The release of the Epstein files continues to dominate headlines for what is and isn’t included.

On Feb. 25, 2026, almost a month after the Jan. 30, 2026, document dump by the Department of Justice, both the New York Times and NPR reported on missing memos related to President Donald Trump’s relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Earlier in February, members of the Congress were given access to unredacted versions of these documents. Rep. Cynthia Lummis, a Republican from Wyoming, had this to say when she emerged from the viewing room: “I’ve not been one of the members who has glommed on to this as an issue. … But 9-year-old victims … wow.”

“Well, initially, my reaction to all this was, ‘I don’t care. I don’t know what the big deal is,” she added. “But now I see what the big deal is, and it was worth investigating.”

Whether she meant to do this or not, Lummis’ comments suggested that an alleged global sex trafficking ring involving some of the world’s most powerful people—including, possibly, the president of the United States and several of his high-ranking officials, though they deny all allegations—was not such a big deal when she thought the survivors were teens and young adults.

This sentiment echoes something former Fox News host Megyn Kelly said about the survivors’ ages when a previous round of Epstein files was released in November 2025. On her podcast, Kelly expressed sympathy for the idea that Epstein was not really a pedophile because he was into 15-year-olds—not 8-year-olds. He didn’t like children, Kelly explained, so much as he liked them “barely legal.”

But “barely legal” isn’t a thing (I’ll get to that in a minute), and randomly nuancing the definition of pedophilia shouldn’t be either.

Age isn’t just a number

Let’s start by getting our terms straight: Pedophiles are people who have a sexual preference for children, usually prepubescent children or those who are around the age of puberty. Pedophilia is a psychiatric diagnosis. You can be a pedophile without sexually abusing children, and you can be a child abuser without meeting the........

© Rewire.News