00:00Good to have you with us here on France 24 here on Paris Direct.
00:16Well, in the latest development in the growing Epstein scandal, Jeffrey Epstein's accomplice,
00:22Ghislaine Maxwell, is to be questioned today by the US Congress via video link from prison
00:29where she is serving a 20-year prison sentence for trafficking girls to the sex offender.
00:36Well, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee is probing Epstein's connections to powerful figures
00:42and how information about his crimes was handled.
00:46The hearing is going to take place behind closed doors
00:49and Ghislaine Maxwell is expected not to answer most of the questions she faces.
00:56Instead, she is likely to invoke her right to remain silent.
01:01Well, this, of course, is a big development.
01:03And we on France 24 are joined today by Dr. Sam Martin of Bowie's State University in Idaho
01:10in the United States to shed some light on all of this.
01:14She has a particular interest in conservative social movements
01:18and has written or edited books, including The Election of Donald J. Trump.
01:22But you've also written recently about the victims of Jeffrey Epstein.
01:27Very good to have you with us.
01:28Thank you so much for your time.
01:31Maybe I could start off by asking you,
01:35she is to be interviewed by the House Oversight Committee then,
01:39likely to refuse to answer most of these questions, as we said.
01:42And her lawyers had asked for her to be given legal immunity,
01:49suggesting that if she was granted that, she would deliver more information.
01:53Maybe you can kind of clear this up for us.
01:55So what would such legal immunity have meant?
01:58Would that be against further charges?
02:01And, you know, why wasn't it granted?
02:06It's difficult to say exactly what it would have meant
02:08because it didn't happen and because not many details have come out.
02:11It could very well have meant, like, liberty or freedom
02:15from any charges that are coming in the future.
02:17It may have also been an attempt to get folks to reconsider
02:22the two-decade sentence that she's under.
02:26But most likely it meant to give her immunity from future charges
02:30because, you know, with all the documents coming out,
02:33there's just more and more peril for really anybody
02:37who was affiliated with Jeffrey Epstein or Ms. Maxwell
02:41in any kind of meaningful way.
02:43Now, because she hasn't been granted this immunity,
02:47her lawyers have advised her to invoke her Fifth Amendment rights,
02:51the right to remain silent.
02:53What do you think then we might learn from this hearing?
02:55Because what is out there is the line of questioning that is likely.
03:00What do you think we can learn from that even
03:02and her refusal, if she does, to answer them?
03:05I wouldn't expect to learn a lot.
03:09You may learn, you'll get, you may get to hear,
03:13we may become aware of some of the questions that actually got asked.
03:16They may still do the conversation
03:19and just have Ms. Maxwell continuously, you know,
03:22invoke her Fifth Amendment right here in the United States
03:25to, against self-incrimination and not to speak.
03:29You know, in the hope that always when you ask the questions,
03:33there's a chance that a question will so provoke a witness
03:37that they just begin talking.
03:39And once they begin talking, then everything's on the board.
03:41So there's some small chance that that could happen.
03:45And when and if we see what the question list was,
03:49there's some possibility that we'll learn something
03:52from the kinds of questions the Congress people ask.
03:56It's difficult to say.
03:57I wanted to talk about this question of anonymity
04:01because I know it's something you have written quite a bit about.
04:05The idea that, of course, the alleged perpetrators
04:09and the alleged victims, many of the perpetrators,
04:14a lot of newsrooms are very interested in whose names have come up
04:17and what their connection might have been.
04:21As far as the victims are concerned, you know,
04:26should they have complete anonymity where they want to?
04:30Or does that reduce them to, as you have suggested,
04:35sometimes a forgotten element of the story?
04:38Can you, I mean, you've got quite nuanced views on all of this.
04:40I think it'd be very interesting to hear what you say
04:42about how newsrooms, how coverage of this should be, in your view.
04:46Well, so I think, so our Supreme Court here has essentially ceded the ethical question.
04:55From a legal standpoint here, it's okay to name survivors.
04:58But our legal system has essentially ceded the ethical question to newsrooms themselves.
05:04And that over decades has led in an attempt to treat victims of sexual exploitation and sexual assault with respect.
05:15It has really devolved into, not devolved,
05:17but it has really become a situation where victims very often are not named.
05:22But in this case, we have something strange going on because many of the survivors want to remain anonymous,
05:29but not all of them.
05:30And some have come forward and said,
05:33hey, I'm here.
05:35This is my story.
05:36I want to be heard.
05:37And in the aftermath of the Me Too movement,
05:40people are reconsidering this idea about automatic anonymity in light of the fact that some women who have these experiences,
05:48and indeed some men who have similar experiences,
05:51they are able to reclaim some power by actually being associated and talking about what has happened to them.
05:58And so what makes, I think, what's happening in the media coverage and elsewhere so interesting about what's happening with the victims is it's a kind of flattening.
06:11And as we wait for hearings like that are going to happen today, as we wait for details about those,
06:16or as we've been waiting for the lists and the documents that have been being released by the Department of Justice here,
06:22the suspense becomes more about whether victims will be heard or becomes, excuse me, less about whether victims will be heard
06:32and more about what it means if an influential man gets named.
06:37And so the story turns into a kind of referendum about who counts as news,
06:42because as individuals, it becomes very salacious to know which men have behaved in these really, really, really abhorrent ways
06:51versus really thinking about the people who these abhorrent things happened to and who now have to go forward in their lives and put themselves back together.
07:01And so I think really what I think about is that in that framing, in a scandal that really is thinking about the powerful men,
07:12the problem, as people understand it, isn't what happened to the girls as much over many years,
07:19but it's more about which elites might be embarrassed or implicated or exposed.
07:24And so it's just a question of who people who take in this media walk away from the story thinking about.
07:34We just have time for one more question.
07:36I wanted to ask you, you, of course, are in the U.S., in Idaho.
07:39In the United Kingdom, the fallout from this Epstein affair has been much more significant than in the U.S.
07:45We've seen the king's brother stripped of his titles.
07:48He is no longer Prince Andrew.
07:50He's been banished from Windsor Castle.
07:52The prime minister's on the ropes.
07:54Two big resignations just yesterday and today.
07:57And in the U.S., very little movement.
08:01Do you expect that to change?
08:03Well, so for a very long time, there was this rumor that people would refer to it as a client list.
08:10And with the release of the millions of documents here, it doesn't appear that any such client list exists.
08:15And so I really can't answer that question in as much as the only avenue that really exists here to formally hold someone accountable is through a legal proceeding,
08:33not through sort of like what happened to the former prince, was available as a kind of as a way to hold him accountable without having to without necessarily going through a formal legal process.
08:50And I'll also say that that that what's been happening so much lately with the way that Donald Trump has been running the Department of Justice,
08:57that's a whole different story.
08:59And it's very alarming, I would say, some of the ways that he's using it more as a political tool here than a way to hold people, including himself, accountable.
09:07Another big story in that very answer.
09:11We don't have time for any more.
09:12Thank you so much for being with us.
09:14We really do appreciate it.
09:15Dr Sam Martin from Boyes University in Idaho.
09:19Thank you very much for your insights on that.
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