Former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson writes in The Guardian with women's rights champion Julie Roginsky that while President Donald Trump was a close friend of deceased convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, he wasn't his most powerful ally.
Carlson's 2016 sexual harassment lawsuit against former Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes became a pivotal moment in the global #MeToo movement and led to landmark legislative changes.
Along with Roginsky, Carlson in 2022 helped pass The Ending Forced Arbitration for Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, which ensures that survivors can bring their claims to court rather than being sent into the secret chamber of forced arbitration, and The Speak Out Act, which limits the use of NDAs that silence survivors before misconduct even occurs.
"Focusing on the lurid details of his life and eventual death obscures the far more unsettling truth his case lays bare. Epstein’s story is not really about one man’s depravity. It is about a system – legal, cultural, and institutional – engineered to protect the powerful through silence," they write.
And while Trump and his associates have pushed to evade and cover up any of these lurid details, they have exposed the real enemy in the story, they note.
"His crimes thrived not because they were hidden, but because the people who knew were coerced, encouraged, or more than willing to shut up," they write. "Silence was not incidental to Epstein’s success. It was central to it. And in this, he was hardly unique."
The most revealing document in the entire Epstein saga, they write, is "the non-prosecution agreement the Department of Justice quietly signed in 2007, shielding Epstein from federal charges and insulating unnamed 'co-conspirators'."
"The girls he had abused – minors the government was legally obligated to inform – were kept in the dark. The message was unmistakable: protecting powerful men mattered more than honoring the voices of the girls they harmed," they write.
And while Congress has forced Trump's hand in the scandal to reveal all files related to Epstein, the writers are dubious of this.
"The Department of Justice has not committed to full disclosure. After everything we have learned in the nearly two decades since Epstein pleaded guilty to sex with a minor, the culture of silence is so powerful that it is unclear when, or even if, his survivors will ever truly receive justice," they note.
Silence, they write, was a pervasive ally of Epstein's throughout his life and now in his death.
"Consider how many adults crossed paths with Epstein’s operation – staff, business associates, social friends, lawyers, financial managers. Many surely suspected what was happening and some certainly knew," they note.
"But secrecy functions as a kind of social gravity: if everyone stays quiet, no one stands out. Epstein didn’t need to silence every person he encountered. The architecture around him did much of that work for him," they add.
The Epstein case, the writers note, "is not an anomaly but a magnifying glass. It shows us how private power, institutional incentives, and legal structures align to smother survivors’ voices long before a journalist or prosecutor ever gets involved."
"But we should not rely on exposés and avoidable tragedies to break silence. The cost of that approach is too high, and the damage to survivors too enduring," they add.
Laws need to be rewritten and the culture changed if society is to prevent another Epstein scandal, they note.
"All survivors deserve more than whispered sympathy. The real scandal was never Epstein alone. It was the silence that allowed him to get away with his crimes for so long and that still allows his co-conspirators to get away with them years later," they conclude.
