What does anger feel like to you? Are you tapped into the sound of your heart thumping through your body like a drumbeat, to your blood – hot and bubbling – in your veins? Does your breath quicken, your body tense up to be ready to fight? When did you last want to rip, shred, and tear?
For me, anger struck like a visceral, full-body thunderbolt when the latest tranche of the Epstein files dropped in January, with the US Department of Justice publishing more than three million pages of documents, 180,000 images and 2,000 videos.
Among those images were ones that try as I might, I can’t erase from my mind – particularly late at night as I lie there, thinking about the way young women were treated by the late paedophile financier, Jeffrey Epstein, and his baying social circle of rich and powerful men.
I think about the institutions, built on misogyny, that propped up and enabled decades of rape, trafficking and abuse and I think about the utter failure of duty to victims like Virginia Giuffre, who – before her tragic suicide in April last year – fought for more than a decade to be taken seriously.
She spoke out time and time again about how she was “sold” by Epstein to his “friends” when she was just a teenager. We witnessed her long and difficult fight for justice against the establishment – including settling a sexual assault lawsuit against Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in 2022, who she said had sex with her when she was just 17 (and on two other occasions), which he denies.
