The Hearings They Didn't Attend
When the federal record stopped pointing at the other party, the Epstein-files crusaders went home. The absence is the story.
Three hearings this month asked the same question: did credentialed insiders withhold what Americans needed to consent? Democrats showed up for one of them. The empty chairs are the rest of this piece.
On Tuesday, May 12, House Oversight Committee Democrats convened a field hearing in West Palm Beach, Florida — within sight of Mar-a-Lago and the residence where Jeffrey Epstein abused girls for years — to take testimony from survivors. Ranking Member Robert Garcia announced that Democrats were “launching a new phase of the Epstein investigation.”1 Survivors testified under oath. One, identified only as Roza, described being trafficked from Uzbekistan at eighteen and discovering, after the Epstein files were released, that her name appeared in them more than five hundred times.2 Another, Courtney Wild, recounted being recruited at fourteen.3 Representative Summer Lee named what the architecture had produced: “a system that asks survivors to carry the burden of proof, the burden of patience, the burden of pain — while people with wealth and power are given time, protection, and silence.”4
The Democrats were right to hold this hearing. The survivors were right to be heard. The institutional architecture they were describing (and which I have painstakingly documented over the past few months here) — credentialed insiders, federal records withheld, accountability evaded by the very people charged with delivering it — is the right diagnosis, and the right object of public attention.
