Editor’s note: This story includes mention of sexual violence or assault. Resources are available here.
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This week, Congress voted almost unanimously to compel the Justice Department to release all of its Jeffrey Epstein files. The bill, called The Epstein Files Transparency Act, would require Attorney General Pam Bondi to make available every unclassified document, communication and investigative record related to the convicted sex offender.
This vote came on the heels of the more than 20,000 pages released by the House Oversight Committee last week. These documents are from the Epstein estate, not the federal investigative files, which remain undisclosed, but the media frenzy around these papers was immediate. Emails claiming that President Donald Trump, who signed legislation Wednesday to allow the justice department to release files related to Epstein, “knew about the girls” and was a “dog that hasn’t barked” have become a few of the sensational headlines flooding our screens this week.
What I don’t understand is why each piece of evidence released is still treated as shocking information. Women have been telling us this for years.
Survivors have repeatedly testified about what Epstein and Trump have done, who was there and how the system enabled these men to consistently evade consequences. Yet every time the public is presented with a new email, birthday card or photo of the two, it’s framed as if we’re witnessing a groundbreaking revelation, rather than the same story survivors have courageously recounted for decades.
It’s a pattern we've seen before: a stray piece of evidence resurfaces, the headlines explode and the cycle resets. Each time, the media narrative centers on the documents, not the people. The problem with this is that the implication is always the same; we finally have something tangible to go on, as though testimony alone wasn’t enough.
But testimony is evidence.
The refusal to accept it is part of the failure that enables predatory men to continue to evade consequences. When we demand additional “proof” beyond survivors’ accounts, it reveals a systemic cultural belief that women’s words are inherently less credible and less objective than documents or data produced by the very systems that failed them. This public and political obsession with “proving” these claims doesn’t strengthen justice; it reinforces the idea that survivors’ voices are insufficient until validated by institutions that historically ignored them, which contributes to a broader, ingrained unwillingness to trust survivors’ reports the first time they speak.
One such survivor is Annie Farmer. Annie Farmer and her sister Maria made the earliest known reports of abuse by Epstein to the NYPD and the FBI in 1996, under the Clinton administration. Maria Farmer is currently suing the federal government, accusing it of negligence and “failing to protect victims.”
Both sisters appeared in a video with many other survivors before the vote in the House, demanding that Congress release all investigative files on convicted sex traffickers. In this video, Annie Farmer asked Congress to "please remember that these are crimes that were committed against real humans, real individuals.” She went on to say “This is not a political issue. This has been going on for decades,"
We cannot reduce this story to another partisan spectacle, especially considering that considering the House and Senate voted almost unanimously to release them. The delay in releasing the Epstein files isn’t a Republican problem or a Democrat problem. It’s decades of institutional protectionism, across multiple administrations of both parties. The theme that has stretched across administrations is leaders are more concerned with preserving their own reputations than with transparency with the American people and securing justice for the women harmed.
Survivors at IU often feel the same skepticism and institutional hesitation as Epstein’s accusers. According to the most recent Campus Climate Survey, in 2019, nearly 20% of survivors who did not report “feared not being believed,” or that “others would harass me or react negatively towards me.”
Alarmingly, almost a third of non-reporting survivors thought “nothing would be done in response.”
To combat this, the most immediate and tangible action we should take is simple: take survivors seriously when they speak. When we take it upon ourselves to make survivors feel seen and heard, we open the conversation for more survivors to come forward. In the long run, this makes IU safer for everyone.
While pushing for complete transparency is crucial, we can’t let ourselves get so caught up in the political spectacle of document releases that we forget the women who spoke up first and were ignored. Real accountability will not come from a memo, an email chain or a grainy photocopy buried in a congressional PDF dump decades after the atrocities were committed. Real accountability begins with taking survivors seriously the first time they speak. When we fixate on “proving” what survivors have already testified to, we reinforce a culture that demands their pain to be repeatedly and externally validated before it matters.
The files only serve to confirm what has been in front of us all this time.
Ainsley Foster (she/her) is a senior studying Elementary Education.
