Jeffrey Epstein survivors confronted Donald Trump at Tuesday’s State of the Union address, attending as guests of Democratic lawmakers while the president delivered a 108-minute speech without once mentioning the convicted sex offender’s files—or the women in the room who survived his abuse.
More than a dozen of Epstein’s accusers sat in the Capitol audience wearing badges that read “Stand with survivors. Release the files,” with a black redaction box blocking part of the text—a pointed reference to the Justice Department’s heavily criticized redactions of the Epstein documents.
Trump ignored them entirely.
“Where are the rest of the files?” demanded Dani Bensky, an Epstein accuser who attended as a guest of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “Why are there no investigations when there are plenty of people to investigate?”
Bensky also called out FBI Director Kash Patel, who was busy partying with the U.S. men’s hockey team at the Olympics in Milan this week instead of, you know, investigating the vast criminal enterprise detailed in the files. “Have you read them? Why is the FBI director out there partying like a college kid when he should be investigating?”
The timing couldn’t have been worse for the president. Hours before his address, NPR published an investigation alleging the DOJ withheld dozens of documents from its Epstein release, including three FBI interviews with a woman who accused both Trump and Epstein of sexually abusing her when she was a minor.
Trump was long friends with Epstein—mentioned thousands of times in the files—and has tried to dismiss the entire focus on them as a Democratic “hoax.” He spent much of last year pressuring Republicans not to vote for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which mandated full disclosure. When Congress passed it anyway and the numbers weren’t on his side, he signed it into law.
Then his Justice Department missed the deadline for releasing the files. And when documents finally started coming out, the DOJ redacted the names of Epstein’s powerful associates while failing to redact survivors’ names.
Trump has refused to meet with any of the survivors.
At a press conference before the speech, Amanda Roberts—sister-in-law of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent victims—made the stakes clear: “Today we are saying we will not move on, and the world is not moving on.”