In Jeffrey Epstein's infamous 50th Birthday Book, compiled by Epstein associate and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, there is a photo of Epstein holding “a poster board-sized check for $22,500” given to him by Joel Pashcow, a mutual friend of Epstein and Trump. The caption under the photo says it was for a “fully depreciated” woman that Epstein was selling to Trump. As the word “depreciation” suggests, the metaphor here is that a woman in Trump's mind is more like a car than a person.
Earlier this month, Trump gave a speech supposedly about religious liberty in which he complained that domestic violence should NOT be treated as a crime. “If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime,” he said. But cops don’t arrest men for a “little fight,” but for violence or serious threats.
In the deposition he gave while facing a civil lawsuit for sexually assaulting journalist E. Jean Carroll, Trump argued that elite men - TRUMP BELIEVES HE IS OF THE ELITE - have been entitled to abuse women for “the last million years.”
On October 7, 2016, The Washington Post published a video and article about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and television host Billy Bush having a lewd conversation about women in September 2005. In the video, Trump described to Bush his attempt to seduce a married woman and indicated he might start kissing a woman that he and Bush were about to meet. He added, "I don't even wait. And when you're a star [i.e. ELITE], they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything."
Stacey Williams, a model who casually dated Epstein in the 1990s, has accused the president of sexually assaulting her in Trump Tower in 1993. She has said that Epstein brought her to meet Trump, who immediately put his hands “all over my breasts” while he and Epstein grinned at each other. Williams said she felt the whole thing was a “twisted game” Epstein was playing. She is one of over two dozen women who have told similar stories about Trump, who has repeatedly denied all such allegations and has never been charged with any such crime.
Maria Farmer was profiled in the New York Times in 2019 as being one of the first women who tried to take down Epstein, alleging he and Maxwell attacked her and abused her sister. Farmer also described an unsettling encounter with Trump. When he stopped by Epstein’s office for a visit, Trump allegedly eyed “her before Mr. Epstein informed him that ‘she’s not for you,'” the Times reported.
Anouska De Georgiou has accused Esptein of trafficking her. Like most of his and Maxwell’s alleged victims, De Georgiou said that “By the time I was being raped, it was too late” to escape the extensive grooming. A contemporary account published by London’s Sunday Mirror in 1997 claimed that De Georgiou had dated Trump following her years with Epstein. “Several American millionaires already had their eyes on Anouska,” the story read. “But she was there with Robert Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine, who has introduced several of her attractive friends to the property developer.” At the time, De Georgiou was 20 and Trump was 50.
As Jessica Winter of the New Yorker explained, the whole book is a document of “hideous, maggot-crawling depravity”, full of cartoons and jokes about Epstein’s sexual proclivities, many of which hint at pedophilia. The birthday card attributed to Trump features a female figure with barely-there breasts — much different than the president’s usual Playboy ideals of womanhood — that fit right into that larger, disturbing picture. It’s not just a world where men view women as objects to be used, bought and sold. It’s one where these ELITE men are downright delighted with themselves for behaving this way.
Bottom line: Dehumanizing women, like dehumanizing any group of people, is a predicate to violence.
When Karoline Leavitt gets behind the podium in the Brady Briefing Room and excuses, lies or otherwise deflects inquiry into Trump’s association with Epstein, she’s contributing to a system that allows women and girls to be abused every day without consequence. It’s why her unblinking shamelessness is so unnerving. On some level, no matter what she tells herself at night, she is participating in the cover-up of details related to a reported sex trafficking ring.
She herself knows that in Trump's eyes, she is a sexually depreciating object. With the end of Trump's tenure, she will be depreciated far beyond her gender.
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