often insisted, her story was far from unique. One Justice Department memo estimates that there were more than a thousand victims.

Although Giuffre was exceptionally brave in standing up to Epstein and other men who assaulted her, the trauma she experienced unquestionably blighted her in ways that defy comprehension. Her suicide is itself a testament to why the Epstein case mattered. Giuffre’s story is soul-crushing—and it happened hundreds of times in various ways to other girls.

One striking aspect of the Epstein case is that the most important people—victims such as Giuffre—are the most quickly forgotten. Even as the case now dominates political discourse, the focus has been not on the crimes committed but the much more trivial matter of the partisan political fallout and the various strategies politicians are adopting to exploit the controversy.

If the Epstein case has become a ghastly circus, much of the blame belongs to that most sinister of ringmasters, Donald Trump. Because of his long-standing ties to Epstein, dating back to the 1980s, Trump himself was sometimes cautious about the case—although he did speculate in 2019 that Epstein’s death was not a suicide. Trump’s personal closeness to Epstein is a legitimate subject for investigation. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2003 Trump sent Epstein a “bawdy” letter as part of a 50th birthday celebration. In that letter Trump reflected, “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.”

But Trump rode to political power as an avatar of anti-system anger, which meant elevating conspiratorial suspicions that were wholly absurd (QAnon and Pizzagate) as well as those with more grounding in reality (the perfectly accurate belief that the CIA has not been forthright about what it knows regarding President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and the many unresolved questions about the Epstein case). Certainly, many major figures in Trump’s circle—ranging from Vice President JD Vance to Attorney General Pam Bondi to FBI Director Kash Patel—have been more than willing to air the more lurid Epstein conspiracy theories.

Now that the Trump White House wants to move on from the Epstein scandal and declare it a closed case, the president is finding he’s facing an intense backlash from his own base. This might be seen as a kind of poetic justice: Dr. Frankenstein being attacked by the very monster he created. On Truth Social on Wednesday, Trump even explicitly lambasted his supporters, writing, “Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker.”

But if Trump deserves the backlash for his cynical conspiracy mongering, elite Democrats also deserve criticism for not taking the Epstein matter seriously until they saw political advantage in it. The long-standing line of the Democratic Party leadership has been the same as Trump’s current position: There is nothing to see here, folks, so move along. In 2019, the DNC attacked Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway for defending “Trump retweeting baseless conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein’s death.” On Thursday, former House majority leader Nancy Pelosi described the Epstein case as a “distraction” from the serious debate about Trump’s budget.

Responding to Pelosi’s comments, former Barack Obama adviser Tommy Vietor tweeted, “The Epstein files debacle is NOT a distraction. It strikes at the heart of Trump’s appeal, which is that he operates outside of a system that MAGA wants to burn down. He’s their hero with gasoline and a torch. If Trump looks like he’s covering up for the elites, he’s screwed.” It’s hard not to believe that Pelosi’s bizarre comment was motivated by the fact that some top Democrats, including former president Bill Clinton, belonged to Epstein’s social circle. As Pelosi’s own daughter Christine Pelosi wrote in 2019, “some of our faves are implicated.”

With polling showing Trump facing a public backlash from even his own supporters on his handling of the Epstein case, Democrats are becoming more vocal on the issue. But here again, we see a cynical attitude at play. On Wednesday, Politico reported:

Interviews with a dozen Democratic elected officials, strategists and aides cast the controversy as helpful not only in dividing Trump’s base but also illustrating the president’s flip-flopping tendencies, even on his core campaign issues…. But the opening may be short-lived. Democratic strategists said they do not expect Epstein-related conspiracies to show up in their TV ads or dominate the party’s midterm messaging, with the GOP megabill likely to take center stage.

It’s hard not to be sickened by the idea that the Epstein case should only be used as fodder for short-lived polling gain. Once again, the victims have been sidelined from the story.

One person who has never forgotten the victims is Miami Herald journalist Julie K. Brown, whose 2019 reporting on the original criminal case reopened the scandal and led to Epstein’s arrest. In her reporting, Brown highlighted the voices of victims such as Virginia Giuffre.