Courtney Wild was a 14-year-old Florida girl when a friend brought her to Jeffrey Epstein’s Palm Beach estate to give an “old guy” a massage for $200. If she brought a friend, $300.
“I felt so dirty and ugly,” Wild told ABC News after Epstein forced her to have sex. “I was embarrassed about what had just happened, and I was also trying to process the $200 I had in my hands. He had a type and his type was 14, 15, 16 years old. He wanted that innocence, and he wanted to break that person down.”
There was 15-year-old Haley Robson with a similar lurid story: “We were told the younger the better, and some of the girls brought their family members. I think a lot predators look at women like Jeffrey did, from broken homes or abusive homes.”
Last November, the entire Indiana congressional delegation voted for the Epstein Files Transparency Act. It was signed into law by President Donald J. Trump on Nov. 19.
This act requires Trump’s Department of Justice to release 6 million pages of evidence and testimony, along with 300 gigabytes of videos and photos from Epstein’s various estates in New York City, New Mexico and his Caribbean island within a month.
The law stipulated that “no record shall be withheld, delayed or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure or foreign dignitary.”
A couple dozen Epstein “survivors’ out of an estimated 1,000 young girls he reportedly exploited and abused, issued this joint statement: “Jeffrey Epstein abused hundreds of women. The United States Government itself held evidence that he had sexually abused 40 children. Some of us are those children. We implore you to stop protecting those who enabled Epstein’s crimes and instead stand firm in protecting the women and children he harmed.”
The problem is that only about half of these Epstein files have been released.
The Department of Justice posted more than 3 million pages, including some 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. But on Jan. 30, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said DOJ had fulfilled its obligation.
“Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election,” the DOJ news release said. “To be clear, the claims are unfounded and false, and if they have a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”
A New York Times analysis revealed that President Trump, his family and places like his Mar-a-Lago estate would be referred to more than 38,000 times in these files. Blanche and Attorney General Pam Bondi told Trump in July 2025, according to New York Times reporting, “We’ve gone through the files. There’s not a lot there. A lot of child pornography — obviously we can’t put any of that out. There are some mentions of you, but nothing substantive.”
President Trump has been calling the Epstein Files a “Democratic hoax.” On July 12, 2025 President Trump urged his “boys” and “girls” on his Truth Social platform to “stop wasting time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”
But prior to winning a second term in 2024, two of the biggest social media influencers fanning the Epstein conspiracy flames were Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who in January 2025 were installed to lead the FBI. Patel had claimed on podcasts that the government had been hiding Epstein’s client list or “black book.” He promised a second Trump administration would release “everything.”
On “The Dan Bongino Show,” the future FBI second banana claimed a cover-up: “What the hell are they hiding with Jeffrey Epstein?”
By the time Bongino had resigned earlier this year, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The Times reported that this had become an Epstein File cover-up, quoting Bongino, “This is going to be President Trump’s Iran-contra.”
The Indiana congressional delegation has been characteristically mute on this lack of transparency with half of the files still cloaked in darkness and mystery; essentially mired in a … cover-up.
If you are an Indiana newspaper or broadcast reporter, or an Indiana Republican convention delegate in Fort Wayne on June 19-20, you need to be asking our congressmen and woman as well as our two U.S. senators why this law is being ignored. Why, if there’s nothing to hide, haven’t all these files and 300 gigabytes of video and photos been released?
You can call them and ask why they aren’t calling for full transparency:
Since the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, the persistent axiom has been that the cover-up is always worse than the crime.
That is not the case here. The crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and their rich and powerful buddies were horrific and cruel; the current cover-up equally so.
Brian A. Howey is an opinion columnist for State Affairs Indiana and the founder of Howey Politics Indiana. His writing offers analysis and opinion shaped by decades of experience covering Indiana politics. Email him at howey@stateaffairs.com.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Indiana’s congressional delegation MIA on Epstein files | Opinion
Reporting by Brian Howey, Columnist / The Herald-Times
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By Brian Howey, Columnist | USA TODAY Network
