‘Furious’ Is a Cathartic Feminist Fable After Years of Epstein Stonewalling

Hulu’s Furious channels rage over gender-based violence into a feminist fantasy of women fighting back against abusers and the powerful systems that protect them.

Spoiler alert: This analysis gives away plot points of the Hulu series Furious.

Congress passed the Epstein Transparency Act in November 2025, yet the Department of Justice is refusing to release all the Epstein files. For those they have released, the DOJ redacted the perpetrators’ names while revealing the victims’ names. We have watched the victims demand accountability at the Capitol and attend congressional hearings, while being ignored by attorneys general, politicians and prosecutors—over and over. No one has been charged. No one has been charged, prosecuted or convicted other than one woman, Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell.

As we rage against the injustices of Epstein’s crimes and the ongoing cover-ups, we find dark satisfaction in the new Hulu series Furious that portrays women with no other recourse fighting back against perpetrators and the protectors and systems that are failing to hold these abusers accountable.

The series, created by Elizabeth Merriweather, is about a trio of brilliant, abused, troubled and vengeful women, two white and one Black, all intimately familiar with men’s violence.

While Furious is technically a crime drama and psychological thriller, it is really a radically feminist fable delivering a kind of divine justice to perpetrators who operate with impunity in our lawless rape culture—here personified in a billionaire torturer and raper of teen girls and the men (and woman) who enable him.

Catherine Grace (Lola Petticrew) is a traumatized child sex trafficking survivor who goes after the rich and powerful men (and their enablers) who bought, raped, starved and strangled her. This is no simple outlaw hero story; she also sexually manipulates a foolish woman working at a domestic violence shelter to get the supplies she needs, then murders her to keep her quiet.

The other two protagonists are women in law enforcement. Nora Washington (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) is the head of the FBI Sex Crimes unit, a brilliant and highly educated woman, but marginalized, her team assigned to the basement, while the mediocre if not utterly corrupt men she works with mock her as a “DEI hire.” Nora now drinks way too much.

Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) is a former cop, starting over as an FBI trainee who wants to work in that sex crimes unit. At 14, Alice was groomed and seduced by an adult male, who filmed her having sex and shared the film with the man who abused Catherine. Alice ended up pregnant, and her parents threw her out of her home.

As an adult, she was battered by her alcoholic boyfriend, another cop, and after coming forward, she becomes the one stigmatized by their peers and supervisors. Alice leaves him, but is barely coping with PTSD.

Nora and Alice pursue Catherine, but find that they deeply identify with her, save her life and maybe also learn something about justice from her—divine feminist justice, that is.

The idea of “divine justice”—a cosmic righting of the scales when human law can not or will not—is signposted throughout Furious, through mythic references to avenging angels and goddesses who rage against men’s violence against women: the Gorgon Medusa and the Winged Furies.

Throughout Furious, the camera goes in tight on the women’s faces, particularly Alice with her wild hair and raging, staring eyes, and giving a look that could kill—much like Medusa.

I use fury more often than rage, partly because of its origins in ancient mythologies, tales of fierce female deities that violently administered justice—goddesses of vengeance.

Kali Nicole Gross, ‘Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times’

Many films deemed “classics” (Psycho, Halloween, Silence of the Lambs) feature men killing and decimating naked and bloody female bodies.

Furious, instead, focuses on a woman exacting lethal retribution on guilty men. Like the Epstein johns, the men evade criminal prosecution or even even public identification.

For these reasons and more, we found Furious to be a necessary corrective, even a catharsis—a drama that allows women and girls to vicariously feel, ponder, honor and activate the rage we are expected to silently contain.

Women are supposed to be hit, and raped, and go away and die quietly, not start murdering people. Everyone likes it when there’s a sweet little woman, lying on the floor naked and cut up in pieces. I get so fucking angry. It doesn’t matter. Anything you do, the ones who are really to blame do not get caught. Never. Never.

Nora Washington, Furious, Episode 1

A show that imagines consequences for the powerful sexual predators who assume impunity as their birthright is jarring, to say the least. There has been no justice in real life.

To be clear, we don’t support murderous vigilantism. But when the criminal justice system is so badly broken—when 99 percent of rapists never spend a day in jail, and femicidal killers and incels (Ted Bundy, Elliot Rodger) become legendary outlaw heroes and role models in the manosphere, inspiring men toward further violence—isn’t it important for women to imagine confronting the perpetrators and ending their ability to get away with it?

Beyond the ultra-wealthy child sex trafficking perpetrators, Furious evokes the Epstein case in other ways. The Epstein-like billionaire’s daughter Emma (Hope Davis) is his female accomplice, similar to Ghislaine Maxwell: paying the girls, pretending she is making things nice for them, providing fresh flowers and drugs as she shepherds the teenage victims in and out of the mansion where her wealthy father abuses them.

Furious also portrays corrupt law enforcement men, who cover up for the Epstein-like figure—similar to how U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, who served as Trump’s labor secretary from 2017-2019, approved the 2008 non-prosecution agreement for Jeffrey Epstein, allowing him to abuse girls for another decade.

The series condemns the people who know of the abuse but don’t do anything.

Catherine asks one of her captives, the lawyer for the Epstein-like figure: “What’s the punishment for people who know what’s happening and do nothing?”

He has no answer. But she does.

Epstein, his clients and other-perpetrators—priests, pastors, prime ministers, princes, presidents, politicians, doctors, judges, teachers, coaches, fathers and so many others—have shown us that powerful men can rape girls and then be protected by powerful institutions: churches, governments, the courts, schools, hospitals and families.

When powerful perpetrators are above the law, the only avenue for justice for victims may be by becoming outlaws.

We are long overdue a fuck-this-shit snapping. It is as if men have hoarded the operating manual for violence and, from boyhood, have been taught the language of that manual, while girls and women are kept illiterate.

Mona Eltahawy, ‘The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls’

Feminist theorists and agitators have taken up this idea.

Mona Eltahawy celebrates “violence” as a “necessary sin” for women and girls.

Kali Nicole Gross names a reality of “vengeance feminism … deeply concerned with justice, the lack thereof, and also efforts to find new ways to administer it.” She tells stories of U.S. Black women who “lashed back” at their sexist and racist abusers, manifesting, a “fury” akin to ancient “goddesses of vengeance.”

Most heterosexual serial killers are men who kill women. But in recent years, novels have begun to portray female serial killers with male victims who—similar to the tragic case of Aileen Wuornos, who targeted johns and rapists—have histories of men’s violence against them, such as Imani Thomson’s Honey (2026), Chelsea G. Summers’ A Certain Hunger (2021) or Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, The Serial Killer (2018). Unlike in stories about male serial killers, films and novels about female serial killers often have protagonists who act out of pent up rage from their past victimization at the hands of their perpetrators.

Still, films about women killing abusive men, including the iconic Thelma and Louise (1991) and the more recent Promising Young Woman (2020) conclude with the women’s deaths.

Most of the male characters in Furious are everyday dastardly types, practiced performers of charm to mask manipulation, or cops who abuse women and callously disbelieve victims.

But there are good guys too.

Danny (Scoot McNairy), the honest and good-looking cop who loves Alice, is a romantic cliché.

Alden (Sam Way) is a ground-breaking character. Alden has muscular dystrophy (as does Way). Catherine has been Alden’s caregiver. He falls in love with her and keeps that faith, even after finding out about her past abuse and current murders. Alden has wit, will and the savvy to guard crucial evidence that Nora eventually acquires, waiting to be able to use it against her self-serving boss and the abusers he protects (perhaps in Season 2, which has been announced).

Men who commit violence against women and girls count on the state not enforcing the law and women and girls not engaging in self-defense and vigilante justice. Furious poses the possibility that they might—that the ongoing war on women will no longer have bodies on one side only.

Still, Furious gives no easy answers, no neat delineations of right and wrong. Rather it insists we face what a patriarchal culture has made of power.

In the last episode, when Alice goes to visit Catherine awaiting trial in jail, Catherine asks her if she has ever killed anyone and explains what that feels like:

“It’s power watching someone die. There’s this moment right before they go when you’re not scared at all and I was always scared, I was always always scared. But when I’m killing someone, it’s like, it’s like I’m eating him right? Like I’m like swallowing him, like everything he’s ever done is disappearing inside me and I have all the fucking power in the world. And they don’t want us to have that. They want to take that from us, but I want you to feel it.”

Alice, we find out, does feel it.

Furious is a feminist fable, arising from our collective rage and fomenting resistance to our lawless rape culture. As her name reveals, Catherine is Catharsis, a goddess/monster purging the toxic social body, seizing and using the dread power men wield against women and girls every day to implement a kind of divine justice.

Furious demands that we all—especially men—face the evil that men do.

Furious invites survivors of sexual abuse and allies to imagine what it would feel like to “have all the fucking power in the world,” then tap into that power to continue the work of destroying rape culture.

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