Funding for To The Contrary provided by: This week on To The Contrary: In these emails, you see Epstein and his powerful friends thrown into chaos by the realization that for a period of time, sexual assault and abuse survivors were being taken seriously, were in the headlines, were being quoted with a degree of respect.

And, you know, part of what he was doing was identifying places where people were less inclined to believe survivors in the first place.

That's why he was pushing the the parts of the media that were hypercritical about survivor stories.

A lot of the broader affects of the MeToo movement did not last particularly long, and ultimately, the prevailing social order has kind of resumed.

Hello, Im Bonnie Erbé.

Welcome to To The Contrary, a discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

The release of millions of pages of Jeffrey Epstein's records reveals a complicated scenario for silencing survivors.

He used his connections to powerful figures to brand accusers as liars before they made it into the news.

That's how he and his associates insulated themselves from the cultural shifts of the MeToo era.

Joining me this week are Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women's Law Center, and Anna Merlan, a senior reporter at Mother Jones.

Welcome to you both.

Okay, so let's start with a question out of an op ed in The New York Times, which argued that the Epstein email show MeToo never stood a chance.

Let's start with you, Fatima.

Is that correct or an exaggeration?

Listen, you know, I think it overstates it.

No one in the MeToo movement was ever under the impression that this was going to be some easy task to change our culture, to change our institution, to change the way survivors were believed.

But I actually think wha the emails demonstrate was that Epstein, and so many other men in those emails, understood the power of survivors, understood that this was a movement unlike anything they had seen and a force that was going to be hard to take down.

Why was it more forceful than other women speaking out against abuse by men?

I think it was a combination of things.

It was a combination of people being able to see that they were not alone.

And social media obviously helped that.

But, you know, survivor storie are always so deeply personal.

And when we tell them and have an opportunity like we did in 2017, to be believed, there was something powerful in that.

And that is what kept things going.

Story after story, survivor after survivor, supporting each other and drowning out the noise.

Anna, do you agre or did you see it differently?

No, I agree.

I mean, Epstein was very early to identify the power of the MeToo movement, obviously as the sex criminal himself.

He viewed it as a tool to take down powerful men.

He did not understand i to be a tool for social justice, and he understood that it was going to require those powerful men to come together in secret, to literally conspire as to how to discredit their accusers.

And so the tranches of Epstein email that have been released recently by the House Oversigh Committee show again and again, Epstein's profound interest in talking to other men about how to discredit survivors, about how to use old narratives about women's reliability against them.

You know, about all kinds of tropes, ideas, claims, anything he could use to discredit not just his own accusers, but anyone accusing a powerful man of sexual abuse.

Either one of you have any idea what's left in the, I believe, millions of files that still have not been released?

I just want to sa I think they will be released.

The power of survivors to continue to demand that they be seen and heard, and that we all know the range of conduct I think will be hard to overcome.

And I think what I am looking for in particular is the additional information around the individuals, but also the many institutions the colleges and universities, the employers, the, you know, the bodies in Congress and in statehouses that made it so possible for Epstei to continue for so many years.

All right, Anna, your thoughts about what is left in the millions, presumably, of file that have not yet been released?

I mean, there are a couple of issues here.

One is that the Trump administration has released these the files that we have seen in a very chaotic way.

There are a lot of redactions.

There's a lot of repetitiveness.

They were dumped in a format that is extremely hard to go through.

You know, journalists like myself are still looking through these records.

There are some things, like grand jury records, that are going to be very difficult to ever have be unsealed.

But the broader point that Fatima is making, which is that it's not just about Jeffrey Epstein's personal communications, but also about the institutions that welcomed him back, even after his first criminal conviction for a sex offense.

It'sit'sit really is the greater question, is learnin more about why those institutions were willing to have him at their events, take his money, and in every other way, sort of downplay what he was already known to have done.

Do either of you believe or think that there's much more damaging material in what Trump has not released than what he has released so far?

Well, here's what I would say.

If we weren't If he wasn't worried about damaging information, if there weren't other powerfu individuals who weren't worried about what might be in those millions of pages, we would have it right now.

I don't think you'd g to all of the effort, including violating a congressionally passed law if you weren't trying to hide something, and at this point, the public won't stand for it.

It is not going to go away on its own.

Do you think the public will stand for i after he's no longer in office?

I think the public is going to continue to press.

Well, let me ask you this question.

Do you think there's anything that's in the second round of files that could be really hair raising, or do you think it' just a lot more boring detail?

I think if we were in a position where we were just talking about millions of pages of news articles or something boring that would not be of the public interest, the Department of Justice and Trump would not be fighting so hard to keep the public from seeing it.

We had Congress pass a whole law that made it very clea they had to release these files.

Congress shouldn't have even had to do that, given that the president himsel had said he would release them.

The Department of Justic had said.

At this point, there's clearly something in ther that they do not want us to see.

And I do not think that survivors or the many, many peopl who have been animated by this information will stand for it being hidden any longer.

Anna, your thoughts?

Do you agree or do you see something else?

I think that this is certainly true, that they certainly seem concerned b what else might be in the files.

There's also just a bas level incompetence issue here.

Almost every doc, like batch of documents that the Trump administration has released has contained, for instance, information that should have been redacted, that wasn't, you know, names of survivors, Social Security numbers, things that are just extremely surprising that they let slip through.

But yeah, the Trump administration has claimed repeatedly that they are the most transparent administration in American history.

And time and time again, they show that that is clearly not the case.

And nowhere is it clearer, obviously, than in their handling of the many related Epstein cases that we're currently seeing.

Fatima, do you think the public gets that, that there's something really important that the Trump administration is hiding, and that's why it's not releasing this material?

Or is it just, you know, more of the sam that the public believes it is?

I think the public absolutely gets it.

It is why they have continued to pressure Congress to do its job.

It's why there was a demand for Pam Bondi to finally come and testify before Congress later this month.

If we were in any other situation, I think what you would have happen is that the Department of Justice would take these millions of emails and write a report about the and sort them and identify the individuals and institution who were most responsible here.

And because they have don nothing and taken this so very they have taken it in a way that suggest they do not treat it seriously.

I think the public is more and more enraged every day.

But why do you think that is?

Because the public, he still has like 37high 30% of his original supporters are still supporting him.

With tha many, would a chunk that large of his original supporters who were, let's put it this way, diehards by most people's political definitions, are going to get that?

I honestly think that this is an issue that matters to his diehard supporters, and every time they distract or pretend like they don't understand, they have to release these documents, more and more people are concerned and worried.

It is the thing that first fractured them as they were moving in lockstep, and it is not going away because it is an issue that is so deeply serious.

And that is true across party and that is true across this country.

Anna, can you give us an idea of the kind of thing that you think might be in the file that have not yet been released?

I realize this is speculation, but it's speculation by somebody who's seen the first half of the files.

You know, I primarily cover conspiracy theories and disinformation.

And about a year ago, I wrote about the fact that there will always be Epstein conspiracy theories forever, no matter how much information is ultimately released, because the initial handlin of this information was so poor, not just that the release has been delayed, not just that there's al these files still to be released and we do not know what's in them, but also because when this stor first started gaining traction again, Donald Trump said you know, this is a fake story.

He wrote several posts on Truth Social, kind of encouraging the public to drop it.

And that kind of rhetoric makes people extremely uneasy.

And it feeds into conspiratorial rhetoric and ideas.

So we don't know what else is in the files.

Some of it is going to contain information that cannot be released, like personally identifying information about Epstein victim who have not yet come forward, and some of it, yeah, could implicate other powerful people, which is obviously the speculation that many people have put forth for years.

Do both of you have any ideas about what actuallywhat could be in there that actually drove him to take his own life?

Or was he a depressed person to begin with, and prone to this kind of behavior put under incredible stress?

Well, so we know from previous releases by the Bureau of Prisons that Epstein was left unattended for long periods of time, that he had a previous suicide attempt in prison, and that the impunity with which he was treated was extended to the fac that he was granted a degree of freedom and a degree of privacy that most prison inmates certainly never see.

But now, obviously, that level of incompetence of the Bureau of Prisons level has also given rise to conspiracy theories about his suicide, which is another thing that I don't think the Trump administration or future administrations will ever be able to fully tamp down.

The initial handling of it was so poor that it's just given rise to this permanent atmosphere of suspicion.

Well the only other thing I would add is we know from the files that have been released that he was obsessed with not going to prison, that part of the odd exchanges he was having with folks was you know, trying to figure out how do you discredit survivors, how do you make it so that the usual ways of business, which is not believing survivors continue?

Well, tell us, both of you, tell us, what do you think he di to try to discredit survivors?

I mean, we see it.

We see it in these emails, right?

He spoke to other men who are facing sexual abuse allegations about how to counter them.

He was obsessed with the UVA story, which was obviously the Rolling Stone story that infamously turned out not to be true, and how that could be used to discredit other survivors of sexual violence.

He had advised Steve Bannon, then a presidential advisor for President Trum about how Christine Blasey Ford could be discredited when she was testifying against Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

You know, it was extremely blata And there wasthere were never any charges brought for trying to evade having to answer questions?

You know, part of what he was doing was identifying places where people were less inclined to believe survivors in the first place.

It's why he was pushing the the parts of the media that were hypercritical about survivor stories.

That's why he was pushing Steve Bannon and other Trump administration officials not only to support them on Kavanaugh.

They, you know, they went as far as advising them on the Title IX rules around sexual violence on college campuses.

Part of what he was doing was gathering support for him in the future.

Right?

A group of people who would be more inclined to believe that maybe he was innocent because they believed generally that women were liars.

And what percentage of the population You know, give me a ballpark, do you think would believe that, that generally speaking, women are liars?

Or generally speaking, all people are liars?

I mean, here's what I will say.

I definitely don' have a percentage to offer you, but part of why MeToo is seen as so revolutionary was for a period of time, survivors were able to tell their storie without the typical interruption of not believing them, without the typical suggestion that they were liars.

Right.

That was what was such a a deep threat.

Our culture is not prime to generally believe that survivors of sexual violence are telling the truth.

And that is in part why our various institutions, whether it is our legal system or employers or schools, have had such a difficult tim dealing with these allegations.

No, it's absolutely true.

And it's one of the reasons why in these emails, you see Epstein and his powerful friends thrown into chaos by the realization that for a period of time, sexual assault and abuse survivors were being taken seriously, were in the headlines, were being quoted with a degree of respect.

And you know that some of these men who were accused or even convicted of crimes like Harvey Weinstein were for at least some period of time out of public life.

As we know now, a lot of the broader effects of the MeToo movemen did not last particularly long.

And ultimately, the prevailing social order has kind of resumed.

But Epstein and his powerful friends were horrified by the idea that things were changin as fast as they appeared to be, and they identified it as a threat to their to their primacy and the primacy of the social order that had put them into their positions of power and made in Epstein's case, made him very wealthy.

What would have happened to Epstein?

Would he have spent the rest of his life in jail if he had gone to trial, or would he have been released at some point?

And at that point, what do you think he would have done with himself?

I should imagine nobody who was his and nobody with intelligence and a good perspective on the situation who was a contact of his before all this happened, would have been a contact after he got out of jail.

What, would he have been on the streets so poor, going from these huge townhouses, owning an island in the Caribbean, all that sort of stuff to living on the streets?

No, please.

Well, I was just going to say, I think the fact that Maxwell herself is in prison is an indication of what would have happened to Jeffrey Epstein had he gone to trial.

And I think the million of documents that have come out that under any reasonable set of circumstances should have led to more investigation of not only Jeffrey Epstein, but the individual, powerful men and institutions that covered for him.

I don't think we would have seen a quick end.

I don't think it would have been just one trial, one time.

I think we would have seen a series of things happen to try to ensure that the full story was told, and that he and others aroun him were fully held accountable.

Well, it's important to point out that the first time Jeffrey Epstein was convicted of a sexual offense he was handed an infamously lax plea deal.

The very little prison time that he served, he was allowed to leave jail during the day and spend time at his office, and that he went on to resume his place in society to become fabulously wealthy, to try to remake himself in the public eye as a donor to scientific and educational causes.

And all of that went extremely well for him until 2019.

Even Ghislaine Maxwell now ishas been quite infamously moved to what is widely viewed as a lowe security, more cushy facility.

And President Trump has refused to rule out the possibility of pardoning her.

So, you know, while certainly, I think probably Epstein would have faced a situation like Harvey Weinstein's where there would have been a lot of criminal cases, a lot of court cases, he would have spent quit a long time, probably in jail.

We simply don't know that for sure.

We have no idea how ultimately, somebody with his power and influence would have greeted further charges.

Starting with you, Anna.

What is what did this whole campaign about quoting the phrase “believe women” have to do with it?

What was it meant to do?

Did it accomplish its goal?

I think that when people started to use the phrase “believe women” in the MeToo context, what they meant is believe women as much as society reflexively believes men who are accused of and deny sexual abuse allegations.

It meant afford survivors a degree of dignity and a lack of reflexive suspicion.

And I guess for a period, a very short period of time, perhaps, that happened.

I would argue that that period of tim has come and gone very quickly.

I'm interested to see what Fatima thinks.

Well, I just believe that the phrase believe women was a response to witnessing the courage of survivors coming forward, and knowing that that courage deserves some respect, that they had a chance to be believed, that they had a chance to be treated seriously, and for our legal system to treat them seriously and their workplaces and their schools.

And so in some ways, it was a small demand, right, that they just have a chance to be believed.

And in other ways, it was revolutionary because we were saying the usual ways of doing business the usual ways of discrediting, not believing them and doing nothing shouldn't happen anymore.

And in this day and age, does it still happen a lot?

I mean, I could see it happening back in the 70s when the, you know, a new cycle of the women's movement was getting going.

But at this point in time, do women do they still have so little credibility as far as the public is concerned, that when they told these gut wrenching stories about what happened to them, the people wouldn't have believed them?

You know, on the one hand, one of the only bipartisan things we have seen happen in this Congress has been around supporting survivors, bot the Epstein survivors and also the two members of Congress who recently resigned.

I think you don't have that sort of movement but for the MeToo movement earlier.

How much help do you believe the movemen that was propounding the theory, quote, believe women, end quote, ended u being to any of the survivors?

Right.

It's hard to say.

I mean, I don't think that that slogan in itself did all the work that needed to happen to allow the broader society to take women seriously when they repor sexual abuse and sexual assault.

I mean, as a journalist, I still see this every time there is a prominent story about sexual abuse or sexual assault.

There is almost immediately a lot of speculation about the credibility of the person coming forward with these claims.

So unfortunately, I'm a little bit pessimistic about the idea that believing survivors is a really ingrained part of our culture.

And how long do you think it will be before it is an ingrained part of our culture?

I mean, the the second phase, I believe, of the women's movement started in the 70s.

That's 50 plus years ago already.

How many more decade or centuries is it going to be before women are believe as equally as men are believed?

Or do you think that's the case now?

If I could just say it's hard to answer that question without acknowledging the time we are in.

We are in a time where the president himself tries to discredit women so that with the highest bully pulpit, you know we're in a time where he calls reporters piggy and other names.

And so that effort to discredit women, it's not just limited to survivors, it is limited in to women generally.

And so we have to sort o think about this backlash moment we are in and what it will take for survivors to continue to demand to be believed in spite of it all, right?

The Epstein survivors are demanding that they be seen, heard and taken seriously in the midst of this huge backlash.

And, you know, that's what keeps me inspired and believing that it will be possible for us to be in a different place in the future.

Anna, very briefly, your thoughts.

I am curious to see what happens the next time a powerful man is accused of sexual abuse.

Not an Epstein, but somebody-someone else.

I am curious to see if we, as journalists, as members of the public, have learned anything from this sequence of events because Epstein was able to get away with this pattern of behavior for about 20 years.

So I am extremely hopefu that the next time this happens, we will see a more equitable path to justice, and we will see a more sympathetic response to the public when these survivors come forward.

But only time will tell.

All right.

Thank you both for participating.

Very enlightening material.

We really appreciate it.

That's it for this edition of To The Contrary.

Let's keep talking on social media, including X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

Reach out to us @tothecontrary, and visit our website.

The address is on the screen and whether you agree or think to the contrary, see you next time.

Funding for To The Contrary provided by: You're watching PBS.