As prominent names dominate the headlines following the recent release of 3.5 million pages from the Epstein files, the voices of its victims have largely gone unheard.
News reports document that Epstein victimized at least 1,000 women and children, but their search for justice has been hindered by a system that tends to treat them as “problems to be managed” rather than victims to be protected.
Justice remains a myth
The problem is much bigger than just the Epstein network, and the legal response is staggeringly inadequate.
“More than one million people are trafficked annually,” said Pilar Marrero, a journalist and author, at an American Community Media (ACoM) briefing about the Epstein files, on Feb. 13, 2026, according to a report by anti-trafficking organization Hope for Justice. The majority are young women and girls,” but almost 99% of sex trafficking cases are not brought to prosecution.
“When victims did speak out… not only were they retaliated against, but they saw that their powerful predators… nothing happened to them. And so, justice is gonna just be a myth.”
Jacquelyn Aluotto, Co-Founder and President of No Trafficking Zone
Dr. Michele Goodwin, Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy at Georgetown University, noted that this injustice is rooted in a historic and ongoing “connection between power, violence, and the silencing of people who have been sexually assaulted.”
Many survivors do not self-identify as victims due to intense psychological manipulation and shame of being exploited, which prevents them from coming forward.
This silencing was evident in the recent release of the Epstein documents, where the Justice Department exposed the names and images of many survivors.
“This is absolutely shocking and inconsistent with what would be the rule of law,” Goodwin said.
She explained that American courts prioritized male harmony over the safety of women and children for centuries, adding that “what was unharmonious to American courts was girls being able to get justice.”
Despite Epstein’s survivors’ early attempts to seek justice—Maria Farmer had contacted the New York Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, offering to share what she knew about Mr. Epstein in 1996—no formal investigation was launched following their reports.
Jacquelyn Aluotto, Co-Founder and President of No Trafficking Zone, reiterated that women are not listened to or taken seriously in sex trafficking cases.
“I think that not only are these women not taken seriously, but I think in the past, agencies haven’t worked together to understand [the crime],” she added.
Aluotto pointed out that the problem isn’t just that survivors aren’t heard, it’s that even when they are, the system still fails to do anything about it.
“When victims did speak out… not only were they retaliated against, but they saw that their powerful predators… nothing happened to them. And so, justice is gonna just be a myth.”
Virginia Giuffre, one of the principal accusers of Epstein and Prince Andrew, and an advocate for sex trafficking victims, became the first of the survivors to give up her anonymity and describe her experiences in 2011.
In February 2022, Prince Andrew reached a financial settlement with Giuffre through their lawyers. He did not admit any wrongdoing and still denies her claims that he had sex with her, that Jeffrey Epstein trafficked her to him, or that he ever met her at all. Giuffre died by suicide on 25 April 2025.
Exploiting Vulnerability
The vulnerability to trafficking is often rooted in the intersection of poverty and exploitation, hugely affecting marginalized groups such as homeless youth and those aging out of the foster care system. Prior sexual trauma often increases this vulnerability, essentially marking individuals as targets for predators who use grooming tactics to build trust.
“So many young women, myself included, have been criticised for returning to Epstein’s lair even after we knew what he wanted from us. How can you complain about being abused, some have asked, when you could so easily have stayed away?” Giuffre wrote in Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice.
“But that stance discounts what many of us had been through before we encountered Epstein, as well as how good he was at spotting girls whose wounds made them vulnerable.”
Traffickers systematically identify and weaponize unique vulnerabilities, tricking victims with false promises of help or fake job offers.
For many, the nightmare begins in familiar environments; Courtney Litvak, a survivor trafficked at age 17 and held captive for 3 years, said at the briefing, “It began at my very own high school.”
In Texas alone, 55% of survivor leaders reported being first groomed or recruited through their schools. In Litvak’s case, her school was “more concerned with liability versus accountability, and they covered up these crimes and cared more about protecting varsity athletes and their reputation.”
Within these school pipelines, traffickers utilize peer-on-peer exploitation, sometimes paying students a finder’s fee to turn over classmates to organized crime networks, Litvak and Aluotto explained. Once trapped, their sense of self is slowly stripped away.
“How can a victim or survivor be focused at all on their education when they are in what’s called survival mode?” asked Litvak, also a former member of the US Advisory Council to Combat Human Trafficking.
Aluotto spelled out the psychological toll: “The goal of a trafficker and a predator is: If I can completely dismantle your identity and turn your identity into what I want, I can control you.”
“Our clients are calling us and telling us they’re afraid to report crimes against them. They’re afraid to be on the street at all.”
Carmen McDonald, Executive Director of the Survivor Justice Center
The Burden of Immigrant Survivors
The shame and stigma attached to trafficking make female victims suffer in isolation, noted Nairruti Jani in a study, asking, “Why don’t we hear from Asian Indian victims of trafficking in the United States?”
Between 2015 and 2017, approximately 800 workers on temporary visas were trafficked from South Asia; the majority were women navigating the intersection of language hurdles, caste-based biases, and the pressure to maintain a “model minority” image.
The cultural paradox of subjugation often makes human trafficking an unintended outcome of immigration and human smuggling from the region, she writes.
Immigrant survivors of sex trafficking face a unique set of barriers—from not knowing what being trafficked means to the weaponization of their legal status—preventing them from seeking justice or leaving their exploiters.
Carmen McDonald, Executive Director of the Survivor Justice Center, explained that in many instances, predators with significant social capital turn the legal system against those they exploit by filing false police reports for coerced crimes or by withholding the survivor’s identity documents to prevent them from fleeing.
For example, her organization encounters situations where a trafficker might make a police report against a survivor for drug use that was coerced, or other crimes that they may have committed as a result of the trafficking.
“There’s always the fear of arrest, and that leads to the coercion surrounding folks that are trafficked,” she said. “If a survivor is discarded. But then reaches back out to the person who trafficked them, the [trafficker] may file a restraining order against them. If a survivor speaks out, we see cases where they can get sued for defamation. These all have chilling effects on survivors fleeing or trying to find safety.”
Undocumented survivors are paralyzed by the fear of deportation.
“Our clients are calling us and telling us they’re afraid to report crimes against them,” McDonald added. “They’re afraid to be on the street at all.”
These systemic barriers and the complexity of the law prevent survivors from finding safety. Those who do not speak English as a first language also struggle more to convey the subtle nuances of their exploitation to investigators, especially when a city lacks an interpreter for their specific dialect.
Legal remedies like the T visa exist to protect immigrant survivors, but many remain unaware of their rights while facing a reality where “immigration laws are changing… monthly, daily, weekly, by the minute,” she said.
“There is no such thing as a perfect victim” – Courtney Litvak
Dr. Goodwin pointed out that the prosecutors are looking for evidence— such as a police report filed, a rape kit exam— from the survivors, creating a legal system that often demands they act as their own investigators.
“Well, what 6-year-old…10 year old, 14-year-old filing a police report?” she said. “Imagine the 14-year-old or the 15-year-old who had been working at a very prestigious place, like Mar-a-Lago, and then recruited from there over to Jeffrey Epstein’s place doing these massages, and then sexually assaulted. There is no blueprint for a child in terms of what it is that they need to do to collect the kind of evidence that is going to be necessary for police and prosecutors later.”
Influential perpetrators often use their economic and political power to discredit victims. In Epstein’s case, his legal team famously reframed children as “prostitutes” to shift blame, despite the legal reality that minors are incapable of providing consent. Under state statutory rape laws, any sexual act with a minor is automatically a crime, yet powerful actors frequently receive insignificant punishment while survivors are stigmatized.
A high-profit, low-risk crime
As people process the Epstein files, advocates say attention should move away from the high-profile abusers and focus instead on helping survivors heal. To achieve real justice, Litvak urges the public and the media to “follow the money trail” and defund the sex trade by holding co-conspirators and corporations accountable.
“Traditionally, with human trafficking, it has been a high-profit, low-risk crime,” said Aluotto. Even though powerful predators from the ‘Epstein Elite’ to street pimps, organized gangs, international networks, and corporate executives make enormous amounts of money, they are held unaccountable. In Texas and across the country, added Alutto, they often face deferred probation, a slap on the wrist, and are free from any deterrent to stop this type of crime.
Dr. Goodwin wants us to pay urgent attention to the Epstein survivors and hopes the investigation becomes a platform for people to find the justice they deserve and get the chance to thrive as adults, free from the shame associated with speaking out about their abuse.
“Hopefully it opens the door for deeper, broader, honest conversations in our society that connect political power to violence, but that also provides pathways forward, both state-wise and federally.”