Filipinos are everywhere. They are even in the Epstein Files! But it's not the rich and powerful Filipinos such as the Marcoses or Villars and Tans whose names appear in the files. There are global Filipinos who attend the World Economic Forum in Davos but did any of them set foot on Little St. James? Instead it's the lowly drivers and housemaids whose names appear unredacted. One writer laments this as a grave injustice.
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| https://usa.inquirer.net/188800/opinion-the-invisible-filipinos-in-the-epstein-files |
If you were in the Epstein Files would you be proud? Or would you feel shamed?
I found some Filipino names in there, and my first question is why weren’t these names redacted along with the other victims who were sexually abused?
The three million page dump of the Epstein files are overwhelming – like trying to catch up on a Russian literature class the week before finals. The scale alone ensures that only certain stories will be told.
And sure enough, the early focus has been predictable: celebrity names. Trump. Clinton. Musk. Billionaires. The powerful people who drive clicks and headlines.
Meanwhile, another group has been exposed without protection and without voice: the workers who made Jeffrey Epstein’s life function.
This is not a metaphor. It is literal.
The files contain names, résumés, contact information and employment histories of household staff, yacht crew and service workers recruited through agencies. I won’t mention them here because I don’t want to add to the offense. Many of these workers were Filipino – part of a global labor pipeline that has long supplied wealthy households with compliant, replaceable service labor.
Their information is not meaningfully redacted.
The girls who were abused must – and should – remain the priority. They were victims of sexual violence and trafficking. That hierarchy matters.
Another injustice
But recognizing that truth does not require ignoring another injustice unfolding in plain sight.
What happened to these workers is not just embarrassing exposure. It is unequal exposure – and that is the injustice.
The Epstein files bend over backward to protect the reputations of the powerful. Redactions obscure elite identities. Legal language shields decision-makers. Accountability diffuses upward until it disappears.
But workers – especially migrant workers – are left naked in the record.
Names searchable forever. Résumés frozen in time. Phone numbers traceable.
That is not transparency. That is downward accountability without power.
Silence
These workers were embedded in a criminal ecosystem they did not design, control or profit from. They did not have leverage. They did not have lawyers. They did not have the freedom to speak – because NDAs, immigration status, financial precarity, and the unspoken rules of elite service work all pointed in one direction: silence.
That silence was not freely chosen. It was coerced by structure.
For migrant service workers – especially Filipinos – employment is rarely just a job. It is tied to remittances, visas, family survival and obligation. Breaking an NDA doesn’t just risk a lawsuit. It risks deportation, blacklisting and economic collapse for families thousands of miles away.
Now, years later, these same workers are publicly identifiable in government-released files – without warning, consent or protection.
That is harm.
It exposes them to stigma: You worked for Epstein. It exposes them to suspicion: What did you see? What did you know? It exposes them to retaliation from future employers who don’t want “complications.”
And it does so without offering legal support, anonymity or a path to tell their own stories.
That is not accountability. That is scapegoating by omission.
There is also a racial and labor hierarchy the files reveal with bureaucratic indifference.
Invisible
Filipinos appear again and again as “the help” – butlers, house managers, yacht crew, domestic staff. This is not accidental. It reflects a global racialized labor system where Filipinos are trained, marketed and perceived as obedient, grateful and invisible.
When elites grow accustomed to Filipinos as servants inside private compounds, it bleeds into how Filipinos are seen everywhere else: not as colleagues, not as equals, but as support staff in someone else’s world.
In earlier centuries, these workers would have been enslaved. Today, they are paid – and we are told that makes the arrangement fair.
It doesn’t.
Payment does not erase exploitation when power is this unequal and exit is this constrained.
The injustice here is not that workers existed.
It’s that when the reckoning came, they were exposed while the powerful were shielded.
True accountability punches up.
This punched down.
If the Epstein files reveal how sexual abuse was enabled, they also reveal how elite crime is sustained – by armies of invisible workers whose vulnerability is treated as collateral damage.
Seeing that is not a distraction from justice.
It is part of it.
The fix
There is a fix – and it requires choosing sides. When the government releases massive investigative records, it must stop protecting power while exposing labor. Redaction rules should automatically shield domestic and service workers, especially migrant workers, unless there is clear evidence of criminal liability.
For Filipino labor in particular – often recruited through agencies, bound by NDAs and tethered to visas and remittances – there must be mandatory anonymization, advance notice before disclosure and access to independent legal counsel and trauma-informed support. Names, résumés and contact details should never be released by default. Transparency that punches down is not transparency – it’s exploitation by paperwork.
If accountability is real, it must not protect the powerful, while exposing Filipino migrant workers and other invisible laborers as collateral damage – so Congress, the DOJ and the media need to fix this now or admit that “transparency” is just another word for exploitation.
Until that’s done, the most honest reading of the Epstein files isn’t that justice is finally being done.
It’s that power is still deciding who gets protected – and who gets sacrificed.
Boo-hoo Filipinos are exploited by the rich and powerful to do menial labor. They are actually slaves. Paid, but slaves. Surely this writer is aware that the government encourages Filipinos to be overseas workers?
Let’s drop the faux-naïveté about exploitation for a moment. Filipinos being used for menial labor by the global elite is not a revelation. The Philippine government openly encourages it. There is an entire bureaucracy devoted to exporting labor. The DFA proudly calls overseas Filipinos part of the country’s soft power. Since the 1970s, Filipinos have been deliberately deployed abroad as instruments of foreign policy.
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| https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1217840 |
Diaspora, or the spreading of Filipinos across the globe along with the Filipino culture, is the country's “soft power”, an official of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said Monday.
In diplomacy, soft power is the ability of a nation to influence other nations through attraction and persuasion instead of force or intimidation.
"We send our people or they themselves go without government intervention or support. We deploy our workers, beginning 1973 in the oil crisis, caused by the conflict between Israel and their cousin, the Arabs but not just as workers," DFA Undersecretary Eduardo Jose de Vega said during his speech at a multi-stakeholder symposium.
He said these Filipinos sent abroad are instruments of the country's foreign policy.
"Oftentimes, especially after Republic Act 8042, our diaspora drives our foreign policy," he added.
So spare us the sudden moral shock. If this is exploitation, the proper address is not an opinion column, it’s Malacañang.
Jeffery Epstein is dead. No one is working for him anymore. Any NDA that these people signed while working for him should be ignored as legally and morally irrelevant. Silence no longer protects anyone except the living elites who benefited from it. These people are perhaps eyewitnesses to crimes committed by the elites who run this world. And the author treats that like its shameful!
Now, years later, these same workers are publicly identifiable in government-released files – without warning, consent or protection.
That is harm.
It exposes them to stigma: You worked for Epstein. It exposes them to suspicion: What did you see? What did you know? It exposes them to retaliation from future employers who don’t want “complications.”
But, as the author laments, these Filipino servants are invisible. It could be no investigator will come knocking on their door. In that case the solution would be for them to go public on their own.
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