02/18/2026
THE EPSTEIN FILES ARE BEING RELEASED THIS WAY AS PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE. PROTECT YOURSELF.
By Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
Every time you open your phone right now, there he is again: Epstein. The stupid, smug, punchable face. And there they are, too. The screenshots. Emails. Photos. The descriptions of the photos. Even if you don’t want to see this stuff, chances are you’re seeing it. People I care about are spiraling in the comments and in their lives. Heck, I’m spiraling out right here in my living room as I write this.
The truth matters. Of course it does. But it’s starting to feel like the way it’s being thrown at us is its own sadistic form of abuse.
In a functional society, these files would be thoroughly and professionally investigated by the FBI, CIA, NSA – people trained to do exactly this kind of work. They would sift, analyze, cross-reference, quietly knock on doors, and then make arrests. The media would be briefed, and if we had a real and honest news media, they would tell the public what we need to know in ways that do the least damage to us all.
Instead, this case has been treated differently from the start because of the wealth and power of the staggering number of men and women involved in, or turning a blind eye to, the buying, selling, ra**ng, abusing and, it seems, murdering of girls, boys and women for fun. Secret deals have been cut. It has been one cover-up after another.
That is what happens when you don’t live in a functional society anymore. We live in Trump’s fetid, rotten madhouse. The files being thrust into your eyes, ears and spirit, often against your will, is part of that. He’s shoving them down our throats because that’s how this gang of monsters likes it.
Steve Bannon once explained the MAGA media strategy in one ugly little sentence: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.” That is how information warfare works. You bury people in so much shocking, conflicting, emotionally radioactive material that they cannot tell what is real, cannot see the pattern, and eventually cannot feel anything but dread and disgust. The Epstein files have been turned into exactly that: a “flood the zone” operation, complete with voyeurism, glitches, victims exposed, perpetrators protected, and millions of us drafted as unpaid and unqualified forensic analysts.
What this does, in practice, is make the worst details in the files sound like plausible conspiracy theories. Especially when they come from someone like, well, me. When the truth is coming out of places like my newsletter instead of out of a reliable FBI investigation and arrests, doubt is baked right in. They want that.
The KGB pioneered a type of psychological operation called reflexive control, which seeks to manipulate enemies by tricking them into doing your dirty work for you. Trump is using it. Often that dirty work means seeding information into the broader culture in a way that causes the people who most need that information to reflexively reject it as crazy because it came from sources they already ridicule. It’s second nature to malignant narcissists, a type of society-wide triangulation.
In recent years, reflexive control has been rebranded as perception control. Republicans are very good at it. It is likely how we got Pizzagate and QAnon: a way to discredit Epstein survivors who were starting to speak up by leaking related themes first through fringe far-right lunatics. Liberals laughed it off. They wanted that. They wanted us looking away and shaking our heads in patronizing disbelief.
Now we’re watching the next phase. The idea is to convince MAGA there’s “nothing to see here” by dumping a sh*t-ton of real files, while framing the people trying to make sense of them – survivors, independent journalists, members of Congress – as suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome,” just out to attack poor perpetual victim Donald. Meanwhile, the rest of us are drowning in millions of pages of atrocities.
That deluge has a secondary benefit for authoritarians: trauma. Widespread, ambient, grinding trauma in the population that still cares. Trauma makes people easier to rule. It makes us tired and hopeless and sick. It weakens us.
Here is the good news, such as it is: the grown-ups are starting to step in at other levels. Yesterday, New Mexico’s House of Representatives unanimously approved House Resolution 1, creating a bipartisan Epstein truth-finding commission to investigate what happened at Zorro Ranch. The four-member panel, with two Democrats and two Republicans, has subpoena power, $2 million in appropriations, and a mandate to dig into years of alleged abuse and public corruption around the ranch, a property federal authorities somehow never searched even while they were raiding Epstein’s homes in New York and Florida. Survivors have been asking for this for years. At least one state has decided to stop waiting for Trump’s DOJ and do the basic work of truth-finding itself.
Let them. Let trained investigators, prosecutors and specialist reporters do the deep dives. That is what they are supposed to be for. People who work in federal law enforcement, intelligence and child-abuse prosecution have to undergo serious screening and training to withstand the kind of material that is now being pumped into your TikTok feed for free. They have protocols, debriefs and mental-health support. You have insomnia, a phone, and a “For You” page that will not stop beating your amygdala to death.
Decades of research show that this constant exposure is not harmless. Psychologists like Dana Rose Garfin have found a clear “dose–response” pattern: the more time people spend consuming media about collective trauma, the more acute stress, PTSD symptoms, anxiety, depression and even later physical illness they experience. The American Psychiatric Association points to studies where heavy viewing of traumatic videos online is directly linked to higher levels of PTSD and depression, especially for women and other marginalized viewers. A 2024 study on disaster coverage found that people who binged media about an earthquake ended up with worse trauma symptoms than some people who lived through it in person.
Trump and Bondi are dumping this on you for the same basic reason Epstein r***d children: they enjoy the pain of the powerless and the feeling of getting away with it.
Closer to what you are seeing now, a Minnesota psychologist recently warned that repeated exposure to violent social-media clips can cause “secondary trauma” in ordinary viewers: nightmares, hyper-vigilance, intrusive images, numbness. Feminist writer Soraya Chemaly calls this new reality “trauma-informed scrolling,” and she is blunt that without conscious limits, the way platforms feed us violent content is literally hurting our brains and our relationships.
If you are a survivor of s*xual abuse, especially abuse by powerful men, you are standing in a direct line of fire.
So here is my ask, and I am saying this as someone who cares about accountability as much as you do. Stay informed. Follow solid investigative work. Support survivors. Cheer on the New Mexico truth commission and every other serious effort to dig into these crimes. Call your representatives and demand that they back real investigations instead of reality-TV document dumps. But if you already understand how bad this is, stop punishing yourself with endless details.
You do not need to personally read victims’ interviews to prove you care. You do not need to scroll through 3 a.m. threads trying to decode PDFs full of equals signs and half-redacted names. You do not need to watch every deposition clip or share every screenshot. You especially do not need to do any of that if you feel your heart pounding, your stomach dropping, your jaw clenching, your old trauma waking up and pacing the room.
Build yourself some guardrails. Give yourself small, scheduled windows to check one or two trusted sources, then close the tab. Mute the hashtags for a while. Curate your feed so you are hearing from trauma-informed journalists instead of outrage accounts. Keep this material out of your bed, your bath and your quiet moments with the people you love. Notice when you slide from “staying informed” into “dissociating with a phone in my hand,” and pull yourself back.
Most of all, remember that this flood is part of the strategy. Authoritarians want you terrorized, hopeless and numb. They want you to believe that all men are monsters and no institutions can ever work, so you will stop demanding better. Trump would not have signed off on this kind of release if he wasn’t getting something out of the spectacle. What he gets is power every time you let despair convince you that nothing matters.
You are allowed to protect your mind. You are allowed to log off. You are allowed to hand the box of horrors back to the people whose job it is to open it carefully, piece by piece, on behalf of all of us. Hold on to your outrage, but hold on just as fiercely to your joy and your peace. He does not get those. They are yours.
