By Sky Tucker
The Scene staff
Anyone remember when I wrote about the parallels between President Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler?
Well, on Jan. 26, the U.S. Department of Justice released more than three million pages of documents from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. After looking through some of them on my own, I cried for three days straight.
All I could think was, “How can people be so evil?”
Then I joined Project Rectitude, a group created by David Freeborn made up of concerned citizens hellbent on bringing this information to light and holding these monsters accountable.
Aside from Freeborn’s Instagram account (@davidfreeborn), where he posts some of the group’s findings, there are also two YouTube accounts: Project Rectitude and Radio Rectitude.
Unfortunately, the former was shadow-banned after reaching 1,000 subscribers. That’s why the second account was created.
With Project Rectitude, I’ve analyzed 260 files marked “No images produced,” a process complicated by DOJ file deletion and website reshuffling. So far, I’ve found four duplicate sets and 105 unconvertible files.
Additionally, I discovered hidden-camera footage from Epstein’s Palm Beach residence, which Channel 4 News and MSN reported on back in February. It was converted to avi, then cut into thousands of still frames prior to being scattered as pdf files on the DOJ website, making it impossible to view the frames via video-editing software.
To overcome this hurdle, I convert the frames to mp4 on third-party websites, limiting me to 10 files daily before payment is required and significantly slowing my progress.
But I refuse to give up.
Using Ctrl+F, I’m able to track what I’ve already looked at and keep going, as the victims’ stories matter more than a task made tedious by a system that’s meant to protect us.
Stories like EFTA00221037, where an officer described one of Epstein’s victims being instructed to bring girls from her school to him, saying, “the younger the better.” Or the testimony about a 17-year-old girl who was paid $1,000 after Epstein “forcibly entered himself into her” during a massage, found on EFTA00221040.
Or the officer stating that a girl was brought from Yugoslavia to be Epstein’s “sex slave” on a modeling visa, found on EFTA00221039.
Then there’s that 11-minute call on EFTA00143411, where a victim named Sarah described how Alan Dershowitz — the same Dershowitz who helped Epstein get a plea bargain and defended Trump during his first impeachment — sexually assaulted her in Epstein’s mansion.
In a system that values wealth over victims, those connected to Epstein rarely face accountability. Their victims struggle just to be heard.
So, when Sarah tells her lawyer, “Those modeling agencies were never investigated,” and that seven years of evidence disappeared, she’s describing a system designed to protect predators. The same way Alfredo Rodriguez, Epstein’s former butler, felt “put on the spot” during a call and cut it short (EFTA00279453), showing how fear keeps people silent.
Even when Rodriguez met with the undercover agent on EFTA00179444, you could still hear the tension.
In my October column, I wrote about the Project 2025 Tracker and how we’ve already completed half that authoritarian roadmap (we’re now much further in). And now, we have the Epstein files to remind us that our current corruption didn’t start with Project 2025, but with a wealthy financier who trafficked underage girls because he knew the right people and understood that laws are negotiable when you have enough zeros in your bank account.
And Trump learned from that same system.
When his administration releases Epstein files in batches that shuffle every few hours, making review intentionally difficult, it demonstrates mastery of the same tactics that protected Epstein for years.
Sure, maybe we can’t fix the entire justice system overnight, but we can pay attention and read the files, even when they’re shuffled. We can also ask why some names are investigated or redacted while others aren’t, the same way we can vote for leaders who don’t treat accountability as optional.
We shouldn’t have required the files to see that these men are monsters, but now that they’re out, they prove what we’ve all been trying to say from the get. And we can see that it was never really just one man or a small group. It was a system designed to protect the powerful at everyone else’s expense.
So, how do we fight a system?
Refuse to look away. Take a break and breathe, but come back and keep fighting because while the world may not get easier tomorrow, it doesn’t mean we give up or lose sight of the injustice around us.