Time Will Reveal What We Ignored

Debarge, Epstein, and the Price of Not Protecting Black Girls First

Introduction

I wasn’t gonna write this.

Real talk, seriously, I tried not to.

The whole Epstein thing?

I figured they had it covered.

CNN’s got their panels. Netflix got their docuseries.

Every white liberal with a podcast already broke it down, right?

So I told myself just let it go. You ain’t gotta say nothin’.

But then it happened.

I was driving. Thinking about all the headlines. About how heavy this story feels, and still….how incomplete.

And that’s when “Time Will Reveal” by Debarge came on the radio.

Now…

If you know, you know.

That song don’t just play. It haunts.

But this time, it didn’t feel like a love song.

It felt like a coded letter from survivors who’d been singing to us this whole time.

Because see…what most people don’t know, especially the folks glued to these documentaries, is that Debarge was abused.

Physically. Sexually.

By their white father.

And they were raised up in this strict Pentecostal world where shame had a backbeat and silence came with harmony.

They made some of the most unforgettable love songs in Black music history while trying to survive unspeakable trauma.

So yeah.

When El hit that line….

“I tell you I love you, but you won’t believe it’s true”—

Something cracked open in me.

Because that’s what it’s always been like for the girls no one believes.

You can scream, whisper, hint, cry… and the world still doubts you.

Still needs proof. Still won’t call it what it is.

But the truth?

“In time it will reveal.”

That line kept echoing.

Because that’s what this is.

A long-overdue revelation.

And now that time has passed, we finally have to face it:

We ignored the first girls.

We erased the Black ones.

We believed the system—until it was too late.

This wasn’t just about Epstein. This was about us.

About how many times Black pain gets written out of the opening chapters.

Ghislaine Maxwell called the girls she trafficked her ‘slaves.’

Let that sit for a second.

Slaves.

That word don’t hit soft when you’re a Black man as I am.

Especially not one who’s read how they used to sell our daughters with ribbons in their hair.

Especially not one who knows what “fancy girls” meant in New Orleans.

Especially not when the first girls Epstein preyed on… were Black.

Not rich. Not blonde. Not on the cover of People Magazine.

Black.

But you didn’t hear that part in the Netflix doc.

You didn’t see them on the specials.

You didn’t know the pyramid started on our backs.

And here’s the part I couldn’t run from:

If we had cared enough when the girls were Black, maybe it never would’ve gotten that far.

But we didn’t.

I didn’t.

Not loud enough.

And now… time has revealed what we ignored.

She Called Them Slaves And We Treated It Like a Line from a Movie

Here’s the part that still don’t sit right with me:

Ghislaine Maxwell called the girls “slaves.”

That’s not me paraphrasing. That’s a direct quote.

And I remember hearing that during the trial and waiting for the world to stop.

But it didn’t.

Now, the girls she was talking about were mostly white.

Blonde. Working-class.

Not rich girls. Not protected girls. But still—white.

And even then, people barely flinched at that word.

That told me something.

It told me that the language of slavery has been softened. Sanitized. Disconnected from terror.

Because if a rich white woman calling white girls “slaves” doesn’t spark a national reckoning, what chance did the actual Black girls have?

Because yeah, Epstein’s earliest targets weren’t just white.

There were Black girls. Brown girls. Girls nobody followed up with.

Girls whose stories never made the specials.

And here’s what I realized:

By the time Ghislaine said “slaves,” Epstein had already built a system that only worked because we ignored the first wave.

So no, the girls Ghislaine called slaves weren’t Black.

But the logic of slavery was already baked in.

And we’d been ignoring it from the beginning.

The Pyramid Scheme of Pain Started With Us

Here’s what people forget, or maybe never knew:

Before Epstein had his mansions, his plane, and a woman recruiting girls like it was a casting call, he was already building something.

And he was testing it on the most vulnerable girls he could find.

Florida.

Poor neighborhoods.

Girls who needed money, who didn’t have lawyers or parents who’d call the media.

And yes….some of those girls were Black.

We know that from buried police reports, court filings, and survivor interviews that never made it into the Netflix specials.

But those stories never traveled.

Because when the first Black and brown girls came forward, it wasn’t seen as a national crisis.

It was seen as “a situation.”

Something local. Something unfortunate.

But not something worth stopping everything for.

Then came the pattern:

Epstein offered cash.

He told them they could make more if they brought their friends.

He created a pyramid scheme built on desperation.

He knew how to find the girls nobody was protecting.

And the thing is he was right.

Nobody protected them.

Not the schools.

Not the police.

Not us.

And once he knew that worked?

Once he saw that silence held?

That’s when the operation scaled.

He moved from motel rooms to mansions.

He got help.

He added private planes, private islands, layers of deniability.

But the playbook? That was tested on girls we never saw on camera.

That’s why it matters that we say their names—even if we don’t have all of them.

Because this whole thing didn’t start in the spotlight.

It started in the dark.

And the people in the dark looked like us.

Fancy Girls Were the First Step

To understand how Epstein’s system worked, you have to understand that it wasn’t new.

He didn’t invent anything.

He just digitized a very old script.

If you’ve never heard the term “fancy girl,” you’re not alone.

It’s the kind of history they don’t teach in school.

But in 19th century New Orleans, a “fancy girl” was a light-skinned Black girl, often a teenager, groomed and sold explicitly for sex.

They weren’t marketed as field labor or domestic help.

They were marketed as luxury.

Trained to be docile, polite, obedient.

Auctioned off in high-end “fancy girl” markets that catered to white men who wanted something exotic, young, and non-threatening.

According to When Rape Was Legal by Dr. Rachel Feinstein, these girls were often described in terms that erased their personhood and elevated their desirability—words like octoroon, quadroon, refined, compliant.

They weren’t just bought.

They were broken.

Sometimes by the very women who were supposed to teach them “proper” behavior.

Sometimes by the men who claimed to be their protectors.

Sound familiar?

Ghislaine Maxwell didn’t call her victims “trafficked.”

She called them “slaves.”

And that wasn’t an accident.

Because the logic behind Epstein’s empire: find vulnerable girls, isolate them, coerce them, and reward silence with small comforts, was the same logic that powered the fancy girl trade.

Only this time, the mansion wasn’t in the French Quarter.

It was in Palm Beach.

And the auction block was a massage table.

Dr. Feinstein writes that, during slavery, “rape was not just tolerated…it was structured. Codified. Managed.”

There were rules about how to price a girl based on how many times she’d been raped.

Laws that protected white buyers.

Courts that never sided with Black girls.

Now tell me that doesn’t sound like Epstein’s operation.

Because in his world, there were tiers.

Girls who were paid more.

Girls who were passed around.

Girls who aged out.

And girls who disappeared entirely from the story.

The only difference?

Back then, we called it slavery.

Now we just call it scandal.

Debarge Was Singing About Survival

When you grow up Black in America, you learn early that music isn’t just art…it’s armor.

The melody might sound soft, but the truth underneath? It’s usually soaked in something heavier.

Debarge was no exception.

On the surface, they were the sweethearts of ‘80s R&B.

Silky falsettos. Radio-ready hooks. Romance dripping from every note.

But the more you learn about their story, the harder it is to hear their music the same way.

Because behind those love songs was a childhood full of trauma.

All five brothers and their sister Bunny were reportedly abused by their white father.

And not just physically.

The sexual abuse allegations are well-documented, deeply disturbing, and largely ignored by the industry that profited off their pain.

You hear “All This Love” now, and it doesn’t sound like a serenade…it sounds like a coping mechanism.

A way to build fantasy around love when the reality of it had been so brutal.

And for me, that’s where the connection clicked.

Because if fancy girls were taught to perform desire for survival…

Debarge learned to sing it.

That’s how deep this thing goes.

Their music became part of a larger Black tradition using love songs to reclaim the idea of choice.

Of touch that wasn’t demanded.

Of love that wasn’t violent.

Of intimacy that didn’t come with a price tag.

You can trace that lineage all the way back to the blues.

Back when newly freed Black folks were writing songs not just about heartbreak, but about having options.

Singing about who they wanted to sleep with because, for centuries, they had no say.

Slow jams evolved out of that same impulse.

We weren’t just crooning for romance.

We were writing a counter-script to what was done to us.

Where consent became the beat.

Where seduction became proof we were free.

So when I heard “Time Will Reveal” that night while thinking about Epstein and Ghislaine and all the girls who never got justice…

I didn’t just hear a love song.

I heard a scream wrapped in satin.

A reminder that Black music has always known the difference between coercion and love.

Even when the world refuses to see it.

This Was Just the Prelude

If you’ve made it this far, I need you to understand something:

This isn’t the whole story.

This is just the intro.

Because everything I’ve laid out here; the pyramid scheme, the fancy girls, the survival songs, the erasure of Black girls from the record…

That’s just the foundation.

In Part 1, we go deeper into the actual structure of Epstein’s operation—who it targeted first, how it scaled, and why certain stories were erased while others went viral.

In Part 2, we’ll break down how white women like Ghislaine Maxwell have historically been allowed to stand adjacent to power and violence—and still be framed as victims or sidekicks instead of architects.

And in Part 3, we’ll ask the harder question:

What do we do now?

Because the system that let this happen to those girls, and to our girls isn’t gone.

It’s just learned how to rebrand.

This series isn’t about canceling anybody.

It’s about correcting the timeline.

And honoring the voices that got drowned out the first time.

So if you’re still with me…

buckle up.

know why this work matters.

Nobody paid to protect the Black girls.

So maybe it’s on us now.

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