The Jeffrey Epstein case is not an isolated incident, nor an individual deviancy. It is a damning mirror of systems of power that disguise desire as entitlement and turn the bodies of girls and young women into permissible terrain under the cover of influence, money, and institutional silence. In this sense, the name Epstein refers less to a person than to a deeply rooted system that is reproduced whenever power is detached from accountability, and whenever violence, especially sexual violence, is treated as a side effect rather than a structure.
The voices of survivors were perhaps heard, but their pain was rarely respected. Victims’ testimonies were transformed into scenes, images, and tools of manipulation, while the voice itself remained trapped within the conditions of media moments or political campaigns against the enemy of the hour. Images of victims circulated, sometimes with visible faces and sometimes without, under the pretext of protection, while each girl knew she was present in the frame, endlessly recycled and stripped of context and meaning.
What was framed as concealment was never care, but erasure. The body endured as evidence, stripped of the self as a way of being, the spirit, and the meaning. Hiding faces did not prevent bodies from being turned into visual proof used across media, politics, and public discourse. These images, repeated without context and voice, did not protect the girls from exposure. They deprived them of the right to narrate and to locate themselves. The body became present as material evidence, while the voice disappeared, the experience was reduced, and humanity was excluded.
True advocacy, by contrast, requires restraint, accepting silence and limits, and refusing to extract details to satisfy emotional impact or moral posturing. Voyeurism, on the other hand, thrives on repetition and display, on turning testimony into content and suffering into evidence. Here, advocacy itself can slip into reproducing the very power imbalances it claims to resist.
In this space, the line between genuine listening to victims’ pain and voyeurism becomes dangerously thin. When suffering is used to generate public outrage, and when stories are invested in without consent or agency, the same logic of violation that enabled the violence in the first place is reproduced. The question no longer concerns only who committed the crime, but who enabled it, who remained silent, who watched, and who still lurks in the shadows. How many names have yet to be mentioned? And how many bodies will remain at risk so long as power is exercised as a right to gratify desire rather than as responsibility?
The Epstein case is often presented as a pivotal moment in public awareness of sexual exploitation, human trafficking, and elite impunity. Yes, some survivors were believed in ways that would not have been possible decades ago, and their testimonies helped break long-standing walls of denial. But belief alone does not amount to justice, and public visibility does not necessarily mean respect. Despite the unprecedented attention surrounding the case, this moment exposed a deeper failure. It revealed the inability of institutions, media, and public discourse to respect survivors’ voices, agency, and dignity.
For decades, Epstein’s victims were ignored, doubted, or directly silenced. When their stories finally entered the public sphere, they did so suddenly and overwhelmingly. Media coverage intensified, documentaries multiplied, and legal documents were dissected in full public view. Survivors’ experiences became central to the narrative, yet were often treated as raw material rather than as lives requiring care, consent, and context.
Public attention quickly gravitated toward sensational questions. Who else was involved? Which powerful figures were implicated? What remains hidden? In the process, survivors’ voices were instrumentalized, and pain was used to feed public curiosity rather than to drive genuine accountability and structural reform.
The politicization of Epstein victims’ images and their use as fuel for public outrage reveal a profound ethical failure to distinguish between testimony and voyeurism. Truly listening to survivors requires recognizing their right to control how their stories are represented, and to determine what is told and what is withheld. When images become mobilization tools that are summoned when useful and discarded when no longer needed, we reproduce the same logic of violation. First the violation of the body, then the image, and finally meaning itself.
While many survivors within Epstein’s network were acknowledged and believed, this recognition alone is insufficient. At every intersection, structures persist that enable the targeting of vulnerable bodies, developing minds, fragile knowledge systems, and eroded forms of protection. In such a context, the designation survivor becomes inadequate, as survival cannot be reduced to the mere continuation of physical life. The perpetrator persists as a social presence, embedded, obscured, and awaiting the conditions under which violence can be reproduced.
The political exploitation of Epstein’s documents will not absolve those who legitimized child marriage, preyed on children in care institutions and places of worship, or justified the use of power to fulfill sexual violence, which is violence in its essence and core.
Yesterday, traveling from Tripoli to Beirut, I saw girls leaning out of car windows, chased by men propelled by the very instinct that animates those at the heights of power. This is a matter of relativity, of how power scales itself, and how girls’ vulnerability shifts with circumstance. Nothing about this is strange. Epstein is not distant from us. He is near, and our complicity appears not only in silence, but in deliberate, knowing acts.
