TAG / JEFFREY EPSTEIN

A landmark 2018 takedown promised a reckoning for online sex trafficking—but while a handful of executives fell, the broader ecosystem of enablers, profiteers and apologists remains largely intact. How do we hold the hidden perpetrators accountable?

In public, Banfield accurately described him as a creep, a sleaze and a pedophile. In private, she begged a friend to find out if he wanted to date her.

Amid the collapse of careers over even distant ties to Jeffrey Epstein, Tony Ortega’s public contempt for efforts to expose predators set the stage for a lifetime of defending the sexual exploitation of kids. 

As the UN champions global efforts against modern-day slavery, scrutiny is mounting over whether its attorney’s financial support of her husband—who long defended the world’s largest child sex trafficking marketplace—undermines the institution’s human rights mandate.