On January 30, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, announced the Justice Department’s publication of more than three million pages of documents relating to investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender. The release came weeks after a deadline set by Congress and was said by Blanche to be the final batch of documents—despite millions of files still being withheld. “Listen, victims of Mr. Epstein have gone through unspeakable pain,” Blanche told reporters. “To the extent that there’s frustration, I understand where that comes from.” He added that he hoped the Justice Department’s efforts would “bring closure.”
It took barely any time at all to realize that the victims of Epstein’s abuse—the DOJ estimates he preyed on at least one thousand women and children—felt not a sense of closure, but anger. Thousands of released documents featured survivors’ names, and reports quickly emergedof the inclusion of unredacted photos of nude bodies and faces, some of them likely of minors. Survivors’ names, addresses, driver’s license information, bank details, and photographs were released. Soon, survivors found themselves on the receiving end of press intrusion as well as disgusting messages and death threats. The release of files looked not so much like a sincere effort at closure as a mass doxing campaign, retraumatizing survivors of grotesque abuse.
Lawyers representing a group of survivors demanded the DOJ website be shut down while this negligence was addressed. (The department defied that demand, but did say on Monday that thousands of documents had been removed.) “There is no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence sufficient to explain the scale, consistency, and persistence of the failures that occurred,” the lawyers wrote. “The harm is ongoing and irreversible.” The sloppiness over survivors’ privacy stood in contrast to the zealous redactions of other material, such as names of Epstein’s business associates or a photo of Donald Trump, as several reports pointed out.
The sheer amount of material, as indigestible as a spoonful of sawdust, has created a problem for news organizations. Robert Caro, over his long career, has often repeated a mantra, based on advice he got from an editor at Newsday, where he was a cub reporter, to “turn every goddamned page.” Striving to follow that advice has left his brilliant multivolume biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, which he started in the late seventies, still unfinished. (Caro estimates the LBJ Presidential Library holds more than forty-five million pieces of paper.) Reporters approaching the Epstein files are prone to experience similar overload. That’s partly down to the janky website where the DOJ has uploaded the files (justice.gov/epstein), and partly to the indecipherable way the agency chose to present the material: shuffled out of sequence, shorn of all context, crammed under folder names such as “Data Set 6” (helpful!) with file names like “EFTA00008716.pdf” (exactly what I was looking for!). We see sworn depositions next to meaningless news clippings next to email after chilling email in Epstein’s lowercase, typo-addled style.
Newsrooms have pursued a choose-your-own-adventure approach. In the first few days at least, publishers seemed to narrow their lines of inquiry out of necessity, prioritizing what they know—the Financial Times and Wall Street Journalfocusing on news lines rocking Wall Street and Silicon Valley; Varietylooking at those concerning Hollywood and celebrity culture; the New York Times paying attention to, among other things, how the president appears in the files, and so on. In some ways this is positive: journalists, like workers in a Ford production line, are clunking away at their individual tasks and eventually, we hope, will build the car, reveal the whole story. But this specialization has also contributed to a further sense of information splintering: the feeling that a thousand different conversations, on a thousand different topics, are happening at once.
The release of the files has also rewarded the best-resourced outlets. The Times’s coverage has been particularly impressive, I’ve felt. Stories from across the newsroom have been grouped under various thematic tabs such as “Latest Release,” “Maxwell and the Clintons,” “The Royals,” “Powerful Men in Files,” and so on. (I wonder if the DOJ thought of doing that?) It was a shame to see the Miami Herald relying on wire copy for many of its online stories in recent days. After all, it was the Herald’s trailblazing Julie K. Brown and her dogged investigative work that reignited investigations into the Epstein case in 2018. (Epstein died, apparently of suicide, in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019.) Maybe that’s to be expected for a metro paper, albeit one that still punches above its weight nationally. And to their credit, Brown and other reporters have continued to produce quality, deeply reported pieces, particularly on the prominent men who were fixtures in Epstein’s orbit.
Brown has criticized the way in which the DOJ released the material, describing it, on a podcast following a previous release in late December, as if “they put everything in a salad bowl and just threw it online.” It has led some survivors to accuse the Trump administration of a cover-up to protect powerful men. (Blanche denied this during his press conference.) But one could say the DOJ release is less of a salad—where you might identify what’s in it by simply taking a bite—than a soup that’s been blitzed with a blender, its distinct ingredients concealed in a mystery puree. The disorderly file dump makes it harder for reporters to answer simple questions like: Is what we’re seeing here explosive, or not? Will we see further prosecutions, or not? Does this exonerate the president, or not? As far as the DOJ is concerned, the medium is the message, and the message, perhaps intentionally, is confusion—to the point of meaninglessness.
Yet one thing that comes across with striking clarity in news coverage is the casual, routinely misogynistic way a cohort of elite men talks about women. “The Epstein files reveal a patriarchy in action,” writes the Guardian’s Amelia Gentleman. “The emails showcase the private behaviour of a male ruling class, as they network, joke and trade information. Women exist at the periphery, tolerated because they organise the diaries of the busy men, they arrange food, they grace a table, they provide sex.”
That made me think of the words written by Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Epstein, who took her own life last April, at forty-one. “Some people still think Epstein was an anomaly, an outlier. And those people are wrong,” Giuffre wrote in Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice. “The way he viewed women and girls—as playthings to be used and discarded—is not uncommon among certain powerful men who believe they are above the law.” Listeners may have heard an echo of that misogyny in Trump’s comments to CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins on Wednesday. When she asked at a White House press conference about Epstein’s victims, the president identified her as “a young woman,” and responded: “I’ve known you for ten years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face.” Writing for CJR on Friday, Susie Banikarim criticized the rest of the White House press corps for failing to show solidarity with Collins.
The work I’ve most admired has come from news organizations that put the words of survivors, so long ignored, at the heart of their coverage. One survivor, Lisa Philips, spoke to Annie Kelly on the Guardian’s “Today in Focus” podcast, discussing the complex emotional forces that allow men like Epstein—who control and coerce not through brute force but through favors and charm, by leveraging reputations and preying on ambition—to abuse people. “He got into your head,” Philips said. The goal now, she added, is simple: “One source of justice, one source of potential healing, is in having the truth be out there, and in having the mandate for secrecy be lifted from the survivors, and the responsibility of shame being placed back onto the perpetrators.”
Centre for Nigeria Progress 