The reckoning over Jeffrey Epstein isn’t finished | The Excerpt

On the Friday, April 10, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast: After reading the Epstein files, Claire Wilmot, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, uncovered a chilling pattern: systematic efforts to discredit survivors of sexual abuse while protecting the rich and powerful.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Cody Godwin:

Pam Bondi is out as attorney general. Millions of Epstein-related documents are now public, and the names of the powerful people in his orbit are finally out in the open. You might think the reckoning is over. You'd be wrong. Hello, and welcome to USA TODAY's The Excerpt. I'm Cody Godwin in for Dana Taylor. Today is Friday, April 10th, 2026.

My next guest read through the Epstein files seeking an answer to the question of accountability. What she found instead was a disturbing pattern of repeated attempts to discredit the victims while letting the rich and powerful off the hook for enabling Epstein's behavior to continue for so long unimpeded. Why? Joining me to share her insights on this is Claire Wilmot, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Claire, it's great to have you on The Excerpt.

Claire Wilmot:

Thanks so much for having me.

Cody Godwin:

In an op-ed you recently published in The New York Times, you wrote about a phenomenon you saw over and over again in the Epstein files. You called it, quote, "the mechanics of doubt," end quote. What did you mean here?

Claire Wilmot:

So I was looking through the Epstein files to try to understand how these powerful men were responding to MeToo in real time. So my academic background looks at the aftermath of seemingly progressive legal reforms specifically around gendered violence and tries to see what's happening in the wake of those reforms on a sort of practical level.

So how are people being believed and disbelieved when they go to report a crime at police stations, but also the other places that they might talk about what's happened to them? So yeah, my work follows how doubt functions and how doubt can kind of derail those cases either before they enter the criminal legal system or through the criminal legal process. So I wanted to see how were women being believed, disbelieved, doubted in the Epstein files.

And so, I was looking for references to whether or not women were being called liars, how the testimony of Epstein's victims were being undermined. But through that process, I found some very interesting correspondences between Epstein and the vast networks of allies where they were basically responding to a number of high-profile MeToo cases and trying to sort of sow seeds of doubt around the testimonies of all survivors that were coming forward during this period.

Cody Godwin:

For the record, are false reports of rape at all common?

Claire Wilmot:

No. They're very, very rare. Like plane crashes, they're an extremely unusual event that ends up attracting a huge amount of press attention, but they make up a very, very small proportion of overall reports.

Cody Godwin:

As you said, false allegations are statistically rare, but they still seem to carry outsized cultural weight. Why do you think that narrative is so powerful?

Claire Wilmot:

It's a really good question, and the short answer is that I don't know. My work asks what doubt and disbelief tell us about different forms of structural power. So I'm interested in what you can learn about the persistence of patriarchy, of racism, of class oppression through these kind of moments of doubt and disbelief.

So I think when it comes to social movements, structural change is really hard, and it takes a really long time. And so, I think what we're seeing with the outsized attention that these false reports garner in the media and also in everyday discourse is this sort of resistance to the kinds of structural change that a lot of these movements are seeking to bring about.

The status quo sort of rears its head and pushes back against these changes through the processes by which we form our beliefs. So yeah, I think it's very difficult to force through structural change, and I think the backlash to a lot of the structural changes that I think MeToo was pursuing can be seen in the kind of specter of the false rape allegation and the way that those fears were sort of fueled in order to preserve the status quo, because there's a lot of powerful people that benefit from the status quo.

Cody Godwin:

Many of the associates whose names were released in the Epstein files have claimed innocence and that they didn't know about his earlier conviction, that they never witnessed any sexual abuse, and a lot of people have chosen to believe them. How do you respond to them?

Claire Wilmot:

I mean, I can't speak to the specifics of any of the individuals and what they really believed, but I think I find it interesting that Epstein was a publicly registered sex offender since the 2008, 2009 conviction, and many of the people who stayed in his orbit had access to that information. That information was not hard to find. Whether they knew that or not, I think, for me, it reflects a sort of willful ignorance. I think a lot of the people in Epstein's orbit could have found out more if they truly did not know that his abuse had continued.

But looking further, digging further, that's a choice, and I would argue it's a political choice about what you do and do not want to know about the powerful people in one's orbit. But I find it odd that there was a lot of information on the public record that people did not seem to take into account when continuing their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. And for me, it suggests that there was a lot of willful blindness going on.

Cody Godwin:

Do you think the Department of Justice will ultimately release more files from the Epstein investigation, and what more can the public learn from them?

Claire Wilmot:

I mean, I hope that the full trove of Epstein files will be released. I have no idea whether that's likely in the current political climate, but I think it's going to take us so many years to unpack everything that's in them. There's so many different ways to slice this data, to interrogate the conversations that are being had between some of the world's most powerful people, and I think we're just really starting to scratch the surface when it comes to learning what this archive of material can tell us about the way that power functions in society.

Cody Godwin:

When the MeToo movement originally started 20 years ago, it was created in part to force accountability, but you wrote that, quote, "The liberal reform that #MeToo produced were not up to that structural task," end quote. What did you mean?

Claire Wilmot:

So I think that MeToo is really successful in forcing through a number of much-needed legal reforms across jurisdictions. So in the U.S., but also in Canada, where I'm from, in the UK, where I've worked, and other developing countries as well, we saw a lot of updates and reforms to legal frameworks, policies, sets of rules.

Those were things that a lot of feminist activists had been demanding for some time, and my research sort of shows that those are necessary but insufficient. So I think when you look at the ways that women continue to be disbelieved in these kind of small, minute ways, whether it's police exercising their discretionary power about what cases to take on, whether it's a social worker who's deciding whether or not to refer someone to additional supports, those sorts of ways that women are doubted speak to how much work we still need to do at that structural level to disrupt these forms of power like race, like gender, like class, that shape who has to prove what to who.

And so, I don't want to position MeToo as a total failure. I think MeToo did bring a lot of really much-needed reforms, but my work is interested in the aftermath of those. How do we take those reforms and actually make them do the structural work that manifest in our systems of belief? And that's, in some ways, quite a bit harder than changing laws, because there's no clear targets.

Cody Godwin:

You found that, in some places, reporting of sexual violence went up after #MeToo, but prosecutions didn't follow. What does that gap tell us about the limits of reform?

Claire Wilmot:

I think for a long time, there was an expectation that we just kind of shut up and don't talk about sexual violence and don't demand accountability, and I think the MeToo movement raised expectations about what legal systems could do for people, and then these reports were running up against different sorts of constraints that the legal systems in these jurisdictions are governed by.

So for me, and I don't want to say that a high conviction rate is a measure of justice. I think a lot of the women that I interview aren't actually that interested in convictions. They're interested in accountability. They're interested in reparations sometimes. They're interested in ways to help get their lives back on track.

But the fact that so many of these cases are falling off at later stages in the criminal legal system suggests that women and girls and men and boys as well who survived sexual violence are demanding more from systems that are not able to meet those demands. And so, I think addressing that justice gap is going to be really key moving forward.

Cody Godwin:

Will there ever be a full accounting of Jeffrey Epstein's associates? And if so, what would need to happen to bring this about?

Claire Wilmot:

Gosh. Yeah. I have no idea if there will ever be a full accounting or, frankly, even what accountability would look like. The Epstein files show us that there's such a wide range of forms of complicity in this kind of sexual violence, trafficking, and exploitation of underage girls in the case of Jeffrey Epstein himself.

And I think the challenge will be trying to figure out how you bring about meaningful accountability for all of those people who chose to look the other way, even if they weren't actively participating themselves. And I think in my reading the files anyway, there's a lot of that kind of complicity, the willful blindness, the choosing not to know.

And from an accountability perspective moving forward, I think there will have to be a reckoning with that. Whether that takes place in the criminal legal system or in some other form is not clear to me, but I do think there needs to be a reckoning with the ways in which many of these powerful people enabled and/or turned a blind eye to what was going on. If they had done something, said something earlier, I think a lot of abuse could have been stopped.

Cody Godwin:

Towards the end of your piece, you suggest this isn't just a legal problem. It's cultural. What are the deeper forces that shape who we believe? And importantly, how do we change them to help bring about accountability?

Claire Wilmot:

It's really tough, because often, we don't see what happens behind the doors of these institutions. Sometimes we get access to statistics on attrition and prosecutions and whatever else, but we don't really see how victims are treated when they enter these, unless we're victims ourselves or unless we have unusual access to some of these institutions, which I've been fortunate to have as an academic.

But yeah, it's really tough, and I think one of the difficult things about this particular moment compared to the moment of MeToo is that we really don't have that same kind of broad-based feminist movement to demand more structural change, to demand other kinds of accountability around what we're finding. We really live in a flood-the-zone moment, and it's tough for activists, movements to take up some of this stuff and push for change.

Cody Godwin:

If you're interested in reading more about this issue, we have a link to Claire's op-ed in the show description. Claire, thank you for coming on The Excerpt.

Claire Wilmot:

Thanks so much for having me.

Cody Godwin:

Thanks to our senior producer, Kaely Monahan, for her production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. We'll be back Monday morning with another episode of USA TODAY's The Excerpt.