She’s an Epstein Survivor Who Trusted Trump. Now She’s Urging Voters To Reject the ‘BS.’

Survivors Have Been Working To Turn Out Voters Frustrated With Corruption Around the Country — Including in Epstein’s Home Base of Florida.

KISSIMMEE, Florida — Two years ago, Jena-Lisa Jones voted for President Donald Trump for one reason and one reason only: his and his allies’ promise to release millions of files connected to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who abused her and hundreds of other known victims.

“For me, wanting some type of justice, even knowing that he wasn’t a great man, he was still offering us something that nobody else had offered us, and I really thought that he was going to,” Jones said in a joint interview with fellow survivors Sharlene Rochard and Marina Lacerda in Kissimmee.

They’re among the few people who can say they’ve taken on an increasingly emboldened and revenge-obsessed Trump and won — working with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna to get around opposition to releasing the files from GOP leadership, forcing Trump and Republicans’ hand until they relented. Some 3.5 million files have been released, but survivors are pushing for the release of some 3 million more.

For months, they and other survivors have been on the road with the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room and bookmobile, an interactive exhibit of the Epstein files, continuing to tell their stories and hold events with Democrats running for Congress in key battleground races. After two stops early last week in central Florida, the Bookmobile tour went west to the Tampa Bay area and finished up Sunday in Fort Lauderdale with Pia Dandiya, the Democrat running to represent Palm Beach, which includes Trump’s residence of Mar-a-Lago, in Congress.

“I feel like we’re bringing the truth to the American public. We’re tired of waiting for the truth to come out, so we have to bring it to the people,” Rochard said, standing next to the Bookmobile, which was parked outside the venue where Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon held a rally a few hours later.

If Democrats flip one or both chambers of Congress on Tuesday, the relentless advocacy of Epstein’s survivors will have played a crucial role. They’ve campaigned in Texas, Michigan and New York, and their message of powerful people covering up crimes is one that resonates with voters frustrated with Trump and Republicans.

“The whole reason I’ve gone on this campaign trail is it’s very, very clear for me: If you stand with a pedophile, I want no part of it,” Jones said. “It doesn’t matter what side of the line you are on, red or blue or in between.”

They said they’ve invited candidates from both parties to join them on their tour, but so far only Democrats have taken them up on it.

“I think in the beginning, when we started, we really wanted this to be a bipartisan issue,” Lacerda said. “And unfortunately, we’ve seen that it was going nowhere.”

Lacerda is now even appearing in television ads funded by an outside political action committee opposing GOP Sens. Ashley Moody of Florida and Roger Marshall of Kansas. Both initially voted against measures in the Senate to compel the release of the files before Trump got on board with the effort.

“It is unfortunate that we had to choose a side on this, and that is why I did the campaign ad,” she said. “Because it’s just very clear: if you voted against these files, if you voted against transparency and accountability, then I feel like you’re not even meant to be in America.”

It’s unclear how much impact the message will have in elections in Florida, a one-time swing state that Trump won three times and has only gotten redder in the past several years. The files that have been released so far put a renewed spotlight on Epstein’s abuses and the people in power who helped rehabilitate his reputation. But in Epstein’s former backyard of South Florida, the stark economic inequalities and systemic failures that enabled him to prey on young girls persist.

Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to state-level counts of soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida as part of a controversial nonprosecution agreement that effectively shut down an FBI sex trafficking probe. In 2019, after the Miami Herald published an investigation into the plea deal that also identified many of his survivors for the first time, federal prosecutors in New York charged Epstein with sex trafficking conspiracy. They said in the indictment that he “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls” in Florida and New York.

But those women, now adults, never got their day in court. Epstein died in federal custody in 2019 while awaiting trial; his death was ruled a suicide. His coconspirator Ghislaine Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to sex trafficking conspiracy.

After decades of being failed by police, prosecutors and five presidential administrations, Epstein’s survivors took matters into their hands. When Trump, who in 2023 was found liable for sexual abuse in a separate matter, fell short of his 2024 campaign promise to release all the files, survivors called his bluff.

“It’s infuriating because you wanted to have some faith that he was going to do the right things and all that, but especially this term,” Jones said. “Not saying that he was great the first term, but this term in particular, he has really, really came after and showed us how he feels and views women.”

Trump and Epstein traveled in the same social circles in Palm Beach and New York, but Trump has said the two fell out before Epstein became a convicted sex offender. Still, he spent months dismissing the Epstein matter as a “Democrat hoax.” His recalcitrance made more sense to Jones when she saw his name appear thousands of times in the files that have been released; he has not been accused of criminal wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.

While Jones’ circumstances are unique, she’s among the many White suburban mothers who regret their votes for Trump in 2024. She said that in many parts of South Florida, where she was born and raised, “it’s almost taught to you” to be a Republican.

“I am hoping that people are opening their eyes and not taking this BS anymore that they try to shove down our throats, and think that they’re doing something for us because they give us an inch in Florida and not a mile,” she said.

Epstein and Maxwell didn’t pick their victims at random. They preyed on girls who lived in poverty, came from unstable home environments and were more vulnerable to exploitation and less likely to be believed.

Elizabeth Holmes, a 43-year-old special education teacher in Palm Beach County schools, sees every day how the system continues to fail vulnerable youth, just like it failed Epstein’s victims two decades ago.

Holmes said she decided to run for office after having an especially tough day at work, the only day in her 15 years of teaching that made her want to quit. She’s now running to flip the Republican-held 94th District in Florida’s state House and has made investing in public education and tackling corruption central to her campaign message.

“Regular people need to be represented,” she said at a Wednesday campaign event in Palm Beach Gardens. “And gosh, there’s so much corruption up there, and I think it’s about time that we start turning the tide.”

Teachers like her see firsthand the consequences of the lack of a safety net for struggling students. Holmes said she’s helped furnish a home for an 18-year-old who had been homeless her entire life, arrange a scholarship for a soccer player whose family couldn’t afford a travel team, and fix a student’s family car after learning they had been relying on rideshares to get to school.

“How I see our schools, they are a microcosm of our area,” Holmes said Wednesday. “I have students who are homeless. I have students who are living on their own because their parents have been deported, they’re taking care of younger siblings. I have kids who are sleeping through first period because they’re out late working to help support their families.”

In Palm Beach County, the multimillion-dollar oceanfront mansions and luxury shops on Palm Beach Island and polo fields and stables of Wellington — the world capital for elite equestrians — are juxtaposed with poverty, homelessness and addiction.

Over four days of reporting, The 19th attended campaign events held at homes in gated communities and spent time with Holmes as she campaigned in Belle Glade, a majority-Black and Latino city near Lake Okeechobee in the heart of sugarcane country where 27 percent of the population lives below the poverty line and 20 percent are without health insurance. It’s one of the communities that Democrats like Holmes say have long been disenfranchised and left behind by the state’s Republican-controlled state government.

“Nowadays, we talk about human trafficking a lot, and that wasn’t anything that was talked about when I was in high school growing up here in this community,” Holmes said. “And to think that it was happening so rampantly is just so sad.”

Retired teacher Maureen Witkowski, a volunteer for Holmes’ campaign, taught health and physical education in Palm Beach County for 25 years. She spent most of them at Royal Palm Beach High School, where at least 15 of Epstein’s survivors were students: A fight between two students that led to an administrator discovering $300 in one of their purses was a catalyst of the initial investigation into Epstein.

Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of the first survivors to come forward publicly, attended the school for a year. Witkowski also remembers survivors including Courtney Wild and Lacerda, who was only 14 when she met Epstein, as students.

“When I think of [Lacerda], I knew exactly where she sat,” she said in Belle Glade. “And when I saw her on one of those TV shows, it broke my heart.”

“I’m still heartbroken that he got away with it,” she added.

The survivors have made extraordinary sacrifices to get their message out, committing to grueling travel schedules and leaving their families for long stretches. But Lacerda said it’s all been worth it.

“Our abuse does not make it any different or any more important because it was a powerful, rich person, and that’s the message that we want to send to people,” she said. “We’re out here on the ground, but we do have our lives, and we’re leaving them behind. And it is to save the children and the future.”

Many Democratic candidates view the Epstein files as part and parcel of their broader message opposing corruption, which has become a top issue for voters already frustrated with the economy and rising prices.

It’s also been a prominent focus for Democrats running in Florida, a state known for its insular but often rowdy and boisterous political culture, where Republicans currently hold a supermajority in the legislature.

Nixon, a democratic socialist state lawmaker, has rebutted accusations that she supports abolishing the police by stating she wants to see Moody, the state’s former attorney general, jailed in connection with a scandal over $10 million intended to fund healthcare for poor children being diverted to a charity run by First Lady Casey DeSantis. (A grand jury did not find enough evidence to charge anyone with a crime.)

“We see that as an issue throughout other things in our government,” Bale Dalton, a Democrat running for Congress in Florida’s 7th District, told The 19th while visiting the Epstein Bookmobile Monday in Sanford. “What we’re seeing here in Florida is that people are just fed up with it.”

Florida Republicans also seem to recognize how potent corruption is for voters. Rep. Byron Donalds, the GOP nominee for governor, and state Rep. Meg Weinberger, Holmes’ opponent, are both running campaign ads pledging to hold the state government in Tallahassee accountable and stand up to influential special interests like the utility and insurance companies.

Jones hopes her fellow Floridians are paying attention.

“I’m hoping that they’re seeing what is going on in our state, and I hope there’s a lot of flipping,” Jones said. “I really, really, really do. I see it, they’re mad.”

To check your voter registration status or to get more information about how to vote and what’s on your ballot, visit vote.org.

This article was previously published by The 19th on November 2, 2026.

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