The Jeffrey Epstein cover-up is an affront to US democracy

[babylonsister]

The Jeffrey Epstein cover-up is an affront to US democracy
Rebecca Solnit
Democracy means a society and system in which everyone’s rights matter. Rapists count on this being untrue – and Trump is proving them right
Sat 6 Sep 2025 06.00 EDT


Rape is a crime against democracy in the most immediate sense of equality between individuals and the premise that we’re all endowed with certain inalienable rights. Most rapists operate on the premise that they can not only overpower the victim physically, but can do so socially and legally. They count on a system that discounts the voices of victims and only too often cooperates in silencing them, through shame, intimidation, threats, discrediting, the obscene legal instrument known as a nondisclosure agreement and a system too often run by men for men at the expense of women and children. That is to say, rapists count on getting away with it because of a system that hands them power and steals it from their victims. They count on a silencing system. On profound inequality.

Which is what makes rape such a peculiar crime: it is the ritual enactment of the perpetrator’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, buttressed by the circumstances that puts and keeps each of them in those roles. It’s driven by the desire to use sexuality to cause physical and psychic injury, to dominate, to celebrate the rapist’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, to treat another human being as a person without rights, including the right to set boundaries, to say no and to speak up afterward. A society that perpetuates and protects this desire and arrangement is rape culture, and it’s been our culture throughout most of its existence.

snip//

And this attempt to suppress the truth about crimes and silence victims is only too consistent with the Republican party and the Trump administration. The attacks on immigrants, refugees, Black and brown people, women, trans people, the positioning of the administration as above the law with the cooperation of the rogue conservatives of the supreme court: all this is an attempt to roll back not only the democratic gains of the past several decades, but the democratic principles of universal rights and equality under the law embedded in the constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Rendering women second-class or maybe 11th-class citizens again is at the heart of the current rightwing agenda, with its pursuit of criminalization of pregnancy, denial of reproductive rights including access to birth control, the right to choose whether to bear children, and life-saving care for women who have miscarriages or otherwise need a pregnancy terminated. But this is only part of the attack on women. The administration has disproportionately fired Black women from government jobs. 300,000 Black women have left – or been pushed out of – the workforce in the last three months.

more...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/06/epstein-files-rape-crime-trump?fbclid=IwY2xjawMqZT5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHphgBZFMLw-ytqdJ7LEyAWs0ippTFBThnYN-w-eUjsQ0hQyEgWk3tBdRBVF8_aem_tEaky3EtFNqPLM2CykjMig

[marble falls]

1. It steps on victims' access to justice. It further destroys their lives.

[Irish_Dem]

2. Crimes against women by men are acceptable in our society.

80-90% of all crimes against women are committed by males.

No one thinks anything about it.
If 90% of all crimes against men were committed by women
we would all be rounded up and placed into detention camps.

But in our society we take it for granted that boys will be boys, and other nonsensical
excuses.