Epstein Survivors Say Republicans Ghosted Them Before Blanche Vote
Republican Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn each reneged on their promises to meet with victims of Jeffrey Epstein, with Tillis even leaving them waiting in his office for 45 minutes before they gave up.A group of Epstein survivors on Tuesday accused Blanche and Cornyn of going back on their word, as the senators prepared to vote in favor of Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general after he provided a weak promise in writing to kill President Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”“The treatment we received from senators throughout this process was just as revealing. Senator Tillis publicly invited us, on camera, to come to his office and promised to meet with us. We did. We waited for 45 minutes in his lobby, only to be told by a staffer he would not meet with us after all,” the survivors wrote in a joint statement.“Senator Cornyn also refused to hear directly from survivors before casting his vote. Senators Tillis and Cornyn were not willing to sit across from us and answer for the vote they were preparing to cast. If they believed they were doing the right thing, they should have had the courage to look survivors in the eye and tell us why. The message was unmistakable: They wanted us to go away. We are not going away.”Tillis’s snubbing is particularly nasty given that he made a big fuss about not voting for Blanche’s confirmation unless he met with Epstein survivors. Blanche did eventually meet with survivors, but it did not go well, as survivors reported he told them to “get to the point” and to talk to the FBI instead. Survivor Danielle Bensky called the meeting “a box-checking exercise to secure Tillis’ vote,” and noted he “offered no meaningful explanation for how the redaction failures happened, who approved the release, or what steps he would take to prevent survivors from being exposed again.”Before Tillis ghosted the survivors, he promised on camera to invite them to his office.“I wanna meet—not with the attorneys, but with the survivors. And have a discussion about that stuff,” Tillis said. “I wanna see specific action items. And some of that could even have to do with investigations. My office is right around the corner.... I gotta rush … but I wanna have that meeting. I don’t want suits in the room. I want victims, and me.”In case you missed it, here’s the video where he clearly agreed to meet with them, only to stand them up in his office. Beyond disrespectful and cowardly pic.twitter.com/VzDKk5Li8a— Cheyenne Hunt (@CheyenneHuntCA) August 4, 2026Tillis and Cornyn are both outgoing senators who would have lost nothing for being genuine and transparent. Instead of actually acting upon any of their own stated principles, they opted to play political theatre with the emotions of these survivors, unable to even offer them the basic decency of coming to a meeting they said they’d be at. We’re talking about women who survived abuse from perhaps the most infamous predator of the century.