This Tuesday, it was the turn of the House of Representatives, and especially its Republican members, to show their true colors with the vote to approve the Epstein Papers Transparency Act, which will allow Congress to demand that the Trump Administration declassify the millions of documents related to the case of the pedophile financier and his connections to power. But the first words were not from the politicians, but from the survivors of the sex trafficking ring that Epstein orchestrated with the help of his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. They spoke in the morning, on a frigid 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, told Donald Trump, who had obstructed the bill’s progress for months until last Sunday when he gave his party permission to vote in favor of the legislation, which is expected to pass unanimously before moving to the Senate. This is also before Trump himself has to sign it, something he promised to do on Monday.
“The government is going to start investigating Democrats who were friends with Epstein. I implore you, President Trump, stop politicizing this,” Lisa Jones pleaded, referring to the announcement that the Justice Department will focus its investigation on powerful figures within the Democratic sphere, such as Bill Clinton, former Harvard president Larry Summers, and mega-donor Reid Hoffman, all of whom are mentioned in documents that have been released thanks to the House Oversight Committee.
Jones, like many of the victims who traveled to Washington on Tuesday, displayed a picture of herself before speaking, showing the moment she met Epstein and was abused by him. In her case, she was 14 years old. “This isn’t about you,” she 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 reiterated that point: “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 dozen survivors, as well as the brother of Virginia Giuffre, perhaps the most famous victim, who committed suicide in April, a month after surviving being hit by a car in Australia, where she lived. Avis recalled that they had all traveled at their own expense to attend a vote that was repeatedly described as “historic.”
“For too long, survivors like me have been ignored, silenced, and told that our pain was exaggerated or fabricated. But let me be clear: this is not a hoax,” Sharlene Rochard declared in another direct appeal to the President of the United States, who has spent months dismissing the Epstein case as a “Democratic hoax.” “The truth has been hidden for far too long,” she added, taking the Trumpian slogan Make America Great Again (MAGA) and using it against her leader: “How can we maintain America’s greatness if we fail to protect the principles upon which the nation was founded—that power resides in the people? That no one, no matter how rich or influential, is above the law? If we cannot face the truth, we betray the ideals that define us as a country.”
Threats against Marjorie Taylor Greene
Before them, three congressmen spoke: the two who have promoted the law, Democrat Ro Khanna (California) and Republican Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who used to be one of the most prominent faces of the MAGA movement on Capitol Hill until last week when Trump lashed out at her, calling her a “traitor” in a series of messages on his social network, which, according to Greene, led to threats and other intimidation tactics by supporters of the president.
“I demand that all the names [on the Epstein list] be published so that these women don’t have to live in the fear and intimidation that I have been able to experience, just a little, in recent days. They have been living like this for years,” said Greene, who defined her determination (and that of the three other congressmen who voted for the House of Representatives to pass the measure this Tuesday) as a “tenacious fight against the most powerful people in the world, including the President of the United States.”
“Now she calls 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 standing behind me,” she clarified, referring to the survivors.
If, as expected, the bill being voted on this Tuesday in the House of Representatives passes, it will move on to a vote in the Senate, where amendments could be introduced that would hinder its path to Trump's desk, where the president would have to sign it.
The Justice Department would then be obligated to release the millions of unpublished Epstein documents containing information about his sex trafficking ring and who was aware of or involved in it between the early 1990s and his death (ruled a suicide by the coroner) in 2019, while he was in custody in a maximum-security cell in Manhattan. The question now is whether the Justice Department intends to resist, arguing that there are ongoing judicial investigations. Everything hinges on whether or not the US president's orders to Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate the millionaire pedophile's relationships with prominent Democrats bear fruit.
