These days, every woman following what is being written about the Epstein case should watch Epstein’s videos—especially those recorded after his conviction. Every woman should see how patriarchy settles onto a man’s face; how, in response to accusations, he speaks not as a human being but as an institution—ventriloquizing the supremacy of patriarchy itself. With a faint, almost amused smile, he seems to mock us all, to mock the world, as if what he has done were not a crime but his right. So who tailored this garment he wears so well—this outfit that fits him perfectly, that clings to his body and even to his soul?
The self-satisfied expression of pride on Epstein’s face—his certainty that he has done exactly what befits him—felt painfully familiar. Every woman who grew up in Turkey in the 1980s experienced open harassment, because it was never considered strange for the men in her family to read newspapers filled with pornographic images. Reading those papers at home or in public, thrusting them into women’s sight, normalizing this as an ordinary part of life—this was overt, unabashed harassment for all of us. Parents who failed to recognize that girls must be protected from both adult and underage men actively contributed to raising sons who felt entitled to do whatever they could.Families—and entire neighborhoods—chose to shield the abusive boys, uncles, fathers, and brothers among them. They normalized the perpetrators’ actions while accusing and punishing the victims as deviant. The message was crystal clear: harassment and rape are normal components of male sexuality. And this norm is reinforced by women’s silence—by the “justified” shame imposed on those born into the supposedly deficient, non-male sex.
The crimes that have exploded like a bomb in the white world with the Epstein file are not aberrations; they are essential to the colonial order. Indeed, they are no different from what occurred daily on the plantations where enslaved people were forced to labor in America. To express shock at such crimes requires ignoring the colonial violence accumulated over centuries by humanity’s blindingly white half. As the colonial knowledge of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was obscured by nationalist theories, empires transformed into nation-states, and that knowledge became a founding pillar of white supremacy. The foundational knowledge that nourished Epstein and allowed that smile to settle on his face is precisely this accumulated knowledge.
Epstein’s victims call themselves “survivors.” We are told there are a thousand of them; when we consider their families, we are speaking of thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of victims. We live in a time when the law has almost entirely severed its connection to justice. Legal processes—when they function at all—rarely go beyond technical mediation. In doing so, they require perpetrators to confront victims, compel victims to “find a language,” to recount repeatedly “what happened.” Yet as this case demonstrates, when everything is already laid bare, when crime has wholly supplanted normality, when crime is served up as a daily breakfast routine, as entertainment, as pleasure—and when thousands line up to partake in the crime—how meaningful is it to claim that justice can be established through law?
Given the limitations of the legal mechanisms available to us, revelation is an important tool. But the crucial question is how to make this mechanism function in a way that protects victims—survivors—most effectively. We must consider how to prevent survivors from being left alone, and how to ensure that those exposed remain condemned in the public conscience for decades.
Several years ago, researching an 1856 case of incest, abortion, and divorce within the Armenian administration of Akşehir fundamentally transformed my understanding of exposure. While studying Armenian canon law, I examined the place of incest within it and, drawing on the work of Nerses Melik-Tankyan, wrote that incest was treated as equivalent to murder under Armenian church law. This was such an accurate characterization. It may have been my ignorance, but until then I had not encountered any legal framework that defined incest as murder. And indeed, if a process that kills a woman’s spirit—reducing her to unarticulated aggression, driving her toward psychiatric confinement, toward madness, toward the erasure of her life—if that is not murder, then what is?
Armenian church law treated the perpetrator of incest as a murderer and required him to perform public penance before his community for twenty years. Let us consider what it means for a person to confess and repent publicly every Sunday for two decades. Everyone in the place where he lived would know that he had committed this crime; this knowledge would pass down through generations. The person he harmed would live not alongside denial, but alongside a man visibly paying the price for the crime he committed against her. I do not know whether this was implemented exactly as prescribed in practice. You may ask how such a system could function in a “modern” society. Even so, as knowledge distilled from centuries of legal experience about how such crimes should be evaluated, it offers a powerful point of reference.
I also find it crucial that the woman in that case did not withdraw her testimony—that she did not retract her statement that she had become pregnant by her uncle. Another document from Istanbul shows a family making a serious claim for compensation in a similar case involving their daughter. Moreover, we see that the woman’s family did not abandon the lawsuit. There was a time when broken arms did not remain hidden in sleeves. Let it be our task to adapt the experience of that time to our own and to consider what kind of collective mechanisms we might build today.
