Miranda Levi

Content warning: childhood sexual abuse, rape, family betrayal, trauma, suicidal ideation.

There is a sentence that still lives in my bones:

No one will believe you.

I was told that as a child.

And for years, I believed it.

I said no.

I said stop.

I said I didn’t want this.

I was six years old.

Six.

Before I had words for sex, I had words for fear.

Before I understood violence, I understood survival.

Before I knew what rape was, I knew what it meant to leave my body and wait for it to be over.

For years, I could not say the word.

Even as an adult.

Even with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice.

Even working in law enforcement.

Even while helping other people name crimes done to them.

Then one day, a police officer said to me, “I know this word is uncomfortable, but what we’re talking about is rape. You were raped.”

And everything in me split open.

Because he was right.

Because I knew he was right.

Because I had spent years choking on that truth anyway.

What trauma actually does

People think trauma is a memory. A scene. A bad thing that happened once and then ended.

It isn’t.

Trauma is a long occupation.

It moves into your nervous system and changes the locks.

It rewires your instincts until danger feels normal and safety feels fake.

It teaches you how to smile while disappearing.

It teaches you that silence is safer than honesty.

It teaches you to call survival “overreacting,” and grief “being dramatic,” and terror “just anxiety.”

That is what trauma does.

It steals your voice first—so you cannot name what happened while it is happening.

Then it steals your timeline—so years collapse into flashes, smells, and panic you can’t explain.

Then it steals your certainty that truth even matters—because every time you try to speak, someone tells you to sit down, shut up, or prove your pain in a language built by people who never had to survive it.

Trauma makes you doubt your own memory while your body keeps perfect score.

Trauma makes you hate yourself for choices you made as a terrified child.

Trauma makes you carry guilt that belongs to a predator.

And then the world has the audacity to ask why you didn’t report sooner.

The people who should have protected me didn’t.

My abuser wasn’t a stranger in a parking lot.

He was family.

He threatened me.

Humiliated me.

Used fear as a leash.

And the adults around me—the ones who were supposed to keep children safe—failed me.

Some ignored it.

Some denied it.

Some defended him.

Some helped preserve the family story at the expense of the child living inside the nightmare.

When another cousin came forward years later, she was dragged and called a liar.

I tried to speak in that moment too, and I was shut down.

The same words he used on me came out of other mouths: lying bitch.

Do you understand what that does to a person?

To hear your abuser’s script repeated by the people who are supposed to love you most in the world?

Silence isn’t always chosen.

Sometimes it is engineered.

Sometimes it is beaten into the architecture of a family.

The legal truth that shattered me all over again

I eventually did speak out. I went to law enforcement. I did what people always say survivors should do. I told.

They believed me. They gathered enough proof. And still, I was told the law could not touch him.

In Washington, my abuse fell under older statute-of-limitations rules. I was told that despite later legal changes, what happened to me was still trapped by the law that governed when my abuse occurred. That legal window had closed.

Let me translate that into plain English:

The state did not say I lied.

The state said I was too late.

Too late because I was a child who was threatened.

Too late because I depended on adults who protected him.

Too late because I was trying to survive in a home where speaking could cost me everything.

Too late because trauma does not run on courtroom calendars.

A statute of limitations does not mean a crime did not happen.

It means the system has decided there is an expiration date on consequences.

And predators know it.

About Epstein, and everyone like him

When I talk about the Epstein files, I am not talking about headlines as entertainment.

I am talking about children.

I am talking about power used as a weapon.

I am talking about wealth, influence, reputation, and political proximity being used like bleach on evidence.

This is not gossip.

This is not partisan content.

This is not a thought exercise.

This is a map of how abuse scales when powerful people are protected.

I do not care what party they belong to.

I do not care what network they sit on.

I do not care who they golf with, donate to, or appear beside in glossy photos.

If you raped a child, trafficked a child, procured a child, facilitated access to a child, threatened a child, intimidated witnesses, buried evidence, or used your status to shield any of this—you are not “controversial.”

You are dangerous.

This is where people try to force everything into team colors, and I refuse.

This is not left versus right.

 This is not conservative versus liberal.

This is not red state versus blue state.

 This is not a branding exercise for pundits.

This is human versus monstrous.

Human is the child who says no.

Monstrous is the adult who keeps going.

Human is the friend who believes you on the playground while both of you are still babies yourselves.

 Monstrous is the institution that teaches children silence and calls it order.

Human is accountability, even when it is politically inconvenient.

Monstrous is selective outrage based on whose name appears in the file.

Human is protecting kids over reputations.

Monstrous is protecting reputations over kids.

If your politics collapse the second your “side” is implicated, your politics were never about children.

They were about power.

My anger is not the problem.

I am angry.

I am angry that I still carry what he did in my body every day, while he walks freely through the world.

I am angry that survivors are asked for perfect timelines, perfect composure, perfect evidence, perfect victimhood.

I am angry that families call silence “peace.”

I am angry that people act shocked when survivors sound enraged, as if rage is not the sane response to sanctioned cruelty.

My anger is not instability.

My anger is clarity.

It is what happens when truth has nowhere else to go.

So what happens next?

We need more than sympathy posts and scandal cycles. We need legal and political courage that survives contact with wealthy names. We need lawmakers, prosecutors, judges, and media institutions to stop treating child sexual abuse like an optics problem and start treating it like the emergency it is. We need full transparency in high-profile exploitation cases, including the Epstein network and every adjacent pipeline of procurement and protection. We need states to end legal loopholes that reward delayed disclosure with denied justice, because delayed disclosure is not suspicious—it is predictable in trauma. We need statutes that reflect reality: children coerced by threats, trapped in families, and silenced by shame do not report on demand. And we need voters—every voter—to stop giving cover to anyone who minimizes this because the accused person is rich, connected, famous, or useful. If we keep accepting partial accountability, we are not neutral. We are participating in the conditions that let this keep happening.

I am not asking politely anymore.

I am demanding what children were denied: protection, truth, and consequence.

To every survivor reading this:

If you have ever whispered your truth and been punished for it—I believe you.

If your body remembers what your family erased—I believe you.

 If the law said “too late” and your soul heard “you don’t matter”—you do matter.

You always did.

What happened to you was real.

What happened to you was wrong.

What happened to you was never your fault.

I was a child.

I survived.

I am done carrying his shame.

And I am done being quiet so other people can stay comfortable.

Not now.

Not ever again.