Violence against Women: Hate Crime or White Noise?

Melania told the media yesterday that Congress should hold a hearing with Epstein’s victims, of whom, she insists, she was not one.

The survivors were not impressed. Fifteen released a joint statement saying that they’ve already spoken, and it’s not their place to be called to testify again.

The right-wing chatterers were baffled that she put the issue back on the front page of the news. The president was just confused.

Violence against women is so pervasive that it’s often almost invisible. Treating Epstein as a monster helps to maintain the fiction that it’s anomalous.

From that perspective, Mrs. Trump’s press conference makes sense: point to Epstein to avoid pointing to everyone else. And it also makes Mr. Trump’s desperation to keep the files away from the public seem, well, weird.

Trump is on record as calling up Michael Reiter, then chief of the Palm Beach police department, to say “Thank goodness you’re stopping him [Epstein], everyone has known he’s been doing this.” 

But it seems completely out of character.

DoJ investigators believe that Epstein sexually assaulted more than a thousand girls and women during nearly five decades on the prowl. (Students at the Dalton School, where he taught physics and math in 1975 — though he hadn’t graduated from college — said his behavior with female students was “weird” and inappropriate.)

It’s a horrifying number. Epstein is a monster.

But let’s put it in context. The US government estimates that more than 63,000 children are raped or sexually assaulted every year, as well as seven million women and 2.5 million men. Lifetime totals: 60 million women and 20 million men (pdf; pages 8 and 15). 

The perpetrators? 99 percent male. 

Who are they? A non-trivial fraction of the male population.

A review of 78 surveys of more than 25,000 men found that on average, almost 30 percent admitted to having committed sexual violence, and 6.5 percent said they’d ever raped someone. 

Caveat: when 34 men were given a written survey and then interviewed, 100 percent of them turned out to have checked off no on a question about sexual coercion, but later said, well actually, yes. (The article: there are “a significant number of false negatives.”)

Which gets me back to Mr. Melania Knavs,* more commonly known as President Donald Trump.

Despite the reported phone call, Trump has repeatedly claimed he knows nothing about Epstein’s crimes. But he has also admitted to sexual coercion, claiming “women let you” if you’re rich and famous.

Here’s his conversation with Billy Bush, the host of Access Hollywood. It’s been quoted, parodied, and memed so many times it’s almost white noise at this point … but I’m quoting it again anyway.

Trump: You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Bush: Whatever you want.
Trump: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

Asked about those comments, he doubled down: 

If you’re famous, rich or whatever, … if you’re a star … women let you. People who are rich, they tend to do well in a lot of different ways…. It’s been true approximately a million years.

It was true for a very long time that men, and especially wealthy men (by “people,” he means “men”) could rape (they used to call it “seduce”) their household staff with impunity. It remains true that teenage girls are assaulted by their coaches or offered good movie roles in exchange for sex. That some men force sex on their dates, with or without alcohol or roofies. 

Raping your spouse was legal in some states until 1993. (It was legal in all of them until 1975.) Loopholes remain: in several states, if she’s unconscious it doesn’t count as rape.

The data I quoted above about sexual violence? 

Trump ordered ordered it be removed from the US Government’s web sites.

It’s available again only because a judge ordered it restored after a lawsuit.

With a disclaimer:

The Trump Administration rejects gender ideology due to the harms and divisiveness it causes. This page does not reflect reality and therefore the Administration and this Department reject it.

Got that? Data about sexual violence is driven by gender ideology and isn’t real.

Back to the 2006 investigation. Palm Beach police talked to more than a dozen girls who said Epstein abused them and tried to file charges on multiple counts of sex with a minor. But Barry Krischer, the county prosecutor, didn’t believe any of it. Keep in mind, he’s the prosecutor, not a lawyer for the accused. But he thought the girls, as young as 14, were having illegal but consensual sex with Epstein because they wanted money for clothes. 

He didn’t bother actually talking to any of the girls, but he did call a grand jury — unprecedented in this kind of case. He assigned a prosecutor who called the victims prostitutes in front of the jurors, and told the girls testifying that *they* were guilty of crimes.

The jury came back with one count: solicitation of prostitution.

Chief Reiter took the case to the FBI. They investigated. When they brought the case to court in Miami, US District Attorney Alexander Acosta didn’t believe the girls either. He dragged his feet for a year, talking to Krischer and to Epstein’s lawyers, and then cut Epstein a deal — kept secret from the victims — before the feds had even finished their investigation.

Epstein served 13 months. Acosta’s plea deal allowed him to go home every day to work and gave him immunity from further prosecution.

The (mostly) men who remained in touch with him claim they knew nothing of his crimes or, more plausible but still creepy, as Noam Chomsky put it, he’d done time for his crime and had “a clean slate.”

But plenty of people knew about his behavior, and objected to it.

In 2008, Tina Brown, then-editor of Vanity Fair, was invited to a party at Epstein’s place; other guests included the former prince Andrew and Woody Allen. Her response: “What the hell is this — the Predator’s Ball?” 

In 2017, Trump nominated Acosta as Secretary of Labor. His treatment of Epstein came back into the news. Nevertheless, several labor unions endorsed him and the Senate confirmed him. 

Trump’s claims that he knew nothing of Epstein’s crimes sound sketchier and sketchier.

In 2018, Julie K. Brown tracked down the victims, interviewed them, and wrote a series of searing articles for the Miami Herald. The feds reopened the case and arrested Epstein again. Acosta had to resign, finally.

In 2019, Melinda French Gates filed for divorce. Besides the fact that Bill kept chasing female staff members, French Gates objected to Bill’s relationship with Epstein.

In 2020, Trump ran for re-election and lost. It was a pretty decisive defeat, in terms of both the electoral college and the popular vote. But Trump claimed his victory was stolen and encouraged his supporters to storm the capital while electoral votes were being counted.

From here, I’m going to jump over Biden’s entire presidency to Trump’s second term. On his first day back in office, he pardoned everyone convicted of crimes as a result of the January 6 riot, and ordered all pending cases to be dismissed. (Even Vance said this was a bad idea.)

A full dozen of them are back in jail or face charges of child sex crimes or violence towards women: rape, sexual assault, stalking, strangling, and assault.

A couple dozen more are accused or convicted of killing by DUI, building a bomb, death threats, home invasion, forgery, and other violent crimes.

Meanwhile, the media. What they’re not saying: people knew Epstein was repugnant, called his plane the Lolita Express, but still wrote him friendly emails, asked for advice about women, “liked the torture video,” wanted him to help their kid get into college, or find a job or a place to live.

What they are saying: the files, not people’s actions, are causing fall-out, repercussions, chaos. Somehow the files are the monster, and letting them out into the world is the problem.

How would we think differently about violence against women and girls if it were classified as hate crime? Would it make it more visible? Or will it be possible to think about it as hate crime, only when perpetrators and their friends learn to see it and when everyone learns to see women as fully human?

* Trump’s current wife was born Melanija Knavs in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. Somewhere along the line, she changed the spelling of her name. Can she even prove that the Melanija Knavs born in Yugoslavia is the same person as the Melania Knauss who married Donald Trump? Under the SAVE act, could she prove that she is eligible to vote?