I’ve Met This Man Before: The Epstein Files and the Familiarity of Power

What my father taught me about men who can’t tolerate limits (This essay contains content that may be triggering to some readers)

When Donald Trump rode down that golden escalator, I couldn’t quite name the feeling I had. I was seventeen, watching a man descend into applause, and I felt, beneath the noise and the jokes and the spectacle, a small internal cry. Something in my soul recognized the performance. Not the politics, but the posture, the certainty, and the way the room bent around him like gravity.

But today, as headlines surrounding the Epstein Files continue to circulate and documents are released and names surface in new combinations, that old feeling returned with a sharper edge. It wasn’t surprise, or outrage, not exactly. It was familiarity.

My father was born in 1943 in Decatur, Illinois. If you read the official version of his life, he grew up in a normal house with a normal family, relocated to the Sacramento area as a child, graduated from El Camino High School, and went on to college to earn a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature. If you believe his obituary, he later earned a PhD in Scientific and Technology Writing and Artificial Intelligence from U.C. Davis in 1968. Which is interesting, considering those fields, alone or stitched together, did not exist the way he claimed they did. At least, not then, or like that.

But my father was not a man who lived inside ordinary limits. He lived inside stories. He wrapped himself in clout the way other people wore coats: something to make him look larger, warmer, untouchable. When I was a child I would have told you, without hesitation, that he had a PhD in physics and a two-hundred IQ, because that’s what he told me. I would have told you he was a genius inventor and businessman, an environmentalist, a man destined to change the world. I would have told you he was special, different from the rest. And if he would’ve told me so, I would’ve told you that he created “the hottest economy in the history of the world.” I was a little girl. I believed my father was a superhero because children are built to believe that the hands that feed them will not also harm them.