Where are the victims?

I’ve been watching the Epstein files coverage with a familiar knot in my stomach. Not because the revelations shock me (none of this is news to women). But because we’re talking about literally everyone except the people who were abused.

What this means for Trump. Mandelson’s future. The artist formerly known as Prince Andrew. It’s a masterclass in looking the wrong way, and I reckon that’s exactly the point. Because if we actually talked about what this scandal is fundamentally about – the systematic abuse of women and girls by influential men who thought they were untouchable – we’d have to confront some deeply uncomfortable truths.

I know this playbook all too well. I’m a survivor of sexual violence. During my time in politics, I watched this behaviour unfold up close; powerful men rallying around a predator like they were protecting a mate who’d had one pint too many, not someone credibly accused of abusing their position. Careers protected, reputations laundered, victims quietly undermined. 

The machinery doesn’t just live in shadowy cabals at the upper echelons of society; it operates in plain sight. It’s there in the whisper networks women build to survive – the unwritten maps of which rooms not to be alone in, which colleagues to avoid at the Christmas party, who to avoid getting in a lift with. And it’s there in every news cycle where we somehow make the story about anyone except those harmed.

Every woman I know has witnessed or experienced the attitudes that make this possible. The boss who kept promoting the sleazy manager because “he brings in the sales”. The colleague who laughed off inappropriate comments as “banter”. The friend who was told she was overreacting when she complained about being groped by a senior colleague at a work event. These are the foundations that let the whole rotten edifice stand.

What gets me about the Epstein files isn’t just the depravity, it’s the casual ordinariness of how it was enabled. Take Steve Bannon, who now calls Epstein a “globalist child molester” but once helped him brainstorm a PR strategy.

“What about establishing THE major centre for human trafficking, teenage prostitution etc” Bannon suggested in emails. A Jeffrey Epstein Foundation to tackle the very crimes he was committing. 

You couldn’t make it up, except we’ve seen this playbook before. The predator who becomes the champion. It works because we’re desperate to look anywhere else.

Melinda French Gates said something on a podcast this week that stuck with me. When asked about Bill Gates appearing in the Epstein files, she responded: “Those questions are for those people, and for even my ex-husband. They need to answer to those things, not me. And I am so happy to be away from all the muck that was there.”

The women connected to these men have become collateral damage in a story that should never have been about them. But the real collateral damage? The survivors. The women and girls who were trafficked, abused, and treated as disposable by men with enough wealth to build an iron fortress around their behaviour.

Where are their voices in the media coverage? Where are the conversations about what justice looks like for them? Where’s the reckoning with the systems that made this possible?

We’re having yet more conversations about influential men’s reputations while the people they harmed remain what they’ve always been, footnotes in their own story.

Centring victims means believing them. It means their right to justice matters more than protecting powerful men’s legacies. Simple as that.

As a survivor, I can’t begin to express what it’s like to watch this play out. It’s exhausting. It’s infuriating. And it’s depressingly familiar. Sexual violence thrives in environments where victims are treated as inconvenient complications in stories that are really about something else. Politics. Power. Money. Access.

When the Epstein story broke properly in 2019, I thought: finally. Finally, we’re going to have that reckoning. We’ll stop obsessing over his little black book of the global elite and ask the only question that matters: how did so many men with power enable, participate in, or turn a blind eye to this?

Seven years on, we’re still not asking it.

The scandal isn’t about Mandelson or a disgraced royal. It’s about a system that made all of this possible and remains entirely intact.

Until we finally centre victims in these conversations – until we listen to them, and let their voices drive the narrative – we’re a long way from having that reckoning. We’re just caught in another news cycle. And when this one ends, the cycle will grind on. The next set of victims will be sidelined. Another scandal will be about anything other than the abuse at its core.

I’m sick of it. Every woman I know is sick of it. Duw, we’re beyond sick of it.

So here’s what I want to know: In a story about the systematic sexual abuse of women and girls, why are we centring everyone except those who were abused?

Why are the most powerful voices in this conversation still the men? Why is Mandelson still gracing the cover of broadsheet magazines in his slippers? Why are we letting them control the narrative of their own complicity?

The victims deserve so much more than being extras in someone else’s bloody political drama. They’re human beings whose lives were shattered by men who believed money and connections made them invincible.

Every day spent dissecting Mandelson is another day proving those abusers right. There will always be something more important than victims. Another political crisis. Another reputation to defend. The systematic abuse itself is just the messy backdrop to the real story – the one about power, access and male protection rackets. Victims are wallpaper. We have always been wallpaper. At least now nobody’s pretending otherwise.