The Fake & Fraudulent Prophets Around the President
September 4, 2026 |
Daniel Henderson
We feign shock and surprise at the blatant and reprehensible actions of Jeffrey Epstein for his free lance abuse of young women and the complicity of those around him, including President Donald Trump. His actions and the leniency he received in the legal system seem both an aberration, and yet, all too familiar at the same time.
This is what we know…the Epstein case is neither rare or unsurprising. It is the rule.
Epstein represents a historical trend within the western narrative: Euro-American men have privilege and power based on patriarchy. This is not new and it will be hard to dismantle.
The Epstein affair is consistent with long-standing patriarchal patterns rather than a deviation. White powerful men with elite privilege are buoyed by structural protection from legal institutions. The victims inevitably come from vulnerable female/gendered populations and often intersect with race and class which enhances male impunity.
After all, who cares if the victims are young homeless women, native American women or women of color? It has been and still is the privilege of powerful white men to take advantage of these groups.
This affair reveals how, despite decades of reform, the same structural logic still persists: those at the top (male, white, wealthy) remain insulated, while those at the bottom (female, poor, vulnerable) are exploited and silenced.
The fact that Epstein’s plea deal was negotiated with anonymity, that victims were excluded from crucial legal rights, and that the current federal investigation was curtailed reflect institutional workings of patriarchal power and elite immunity. The only one sitting in a jail now is a woman.
The Epstein affair is not just an outlier scandal but fits the historical continuity of white patriarchal authority. Recognizing it as such helps frame reform not merely as improving prosecutorial outcomes, but as challenging deeper institutional, religious, and societal ideologies of gender/race/class power.
But lets consider the historical antecedents. The record is clear and transparent. In the antebellum period, white male slave‐owners had near-total impunity in sexually exploiting enslaved women, and legal systems seldom, if ever, punished them. This historical fact reflects male authority grounded in race and class as much as gender.
In the Gilded Age, wealthy industrialists and politicians often engaged in sexual improprieties such as gentleman’s mistresses and vice scandals that were covered up or treated as private matters, especially when the men were part of the elite. It has the same logic and creates a direct line to the Epstein episode. Protect the reputation of the patriarchal elite rather than elevate the claims of women.
During the Progressive Era, legal reforms targeted some abuses like child labor and workplace safety but failed to dismantle the protection enjoyed by elite men. Feminist historians have shown that while women’s suffrage and workplace rights advanced, men’s control over public institutions remained intact, and sexual exploitation by elites remained largely invisible or unaddressed.
Sexual violence against women of color by white men was common during the 1930s and 1940s. This included gang rape, individual assaults, and sexual exploitation within the context of the Jim Crow South. These acts were used to intimidate and control Black communities through sexual violence, with a high degree of impunity for the perpetrators, who often faced no legal consequences due to racist legal systems. A notable example is the 1931 attempted rape of Rosa Lee Ingram by a white man while she was babysitting, as detailed in her own account. Another was the case of Recy Taylor who was gang raped by six white men in 1944 near Abbeville, Alabama. None of the white men were ever held accountable.
Roll the tape forward and we run into Clarence Thomas and Antia Hill, Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blassey Ford. Wealthy elite men, or in the case of Thomas, wealthy white men who wanted favors from a Black justice, were protected. The women were doubted, challenged, not believed, and ultimately, silenced. The men were elevated to positions of privilege and power.
Then there is the misconduct of Donald Trump. Even after his video taped confession as a sexual predator (Access Hollywood), Trump still sits on his golden toilet with the full protection of the patriarchy. Stacey Williams, who alleged in interviews in October 2024, that former President Trump groped her while Jeffrey Epstein watched in 1993, is one of roughly 27 women who have accused the Republican President of sexual misconduct. Yet, he remains unscathed.
The pattern remains recognizable: wealthy men engage in sexual predation, use their resources to avoid full accountability, and benefit from institutional complicity. The Epstein case should be seen as a contemporary variant and extension of this historic pattern. The dynamics of patriarchal protection remain; male elite, female (and often vulnerable) victims, institutional leniency and cover-up.
Gerda Lerner in The Creation of Patriarchy defines patriarchy as “the manifestation and institutionalization of male dominance over women and children in the family and the extension of male dominance over women in society in general.” She also comments that “Patriarchy has had a continuous existence in Western civilization. It has shaped the legal, economic and social institutions, and it determines power relations to this day.”
Within that context, patriarchy can be seen not only in sexual misconduct, but sanctioned in government policy. Controlling women’s reproductive choices, condemning any gender definitions other than the binary ones, or even advocating that women not be allowed to vote are corollaries of the same ideology that covers up for Trump and Epstein.
From this perspective, what matters is not only individual acts of abuse, but the way institutions and elites collude through law, money, and reputation management to protect powerful men, while delegitimizing or silencing the voices of vulnerable women and girls.
For instance, scholar Janice G. Raymond has described what she calls “Immunity Incorporated” in her feminist critique of the Epstein case, arguing that “the injustice that Jeffrey Epstein can buy” is one expression of how patriarchy intersects with wealth and legal non-accountability.
In short, elite men don’t operate as isolated wrongdoers, but within a network of privilege that includes structural gender/race/class hierarchies that enable their protection and sustains the system. This has been going on for centuries.
The term “white heteropatriarchy” has been used to emphasize how whiteness, heterosexuality, and masculinity combine to mark who is treated as a suspect and who is treated as a social insider.
In this framework, the Epstein case has much broader and more expansive implications. It is about societal and cultural reform, not just accountability for one or even two powerful men.
Consider again the Epstein environment. Epstein’s victims were overwhelmingly teenage girls recruited in financially vulnerable circumstances, offered “massage” jobs, then groomed into sexual exploitation. The gender dynamic here is clear: the male predator, the female prey.
In this environment, young girls are treated as objects, passive, coerced, and their agency undermined. For example, one feminist commentary frames Epstein’s activity as “the eroticization of domination”—where sexual acts become mechanisms of male superiority and female objectification. It is not a coincidence that Trump’s methodology of politics is domination; just as it is in personal interactions and encounters. It is about dominating women as much as it is the sex.
Then, the secrecy around Epstein’s “non-prosecutorial agreement” the NPA, and the failure to notify victims of their rights under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act (CVRA) reflect institutional disregard for the female victims’ agency and voice. This is a systemic and structural issue. A Washington Post opinion piece described how “power and money colluded to let a sex-obsessed monster get away with abuse.”
Viewing the Epstein case through this broader framework suggests that reforms must go beyond individual prosecutions. They must address institutional accountability: ensuring that institutions (prosecutors, justice departments) cannot negotiate secret deals that bypass victims’ rights. There must be structural and institutional transparency.
Potential reforms must also include intersectional analysis: recognizing how whiteness, class, male privilege intersect to create immunity for some and vulnerability and silence for others. Reforms need to center survivors, especially those from marginalized backgrounds. They need to dismantle the reputational protection of elite men which is often built on erasure of those voices. Victims need to have their voices heard and protected.
These types of reforms suggest cultural transformation. Since patriarchy depends not only on laws but on norms of male entitlement, sexual domination, and female silencing, culture will have to deconstruct the ideology of white heteropatriarchy.
However, white heteropatriarchy isn’t just a social-cultural product. It also has religious roots and foundations. Conservative Christian traditions, especially in the U.S., have historically framed and supported patriarchy through religious doctrine. This includes men as divinely appointed heads of households, women as submissive and morally suspect placing sexual purity as a burden on women and girls, and authority, divine or otherwise, as inherently masculine and divinely sanctioned.
This creates a moral architecture in which powerful men’s sexual transgressions are treated as private sins, while women’s sexuality is scrutinized as a marker of virtue or shame. This theology did not vanish with modernity; it was repackaged in evangelical purity culture, complementarian theology as in the teachings of the Southern Baptist Convention, and the political language of “family values.”
More specifically, white Christian nationalism is not merely a political ideology—it is a gendered worldview that normalizes male authority. Scholars like Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Samuel Perry, Andrew Whitehead, and Anthea Butler show that WCN sanctifies white male dominance, frames authority as divinely granted to men and interprets challenges to male power as threats to God’s order. Any attack upon male authority is interpreted as an attack by outsiders or liberal forces rather than real abuse.
Although Epstein himself was not a figure of Christian nationalism, the cultural infrastructure that protected him reflect the same structures produced by WCN. The deference Epstein received is not random privilege, it echoes the long-standing American practice of treating powerful men as moral beings, sanctioned by a male deity, whose status protects them from full accountability.
The “Epstein system” is a secular expression of a deeply religious moral hierarchy. “Abuse isn’t a betrayal of evangelical values; it is a logical outcome of a system that privileges male authority and female submission,” according to Kristen Kobes Du Mez in her groundbreaking book, Jesus and John Wayne.
This same logic applies even more directly to Donald Trump who is viewed by white Christian nationalists as God’s chosen President. His authority cannot be questioned or doubted. Any scandal that involves his name is, therefore, an obvious hoax and an attempt to bring down God’s chosen leader. Circle the wagons.
Anthea Butler, in White Evangelical Racism, documents how white Christian nationalism repeatedly rallies to protect abusive male authority while disciplining women and girls. Other feminist scholars converge on the same critical point. Religion is not incidental; it is one of the essential engines that normalizes male dominance and teaches society to excuse or forgive elite male sexual abuse and attack the accusers. The ideological structures of WCN have, for centuries, naturalized male dominance and minimized the harm done to exploited women and girls.
With this framework in mind, we are faced with an even bigger burden. How do we bring justice to the women who were exploited, abused and used as young girls, and tackle the larger burden of changing the patriarchal hegemony?
I will suggest that the first step will be to bring the obvious male perpetrators to justice in the Epstein case. Real justice. That would be a rare occurance.
Listen to the women who have a story to tell and protect them from retribution or legal action. Believe them.
Question the foundations of privilege, power and patriarchy by bring Donald Trump to account. Impeach and convict, then press charges.
Begin the process of reforming the institutions that uphold the male-dominated system. It is not a coincidence that the attack on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is designed to roll back the gains from those programs that have primarily benefited women.
This is not about feminizing society. It is about creating a society that equalizes men and women, does away with classism, and breaks down the racial hierarchy that is embedded in white patriarchal authority. This will be a long haul.
