The Jeffrey Epstein cover-up is an affront to US democracy | Rebecca Solnit

Rape is a crime against democracy in the most immediate sense of equality between individuals and the premise that we’re all endowed with certain inalienable rights. Most rapists operate on the premise that they can not only overpower the victim physically, but can do so socially and legally. They count on a system that discounts the voices of victims and only too often cooperates in silencing them, through shame, intimidation, threats, discrediting, the obscene legal instrument known as a nondisclosure agreement and a system too often run by men for men at the expense of women and children. That is to say, rapists count on getting away with it because of a system that hands them power and steals it from their victims. They count on a silencing system. On profound inequality.

Which is what makes rape such a peculiar crime: it is the ritual enactment of the perpetrator’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, buttressed by the circumstances that puts and keeps each of them in those roles. It’s driven by the desire to use sexuality to cause physical and psychic injury, to dominate, to celebrate the rapist’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, to treat another human being as a person without rights, including the right to set boundaries, to say no and to speak up afterward. A society that perpetuates and protects this desire and arrangement is rape culture, and it’s been our culture throughout most of its existence.

Democracy, in this context, means a society and system in which everyone’s rights matter, everyone’s voice is heard and everyone is equal under the law. Rapists count on this not being true, but is has become more true over the past half century, thanks to feminism, and changed a lot more over the past dozen years, thanks to more feminism. There has been a shift toward equality of of voice, rights and support from the legal system, from arresting officers to investigations, judges and juries (who, thanks to feminism, are no longer exclusively male). It hasn’t changed enough, but it’s changed a lot, which is how a hundred survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s rape club were able to gather with the support of Thomas Massie, a Republican congressperson from Kentucky, and Ro Khanna, a Democratic representative from California, on Wednesday morning to speak to the world about their experiences and demand justice.

They became victims, and some were abused for years, because of the power differential between Epstein and the girls and young women. His power consisted not only of his immense and still-unexplained wealth, but of aid from a host of others. Some actively cooperated in manipulating and abusing them, as groomer and pimp-in-chief Ghislaine Maxwell did, along with the fellow rapists to whom Epstein offered these children and young women. Others knew and chose to protect him and his fellow abusers, and some still do, all the way to the very top.

Mike Johnson, the House speaker, adjourned Congress earlier this summer to prevent votes on measures relating to Epstein and thereby protect Donald Trump. As the New Republic reported on Tuesday, “House Speaker Mike Johnson is offering Republicans a cowardly out to avoid voting on a bipartisan discharge petition to release the Epstein files in full.” Johnson’s main concern in this (and pretty much everything else he does) is to protect Trump. He is not alone. Jamie Raskin said in July: “They’d conscripted a thousand FBI agents to be working around the clock 24 hours going through a hundred thousand Epstein documents and told them to flag any mentions of Donald Trump ... This might be one of the most massive cover-ups in the history of the United States unfolding before our eyes.”

The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, ordered this frantic censorship scheme to protect Trump, which should have begotten a thousand front-page news stories demanding to know what exactly it took a thousand agents to hide from us and who exactly Trump is that he requires this kind of anti-democratic protection. Like Johnson, and like Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, who conducted a long, deeply wrong exculpatory softball interview with Maxwell, she’s serving one man rather than the 342 million people of this country. Trump himself, who over the summer seemed terrified and eager to distract from whatever there is to be found out about his role in all this, once again attempted to silence victims by calling the whole thing “a Democrat hoax” immediately after the news conference. Survivor Haley Robson called out Trump and declared: “I cordially invite you to the Capitol to meet me in person so you can understand this is not a hoax.”

The women who spoke at Wednesday morning’s press conference made it clear they still fear they face threats, that the machinery of silencing is still at work. Katie Tarrant of the Washington Post writes, “Lisa Phillips, a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, and her lawyer Brad Edwards, said victims were scared to speak publicly about other abusers for fear of legal action. Her response came in response to a question about a client list some victims said they are compiling.” Another Post journalist reports, “Anouska De Georgiou, who said she was a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, said she and her daughter were threatened when she volunteered to be a witness in a lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell.”

And this attempt to suppress the truth about crimes and silence victims is only too consistent with the Republican party and the Trump administration. The attacks on immigrants, refugees, Black and brown people, women, trans people, the positioning of the administration as above the law with the cooperation of the rogue conservatives of the supreme court: all this is an attempt to roll back not only the democratic gains of the past several decades, but the democratic principles of universal rights and equality under the law embedded in the constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Rendering women second-class or maybe 11th-class citizens again is at the heart of the current rightwing agenda, with its pursuit of criminalization of pregnancy, denial of reproductive rights including access to birth control, the right to choose whether to bear children, and life-saving care for women who have miscarriages or otherwise need a pregnancy terminated. But this is only part of the attack on women. The administration has disproportionately fired Black women from government jobs. 300,000 Black women have left – or been pushed out of – the workforce in the last three months.

Pete Hegseth, who himself settled rape allegations out of court, has fired women in high positions in the military, claims women are less qualified than men and has been reposting videos from Christian fanatics asserting women should not have the right to vote. Trump’s is quite literally a pro-crime administration, as major branches of federal government are pulled away from pursuing criminals to persecuting immigrants, often violating the law to do so. The administration has sought to cut funding for and dismantle programs addressing domestic violence. And of course the Trump administration is headed by Donald J Trump – a judge found in a civil claim that it was “substantially true” that Trump raped journalist E Jean Carroll. It’s rapists all the way down, and enablers all the way up.

• Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility