A companion piece to Dr. Gary Salyer's essay on the Epstein files and women's safety.
A colleague shared an essay this week that I have not been able to stop thinking about.
Dr. Gary Salyer wrote a guide for men on why the Epstein files are landing in women's bodies the way they are. Why the information doesn't stay as information. Why she goes quieter, more watchful, harder to reach. Why your dismissal of it makes everything worse, even when you mean well.
He is right about all of it.
His piece is generous, careful, and necessary. I am linking to it at the bottom of this essay. Read it.
What I want to add is what only a woman can reach from where I stand. Because the Epstein files are one thread. Pull on it and you find the whole pattern.
On March 9th, 2026, at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, the world gathered to vote on a document affirming women's rights. Access to justice. Protection from discrimination and violence. The right to walk into a courtroom without being treated as less.
Thirty-seven countries voted yes. Six abstained.
One voted no.
The United States of America stood alone as the only government in the world to vote against it.
Judith Dayal documented exactly what was in that document and what the US tried to change. It was not a radical framework. It was not a new idea. It was the same agreement that had held by consensus for seventy years. Her piece is linked at the bottom of this essay.
Let that sit for a moment.
This is not the beginning of the story. It is only the most recent confirmation of something women's bodies have been tracking for a long time.
In 2022 Roe v. Wade was overturned. In the year that followed, at least 210 women faced criminal prosecution related to pregnancy, the highest number ever documented in a single year. Women investigated for miscarriages. Women arrested for "concealing a death" after their bodies did what one in five pregnancies does naturally. Three women in Texas died because doctors were too afraid of prosecution to treat them during a miscarriage.
Three women died of a miscarriage they could have survived.
On inauguration day 2025, an executive order declared that only two sexes exist. Non-binary people were erased from federal recognition before the day was out. The word "gender" was banned across federal agencies. The word "women" removed from health communications. The structures meant to protect were being taken apart from the inside.
In 2024, footage emerged of Israeli soldiers gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner at a military detention facility. The attack was so brutal he required surgery and could not walk. When soldiers were arrested for it, politicians stormed the prison in their defence. A member of parliament was asked on record whether it was legitimate to insert a stick into a person's rectum. He said yes. The protests became known as the "right to rape" riots. In March of this year, all charges against the soldiers were dropped.
The Epstein files name men of extraordinary power, including those connected to intelligence agencies, running a network that trafficked girls as young as thirteen. No one of significance has been charged. The files were released by the same administration that appears in them.
I am not listing these things to make you feel hopeless.
I am listing them because I want you to understand something about the woman sitting across from you at dinner, or lying awake at 2am, or who went quiet in a way you cannot explain.
She is not overreacting.
She is pattern recognising.
Her nervous system is not confused. It is tracking. It has been tracking for a long time, and what it is tracking is real.
Dr. Salyer writes about what men can do in these moments. Feel first. Fix last, if at all. He is right. What he describes as emotional presence I translate into something that can be practised: the actual steadiness in the body that gives hers somewhere to land.
This is not new fear. This is inherited fear meeting real-time confirmation.
Women have been carrying this in their bodies across generations. Grandmothers who had no legal rights over their own bodies. Mothers who stayed in marriages they could not leave. Daughters who learned early that the world was not built with their safety in mind. The alarm did not begin in 2022 when Roe was overturned. It was passed down. What is happening now is that the inherited alarm is meeting evidence on every screen, every day, telling her she was right to carry it.
She was right.
I have been working with women and couples for over fifteen years. I know what it looks like when a woman's body cannot settle. I know what it costs her. I know what it costs the relationship.
I also know what becomes possible when someone finally stops trying to talk her out of what her body already knows.
Twenty years of sexual trauma left one woman's body in a single session. Not because I convinced her of anything. Because her system finally had somewhere safe enough to put it down.
That is what is being asked of the men who love these women right now. Not agreement. Not solutions. Steadiness. The kind that says: I am not going anywhere, and I am not going to need you to be fine.
There is more I need to say about all of this. It starts with my own body.
That essay is next.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette