The sprawling scandal over President Donald Trump’s refusal to release the files surrounding accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein exploded back into the national conversation on Nov. 12 following the discovery of an email written by Epstein that said Trump “knew about the girls.” What followed was a frenzy that dwarfed any of Trump’s many first-term scandals.
The media understandably lost its mind, generating a tidal wave of think pieces and hot takes to feed the public’s surging interest in the Epstein files. But some of those pundits should have kept their mouths shut.
That’s especially true of former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who took the occasion to embark on a disgusting and disgraceful rant in which she attempted to argue that Epstein wasn’t definitionally a pedophile because he preferred 15-year-old girls to 5-year-olds. Blech.
Right-wing loudmouths like Kelly are more than willing to sell their souls in a frantic effort to insulate Trump from the growing Epstein fallout. That isn’t just a moral disgrace: It also causes deep and lasting harm to the many victims of child sex abuse who point to Kelly’s callous comments as an example of why so many victims choose to remain silent. Last week, I had the opportunity to speak to two of those victims. Their stories were heartbreaking, but their courage should prompt a moral reckoning among the pundit class.
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First let’s take a look at why Kelly’s comments were so harmful. It isn’t just that her remarks minimize the violence and sadism of Epstein’s sex trafficking: She’s also fundamentally wrong on the law. Kelly described Epstein’s teenage victims as the “barely legal type,” but that’s nonsense. There isn’t a single state in America where the age of consent is 15. Those children weren’t “barely legal” women engaging in sex with an older man. They were children who were raped by a predator who leveraged his power to abuse them.
As the mother of a 14-year-old girl herself, Kelly surely knows better.
But, as Kelly said, “he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds.” This is what passes for morality in the broken landscape of today’s Republican Party. The same people who once condescendingly accused Democrats of being dangerous moral relativists are now comfortable drawing an imaginary line between abusing an 8-year-old and abusing a 15-year-old. It’s a level of moral bankruptcy we’ve rarely seen in the history of American politics, and it’s an indication of a deep and highly developed rot at every level of the GOP.
What’s more, sex trafficking is a crime regardless of the age of the victim involved. It’s as much a crime to traffick a 30-year-old or an 80-year-old as it is a teenager, and describing Epstein’s criminal enterprise as nothing more than his personal sexual preference erases the real horror of what he and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell were doing.
It’s easy to forget that what pundits view as political sport actually involves real people like Hannah, a woman from Ohio who called in to the Sirius XM show “Tell Me Everything with John Fugelsang” while I was guest hosting on Nov. 12. Like at least 24,000 Americans in 2024, Hannah was the victim of sex trafficking when she was younger and had remained quiet about her trauma for years—in part because of victim-blaming, rapist-excusing rhetoric pumped into the culture by pundits like Kelly.
“This is happening in every single state, every city and every town. This is not a new problem, we just didn’t call it human trafficking. We called it prostitution, hooking, and hoeing,” Hannah told me. “Nobody thinks it’s a problem, they look at us as women and god forbid teenagers who think we did it for ourselves. They talk about teenage prostitution. There is no such thing. That is a victim.”
In a country where over one-third of Americans allow pro-Trump partisanship to blind them to the suffering of their own neighbors, as Kelly has, victims in need of support often feel it would be less traumatic to simply keep quiet. That’s especially true in families dominated by MAGA fanatics, where a cry for help can often be met with judgment and blame.
“There are MAGA people out there, if this happened to their niece, they wouldn’t care,” Hannah said. “There are people who blame their own flesh and blood because people think they were just prostitutes who wanted this.”
I heard a similar story from Gena, a woman who called into “The Dean Obeidallah Show” when I was guest hosting on Nov. 13. Holding back tears, Gena described how she had only come to realize years later that she had once been raped by a much older man. At the time she had viewed herself as a complicit actor in the abuse, even blaming herself.
“Women are afraid to admit that they’ve been subjected to this in their lives,” Gena told me. “I don’t understand the divisiveness that’s going on. People don’t care about each other … they care more for their pets than they do for their neighbors.”
When women in America feel less valued than the family dog, too often the end result is a cycle of self-harm and self-hate that ends in preventable death. Hannah shared with me the story of a friend who survived a rape only to be dismissed when she came forward. After struggling for years with the trauma, Hannah’s friend succumbed to a drug overdose.
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Hannah’s friend is just one of too many similar stories. Virginia Giuffre, perhaps the most visible of Epstein’s alleged child victims, took her own life in April after years of attacks on her story and character by conservative Trump defenders.
Carolyn Andriano, who was only 14 when Epstein allegedly trafficked her, also died of an overdose her mother links to the trauma she endured. Now her loved ones are left to process that emotional chasm while pundits like Kelly use their platform to defend her daughter’s victimizer.
People like Kelly can’t recover from the advanced state of moral decay their indefensible comments represent. But Congress can seize this opportunity to pursue justice and accountability not just for Epstein’s victims, but for the growing number of sexual abuse victims who are afraid to speak out for fear of rousing the anger of powerful media figures like Kelly.
Releasing the Epstein files is a great place to start.
