For the TV producer or the newsroom editor it must be, as they say, a no-brainer that the crimes of a billionaire convicted sex offender – and each new revelation about his behavior, most recently his plans to repopulate the world with his own scientifically engineered offspring – is a grabbier story than the death of a Guatemalan child. There was never any doubt about which of these items got top billing when Jeffrey Epstein’s initial arrest occurred around the same time as the child’s bereaved mother testified before Congress. Epstein got the headlines and led the broadcasts, while the mother, Yazmin Juárez, was the sixth or seventh item into the program, the night I watched. Still, let’s give the network some credit for allowing her to tell her story: for listening to her at all.
Make no mistake. I’d be glad to see the creepy, privileged Epstein go down. Like most people, I don’t like the idea that the rich are above the law, though we hardly need Jeffrey Epstein to remind us that the US has parallel legal systems operating according to the race and income level of the accused. Who doesn’t love a scandal? We can’t help it, we’re human. And each new chapter – now the news of the celebrated scientists he courted to advise him on his bizarre eugenics program – continues to seize and hold our attention.
But on the same day he was arrested on sex trafficking charges, the day I couldn’t look at my phone without seeing Epstein’s face, I saw, on the evening news, a short clip from the testimony at a congressional hearing: Juárez described the death of her 19-month-old daughter, Mariee, after they were imprisoned by Ice at the border in a room she called “the Icebox” – locked in with thirty other people, sleeping on the cold concrete floor. During her interview with Ice, Juárez was told by an official that this country was for Americans, that Trump was his president, that they could take her baby away from her and lock her up in jail.
Transferred to Texas’s notorious Camp Dilley detention center, Mariee fell ill, and her illness failed to respond to the prescribed Tylenol and honey. Even after Mariee had lost 8% of her body weight, she was treated for an ear infection. After six weeks in the hospital, ultimately on a ventilator, Mariee died, “slowly and painfully” of a treatable viral lung infection. “My daughter is gone; the people who are in charge of running these facilities and caring for these little angels are not supposed to let these the things happen to them.”
Among the conclusions that the clearly moved Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew from Juárez’s testimony is that what happened to Yasmin and her daughter in the detention center reflects a wider “a culture of cruelty” in these camps and in our treatment of migrants, in general. And these deaths continue to happen while we await new revelations about how vile and delusional Epstein was.
What connects these two stories is that they are both about suffering and about the culture of cruelty, about cruel abuses of power. Both stories concern the abusive mistreatment of children.
But there is one more connection, which is Donald Trump. Along with the agents of Ice, Trump has Mariee’s blood on his hands. Trump is also a former friend of Epstein’s. Their friendship soured, but Trump has been widely quoted as saying Epstein is a fun guy who shares his love of beautiful women, “some of them on the young side”.
Some of them on the young side.
To be alive at this moment is to be in a constant state of denial, ignoring all sorts of things, among them the fact that the president of the United States is an accused rapist and a man who thinks that the sex trafficking of girls “a little on the young side” is a joke. Locker-room stuff, people said, when he boasted about grabbing women’s pussies. He continues as president, even as the list of sexual misconduct charges against him threatens to rival Bill Cosby’s, and as other men are disgraced for much less serious offenses.
I and many Americans are in a state of stunned disbelief that this is who we have become. A culture’s values trickle from the top down, and what’s trickling down from Trump and his oligarch friends is the idea that cold-blooded cruelty to the weak and defenseless is not only justified but energizing and exciting. A turn-on.
When I hear the “strategic” argument that we should wait and defeat Donald Trump at the ballot box in 2020, all I can think of is how long that time – the days and hours and weeks between now and October 2020 – will seem to the children in cages, the families in mourning, the parents looking for lost kids. We can’t forget them for a moment, no matter how avidly we follow each new detail of the Epstein case – while Mariee is all but forgotten except by those who loved and continue to mourn her.
