White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is good at her job. Not only does she fulfill the traditional duty of spokesperson for President Donald Trump, but she also serves as chief gaslighter of the nation. Leavitt consistently contradicts reality with ease — it’s a skill that would cause mental collapse in a person with a conscience. On Tuesday, this knack for playing dumb was on full display when she was asked by a reporter about a telling page from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book, which was revealed earlier this week by the Wall Street Journal.
The book, compiled by Epstein associate and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, included a photo of Epstein holding what the Journal described as “a poster board-sized check for $22,500.” Presented to him by Joel Pashcow, a businessman, Mar-a-Lago member and mutual friend of Epstein and Trump, the fake check was a sort of in-joke, made to appear as if Trump had sent it to Epstein. The caption said it was for a “fully depreciated” woman that Epstein was selling to Trump.
When asked about the photo, Leavitt performed a clever trick. “It is not Donald Trump’s signature on that check. The president did not sign that check.”
No one had accused Trump of signing the check. Leavitt, who isn’t as stupid as she pretends, knew full well what was going on. Pashcow was teasing his two friends by suggesting Trump was dating a woman that Epstein had “depreciated.” The joke’s premise was that both Epstein and Trump saw women not as human beings, but as objects to be used however men see fit. As the word “depreciation” suggests, the metaphor here is that this woman was more like a car than a person; she had no rights that a man needed to respect.
Leavitt wasn’t alone in trying to ignore the obvious. Many MAGA propagandists have desperately denied the evidence of how Trump clearly feels about women. After meeting with a group of Epstein survivors on Sept. 3, Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., laughably tweeted that Trump “is COMMITTED to protecting women and kids.” The president himself, however, has frequently revealed — and indeed, boasted about — his ugly views of women.
On Monday, Trump gave a speech supposedly about religious liberty in which he complained that domestic violence is treated as a crime — and was interfering with statistics that should have shown, he said, a bigger reduction of crime in Washington, D.C., while its police force has been under federal control. “Much lesser things, things that take place in the home they call crime,” he said. “If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime.”
That “little fight” language was a ham-fisted effort to pretend he was not talking about violence. But of course he was. Cops don’t arrest men for a “little fight,” but for violence or serious threats — just as they would if the victim were a stranger to the abuser. The president’s comments were in line with his long history of similar language. In the deposition he gave while facing a civil lawsuit for sexually assaulting journalist E. Jean Carroll, Trump argued that elite men have been entitled to abuse women for “the last million years.” When he was asked later on CNN what he meant, Trump clarified that, “fortunately,” that was reserved for privileged men like him.
Leavitt’s efforts to maneuver her way around the implications of the check photo were slick enough, but undermined by two important points. First, the president’s public attitudes about women are in keeping with the misogyny behind Pashcow’s attempt at humor. Then there are the experiences of at least three women who felt victimized in the world inhabited by Trump’s close friend Epstein and those in his orbit.
Stacey Williams, a model who casually dated Epstein in the 1990s, has accused the president of sexually assaulting her in Trump Tower in 1993. She has said that Epstein brought her to meet Trump, who immediately put his hands “all over my breasts” while he and Epstein grinned at each other. Williams said she felt the whole thing was a “twisted game” Epstein was playing. She is one of over two dozen women who have told similar stories about Trump, who has repeatedly denied all such allegations and has never been charged with any such crime.
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Maria Farmer was profiled in the New York Times in 2019 as being one of the first women who tried to take down Epstein, alleging he and Maxwell attacked her and abused her sister. Farmer also described an unsettling encounter with Trump. When he stopped by Epstein’s office for a visit, Trump allegedly eyed “her before Mr. Epstein informed him that ‘she’s not for you,’” the Times reported.
Anouska De Georgiou has accused Esptein of trafficking her. Like most of his and Maxwell’s alleged victims, De Georgiou told NBC News she was lured into his world as a teen by all the glamour and wealth, only to find herself being manipulated into sexual abuse. “By the time I was being raped, it was too late” to escape the extensive grooming, she alleged. While De Georgiou doesn’t speak about her experience often, a contemporary account published by London’s Sunday Mirror in 1997 claimed that she had dated Trump following her years with Epstein. “Several American millionaires already had their eyes on Anouska,” the story read. “But she was there with Robert Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine, who has introduced several of her attractive friends to the property developer.” At the time, De Georgiou was 20 and Trump was 50.
These stories are all different, but they all offer us glimpses of the world Pashcow was referring to with his joke about Trump purchasing a “depreciated” woman from Epstein.
The larger context of the birthday book offers more insight. As Jessica Winter of the New Yorker explained, the whole book is a document of “hideous, maggot-crawling depravity” that “reads like a catalogue raisonné of outsider art by registered sex offenders.” It’s full of cartoons and jokes about Epstein’s sexual proclivities, many of which winkingly hint at pedophilia. The birthday card attributed to Trump features a female figure with barely-there breasts — much different than the president’s usual Playboy ideals of womanhood — that git right into that larger, disturbing picture. It’s not just a world where men view women as objects to be used, bought and sold. It’s one where these men are downright delighted with themselves for behaving this way.
All too often, men like this get away with these attitudes because they convince enough people that, while it may be gross, it’s ultimately just decadent, consensual behavior that harms no one else. But the stories told by Epstein and Trump’s staggering number of accusers reveal an uncomfortable truth: Dehumanizing women, like dehumanizing any group of people, is a predicate to violence.
When Karoline Leavitt gets behind the podium in the Brady Briefing Room and excuses, lies or otherwise deflects inquiry into Trump’s association with Epstein, she’s contributing to a system that allows women and girls to be abused every day without consequence. It’s why her unblinking shamelessness is so unnerving. On some level, no matter what she tells herself at night, she is participating in the cover-up of details related to a reported sex trafficking ring.
How does she even begin to sleep?
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