The #MeToo campaign leader using the Epstein scandal to champion victims: ‘The survivors are the heroes'

The Guardian

2 days ago

The swirling political drama around the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his jailed accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, and the mixed verdicts in recent Harvey Weinstein and Sean 'Diddy' Combs trials, have raised questions around the health of the #MeToo social movement and its emphasis on raising awareness about sexual harassment.
There are fears of a backlash to the testimonies and experiences of victims and survivors of sexual violence and a lessening of the will to hold perpetrators to account.
But one person determined to keep survivors of sexual violence firmly at the forefront of public debate around the Epstein saga is the former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson, who received a $20m settlement from 21st Century Fox in 2016 to resolve a sexual harassment lawsuit against the Fox News chairman Roger Ailes.
'The survivors are the heroes in this [Epstein] case because there would be no case without them and their courage and bravery in speaking up,' Carlson told the Guardian last week.
Carlson, together with Julie Roginsky, who settled with Fox over claims she was denied a promotion after she refused Ailes, is now heading a pressure group, Lift Our Voices. The group aims to overturn legally binding non-disclosure agreements that prevent employees from speaking out on their experiences in the workplace, as neither Carlson nor Roginsky were able to do under settlement-attached NDAs they too signed.
'We aim to continue lifting [survivors] up and letting them know that we are here to support them,' Carlson said.
It's a mission that has become particularly acute in recent days as an effort by Maxwell to win a sentence commutation or sentence reduction on her 2021 conviction on sex-trafficking charges.
Remarkable in the ongoing controversy is the absence of young women who made allegations against Maxwell and Epstein and were in most instances paid out under an Epstein estate victims' compensation fund. The settlements, which amount to $121m to about 150 survivors, came with a commitment not to pursue future legal claims but permitted them to participate in criminal investigations and to share their stories publicly.
Carlson and Roginsky acknowledge that, even as powerful professionals, adult women when they came forward, the balance of power was tipped in favor of the man they were accusing. Almost a decade later, there is little expectation that Epstein-Maxwell survivors will want to expose themselves while a political storm rages.
On Thursday, the family of Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide in April, called on Donald Trump to resist pardoning Maxwell, calling her a 'monster who deserves to rot in prison for the rest of her life'.
Still, Roginsky says, the accounts of women used to be swept under the rug. 'The very fact that these survivors are believed is already a massive development in the way our culture treats these kinds of cases and reports.'
Adds Carlson: 'Nobody is saying we don't believe these people, and we have to see their faces and hear their voices to believe them, or to prove this story actually existed, and that is a huge step forward as well as a victory for the movement.
'People want information about this [Epstein-Maxwell] story but they're not demanding that survivors come forward in order for it to be true,' Carlson adds.
Behind the scenes Lift our Voices has championed federal legislation to make it easier for claimants to come forward.
In 2022, Congress passed the Ending Forced Arbitration for Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act (EFAA), which gave employees the right to take their claims to court instead of secret arbitration. Another federal law, known as the Speak Out Act, means claimants are no longer bound by a pre-dispute NDA or non-disparagement agreements if they have experienced sexual harassment or assault at work.
But the jury verdicts in both the second Weinstein trial, brought after the movie mogul's first conviction on sexual assault charges was thrown on appeal and succeeded in one out of three charges, and the Combs case, in which prosecutors failed to prove racketeering but succeeded on two lesser counts of transportation to engage in prostitution, indicate that jurors, at least, are sending mixed signals to advocates for survivors of sexual violence.
But Roginsky and Carlson are not deterred or deflated.
'Harvey Weinstein was found guilty and will be spending many more years in prison, so from that perspective it was a success,' says Roginsky. 'Sean Combs was also found guilty and will also be spending time in prison.'
Carlson and Roginsky laud the testimony of Cassie Ventura, Combs's former girlfriend who, heavily pregnant, spent days on the stand walking jurors through her experience. 'She's been held up largely as a hero and an inspiration to many other women,' Roginsky says.
'So these are not setbacks, this is more evidence that the movement is not going away, moving forward, holding perpetrators accountable, and giving survivors space and respect to tell their stories,' she adds.
Carlson points out that movements to change a culture are rarely a straight line of constant successes. 'But that doesn't mean there hasn't been significant change. We have to look at this globally and not in black-and-white,' she said.
But as demands for more information on the Epstein-Maxwell sex-trafficking conspiracy mount, both Carlson and Roginsky are doubtful that this information should come from Maxwell or the victims of the conspiracy.
'We don't need Maxwell to tell the world what happened, especially a woman who is a known liar and somebody that I think we all understand will say whatever it takes to get out of prison even if that means protecting certain high-powered people who may not need to be protected,' says Roginsky.
But fundamentally, adds Carlson, the will-she won't-she daily Maxwell show is a sideshow. 'This has nothing to do with the survivors. This is an abstraction for the Trump administration to be able to say look over here, not over there.
'It's preposterous that there would be any discussion over Maxwell getting any kind of a pardon,' she says. 'The fact that the president of the United States cannot say absolutely not to the most prolific child sex trafficker in a generation, besides Epstein, is a disgrace.'
Trump told reporters last week that while he was allowed to issue a pardon or clemency to Maxwell 'it's something I have not thought about.'
But the political consequences of that move, Carlson predicts, would be severe.
She said: 'There would be an insurrection if that happens, and it wouldn't just be from the left or the center, it would also be from the right, because Maga is behind wanting more information, ironically. It's brought Maga, the middle and the Democrats together. The survivors should even be in the equation on this.'