Claire Wilmot

You know, the status quo sort of rears its head and pushes back against these changes through the processes by which we form our beliefs.

So, yeah, I think it's very difficult to force through structural change.

And I think the backlash to a lot of the structural changes that I think Me Too was pursuing can be seen in the kind of specter of the false rape allegation and the way that those fears were sort of fueled in order to preserve the status quo, because there's a lot of powerful people that benefit from the status quo.

I mean, I can't speak to the specifics of any of the individuals and what they really believed, but I think...

I find it interesting that Epstein was a publicly registered sex offender since the 2008, 2009 conviction.

And many of the people who stayed in his orbit had access to that information.

That information was not hard to find.

Whether they knew that or not, I think, for me, it reflects a sort of willful ignorance.

I think a lot of the people in Epstein's orbit

could have found out more if they truly did not know that his abuse had continued but you know looking further digging further uh that's a choice and i would argue it's it's a political choice about what you do and do not want to know about the powerful people in one's orbit but i find it odd that there was a lot of information on the public record

that people did not seem to take into account when continuing their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

And for me, it suggests that there was a lot of willful blindness going on.

I mean, I hope that the full trove of Epstein files will be released.

I have no idea whether that's likely in the current political climate, but I think it's going to take us so many years to unpack everything that's in them.

There's so many different ways to slice this data, to interrogate the conversations that are being had between some of the world's most powerful people.

And I think we're just really starting to stress the surface when it comes to learning what this archive of material can tell us about the way that power

So I think that Me Too is really successful enforcing through a number of much needed legal reforms across jurisdictions.

So in the U.S., but also in Canada, where I'm from, in the U.K., where I've worked in other developing countries as well, we saw a lot of updates and reforms to legal frameworks, policies, sets of rules.

Those were things that a lot of feminist activists had been demanding for some time.

And my research sort of shows that those are necessary but insufficient reforms.