February 24, 2019
The news of the last few days has ricocheted from one rage inducing story to the next that demonstrates just how little regard this country has for women and girls. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra issued a decision finding that federal prosecutors violated the rights of the victims of pedophile sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, (Source: “Jeffrey Epstein’s deal with federal prosecutors wasn’t normal. The men who arranged it need to face the music,” by Mimi Rocah and Berit Berger, NBCNews.com, 2/23/19). As Miami Herald journalist, Julie K.Brown, details in her award winning series, “Perversion of Justice,” Epstein was a truly revolting predator who ran a sex trafficking ring involving as many as 42 underage girls, some as young as 14.
Once caught, Epstein used his wealth and network of influential friends to hire a phalanx of high powered lawyers, including Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr, to enable him to avoid the decades’ long prison sentence that his depravity deserved. Despite the fact that Epstein was charged with, not only luring underaged girls to his home to be repeatedly raped by him, but with “trafficking minor girls, often from overseas, for sex parties at his other homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and the Caribbean,” Labor Secretary, Alex Acosta, who was then the U.S. Attorney, negotiated a Non-Prosecution Agreement that shut down the FBI investigation, allowed Epstein to plead guilty to two state prostitution charges and to serve a mere 13 months in a county jail, (Source: “Perversion of Justice: How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime,” by Julie K. Brown, Miami Herald, 11/28/18).
Judge Marra found that the government violated the Crime Victims Rights Act by not only concealing the fact that it was entering into a Non-Prosecution Agreement from the victims, but by misleading them into believing that prosecution was still a possibility. The voluminous factual record cited by Judge Marra depicts a U.S. Attorneys’ Office either cowed by, or acting in concert with, a depraved sex trafficker of young girls. The fact that the man responsible for this travesty is now Labor Secretary tasked with combating human trafficking is a sick joke.
The day after Judge Marra issued his opinion, we learned that another Trump pal, New England Patriots owner, Robert Kraft, had been ensnared in a human trafficking case. The billionaire was charged with two counts of soliciting prostitution in a seedy South Florida “spa,” that was a hub of a sex trafficking ring. The Martin County Sheriff’s Office detailed an operation where women were lured from China with the promise of jobs as “maids or restaurant workers,” only to be forced into sex work once they arrived, servicing as many as 1500 men over the course of a year, (Source: “What We Know About Robert Kraft’s Charges of Soliciting Prostitution,” by Jenny Vrentas, SI.com, 2/23/19).
Finally, after 25 years of preying on Black girls and women without consequence, R. Kelly was indicted Friday on “ten counts of sexual abuse against four women, three of whom [were]…between the ages of 13 and 17 at the time of the alleged assault,” (Source: “R. Kelly Indictment Update, Latest: Singer Doesn’t Have Enough Money to Post Bail At This Time, Lawyer Says,” by Kelly Wynn’s, Newsweek.com, 2/23/19).
All three of these cases demonstrate, to an alarming degree, just how disposable this country considers women and girls. All too often, those with authority do nothing to protect them, whether they are star struck Black girls on the Southside of Chicago, fresh faced white high schoolers from Palm Beach, or Chinese immigrant women duped into sex slavery.
The Trump administration has elevated the depredation of women and girls into policy. From the “Global Gag Rule” enacted in January 2017, to blocking teenage refugees from obtaining abortions, this administration has put the full weight of the federal government behind stripping women and girls of their autonomy. The latest salvo was Friday’s announcement that the administration was poised to impose a “domestic gag rule” which will deny Title X funding to any clinic that performs or refers patients for abortions. Planned Parenthood, which services “41% of patients who receive family planning services under Title X,” would lose that funding, decimating low income women’s access to birth control, (Source: “The Trump administration is finalizing plans to strip funding from Planned Parenthood,” by Anna North, Vox.com, 2/22/19).
It is chillingly clear that far too many men in this country see each of us as nothing more than an ambulatory, ornamental collection of orifices that exist solely for male gratification or exploitation, rather than as human beings entitled to agency and dignity. We have no choice but to destroy the patriarchy, because it sure seems hellbent on destroying us.