There's only one reason you're shocked by the Epstein scandal
No ugly details, but people need to know the facts
Sometimes I’m so angry I don’t know how to deal with the anger. Doesn’t matter what the serenity prayer says about accepting what we can’t change. Can’t change it, can’t accept it either. Some things shouldn’t be accepted.
Epstein files, Epstein files — that’s what I’m hearing everywhere.
People screaming for them to release the Epstein files.
It’s been over a month since the court ordered release date. Of course we’re screaming for the rest of the files. They’ve released millions of pages and it’s barely even half. And now the DOJ is saying they won’t release more.
You know what people want to know, right?
They want to know who is in those files. They want names.
ALL the names. Not the ones that were cherry picked for the public.
Everyone wants to know which people were so despicable that they raped little girls. So many little girls. Over 1200, at least that’s what the news media is telling us. They started by saying 200 but the number kept growing. Now they’re saying 1200.
It’s a horrifying thought, isn’t it?
Twelve hundred little girls who weren’t old enough to vote. Some not even old enough to drive a car. Some as young as thirteen. It’s enough to make people livid with anger. How dare they. Who are those nasty men?
You want the answer to that? The real answer?
You want to know who the men are that abused little children?
Look around you.
Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
Shakespeare said that in The Tempest but we live there. We live in a raging, roiling, ugly tempest and most people don’t even know about it.
A lot of people are saying it’s rich men. I wish they were right.
Sometimes truth arrives with a punch to the gut. Just wham — and you’re gasping for air. Then you can’t get it out of your head, what you know.
This is not going to be an easy read. I will spare you the horrific details. Just going to give you some numbers that are plenty horrifying. I hope you’ll read it. Because our children need us to protect them. And we’re not.
I was researching a piece on violence against women when I stumbled across a statistic that made me sick. Brace yourself.
In America, a child is raped every nine minutes.
Every nine minutes. A child.
How’s your math?
Know what that means? It means yesterday, 160 children were raped. Today, another 160 and another 160 tomorrow. It means on your lunch hour, six children get raped.
How do you wrap your head around that?
I need to pause and say this isn’t an attack on men. I’m going to say the phrase women hate. Not all men. I’m not saying it the way men said it when #metoo went wild. I’m saying it because in the case of child rape, it’s dead true and we can not make this into a man vs woman battle. That will not help our children. This is not an attack on men.
So, let’s say Epstein and his cronies raped 1200 little girls, okay?
Let’s pretend that number is correct. Know how long it takes average men across America to rape 1200 children?
7 days and 12 hours.
Think about that. Every week over a thousand children live their own home-town version of Epstein Island. It makes me want to hit something. Makes me want to just burn down the world for allowing it to continue.
7 days and 12 hours. To rape 1200 children.
Oh sure, Epstein and his cronies had money, so they could put the kids on a private plane, fly them to a tropical island where some of the richest men in the world had nasty pedophile parties and emailed each other about their preferences. They trafficked children, flew them around the world. But here’s a question—
Do you think it’s less horrifying for a little girl to be held down and raped in her hometown by a man who doesn’t have money? Do I even need to ask that?
It’s a valid question. Are we so incensed by the Epstein case because of the children? Or because it was rich and powerful men involved? Do we have the same anger at poor men raping kids we don’t know about? Is it about the rape, or the rapist?
One more snippet of math.
Every nine minutes isn’t just 160 per day. It’s 58,560 per year.
According to RAIIN, 82% of child rape victims are female, 18% are boys. So every day, 131 girls and 29 boys. Every year, 48,019 girls and 10,541 boys.
I’d like to stop right there. I’d like to say okay, I’m done.
Done, done, done. Done with this piece, done with these facts and done with humanity, for that matter. But I know what someone is going to say. They’re going to question the numbers. Because surely, it can’t be true?
Where they getting those numbers? It’s a valid question.
Because we live in a world where it’s hard to know what to believe anymore thanks to fake news, AI and rich men who lie like there’s no tomorrow. From the federal government. That’s where the numbers come from.
RAIIN gets their statistics from the federal government.
They track it. They didn’t always. But they do now. See?
Want to know something wild? America didn’t even start tracking crime on a national level until 1930. People got assaulted, robbed, raped, murdered. Ask the government how many and they’d shrug. No idea.
The FBI began publishing the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) in 1930. Rape was just one category. They defined it as forcible rape of a female and documented cased that were reported to authorities, but they didn’t list age or specifics.
In 1973, the government launched the National Crime Survey, now called the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Finally, they reported the victims age. Except the database started at age 12. So any rape of children under age twelve was not reported. The database didn’t allow for that.
That’s only 23 years before Epstein was first reported to the FBI and police.
In 1987, The FBI created the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). It was a more comprehensive tracking of rape and other crimes. For the first time in American history, they started to document victim age, relationship to the offender and the specific offenses committed against children.
1987. That’s only 9 years before Epstein was first reported. Nine years before Maria Farmer went to the police station and reported what Epstein did to her and her sister, and then reported it to the FBI as well.
That’s how new tracking child rape is. 1987.
Thirty nine years ago.
You know why it took so long? Because government officials and courts saw children as unreliable witnesses. And I want you to think about that. About powerful men saying meh, children lie. Can’t believe them.
Look at that in light of the men in the Epstein files. All those men saying it didn’t happen until the files started coming out. It makes me so angry.
I’m going to share some charts, courtesy of the government. Compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice. I won’t share all of them because it’s hard to look at them. So, just an overview, okay?
This chart in particular makes me ill. I took the liberty of screen capping and adding pink lines to break out the ages, year by year. Keep in mind these aren’t estimates. These are only the cases that were reported and documented by federal officials.
The spike at age four hurts my heart.
They even track the type of assault.
Here’s one thing that makes me angry. A man forcing a child to perform oral sex on him is categorized under forcible fondling. What? God, that just makes me livid.
There are more charts. For example, charts that break out what type of rape based on the age of the child. We’ll stop there, okay?
I can’t look at more. Can’t ask you to, either.
According to the report, 96% of offenders are male, 4% are female. Which is what we see in the Epstein files, right? Ghislaine Maxwell and a few other women in there, doing their part to — I don’t know — I have no explanation for those women.
A few offenders are juveniles themselves. Just under 23%, and it hurts my heart to think of young boys who aren’t even legal age themselves, assaulting children younger than them. Were they once assaulted? But the majority — adults. Over 77%.
And if you think they’re mostly family, you’d be wrong.
That’s what a lot of people think, you know? Some sicko in the family, but that’s the minority. Only 27% of offenders were family members.
Most were an acquaintance. Doesn’t that give you chills?
In rare cases, it’s someone in a position of trust, who assaults hundreds of girls before any of the girls told. Like Larry Nassar, former USA Gymnastics and Michigan State doctor who sexually assaulted over 300 girls aged 6–15. The littlest ones, 6–12 were assaulted at gymnastics camp. Send your tiny girl to camp, that’s what happens.
Like Rick Butler, a volleyball coach in Illinois and Geoffrey Robert, yet another gymnastics coach. Teachers, coaches, trainers, doctors, even clergy. Men who abuse dozens or hundreds of children before they are found out because the kids are scared to tell. Sometimes they are threatened not to.
But most cases are not one man assaulting hundreds of children. Mostly, it’s men who quietly assault a small handful of girls they have access to.
Here’s the part that breaks my heart — what happens after the fact.
According to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), there are two ways to ‘clear’ a case of child rape once it’s documented. And by ‘clear,’ I mean close.
One way is arrest. If the accused is arrested, the case is closed, no matter the outcome. That’s the least common way. Most cases of child rape are cleared using what the FBI calls “clearance by exceptional means.”
Know what that means? It means the child won’t cooperate.
Let me explain what “won’t cooperate” means.
In the United States, the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees a criminal the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”
Any person accused of a crime has the right to see and hear the witnesses who testify against them. Their attorney has the right to cross-examine. There are exceptions for children. A child may be permitted to testify by video or from behind a screen if the judge says so — but the defense lawyer still gets to cross-examine.
Because the constitution says so.
Children nope right out of that.
Just like many of the girls in the Epstein case who don’t want their name used. Don’t want any part of that. They’ve been violated enough.
Sometimes, it’s parents who say nope. Can’t put her through that, she’s been traumatized enough. Would you make your four year old testify? Eight year old? Ten? What age? What age would we let our little girls face their rapist in court?
No, she won’t testify? Okay — “clearance by exceptional means.” Case closed.
The younger the victim, the less likely there will be an arrest.
In cases of children under six, 19% of reported cases result in arrest. Kids 6–17, it’s about a third. Two thirds of reported and documented child rape cases are closed “by exceptional means” because the child won’t face the rapist in court.
So the men walk. No arrest.
The only reason anyone can be shocked by the Epstein scandal is that they don’t know how often in happens across America. In the month since the Epstein files were supposed to be released, almost five thousand children have been raped.
This needs to change. I don’t know how. But it can’t continue.
This is horrific. I’m sorry you had to write this. More sorry it’s fact and not fiction. Thank you.
This. Holy shit. You nailed it. Hard to read. Necessary to digest. Thank you.