Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation on Tuesday forcing the Justice Department to release its files on the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Liz Stein, an Epstein survivor and an anti-trafficking advocate, was at the Capitol when the Epstein bill passed.
“There was a collective sense of joy,” Stein told Here & Now‘s Elissa Nadworny. “When we were at the House, we had no idea what would be coming after. So, it was really just a day that I think we’re all trying to still wrap our heads around.”
5 questions with Liz Stein
What are you hearing from the other victims in this moment?
“I think that many of us have concerns about this. Some of us are feeling a little bit of whiplash. The position that the current administration has taken has been flip-flopping back and forth and back and forth. And so, I think that we are cautiously optimistic about this, but we definitely have feelings about it.”
How has this become politicized?
“Well, I say very frequently that this isn’t a political issue. This has been ongoing throughout five administrations of both political parties. What we’re looking at but what we’re not seeing clearly is that this is a crime and it’s a crime of sex trafficking. We are victims of a crime. These people are predators, and they preyed on young girls and women, and I don’t think that any of us in society, regardless of where our political loyalty lies, could stand for that. And I think that we’re being distracted by making this a political issue when it’s not.”
How did you realize you had been trafficked after Epstein was arrested in 2019?
“I consider myself to be a reasonably well-educated person. I’ve always felt very strongly about women’s rights, but I had misconceptions about what sex trafficking was. And so when Epstein was arrested in 2019, I really didn’t understand. I thought in my mind, I was thinking, ‘But they were my friends. I wasn’t trafficked. I wasn’t a girl in Florida. I wasn’t on the island.’ I knew them in New York. I traveled with them a little, but I didn’t, you know, I didn’t fit with what the media was talking about. And so that left me confused, you know, trying to process what had happened to me. And when I did that, and I actually understood what trafficking was and what it looked like, it was exactly what happened to me. And that made me so angry that I just felt like I had to become a part of the movement.
“When you’re looking at a sex trafficking operation, you have, kind of, three components. You have the pimp or the person who’s supplying the people to be exploited. You have the buyers or the johns or the men who are receiving the services of the people who are being exploited, and you have the people who are being exploited, right? And we’re really our attention’s being refocused because these men — these men who are perpetrators — have these positions of power, and it can be almost unthinkable to us that these people that we respect in society could do these horrible things.”
Do you think the Justice Department will actually release the files?
“I think that we’re going to have to wait and see. So much of this case has been completely unpredictable for us, but I can say that we’re really hopeful and that any time that we move closer to seeing what actually happened, we’re getting closer to having justice.”
What does justice look like to you and the other survivors?
“That’s a question that we get a lot, and it’s a really hard question to answer. I think justice can come in a lot of different forms for us. I think we’ve seen pieces of justice, but ultimately, I think that we all want to see whoever was involved in these crimes be held accountable.”
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Samantha Raphelson produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Catherine Welch. Raphelson also adapted it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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