Jesse Scheckner
Tallahassee residents and visitors looking skyward Friday morning may have caught sight of a rather accusatory message aimed at the President and his handpicked top cop.
A plane-carried banner flying over the Capitol Building and nearby facilities declared that President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi “are protecting predators” — a reference to still-withheld records on underage sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a former friend of the President’s.
The group behind the message, which flew from 9 a.m. to noon: UltraViolet, a Washington-based women’s advocacy organization.
UltraViolet previously campaigned against R. Kelly, Bill O’Reilly and Harvey Weinstein and recently launched a petition calling for Bondi to for “exploiting survivors’ pain and using Jeffrey Epstein’s horrific case to score political points with her and President Trump’s right-wing base.”
“Donald Trump and Pam Bondi do not care about survivors of sexual exploitation and abuse,” UltraViolet Campaign Director Elisa Batista said in a statement.
“They’ve never taken into account the perspectives and needs of the children, now adult women, who Epstein trafficked and abused, three of whom have taken their own lives. Instead, they have heartlessly and carelessly used this case to score political points with right-wing social media influencers and the MAGA base. Survivors deserve better than this.”
The banner flying came the same day Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche concluded meetings with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and co-conspirator. Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for child sex trafficking at the federal correctional facility in Tallahassee. UltraViolet also flew the banner over prison Friday.
Ethics experts criticized the meetings, citing among other things Blanche’s previous role as Trump’s defense attorney in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, Trump’s decadeslong relationship with Epstein and the administration’s control of ongoing investigations.
The right thing to do to deliver justice to victims, UltraViolet said, is hire a neutral, third-party investigator.
“It’s time for Trump and Bondi to protect survivors and honor their wishes for full transparency and swift accountability,” Batista said. “They must release all files related to Epstein’s crimes, network, and enablers.”
Federal Judge Robin Rosenbaum this week denied the U.S. Department of Justice’s request to unseal 2005 and 2007 grand jury transcripts involving Epstein’s predation of underage girls while living in Palm Beach. The Judge cited insufficient legal exceptions.
The Justice Department sought the records amid mounting pressure from Trump’s base, which believes a conspiracy shielded Epstein’s high-profile associates. Another request is pending in New York.
Epstein avoided federal charges in 2008 through a “sweetheart” plea deal. He died by apparent suicide in 2019 while awaiting new charges.
Last year, some 150 pages of grand jury testimony were made public through narrowly written Florida legislation.
In May, the Justice Department told Trump that his name was among many that appeared multiple times in what Bondi described in March as a “truckload” of documents related to Epstein, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Earlier this month, Bondi walked back that assertion, telling reporters she was referring instead to a collection of files related to Epstein and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. She added that many of the videos in Epstein’s files were “child porn” and were “never going to see the light of day.”
The Justice Department and FBI later released a video of what it called “full raw” from surveillance cameras of Epstein’s cell on the night of his death. Investigators from WIRED found evidence the video was instead two clips stitched together using Adobe Premiere Pro and that one of the source clips had nearly three minutes removed from it during the editing process.
A one-minute gap previously cited in the video was attributed to a routine nightly system reset at the Metropolitan Correctional Facility in Manhattan, where Epstein was being held while awaiting a new trial on federal sex trafficking charges involving minors.
