At 17, I was an aspiring ballerina with my whole life ahead of me. That all changed when I met Jeffrey Epstein. I was brought into Epstein’s orbit under the guise of being a masseuse to make a little extra money on the side.
It didn’t take long for Epstein to use one of the most painful experiences of my life, my mother’s brain tumor, as a manipulation tactic to force me to comply with his abuse. Epstein told me that he knew all of the most powerful doctors in New York City and said that if I did not do what he asked, my mother would not receive the healthcare she desperately needed.
The trauma I endured is why I was horrified to read that senior administration officials gathered in the White House Situation Room last summer to contain the political fallout from the Epstein files. The conversations reportedly included Vice President JD Vance, former Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and other senior White House officials.
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Those discussions also included Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general and now President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Justice Department.
It appears that these officials were treating the Epstein files primarily as a political crisis to be managed. The reporting describes urgent discussions about the administration’s public response and how to contain the damage.
What it does not describe is the same level of urgency around the questions that matter most to survivors: What unresolved leads remained in the files? Who else participated in Epstein’s crimes? Who helped facilitate them? And what was the Justice Department doing to hold those people accountable?
The Epstein files are not merely a collection of embarrassing names or politically damaging associations. They are records connected to the sexual exploitation and trafficking of girls and young women. Crucially, these files may contain information that helps establish how Epstein’s operation worked, who assisted him, and whether additional crimes can still be investigated.
The government’s first concern should have been protecting survivors, pursuing every credible lead, and determining whether anyone else could still be held accountable. This does not appear to have been the case.
It is particularly difficult to understand Blanche’s presence in those situation room discussions. As deputy attorney general, he was not a White House communications adviser. He was the second-highest-ranking law enforcement official in the country. His responsibility was to the Justice Department and to the fair administration of the law.
Why was his priority to manage the political consequences of the Epstein files? Was he also pressing officials to pursue the evidence contained within them? Did he advocate additional investigations? What steps did he take to identify other perpetrators, facilitators, or enablers?
Those are fair questions for any deputy attorney general. They are essential questions for someone now seeking to lead the Justice Department.
Under Bondi, the department promised transparency but failed to deliver the accounting that survivors were led to expect. It has exposed survivors’ names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, and other identifying information.
For women who had already taken enormous risks by coming forward, these were not minor clerical errors. Survivors I know have received threats, been followed, installed new security systems, and changed how they live because sensitive information was repeatedly made publicly available. The department charged with protecting victims instead left some of them feeling less safe.
Bondi has acknowledged that mistakes were made. But in recent testimony, she also said she had delegated the process to Blanche and that he was responsible for the entire release.
That makes Blanche’s role impossible to treat as peripheral.
He was responsible for a process that failed to protect survivors’ most sensitive information. He was present for White House discussions about managing the political fallout. He also personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker with every incentive to tell the administration what it wanted to hear.
This is not about assuming that every person whose name appears in a document committed a crime, but about whether the Justice Department pursued credible evidence with the seriousness these crimes demanded.
The department should never allow concerns about political embarrassment to interfere with an investigation into the sexual exploitation of children. The standard should remain simple: Follow the facts wherever they lead.
For decades, powerful institutions treated Epstein as a reputational problem rather than a criminal one. Universities, banks, businesses, and prominent individuals worried about their own exposure while survivors fought to be heard. Recent reporting raises the disturbing possibility that the federal government repeated that mistake, devoting extraordinary attention to managing the political consequences of the files while leaving survivors to wonder whether the same urgency was applied to pursuing the people named within them.
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Survivors have spent years watching institutions protect themselves first. We should not have to watch the Justice Department do the same.
The Epstein files are evidence, not a public relations problem. The next attorney general should treat them that way.
Danielle Bensky is a Jeffrey Epstein survivor, public advocate, and speaker fighting for government transparency, victim accountability, and legislative reform in sex trafficking cases.