Blanche's Sham Meeting with Epstein Victims Proves He's Unfit

He left them feeling dismissed and demoralized. No senator should endorse that conduct.

When I was district attorney of Westchester County, New York, I frequently met with victims of crimes that I had not prosecuted or overseen, sometimes even ones that had happened decades before I took office. But the victims came to me for specific reasons in a time of need, seeking answers. I couldn’t always give them the answers they understandably wanted or needed to hear, but I am confident that each one left my office feeling that I had tried, feeling that I cared, feeling heard.

When Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche finally met last week with survivors of the horrific crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, he not only did not do that, but he did the opposite. He left them feeling dismissed and demoralized.

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In the long list of ways in which the justice system has failed the victims of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s horrific child sex trafficking operation over decades, three stand out to me. First, and foremost, a calculated plan by the prosecutor in charge of the Miami U.S. Attorney’s Office, Alex Acosta — acting in concert with Epstein’s defense attorneys — to hide from young victims a shockingly light plea agreement with Epstein. Federal District Judge Kenneth A. Marra found in 2019 that Acosta’s office had violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act in several ways by not notifying the victims of this plea. The Florida police chief at the time has spoken out multiple times about how state and federal prosecutors completely betrayed their duties to these victims.

The second was when this Trump administration, which had come into office promising transparency and answers for the Epstein survivors, did a complete 180 and essentially said, “case closed,” nothing to see here, without any explanation to the survivors whose hopes they had raised. The administration was, of course, forced by the passage of the Epstein Transparency Act to release all files in the Justice Department’s possession with very few exceptions. But the betrayal of the survivors was not over. The DOJ, under direction of Blanche, then the deputy attorney general, utterly failed the victims again by releasing identities, personal information, and even photos that were required to be redacted, while continuing to hide the names of people involved with Epstein. The disgusting way in which survivors were treated continued when then-Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to turn around and look at the survivors standing behind her during testimony before Congress in February 2026.

The third, and perhaps an even lower low, was Blanche’s one-two punch in meetings with Maxwell and the survivors. In July 2025, Blanche traveled to a prison in Florida for two days and spent nine hours conducting a sham truth-seeking exercise with Maxwell, who was rewarded with a transfer to a cushy prison. One survivor called Blanche’s interview with Maxwell “repulsive” and “triggering,” saying that Maxwell used the same voice for her “lies” in the interview that she did when trapping young women to join Epstein’s enterprise. No justice official should give a platform to a convicted child sex trafficker, let alone one who continues to minimize and deny her own culpability. Contrast that with the last-minute meeting Blanche staged with a group of survivors to ensure that his nomination for attorney general would move out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In this political theater, Blanche used these survivors as political pawns, treating them, by their own descriptions, with disdain and condescension and without the respect or compassion they deserve and as required under the Crime Victims Rights Act. This meeting lasted just an hour and came after Blanche’s refusal to meet with the survivors despite months of requests. It is clear it finally happened only because Sen. Thomas Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, had warned that he was not willing to vote to advance the nomination to the full Senate until Blanche met with Epstein victims. “I expect that meeting to occur before I’m willing to vote out of the committee,” Tillis said after Blanche gave repeated and contradictory answers about why he had not yet done so during his confirmation hearings.

Blanche jumped at the chance to check that box. Without warning or a chance for survivors and their lawyers to prepare, Blanche arranged a meeting, forcing some of those who had attended the confirmation hearings to literally turn around during their travels home. And in that meeting he did something no prosecutor should ever do: He made them feel even worse than they had about our justice system then before. He refused to take responsibility for the ways in which they had so awfully been treated by the justice system, including under his leadership, and to apologize in any meaningful way.

I wasn’t in the room, and I cannot get inside Blanche’s head. But based on everything I have seen and heard over the past months, it seems clear that Blanche has and continues to treat these women not as crime victims whom he has a duty and legal obligation to serve and protect, but as a political nuisance that needs to go away for the benefit of Trump, whom he clearly views still as his client.

Any senator who cares about how victims of crime are treated by the justice system would not vote to endorse this abysmal conduct from the highest federal prosecutor.

Mimi Rocah was the district attorney of Westchester County, New York, from 2021 to 2024 and was a federal prosecutor from 2001 to 2017.

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