At a time when the world is shaken by new crises, returning to the Epstein files may appear unnecessary to some. Yet the series of texts we have been continuing since our previous article two weeks ago, does not aim merely to examine a criminal case. Rather, it seeks to understand how our ways of seeing and not seeing are produced.
When discussing the Jeffrey Epstein case, one question is repeatedly asked: “How could no one have seen this for so many years?” Perhaps we need to ask a more difficult question: Where did we learn not to see?
The answer cannot be sought only in law, politics, or the media. It may also be found in literature, in the cultural canon, and in texts circulated under the name of “high art.” Culture does not merely tell stories. It produces ways of seeing. It teaches us what we can look at, what we should pass over quickly, and which forms of discomfort are dismissed as “overly sensitive.”
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most well-known examples. The relationship between a young girl and an adult man is often read through the lens of aesthetic distance, an ironic narrator, or the veil of a “complex mind.” What is expected from the reader is not discomfort, but understanding. Understanding, even admiration.
The problem begins precisely here. In these narratives, the experience of the young girl is not at the center. The story moves within the consciousness of the adult man. The girl does not speak; and even if she does, she is not heard. Her body becomes a device through which someone else’s inner world is deepened. In this way, literature normalizes the direction of the gaze without explicitly defending abuse. Who looks? Who is seen? Whose complexity matters?
Rebecca Solnit points precisely to this problem in her 2015 essay “Men Explain Lolita to Me.” The issue is not simply the content of a novel, but how that novel is defended. Solnit writes that she first read Nabokov’s novel as a young girl and naturally identified with Lolita. Yet she realized that the story never truly belonged to Lolita. The narrative always remains in the hands of the perpetrator. This literary structure produces a social reflex: the perpetrator narrates, the victim is represented.
A similar structure appears in the Epstein case. There are surviving women. Their testimonies exist. Yet the narrative is rarely built around them. Instead, the story revolves around men: who was connected to whom, who concealed what, who protected whom. Even when women’s voices are heard, their testimonies are often coded as emotional excess. Thus, instead of a speaking subject, a “pathologized victim” appears.
And perhaps one of the most striking symbols of this blindness is the aircraft that came to be known as the ‘Lolita Express.’ How could so many powerful adults, from business figures to politicians, from academics to scientists, board an aircraft carrying this name without question? A plane named after a young girl became a chilling symbol of how normalized this regime of gaze had become.
At this point, the issue is not about canceling the literature of the past. Rather, it is about recognizing the forms of blindness we have inherited along with these texts. Which silences were normalized? Which discomforts were suppressed in the name of “high art”?
What becomes decisive here is a regime of gaze. The gaze is not innocent. It determines who is allowed to look, whose gaze is considered legitimate, and whose body is made available for circulation. In the Epstein case, certain bodies are not merely seen. They are circulated through narratives, photographs, rumors, and files.
As Rebecca Solnit notes in another essay on Epstein, this structure is not simply a deviation belonging to “rape culture.” It is part of a longer historical continuity. The perpetrator holding the narrative, the victim’s voice being coded as excessive or unreliable, and bodies appearing as objects of representation rather than testimony are not phenomena unique to modern media. They are mechanisms that recur in different forms in post-violence societies.
This regime of gaze does not operate only through sexuality. As Elyse Semerdjian shows in her book Remnants, Armenian women’s bodies after 1915 were subjected to a similar regime. Bodies that survived displacement, forced conversion, and violence became both witnesses to violence and silent carriers of it. These bodies do not speak. They are spoken about.
This historical experience teaches us something important: regimes of gaze are not only sexual but also political and ethnic. Whose bodies are protected? Whose bodies circulate? Whose stories are told, and whose remain in the margins of archives?
In the Epstein case, documents are being opened and names circulate publicly. Yet the narrative still revolves around powerful men. Patriarchy does not only tremble when legal mechanisms function. It trembles when it loses control of the gaze.
Perhaps the question we must ask today is this: What injustices were rendered invisible through the forms of admiration that literature and culture have taught us? Because some silences are not accidental. They are culturally constructed. And without confronting these silences, we cannot truly understand cases like Epstein, nor prevent the next silence from taking shape.
