Recommendations of the Editorial team
The survivor of the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, his complicity Ghislaine Maxwell and other wealthy elites gathered on Wednesday in Washington, DC to request accounting and to be approved by the approval of further information about Epstein’s abuse network. A survivor said that she was part of a group that creates its own list of names from Epstein’s known based on her own stories.
Demand for complete publication
MPs Ro Khanna (D-Kalifornia) and Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) performed with Epstein’s victims and their families at a press conference in front of the US capitol and asked Donald Trump’s Ministry of Justice to release more information. The government has already published thousands of documents under pressure from Democrats and Republicans, but there were no new knowledge. Trump, who promised to release the so-called Epstein files in the 2024 election campaign, maintained a long and well-documented friendship with Epstein.
“Less than one percent of these files were published,” said Khanna. “Today we are calling for the relief petition that all files are published.”
He explained that 212 Democrats and four Republicans supported the “Epstein Files Transparency AC” T, a relief petition that the Ministry of Justice asks to disclose all the not classified files on Epstein and Maxwell. A total of 218 signatures are required. The Republican leadership, on the other hand, follows a different path over the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. This committee published 33,000 documents on Tuesday, but could not provide the answers that the survivors are looking for.
“Today we are at the side of the survivors,” said Khanna. “We stand against the big money. We stand to protect the children of America. That’s what that’s really about.”
“I am calling for justice,” said Lisa Phillips, a model that was brought to Epstein’s island in 2000. “The congress has to decide. Will you continue to protect perpetrators? Or will you finally protect the survivors?”
Survivors want to create their own list
“I would like to announce here today,” she continued, “we have discussed our own list. We know the names. Many of us have been abused by us. Together as survivors, we are confidentially compiled the names that run regularly in the epstein world. And it is done by survivors and for survivors-nobody else is involved.”
“We are the key to this situation,” said surviving Haley Robson. “We have the truth, and the FBI knows the truth, the government knows the truth. You can connect the sheep to the sheep. But we are the key. We know who was involved. We know the game. And we know the players and we have been waiting here for 20 years that you do something. Well, advising you: Your time is over, and now we do it ourselves.”
Marina Lacerda – a survivor who was named in Epstein’s Federal Ranking in 2019 as a minor victim one and provided decisive evidence that brought Epstein behind grids – spoke publicly about the abuse for the first time. She said there were many parts of her own history that she couldn’t remember.
Documents in government ownership
“It is so difficult to start with the healing process when you know that there are people out there who know more about my abuse than myself,” she said. “The worst thing is that the government is currently in possession of documents and information that could help me to remember and perhaps overcome all of this and could help me heal. You have documents with my name, which were confiscated from Jeffrey Epstein’s house, and that could help me to bring the parts of my own life back together. But I have nothing of it, and I know that many of these women are the same.”
Sky Roberts, the brother of the well-known Epstein-surviving Virginia Giuffre-who committed suicide in April-made three demands: “Ghislaine Maxwell has to stay in a high-security prison for the rest of her life,” said Roberts. “No mildness, no deals, no special treatment. The Epstein documents have to be sealed. Every name, every detail, no further secrets, no further protection for those who have misused the weak. And finally we demand full account of every helper, every accomplice, every person in power position that looked away.”
Open questions about the death of Epstein
Lawyer Gloria Allred, who represented 27 survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and some alleged victims of Ghislaine Maxwell, said that the survivors were “overdue on justice”. She questioned the circumstances of Epstein’s death in prison in 2019.
“I saw him at the last hearing before the Federal Supreme Court,” said Allred. “And so many victims and so many survivors thought: ‘Finally there is justice’, but instead of justice there was a body in the metropolitan correctional center. And there are still questions: ‘Was it suicide? Was it murder?’ But the victims never got the opportunity to confront this sex offender in court.
“We are overdue for justice. We won’t wait for justice. And we are fighting for justice.”