Lawmakers invited survivors to the State of the Union. Meanwhile, they were protecting a perpetrator under the same roof.
When survivors of Jeffrey Epstein stood in the Capitol during the State of the Union earlier this year, we were meant to read it as a sign that this Congress takes the sexual exploitation of women and children seriously. But weeks later, that symbolism rings hollow to anyone who watched Kevin McCarthy appear on television, bluntly telling the world that “every member of Congress” knew about allegations against Eric Swalwell.
Let’s sit with that for a moment. Lawmakers invited Epstein survivors into the chamber, while simultaneously elevating a colleague with his own credibly documented history of violence against young women—one who was until very recently, positioning himself as California’s next governor.
If we cannot connect those two facts, we are not serious about addressing these issues.
This is what male entitlement looks like when it is woven into the fabric of institutional power. It operates through silence, through selective outrage, and through the careful management of optics. And it exists on both sides of the aisle.
For those of us who do this work—who have spent years with survivors and their families, with prosecutors and with judges—none of this is shocking. In fact, it’s clarifying. Men like Swalwell and Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) are not aberrations. They are illustrations of how the system functions: Political utility and institutional loyalty outweigh survivor justice and community safety.
What should disturb us is not how rare these men are, but how reliably they are protected. And though both recently announced they will resign from Congress, the resignations mean an end to the House Ethics Committee investigations concerning both men, given the Committee no longer has jurisdiction. So, as usual, no interrogation of the system.
But the pattern doesn’t stop with individual bad actors. It extends to every institution that looks the other way when the man in question is useful; it includes the cultural structures we build around that same logic.
It shows up in entertainment and media that normalizes sexual commerce in teenage girls, in shows like Euphoria that frame prostitution as character development rather than violent exploitation.
It appears in legislative chambers in Colorado, Illinois and New York, where acts of pimping and purchasing sex are being replaced with frameworks that effectively decriminalize the entire sex trade under the guise of bodily autonomy and women’s empowerment.
I am not against protecting vulnerable people. I am against the sleight of hand that reframes a demand-driven industry built on the bodies of women and girls—overwhelmingly women of color, disproportionately survivors of prior abuse—as a pathway to economic self-determination. When lawmakers tell women that prostitution is the answer to poverty, they’re admitting that they have no intention of addressing their material precarity. That’s not offering them liberation. It’s managing exploitation more efficiently.
The same lawmakers who invoke empowerment and free choice when discussing sex trade policy are not, in the same breath, fighting for universal healthcare, living wages, or the kind of robust social infrastructure that would actually change the reality women and their children face. That is not a coincidence. It is a choice about whose suffering is worth solving.
This is why the dots must be connected. Male entitlement, sexual assault, prostitution and child trafficking are not separate policy problems. They are the same problem at different points on a continuum—a continuum powered by impunity and enabled by institutions that would rather manage the symptoms than interrogate who benefits from the status quo.
Lawmakers who invite survivors to the State of the Union while protecting their own are not breaking the cycle. They are perpetuating it, under better lighting.
We need representatives who will legislate like they believe women and girls’ lives are worth fighting for. That means demanding real economic safety solutions, instead of policies that ease the conscience without changing material conditions. It means holding their own accountable before demanding accountability from the other side. And it means being honest that Washington’s misogyny problem will not be solved by optics.
The women in that chamber deserved more than just symbolism. So do the survivors whose exploitation never makes the news.
