For years, Jeffrey Epstein conjured a kind of grotesque fascination: the private island, the powerful friends, the whispered allegations. But focusing on the lurid details of his life and eventual death obscures the far more unsettling truth his case lays bare. Epstein’s story is not really about one man’s depravity. It is about a system – legal, cultural, and institutional – engineered to protect the powerful through silence. His crimes thrived not because they were hidden, but because the people who knew were coerced, encouraged, or more than willing to shut up.
Silence was not incidental to Epstein’s success. It was central to it. And in this, he was hardly unique.
The most revealing document in the entire Epstein saga is one of the first to come to light: the non-prosecution agreement the Department of Justice quietly signed in 2007, shielding Epstein from federal charges and insulating unnamed “co-conspirators”. The girls he had abused – minors the government was legally obligated to inform – were kept in the dark. The message was unmistakable: protecting powerful men mattered more than honoring the voices of the girls they harmed.
Even now, after Congress forced President Trump’s hand to mandate the release of the Epstein files, the Department of Justice has not committed to full disclosure. After everything we have learned in the nearly two decades since Epstein pleaded guilty to sex with a minor, the culture of silence is so powerful that it is unclear when, or even if, his survivors will ever truly receive justice.
This pattern echoes across institutions and industries. When abuse occurs, the first instinct is too often containment, not accountability. Corporations draft non-disclosure agreements that muzzle employees. Organizations force workers into arbitration, protecting executives while survivors are bound by confidentiality and pushed out the door. Even government agencies, as in Epstein’s case, have shown a willingness to trade transparency for expediency.
We know this pattern because we have seen it ourselves. Nearly a decade ago, we came forward to allege sexual harassment and retaliation against the former Fox News chairman and chief executive Roger Ailes and the network he ran, respectively. We each had to jump through hoops for our cases to be public, battling silencing mechanisms to bring our claims to light. And yet, long after Ailes’s death in 2017, we are still bound by NDAs that prevent us from sharing our stories. The priority, time and again, is to sweep accountability under the rug, even if it comes at the expense of the truth.
What the Epstein case and many like it expose is the architecture that protects predators long before the public ever hears their names. It is built from familiar materials: forced arbitration clauses, airtight NDAs, closed-door settlements, and a culture of retaliation that make speaking out dangerous. These tools do not simply resolve disputes – they suppress them. And that suppression creates the conditions in which serial abuse becomes not just possible, but predictable.
The language of these mechanisms is bureaucratic, even dull. But their real purpose is simple: silence. Silence that keeps survivors isolated. Silence that prevents patterns from coming into view. Silence that allows predators to move from institution to institution with their reputations intact.
Consider how many adults crossed paths with Epstein’s operation – staff, business associates, social friends, lawyers, financial managers. Many surely suspected what was happening and some certainly knew. But secrecy functions as a kind of social gravity: if everyone stays quiet, no one stands out. Epstein didn’t need to silence every person he encountered. The architecture around him did much of that work for him.
In this sense, the Epstein case is not an anomaly but a magnifying glass. It shows us how private power, institutional incentives, and legal structures align to smother survivors’ voices long before a journalist or prosecutor ever gets involved. But we should not rely on exposés and avoidable tragedies to break silence. The cost of that approach is too high, and the damage to survivors too enduring.
In 2022, we helped to pass two federal laws that cracked the closet door open. The Ending Forced Arbitration for Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act ensures that survivors can bring their claims to court rather than being sent into the secret chamber of forced arbitration. The Speak Out Act limits the use of NDAs that silence survivors before misconduct even occurs. These reforms chip away at the secrecy that has long shielded predators. They also send a signal: institutions can no longer count on silence as a default outcome.
Still, this work is only beginning. If we want to ensure that another Epstein cannot hide in plain sight, we must confront not only the individuals who commit abuse but also the systems that shield them. That means rewriting laws, changing culture, and rejecting the idea that forcing survivors into silence is the way it should be, because it has always been this way.
All survivors deserve more than whispered sympathy. The real scandal was never Epstein alone. It was the silence that allowed him to get away with his crimes for so long and that still allows his co-conspirators to get away with them years later.
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Gretchen Carlson is a journalist, bestselling author and internationally recognized advocate for women’s rights. Julie Roginsky is a champion of women’s rights and political consultant. Carlson and Roginsky co-founded the nonprofit Lift Our Voices, dedicated to eliminating silencing mechanisms like forced arbitration and NDAs for toxic workplace issues
