The Girl Has No Arms: My Thoughts on the Epstein Book

So: now, we’ve seen Trump’s drawing of the girl in the Epstein book.

Just yesterday, a congressional panel published a redacted copy of the infamous book that convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell put together for the wealthy pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. Maxwell had all of Epstein’s friends contribute pictures and notes for his book; there are all kinds of famous names in there. We learned about the book’s existence in July, when the Wall Street Journal published an explosive article about a lewd drawing and an odd little poem which Trump contributed to the book. I reacted to the news at the time.  Trump insisted the drawing wasn’t real, and sued. The Epstein estate turned the book over to Congress. Now it’s been published for the world to see. I can’t imagine that will help Trump’s court case.

I won’t be showing you a picture of that drawing, or any of the other obscene pictures and notes in the Epstein book. Here’s the Reuters article if you want to look for yourself.   I do caution my readers who suffer from sexual trauma that I’m going to describe some terrible things from here on, though. Please stop here if reading them would upset you.

Trump’s drawing is in his signature sharpie. It’s a crude sketch of a woman’s torso– or, rather, of a girl’s torso, because the two semicircular breasts are very small. An odd poem hinting about “wonderful secrets” that Epstein and Trump share is typewritten inside the torso. His name, just the given name, “Donald,” is scribbled in the crotch so it looks like pubic hair. And yes, it is really Trump’s signature. I’ve seen suggestions that it’s not, but it looks exactly like Trump’s signature every other time he’s signed his name “Donald.”

That drawing is all over the internet right now, with good reason. But it’s almost a shame that that drawing stole the show, because there are so many other things in that book to be horrified about.  No, I don’t believe Bill Clinton’s quip about “childlike curiosity” on his page was an innocent single entendre. He’s Bill Clinton. I’ve been disgusted by the sleaziness of Bill Clinton since I was a child. I am beyond sickened by the drawing of Epstein handing little girls balloons, and then receiving a massage from girls in bikinis, though I don’t know who drew the picture on that page.  Of course, the billionaire Les Wexner from my hometown of Columbus is in the book as well, with a dirty drawing of breasts. I don’t know how the Ohio State University could even begin to re-name all the buildings named for Wexner, but they ought to.

All of these wealthy and famous people knew exactly what was going on. They treated Epstein’s horrific exploitation of girls like a joke. None of them should ever be allowed to show their faces in public again.

Our whole world is owned and controlled by the most disgusting, selfish, narcissistic, wealthy people. Epstein was one of them, but so many were his enablers.

Sometimes I think that America’s gravest sin is our cultural assumption that if a person is rich and famous, he must have earned that  through virtue. Americans assume that rich people deserve to be rich, and the poor deserve their fate as well. Other countries have other silly beliefs, but the canonization of the rich and the demonization of the poor is America’s sin.

Americans celebrate rich people, defend them from criticism, and aspire to imitate them. We don’t expect them to pay their taxes, because they do enough good for society just by existing. We stigmatize the homeless and glorify the billionaires, even though we have so much more in common with our unhoused neighbors than with billionaires. We have the flimsiest social safety net of any developed country, in order to further embarrass the poor, even though every single person reading this is far more likely to need Welfare than to be a billionaire. We tell ourselves that we could be just like the wealthy, if only we worked hard enough, and that that would be a good thing. I wish that this horrific chapter in American history would serve to teach us that wealthy people are often the very worst people, not admirable or imitable in the least. But I don’t know if even this could get the lesson through.

I can’t imagine what Epstein’s many victims are feeling right now. My heart goes out to them. I can’t imagine having your trauma plastered all over the news again and again and again in this way.

And I keep going back to that drawing, with our president’s name as the pubic hair.

To me, the most haunting part of the composition is that the girl has no arms. The body ends at the shoulders, with two sharp little stumps where the arms ought to be. She doesn’t have a head either, just a neck, but I keep looking back at those stumps.

I’m sure Trump only drew his sketch that way because he didn’t have room on the paper, or because he didn’t want to draw the complicated parts. But on an artistic level: she is helpless. She has no arms. She has no agency. She can’t fight or move away. She is a torso for rich men to use, and a rich man wrote his name on her genitals.

That’s how Donald Trump and his friends see every girl and woman.

That’s how the decadent billionaire class see you.