On the Epstein Files

because silence is how rot survives

I’ve been carrying a grief I couldn’t quite name. It’s lingered quietly like a hum beneath everything. I couldn’t locate it until the other night when I held my daughter a little longer than usual. I felt it then and it struck me with clarity: This world does not care for her.

Worse, it is arranged and organized to harm her.

Since the latest batch of the Epstein files dropped like a bomb into our consciousness, I’ve been suspended between two instincts: stay informed or stay sane. I don’t want to look away, and I also know how fragile the psyche is in the face of this kind of evil.

So I read, but carefully. I refuse to click on the images. I skim, but I try not to descend because the few times I’ve gone too deep, my mind would not let me go. The emails and images replay themselves—so grotesque, you wonder if it could all be real. Grown men—powerful, connected, influential men—most of whose names have been redacted, of course, writing about bringing their “little girls” to meet Epstein. Joking about “the littlest one being naughty last night.” This line haunts me, and I hate even typing it. It feels like some sort of violation, and yet, something in me tells me they must be spoken because silence is how rot survives. Silence has always been the accomplice of abuse.

Some will refuse to engage because it’s too dark, too grotesque, too destabilizing. It makes the ground beneath our institutions feel less solid. But that is exactly what needs to happen because if we do not look, if we do not reckon, then what? Evil not only thrives most where it is politely ignored, but we also participate in the very conditions that allow exploitation to persist undisturbed. Reckoning is painful, but it is the only path toward repair.

What intensified my grief was watching people begin to trace connections between the names in the files and powerful corporate leaders. When conversations online linked individuals associated with Epstein’s network to executives tied to companies like Lifetouch—the nation’s largest school photography company—the proximity of it all felt suffocating. Kind of like when I began to reckon years ago with the way colonialism and the church are one and the same. It is paradigm-shifting.

These are not shadowy figures operating in some distant underworld; these are institutions embedded in our children’s everyday lives. The machinery is not abstract, for Christ’s sake, it smiles in school hallways.

Then reports surfaced linking Limited Too to Epstein’s orbit, and I’m suddenly thirteen again, walking into that glittering store at the mall, sequins and lip gloss and bright girlhood everywhere. How many of us moved through these spaces believing we were safe? How many of us were taught to trust the brand, the smile, the familiar logo? When you sit with this too long, your body starts to protest. A sense that the ground is not as solid as you thought.

This is the grief I’ve been holding. Not only did men do monstrous things. We have always known men do monstrous things. What devastates me is the architecture that protects them, the networks of wealth and influence that insulate them, the way power circulates among the same names while children pay the cost. And no, this isn’t new. I am not “surprised.” And yet—I am, because I refuse to let my spirit grow dull to the absurdity of injustice. Even if the information isn’t new, I don’t want to not feel this ache. This is the truest part of my humanity. It is what reminds me that I am alive. That I am awake.

Our daughters move through a world structured by men who trade in innocence while speaking the language of family values, and it is beyond grotesque. It is demonic.

I know there are people who bristle at the word demonic. They worry that naming something demonic shifts the blame away from flesh-and-blood actors, from policies and boardrooms and signatures on contracts, and relocates it to some vague, spiritual elsewhere. I understand that concern. The last thing I want is spiritual bypassing, the kind that shrugs and says, “Well, sinners gonna sin,” as if exploitation were inevitable weather.

That is not what I mean.

When I use the word demonic, I’m not excusing men or systems. I’m trying to name the depth of the rot. I’m reaching for language big enough to hold the reality that this is more than a few “bad apples”—it’s something embedded, normalized, woven into the architecture of what we call success and stability. It’s evil that has learned to wear a suit, to draft policy, to fund campaigns.

This is where my mind goes when I think about Ephesians 6: the call to put on the “armor of God” has so often been reduced to private piety, but the passage speaks of resisting the “schemes of the devil,” which it immediately describes as rulers, authorities, powers governing this present darkness. The struggle, it says, is not merely against flesh and blood, but against forces in the unseen realms.

And these forces are not disembodied ghouls floating above us. They are systems, structures, ideologies, economic arrangements, theological narratives—real mechanisms that protect the powerful and grind the vulnerable into silence. The unseen realm is not somewhere far away; it’s the spiritual undercurrent animating what looks perfectly ordinary on the surface.

And yes, spiritual bypassing deserves to be called out. Sometimes the truth is so grotesque, so destabilizing, that we would rather theologize it than confront it. I have watched Christians deflect by saying that focusing on “darkness” will not help their “sanctification,” that only “following Christ” will. But since when does following Christ mean averting our eyes from suffering? Since when does discipleship require emotional detachment from the wounded? The Christ I read about moves toward lepers, toward hemorrhaging women, toward the demonized and dispossessed. He does not protect his inner peace by ignoring their pain. He looks darkness straight in the face and names it.

I remember the responses when widespread sexual abuse was exposed within the SBC. I hear echoes of it now: “Everyone needs redemption.” On the surface, that sounds orthodox, but it collapses under scrutiny. Because when powerful people harmed others—especially in systemic, institutional ways—Jesus did not wave it away with a reminder that we all fall short. He confronted and he rebuked and he overturned tables in the temple when exploitation was baptized as religion.

What unsettles me is how easily some Christians become passive when the men in question are powerful, charismatic, or useful. And then I remember David.

I remember how his story is told.

Yes, he committed adultery, we say, but he was also gentle—he took care of sheep! And he was brave—he slayed (slew?) giants! C’mon, he was “a man after God’s own heart!” We linger over his poetry and his repentance. We soften the edges of his violence. We call it a “moral failure,” as though it were an impulsive mistake rather than an abuse of royal power.

And of course, there’s Bathsheba. For centuries, she’s been cast as a temptress, as if a woman bathing—while purifying herself according to the law—were an invitation. The text tells us David saw her and sent for her and took her. This was not consensual adultery between equals; it was a king summoning a subject. It was coercion. It was rape.

When she became pregnant, David did not confess. He orchestrated the death of her husband through calculated political manipulation: he used his power to ensure that the man he’d wronged would die on the battlefield. That is not a lapse in judgment; it’s systemic violence enacted from the highest place of power. And the consequences did not end with a psalm of repentance. Violence multiplied within his own household. David’s daughter Tamar is sexually assaulted and receives no justice from her father. Her brother seeks vengeance by replicating violence. The cycle continues to spiral because this is what happens when abuse is minimized, and power goes unchecked: it becomes culture. It becomes normal. It becomes the way things are.

Yet David’s leadership is praised, his repentance celebrated, while the women in the story—image bearers of the divine—are reduced to narrative devices, collateral damage in a tale about a flawed but favored king.

This pattern is ancient, and it is painfully contemporary. The ones who suffer most are not abstractions; they are girls. Girls with names and laughter and futures. Girls with gifts and callings and untapped brilliance. They are not plot points in a redemption arc for powerful men. They are not vessels for male desire or theological lessons about forgiveness. They are image bearers. They are children, and it is better for a stone to be hung around your neck and be drowned in the bottom of the lake then to cause one of them to fall into sin, Jesus said.

When I call this demonic, I am naming the way violence against the vulnerable is normalized, sentimentalized, even spiritualized. I am naming the theology that protects kings and blames girls. I am naming the systems that absorb abuse and continue functioning as if nothing has happened.

To follow Christ is not to sanitize these stories. It is to tell the truth about them. It is to stand where he stands—against the misuse of power, against the exploitation of bodies, against the quiet arrangements that keep predators comfortable.

So yea, I’m grieving. Not just the world my precious, strong, brilliant daughter was born into, the one I feel almost helpless to protect her from, but I am grieving my own inner child. The way she wasn’t protected either. And I’ve learned something about grief: it can either hollow us out or clarify us. I do not want to become numb. I do not want to become conspiratorial. I do not want to drown in horror. I want to stay awake. I want enough of us awake that power begins to tremble. Because only when enough of us care—truly care—will something shift. I don’t know what that shift looks like yet.

But I know this: my daughter deserves a world that does not prey on her innocence and call it business. And if grief is the doorway into that fight, then I will walk through it with my eyes open and my heart heavy.