The Epstein Files: An Abuse Survivor’s Perspective

When Not Yet Becomes Right Now (00:00)
Welcome to When Not Yet Becomes Right Now, the podcast where we dive deep into the moments of transformation, the times when not yet shifts into right now and everything changes. I'm your host, Jen Ginty, and this podcast is all about those pivotal moments in our life journeys. You know the ones, when the hesitation fades, when we take that first step, even if it feels like a leap. It's in these moments that growth and healing begins. Each episode will explore stories of resilience,

moments of clarity, and the sparks that ignite real change. From personal experiences to expert insights, we'll uncover how people navigate the complex journey we call life and come out stronger on the other side. Whether you're searching for that spark in your own life or just curious about how change unfolds for others, you're in the right place. We'll discuss the ups and downs, the breakthroughs and setbacks, and how to embrace the right now, even when it feels out of reach. Because sometimes,

The hardest part of the journey is realizing that the moment you've been waiting for has already arrived. So take a deep breath, settle in, and let's get started.

Jen (01:09)
Hello and welcome to When Not Yet Becomes Right Now. This is my 50th episode. Reaching 50 episodes, it's a milestone for me and I knew I didn't want this to just be a celebration. I wanted to use this episode to talk about something that matters deeply, especially to survivors like me.

Today I want to talk about the Epstein files and the impact that it can have on people who have lived through sexual abuse and assault, especially children. Before I go any further, I want to say if this is too heavy for you, please, please take care of yourself. If you need to pause or maybe you need to come back later, skip this episode for now because it's just too raw for you. Please do.

Please take care of yourself. But I wanted to talk about this because I think it's very important in our society right now that we continue to talk about this until we get what we need, which is for the files to be made public. So again, if this is something that triggers you or you've heard too much

about it and you need a break, please take care of yourself. Come back when you feel as though this is something that you can listen to, a topic that you can listen to. And I'll tell you a little bit about myself. If this is one of your first episodes with me, let me reintroduce myself. So I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and other types of abuse.

and I live with complex PTSD and major depressive disorder.

I grew up in a house of, I had two older siblings and myself and my mother and father and my father was my abuser.

and he was a pretty vicious abuser. He put my siblings and I through things that children should never have happened to them, which includes a lot of physical abuse, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse. I received a lot of emotional abuse. My abuser...

pretty much told me every day that I was fat and ugly and no one would ever love me. He made sure that I felt small and that I didn't speak up for myself.

When I was 14, my older sibling told a trusted adult about what was going on in our lives, in our family, in our house. And that's when a second upturn of my life happened. I think a lot of people think that when an abuser is taken from the home, that that's it. Okay, the children are now protected. But there are other traumas that we go through.

For me, it was the court system. The courts, they did want to put my abuser in prison. But what they decided was they wanted us to follow along with their narrative, which was unacceptable to us. My older siblings were able to talk about the abuse that they had had by my abuser, but I wasn't.

I was pretty quiet about the abuse that happened to me. I was only 14 years old. It was so difficult to stand up and tell people what had happened to me, to my body, to my ability to trust. And the courts, they did not give me a reason to trust them. The DA...

As I said, they wanted us to go by their narrative. And there were multiple counts against our abuser, including child rape, assault on a minor under 14, an assault on the minor above 14, many counts of this. But the DA just wanted a tidy package.

that they could wrap up and show the judge and then that would be it. My abuser would go to prison. But it wasn't so easy for us that way. We felt like we were being silenced. And when I finally did get the courage to talk about my own personal abuse issues, what had happened to me, I wasn't believed.

the DA thought that I was making it up because I wasn't getting enough attention. Now that's crazy for a 15, 16, a high school girl trying to live a quote normal life as a teenager in high school that I was making up because I wanted the attention. So.

She made me go in front of a grand jury, an audience as you can imagine, to talk about explicit sexual details that happened to my body, to me, to this little girl, because the abuse ranged for a very long time throughout my childhood. And then, only then,

Were they?

going to add counts to my abusers already large list of accounts against him.

After four years of going through court, my abuser only received four years in prison. What a slap in the face.

After all of those years of fighting to get him to where he deserves to be, he was set free four years later. And my abuser did go on to abuse other children. My abuser throughout his life has probably abused over a dozen, children, I would say. And it weighed heavy on me.

that I couldn't put him away longer. It wasn't my choice. And it certainly wasn't my job to put this man away. But after four years, they said he went through an offender program and he's fine. Let me tell you something. Offenders re-offend. They don't just stop what they're doing.

They re-offend, they go on to harm other children. And that's something that for the Epstein files really hits hard for me. As someone who saw their abuser go to prison, but only to be released to be able to go do whatever he wanted in this world to more children, is a real kick in the face.

And that's what's happening with the Epstein files. These offenders are out there still offending because offenders do not stop. It's a part of them. They want it so badly that they'll figure out ways to do it. If they have to change the way they do it, they will. They will figure out a way to re-offend, to harm other children if they are pedophiles. ⁓

I can tell you is a fact, just as my abuser went on to abuse more children. So for me, the Epstein files is very important because these women as young girls were abused, but there was no justice in the end, right? These offenders are still out in the world looking for a way

to offend again.

So let's dive a little bit more into this. Let's get some backstories and things like that. So when the case like Epstein's hits the headlines, it's a way that reopens wounds for those who are survivors of sexual abuse and assault. It hits harder for us. It...

reminds us of what we went through and whether or not we got justice for what happened to us. So the details, the way that it's talked about can be really triggering and it can bring old pain and body memories back to survivors. And it can also

cause us to shrink again, like we did when we were first abused. And it doesn't help that the coverage that we are getting on the Epstein files is often, it sensationalizes perpetrators instead of centering on survivors and their healing, right?

That's what makes the Epstein file so hard to watch. They show on a massive scale what so many of us already know. Money and influence protect abusers.

They get away with this because of the power they hold with their wallet, with the power that they've been given, such as in this administration.

And what's even more devastating is watching people who enabled or even participated in the abuse being shielded from accountability. Now Epstein is gone.

But he had a mate in this, Glaine Maxwell, who did go to prison for her part in this, is now being coddled because this administration does not want her to talk about the people who abused, who are a part of the files, Now she's been sent to...

a prison that's basically, from what I've heard, a walk in the park. You know, like a hotel. A hotel for abusers. And it's disgusting.

These women who were abused live every day with their trauma, their complex PTSD, and that sits in your body. It changes your body chemistry. It changes the neuron pathways in your brain so that you are in constant survival mode. So these women have been living their lives in constant survival mode. That's how I live.

It's a part of us. It's a part of our brain. It's a part of our mind. We are hypervigilant, waiting for someone to harm us. We don't sleep well because of the hypervigilance, because we're waiting for someone to harm us. So when perpetrators are coddled, like Ghislaine Maxwell, an outright

allowed to go free when they seriously harmed these girls is just enraging to me.

For survivors, it sends a painful message that power often matters more than truth, and that speaking out doesn't always lead to justice. So this is a real-time reenactment of so many other survivors out there in this country, watching what is happening in real time in front of our faces.

And we're remembering that we did not receive the justice that we deserved and that these women are not receiving justice on a large scale. They're being demonized. There's the disbelief of it. It hurts survivors, this public dismissal. We hear people saying it's all exaggerated, made up, or even f—

Fake, that disbelief is mirrored with so many of us because that's what we heard in our own personal struggles. ⁓ I was questioned on my own abuse. It was minimized by the DA and the court system and pretty much ignored at so many survivors.

go through the same thing that I went through, the same thing that these women are going through. And when the public treats survivors like this, we want to hide again. We feel that shame in our bodies that we did when we were originally threatened, originally abused, and

We feel invisible because of that.

Here's what I want survivors listening to know. You may not be able to control the media, the justice system, or the protection of these people. This administration is protecting these offenders. Think about the people that we already know are in the files. It's pretty much well known that

President of the United States is in those files. numerous pictures of him with Epstein, with Maxwell, with his own wife with them. think of the other people too.

You know, a lot of people saying, well, Bill Clinton is on that list. Yeah. Let's hear it. Let's get justice. He deserves to be put in prison for what he did to these children. A prince is being protected in the UK because of this. A man who there were pictures of him with one of his, survivors.

There's an actual picture of them together and he still denies that he's on that list. And he is being protected. There are numerous people, so many people who are being protected because they have a wallet with a lot of cash in it or they've been given power over people. And those people are unable

to stand up to them because of that power.

before.

this past year, this current administration, people from both sides were screaming for these files. Even MAGA was screaming for these files because I think they believed that there was an inordinate amount of people on the left. So they wanted to get them. But now that they know that their president is on that and they have this adoration,

for a man who has many times talked about sexual assaulting women.

and has been convicted of sexually assaulting a woman.

They now do not want these files out because if their leader is in them, they may not get the protections that he gives them. He's even threatened, if you do vote to get these files out into the public, I will retaliate. He said this.

For the survivors, we can't control what is going on in the justice system, in this protection of these powerful people. But we can take back our own power by healing. Now, if you've listened to my show, you know that I say healing is never linear, first of all.

Second of all, I've been on my healing journey for a while now. And when people ask me where I'm at with my healing journey, I say in the middle. 10 years from now, I'll most likely say I'm still in the middle of it because healing takes a long time, especially when you've lived like I have for 50 years with this trauma.

My healing journey isn't going to be a short one. So how do we take back our power through healing? Well, that might look like therapy, individual therapy, therapy groups for survivors. I can tell you that I've been in survivor groups. I've been in groups with people who

have similar symptoms to me who have complex PTSD, who have depression, who have anxiety. And when I was young, when I was first forced into therapy groups, I hated it. Absolutely hated it. Teenage girl, why would she want to be in a group with other kids talking about trauma? Talking about the things that have happened to us when we just want to be quote, normal kids.

at that point I was smoking already. I'm Gen X. I was a smoker. All I really wanted to do was go outside and have a cigarette, honestly. Why would I want to talk about this with a bunch of other team people? But now I love, I absolutely love group therapy because I am in a group of others who have gone through the same thing that I have or have the same symptoms that I have.

so it feels more like community. So if you are looking for a way to heal and take back your power as a survivor, see if group therapy might be in your wheelhouse. You might feel relief because you are surrounded by other survivors. ⁓ Just as the Epstein survivors,

They're like sisters in their trauma, in their survival. They're a community. They're there for each other. And sometimes we tend to want to pull away from society, from people, from having to talk about it with people. But give it a chance. Honestly, give it a chance because you may feel like you've finally found your people. And I think that's really what's important.

You can also go to survivor-led communities. They may not be group therapy, but they may be survivor communities that don't necessarily talk about the trauma because that's too much, but do grassroots efforts to get

stronger laws for survivors and against the perpetrators, against the abusers. There are so many grassroots efforts in your state that you can work with to see justice come to children who are abused.

And you can also get into advocacy, Being an advocate and helping others through their trauma may feel really great to you in the end. If you haven't listened to my episode with Lisa Sugarman, I highly recommend that you go back and listen to that because Lisa is an advocate for

people who are struggling, who are ⁓ suicidal, who have suicidal ideation. And she works on phone banks for the Trevor Project and for NAMI. She is doing the good work. And we talk a lot about what it's like to be that kind of advocate. And it's not as scary as you think. I thought it was gonna be really scary.

So having her walk through what it's like and the things that you can do to help others was really helpful for me. And so I highly recommend going back and listening to Lisa Sugarman's episode and to listening to her podcast, The Survivors. So there's so many things that we can do to ground ourselves and to heal ourselves. And I also suggest

staying away from social media, staying away from media right now. Because I don't think that this country's media...

is out to help. I think they've been bought. I think that the papers that are bought by billionaires who are supporting our administration, they're not telling us the truth. So avoiding those types of media can be really helpful for you.

And again, this watching these survivors may not be helpful for you, but it may. I actually listened, I watched the ⁓ press conference that these survivors did and I was amazed by these women. I remember how hard it was for me to come out. Only two years later,

to talk about what has happened to me. And that's where this whole thing gets difficult for me is, you know, I've been through this, that people are saying that they don't believe. They think that they're acting out. Why did they wait so long? I know why they waited so long. First of all, they were afraid for their lives. These are powerful people that abused them.

These are people who can get things to happen to you. So there's the fear of retribution, right? There's a fear that they are going to be harmed. I know there's one survivor.

And it really hits home for me that she died by suicide last year because this was too much and she wasn't being heard. It gets too much. It gets so hard. And sometimes the too much takes over. And I feel for her and I feel for her family. And I truly hope that she's at peace.

What matters to survivors is that our story matters and that our healing matters, and you don't have to carry this alone. Again, finding community, advocating can be such a help for these times that are very triggering and the frustration that you may be feeling all over again for yourself.

because it's so frustrating to see these people be protected, the power that they have.

And it's enraging for me I've been triggered into being completely enraged by this. ⁓ Each time I see something like Donald Trump's birthday card to Epstein, that's not a woman's body that he drew. That is a child's body. That is a young girl's body. That enrages me.

because then this administration comes back, no, no, no, that's not his signature when it obviously is his signature. They can blast all they want that this is fake, all of this is fake. But the truth is that these people in power who are predators are getting away with it. So we need to take care of ourselves.

and to remind ourselves that it's not happening to us again. Sometimes it feels in our body that it is happening again because it's so raw and so many women have these accounts that they're giving of their abuse. It can trigger your entire body remembering your abuse. And that's when we need to step.

back, step away, give ourselves grace, find the people in our lives that can help us most. And here's where I will say again, if you've listened to my show, you know that I am a huge proponent of individual therapy. And here's why. An individual therapist is a third party.

They are not in your life. They are not family. They are not friends. They are there specifically to listen to you and to help you heal. So having a therapist, especially during a time like this where we're watching survivors discuss their abuse, they're talking about the injustice of it all, and we've felt injustice ourselves. Having a third party to talk to.

feels so much better is because your family, your friends are going to react differently because they know and love you so much. And I won't say that you're therapists in the end. They want to take care of you, but they're not in your everyday life. So you don't have to go home and be like, well, maybe she'll tell ⁓ your sister, or maybe they'll tell, you know,

a friend from way back when. You don't have to worry about that. You can sit down and talk to your individual therapist about how you're feeling with all of this controversy surrounding our country. And I know that they're trying to do a whole look over there to us by, you know, all the different things that they're doing.

in this administration, the sending the National Guard into blue states because they've pissed off the president. These things that they're doing is all a way to tell you that other things are more important. Well, for survivors, this may be the most important topic in the country right now. And we deserve

to feel that it's being paid attention to because it feels like we're being paid attention to as survivors.

So this is my 50th episode. It isn't just about my journey with the podcast, with the people that I've interviewed, the stories that have been told. It's also honoring survivors, including me. We've had to navigate both the trauma of abuse and the trauma of being disbelieved and silenced.

If today's episode stirred something in you, please be gentle with yourself. Give yourself grace. Step away. Ground yourself in the ways that you may know best for you. know that most likely after this, I'm gonna do a box breathing exercise. I may do the five senses, pick one thing that I see, pick two things that I hear. If these type of exercises help you,

You can also go on to my YouTube at My Moody Monster because I do Moody Talks and I talk about emotions and coping skills that we can use to help ourselves in these moments. So if you're looking for coping skills that you can create a toolbox with, head on over to My Moody Monster's YouTube channel and go to the Moody Talks. I go through a different emotion every month.

and I give coping skills to help with that specific emotion. And it's been something that I've been working on for years and I hope that it can help others as well. So if you do need some exercises, please go on over there. You'll find a ton of them. They're all based in DBT, which is a type of therapy that has helped me considerably as a survivor with complex PTSD.

and you are not alone. I'm here. I'm always here to talk if you need it. Please reach out to me. I would be happy to talk with you. Reach out. there are other resources. There are other ways that you can reach out if you need support. You can call or text the 988-SUICIDE-IN-CRISIS LIFELINE or contact RAINN at

800-656-HOPE and they have the help that's available for you. Thank you so much for being here for my 50th episode. Thank you for holding space with me. I'm so grateful you're part of this community and if this was one of your first episodes, I hope that this has given you a better understanding of what When Not Yet Becomes Right Now is all about.

I'm here to tell stories and to have people tell stories so that others feel less alone in their life. And if that's you, there are so many different life journeys that my guests have talked about and maybe it resonates with you. So take a look through the first 49 of my episodes and let me know what you think. Send me a DM or leave,

leave a review, that would be wonderful if you follow, like and review the podcast. It's very helpful for me to be able to get more stories out into the world. If you have a life journey, a healing journey that you would like to talk about, please send me an email at jenetnotgettorightnow. Let me know that you want to come on the show. You have a story.

of when you held off on a healing journey or a life journey and what was that moment that got you on that road. I would love to speak with you and share your story with the world so that you can help others feel less alone. Thank you.

When Not Yet Becomes Right Now (35:29)
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the podcast. This show is produced by Phoenix Freed LLC and I'm your producer, Jen Ginty. We hope you found today's conversation inspiring. Thank you for joining us for this episode of the podcast. This show is produced by Phoenix Freed LLC and I'm your producer, Jen Ginty. We hope you found today's conversation insightful and inspiring. If you have a story of your own about when a not yet moment became right now,

We encourage you to reach out and share it. You can find more information about being a guest on our show at whennotyetbecomesrightnow.com. Remember, you are not alone on your journey, whether it's a journey of healing, growth, or transformation. Every story matters. Thank you for listening, and we'll catch you next time with another inspiring episode.