The reckoning over Jeffrey Epstein isn’t finished
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What chilling pattern did Claire Wilmot uncover in the Epstein files?
Pam Bondi is out as Attorney General. Millions of Epstein-related documents are now public, and the names of the powerful people in his orbit are finally out in the open. You might think the reckoning is over. You'd be wrong. Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Cody Godwin in for Dana Taylor. Today is Friday, April 10th, 2026. My next guest read through the Epstein files seeking an answer to the question of accountability. What she found instead was a disturbing pattern of repeated attempts to discredit the victims while letting the rich and powerful off the hook for enabling Epstein's behavior to continue for so long unimpeded. Why? Joining me to share her insights on this is Claire Wilmont, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Claire, it's great to have you on the excerpt. Thanks so much for having me. In an op-ed you recently published in The New York Times, you wrote about a phenomenon you saw over and over again in the Epstein files. You called it, quote, the mechanics of doubt, end quote. What did you mean here?
So I was looking through the Epstein files to try to understand how these powerful men were responding to Me Too in real time. So my academic background looks at the aftermath of seemingly progressive legal reforms, specifically around gendered violence. and tries to see what's happening in the wake of those reforms on a sort of practical level. So how are people being believed and disbelieved when they go to report a crime at police stations, but also, you know, the other places that they might talk about what's happened to them. So yeah, my work follows sort of how doubt functions and how doubt can kind of derail those cases, either before they enter the criminal legal system or through the criminal legal process.
So I wanted to see, you know, how were women being believed, disbelieved, doubted in the Epstein files? And so I was looking for references to whether or not women were being called liars, how the testimony of Epstein's victims were being undermined. But through that process, I found some very interesting correspondences between Epstein and his vast networks of allies. Where they were basically responding to a number of high-profile Me Too cases and trying to sort of sow seeds of doubt around the testimonies of all survivors that were coming forward during this period.
For the record, are false reports of rape at all common?
No, they're very, very rare. You know, like plane crashes, they're an extremely unusual event that ends up attracting a huge amount of press attention. But they make up a very, very small proportion of overall reports.
As you said, false allegations are statistically rare, but they still seem to carry outsized cultural weight. Why do you think that narrative is so powerful?
It's a really good question. Yeah. And the short answer is that I don't know. My work asks what doubt and disbelief tell us about different forms of structural power. So I'm interested in what you can learn about the persistence of patriarchy, of racism, of class oppression through these kind of moments of doubt and disbelief. So, you know, I think when it comes to social movement, structural change is really hard and it takes a really long time. And so I think what we're seeing with the outsized attention that these false reports garner in the media and also in sort of, you know, everyday discourse is. is this sort of resistance to the kinds of structural change that a lot of these movements are seeking to bring about.
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.
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