The Epstein Files and Class Struggle

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale

One of the great class confrontations of our time is playing out in Washington DC right now – the Epstein files. We know that sounds like a really, really weird thing to say. But look at what’s happening in front of our eyes.

On September 3, 2025, roughly twenty working class women showed up to speak to the press in Washington and demand the release of the Epstein papers. Some were in their thirties, and some were in their early middle age. They were cold – winter was coming. They were survivors of Epstein’s abuse and exploitation. And they were terrified. Most did not speak, but they stood there beside those who spoke.

Julie K. Brown was the journalist hero first broke the Epstein story in the Miami Herald in 2018. Now she tweeted that she was speaking to many survivors, and they were all terrified. The obvious reason was what happened to Epstein. But also, of course, those women had known those powerful men up close and personal, their arrogance, cruelty and ruthlessness. As they took turns leaning into the microphone, shaking in their courage, they knew what they were doing.

On the other side were the legions of rich, powerful and influential men who had used them, and the greater legions of powerful men and women who had concealed and enabled the abuse. On that side stood two presidents of the United States, one former prime minister of Israel, the American architect of the Good Friday agreement in Ireland, rich and powerful lawyers, distinguished Harvard professors, the greatest linguist of his generation, the British ambassador to the United States, Bill Gates and other billionaires.

Those working class women confronted scores of men from the ruling class. That courage was in them because there were many of them, standing together. It was in them because their fight against Epstein had now lasted for years, and they had grown and changed as they stood by each other to rescue themselves.

They also found courage because they stood on the shoulders of giants. The global movement against the sexual violence of the rich and powerful has been growing for forty years. It began with women and men who had survived abuse as children.

The largest and earliest movement began in 1990 among the women and men from the First Nations of Canada who had survived physical, cultural and sexual abuse in the Indian Residential Schools. The Catholic Church ran most of those schools, but the Canadian government and the Mounted Police backed the Church every step of the way.

But the First Nations survivors had whole communities behind them, and a rich tradition of struggle. From there the revolt spread to Catholics and former Catholics all over the world, to Anglicans in Britain, to survivors all over the world.

The revolts of the survivors of childhood abuse came first and cleared the path. But the revolt of people abused and harassed as adults began to grow until it was equally as important. They called it Me Too in America, Rape Must Fall in South Africa, Azadi (“Freedom”) in India. Whatever they called it, the global wall of silence was breaking, lie by lie. That is why those women in Washington could have such courage. Millions had testified before them, in every corner of the globe. People had heard these words, or words like them, so many times before. That’s why people could hear what these women were saying about Epstein. [MOU2]

We do not know how this confrontation will turn out. But we can see Trump’s power draining away. Republican politicians have begun to flee from them. Trump ordered the Republicans in the House of Representatives not to meet the women’s demand and vote for the release of the files. In the end, Trump backed down and all but one Representative voted to release the files.

This happened because most working class people who voted for Trump have a basic morality which refuses to support the violation of children.

Trump’s panic is open for all to see. This is the most important moment in the long global struggle against the sexual violence of powerful men. And our side is winning.

NOT POLITICAL

Of course, many of the Epstein survivors say they are not doing anything political. And in the sense they mean it, they are absolutely right. The men who abused and exploited them came from across the political spectrum. So did the men and women who enforced silence and protected their abusers.

Two American presidents were involved – Trump and Clinton. Trump’s far right adviser, Steve Bannon, is all over the emails and photographs. Clinton’s main economic adviser, Larry Summers, is implicated [MOU3] in more than that. Virginia Giuffre realized she had to flee Epstein’s world when she emerged from sex with Ehud Barak bleeding from her mouth, her vagina and her anus. Barak was an Israeli general and leader of the Israeli Labor Party.

Noam Chomsky is in the photos and emails too. He was a frequent visitor to Epstein’s New York mansion – he says he enjoyed the intellectual conversation at the parties. There is debate among agonized leftists about whether Chomsky used the girls. This is beside the point. Giuffre said rightly that every person who entered that mansion could see the sexy photos of young girls all over the wall. They knew, all of them. They just didn’t care about working class women.

Ghislaine Maxwell said once to a friend, “All the girls are trash.” That is how the rich and powerful feel about all the rest of us, but especially about the hurt and injured, the poor and needy and traumatized girls that Maxwell collected for those men.

And yet the trash are winning now. The girls who went to Royal Palm Beach High School, who could not afford the nice clothes the rich girls wore, who were never going to be cheerleaders no matter what they looked like, they are now bringing down the men who taught at Harvard. Trash is the British word for garbage, and it is now Summers and Dershowitz and Pinker who the world can see are garbage.

In Britain Andrew Mountbatten Windsor is, we all presume, a Tory. But Lord Peter Mandelson is Labour. Margaret Thatcher, who protected Jimmy Saville for years, was a Tory. MI5 ran the Kincora boys’ home in Belfast. David Steel was a leader of the Liberal Democrat party who introduced the act that made abortion in Britain, and he never abused anyone in his life. But Steel protected Cyril Smith, the liberal MP who abused hundreds of boys.

Beyond the US and Britain, Daniel Ortega began abusing his stepdaughter when she was thirteen and he was the leader of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s. The leading people in his movement knew and said nothing. When his stepdaughter finally, heroically, went public, everyone in Nicaragua knew it, and no one on the international left has ever discussed it.

So in one sense no, the Epstein files are not party political. But there is another way of thinking about politics, as a struggle between classes, not between political opinions but between living breathing human classes. And in that sense this moment is utterly political.

NANCY LINDISFARNE

Jonathan Neale writes: Nancy Lindisfarne and I founded this blog, Anne Bonny Pirate, ten years ago. Nancy died on November 15 of a very rare, swift and aggressive form of cancer. During those days the last book she read was Virginia Giuffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl. Nancy said it was very good, but after page 120 she no longer had the strength to read.

Nancy was the great love of my life, and my companion for thirty years. In her last days, we talked about writing this post. We roughed out the approach and agreed it would be about the centrality of class conflict. And we agreed that the post would explain the relevance of the ideas about sexual violence we had developed together over the last decade. That’s why Nancy’s name is on it.

THOUSANDS OF SMALL CLASS STRUGGLES

From the beginning our posts on Anne Bonny were about many things, but sexual violence was central. We worked to develop an evolutionary and historical understanding of why gender inequality, class violence and sexual violence were all central to all class societies, societies with economic inequality, throughout human history. [See our book, Why Men? A Human History of Violence and Inequality.]

Alongside that work, we researched one case after another in the rapidly growing global movement against sexual violence. We read up on many different movements of survivors of childhood abuse and adults who were resisting sexual harassment. As we did so, we saw a few things over and over again.

First, the sexual violence or harassment usually happened in a workplace. Sometimes this was a law firm, a tech company, a film company, a state government, or whatever. Sometimes it was an institution like a school or a children’s home where the abuser was employed and the abused kids or students were trapped.

In almost all cases, the middle and senior management believed that their central task was to cover up the abuse or violence. Sometimes they felt they were doing this to protect the institution. Often they felt ashamed and dirty, but knew they would lose their job if they did not cover up.

Whistleblowers were punished, and everyone knew this. So almost no one took on an employer or a church alone. People reached out to others, and they organized in secret. Adults at work organized using the secret whisper networks women already had to alert each other to which men were dangerous.

Gradually, people tried to give each other courage. Everyone knew, as in any workplace struggle, that they key thing was how many people were prepared to act together.

So there was organization, and there was almost always leadership, people who were braver, or more politically committed, or seemed wiser and steadier to their fellow workers or survivors. But those leaders were nothing without the solidarity of the people around them. Indeed, their leadership consisted of encouraging solidarity.

These struggles are usually reported as if the journalists or the lawyers were the heroes who made it all happen. But look more closely, each time, and you see the formal or informal organizations of the abused looking frantically but carefully for lawyers and journalists. People like Julie K. Brown or Ronan Farrow are heroes too. But they are heroes as part of a wider movement from below.

These movements owed a great deal to earlier feminist campaigns against rape in society and abuse in families. But they were also different. The feminist focus had been on male violence against women. But as soon as survivors began to organize against abuse in institutions, it was obvious that many of the abused had been boys, and many of the people campaigning to break the wall of silence were therefore also men.

Moreover, most men are not abusers. Most men do not rape, and most men do not sexually harass the people who work for them. But for generations almost all managers have covered up abuse in almost every country in the world. That means almost all men who were middle or senior managers have protected abusers and thereby enabled further abuse and exploitation.

Many women are also middle and senior managers. Almost all of them also covered up and enabled further abuse.

Sexual violence of every kind is absolutely saturated with sexism. But it is not sexism that makes almost all managers complicit. It is loyalty to the ruling class and the hierarchy of power and class. And a manager who will not do this rarely remains a manager.

So each struggle about abuse in a workplace or an institution becomes a struggle about the power of managers and the dignity of employees, students or inmates.

Many of the bravest and strongest struggles have been in India, where the Army has used rape as a weapon of control against indigenous and Muslim communities. But just as important is the use of sexual violence by upper caste landowners in villages to terrify and humiliate dalit agricultural workers. But many, many of those young, poor abused women and girls have fought for year upon year for justice, and the women and men of their communities have stood by them.

But it’s not just in India. There has been a wind blowing through the world these last few years, and it will become a hurricane.

Many people we know have said American workers would never fight back against Trump. Well, those women have, and they were all workers, and Epstein and all his enablers were their bosses.

We have been told that the working class care only about economic issues, and so forget the culture wars. This is the mother of all culture wars at the same time as it’s a class struggle.

It’s been a long struggle across the globe. We have come so far, and we have so far to go. And also, all of us, those who told the truth, those who whispered the truth, those who stood by the truth, those who stood together, we too have won this.

If the Epstein files are not actually released, there will be hell to pay, and then they will be released anyway. There will be an explosion of feeling. Trump will be toast. The angry, the bitter, the hurt and struggling and abused all over the world will see and take heart.

Further Reading

Nancy and Jonathan, The Epstein Files and Me Too.

Nancy and Jonathan, Harvard, Sexual Politics, Class and Resistance.

Nancy and Jonathan, The Roots of Sexual Violence.

Nancy and Jonathan, The Five Chinese Feminists.

Nancy and Jonathan, Sexual Violence and Class Inequality.

Nancy and Jonathan, The Archbishop of Canterbury, Elon Musk and Sexual Abuse in Britain.

Nancy and Jonathan, Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Saville and the Wall of Silence.

Nancy and Jonathan, Jimmy Saville, Boris Johnson and the Slow Burial of the Commission of Inquiry into Sexual Abuse.

Julie K. Brown, Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story.

Bradley Edwards, Relentless Pursuit: Our Battle with Jeffrey Epstein.

Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School.