The Constant Struggle to See

The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges. 

Content warning: This commentary contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence and abuse.

George Orwell famously wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Harvard University’s response to ongoing revelations regarding Jeffrey Epstein’s web of relationships with the University—including rejecting an application by students and faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School to dename the Leslie H. Wexner Building— offers a stark reminder of the continuing need for such a struggle. Indeed, underneath the reflexive expressions of outrage and horror over Epstein’s crimes by university officials, to date we have seen precious little in the way of a substantive effort at either repair—to make amends for the harm to which the University contributed over many years—or reform, to ensure that such a scenario never recurs. 

Indeed, underneath the reflexive expressions of outrage and horror over Epstein’s crimes by university officials, to date we have seen precious little in the way of a substantive effort at either repair—to make amends for the harm to which the University contributed over many years—or reform, to ensure that such a scenario never recurs. 

It is understandable why serious, ongoing discussion of Epstein's crimes, and Harvard’s level of responsibility for contributing to them, is so difficult. Some things are so terrible that people will go to great lengths to avoid them. Many of us know the particular vertigo of looking away from a stranger’s visible suffering on the street while quietly telling ourselves that we remain good people, that someone, somewhere, should do better. The psychologist Albert Bandura calls this “moral disengagement”: the everyday, often unconscious tactics—euphemistic labeling, advantageous comparison, displacement of responsibility—that let people preserve a self-image as moral while doing nothing about the harm in front of them. The sociologist Stanley Cohen gave a name to where this leads: “implicatory denial,” in which people do not dispute the facts so much as quietly discount what those facts demand of them.

Both phenomena are on full display in Harvard’s response to the Epstein scandal. There is a certain banality—Arendt’s word comes to mind, if not quite her meaning—to each official statement to the effect that “Epstein was a monster and we are horrified by his crimes.”

It is harder to hold onto that banality once a person actually confronts what “his crimes” entailed. It’s past time to rip off the band-aid and look clearly at what is in front of our noses. I offer two glimpses into that reality. Trigger warning: it is ugly.

The first is an excerpt from a diary that surfaced among the investigative files the FBI compiled on Epstein and Maxwell (Scripps News, Feb. 2026). Epstein survivor Lisa Phillips read the passage aloud, not her own words but those of an unnamed survivor whom Phillips described as “a young schoolgirl who had just given birth,” during a 24-hour “read-a-thon” held by survivors at the “Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room” in New York. It is one of several entries in the same diary documenting repeated forced pregnancies. She described the passage itself as “so harrowing it resembles a horror scene from The Handmaid’s Tale”:

Close your eyes. Close your eyes. Close your eyes. Don’t speak. She doesn’t talk. I cannot stop shaking and it’s been a week. A decision was made, but I can’t tell Jeffrey. These things happen. Why didn’t I close my eyes fast enough? The doctor was different again—I think from Israel. He had kind eyes but didn’t speak directly to me. This was different. A shot and those rod-like things like a hook and so much pain. Ghislaine said to push all the pain away. I don’t understand. Blood and water all over the bed and she was right. Like a feeling when your tummy hurts and you have to push. She said to close my eyes and put her hand over my eyes, but I didn’t close them because of these tiny cries. I’m so lost. I saw between her fingers this tiny head and body in the doctor’s hands. It reached its tiny arm up and it had a tiny foot. I closed my eyes and no more cries. […] I don’t understand what is going on and no one will tell me. I can’t go to school like this. I can’t stop shaking. Why won’t anyone make it stop? I know Ghislaine is trying, but nothing changes. Why didn’t I close my eyes? In the hall, Ghislaine said she was beautiful. She was, not is. She was a beautiful girl. I heard her. What is she? Why did she stop whimpering? She was born and I heard the tiny cries. I can’t do this anymore.

The second comes from Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl. Giuffre, writing in her own voice, describes being trafficked, on Epstein’s island, to a man she identifies only as “a well-known Prime Minister,” one of "dozens" of men to whom Epstein had trafficked her by this point. Here’s what “trafficked” actually meant. The man, she writes, “wasn’t interested in caresses. He wanted violence.” He choked her repeatedly until she lost consciousness, and she says he “took pleasure” seeing her “in fear for my life.” He laughed and grew more aroused the more she begged him to stop. She emerged “bleeding from my mouth, vagina, and anus,” she writes, and it hurt to breathe and swallow for days afterward. She got down on her knees and “tearfully begged” Epstein not to send her back to the man; he responded, coldly, “you’ll get that sometimes.” About eight weeks later, Epstein sent her to the same man again, this time aboard one of his private jets. “Hello again,” he said when she stepped inside, immediately recognizing him as the man she feared more than anyone else. “Will he kill me this time?” she remembers wondering, bracing herself for the hour-long flight. He didn’t. (Nobody’s Girl, Knopf, 2025: pp. 162-164). Giuffre was 18 at the time, having been Epstein's "sex slave" (her words) for about two years.

The identity of this “well-known Prime Minister” is not an especially well-kept secret. Yet no mainstream news outlet will publish it. And to my knowledge, no mainstream news outlet has published the diary excerpt, even if numerous news stories have noted its existence.

These are two small drops of water in an ocean of horror. I understand the temptation to look away from the ugly details. But this is what a one-line statement of outrage is standing in for. This is, however many steps removed, what the name on a building at the Harvard Kennedy School is attached to.

The temptation to look away is not unique to Cambridge. Harvard is not alone in its implicatory denial. Bard College president Leon Botstein, a close associate of Epstein who maintained their relationship for years after Epstein's conviction, defended taking Epstein's money by asserting "I would take money from Satan if it permitted me to do God's work."

These are two small drops of water in an ocean of horror...This is, however many steps removed, what the name on a building at the Harvard Kennedy School is attached to.

More troubling still, MIT actively helped Epstein conceal his donations to the university—recording them as anonymous at the direction of senior administrators who, in the words of MIT President L. Rafael Reif, "believed it was important that Epstein not use gifts to MIT for publicity or to enhance his own reputation." MIT didn't just take money from a convicted sex offender; it actively helped him conceal the relationship. 

At Harvard, Kennedy School Dean Jeremy Weinstein recently announced a series of steps the school intends to undertake to move toward repair, including programming focused on women's rights, gender-based violence and exploitation. He further indicated that consideration will be given to ways in which HKS might contextualize Wexner's relationship with Harvard and with Epstein. That relationship included Wexner serving as Epstein's primary financial patron for nearly two decades, granting him power of attorney over his personal fortune, and lending Wexner’s name to the Kennedy School's main building as a result of a major gift to the University. These are positive first steps, and they are forward-facing. But they are only first steps. There is much more work to do. Above all, Harvard needs to implement reforms so that nothing like this happens again.

To prevent that outcome, it is important to look clearly at what all the fuss is about. When Harvard asserts that it cannot legally dename the Wexner Building at the Harvard Kennedy School due to “the terms of the gift agreement”—and in doing so forestalls an investigation into the substantive merits of the denaming question—this is the legacy they are protecting, however unintentionally.

At some point in the future, public awareness of the linkage between the name on the building and the horrific abuse inflicted on so many young girls by Epstein and his associates may fade. People may forget the many instances of complicity, or far worse, among numerous senior, respected members of the Harvard community. But I continue to hope we will do better, that we will choose to embrace the constant struggle to see what’s in front of our noses.