Monica Lewinsky on the Epstein Files and the Nuances of Grooming

Monica Lewinsky emphasizes the importance of understanding the nuances of grooming, a manipulative process often used to exploit vulnerable individuals, particularly young women and children. She condemns victim-blaming, especially when some downplay the abuse as consensual, and highlights recent legislative efforts like Virginia’s Law to eliminate statutes of limitations on sex trafficking crimes. Lewinsky also reflects on the societal challenges of processing the extent of abuse connected to Jeffrey Epstein, emphasizing the need for truth and transparency while honoring the resilience of survivors.

Let’s talk about the nuances of…well…Nuance.

At a recent dinner in London, I had a maddening conversation with someone I’d just met. This happened to be the day that many Brits were holding their breath, wondering whether Keir Starmer, the prime minister, would need to resign. Why? Primarily because of the Epstein files. Not because Starmer himself was implicated in the recent document dump. He wasn’t. But because his former ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson, was. (Mandelson has denied any wrongdoing in regard to his relationship with Epstein and was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office this week.) The mood in the room—and the UK—that evening, I might add, was a far cry from what’s being felt in the States, where some people have resigned or been let go but no one has been properly held accountable by the judicial system since the massive tranche of emails, videos, photos, and other files was released late last year and in January of this one. But that’s a conversation for a different day.

The man at the dinner proceeded to talk about This Lady he knew who had dated Jeffrey Epstein. “Rightly or wrongly,” he went on to say, “she was pushing back against all of this ‘Epstein stuff’ in declaring, ‘Those girls knew what they were doing. They wanted to be there.’” To paraphrase: In the view of This Lady (who was not actually named), those girls were happy to give hand jobs in exchange for handbags; they liked the attention. I almost dropped my drink.

This was Psychology 101—motivated reasoning, denial, misogyny, projection, and a perverted “just-world fallacy” expressed through victim blaming. Worse, to erase victims is an attempt to shrink the blast radius of the repugnant abuse and crimes committed. Many of these girls, teenagers, and young women were lured. Lured over time. Lured by being groomed. And what This Lady was talking about was textbook grooming with a capital G.

Grooming is the starting point of the human trafficking pipeline—sometimes considered the hidden step. The Department of Justice describes grooming as “a form of child sexual abuse that can involve the targeting and isolation of the victim, in order to gain the trust of the victim through a controlling relationship to manipulate, exploit, and abuse the victim.” Targets are often vulnerable children who have low self-esteem, struggle with boundaries, or have a history of abuse or neglect. (Like a number of the Epstein survivors.) These young people may be more receptive to this kind of attention and therefore more easily manipulated and ripe for the grooming process.

The contemporary concept of grooming has only been used in the culture for the past 20 to 25 years (and in scientific circles for the past 35 to 40 years). In the cruel calculus of grooming, what may appear as consent—a teenager swearing love, a college student “agreeing” to an affair with a professor, a young person being recruited into a gang—is usually the outcome of slow-burn manipulation. It’s a con job. It’s dependency posing as affection, coercion masquerading as choice. It’s a gradual process in which someone older, more powerful, or in a position of trust builds dependence or subservience, tests boundaries, normalizes abuse, and makes the object of his or her advances feel special or responsible. The aim is control. Ipso facto, grooming does not exist without Nuance.

I recently spoke with Emmy-, BAFTA-, and Peabody-winning documentarian Deeyah Khan for an upcoming episode of my podcast, Reclaiming. The conversation illuminated for me the levels and layers of complexity and nuance around grooming. Many of Khan’s films center on the dialogue she has with extremist hate groups (jihadists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, in films like Jihad: A Story of the Others and White Right: Meeting the Enemy). Maybe it was because I had been working on this piece, but when she talked about the many young men (and boys, even) she had sat with who had been recruited into these groups—and recruited specifically because they were vulnerable—I thought of grooming. “When I filmed with the neo-Nazis, some of them told me the same thing, very point-blank,” Khan told me. “One of the guys said, you know, ‘We sometimes will hang out around schools and we’ll look for the little kid. We’ll look for the one being bullied. We’ll look for the one who seems like a bit of an outcast, and we will target him.’ And I said, ‘Well, what do you mean target him?’ He said, ‘Well, we will embrace him, and we will accept him, and we will give him a place. So that he feels loved and secure and supported and like he’s a part of something greater than himself.’” I’m not suggesting those groomed and recruited to commit horrific crimes are in the same category as the Epstein survivors, but it shows how pervasive and pernicious grooming has become in our society. (In fact, research by Thorn, a child safety nonprofit, found that 40% of kids online have been approached by someone they thought was trying to “befriend and manipulate” them.)

Back to This Lady. What incensed me so about her argument was that she was blaming the Groomed instead of the Groomers, a.k.a. the Predators. That’s insane. Here’s an extreme comparison: Adults tell children not to take candy from a stranger. If a child does, despite a guardian’s warning, we don’t blame the child. (My friend Catherine, who is a pediatrician, once pointed out to me that for 364 days of the year, we tell kids not to take candy from strangers…and yet, on Halloween, “it’s different.” Nuance.)

On February 10, 2026, the day before Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared in front of the House Judiciary Committee—to defend the DOJ’s actions, or lack of actions, in relation to the files—Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Representative Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) introduced Virginia’s Law, a piece of legislation named after Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent and vocal accusers. It should break all of our hearts that Giuffre sadly died by suicide last year.

The lawmakers announced Virginia’s Law in the presence of Giuffre’s family and some Epstein survivors. Communications expert Dini von Mueffling, who represented Giuffre when she was alive and still works with her family and several Epstein survivors, explained the proposed legislation to me via text: “Virginia’s Law will eliminate the statute of limitations on adult sex trafficking at the federal level. This is important because it often takes years or decades for survivors to come to terms with what happened to them. (In Arkansas, the statute is only three years!) It will also have a ‘look-back window,’ which means that survivors who come forward after the law is passed have a period of time to report their assaults and have it count now.” (Full disclosure: von Mueffling is also my publicist.)

Dr. Jennifer Freyd, a psychologist who developed betrayal trauma theory and the concept of “betrayal blindness,” posits that when abuse is committed by someone the victim depends on (most often a caregiver, but not always), the victim’s mind may block or minimize awareness of what happened in order to preserve the relationship and survive. Full recognition of the abuse often doesn’t come until much later. “While conscious appraisals of betrayal may be inhibited at the time of trauma and for as long as the trauma victim is dependent upon the perpetrator, eventually the trauma survivor may become conscious of strong feelings of betrayal,” Freyd and Dr. Anne DePrince write in a chapter of Jeffrey Kauffman’s Loss of the Assumptive World: A Theory of Traumatic Loss.

The arrival of the recognition of betrayal may not happen for years. Years. For some survivors—of abuse at the hands of Epstein or others—it could mean that the statute of limitations has run out. Should the proposed bill eventually become law, Nuance will have its day in court.

“People keep asking me if I’m okay vis-à-vis all the Epstein news,” I said to my therapist (a trauma psychiatrist). It was late last year, and my therapist was going to be no different. “I’ve been thinking of you with all of the Epstein news too,” she said. “How are you doing?” “Fine,” I replied. Over and over. Each and every time. To everyone. I didn’t understand why she (and others) were asking me so often. As a woman—and one versed in traversing trauma—I, of course, felt for the survivors. My heart broke for them and the young girls they had been. But what they had endured was far different from and far worse than my experiences in my 20s at the center of a sex scandal. Sure, yes, Bill Clinton’s name had resurfaced in the news at some point in late fall in connection with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. But that felt distant from my personal narrative. (Note: The former president has denied any wrongdoing. And both he and Hillary Clinton are testifying in front of Congress this week.)

But then, on December 19, 2025, I understood why they had all been asking. After receiving some bodywork (yes, the body does keep the score), I broke down. Broke down sobbing. I realized I had been holding in so much anxiety for these women who had already been so brave. While many people—especially women—felt similarly, few others, if any, knew what I knew. Knew what the survivors were about to experience being at the center of a government document dump. (There were hundreds of thousands that day, only to be followed, in January, by 3 million more pages.) That they were about to have their darkest nightmares splayed out on the world’s stage click by click. That they—and their trauma—would be dissected and feasted on like carcasses. It’s an exposure unlike any other. To have that level of attention and energy coming toward you, to be in strangers’ thoughts. Many of the survivors had fought so hard for this release, and yet it felt as if Lady Justice’s exchange was to demand a pound of flesh.

I could vividly recall how I felt on September 11, 1998, the day the Starr report was released online. I was 25 years old. The report was full of explicit scenes from my private life—broadcast, in an instant, around the world. A report on the internet, full of devastating detail—in my case, prurient; in the survivors’ cases, suggesting the occurrence of horrific crimes. (Please note, I am not equating my experiences and trauma with those of the survivors of Epstein’s abuse.)

Now, as was the case nearly 30 years ago, there are people on both sides of the aisle, people from every walk of life, from every part of the globe, gasping with horror or perverse glee as they read the violations. They wade through the muck (and truth) being heaped upon the public square—some triggered and suffering in silence, some disgusted after a few video clips, some putting up posts on social media to bear witness, to educate, and to seek justice; others gorge on each sordid email, sharing them to get clicks or attention.

We’re not strangers to this collective gluttony. We have feasted before on not only the Starr report, but the Sony hack, the Leveson report (spurred by the News of the World phone-hacking scandal), WikiLeaks, the Ashley Madison hack, the Mueller report. And on and on, etc.

We have to ask ourselves, where is the line between informed citizen and armchair voyeur? It’s a fine one, demarcated by Nuance.

We know that the number of women abused by Epstein is north of 1,000. As a society, we are still trying to process, understand, and accept the full extent of the damage inflicted by Epstein, Maxwell, and their cadre of fellow abusers. And we won’t be able to do that until Congress, the courts, and the culture fully gauge the breadth of the abuse that is only now coming to light. This is why the villainy and bile that have surfaced these past weeks are so important—all of it pushes us to keep insisting on truth and transparency.

There’s no clever or pithy kicker to this piece. Simply, my heart goes out to each and every survivor. Thank you for all you do and stand up for, and for insisting on bringing the darkness into the light. As children and young women, you were utterly failed by us as a society.

For everyone else, if you’re still reading, please spare an extra moment to hold these brave survivors in your thoughts.

Monica Lewinsky on the Epstein Files and the Nuances of Grooming | Vanity Fair

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