The Epstein enablers who looked away

It was all he said, she said, the details weren’t clear, blah blah blah – all the usual stuff. It was 2012, and I remember it well because it marked the end of something, for my 20-year-old self. I’d not been an especially innocent teenager but still, those weeks stained my soul irreparably. I haven’t been the same since. Could you blame me?

I’d joined the socialists and the anarchists because I was young and hopeful and idealistic, and I wanted to build a world that was so much better than the one we lived in. To find that so many of the people I’d been campaigning with just didn’t care about sexual assault was crushing beyond words. Weren’t we meant to be the good ones?

It took a long time for my disappointment in my fellow man to reach new highs – or new lows, depending on how you look at it. Well, it took another six or seven years. I’d been a political journalist in SW1 for a while by that point, and had known about many gruesome stories which everyone talked about but no-one could quite get to print.

They were grim and enraging, but I suppose I blamed the systems, and not the people. Traditions and expectations can crush you in Westminster, and I got that people just didn’t want to rock the boat, especially when it wasn’t clear that the rest of the world would care. That changed in 2017, when the MeToo scandal broke and made its way to politics.

I assumed, naively, that it would be the beginning of something, and hopefully the end of a culture which either gleefully threw victims under the bus or paraded them around the press, depending on what felt most convenient. Good heavens, I was wrong.

I waited and I watched all those MPs I knew were wrong’uns, counting down the minutes until they got their comeuppance, and I’m glad I didn’t hold my breath because I wouldn’t be here today if I had. So many of them didn’t suffer any consequences for their actions. So many of them were simply too useful, too likeable to those in power, too well-connected.

I couldn’t even blame the institutions this time: I watched as people I thought I knew and respected still welcomed ministers at events with open arms, despite knowing that they were rapists. In the end, this was one of the reasons why I decided to leave Westminster behind; I didn’t like what it was doing to me, and how I felt about humanity. 

I strongly believe that no-one has ever become a better person by being more cynical, but I just couldn’t see any other way in which to keep being a person in politics, so I walked out. I’m glad I did; do you remember the Labour Party making all the right noises about coming into government and cleaning up the Commons? Have you seen or heard of them doing anything to actively rid the House of its creeps? 

Suggested Reading

How the Epstein scandal broke MAGA

James Ball

Despite all this, I still struggled to get through this cache of emails sent to and by Jeffrey Epstein. Of course, the correspondence which alluded more or less directly to abuse was stomach-churning but, oddly, that wasn’t the worst of it for me. We already knew that he and his co-conspirators did abominable things; seeing it written in black and white felt awful, but unsurprising.

Instead, what rocked my faith in humanity, again, was the sheer number of people who corresponded with Epstein, and who were unlikely to be abusers themselves. There were men and women, old and young, from many different countries, and clearly they all had one thing in common: they didn’t care. They knew who Epstein was, and what he did, but they didn’t care.

That just makes me Charlie Brown, doesn’t it? He’s always convinced he’s going to kick the ball, and I’m always shocked to my core when I remember that only relatively few people consistently care about rape and sexual assault. I find it impossible to get used to, even if the world keeps throwing it in my face. 

Maybe that’s the way it should be; I just don’t know how I could carry on, if I carried that truth with me at all times.