Guy Who Had a Lot of Time for Ghislaine Maxwell Suddenly Couldn’t Give Epstein’s Survivors the Time of Day

“Patronizing,” “condescending,” and “gaslighting” have been but a spattering of very telling words used to describe acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s behavior in a meeting with Epstein survivors on Thursday, who—per multiple accounts—showed up to the meeting dragging his feet, ignoring victims’ grievances, and refusing to accept even an ounce of accountability over the botched release of the Epstein files. 

“It was very clear he was taking the meeting because he wants this promotion,” Jess Michaels, one of the victims who was present in the meeting, told MS Now’s Alex Witt on Saturday. According to her, Blanche first tried to delegate the meeting to his assistant, a suggestion that was rejected by several victims waiting to meet with him. After a few more attempts to push things off, he finally agreed to sit and speak with them at about 4:30 p.m. on Thursday—a conversation that Michaels says was “really demoralizing, to say the least.” “He completely talked around questions, he didn’t give transparent answers—it felt like more political posturing and using survivors the way that we’ve been used as political pawns.” 

Blanche met with victims only after Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) demanded it, otherwise threatening to withhold his confirmation vote for his AG nomination—which currently hinges on whether every GOP member in the Senate Judiciary Committee votes Blanche forward, especially given all 10 Dems on the panel are probably voting against him. But in this dog-shit, real-life version of taking an evil horse to water, the only thing Blanche really did was show up to the room—and it looks like for Tillis, that’ll be enough.

“I commend Todd Blanche for doing what all his predecessors over the last two decades never did,” the senator tweeted after the meeting. “I appreciate his willingness to directly engage and listen to them.” 

Which, um, is quite the generous interpretation, given several descriptions of Blanche’s “engaging and listening” entailed him doing anything but. “After meeting with Todd Blanche, I feel even more confident in urging senators to vote against his confirmation as the United States’ Attorney General,” Annie Farmer, another victim, said in her own statement Thursday night. “I found him abrasive, condescending, and intentionally noncommittal to survivors—a marked contrast to his public testimony during his confirmation hearing.” 

Danielle Bensky, one of the Epstein survivors who took the stand during a congressional shadow hearing in May, added that Blanche treated the meeting as a “mere check-the-box exercise intended to secure votes for his confirmation,” in a statement shared with PBS News. “He danced around his wording, repeatedly interrupted us and could not commit to anything that would demonstrate good faith or begin to restore trust.” 

“I did not feel he was a public service there addressing crime victims that experienced horrific abuse—not just from the person that abused us, but the system that was supposed to protect us,” Michaels added. 

All of this becomes even more blatantly screwed up considering the DOJ’s massive mistakes in uploading millions of Epstein files earlier this year—erroneously and carelessly releasing several of his victims’ names, details, and nude images. “I can’t tell you how many different times in how many different ways the survivors in the room that had their information leaked,” said Michaels. “No matter how many ways they described how harmful it was—he could not take responsibility for that at all in fact he seemed confused why we had demanded him and not his human trafficking expert.” 

In the MS Now interview, Witt also referred to comments Bensky made during her May testimony, or specifically when she called out Blanche and the DOJ for the botched release. “These documents hold disturbing, and yet, incomplete accounts of my abuse,” Bensky said then. “And they were viewable not only by the entire world, but my child, my students, my students’ parents, my friends, my employers, my colleagues, my family. In public.” How, Witt asked, did Blanche defend that?

“He didn’t,” Michaels replied. “He minimized what we were saying, he kind of glossed over it so it felt like we were hitting a brick wall when we were trying to talk with him,” she explained. “We were giving him information that he could have talked with us about, but we were gaslit—we were skipped over.”

Thursday had meant to be a historic meeting—marking the first time the member of an administration stopped ignoring the presence of Epstein survivors. Alas, it looks like that accolade is still a ways off.