November 18, 2025 – Today, the House of Representatives voted to compel the Department of Justice to release all documents pertaining to the case of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Public access to his personal correspondence and court records will bring additional light to the scope and scale of his widespread sex trafficking ring and the sexual exploitation of young women and girls. For decades, Jeffrey Epstein and his chief co-offender, Ghislaine Maxwell, facilitated and committed countless acts of sexual violence and prostitution against vulnerable women and girls globally, including procuring them to some of the most powerful men in the world.

Survivors and victims of Epstein have been fighting for accountability and justice for many years, facing intense public and legal scrutiny, as well as apathy – and political jockeying – from our elected officials. We have now reached a critical moment in which the public is paying close attention to these women’s pain, and demanding justice alongside them.

In 1988, when the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) was formed, human trafficking was not yet defined in federal or international law. Today, thanks to decades of advocacy, led by survivors and their allies, we now have laws to combat and prevent these human rights violations. Yet laws are only as strong as the systems in place to enforce them, and we’ve seen time and time again that our systems fail survivors of trafficking and sexual exploitation.

The list of people complicit in Epstein’s and Maxwell’s sex trafficking operation is shockingly long but the list of victims is longer, and perhaps will never be fully revealed.

One of the most vocal Epstein survivors, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who passed away this year said: “From the start, I was groomed to be complicit in my own devastation….[.] The reckoning must not end. It must continue. He did not act alone. We the victims know that.”

For too long, survivors have carried the burden of seeking transparency and justice alone. Each of us has an opportunity to lift this burden from them and call for an end to impunity – by listening to them, believing them, and demanding that institutions no longer tolerate and conceal the systemic sexual abuse of women and girls.

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