Coping With The Extent Of American Misogyny In The Wake Of The Epstein Files

After a week of shocking Epstein revelations, the powers that be are trying to change the subject. I’m no scholar in Middle East politics, so I won’t say anything other than I’m anti-genocide, I’m pro-human rights, and I don’t believe there’s any excuse for mass casualties.

The headlines are suddenly full of the war in Iran instead of the shock and awe of the Epstein files dump and the murders in Minneapolis. But as much as I want to care about Iran, the only part of this war I feel resourced to care about is that, according to Iranian state media, 165 children were killed at Shajarah Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in the southern town of Minab. This is happening right when we’re talking about how so many girls were sex trafficked and raped. This is happening right after Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered in cold blood by thugs who think they can get away with it- and who probably will.

Many of us are screaming inside, “Someone please stop the powerful men who can’t seem to avoid committing atrocious violence against women, children, or anyone who tries to stop them!”

As Suzanne Bender, MD wrote on Psychology Today in her essay The Emotional Impact of American Misogyny:

And don’t even get me started about Trump’s comments to the US men’s hockey team. On Feb 22, 2026, a video was recorded after the US men’s hockey team won Olympic gold. During a congratulatory call in which Donald Trump invited the players to the White House and said he had medals to give them, he joked that he’d need to invite the women’s team too or he’d “be impeached.” The male players in the locker room were seen laughing at the misogynistic comment, which got widespread negative media attention. In Stop Calling It Sexism; It’s Cowardice, Liz Plank wrote:

Then as Celeste Davis pointed out in When men make a mess, no need to send the men with an apology, just send a woman with a smile, nobody from that men’s hockey team apologized for 3 days after that. Instead, the women’s hockey coach (who was the mother of two of those hockey players) made excuses for them.

That’s a woman with internalized misogyny, a woman who betrayed her own team. And yes, us women are reeling from this kind of misogyny right about now.

Regarding the Epstein files, I can’t stop wondering why so many of the most powerful men on the planet did not care enough about protecting girls and women- and then, after betraying girls and women, they dismiss what’s been done- and we’re just supposed to move on and care about the war in Iran. They don’t realize many of us can’t move on. The dawning awareness about the extent of misogyny in America- and the complicity of so many people, especially men- refuses to let us move on.

As American women, we were already beside ourselves in 2016, when the words of an eye-rollingly misogynistic TV star running for President were unearthed: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Then our own country’s voting population betrayed women, including the internalized misogyny of far too many women who voted for Trump, by putting him in power. Twice, Trump was elected over the women who ran against him, who might have been our first female Presidents. We didn’t know how to process that shock, but all along, the Epstein nightmare was playing out in the background. It was hidden, but our nervous systems registered it, nevertheless. Some part of us knew…something is not right in this country. I don’t feel safe here anymore. This country doesn’t respect me anymore.

Now, it feels like the worst version of a mashup between our outrage that Trump was elected in 2016 and the confusion about what’s real that arose during the pandemic. After we spent so much energy trying to figure out what was a real conspiracy and what was a debunkable conspiracy theory during the early pandemic, when we discover from the Epstein files that an actual conspiracy has been suppressed for decades, it’s understandable that we’re all reeling a bit. I don’t believe Q was right or that an evil cabal of elites headed by Hillary Clinton were drinking the blood of children. That’s a debunked “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that led to a 28-year-old North Carolina man named Edgar Maddison Welch entering the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor with an AR-15-style rifle and a revolver, causing customers and employees—including families with children—to flee. Inside the restaurant, he fired his rifle into a locked door while trying to investigate the conspiracy claims. After spending about 20 minutes inside and finding no evidence of children being held in some imaginary basement, he surrendered to police.

But yes, there was a ring of evil elites, mostly men but some women, who enabled Epstein to rape and sex traffic girls and women and who may have raped children and women themselves. And they covered for each other and are still doing so, joking about the cute girls and making misogynistic comments to each other the whole time.

When we wake up to the fact that some of the most powerful men on our planet at the very least enabled Epstein’s sex trafficking and rape of young girls- and then joked about those girls, when it hits us how many bystanders were complicit with their silence and failure to protect those girls, when we see our own President’s obvious misogyny- and so many other people’s lack of care about it- it can be paralyzing. We don’t know whether to fight, flee, freeze and dissociate, fawn, or just indulge addictions to numb it all out.

We must see the rest of the Epstein files. Already, the fall out is huge, but it’s not enough. When we’re faced with the fact that so many powerful men are still conspiring to hide what’s in the Epstein files, that they’re protecting what powerful men said, did, and wrote, instead of protecting vulnerable victims, our imaginations are left to run wild. In the absence of enough prosecutions, we wonder what, if anything, will happen to people who enabled sexual violence against girls and women. If not much will happen, if the news cycle just moves on, we have a right to feel unsafe, outraged, and angry at those who continue to look the other way.

Add the misogynistic insult of hearing about girls killed in Iran- all because the boys can’t keep their missiles in their pants. Add how people like Deepak Chopra, Jeffrey Martin, and Peter Attia, people who the public trusted, people from the wellness and spiritual world who should have known better, joked about Epstein’s girls- instead of calling the police and reporting what they appear to have known.

And now we’re supposed to change the subject and talk about Iran, right as we’re finally getting some traction and feeling just a little bit heard and validated? Huh?

In my private mentoring sessions and in the IFS practice groups I lead (like LOVE SCHOOL and THE WRITER’S CALLING), undiluted fury from women is pouring out like lava. People are having panic attacks after reading social media posts. We feel disgust and a deeply rooted sadness that quickly turns to rage. For many of us, all this misogyny lands like a psychological shock to an already weary system.

There’s a disorienting feeling that echoes what many people experienced during the revelations about abusive priests in the Catholic Church. Oprah-endorsed “spiritual leaders” like convicted rapist John of God and Epstein-implicated Deepak Chopra and Jeffrey Martin (and other badly behaving self help authors that I blew the whistle on here) are betraying public trust in the arenas where we need to trust our leaders the most- medicine, spirituality, coaching, wellness. Public personas and private actions don’t line up. Institutions that were supposed to protect the vulnerable instead protected the powerful. These are the people we often go to when we’re physically sick, when we’re heartbroken, when we’re soul sick, when our nervous systems are fried. And they’ve betrayed us.

Being betrayed by our President (and all the people who voted for him) is bad enough. But when we find out that the very people whose work helped soothe us are also complicit in enabling the rape of girls and women, it’s destabilizing. The result is a kind of collective vertigo. Many people feel as if we’ve been dropped into a horror movie without their consent- and it’s everywhere.

Maybe we’d been able to compartmentalize misogyny, to put it under the sofa while we go to yoga class (even though yoga gurus have mostly fallen too.) But we can’t escape it anymore. As more information about Epstein’s network becomes public, the depth of misogyny embedded in our culture becomes difficult to ignore. In the Epstein files, the female body was treated as disposable. The bodily integrity of children was treated as irrelevant.

All of this dredges up for many of us the ways we’ve been victims of misogyny in our own lives. We can’t avoid feeling the stings of how we, as girls, as women, have suffered at the hands of men who degraded, denied, invalidated, attacked, exploited, committed violence against us, and then blamed us. It’s all too familiar- the narcissism playbook.

First, deny wrongdoing—even when evidence appears overwhelming. Then gaslight the people who are upset, implying they are overreacting or misunderstanding. If that fails, shift the blame onto the victims or critics. And when accountability still threatens, introduce distraction after distraction until attention scatters and the original issue fades from focus. Whether in personal relationships or public life, the pattern is recognizable.

We seem to be seeing a version of this dynamic in the political sphere as well. As public attention grows around Epstein’s crimes and the powerful figures connected to him—including scrutiny involving Donald Trump—the news cycle rapidly floods with other crises, geopolitical conflicts, and controversies. Whether intentional or not, the effect is the same: our collective nervous system becomes overwhelmed. And when people are overwhelmed, attention fragments- and accountability becomes out of reach.

I just got into a bit of pissing match with two powerful men who are trying to make statements about this moment in history, and I don’t think they’re getting it. But just like BIPOC women like Layla Saad, author of Me & White Supremacy, don’t want to teach “spiritual white women” about white supremacy, I don’t want to do the emotional labor of teaching cis, white, hetero men about patriarchy. It’s too triggering how clueless men can be about how misogyny affects women. Let the men do that with each other. Let us women grieve and metabolize our outrage together.

All this made me flash back to 2012, when Jackson Katz gave a TEDx talk- Violence Against Women- It’s A Men’s Issue at the same event where I did my first TEDx talk-The Shocking Truth About Your Health. His talk is an idea worth spreading, because it calls out male silence, male complicity, a man’s ability to leverage the privilege and power of being male to look the other way when it comes to sexual violence of women and children. They minimize them (and therefore can ignore them) as “women’s issues” when they should be men’s issues.

Later in his talk, he says:

Too much silence. I’ve been too silent. My partner has been too silent. Powerful people who actually had the power to move the needle have been too silent. My inbox is now full of insides in the wellness and spirituality world, people who worked for the Chopra Center, people who worked for Oprah, people who worked at Hay House- telling me their stories and naming names about all that we’ve witnessed. I do not want more private stories shared with me!

I want us all to stop being silent in order to protect powerful people.

I wrote this article “Good Guys,” Here’s What Women Need When Talking About The Epstein Files about how men can help the women in their lives metabolize everything that’s happening around misogyny and patriarchy right now. We need both women and men (and any other gender identities) to help us cope with all this. But we especially need men to understand what we’re going through.

In my conversations with clients and colleagues, I keep coming back to a few grounding reminders. First, there are three deeply disturbing elements of the Epstein situation:

1. The abuse itself.
2. The silence of the powerful people who knew.
3. The inadequate societal and legal response to the abuse.

When those in power minimize harm or deny obvious wrongdoing, it can make people question our own perceptions. That disorientation is a classic effect of gaslighting. But your reactions are not irrational. Feeling grief, anger, disgust, or a yearning for accountability is a healthy human response to learning that vulnerable people were harmed and that justice may have been obstructed. Your anguish is a good thing- because it reflects your empathy.

At the same time, constant exposure to traumatic information can itself be destabilizing. Research has shown that repeated media exposure to traumatic events can produce symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress—heightened anxiety, intrusive thoughts, dysphoria, and sleep disturbance. Social media algorithms often amplify shocking or disturbing content, meaning people can encounter new revelations repeatedly throughout the day, whether they intended to seek them out or not. The takeaway isn’t to shut yourself off from the world. But it is wise to pace your exposure.

Limit how often you read updates. Choose a few trusted sources rather than scrolling endlessly. Step away when your nervous system feels flooded. Regulation is not avoidance. It is self-protection.

It may feel as if no one is standing up to powerful abusers, but allies do exist. Journalists, investigators, survivors, and advocates have been working for years to bring this story into the light. Whistle-blowers brought down the Catholic Church. We must continue to blow whistles and to remind ourselves that brave people do exist. We can do what’s within our power to support those courageous, risk-taking folks. When facing powerful systems that enable abuse, solidarity matters. Accountability rarely emerges from isolated voices; it grows when enough people speak up- together.

If what you are learning is making your stomach turn or disrupting your sleep, don’t carry that weight alone. Talk with trusted friends or family. Speak with a therapist if you have access to one. If you feel called to use your platform to advocate for accountability, do so thoughtfully and responsibly- and name names when you’re ready- so you can help protect the next victim.

Remember, what you are feeling is not the result of some kind of inner weakness; it is a natural human response to injustice. And one of the few reliable antidotes to both abuse and intimidation is collective clarity: people refusing to look away, refusing to forget, and refusing to let harm to the vulnerable be dismissed as the price of power.

How are y’all doing? Share what’s coming up for you in the comments. And thank you for staying in the hard conversations here. I’m so grateful to the women of Substack right now for all the amazing content you’re putting out! Please share your favorites with regards to this historical moment in the comments if you feel inspired to do so. If you feel inspired to write about this moment, join us for The Writer’s Calling on 3/13. Learn more here.

Or come write with me and Memoir As Medicine author Nancy Aronie for a weekend Zoom workshop in April for Enough Already.