What the Epstein files teach the rest of us about reporting abuse
Sustained attention on the Epstein files has been stirring hopes among survivors of abuse and coercive control: could the spotlight force a change in how reports like theirs are received and acted on?
“I don’t know if it’ll be a net benefit, or whether it’s so scandalous and so salacious it will just blur the issue even further,” said Richard Grannon, a prominent thought-leader specializing in narcissistic abuse recovery and trauma healing. “While the concept of coercive control is better understood today than it was twenty years ago… reporting it is still a very risky endeavor. That’s not to say ‘don’t report’. It’s to warn: it may not be received very warmly at all.”
Institutional Betrayal
Psychologist Jennifer Freyd coined a term for the experience of being failed by the institution one depends on for protection: institutional betrayal. The Epstein files are a textbook example of institutional betrayal. Jeffrey Epstein’s victims reported on him for years and were systematically disbelieved, silenced, or vilified by the systems they sought protection from.
Quick overview: the case first broke in March 2005, after the parents of a 14-year-old girl reported to Palm Beach police that the millionaire financier had molested her at his mansion. The FBI opened a federal investigation in 2006 and identified about three dozen underage girls. But the 2008 Florida arrangement shut the federal case down, allowing Epstein to plead to minor charges and serve about a year with work release, while his victims were kept in the dark about the deal. The first state prosecutor’s office never reached out to or interviewed any of the girls who accused him, and the Palm Beach Post investigation found the early prosecutors treated the underage victims as prostitutes, placing the moral responsibility for their abuse on them. This trend remains consistent throughout: Maria Farmer, who worked for Epstein, reported him to the police and the FBI in 1996, and the complaint went nowhere; for nearly thirty years she was treated as a liar, until the released files finally proved she had filed it.
In their 2013 study, Dangerous Safe Havens: Institutional Betrayal Exacerbates Sexual Trauma, published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, Freyd and Carly Smith surveyed 345 college women. Among those who had had an unwanted sexual experience, nearly half also reported institutional betrayal — and those who did showed measurably worse outcomes, from heightened anxiety to dissociation, than those affected by the assault alone.
Virginia Giuffre was a key figure in the lawsuits leading to the unsealing of many of the Epstein files. She went public in 2015 and spent years having her credibility publicly torn apart by the very institutions meant to protect her. She died in April 2025, in what was ruled a suicide. In her memoir, Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, published posthumously in October 2025, she wrote: “I yearn, too, for a world in which perpetrators face more shame than their victims do.”
No Marks to Show
In 2007, sociologist Evan Stark coined the term “coercive control” to describe how abusers entrap their victims, stripping them of their freedom and autonomy rather than leaving a physical injury. He defined it as “a pattern of domination that includes tactics to isolate, degrade, exploit and control” a victim (Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life, Oxford University Press, 2007). It’s a recognized sociological and legal concept.
Coercive control is one of the hallmarks of narcissistic abuse – a non-clinical term describing the sustained emotional and psychological domination inflicted by an abuser with narcissistic traits, who isolates and manipulates without ever leaving a mark.
Grannon, author of A Cult of One: How to Deprogram Yourself from Narcissistic Abuse (2022), is a prominent influencer and trauma recovery coach who has built his practice around it. When there are no marks to serve as evidence, Grannon says, the treatment survivors of coercive control receive upon reporting can be debasing.
“We’re not talking about a van that screeches to a halt next to you while you’re walking down the street, and somebody puts a gun to your head and throws you in the van. We are talking about girls who voluntarily went to a party. As soon as you say, okay, so there was consent there, everything they say afterwards becomes devalued. Did you voluntarily go to that place, that man’s house, that party? Yes. Were you drinking? Yes. Were you taking drugs? Yes. Every “yes” diminishes the value of your testimony. Because if you consented in the beginning, it’s hard for people to conceptualize how consent could have ended at some point, and coercion began.”
The Epstein files run on the same logic. The state’s first prosecutors treated the underage girls as willing participants because Epstein had paid them. Before the grand jury in 2006, a prosecutor questioned one 15-year-old about her drinking and her MySpace photos (which Epstein’s lawyers had supplied) and asked the girl whether she understood she had “committed a crime.” The grand jury returned a single count of soliciting prostitution, the charge a man would face for propositioning an adult sex worker. The money the girls had taken became the reason to doubt them.
The pattern held in court. British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell is Epstein’s longtime associate and former girlfriend, who recruited and groomed underage girls for him. At her 2021 trial, a witness called Kate described Maxwell recruiting her at seventeen, then easing her into sexual contact with Epstein over months. Since she was over the age of consent when the sexual exchanges finally took place, Judge Alison Nathan instructed the jury that Kate was “not a victim of the crimes charged.” Her account would corroborate the other accusers, but on its own it could not legally support a charge. Coercion that crossed no statutory line registered, in the end, as choice.
Maxwell’s defense built the same argument from the accusers’ own conduct. Carolyn began going to Epstein’s house at fourteen and kept returning for years, paid each time, until, she testified, “I realized I was too old.” The defense pressed her on the payments and pressed another accuser on why she had waited two decades to come forward, arguing their memories were corrupted and Maxwell was a scapegoat. That the girls had taken the money and returned for more was offered as proof they had chosen their own path.
Considering the number and caliber of the people named in the Epstein files, royalty and world leaders among them, it’s tempting to attribute the system’s hostility towards the accusers to the power wielded by the accused. Grannon says otherwise. “The Epstein files are a horrifying, global-level political scandal that points to a very common experience.” Rank-and-file survivors of coercive control are disbelieved routinely, both by the institutions meant to help them and by their own friends and families.
“You’re very much at the mercy of whoever your first contact with the legal system is. And that could be an overworked, stressed-out, tired police officer who just hasn’t got time for it,” Grannon commented. “Or you could be told, as one lady I know was told, that she was making the whole thing up and she was just a crazy person seeking to defame the name of a famous person.”
Grannon, himself a survivor of narcissistic abuse, said that the dismissal cuts deepest when it comes from the survivor’s own circles. “I had that experience myself. When I told family and friends about it [the abuse], they were, like, it takes two to tango. Every relationship has its ups and downs. Every story has two sides. I even had a therapist who told me that.” Overall, said Grannon, most people he turned to responded with “total indifference.”
Nowhere to Report
Epstein’s victims were eventually, partly, believed. Ghislaine Maxwell, the associate who recruited girls for him, was convicted of sex trafficking in 2021 and sentenced in 2022 to twenty years. A federal court found that the prosecutors who concealed the 2008 deal had broken the law. Epstein himself never reached a jury; he died in custody in 2019. But belief, when it finally came, needed conditions almost no everyday survivor will have: a wealthy and connected perpetrator whose fall became a global political event, a critical mass of accusers, hard documentary evidence, an act of Congress, and a Justice Department forced to publish. For everyday survivors, what the Epstein files teach us about reporting abuse is that the system’s default is disbelief.
The root cause is a lack of systemic awareness. Coercive control was named in 2007. It became a crime in England and Wales in 2015, with Scotland, Ireland and parts of Australia following suit. The United States has no federal equivalent, and the few states that address it mostly do so in civil, not criminal, law. The same is true in the medical fields: Complex PTSD, the condition that describes the effects of coercive control, is recognized in the ICD-11, the diagnostic manual the World Health Organization publishes and most of the world uses. The American manual, the DSM-5, does not recognize it.
To add to the diagnostic divisions, terms like narcissism, narcissistic abuse, and codependency have been co-opted by folk-psychology and diluted to the point that the validity of the entire vocabulary is now questioned. Grannon recounted a paid specialist who dismissed his testimony with: “nothing happened to you… because narcissism isn’t a real personality disorder and narcissistic abuse doesn’t exist.”
According to Grannon, there is currently no established legal or medical system to which survivors of abuse and coercive control can safely report. He points them toward each other instead, sending his clients and his followers to peer support groups, where, in his words, “to the left of you and to the right of you are people who’ve been through the experience you’ve been through.” “There’s nowhere else you can go,” he says.
Disclosure: Richard Grannon is a STAR Network ambassador, and the author is STAR’s editorial lead.
STAR Network runs TAR Anon, a free, virtual, peer-led fellowship of survivors who share their experience, strength, and hope that each may resolve their own personal Toxic Abusive Relationship and, in doing so, help others in their own recovery. Meeting online five days a week, across time zones — no waitlist. No copay. No diagnosis required.
