When Donald Trump rode down that golden escalator, I couldn’t quite name the feeling I had. I was seventeen, watching a man descend into applause, and I felt, beneath the noise and the jokes and the spectacle, a small internal cry. Something in my soul recognized the performance. Not the politics, but the posture, the certainty, and the way the room bent around him like gravity.
But today, as headlines surrounding the Epstein Files continue to circulate and documents are released and names surface in new combinations, that old feeling returned with a sharper edge. It wasn’t surprise, or outrage, not exactly. It was familiarity.
My father was born in 1943 in Decatur, Illinois. If you read the official version of his life, he grew up in a normal house with a normal family, relocated to the Sacramento area as a child, graduated from El Camino High School, and went on to college to earn a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature. If you believe his obituary, he later earned a PhD in Scientific and Technology Writing and Artificial Intelligence from U.C. Davis in 1968. Which is interesting, considering those fields, alone or stitched together, did not exist the way he claimed they did. At least, not then, or like that.
But my father was not a man who lived inside ordinary limits. He lived inside stories. He wrapped himself in clout the way other people wore coats: something to make him look larger, warmer, untouchable. When I was a child I would have told you, without hesitation, that he had a PhD in physics and a two-hundred IQ, because that’s what he told me. I would have told you he was a genius inventor and businessman, an environmentalist, a man destined to change the world. I would have told you he was special, different from the rest. And if he would’ve told me so, I would’ve told you that he created “the hottest economy in the history of the world.” I was a little girl. I believed my father was a superhero because children are built to believe that the hands that feed them will not also harm them.
The belief began to thin the way fabric thins: not all at once, but in places of repeated friction. The more I asked questions, the more I heard the way adults talked about him when they believed no one was listening. The more I overheard conversations from the hallway, the kitchen, the edge of a doorway where I wasn’t supposed to be listening. And then there was how he spoke to my sister.
The way he put her down with a casualness that made it feel like weather, inevitable, unremarkable, something you endured. The way she would crumple and then stand back up, smoothing herself, telling herself she deserved it. Watching her taught me something early: that love, in his house, could be used as a leash. I was ferocious as a kid. Too much mouth, too much heat. The kind of child who didn’t know yet that survival sometimes requires silence. I couldn’t stand the way he talked to her. I couldn’t stand that she took it like it was true. So, one day I decided to stand up to him. I don’t remember what he said to her. I don’t remember what I said back. What I remember is what followed. Darkness. Bath water.
My body stuck in his lap while the house slept around us. The chair, old, creaky, “pleblon” fabric, rocking and rocking. My wet hair. My skin cold where the air met it. A towel wrapped around me that was meant to look like comfort, like safety, like something a good father would do. As if fabric could change what had happened. I stared out the window and watched birds move through the earliest light as the sun rose. I watched the world keep turning without me. I watched morning arrive like it always did, indifferent, inevitable.
He knew what he was doing. He had tried other ways to break me, anger, shame. The long lectures that never ended, the ones that made you forget what the original accusation was. The contempt that could fill a room, but none of it worked the way he wanted. I was too much like my mother, unwilling to accept the false narrative. But that morning he found something that worked.
He found a way to put me in my place. To strip me of my will. To teach me that he was more powerful, and I shouldn’t have dared to think otherwise. The part that still makes my stomach turn, even now, is how clean the logic was. It wasn’t about love, it wasn’t even about desire, not in the way people want to imagine when they try to make sense of the unspeakable. It was about punishment, about control. It was about the moment I stepped between him and my sister and refused his script.
And because it happened to me, and not to the sister I defended, or my older half sisters, I know what it was in his mind: not a compulsion, not an accident, not a “mistake.” It was a decision, simply a tactic, a way to take my strength and prove to himself that he could. Luckily for me, the story didn’t end there, I got away. And now, years later, when I watch a certain kind of man move through the world with manufactured greatness and a crowd eager to believe it, when I see how easily power dresses itself up as inevitability, I recognize the shape of it in my bones. Not because every public performance is the same. But because I learned, very young, what it looks like when someone builds a persona large enough to live inside… and then uses it to make everyone else smaller. That’s the thing about familiarity, it isn’t always a comfort. Sometimes it’s a warning.
Because I’ve met this man before. Not this exact man, different suit, different stage, but the same architecture underneath. The same need to be seen as exceptional, the same insistence that truth is whatever serves him, the same contempt for anyone who won’t clap on command. My father needed me to believe his myth, Trump needs the country to believe his.
My father inflated his credentials the way a drowning man grabs at air, anything to look larger, smarter, untouchable. Trump does it with the amplification of a nation: the superlatives, the certainty that he alone can fix what everyone else has broken, the demand that we accept the performance as reality. And when reality refuses to cooperate, the response isn’t reflection, it’s escalation, it’s punishment, it’s control.
That’s the similarity that matters, not a diagnosis, not a label, but the pattern: a man who cannot tolerate limits will try to remove the people and institutions that enforce them. We’ve watched that posture become policy. We’ve watched the White House assert the right to decide which outlets get the kind of close access that exists specifically so the public can see what power is doing.
We’ve watched journalists barred and punished over language, over refusing to adopt a government‑preferred name, as if words belong to the person in charge, and the truth is something you can order into existence if you’re willing to squeeze hard enough.
We’ve watched independent watchdogs dismissed in a sweep, quiet, administrative, easy to miss if you don’t know what oversight is for, but devastating if you do.
I’m not saying this to debate politics. I’m saying it because it’s the same physics I grew up under: the need to dominate the room, the reflex to punish resistance, the obsession with being untouchable. My father did it in private. Trump does it in public.
And then there are the Epstein files, this new wave of documents, this new cycle of names and screenshots and speculation, this churn that makes people feel informed while the harmed are treated like collateral. The Justice Department has published an official Epstein library with an explicit warning that parts of it contain descriptions of sexual assault. They also admit, shamelessly, that because of the volume, the site may still contain non‑public personally identifying information or other sensitive content, and they rely on the public to flag it. As if the survivor didn’t give up enough speaking out under the assumption of confidentiality.
Survivors’ attorneys have said names and identifying details appeared unredacted in the release. And the Justice Department has acknowledged taking down thousands of documents and “media” that may have included victim‑identifying information after outcry from victims and their lawyers. Even transparency can become another violation if it forgets who it’s supposed to protect.
Releases like this, at this scale, can include raw tips and allegations alongside genuine communications and evidence, and DOJ officials have said some claims are sensational and lack credibility. So, I am not asking you to take a screenshot and call it certainty. I am not asking you to convict a person in your mind because you’re angry. I’m asking you to notice what happens to your moral instincts when the man is powerful.
Because if you read my story, if you read about a father using his power inside a family to punish a child, most people feel a clean, immediate response: Stop him. Make him pay. Protect her. There is no long philosophical debate, your instincts understand what the mind tries to complicate. And yet when the man is famous, when the man is politically useful, when the man is wrapped in symbols and surrounded by people willing to translate cruelty into strength, suddenly the response changes.
Suddenly the victims become suspicious and the powerful man becomes fragile.
Suddenly there are endless “what ifs,” endless excuses, endless demands for the kind of perfect proof that trauma rarely produces. Suddenly the same people who would never leave their daughter alone with an ordinary predator will defend an extraordinary one, because defending him protects something in them: a belief, an identity, a team.
So, let me ask it plainly, because dancing around it is part of how this keeps happening: If these accusations, these associations, these patterns of proximity and power, were about any other man, would you defend him the same way? If he lived on your street, would you shrug? If he coached your kid’s team, would you call the accusers liars? If he were your boss, would you say, “well, he’s done some good things?” If he didn’t offer you a sense of belonging, would you still demand the victims prove their pain to your satisfaction?
Why is the standard higher for the harmed and lower for the powerful? My father had no money, no influence, no name. He didn’t have handlers or lawyers or a cheering section trained to call consequences “persecution.” He was a powerless man in the world. And still, what he did to me nearly destroyed my life.
I remember the dark. The bath water. My wet hair cooling in the air. I remember that towel wrapped around me like a costume, like if it looked enough like comfort, it could become comfort. I remember the creak of that chair as it rocked and rocked, and I remember the sunrise arriving anyway, indifferent and inevitable, birds moving through the first light as if nothing had happened. That’s what power counts on: that morning will come, and everyone will carry on, and the harmed will be expected to swallow it in silence.
So, when I look at men who move through the world with money and networks and influence, men who can reshape institutions, punish scrutiny, and turn accountability into a punchline, I can’t help but think about what I lived through, scaled up. Not because my story is the same as anyone else’s. Because I know this truth in my bones: if a powerless man can do that much damage, what does power make possible? And what does it say about us, about who we are willing to crown, when we let men like that represent us to the world? Think of former Prince Andrew, title removed, no longer allowed to walk palace grounds, this is how countries with morals deal with the abuse of women and children.
So here is my call to action, and I mean it as a refusal to participate in the same old cycle: Don’t wrap harm in a towel and call it safety, don’t rock yourself back and forth in the creaky chair of denial because facing the truth is uncomfortable, step into the light, into the part of the day where we can actually see.
Protect survivors like they are real people, not content, donate to a local rape crisis center, a child advocacy group, or a victims legal fund. Don’t circulate unredacted names. Don’t share the most graphic screenshots like there isn’t someone’s trauma behind it. If you need to share a document for accountability, crop it, blur it, warn for it, link to responsible reporting instead of distributing someone’s pain raw. And when you see identifying information that shouldn’t be public, report it. Defend the institutions that make predators nervous: a free press, independent watchdogs, oversight with teeth, because darkness is where impunity grows. Help independent journalists and free press keep the lights on, subscribe to the newsletters and the YouTube channels, support the investigative journalists.
And hold the line in conversation, especially with people you love: ask them, gently but directly, whether they would say the same things if these allegations were about any other man. Ask them why the victims are always asked to be perfect, while the powerful are allowed to be monstrous and still be called “strong.” Because men like this don’t run on competence, they run on belief.
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