The Pattern That Never Changes Protecting the Powerful, Silencing the Survivors

The Pattern That Never Changes

Protecting the Powerful, Silencing the Survivors

By Sharri | February 2026

I Watched Them Stand

On February 11, 2026, I watched a congressional hearing that gutted me. Not because I learned something new about how the world works—I already knew. I work with survivors of organized abuse every single day. I sit with people who have been tortured, trafficked, programmed through mind control, and thrown away by systems that were supposed to protect them. I know what institutional betrayal looks like. But watching it play out on a national stage, in high definition, with the Attorney General of the United States dismissing survivors to their faces—that hit different.

Representative Pramila Jayapal asked the Epstein survivors in that hearing room to stand. She asked them to raise their hands if they had still not been able to meet with the Department of Justice about the abuse they suffered. Every single survivor raised their hand. Every one. And Jayapal said for the record: "Please know for the record that every single survivor has raised their hand."

And when Jayapal asked Attorney General Pamela Bondi to turn around and apologize to those women? Bondi refused. She may have meant that what Jayapal said was "theatrics" but in that moment she was referring to their pain as drama. She said she would not "get in the gutter" with her but in saying that she refused to stand with them. She deflected. She attacked the lawmakers asking questions. She recited crime statistics from California when asked about trafficking victims. She called a bipartisan congressman who co-authored the very law requiring the file release a "failed politician" with "Trump derangement syndrome."

I have seen this before. Not on C-SPAN, but in the eyes of the people I advocate for and minister to. I have sat across from survivors who told the truth and were called liars. Who reported abuse and were told they were imagining things. Who went to the authorities and were turned away and were sent back to their abusers. Many law enforcement and those in the judicial system are connected to the cultic criminal networks we trust to bring justice about. The venue changes. The pattern never does.

What the Files Actually Show

The Epstein Files Transparency Act was passed by Congress and signed into law in November 2025. It required the Department of Justice to release all documents related to Jeffrey Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. What has actually happened since then is a masterclass in how institutions protect the powerful while claiming to pursue justice.

On January 30, 2026, the DOJ released over 3 million pages of documents, 180,000 images, and 2,000 videos. What they did with those documents tells you everything you need to know about whose safety matters to them. A Wall Street Journal review found that at least 43 victims’ full names were exposed in the files—including more than two dozen who were minors when they were abused. Some names appeared over 100 times. Home addresses were visible in keyword searches. Attorneys who had provided the DOJ with a list of 350 victims’ names in advance—specifically so they could be redacted—said the department failed to even perform a basic keyword search.

Meanwhile, the names of co-conspirators—the people who helped recruit, transport, and abuse children—were blacked out. Attorneys for survivors called it exactly what it is: "hiding the names of perpetrators while exposing survivors." I call it cover up and protecting the pedophiles and those who need to be prosecuted for the crimes they have commited.

Attorneys representing more than 200 alleged victims asked federal judges to order the immediate takedown of the DOJ’s Epstein Files website, calling the release "the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in United States history."

Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna—a Republican and a Democrat who co-authored the transparency law—went to the DOJ to view the unredacted files themselves. What they found was damning. Six men whose names had been hidden behind black ink in what the FBI itself had labeled a co-conspirator document. Khanna read their names on the House floor: billionaire Les Wexner, Dubai CEO Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, and others. He asked the question that should haunt every American: "Why did it take Thomas Massie and me going to the Justice Department to get these six men’s identities to become public?"

That means a survivor’s statement to the FBI—naming rich and powerful men who went to Epstein’s island, his ranch, his home, and raped and abused underage girls—was hidden. Protected. While the survivors themselves were exposed.

The Web of Connections That Cannot Be Ignored

I am not a conspiracy theorist. I am a woman who has spent years healing after being harmed by similar cultic criminal networks through ritual abuse, mind control and childhood sex trafficking. I have studied and know persoanlly how organized abuse networks function, how they use legitimate institutions as cover, and how they rely on the silence and complicity of powerful people to continue operating. So when I look at the documented, verified connections in this case, I am not speculating. I am recognizing a pattern I have seen before because I lived in it.

The relationship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein is not alleged—it is extensively documented across decades of public record. Trump himself told New York Magazine in 2002: "I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." Trump’s name appeared in Epstein’s contact book. He flew on Epstein’s private jets seven times between 1993 and 1997, according to flight logs entered as evidence during Maxwell’s trial. They were photographed together at Mar-a-Lago with Ghislaine Maxwell in 2000. NBC archival footage from 1992 shows the two of them at a party at Mar-a-Lago with NFL cheerleaders, evaluating women together.

Virginia Giuffre—one of Epstein’s most well-known survivors—was recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell while working as a teenage locker room attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. She was 16 years old. In a 2011 email to Maxwell, Epstein himself wrote that one of his victims had spent "hours" at his house with Trump. Epstein called Trump "the dog that didn’t bark"—and Maxwell replied, "I have been thinking about that."

In a January 2019 email, Epstein allegedly wrote that Trump "knew about the girls, as he asked Ghislaine to stop." If true, this means Trump knew children were being trafficked at his own property and his response was to ask someone to stop—not to call the police. Not to protect the children. To ask the co-conspirator to stop.

Since the 1970s, at least 25 to 28 women have publicly accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct ranging from unwanted kissing and groping to rape. In 2023, a New York jury found Trump civilly liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll. He was not found liable for rape under the narrow legal definition but was found liable for sexual abuse. Trump has denied all allegations, calling every accuser a liar.

The newly released Epstein files contain a list compiled by FBI officials of more than a dozen additional unverified allegations related to Trump. The DOJ itself said some documents contain "untrue and sensationalist claims" against the president. But the question that won’t go away is this: if there is nothing to hide, why has the administration fought so hard to control what gets released? Why did the DOJ initially try to pass off already-public documents as new revelations? Why are co-conspirators’ names redacted while victims’ names are exposed?

And why—when Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that no additional prosecutions related to Epstein would be pursued—did he say it so quietly, as if he hoped nobody would notice? Over 1,000 identified victims. Millions of pages of evidence. And as Representative Ted Lieu said directly to Bondi: "As we sit here today, there are over 1,000 sex-trafficking victims and you have not held a single man accountable. Shame on you."

Charlie Kirk Spoke Up—And Then He Was Gone

On September 8, 2025, Charlie Kirk publicly called on the Department of Justice to immediately unseal all the Epstein documents. He said on his show that the American people deserved every file released with no redactions. He said he was pushing for it "both privately and publicly." He was drawing attention to Epstein’s intelligence ties. He was asking questions that made powerful people uncomfortable.

Two days later—on September 10, 2025—he was assassinated at Utah Valley University. Shot in the neck by a sniper positioned on a rooftop while he spoke to 3,000 people. Tyler Robinson, 22, has been charged with aggravated murder, and the prosecution is seeking the death penalty.

I am not claiming to know the full truth of why Charlie Kirk was killed. The legal process is ongoing. But I am saying this: a man who was loudly demanding transparency about one of the most significant trafficking cases in American history was silenced permanently. And the institution that was supposed to release those files has done everything in its power to delay, redact, and control what the public sees.

Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, took over as CEO of Turning Point USA. She worked as a real estate agent at the Corcoran Group—a firm whose name appears in the Epstein documents. She ran a charity called Everyday Heroes Like You that operated a project in Romania with orphans, in partnership with the U.S. military. The connections between these worlds—real estate, pageantry, charity work, military, political connections and with vulnerable children, proximity to powerful men—are the very patterns that those of us in this field are trained to recognize. I am not saying Erika Kirk is personally implicated in wrongdoing, but I am saying that hers and the behavior of the people at Turning Point USA are suspiciously weird. Instead of just answering the questions Erika Kirk is lying and it seems that they are all covering something up. Their silence is loud. And in my world, silence in the face of children being harmed is never neutral.

What I Know From Sitting With Survivors

I work with survivors of ritual abuse, mind control, and trafficking. I train clinicians who treat people with dissociative identity systems created through deliberate, organized torture. I know things about how these networks operate that most people could never stomach hearing. And here is what I know to be true: Trafficking operations do not operate in isolation. They require the cooperation—or at minimum the willful blindness—of people in positions of power. They use legitimate businesses as fronts. They exploit charitable work with vulnerable populations. They rely on beauty, glamour, and social access to recruit and groom. They depend on institutional silence to survive. And when someone threatens to expose them, that person becomes a target.

What I watched in that hearing room on February 11 was not politics. It was a reenactment of every disclosure session I have ever witnessed where the survivor told the truth and the person in authority looked away. When Bondi refused to apologize to those women—when she called their advocates theatrical, when she recited unrelated crime statistics rather than answer a direct question about why perpetrators’ names are hidden—she was doing what every complicit system does: she was protecting the structure that protects the abusers.

Jamie Raskin named the survivors present in the room: Theresa Helm, Jess Michaels, Lara Blume McGee, Dani Bensky, Liz Stein, Marina Lacerda, Sky and Amanda Roberts (the family of the late Virginia Giuffre), Sharlene Lund, Rachel B., and Lisa Phillips. These are not abstractions. These are human beings who were trafficked, raped, and exploited as children—and who showed up in a room full of politicians and cameras because they still believe that truth matters. They have had to feel the crushing blow of finding out that their lives did not matter in that room when these people are in a position where they could have done differently. Being silent is being complicit of guilt.

Dani Bensky said before the hearing: "The DOJ needs to do its job. Give us the rest of the files and start the investigations." Sky Roberts, Virginia Giuffre’s brother, called Bondi’s handling of the case "nothing short of a failure." Annie Farmer, another survivor, pointed out the absurdity: "If you see some of these documents where there will be a list of 50 names and one is redacted, there’s just no explanation for how it could have been done so poorly."

She’s right. There is no innocent explanation. When you redact the perpetrators and expose the victims, you have made a choice. And that choice tells survivors everywhere exactly where they stand in the eyes of the people who hold power.

This Is Not Okay

I am writing this because I cannot watch what I watched and just let it go. I cannot see the pattern—the same pattern I see every day in my advocacy—playing out at the highest levels of government and pretend it doesn’t matter.

Over 1,000 identified victims. Millions of pages of evidence. Exposed names of children who were trafficked. Redacted names of the men who did it. An Attorney General who refuses to apologize. A Deputy Attorney General who announces there will be no more prosecutions. A president whose name appears over 1,000 times in the files, whose property was a recruitment site, who called the man at the center of it all a "terrific guy," who has been found civilly liable for sexual abuse, and who has been accused by at least 25 women of sexual misconduct—and who calls every single one of them a liar. This is corruption. This is evil. And the fact that it is happening in plain sight—that we can watch it on livestream, read the documents, hear the survivors’ voices—and still nothing changes? That is the part that breaks me. Because I know what happens to the survivors as a result, I know what it costs a survivor to tell the truth. I know how many years of therapy it takes to even remember what was done to them, let alone speak it out loud. I know what it looks like when someone finally finds the courage to disclose—and the system looks them in the eye and says, "I’m not going to get in the gutter for your theatrics."

Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican, said it plainly: "I personally have lost all faith in our Justice Department. It’s a system of injustice. There is evidence, there are co-conspirators, you can’t have thousands of victims and have no other accomplices other than one."

She’s right. And that one person—Ghislaine Maxwell—is the only person who has ever been convicted for conspiring with Epstein. One person. For a trafficking operation that spanned decades, multiple countries, and involved hundreds of powerful men.

A Voice for the Voiceless

In 2019 God called me to be a voice for the voiceless and to speak out for those who couldn't yet speak for themselves. And right now, those voices are screaming—in hearing rooms, in court documents, in survivor statements that the FBI filed and never acted on—and the people in power are covering their ears.

I do not have the power to unseal documents or issue subpoenas. I cannot compel an Attorney General to look a survivor in the eye. But I can refuse to look away. I can name what I see. I can call it what it is. And I can stand with the survivors who stood in that room—and the countless others who could not—and say: I believe you. I see you. And what was done to you was not okay. What is being done to you now—the exposure, the silencing, the protection of your abusers—is not okay either.

To the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking operation: you deserved better then, and you deserve better now. To the survivors I work with every day who see this and wonder if anything will ever change: I understand why this feels hopeless. But you are not invisible. Your truth is not theatrical. And the people who did this to you are not untouchable—they are terrified. That is why they are working so hard to keep the names hidden.

The internet is not going to stop digging. The survivors are not going to stop speaking. And people like me—who have dedicated our lives to standing with the broken, the silenced, the thrown-away—are not going to stop asking why the men who raped children are still free while the children they raped are still fighting to be heard.

Nothing is by coincidence. And the truth always comes out.

Ephesians 5:11 Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness but rather expose them.

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Note: The documented facts referenced in this piece are sourced from congressional testimony (House Judiciary Committee, February 11, 2026), DOJ file releases (January 30, 2026), court documents from the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, reporting by PBS, NPR, CNN, NBC News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, TIME, Rolling Stone, ABC News, and the Associated Press, as well as statements from named survivors and their legal representatives.