Epstein scandal cuts deep into nation's moral fabric — Richard Kyte

I made the mistake of thinking this was just another political scandal that would blow over as soon as media attention moved on to other things, something that usually takes just a few days. Instead, it has hung around for years. And I suspect that is because there are so many victims, they have been organized and persistent in demanding justice, and as time goes on, more people are listening to them and advocating for them.

Epstein was initially investigated in 2005 in response to charges that he molested a 14-year-old girl. In 2008 he pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution as part of a plea deal. After a lengthy newspaper investigation in 2018, he was eventually charged with sex trafficking of minors. Epstein was found dead in his jail cell in 2019.

Last week, 23,000 pages of documents, mostly emails, were finally released. This week, the House voted 427-1 to require the Justice Department to release the remaining files. It’s about time.

This case has all the ingredients that make for an enduring story with widespread interest: wealth, power, corruption, sex and cover-ups. But it also has something else. What Epstein did, and what his friends and associates allowed him to do, violates our most deeply held convictions about justice.

Whenever innocent people are harmed and no one listens to them, injustice is done twice. First, by the offender; second, by those who ignore their cries.

At a time when most Americans have lost confidence in our shared institutions and we seem to be devolving into political tribalism, the concern with sexual exploitation of minors is something that just about everyone cares about. To understand why we care, why cases like this go to the heart of our basic intuitions about justice, we must look back at our history.

The ancient world had no legal protections for the weak or vulnerable. The practice of slavery was pervasive, and sex trafficking of both slaves and the poor was commonplace. There were laws, but the laws did not apply to those who had the misfortune of being powerless.

The earliest known condemnation of slavery in the western world comes from the sermons of the fourth-century bishop, Gregory of Nyssa. He wrote: “You are condemning to slavery human beings whose nature is free and characterized by free will. You are making laws that rival the law of God, overturning the law appropriate to humankind.”

The idea that the “law appropriate the humankind” was prior to civil law was a new idea in the world. It was based on the biblical notion that human beings are created in the image of God and are therefore sacred.

In the fifth century, the Christian teaching about the inherent moral worth of all human beings first made its way into formal law. The Theodosian Code of 428 gave legal protection to women who were forced into sex by powerful men. The decree stated that “pimps, fathers, and slave-owners” who forced their “daughters or slave women” into prostitution “will lose not only that power which they held, but they will be proscribed by exile to the public mines.”

The authority of that decree, however, was short-lived. Because of the political instability of the Middle Ages, the idea of inherent moral worth was preached from the pulpit but not widely instantiated into legal documents until the 18th century when European thinkers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant provided the philosophical underpinnings of inalienable and universal human rights. That is the language we recognize today in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

But having an idea instantiated into legal documents is not enough. For an idea to take root, it must also be embodied into daily practices. It must reside in our hearts.

Justice is too often regarded as a formal concept, something that applies to courts and government bodies. But justice is first and foremost a mode of understanding. It is a way of seeing one another as sacred, as beings worthy of our reverence. In short, justice is not an external condition, it is virtue.

That is why civil institutions like Congress, the Justice Department, and the Supreme Court are just only insofar as they are composed of people who recognize and uphold the inherent moral dignity of all people.

We are a nation that aspires to justice, but we also have a long history of putting protections into law that are not enacted by our communities.

Listening to the victims involved in the Epstein case is a step in the right direction. There are an estimated 1,000 people who were harmed by Epstein, his associates, and those who enabled him by overlooking his crimes. But there are way too many Jeffrey Epsteins out there operating with impunity right now.

In 2023, there were a reported 17,000 victims of sex trafficking in the U.S., and the reported number is just a fraction of the actual number of victims. That number has been growing every year.

Why aren’t we listening to them? Where is our moral outrage? Where is our commitment to put an end to these ongoing injustices?

Don’t think of this as just a political scandal. It goes much deeper than that. It is a moral failing on the part of our nation.