Quote:Do women deserve rights and a voice in society? That’s the conflict between the two systems that shape our society; in one of them we are, and in the other we’re not, and if the Trump administration and its allies has its way, the former will prevail. (Various members of the far right, including former Mar-a-Lago guest Nick Fuentes, and pastors in a video reposted by secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, even assert that women should not have the right to vote, along with losing reproductive rights and other forms of equality and agency.)

One way to describe Epstein’s vast network of rape and trafficking adjacent to the exploitative modeling and beauty-contest industries that he and Trump also dabbled in was as a system of treating women and girls as trophies, commodities, objects to be exchanged on the (somewhat) open market, rewards, bribes, service-providers, domestic livestock, anything but fellow human beings endowed with inalienable rights. According to Epstein’s victim Virginia Giuffre in her posthumous memoir, he “liked to tell friends that women were merely ‘a life-support system for a vagina’.”