Monica Lewinsky on the Epstein Files and the Nuances of Grooming
The man at the dinner proceeded to speak about This Lady he knew who had dated Jeffrey Epstein. “Rightly or wrongly,” he went on to say, “she was pushing back against all of this ‘Epstein stuff’ in declaring, ‘Those girls knew what they were doing. They wanted to be there.'” To paraphrase: In the view of This Lady (who was not actually named), those girls were happy to give hand jobs in exchange for handbags; they liked the attention. I almost dropped my drink.
This was Psychology 101—motivated reasoning, denial, misogyny, projection, and a perverted “just-world fallacy” expressed via sufferer blaming. Worse, to erase victims is an try to shrink the blast radius of the repugnant abuse and crimes dedicated. Many of these women, youngsters, and younger ladies had been lured. Lured over time. Lured by being groomed. And what This Lady was speaking about was textbook grooming with a capital G.
Grooming is the starting point of the human trafficking pipeline—sometimes considered the hidden step. The Department of Justice describes grooming as “a form of child sexual abuse that can involve the targeting and isolation of the victim, in order to gain the trust of the victim through a controlling relationship to manipulate, exploit, and abuse the victim.” Targets are often vulnerable children who have low self-esteem, struggle with boundaries, or have a history of abuse or neglect. (Like a number of the Epstein survivors.) These young people may be more receptive to this kind of attention and therefore more easily manipulated and ripe for the grooming process.
The contemporary concept of grooming has only been used in the culture for the past 20 to 25 years (and in scientific circles for the past 35 to 40 years). In the cruel calculus of grooming, what may appear as consent—a teenager swearing love, a college student “agreeing” to an affair with a professor, a young person being recruited into a gang—is usually the outcome of slow-burn manipulation. It’s a job. It’s dependency posing as affection, coercion masquerading as choice. It’s a gradual process in which someone older, more powerful, or in a position of trust builds dependence or subservience, tests boundaries, normalizes abuse, and makes the object of his or her advances feel special or responsible. The aim is control. Ipso facto, grooming does not exist without Nuance.
I recently spoke with Emmy-, BAFTA-, and Peabody-winning documentary Deeyah Khan for an upcoming episode of my podcast, Reclaiming. The conversation illuminated for me the levels and layers of complexity and nuance around grooming. Many of Khan’s films center on the dialogue she has with extremist hate groups (jihadists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, in films like Jihad: A Story of the Others and White Right: Meeting the Enemy). Maybe it was because I had been working on this piece, but when she talked about the many young men (and boys, even) she had sat with who had been recruited into these groups—and recruited specifically because they were vulnerable—I thought of grooming. “When I filmed with the neo-Nazis, some of them told me the same thing, very point-blank,” Khan told me. “One of the guys mentioned, you realize, ‘We typically will hang around round faculties and we’ll search for the little child. We’ll search for the one being bullied. We’ll search for the one who looks like a bit of an outcast, and we’ll goal him.’ And I mentioned, ‘Well, what do you imply goal him?’ He mentioned, ‘Well, we’ll embrace him, and we’ll settle for him, and we’ll give him a spot. So that he feels liked and safe and supported and like he is an element of one thing better than himself.’” I’m not suggesting these groomed and recruited to commit horrific crimes are in the similar class as the Epstein survivors, however it exhibits how pervasive and pernicious grooming has turn out to be in our society. (In reality, analysis by Thorn, a toddler security nonprofit, discovered that 40% of youngsters on-line have been approached by somebody they thought was making an attempt to “befriend and manipulate” them.)
Back to This Lady. What incensed me so about her argument was that she was blaming the Groomed as a substitute of the Groomers, aka the Predators. That’s insane. Here’s an excessive comparability: Adults inform kids to not take sweet from a stranger. If a toddler does, regardless of a guardian’s warning, we do not blame the baby. (My buddy Catherine, who’s a pediatrician, as soon as identified to me that for 364 days of the yr, we inform youngsters to not take sweet from strangers…and but, on Halloween, “it’s different.” Nuance.)
