Helen Rumbelow on what it’s like to read the Epstein files:

As the hours of my time on the site turned into days I started to see these files themselves as a Rosetta Stone through which women might understand male power.

Powerful men often have their identities, in the email and messages chains, redacted. Powerless girls have their faces, in photos, blacked out. Yes, there are the publicised emails, such as Epstein’s draft alleging that Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, acquired an STD from “having sex with Russian girls”, or Richard Branson advising Epstein on how to recover from his little sex-offending public relations problem. Branson requests Epstein visit his Caribbean island again “as long as you bring your harem!”

The DOJ has cautioned that the release “may include fake or falsely submitted images, documents or videos”. Yet the three million files are a vast careless jumble that takes shape the more you read. There are multiple sets of “soap on a rope” in the shape of vaginas; girls’ disembodied limbs; and rich, often anonymised, men using punitive, humiliating terms for women. There are Epstein’s searches for porn using categories like “wild teen” and “sexy teen babe” right next to depositions of young girls talking of being raped. I read the Palm Beach report from 2006 — “her head was being held against the table forcibly as he continued to pump inside her” — that led to men in power letting Epstein off with a slapped wrist.

…

Andres Serrano emailed Epstein three days after the Access Hollywood tape was released in October 2016, saying, “I was prepared to vote against Trump for all the right reasons.” Serrano is a New York artist whose photographs include those of women bound by the wrists and splattered in blood. “But so disgusted by the outrage over ‘grab them by the pussy’,” Serrano continued, “that I may give him my sympathy vote.” 

That one really took my breath away. (That’s not just a metaphor, at least not in my case. I really do stop breathing for a bit when something shocks me.) He’s disgusted by the outrage at a powerful rich man boasting about thrusting his hand between women’s legs without permission? He’s not disgusted by the man boasting about hand-raping women, he’s disgusted by the outrage at the man boasting about hand-raping women?

Well there it is again, Greer’s famous reminder – women have no idea how much men hate them.