Epstein victim to Trump: ‘I am traumatized. I am not stupid’

This Tuesday, it is up to the House of Representatives — and, in particular, its Republican members — to show their 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 disgraced financier and his connections to power. But the first word did not go to politicians; it went to the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking network, orchestrated with the help of his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. They spoke in on a frigid November morning in Washington during a press conference at the foot of the Capitol steps.

“I am traumatized. I am not stupid,” one of the survivors, Haley Robson, told U.S. President Donald Trump, who had obstructed the bill’s progress for months. That changed on Sunday, when he allowed his party to vote in favor of the law, which is expected to pass unanimously before moving to the Senate. Afterward, Trump himself must sign it, something he promised to do on Monday.

“We are hearing the administration say they intend to investigate various Democrats who were friends with Epstein. I beg you, President Trump, please stop making this political. It is not about you,” Jena-Lisa Jones, another survivor pleaded, referring to the announcement that the Justice Department will focus its investigations 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 photo of herself before speaking, showing the moment she met Epstein and was abused by him. In her case, she was 14 years old. “Show some class,” she told Trump. “I voted for you, but your behavior on this issue has been a national embarrassment.”

Jones, like the others, spoke flanked by a couple dozen survivors, as well as the brother of Virginia Giuffre — perhaps the most famous victim — who died by suicide in April, a month after surviving a hit-and-run in Australia, where she lived.

“Far too long, survivors like me have been dismissed, silenced, are told that our pain was exaggerated or fabricated. Let me be clear. This is not a hoax,” Sharlene Rochard declared in another direct appeal to Trump, who has spent months dismissing the Epstein case as a “Democratic hoax.”

“The truth has been buried in sealed files and hidden records for far too long,” she added. “How can we keep America great, if the principles the nation was founded on — that power belongs to the people — is not protected? No one, no matter how wealthy or well-connected, stands above the law. If we cannot face the truth, then we betray the very ideals that define us as a country.”

Threats against Marjorie Taylor Greene

Before the survivors spoke, three members of Congress addressed the press: the two who sponsored the bill, Democrat Ro Khanna (California) and Republican Thomas Massie (Kentucky), and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene had previously been one of the most prominent faces of the MAGA movement in the Capitol until last week, when Trump attacked her, calling her a “traitor” in a series of posts on his social media platform, which, according to Greene, led to threats and other intimidation tactics from the president’s supporters.

“I want to see every single name [on the Epstein list] released so that these women don’t have to live in fear and intimidation, which is something I’ve had a small taste of in just the past few days. They’ve been living it for years,” said Greene, who added that the suvivors had “fought the most horrific fight that no woman should have to fight” against “the most powerful people in the world, even the president of the United States.”

“I was called a traitor by a man that I fought for five, no, actually six years for, and I gave him my loyalty for free,” she added. “Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves, a patriot is an American that serves the United States of America and Americans like the women standing behind me,” she said, referring to the survivors.

If, as expected, the bill passes the House vote this Tuesday, it will move on to the Senate, where amendments could be introduced to slow its progress before it reaches Trump’s desk, where the president would have to sign it.

At that point, the Department of Justice would be required to release the millions of previously unseen Epstein documents containing information about his sex-trafficking network and who knew of or participated in it from the early 1990s until his death (ruled a suicide by the medical examiner) in 2019, while he was held in a maximum-security cell in Manhattan. The current question is whether the Department of Justice will resist, arguing that ongoing investigations are still in progress. Everything depends on whether the president’s orders to Attorney General Pam Bondi — to investigate Epstein’s connections with prominent Democrats — bear any fruit.

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