Some stories never stop haunting us.

For me, the Jeffrey Epstein case is one of them. It hurts my heart to think about it. I’m wrecked by the thought of all of Epstein’s victims—the teenagers as young as my Helen; the little girls in the child-porn that monster collected; all those brave adult women who now must carry the darkness for the rest of their lives.

I’m also heartbroken for our country. Every time this story resurfaces, I feel the same chill: how much power it took to build that operation, and how much complicity among some of the most powerful people in the world was required to sustain it.

But like all stories that dominate our news cycles for a time, a distance seeps in. Unlike Epstein’s victims, unlike Epstein himself and his henchwoman Ghislaine Maxwell, we can’t live in that darkness. So we transform the evil into something we can deal with, or use, or even laugh about. Epstein the moral monster becomes a political pawn in death. Or an argument in a cultural debate. Or a joke—we turn the darkness into black humor. That’s what people do, maybe what people have to do with crimes this notorious and this terrible.

When I spoke with Arick Fudali, one of the lead attorneys representing eleven of Epstein’s survivors, he put it plainly. “He’s the most notorious predator of this generation,” he said. “He devastated countless women’s lives. And then he became a meme.”

That’s the tragedy of this moment: how something so monstrous has been flattened into punchlines and hashtags, how the enormity of it—the pain, the corruption, the betrayal—keeps slipping through the cracks of our attention span.

Arick Fudali has spent sixteen years representing victims of sexual abuse and trafficking. I can’t imagine how he does it—I asked him about that in our conversation. He loves this work, hard as it may be; it takes a special character to what he does.

In this case, he told me, it’s the survivors who keep him going, the women who were betrayed by so many for so long.

“The survivors were wronged by the DOJ, by the FBI, by law enforcement, for decades,” he told me. The original Epstein investigation began in Florida way back in the 1990s. “And when they finally caught him,” Fudali said, “they let him go.”

That was the infamous 2008 plea deal, the one signed off on by then–U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta. Epstein received a slap on the wrist, served minimal time, and went right back to his private jets and mansions. And his criminal conduct.

And now, six years after Epstein’s death, there is a massive effort to conceal the full scope and facts of his crimes.

“He’s the first criminal I’ve ever seen,” Arick said, “to get special privileges beyond the grave.”

We talked about the Epstein files, the thousands of pages of emails and correspondence that the Trump administration promised to release—and never did.

“Something happened,” Fudali told me. “People don’t hide things for no reason. The only people in America who don’t want those files released are the Trump administration and a handful of senators. Everyone else — MAGA rallies, anti-Trump rallies — they all want the same thing. Release the files.”

And he’s right. I’ve been saying for a while that full disclosure on Epstein’s crimes cuts across party lines more than almost any other issue. It’s one of the few points of national unity left.

But beyond politics, the deeper betrayal is of the victims. The young teens and girls now grown into women (those who survived), and who have carried this horror for decades.

Fudali described what they live with: fear, guilt, shame, and the endless media replays that keep Epstein’s face—and their trauma—alive.

“Some of my clients still think they see him outside their window,” he said. “He used fear and control as weapons.”

And then there’s the possibility, still real in the survivors’ minds, that Ghislaine Maxwell — Epstein’s longtime accomplice, now serving time in a minimum-security prison — could walk free if Donald Trump decides to commute her sentence.

“If that happens,” Fudali said, “you can’t describe him as anything but pro–sex trafficker. This is the one thing left and right can agree on — that child sex trafficking is evil. If he pardons her, there’s no middle ground. You either support that, or you don’t.”

It’s hard to fathom that, after all these years, justice still feels so far away. But Fudali’s clients keep fighting for what they can still get: exposure, accountability, and closure.

“Release the files,” he said. “Expose the people who were in Epstein’s orbit, who enabled him, who looked away. Hold them accountable. Let these women finally close the book on this.”

That’s what justice looks like now — not revenge, but the truth.

Because as Fudali put it, “Epstein is still being protected. He’s dead, and he’s still being protected.”

That line stayed with me. Because this awful case is not about Jeffrey Epstein. It’s about us.

Can a nation that prides itself on equal justice under law achieve justice in a case where where money, power, and the deepest depravity intersect?

Let’s hope we at least take the first step. Release the files. It won’t change everything. But it might change enough.

— Terry