Flying home from San Francisco to Miami earlier this month, Frankie Lopez diverted his trip to stop in the rural heart of Kentucky. Dressed in a sleek suit jacket and crisp black dress shirt, he arrived in a converted barn in Williamstown as guests were gathering for the annual Grant County Republican Party dinner.
Lopez pulled the featured speaker aside. “Thank you,” he told Congressman Thomas Massie quietly, “for giving voice to the victims.”
He then told Massie how he had been a victim of child sexual abuse by his parish priest. How, after confronting his trauma five years ago, he turned his life around, treated his alcohol addiction, confronted his suicidal ideation, and transformed his career. Now, at age 50, Lopez understands the pain of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, he said.
“I suppressed it for years,” Lopez told me later. “One day I woke up in the middle of the night, just shedding tears.”
For Massie, this moment was not unusual. Victims of sexual abuse have quietly sought him out, urging him and California Congressman Ro Khanna, his co-sponsor on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, to continue their fight.
The legislation forced President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice to release the FBI’s files on the child sex trafficker. Initially stalled by Trump’s opposition, the act ultimately received a near-unanimous vote because of public pressure. After that, nobody wanted to be seen covering up for a pedophile.
Now, as Massie and Khanna continue to push the Justice Department to release the remaining documents, some lawmakers are suggesting a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s co-conspirator. Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking of a minor in 2021, and some members of the House Oversight Committee investigation argue that by giving her clemency she can assist their investigation.
It’s not only a bad idea, it’s opposed by survivors and their advocates.
“Getting justice for Epstein’s victims is important for other victims,” Massie told me. “It sets the tone for whether the local sheriff is going to do anything about it, whether the principal of the school is going to do anything about it. And if we don’t care in Washington, DC, why would they care back home?”
Not all of Massie’s constituents welcomed his focus on the case, he said.
“Some people think it doesn’t bother them. It doesn’t touch them. They wonder what I’m doing for Kentucky,” Massie said. “But almost at every event, without fail, somebody comes up to me and thanks me — not because they were a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, but because they’re a survivor of sexual abuse in a situation where the authorities didn’t do anything.”
Lauren Book, a former Democratic leader of the Florida Senate and a victim of child sexual abuse, knows how that feels. “There are more people who this issue touches than any of us would ever care to realize,” she told me. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, one in four girls and one in 13 boys will be sexually abused before they turn 18 years old.
Book founded Lauren’s Kids, a nonprofit focused on preventing sexual abuse. She leads an annual walk to raise awareness, one frequently joined by elected officials from both parties.
One of the longtime supporters of the walk is former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, whom Trump recently ousted as head of the DOJ. Bondi not only abandoned her promise to bring the Epstein perpetrators to justice, when Congress called her to testify about her handling of the files, she wouldn’t acknowledge the survivors. That’s the kind of hypocrisy that angers many victims, Book told me.
Meanwhile, Bondi’s successor, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, has reinforced the administration’s ambivalence about pursuing their case. His meeting with Maxwell last summer produced no revelations and, weeks later, DOJ transferred her to a more accommodating, minimum-security prison.
Lopez told me he was compelled to tell Massie to keep trying because he doesn’t want another kid to suffer what he did. His abuse began in fourth grade when he was a new kid at his Catholic school, he said. On the day his class was to go to confession, he approached the confessional, acknowledged his sins, and then the priest whispered to him through the privacy screen: “You’ve been a bad boy. Come around.”
Lopez went around the screen. The priest “grabbed my hand and told me I needed to touch him. He touched me. And with that he said if I ever told anybody, no one would ever believe me, that I was the new kid in school, and that my parents would never believe me.”
The abuse continued through fifth grade, Lopez told me. But in sixth grade, his teacher sensed his anxiety and let him remain in the classroom while his classmates went to confession. By seventh grade, after Lopez was physically stronger, he confronted the priest. “I’m not going to confess to you now or never,” he recalled saying. “And if you ever come touch me again, I’m going to punch you in the freaking mouth.”
That ended the abuse, Lopez recalled, but he “blocked off” the memories until he hit rock bottom “with a nine millimeter in one hand and Captain Morgan’s in the other.” He admitted himself into a rehabilitation hospital and started questioning why he was so angry.
With time, he discovered the voice he’d silenced. He wrote a book and is now a motivational speaker and coach, developing a program focused on young men’s mental health.
Lopez is also one of many out-of-state supporters of Massie’s campaign.
To Book, the former Florida lawmaker, the Epstein case “galvanized a constituency that has always been there.” And it’s loyal, she observed: “They will support people who support them.”
It’s a reminder that Congress shouldn’t mess with a group that cuts across the political spectrum and is bigger than anyone is comfortable talking about. It would do better to focus on getting the DOJ to resume releasing the Epstein files and stop talking about pardoning Maxwell. No matter how quiet this constituency is, its call for justice deserves to be heard — starting in Washington.