Hey Everyone,
I caught up with artist and Epstein survivor, Rina Oh, just back from what turned out to be a momentous trip to Washington DC. Just hours after the survivors gave a stirring press conference on the steps of the Capitol, both the House and Senate voted to release the Epstein files. And, earlier this evening, President Trump signed the bill. It is, as Oh, says a “victory”.
In our interview Oh details what the extraordinary, historic 48 hours was like; she describes how kind various members of the House of Representatives were to the survivors; but, also, how complicated inter-relations between the Epstein survivors sometimes is. This is something I’ve talked about repeatedly. The Epstein story is messier than people would like it to be.
In April I wrote how Oh is suing the estate of Virginia Giuffre over alleged defamation around Giuffre’s response to Oh’s assertion that Giuffre assaulted her in Epstein’s massage room. (Giuffre, you’ll remember, was frank in her posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl, about the fact that she recruited and abused other women and girls for Epstein. She even forgot about one of them - Carolyn Andriano, who stood up in court at Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal trial and described what happened to her at Virginia’s hands. Giuffre doesn’t mention Oh in her book).
Andriano died of an overdose in 2023, and Oh says she is making a bronze sculpture in her memory.
In our interview Oh goes back down memory lane, and explains how Epstein dangled money, job security, and even a studio, to help her burgeoning career as an artist, and to keep her coming back to his New York town house, and to his home in Palm Beach. It’s a tale that is, unfortunately, all too familiar, at this point.
She explains the fear she felt when he had an art work picked up at her parents’ home, because he now had her address, and she felt trapped and unable to speak out about what happened for years.
It’s a reminder that we must never forget that the point of releasing the Epstein files, is not for either party to score political points, but to ensure that the institutional power that propped Epstein up for so long, is never enabled again for such a ghastly purpose.
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