The Lolita Signal

Because predators share a common language, and a fluency in the objectification, degradation, and humiliation of women and girls.

Here we see the visual language of complicity: Nabokov’s Lolita provides the alibi, while Munro’s Open Secrets shows the reality. Crimes that were open secrets known by everyone, yet protected by reputation and discretion.

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Lately I have been wondering why it is that so many predators seem to be fans of Russian literature, a subject I actually studied in college. We see it over and over again, and it is not accidental. For example, consider the name of Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet: the “Lolita Express.”

The name is not subtle. It is not a private joke. It is a public signal. It is also a kind of cultural laundering—literature reduced to an alibi, deployed as if it makes the underlying reality less grotesque, less violent, less criminal.

Predators share a common language, and that language relies on fluency in objectification. It also relies on the culture’s willingness—again and again—to treat the objectification, degradation, and humiliation of women and girls as normal and inevitable. Consider what Dr. Peter Attia wrote to Epstein: “Pussy is, indeed, low carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.” I’ll return to that in more detail later.

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Literature as Camouflage

Predators do not invoke literature because they are interested in literature. They invoke it because it gives them cover—because it creates an illusion of sophistication, complexity, or misunderstanding. The move is familiar: take a cultural object, strip it of meaning, and then use it as camouflage.

Take for example the darling of Canadian literature, the late Alice Munro and her predator husband Gerald Fremlin who pled guilty in 2005 to indecent assault for sexually assaulting Munro’s 9 year old daughter. Fremlin was given probation, and the names of the parties involved were put under a publication ban—purportedly to protect the child victim. At this point Andrea was 38, and Fremlin was 80. The March 2005 publication ban protected both Munro and Fremlin from scrutiny for decades, and cleared the way for ongoing public praise of her work. Munro was even awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. The publication ban wasn’t lifted until after Monroe’s death in July 2024.

In a flimsy and perverse attempt to defend himself, Fremlin invoked Nabokov, claiming he was Humbert Humbert and Andrea was Lolita.

This is why I refuse to treat Lolita references as clever or incidental. They are part of a recognizable predator move: reframing harm as narrative, reframing violence as romance, and recasting the victim as the problem. When this happens, the predator is not only committing harm—he is also trying to control the story that follows.

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The Ubiquity of the Common Language

The point is not simply that predators share references. It’s that they share a vocabulary and a posture: entitlement, contempt, and the expectation that others will go along with it. And far too often, they do.

It could be something as simple as a single word, a slight look, a gesture. Anything at all. And I cannot ignore it. I cannot not point it out. And the thing that drives me the most crazy about it is that it is everywhere. It’s lurking in poems, outside of dressing rooms, in elevators, at board meetings, as part of conferences and retreats. Even in the return line at Best Buy.

Other people often don’t notice what is hiding in plain sight. And when I say or write something about it, they are surprised at what they now see. Or—if they are part of the problem—they immediately become concerned about how emotional I am. They get quiet and distant and ask instead about me. Are you OK? they ask.

No, I’m not. I’m not OK with the way that we continue to turn a blind eye to violence and make excuses and cover up for perpetrators. Why should I be? I’m sick of it. I’m really, really sick of it. And I’m tired of being blamed for being fed up with it and calling it out. This is not something defective about me. It’s something defective about our culture and about what we are willing to accept as inevitable and tolerate as normal. None of this should be OK with us.

This is where the conversation always tries to shift—from the violence, to my tone. From what is being normalized, to whether I’m being “too much.”

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The Lexicon of the Perpetrator

One reason this predation and violence is so hard to name is that survivors are forced to speak inside a language that was never made for us. Like many survivors of sexual violence, for years I lacked the very language with which to talk about what had happened to me. Someone once asked me why I didn’t scream, and I wanted to say that it was because I hadn’t had a voice then.

Left alone without conversations through which we can interrogate what has happened to us, a lexicon is foisted onto us that is centred around blame and shame. It is the lexicon of the perpetrator, not the victim. We are asked accusatory questions such as: What were you wearing? Aren’t you dating? How much had you been drinking? Children are often asked, “Why didn’t you just tell someone?”

This is how predator language becomes public language—until survivors are forced to answer for it, defend against it, and internalize it. And so the corrective has to be structural: we need a new language—a new rubric. We need to stop parsing the facts that surround sexual and gender-based violence and instead place the blame directly where it belongs: on the predators themselves.

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Silencing as a Mechanism

Predator language is reinforced by systems that function to make survivors small, unnamed, and easier to ignore. Publication bans and nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) are often touted as protective measures, but they can do more to protect perpetrators than victims. Publication bans don’t just silence the victims, taking away their ability to choose for themselves yet again; they allow perpetrators to potentially continue their abusive behaviours in the shadows, shielded from the scrutiny that could prevent further harm.

And this is not theoretical. In the Munro/Fremlin case, the publication ban functioned as containment. It extended the conditions that allowed the violence to persist, and it left the culture free to keep admiring the perpetrator.

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The Laundering of Objectification as Sophistication, Discretion, Sensitivity, and Complexity

The common language also depends on a second move: once the objectification is visible, it is minimized. Once the cruelty is obvious, it is reframed. The culture supplies a set of practiced exits: it was juvenile, it was naïve, it was an inside joke, it was just language, it didn’t mean anything, you’re reading too much into it.

This is not an Epstein essay. It is an essay about the cultural infrastructures that made Epstein possible—and that continue to insulate predators through discretion, minimization, and silence. It is about how the language of predation spreads through the people who benefit from proximity to power, including those our culture trains us to trust. This is why the Peter Attia–Jeffrey Epstein exchange I quoted at the start of this essay matters: not because Attia is Epstein—he is not—but because a physician* with a public brand of longevity and discipline still spoke the common language out loud. And there is a word for what discretion, minimization, and silence purchase: impunity.

As the New York Times reported on February 2, 2026, Dr. Attia wrote to Epstein:

“Pussy is, indeed, low carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.”

Attia also asked Epstein:

“Have you decided if you’re interested in living longer (solely for the ladies, of course)?”

Attia later wrote: “At the time, I understood this exchange as juvenile, not a reference to anything dark or harmful.” That claim is painfully ironic, given that Epstein preyed on children.

And then there is the part that reveals the infrastructure behind the language. Attia described Epstein’s “outrageous” life as bound up with:

“the discretion commanded by those social and professional circles—the idea that you don’t talk about who you meet, the dinners you attend and the power and influence of the people in those settings.”

Discretion becomes sophistication. Silence becomes social currency. Women become the punchline. Children are rendered invisible.

This same laundering operates in literary culture, where objectification is repeatedly reframed as sensitivity or complexity, and where the purchase, surveillance, and consumption of women and girls is smuggled in as tenderness.

In my essay “Rattled,” I wrote that I have continued documenting Rattle’s editorial appetite for work that launders the purchase, surveillance, and consumption of women and girls as sensitivity or complexity. I described how a grown man wrote about lingering outside women’s dressing rooms, and how he spent a year confronting women on elevators about what they were wearing so he could report back to his wife to convince her to dress like them.

The cumulative effect is not idiosyncrasy, but an editorial appetite that treats women’s bodies as objects to be surveyed and used. This is not merely tasteless. It is training. It is normalization. It is the culture teaching the common language, then praising itself for being brave enough to publish it.

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Pornography and the Public Tolerance for Degradation

Pornography is another reinforcement mechanism for this fluency—especially in its increasingly violent online forms. Pornography has become ubiquitous, accessible to anyone with a device at any time of the day or night. And the rise of increasingly violent forms of online pornography has become a significant social concern, particularly in its potential to impact behaviour and exacerbate sexual violence, especially against women.

It is also especially dangerous because of the ways it is presented as victimless, with willing participants. Make no mistake: pornography is not victimless. It often involves trafficking, coercion, exploitation, rape, and significant harms, primarily to women and girls. It damages not only the individual women and girls who are directly subjected to it, but all women and girls who are then seen through its toxic lens.

In a 2021 New York Times article about pornography, Peggy Orenstein highlights a 2020 analysis of over 4,000 heterosexual scenes on Pornhub and Xvideos: 45% of the scenes on Pornhub and 35% on Xvideos contained aggression, with this aggression almost exclusively directed at women. In other words, the normalization is not subtle; it is quantifiable. And it is not evenly distributed. Orenstein notes that Black women have been found to be targets of such aggression more frequently than white women, and that teens are being served a heaping helping of racism with their eroticized misogyny.

And this is where I want to place the Combs trial: because what it exposed—again—was the public’s high tolerance for the objectification, subjugation, and degradation of Black women and girls. In 2026, we still live inside a culture where that degradation can be staged, replayed, analyzed, and even consumed as entertainment, and where the women harmed are expected to carry not only the harm itself, but also the burden of being legible, palatable, and calm while naming it. That public tolerance is not separate from pornography. It is part of the same systemic, permissive, normalizing structure.

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The Policing of Credibility

Once women name what we see, the culture tries to make the naming the problem. In my own work, I have written directly into this dynamic: Dear men: Stop telling me to cool down my writing. That line does not exist in isolation. It sits inside a familiar sequence: I point to the violence, to the normalization, to the complicity—and the response is not accountability, but management. The response is the quiet effort to treat my moral clarity as a temperament problem.

And the move is not limited to individual men. It shows up through women, too—women who intervene on behalf of men and the institutions that protect them, smoothing things over, explaining away men’s behaviour, casting women’s principled objections as emotional or triggered.

This is what the policing of credibility looks like in real time. It is not only violence. It is the disciplining that follows violence: be quieter, be nicer, be less angry, be less clear, be less sure of what you know.

And what I am naming here is not an overreaction. It is attunement to what is being normalized as inevitable. But once you see the pattern—once you see how predators share a common language, and how culture keeps giving it cover—it becomes impossible to unsee.

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What We Can Do Instead

We need to do better. We need to look harder. We need to talk about what it is that we see—to accurately describe it. And if the words do not yet exist, we need to create them. That is the work: refusing the lexicon of the perpetrator, refusing the reflex to parse victims, refusing the mechanisms that keep survivors unnamed, and insisting on language that puts accountability where it belongs.

As I wrote in the Editor’s Note for Making Space for the Light: Documenting the Violence that Shapes the Lives of Women and Girls, I ground my work in the conviction that justice is inseparable from voice. Moral repair begins not in abstraction, but in the act of speaking, writing, and being heard—particularly when done in community.

So when I start with the Lolita Express, I am not making a literary observation for its own sake. I am naming a structure: the way predators signal to each other; the way culture provides cover; the way discretion is treated as sophistication; the way institutions—legal, social, literary—police credibility and normalize violence; the way women are instructed to make peace with what should never be accepted as normal.

Predators share a common language. That language can be interrupted. But it will not be interrupted by politeness, and it will not be interrupted by silence. It will be interrupted by accurate naming, by refusing rituals of minimization, by refusing demands for discretion, and by building the language that survivors have always been denied—one that is grounded in truth, and in naming what is parading in plain sight.

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*NOTE: I want to add a note here about the power of the thin veneer of medical authority—and the cultural insulation that comes with it—to manufacture credibility for predators and disbelief for their victims. This has happened repeatedly, across specialties, for decades—under the protection of prominent academic, professional, and medical institutions. I have been inside medical institutions operating at the highest levels, including as Assistant Dean and Research Integrity Officer at Weill Cornell (2007–2015), and Vice President of Quality & Patient Safety at NewYork-Presbyterian, covering both Cornell and Columbia (2015–2019). I had no knowledge, in those roles, of the cases described below.

• We have seen it with Larry Nassar, where Michigan State University agreed to a $500 million global settlement with survivors, and where USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee agreed to a $380 million settlement, and where the U.S. Justice Department reached a $138.7 million settlement over the FBI’s mishandling of reports—bringing total compensation connected to Nassar to more than $1 billion. Reports of the abuse by Nassar were brought forward as early as 1994 and the Michigan Attorney General has described Nassar’s abuse as spanning more than 25 years.

• We have seen this same dynamic in the case of former Columbia/NY-Presbyterian OB-GYN Robert Hadden, who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison in 2023. In its sentencing release, the U.S. Attorney’s Office describes Hadden’s medical practice spanning approximately 1987 to 2012. In 2025, Columbia University and NewYork-Presbyterian agreed to a $750 million settlement resolving 576 sexual abuse claims, and reporting on that settlement notes that total civil payouts connected to Hadden’s abuse have reached more than $1 billion.

• We have also seen it with Darius Paduch, a New York–area urologist who federal prosecutors said used his position at prestigious hospitals to sexually abuse patients, including children, and to make the abuse appear medically necessary. Reporting on the case identified those institutions as NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center and Northwell Health. In November 2024, Paduch was sentenced to life in prison, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office described his abuse as “perverse and pervasive,” spanning over a decade.

• And now, some survivors of Dr. James Heaps—a former UCLA gynecologist—are facing the reality of having to go back to court because a California appeals court overturned his sex-abuse conviction and ordered a retrial, citing a fair-trial violation tied to a juror issue that was not disclosed to the parties at the time; prosecutors have indicated they plan to retry the case. To date, the University of California has paid nearly $700 million in settlements connected to allegations against Heaps. AP reporting states that Heaps assaulted hundreds of women during his 35-year career.