Pam Bondi is out as Attorney General. Millions of Epstein-related documents are now public,

and the names of the powerful people in his orbit are finally out in the open. You might think

the reckoning is over. You'd be wrong. Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excer.

I'm Cody Godwin in for Dana Taylor.

Today is Friday, April 10, 2026.

My next guest read through the Epstein files seeking an answer to the question of accountability.

What she found instead was a disturbing pattern of repeated attempts to discredit the victims,

while letting the rich and powerful off the hook for enabling Epstein's behavior to continue for so

long unimpeded. Why? Joining me to share her insights on this is Claire Wilmot, a visiting fellow

at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Claire, it's great to have you on the excerpt.

Thanks so much for having me.

In an op-ed you recently published in the New York Times, you wrote about a phenomenon you saw

over and over again in the Epstein files. You called it, quote, the mechanics of doubt, end quote.

What did you mean here?

So I was looking through the Epstein files to try to understand how these

powerful men were responding to me to in real time. So my academic background looks at the

aftermath of seemingly progressive legal reforms, specifically around gendered violence,

and tries to see what's happening in the wake of those reforms

on a sort of practical level. So how are people being believed and disbelieved when they go to report

a crime at police stations, but also, you know, the other places that they might talk about what's

happened to them. So yeah, my work follows sort of how doubt functions and how doubt

can kind of derail those cases, either before they enter the criminal legal system or through

...