Chapter 1: 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?
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Chapter 2: How does Claire Wilmot define the 'mechanics of doubt'?
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
When the Me Too movement originally started 20 years ago, it was created in part to force accountability. But you wrote that, quote, the liberal reform that hashtag Me Too produced were not up to that structural task, end quote. What did you mean?
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.
So I think when you look at the ways that women continue to be disbelieved in these kind of small, minute ways, whether it's police exercising their discretionary power about what cases to take on, whether it's a social worker who's deciding whether or not to refer someone to additional supports, those sorts of ways that women are doubted speak
speak to how much work we still need to do at that structural level to disrupt these forms of power, like race, like gender, like class, that shape who has to prove what to who. And so, you know, I don't want to position Me Too as a total failure. I think Me Too did bring a lot of really much needed reforms, but my work is interested in the aftermath of those. How do we take those
and actually make them do the structural work that manifests in our systems of belief. And that's, in some ways, quite a bit harder than changing laws because there's no clear targets.
You found that in some places, reporting of sexual violence went up after Hashtag Me Too, but prosecutions didn't follow. What does that gap tell us about the limits of reform?
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Chapter 3: What insights did Claire gain about belief and disbelief in the context of sexual violence?
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