Chitose Suzuki / The Dallas Morning News via Getty Images

‘Survivors Have Answered Enough’: The Epstein Reading Room Takes Survivors’ Fight on the Road

Attorney General Todd Blanche came to Dallas this week to deliver a “law and order” message at Trump’s midterm rally, where he praised the president and promised accountability for people who break the law. His central line was: “To evil men and women in this country, know this: President Trump will hold you accountable.”

A few miles away, survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse and their family were asking why that commitment to accountability had not extended to them.

They gathered inside the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, surrounded by 3,437 bound volumes containing nearly 3.5 million pages released by the Justice Department. The books weigh about 17,000 pounds and stretch across hundreds of feet of shelving, turning a sprawling digital archive into something visitors can see, walk through and begin to comprehend.

The scale of the files is staggering, but survivors said releasing millions of pages is not the same as delivering justice. They are still waiting for the Justice Department to release the remaining records, protect their identities and investigate viable leads involving alleged co-conspirators and enablers.

“Justice that stops when it reaches power is not justice,” survivor Sharlene Rochard said.

The thousands of bound volumes make that unfinished work impossible to ignore.

From the Magazine:

  • Fall 2026 Cover Reveal: Gloria Steinem Changed the Story, and Taught Us to Keep Telling It

    In our Fall 2026 issue, we remember Gloria not only for the words she wrote, the organizations she helped build or the barriers she broke, but for the connections she made.

    Perhaps her greatest gift was her ability to listen, to make people feel capable of changing the world, and to build relationships across generations and movements. She knew that the work would outlast any one of us. The responsibility was to keep telling the story—and to make room for those who would tell it next.

    Join today to get our newest issue delivered straight to your mailbox—and help sustain the independent feminist journalism Gloria worked to make possible.

    Photo by Jenny Warburg

Rest in Power: Gloria Steinem, Ms. Cofounder and Feminist Visionary

Gloria Steinem, the journalist, organizer and cofounder of Ms. whose name became inseparable from the modern movement for women’s equality, died Wednesday, Sept. 2, at her home in New York City. She was 92.

In 2001, Gloria came to Ellie Smeal and me to discuss the possibility of the Feminist Majority Foundation taking on the publication of Ms. She had rescued the magazine from a series of commercial publishers that had nearly killed it, and it was now facing the headwinds of a rapidly changing media landscape.

We understood, we were being entrusted with far more than a publication—we were being asked to preserve an independent feminist institution, and to keep it alive, questioning and relevant for generations.

That responsibility is more urgent today than at any time in recent memory.

Gloria understood from the beginning that feminism needed its own media—not because feminists should withdraw from the larger public conversation, but because independent media can introduce truths the mainstream has not yet learned to recognize.

Gloria Steinem changed the story women were permitted to tell about themselves. Now it is our responsibility to keep telling the truth.