On the Friday, April 10, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast:After reading the Epstein files, Claire Wilmot, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, uncovered a chilling pattern: systematic efforts to discredit survivors of sexual abuse while protecting the rich and powerful.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it.This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Cody Godwin:
Pam Bondiis out as attorney general. Millions of Epstein-related documents are now public, and the names of the powerful people in his orbit are finally out in the open. You might think the reckoning is over. You'd be wrong. Hello, and welcome to USA TODAY's The Excerpt. I'm Cody Godwin in for Dana Taylor. Today is Friday, April 10th, 2026.
My next guest read through the Epstein files seeking an answer to the question of accountability. What she found instead was a disturbing pattern of repeated attempts to discredit the victims while letting the rich and powerful off the hook for enabling Epstein's behavior to continue for so long unimpeded. Why? Joining me to share her insights on this is Claire Wilmot, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Claire, it's great to have you on The Excerpt.
Claire Wilmot:
Thanks so much for having me.
Cody Godwin:
In an op-ed you recently published in The New York Times, you wrote about a phenomenon you saw over and over again in the Epstein files. You called it, quote, "the mechanics of doubt," end quote. What did you mean here?
Claire Wilmot:
So I was looking through the Epstein files to try to understand how these powerful men were responding to MeToo in real time. So my academic background looks at the aftermath of seemingly progressive legal reforms specifically around gendered violence and tries to see what's happening in the wake of those reforms on a sort of practical level.
So how are people being believed and disbelieved when they go to report a crime at police stations, but also the other places that they might talk about what's happened to them? So yeah, my work follows how doubt functions and how doubt can kind of derail those cases either before they enter the criminal legal system or through the criminal legal process. So I wanted to see how were women being believed, disbelieved, doubted in the Epstein files.
And so, I was looking for references to whether or not women were being called liars, how the testimony of Epstein's victims were being undermined. But through that process, I found some very interesting correspondences between Epstein and the vast networks of allies where they were basically responding to a number of high-profile MeToo cases and trying to sort of sow seeds of doubt around the testimonies of all survivors that were coming forward during this period.
Cody Godwin:
