How Inequality Survives Without Villains
The Epstein files expose how “neutral” systems quietly protect power
The process looks official.
The language is neutral.
The outcomes are brutal.
In November 2025, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act with overwhelming bipartisan support. The law required the Department of Justice to release unclassified records related to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking network — while explicitly protecting the privacy of victims.
The statute could not have been clearer.
Victims’ names were to be redacted.
Information could not be withheld to protect reputations, avoid embarrassment, or shield politically powerful individuals.
And yet, when the files were released, the opposite happened.
Women who had been groomed, raped, and trafficked as children — some as young as fourteen — discovered that their names and identifying details had been left unredacted, while the names of powerful men were obscured, blacked out, or withheld entirely. Survivors who had spent years protecting their anonymity were suddenly exposed again — not by abusers this time, but by the government charged with protecting them.
The women pleaded publicly for the one thing the law guaranteed them: privacy.
Instead, they were retraumatized.
At the same time, the Department of Justice insisted it was acting carefully. Neutrally. Responsibly. Officials explained that documents were still under review. That redactions were complex. That protecting victims required discretion and time.
But the outcome told a different story.
Victims were exposed.
Perpetrators were protected.
And the harm flowed in only one direction.
This is not a story about a lack of law. Congress did its job.
It is not a story about ambiguity. The statute explicitly forbids this result.
And it is not a story about overt hostility toward women.
It is a story about how inequality survives without villains.
What we are witnessing is the operation of what I call soft patriarchy — a system that does not rely on explicit misogyny or bad actors, but on neutrality, discretion, and institutional habit. A system that insists it supports women’s rights, even as its processes consistently protect male power and expose female vulnerability.
Soft patriarchy does not announce itself.
It does not shout.
It does not declare women unworthy of protection.
Instead, it reassures us that everything is being handled properly — while producing outcomes that would be unthinkable if the victims were not female, and the accused not powerful men.
The Epstein files are not an anomaly. They are a case study.
They show how, even when the law demands transparency and victim protection, enforcement can quietly invert those priorities. How neutrality becomes a shield. How discretion becomes a weapon. How harm can be reproduced not through intent, but through process.
This is how inequality persists in a country that insists it has already achieved equality — not through open discrimination, but through systems that look fair, sound reasonable, and still fail women when it matters most.
Why This Keeps Happening
What makes the Epstein files crisis so revealing is not just the harm itself, but how predictable it is.
Congress passed a law.
The language was explicit.
Victim protection was not optional.
And still, women were exposed while powerful men were shielded.
This is the pattern that soft patriarchy explains.
In the United States, sex equality has never been enforced at the constitutional level. Women are protected by statutes and policies — important ones — but not by an explicit constitutional guarantee of equal protection based on sex. That absence matters. It shapes how discretion is exercised, how harm is weighed, and whose interests are reflexively protected when institutions are under pressure.
Without constitutional equality, enforcement becomes conditional.
Care becomes discretionary.
And accountability becomes negotiable.
This is why neutral processes so often produce unequal outcomes — not only in high-profile cases like Epstein’s, but in courtrooms, hospitals, workplaces, and families across the country. When equality is assumed rather than mandated, systems default to existing power.
The Equal Rights Amendment was written to close that gap. Not to confer special rights, but to require that sex equality be treated as a constitutional imperative — enforced, not symbolic. Mandatory, not optional. Structural, not aspirational.
The Epstein files are not a deviation from our system.
They are a mirror.
They show what happens when women’s rights exist on paper, but not in the Constitution. When institutions can claim neutrality while producing harm. When the law speaks clearly, but enforcement whispers — and always in the same direction.
Until sex equality is enforced as a constitutional right, these outcomes will continue to feel shocking — even as they repeat themselves.
Officially sanctioned.
Neutrally framed.
Brutally enforced.