What We Still Refuse to Say About Epstein
The real system behind abuse isn’t wealth—it’s belief
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by Ellie Leonard, Blue Amp Media Contributing Editor
We’ve spent much of the past 15 months or so learning as a society how to compartmentalize terrible news. Whether it’s wars, or land-grabs, or violent claims of religious and/or colonial rights impeding on human rights, we do our best to use our voices, our money, our platform, our feet, and our numbers, to make some kind of a dent in the compounding problems coming from Washington and predatory “allies” from around the world. And we can’t do it all. Most of us focus in on the area in which we feel we can make the biggest difference. For some that’s ICE and immigration rights. For others it’s combating poverty when food stamps and healthcare are ripped away from the most vulnerable. It’s the importance of local politics and understanding our rights and what we’re really voting for at the end of the day.
For me it’s been the Epstein Files. I don’t know that I necessarily picked that path, but it seems to have chosen me, nearly eaten me up at times, but I still have my head above water and hope that a single thing that I might say or do will make some small difference in the course of this investigation and the lives of those involved.
But as I sit back and look at these files, I can’t help but notice the parallels, things that seem to align with the story of hundreds of girls and a club of wealthy older men.
Before I do one of those “fade to the 1990s” effects, I’d like to share a moment of clarity I had a few months back when talking to a friend, another writer, who has focused on these ideas much longer than I. We both wrote books, hers about growing up in the Church of Christ and following the path of faith through college and relationships, and mine as an evangelical kid, a homeschooler, long hair and the whole bit. I’d written books about what I called “rural narratives”—young girls growing up in isolated small towns where the church shaped their every move. Hers, while fiction, is a little more autobiographical; but I always claimed my characters weren’t based on me. I’d made them up, simple as that. But on the third or four edit you suddenly feel the twinge--I think this is me I’m writing about. Maybe not as drastic. Maybe not as tragic. But this kid is certainly built on a world that I know well.
“It’s purity culture,” she told me. I had no idea what that meant.
We spent the next however many months discussing father-daughter promise rings and dances, oaths of abstinence, no kissing, no hand-holding, no makeup, long skirts, baggy clothes, no sex before marriage, and always, always remember that boys can’t help themselves. It was our job to protect ourselves. I remember being told it was a good idea to wear bulky underwear under dresses, so boys didn’t think I had nothing on. Because of course they were always looking.
To be clear, this didn’t all come from family. I was surrounded by a world that told me a similar story. And with that came another darker side of purity that we now know goes hand-in-hand for most young girls: eating disorders. Not only did girls have to stay young, pure, and sweet, but they couldn’t be overweight either. Beauty mattered. It was our responsibility.
It wasn’t just me. It wasn’t just my friends. It was nearly every Millennial and Gen X, and probably all the girls before that. And with it came the statistics of nearly one in four girls being sexually abused, despite “protecting” themselves by staying sweet, or staying thin, or not holding anyone’s hand.
And try though they might to protect themselves, it wasn’t the girls abusing anyone. Sexual abuse is at the hands of men 92-99% of the time. And yet the responsibility of purity culture very rarely fell into their hands. But when it did, it always turned out badly.
Let’s use the Duggars as an example, a family with 19 kids, long skirts, big hair, conservative values, a legislator father, and a reality TV show. The kids had strict rules about what they could wear or who they could be in a room with. They had chaperoned courtships and couldn’t kiss before marriage. They weren’t allowed to dance, listen to “secular” music, or watch most television shows or movies. They grinned as they did their chores. Michelle Duggar, the mother, smiled proudly, always pregnant, as she pulled another tater tot casserole from their massive oven. Her house was clean, the kids dutifully homeschooled, and everything looked so perfect. TLC paid the Duggars $73,000/episode, upwards of $8 million over the course of the series.
Somewhere along the line their oldest son, Josh, started sexually abusing his sisters. When the little girls told their parents, no one reported it to the police, instead opting for pastoral counseling and more than likely a few NDAs. The girls sued for the police records later, and Josh ended up in prison in 2021 for possessing child sexual abuse material. He won’t be released until 2032.
This year, Josh’s younger brother Joseph was arrested for sexually abusing a 9-year-old girl in 2020. When authorities searched his home, they found locks on the outside of their children’s bedroom doors, leading to the arrest of Joseph’s wife Kendra on four counts of endangerment and four counts of false imprisonment.
The Duggar family are members of the Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP) Church, organized by Bill Gothard, which focuses heavily on submission and obedience from wives and children. IBLP “Operates under a patriarchal model, emphasizing the husband’s authority in the home and viewing marital sexual intimacy as a duty.” Bill Gothard resigned from his role in 2014 after being accused of sexual molestation and harassment by 34 women and children.
In January 2018, one of David and Louise Turpin’s 13 children escaped their home to tell authorities that her siblings were chained to the floor and being starved as punishment. While this is an extreme case, the Turpins practiced something called the “Quiverfull” movement, a conservative sect of evangelical subculture that opposes birth control and promotes traditional gender roles with a heavy dose of patriarchy. They homeschooled their kids, their daughters were told to stay sweet, wear long dresses, and produce as many children as possible. Thankfully authorities showed up in time. David and Louise were sentenced to 25 years to life.
But the biggest thing I see in purity culture within the my own church upbringing, is the coexistence of faith and sexual offense. And it can happen for very different reasons.
As an example, we have the story of hundreds of years of abuse in the Catholic Church. This isn’t a coincidence, or a targeted attack on the faithful. It has more to do with suppression and abstinence in a group of people who were never meant to be abstinent. And unfortunately many priests don the cloth because they’re taught that their sexuality is already a sin.
In Amy Berg’s 2006 documentary Deliver Us from Evil, Catholic priests openly discuss their sexual urges after years of abstinence, and toward the most vulnerable, nearly always children. And with no legal consequences, no mental-health interventions, and ultimately silence and trauma, the stories continued as churches shuffled abusive priests from church to church to avoid scandals, while kids crumpled in the shadows.
In other churches, like my own growing up, people often came for their born-again moment to cure themselves of pedophilic sexual urges. And the church welcomed them, promoting the opportunity to pray away any number of sins. The praying didn’t accompany treatment of any kind, but simply attendance on Sunday or a weekly meet-up group, and men with years of abuse could totally change their lives and walk free and clear of their past.
Except that never happens. And now you’ve dropped a sexual offender in the middle of Sunday school, and youth group, and unsupervised kids’ choir rehearsals, and no one knows. And ultimately a kid gets hurt, someone cries foul, and the cycle starts again. Or in my memories, the mother and child leave, and the offender stays, fully supported by the clergy, the congregation, and their friends on the worship team.
This leads me back to the Epstein Files, and why wealthy men keep getting arrested or fired from their jobs for insider trading, or tax evasion, or sharing classified information, but never for abusing little girls. Because we still can’t bring ourselves to say that we’ve stepped out of purity culture, where girls are responsible for their own little bodies in a world of powerful men. It’s girls who should pay attention to where they walk, the way they walk, what they wear, how they react, what message they send with their body language, the amount of makeup they do or don’t wear, if they work in a male-dominated field, if they feel uncomfortable and speak up, if they’re too flirtatious, or too stoic, or walk around with “resting bitch face” instead of a wide smile. Are they heavy? Did they lose too much weight? Are they taller than their partner? Do female athletes look too masculine? Should we check for reproductive organs just to make sure? Are they a single mother? Why couldn’t they hold down a husband? Did they get pregnant again? Why so many kids? Why didn’t they choose to have kids at all? Why don’t they stay at home with their kids? Why don’t they get a job and support their family? Why do they want to be paid the same amount? What if they have to go on maternity leave?
I could go on, but my word count is getting a little out of control. In summary, purity culture is often the reason for the season behind a story about powerful men and children from poor homes who would do almost anything for $200 because it’s stability, and food, and rent. Yet we blame the girls for prostitution. We blame them for sex. We blame them for their bodies, their choices, their jobs, their looks, their mistakes. And yet the worst we can do on their behalf is take away a Prince’s pretend title, force a few CEOs into early retirement to spend on their yachts and private islands, and sniff around 8000 acres that 30 years later we can’t be bothered to search for a few dead kids.
Ellie is an author, editor, and owner of Red Pencil Transcripts, and works with filmmakers, podcasts, and journalists all over the world. She lives with her family just outside of New York City.
The criminal justice system is multi-tiered affair. There's one for the rich. One for whites. And one for property owners. Women and minorities need not apply.
It is not just wealthy and powerful men who participate in this abuse. As emphasized by Jackson Katz, "average" men rarely turn down an opportunity to take advantage of their male privilege to sexually assault women and girls. For example, date rape, fraternity behavior, the use of rape as a gang initiation rite, and the Pelicot rape case in France.
This is a good opportunity to come out in force for Denim Day on Wed. April 29, an international day to recognize that it is never a victim's fault when she is abused. https://denimday.org/