The release of the Epstein files has been framed as a political and celebrity spectacle. Names are being circulated, reputations debated, and headlines built around who knew what and whom.
But for survivors this moment is not about curiosity or gossip. It’s about recognition and the painful confirmation of what they have experienced and always known.
That powerful privileged people can harm with impunity. That institutions protect abusers, and that survivors are expected to carry the cost.
Jeffrey Epstein did not operate alone, he was part of a world that turns vulnerability into currency. Young woman and girls were trafficked through a network that depended on wealth, silence, and the belief that certain lives don’t matter enough to be defended. When survivors came forward, they were dismissed, discredited, or pressured into settlements that traded truth for survival. Some paid with their lives.
This is not a failure of the justice system, it’s the justice system working exactly as designed and its protection of perpetrators.
I’ve worked with families of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit survivors. I’ve sat with families whose loved ones were ignored when they went missing. I’ve listened to survivors who were criminalized and revictimized instead of protected. What happened on Epstein’s island is not separate from what happens in our communities. It’s the same pattern of violence, just dressed in different clothes.
Trafficking, sexual exploitation, and abuse do not happen in isolation. They happen where poverty, racism, colonialism, sexualized violence, and gender-based violence intersect. They happen when people are displaced, in state care, fleeing violence, or living without protection. They happen when institutions decide some lives are expendable.
Epstein’s victims were not harmed because one man was evil. They were harmed because a system existed that allowed their exploitation to be organized, financed, and hidden.
The obsession with famous names risks obscuring the most important truth: that survivors will never be named, believed, or compensated. That their stories will never trend. That their pain will not be litigated in public and they will continue to live with the trauma and fear while the world moves on.
Survivors do not need more spectacle. They need safety, care, and justice.
That means trauma-informed courts that do not re-victimize people for speaking out. It means accessible counselling and supports. It means housing, income supports, and culturally grounded healing for those who have been trafficked and abused. It means ending the use of non-disclosure agreements to silence those who were harmed or who’ve seen the harm being done. It means real accountability for police, courts, and governments who fail survivors and our most vulnerable.
It also means recognizing how many people go missing because exploitation is allowed to flourish. Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people are overrepresented among those who are trafficked and among those who are never found. Their disappearances are not coincidences, they are part of the same system that made Epstein untouchable for so long.
The Epstein files are not proof that the world is suddenly broken. They are proof that survivors have been telling the truth all along.
The question is not whether more documents will be released. The question is whether we’ll finally build a world where no one is so powerful that they can buy another person’s body and harm them with impunity or without consequence or accountability. That no one is so vulnerable that their suffering can be ignored.
Because every survivor matters.
And the measure of justice is not who is named, but who is finally protected.
By Tammy Desjardins, Indigenous Program Coordinator and Counsellor