Just as the Epstein Class is exposed, the President launches an illegal war against Iran. The first U.S. bomb fell on an Iranian school for girls, killing at least 175 mainly girl-children—a slip of the radar, as if the Epstein Class cannot help but annihilate the very thing they most fear, the embodied female. 

At home, the Epstein Class has other ways of putting women in their place: rape, battering, trafficking on the streets or to the rich and well positioned at fancy townhouse parties, on desolate ranches, private jets, or isolated Caribbean islands. These Western men abhor the hijab; they like scanty clothing, easy to rip off. They “like them on the younger side,” as our war mongering, womanizing, “grab ‘em by the pussy” President famously said. “Operation Epstein Fury” (called “epic fury” by its propagandists) continues at home and abroad. A murderous distraction, covering up crime upon sexual crime, while bombing civilian cities. 

Many of the daughters Epstein passed around like a tray of appetizers came from violent homes where they saw their mothers regularly insulted and assaulted. Others were from broken homes who watched their single mothers toil at low-paying jobs. Two hundred dollars for massaging some creep seemed a lifeline. Other daughters ran away. Living on the street, a shiny car pulls to a halt and they jump in. Jealous mothers criticize. Weak mothers fail to protect. 

The broken connection with us, their mothers, is what throws girls into the malignant hands of malignant men.

“If only men could have children by themselves, then we would not need women for anything,” Jason, her unfaithful husband, spits at Medea, the woman he has betrayed for a princess, richer, younger.  

“A woman is just a container for a vagina,” Jeffrey Epstein writes in one of his thousands of smug emails to his hundreds of male, and sometimes, female, accomplices, proving that though he lacks the poetic touch of Euripides, he agrees with Jason’s argument.  

When Medea hears what Jason thinks: women are vessels, merely, she realizes she has to kill her children. How else can she get revenge except by murdering what he cannot have without a woman, an heir. She splits in two while she contemplates her desperate act: she is the loving mother, sorrowing over the loss of her own babes, and the vengeful goddess who knows no human ties. She dialogues with herself, “do not do this thing.” “You must.” The goddess wins, and so the mortal mother stabs her sons. Jason will be childless. She will take the bodies of the children she birthed and murdered with her when she flees the city in her chariot, leaving her unfaithful, mortal husband bereft below. 

Jason forgot Medea was a goddess. He thought, mistakenly, he had domesticated her. He thought that as any domestic animal bred for birthing or for slaughter, Medea had no choice but to bend to her fate. Jason thought he could toss his wife aside.

Epstein’s thousands of dark and smirking emails show us a cabal of women haters, a legion of the powerful who use their power to keep girls from going free. Who see young girls as sex toys, body parts, not as persons.  But the release of these files has released a leonine roar.

Girls with strong, independent mothers do not fall for the Epstein trap, or do they? If their mothers are strong, they fight with and for their daughters. They welcome their daughters home. Help them get abortions, go back to school, kick their habit. Strong mothers protect their daughters. 

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells the story of the mother whose child is taken, raped. Hades, lord of the underworld, abducts Persephone while she plays in a field of flowers. In the Greek myth, the return of the daughter to the mother brings the spring, and renews the cycle of creation. Mother and daughter must reunite in order for life to continue. 

Demeter roams the whole earth searching for her child; she refuses to eat or rest until her daughter returns to her. Demeter, the Mother Goddess, smites the entire world with famine. Hades has to let Persephone return or the whole Earth will die. But, he forces her to eat one pomegranate seed. Therefore, Persephone must return below the earth for three months every year, the months of winter. The other nine months, the time of gestation for a human baby and for the harvest, Persephone reunites with Demeter, the Mother Goddess. Together, Mother and Daughter dance this endless round of life begetting life. Separation and return. If the Mother Goddess were to stop searching for her daughter, stop fighting for her, there would be no life, no spring. 

For thousands of years, Greek men and women, slave and free, celebrated the Eleusinian Mysteries, the sacred rites of worship of Demeter, the Mother Goddess. Annually, they processed, danced, sang, sacrificed and, most probably, drank a hallucinogen (ergot of barely) before they descended to the underground dugout beneath the earth. There, every celebrant shared a vision, which must have been of the goddess herself, in some form or other, appearing in her way to each. Initiates were forbidden to reveal what they saw during this shared hallucination, but it is said, each one lost their fear of death. The Greek worshippers of Demeter understood they are the children of the mother goddess, from her they came, to her they will return so that others might come to life. 

Better to thrust the entire earth into a famine than to lose one daughter. So precious is Persephone. Demeter will cause the whole earth to starve rather than betray her daughter. The daughter is the Mother to come. For thousands of years, the Eleusinian Mysteries celebrated fierce life and gentle death. Without the Mother’s love for her divine Daughter, there would be no endless round of birthing, dying. 

Epstein, whose cronies now insist they never even knew him, didn’t know him well, and had no idea what he was up to, was up to eugenics. He wanted his Ashkenazi genes inserted into the wombs of captive Shiksa women, that is, blond, blue-eyed non-Jews from Miami streets or Eastern Europe. Like Elon Musk, a non-Jew, Epstein believed in his intellectual superiority. He wanted to seed many girls to make many children. Did he maintain, or intend to maintain, some sort of baby factory at his ranch in New Mexico, or on his Caribbean island? Was he breeding captive women? Or, was this his dream? Who would nurse these motherless babes, who would mother them, raise them? Epstein didn’t care. He annihilated motherhood. Girls were vessels, merely. They would have their children pried from them and taken. And in a diary discovered among the files, this seems to have happened. These girls would never know the furious love for all creation that pours from a woman just as she gives birth, nor feel her sudden understanding as she holds her newborn that there is nothing more precious than this single babe on the entire earth. In his warped mind, Epstein got rid of motherhood. Much of his power came from the idea that there is no mother. No one cares about daughters. Men can have children by themselves. Women are merely wombs.

In hunter-gatherer societies, children were carried by their Mothers and Others, the title of a 2009 book by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, dedicated to “my children and my children’s children”. This was before fatherhood was understood, when women swelled with life as if divine. They might have sex with many men or one, but the connection between intercourse and procreation was not evident until people settled into agriculture and began to breed animals. Then paternity was understood. They saw one bull was enough for the entire herd. But, until then, women retained their power as the magical bringers of life into the world. After patriarchy, women had to be controlled, owned to ensure the child she bore was really his. 

Before paternity was understood, men were brothers, uncles, who helped care for their sisters’ children. In hunter-gatherer societies, babies and toddlers were carried in the arms of   mothers and others as the group moved from food source to water, and on. This is when the qualities of empathy, and mutual understanding, arose, Hrdy writes. Babies who stared into their caretakers’ eyes, saw these adults looking back at them with love. They learned to care for others by first being cared for by others. Empathy, Hrdy argues, is an acquired trait, acquired by nurture, and therefore, empathy may grow stronger through its practice but might also devolve as human societies become more violent and technology driven, as toddlers look at screens not into loving eyes.

We can lose empathy like those in the Epstein class who value power over others, promote technology, AI, eugenics, and war. They fantasize that as Earth becomes uninhabitable they will take their many motherless progeny and go to live on Mars. Lords of an infertile planet.

Meanwhile, on earth, men can stand with women to defy the amoral Epstein class, and many are. Men can “mother” too, of course, and many do. Transwomen are feared because they make visible the woman in them. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which celebrates the story of Demeter and her daughter, Persephone, has new meaning for us, now, as we strive to save our Earth and protect our children. A strong mother-force fighting for our children’s future is exhilarating and necessary. Empathy is what we cling to as we shudder at the brutality of the Epstein class. Nurturing our young together teaches our children how to nurture themselves and others. 

Karen Malpede’s new memoir, Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths is available from Vine Leave Press.

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