Sunday Pages: "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant"

A poem by Emily Dickinson

Dear Reader,

This was a week for Truth.

Even the name-change of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, while performative, gratuitous, and vaguely ominous, merely un-Orwelled the Pentagon. In Nineteen Eighty-four, remember, the source of all the fascist propaganda, all the fear-mongering disinformation, was the Ministry of Truth. A federal agency that extrajudicially blows up fishing boats in international waters is not engaging in a nation’s defense. I can’t be the only one who sees in drunk Pete Hegseth Dr. Strangelove’s General Jack Ripper—who, if social media existed back then, would absolutely have tweeted out, in all caps, as Hegseth did, “DEPARTMENT OF WAR!”

But the week’s real truth-tellers were at the Lawmakers and Epstein Survivors Press Conference on Wednesday, accompanied by Thomas Massie, Ro Khanna, and a third House representative, who had this to say:

These women have been fighting since the 1990s—I heard one woman tell us yesterday since 1996—and they have carried with them shame. But I want to tell you something: the shame does not fall on these brave, courageous women. The shame falls on every single person that coldly turned a blind eye to their abuse. The shame falls on every single person that enabled it. The shame falls on every single person that took money to continue it. And the shame falls on the people in power over the past several decades that protected the monster, Jeffrey Epstein, and his cabal that continued a nightmare. Those people deserve the shame.

And today we are coming forward and we are going to fight like hell for these women because we have to fight like hell for those that are enduring sexual abuse and are living in a prison of shame. Anyone that is being abused, it is not your fault. You should live with no guilt or fear or shame. All of the fault belongs to the evil people that do these things to the innocent. This is the most important fight we can wage here in Congress, is fighting for innocent people that never received justice, and the women behind me have never received justice.

If you didn’t already know, and I asked you to guess who stood there with the Epstein survivors and spoke those powerful words, how long would it take before you landed on Marjorie Taylor Greene? But there she was, on the right side of history for perhaps the first time in her life.

And then the women took to the podium, one right after another, and not even the flyover ordered by the well-pomaded SECRETARY OF WAR could silence them. I marvel at their courage, just as my heart breaks at what they had to say.

What Jeffrey Epstein communicated to the girls who were his victims, implicitly and explicitly, after abusing them in unspeakable ways, was that it was futile to go to the police. No one would ever believe them, no one would ever take their side. He had all the power, and they had none. They were disposable. They were nothing.

Annie Farmer: “For so many years, it felt like Epstein’s criminal behavior was an open secret. Not only did many others participate in the abuse, it is clear that many were aware of his interest in girls and very young women and chose to look the other way because it benefited them to do so. They wanted access to his circle and his money. Their choice to align with his power left those of us who had been harmed by this man and his associates feeling very isolated.”

Jenna Lisa Jones: “I have never been more scared in my life than I was that first time that he hurt me. I remember crying the entire way home thinking about how I couldn't ever tell anyone about what actually happened in that house. This guy was so rich and had so many pictures with so many famous people, and no one would’ve ever believed me if I told them.”

Chauntae Davies: “He was too powerful. I was just one of the many young women trapped in his orbit. I was even taken on a trip to Africa with former President Bill Clinton and other notable figures. In those moments, I realized how powerless I was. If I spoke out, who would believe me, who would protect me?”

The abuse was heinous enough. But to be denied their day in court, to be denied the opportunity to testify…to have the whole case sealed up, shut down, walled up in silence for decades—the institutional gaslighting only magnified the already-agonizing pain.

“Accountability is what makes a society civilized,” said Anouska DiGiorgio. “Consequences are not about punishment alone. They exist to deter future harm, to protect the vulnerable, and to set a standard of justice.”

And there have been no consequences, zero, for the enablers of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Two presidents, a prince, a prime minister, a governor, a famous attorney, a Hollywood director, Cabinet members past and present, Silicon Valley billionaires, retail moguls, financiers, bankers, scientists, modeling agents, professors at top universities: We know who they are, anyone with an internet connection knows, but Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice (so-called) will not even deign to produce a list of their names, let alone prosecute any of them.

Haley Robson asked the question we all want the answer to: “Why was he so protected? And why didn’t anyone ever care to stop him?”

It is only due to the wherewithal of one of the survivors, Courtney Wild, that we even found out about the sham non-prosecution agreement to begin with. “When I walked into his office at 19 years old, [Bradley Edwards] sued the government for refusing to tell me what was going on under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act,” she said. “The only reason anyone ever found out that the government had already given Jeffrey Epstein immunity through the non-prosecution agreement was because our lawsuit forced the government to tell us. Otherwise, nobody would even know that today.”

Negotiated by Alan Dershowitz—who before representing Epstein was the attorney for the convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard—and approved by Alexander Acosta, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, the agreement contains this doozy of a sentence:

In consideration of Epstein’s agreement to plead guilty and to provide compensation in the manner described above, if Epstein successfully fulfills all of the terms and conditions of this agreement, the United States also agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against any potential co-conspirators of Epstein, including but not limited to Sarah Kellen, Adriana Ross, Lesley Groff, or Nadia Marcinkova.

Any potential co-conspirators of Epstein. Including but not limited to. For too long that meant Ghislaine Maxwell, as we have seen. And given what we know about the President’s behavior during the many years that he and Epstein were buddies, and given the allegations against him, and given the great and obvious lengths he’s gone through to keep the Epstein files under lock and key—the cover-up is so brazen, it’s like Nixon went personally to burgle the DNC headquarters, leaving a trail of NIXON ‘72 buttons in his wake—it almost certainly means Donald John Trump as well.

Each of the women who spoke on Wednesday had their own stories to tell, and for every one of them who stood at the podium there are hundreds more, living and dead. Courtney Wild acknowledged them on Wednesday: “I just wanted to take a second and just have a moment of silence for all the women survivors that aren’t here with us today—that passed away due to anxiety, depression, trying to keep up with this case. A moment of silence, please. Thank you.”

We call victims of rape and sexual abuse “survivors,” but to be a survivor, one has to survive. How many of Epstein’s victims did not? And under the circumstances, and in the interest of full disclosure, it’s fair to ask: How many of Trump’s?

The full extent of what Epstein, Maxwell, their criminal collaborators, and their contemptible enablers did may never be known. Sometimes a darkness is so great that no source of light has the requisite wattage to illuminate it.

The poet and novelist Stephen Crane meditates on the elusiveness of absolute truth in this terse and cryptic poem:

“Truth,” said a traveller,
“Is a rock, a mighty fortress;
Often have I been to it,
Even to its highest tower,
From whence the world looks black.”

“Truth,” said a traveller,
“Is a breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom;
Long have I pursued it,
But never have I touched
The hem of its garment.”

And I believed the second traveller;
For truth was to me
A breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom,
And never had I touched
The hem of its garment.

Or, perhaps, the whole truth can be known—but a truth this abominable, this awful, this diabolically evil, needed to reveal itself slowly, over time, or people simply would not have been able to process it?

Emily Dickinson was not, we can safely assume, thinking about exposing an international child sex trafficking operation involving some of the world’s most powerful people when she wrote this poem in the 1860s, but its wisdom nonetheless applies to the here and now:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—

Are we, as a nation, finally ready to believe the survivors? Will each individual candle generate the light needed to penetrate the abysmal Epsteinian darkness? Have the facts dazzled gradually enough that we are no longer in danger of being blinded by them? Can we, at last, grab hold of the hem of the garment and unveil the Truth?

“This secrecy is not protection,” Chauntae Davies said. “It’s complicity. And as long as the truth is buried, justice will remain out of reach.”

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Photo credit: Amherst College. Emily Dickinson daguerreotype 1847. In original case.

The transcript of Wednesday’s press conference is here.