Photo by Joe Flood via Flickr
When the first woman emerged from the mists of time to point the finger at Bill Cosby, claiming that he had drugged and raped her, I saw the writing on the wall.
We were now going to take seriously accusations of bad behavior made, in many cases, decades after the fact.
This coincided with an ongoing investigation into the Catholic church, which was dealing with its own priest-pedophilia problem,which created a perfect storm of clients for people like Gloria Allred who survive on the tears of alleged victims.
We all know what happened to Cosby. He was convicted of sexual assault after a torturous journey to the courthouse, and then that conviction was overturned because he’d been denied due process.
I wrote many columns about that lack of due process in both the Cosby and the Catholic Church contexts, which earned me a lot of hate mail and the moniker “rape apologist.”
To this day, some people have never forgiven me for standing with the accused as opposed to the accusers.
It’s no surprise, then, that I was a vocal critic of the MeToo movement, which was like Cosby on steroids, resembling more the witch hunts of Salem, Massachusetts, than any legitimate inquiry into wrongdoing.
As I wrote on Facebook, Christine Blasey Ford waged a dog-and-pony show against now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh because of repressed “memories” of people laughing at her as the former prep school student sexually assaulted her at a party in Maryland.
That was the most high profile of the attacks, but there were many others from grown women who seized the opportunity to claim some amazonian power at the expense of men they didn’t like.
I’m sure that there were some actual cases where victims found their voices and decided that silence was no longer an option.
I am sure that there were, in act, situations where women — and some men — were forced into situations against their will, things that could legally qualify as rape.
But from what I could observe over the years, the vast majority of these cases were brought to dismantle the patriarchy at some macro level, as opposed to seeking real justice for criminal acts.
And far too many of us blinked and said, “OK, I guess we just have to go along or risk being called rape apologists.”
Since I was already wearing that sandwich board, I had no problem in calling foul.
But now we have the Epstein files, and the story is completely flipped. We are no longer talking about women who thought they were abused and mistreated by men who might have had some power differential but who were their age, or slightly older.
Here, we are talking about a man, and his diabolically immoral girlfriend who orchestrated the wholesale violation of scores of young girls, barely pubescent and below the age of consent.
This was rape, pure and simple.
And unlike many of the MeToo self-described victims, these girls, now women, had been making accusations for decades, trying to get someone to listen to them.
Amazingly enough, even during the MeToo moment, no one really did. There were some cases that might have made it into court, and Epstein was convicted of sex crimes, but he skated with a sentence that reflected just how much knowledge he had of the twisted vices among the rich and powerful.
That includes Republicans and Democrats, Catholics and Jews, men and women, princes and commoners, Americans and foreigners.
Jeffrey Epstein’s reach was as wide and as potent as the Medellin drug cartel, and the poison that he administered as lethal.
Donald Trump campaigned on releasing the Epstein files, and endeared himself to the MAGA base with this promise.
Then, once elected, he backtracked for what some consider inexplicable reasons, and others consider self-preservation, and called the whole thing a ”Democratic hoax,” which was a repellent slap in the face to the victims of the predatory Epstein.
Finally, after the pressure became too great and he realized that his own party was going to vote to release the files, the president switched sides in a move that would have made Wrong Way Marshall — the Vikings player who scooped up an opponent’s fumble and ran into the opponent’s end zone — extremely proud.
Regardless of the reason, he did the right thing.
These are not women with a desire to wreak vengeance on chauvinist men. These are not the Christine Blasey Fords who have vague memories of rowdy high school parties.
These are not aspiring actresses going to the hotel rooms of powerful Hollywood moguls.
These were girls. These were children. These were fifteen-year-olds and sixteen-year-olds, promised jobs and instead trafficked in the most horrific manner.
The crime is apolitical, agnostic, transcends class and philosophy, and should be exposed in all of its gory reality. And frankly, it is time.
Evil people have hidden in the shadows, protected by the idea that their power would keep them in those shadows forever.
It’s time to shine the light, so that these victims, real victims, will finally be seen.
And as we approach the Thanksgiving holiday, this is one very important reason to give thanks.
This article originally appeared in the Delco Times.
