Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

November 12, 2025 (Wednesday)

It turns out Representative Eric Swalwell  (D-CA) and House Democrats were right to call it the “Epstein Shutdown” for the last several weeks on social media and in interviews. As Marc Elias of Democracy Docket put it today, while it was clear what the Democrats wanted from the shutdown—lower costs for healthcare insurance premiums, affordability, and for Trump to stop breaking the law—it was never clear what the Republicans wanted. They seemed simply to be doing as Trump demanded.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) kept House members from conducting any business at all. The House last voted on September 19, gathering in Washington, D.C., again only after the Senate on Monday passed a measure to reopen the government. The hiatus gave Johnson an excuse not to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), whose voters elected her on September 23. Grijalva had promised to be the 218th and final vote on a discharge petition that would force the House to vote on a measure that would require the Department of Justice to release files relating to the government investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. 

Elias notes that he, like many of us, considered as plausible the idea that the government shutdown was a way to keep the Epstein files under wraps, but there were other plausible theories as well. Maybe Trump and his cronies wanted to gut the federal workforce. Maybe they wanted to undermine the Affordable Care Act. Maybe Trump simply wanted to run the country without the interference of Congress. 

Today put the Epstein files firmly in the center of the story.

The House got down to business this morning after a 54-day break to work on the Senate measure to reopen the government. Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform immediately released three emails from a cache of more than 23,000 documents the committee received recently from the Epstein estate. The first email was one Epstein sent to his associate Ghislaine Maxwell on April 2, 2011. It referred to a story in which the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes solved a case by noting that a dog didn’t bark at a crime scene because it knew the perpetrator. The reference has come to mean an expected action or piece of evidence whose absence proves guilt. 

Epstein wrote: “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc.  im 75% there.” Maxwell replied: “I have been thinking about that…”
 
The second email the Democrats released was from January 2019, from Epstein to Trump biographer Michael Wolff. In it, Epstein said of Trump: “of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop[.]” 

In a third email thread from December 2015, after Trump had declared his candidacy for the 2016 presidential election, Wolff told Epstein that CNN would ask Trump about his relationship with Epstein. Epstein asked what Wolff thought Trump should answer. Wolff wrote: “I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house,… [y]ou can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.” 

As legal analyst Asha Rangappa noted, this exchange suggests that Epstein would have leverage over Trump if Trump tried to say he had not been at Epstein’s house or on his plane, in other words, that Trump was there and Epstein had receipts. 

After the Democrats released these three emails, Johnson called the release “[a]nother publicity stunt by the Democrats” and claimed: “They’re trying to mislead people.” Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) issued a statement accusing the Democrats of “cherry-picking documents and politicizing information.” The committee then released an additional 20,000 pages of documents received from the Epstein estate. 

Those were hardly better. In a 2015 email, Epstein gave tips on stories about Trump and girls to then–New York Times financial reporter Landon Thomas Jr. When others asked Thomas for stories, Epstein wrote: “Have them ask my houseman about donad [sic] almost walking through the door leaving his nose print on the glass as young women were swimming in the pool and he was so focused he walked straight into the door.” In another email, Epstein offered "photso [sic] of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen,” and Thomas urged: “I am serious man—for the good of the nation why not try to get some of this out there.” 

But a story revealing this information did not appear in the New York Times before the 2016 presidential election or afterward.

In one 2018 email referring to Trump’s payment of hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, Epstein wrote: “i know how dirty donald is.”

Despite how explosive these documents were, they do not appear to be the end of the story. They came from the Epstein estate, but the files from the FBI investigation into Trump have not yet been released. Whatever is still outstanding appears to be even worse than what we have seen, as evidenced by Trump’s frantic attempts to stop the discharge petition.

With the House back at work, Johnson had little choice but to swear in Grijalva. The ceremony was scheduled for 4:00. 

In  the hours before that deadline, the president tried to get one of the four Republican representatives who had signed the discharge petition to remove their signature. He appeared to focus on Nancy Mace (R-SC), with whom he tried to connect by phone, and Lauren Boebert (R-CO), whom he invited to meet with him in the White House Situation Room, which is equipped to prevent recording. CNN reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI director Kash Patel joined Trump and Boebert at the meeting. 

When asked about the meeting, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “Doesn’t that show the level of transparency when we are willing to sit down with members of Congress and address their concerns?” For his part, Trump took to social media to call the released documents an attempt by Democrats to bring up the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” to deflect from “how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects.” He urged “any Republicans involved” to be “focused only on opening up our Country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats!” 

Trump’s efforts to get someone to take their name off the discharge petition failed. Johnson swore in Grijalva at 4:00, as scheduled, and she immediately signed it. Now the petition needs to “ripen” for seven legislative days. Then Johnson has two legislative days to schedule a vote on a measure to require the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files it holds. 

Faith Wardwell and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported this evening that senior Republicans believe as many as 100 Republicans will support the bill when it comes to the floor. Many of them are facing constituents who voted for Trump in the belief that he would release the Epstein files as he promised and who are angry that the administration appears to be covering them up in the service of rich elites. Others likely recognize that they do not want to be seen as participating in that coverup, especially with the threat of even worse material waiting to drop.

If the House passes the bill, it will go to the Senate and, if the Senate passes it, to Trump for his signature. If he vetoes it, Congress has the option to override his veto. 

In the past, Trump has managed to avoid accountability for his actions by using lawsuits to delay while whipping up his supporters to take his side against what he called “witch hunts” or “hoaxes.” Republican lawmakers went along in part because they didn’t want to alienate his base. 

Now, though, a significant portion of MAGA has broken with him, his popularity is low—a new Associated Press–NORC poll has his approval rating at 33%— and last week’s elections showed his coalition is abandoning him. It is not clear that Republican senators will defend him, especially since his erratic behavior—like bulldozing the East Wing of the White House—appears to be increasing. 

As Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who backed the House discharge petition, told CNN: "This vote is going to be on your record for longer than Trump is going to be president. And what are you going to do in 2028 and 2030 when you're in a debate…and they say, ‘How can we trust you? You covered up for a pedophile back in 2025.’”

Midday today, as new revelations from the Epstein documents were hitting social media every few minutes, Representative Swalwell posted: “This is the beginning of the end.” 

Tonight the House passed the Senate’s continuing resolution to fund the government, ending the longest government shutdown in U.S. history: 43 days. The vote was 222–209, with all but two Republicans voting in favor and all but six Democrats voting against it, saying they would not support a continuing resolution that did not extend the premium tax credits for healthcare insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act markets. Republicans neglected to extend those credits in their budget reconciliation bill of July—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—and without them, millions of Americans will be unable to afford healthcare coverage, and premiums will skyrocket for millions more.

The measure funds the government through January 30, 2026; overturns the layoffs of federal employees administration officials made during the shutdown and guarantees workers’ pay; and appropriates money to pay for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits through September 2026, taking them out of Trump’s hands as a pressure point in January.

Failing to get an extension of the healthcare premium tax credits into the continuing resolution, House Democrats filed a discharge petition to force the House to vote on a measure that would extend the credits for three years. “There are only two ways this fight will end,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told his colleagues. “Either Republicans finally decide to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits this year. Or the American people will throw Republicans out of their jobs next year and end the speakership of Donald J. Trump once and for all.”

November 14, 2025 (Friday)

In a transparent attempt to distract from the many times his own name appears in the documents from the Epstein estate members of the House Oversight Committee released Wednesday, President Donald J. Trump asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Democrats whose names appeared in the documents. He singled out former president Bill Clinton, former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers, and Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn and who is a Democratic donor.

Although the attorney general is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and is supposed to be nonpartisan in protecting the rule of law, Bondi responded that the Department of Justice “will pursue this with urgency and integrity.” Maegan Vazquez and Shayna Jacobs of the Washington Post note that reporters have already covered the relationship of Epstein with Clinton, Summers, and Hoffman for years, and that in July, Justice Department officials said an examination of the FBI files relating to Epstein—a different cache than Wednesday’s—“did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

Meidas Touch noted: “In normal times, it would be a major scandal for the President to direct his AG to criminally investigate his political opponents to deflect from his own involvement in a major scandal—and for the AG to immediately announce she is doing it. The Epstein scandal and cover up just got even bigger.”

Earlier this week, the administration cited the food delivery app DoorDash as an authority on dropping consumer prices; today the city of Chicago announced a settlement in a four-year lawsuit charging that DoorDash took advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to list restaurants without their permission and mark up food prices. DoorDash will pay $18 million in cash and credits to restaurants, delivery drivers, and consumers. 

Trump has steadfastly and falsely maintained that foreign countries pay for tariffs. But today he  signed an executive order ending tariffs on beef, coffee, bananas, cocoa, and other commodities from certain countries to lower prices after voters said they are concerned about the economy. Representative Richard Neal (D-MA), the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, said the administration was “putting out a fire that they started and claiming it as progress.”

Trump has seemed particularly nervous that the Supreme Court might uphold the lower courts that have declared most of his tariffs illegal, reiterating that having to pay back tariff money would be “a National Security catastrophe.” Representative Jason Crow (D-CO) reminded Really American Media that Trump has been “using tariffs to enrich himself and his family,” using them—or the threat of them—to get golf course deals in countries around the world, as well as using them to punish countries Trump believes are hurting his right-wing allies. 

In contrast, Trump’s administration is rewarding his ideological allies. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Argentina’s leader Javier Milei appears to have received more financial support from the U.S. government than the $20 billion more widely reported. The U.S. withdrew $870 million from its account at the International Monetary Fund shortly before a similar sum appeared in Argentina’s IMF fund just in time for that country to pay an $840 million debt. It is, one redditor noted, “turning into a scandal.”  

News broke today that the Department of Justice is in talks with Trump’s former national security advisor Michael Flynn to settle his $50 million claim against the government for damages related to the investigation into his conversations with a Russian operative before Trump took office. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and Trump later pardoned him. A federal judge dismissed Flynn’s lawsuit and the Biden administration fought it, but now the Trump administration appears to have engaged with Flynn over it.   

Last week, Flynn suggested he might run for president in 2028 to keep the MAGA movement going.

Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica reported today that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s $220 million ad campaign, which she says is a crucial tool to stop undocumented immigration, has funneled $143 million to a company in Delaware called Safe America Media. The company lists the Virginia home of a Republican operative, Michael McElwain, as its address and was created days before contracts awarded to it were finalized. 

One of the subcontractors who fulfilled a Safe America Media contract was the Strategy Group, whose chief executive officer, Ben Yoho, is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin. Noem’s top advisor, Corey Lewandowski, who introduced Noem to Yoho, has done significant work for the Strategy Group, and Noem used the Strategy Group for her 2022 campaign for South Dakota governor. Subcontractors are not listed in federal contracting databases.

The Department of Homeland Security skipped the normal competitive bidding process for its ad campaign, citing the need for “critical communications to the public” to go out quickly. Charles Tiefer, a former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan and an expert on federal contract law, told Elliott, Kaplan, and Mierjeski, “It’s corrupt, is the word,” suggesting Noem was hiding her friends as subcontractors. He called for an investigation by the House Oversight Committee and the Homeland Security inspector general. That inspector general, Trump loyalist Joseph Cuffari, survived the January 2025 purge of inspectors general. 

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said career officials run its contracting and do it “by the book.” 

William Turton and Christopher Bing of ProPublica reported today that FBI Director Kash Patel waived the standard polygraph exams required to obtain top security clearances for Deputy Director Dan Bongino and two other senior FBI staff members. The exam includes questions about foreign contacts, drug use, whether someone has a criminal history, and mishandling of classified information. 

Like Patel himself, former right-wing podcaster Bongino had no prior experience at the FBI. The deputy director has access to the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), which includes some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets, including information from the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. 

Government officials told Turton and Bing that ascending to the FBI’s second-highest-ranking official without passing a standard background check is unprecedented. 

A forthcoming book by reporter Olivia Nuzzi, about which the New York Times reported today, says that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a recovering heroin addict with whom she had a relationship, told her he uses psychedelics, despite claiming to have stopped using drugs decades ago. 

Tonight Trump turned against those Republicans who voted in favor of the release of the Epstein files compiled by the FBI during its investigation of the sex offender. He announced he was “withdrawing my support and Endorsement of ‘Congresswoman’ Marjorie Taylor Greene,” and went after Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who introduced the discharge petition, calling him a “LOSER!”

Greene responded that Trump was "coming after me hard to make an example to scare all the other Republicans before next weeks vote to release the Epstein files. It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out that he actually goes to this level…. I have supported President Trump with too much of my precious time, too much of my own money, and fought harder for him even when almost all other Republicans turned their back and denounced him. But I don’t worship or serve Donald Trump.”

Tonight Aaron Rupar of Public Notice wrote: “I just don’t see how we can pretend even for a moment that anything involving our federal government is remotely normal when the president is covering up his involvement in a child sex trafficking ring. Like, what are we doing here[?]”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (which was 25 years old yesterday—congratulations, Josh and the TPM folks!) wrote: “Investigate whoever he wants. Trumps drowning on every front.”

November 16, 2025 (Sunday)

On Thursday, November 13, Michael Schmidt reported in the New York Times the story of the 17-year-old girl the House Ethics Committee found former representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) likely paid to have sex with him. The girl was a homeless high schooler who needed to supplement the money she made from her job at McDonald’s to be able to pay for braces. 

Through a “sugar dating” website that connected older men with younger women, she met Florida tax collector Joel Greenberg, who introduced her to Gaetz. Both men allegedly took drugs with her and paid her for sex, allegedly including at a party at the home of a former Republican member of the Florida legislature, Chris Dorworth.

The Justice Department charged Greenberg with sex trafficking a minor and having sex with a minor in exchange for money. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a decade in prison. The Justice Department did not charge Gaetz. In 2022 the girl’s lawyers asked Gaetz and Dorworth about reaching a financial settlement with her. She didn’t sue, but Dorworth sued her, sparking depositions and disclosure of evidence. Dorworth dropped the case. That material has recently been released and made up some of Schmidt’s portrait of the girl.  

Schmidt’s story added another window into the world depicted in the more than 20,000 documents the House Oversight Committee dropped from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein the day before. Those emails show a network of elite people—mostly but not exclusively men—from politics, business, academia, foreign leadership, and entertainment who continued to seek chummy access to the wealthy Epstein, the information he retailed, and his contacts despite his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting prostitution from a minor. 

When accusations against Epstein resurfaced in 2018, along with public outrage over the sweetheart deal he received in 2008 from former U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta—who in 2018 was secretary of labor in Trump’s first administration—Trump ally Stephen Bannon worked together to combat the story. As Jason Wilson of The Guardian notes, Epstein and Bannon treated the crisis as a publicity problem to fix as they pushed Bannon’s right-wing agenda and supported Trump. 

As David Smith of The Guardian put it, Epstein’s in-box painted a picture of “a world where immense wealth, privileged access and proximity to power can insulate individuals from accountability and consequences. For those inside the circle, the rules of the outside world do not apply.” 

On  Tuesday, November 4, Elizabeth Dwoskin of the Washington Post described the ideology behind this world. She profiled Chris Buskirk of the Rockbridge Network, a secretive organization funded by tech leaders to create a network that will permit the MAGA movement to outlive Trump. Dwoskin wrote that political strategists credit the Rockbridge Network with pushing J.D. Vance—one of the network’s members—into the vice presidency.

Dwoskin explains that Buskirk embraces a theory that says “a select group of elites are exactly the right people to move the country forward.” Such an “aristocracy”—as he described his vision to Dwoskin—drives innovation. It would be “a proper elite that takes care of the country and governs it well so that everyone prospers.” When he’s not working in politics, Buskirk is, according to Dwoskin, pushing “unrestrained capitalism into American life.” The government should support the country’s innovators, network members say. 

We have heard this ideology before. 

In 1858, in a period in which a few fabulously wealthy elite enslavers in the American South were trying to take over the government and create their own oligarchy, South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explained to his colleagues that “democracy” meant only that voters got to choose which set of leaders ruled them. Society worked best, he said, when it was run by natural leaders: the wealthy, educated, well-connected men who made up the South’s planter class. 

Hammond explained that society was naturally made up of a great mass of workers, rather dull people, but happy and loyal, whom he called “mudsills” after the timbers driven into the ground to support elegant homes above. These mudsills supported “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement,” one that modeled itself on the British aristocracy. The mudsills needed the guidance of their betters to produce goods that would create capital, Hammond said. That capital would be wasted if it stayed among the mudsills; it needed to move upward, where better men would use it to move society forward.

Hammond’s ideology gave us the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court found that Black Americans “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”
 
In 1889, during the Gilded Age, industrialist Andrew Carnegie embraced a similar idea when he explained that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few was not only inevitable in an industrial system, but was beneficial. The wealthy were stewards of society’s money, administering it for the common good by funding libraries, schools, and so on, to uplift everyone, rather than permitting individual workers to squander it in frivolity. It was imperative, Carnegie thought, for the government to protect big business for the benefit of the country as a whole.

Carnegie’s ideology gave us the 1905 Lochner v. New York Supreme Court decision declaring that states could not require employers to limit workers’ hours in a bakery to 10 hours a day or 60 hours a week. The court reasoned that there was no need of such a law for workers’ welfare or safety because “there is no danger to the employ[ee] in a first-class bakery.” The court concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protected “freedom of contract”: the right of employers to contract with laborers at any price and for any hours the workers could be induced to accept.  

In 1929, after the Great Crash tore the bottom out of the economy, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon did not blame the systemic inequality his policies had built into the economy. He blamed lazy Americans and the government that had served greedy constituencies. He told President Herbert Hoover not to interfere to help the country. 

“Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” he told Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”

Mellon’s ideology gave us “Hoovervilles”—shantytowns built from packing boxes and other salvaged materials—and the Great Depression. 

Today, an ideology of “aristocracy” justifies the fabulous wealth and control of government by an elite that increasingly operates in private spaces that are hard for the law to reach, while increasingly using the power of the state against those it considers morally inferior. 

Yesterday Arian Campo-Flores of the Wall Street Journal reported that the net worth of the top 0.1% of households in the U.S. reached $23.3 trillion this year, while the bottom 50% hold $4.2 trillion. Campo-Flores outlined a world in which the “ultrarich” are living in luxury and increasingly sealed off from everyday people. “They don’t wait in lines. They don’t jostle with airport crowds or idle unnecessarily in traffic,” Campo-Flores writes. “Instead, an ecosystem of exclusive restaurants, clubs, resorts and other service providers delivers them customized and exquisite experiences as fast as possible. The spaces they inhabit are often private, carefully curated and populated by like-minded and similarly well-heeled peers.”

On the other end of the spectrum is the Trump administration’s crusade against not just undocumented immigrants but also against legal immigrants and darker-skinned Americans in general.

But using the power of the state against those outside the “aristocracy” is more widespread than attacks on Brown Americans. Ellen Barry and Jason DeParle reported on October 29 in the New York Times that the future of Trump’s policy for criminalizing unhoused people is taking shape in Utah. On the outskirts of Salt Lake City, the state is building a facility where it will commit 1,300 inmates. Refocusing homeless initiatives from providing housing toward rehabilitation and moral development, the involuntary confinement will end a harmful “culture of permissiveness” and guide homeless people “towards human thriving” through social and addiction services, according to political appointee Randy Shumway, who chairs the state’s Homeless Services Board and whose business promotes software used in case management for unhoused people. 

Critics note that funds are not currently available for those seeking such services, and with the Republicans’ deep cuts to Medicaid it’s hard to see where more funding will come from, although at least some of it is being redirected from currently-operating housing programs. 

On November 6 the Supreme Court reinstated a Trump policy requiring all new passports to reflect a person’s biological sex at birth. As Steve Vladeck explained in One First, from 1992 to 2010 the State Department had allowed people who had undergone surgical reassignment to change their identification on their passports; from 2010 to 2025 they could submit a certificate from a doctor saying they had undergone clinical treatment for gender transition. 

When he took office on January 20, Trump issued an executive order overturning this 33-year policy, saying “[i]t is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” which it defined as “an individual’s immutable biological classification” as assigned “at conception.” Transgender identity, the order said, is “false” and “corrosive” to the country. Plaintiffs led by Ashton Orr sued, and on April 18 U.S. District Judge Julia E. Kobick granted a motion to make the case a class action. She also granted a stay, finding that the plaintiffs would likely win on the merits of their claim that the new policy violates their right to equal protection under the Fifth Amendment. The administration went to the Supreme Court for emergency relief.

In Trump v. Orr the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court reinstated Trump’s policy, writing: “Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth—in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.” In addition to using a passport to travel, transgender Americans who live in states that don’t recognize their transition often use their passports as identification in the U.S. On Friday the State Department updated its website, committing to the new policy that effectively erases those people and forces them to conform to the MAGA ideology. 

In 1858, the year after the Dred Scott decision, rising politician Abraham Lincoln explained to an audience in Chicago what a system that set some people above others meant. Arguments that those deemed “inferior” “are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow…are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world,” he said. “[T]hey always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden…. [This] argument…is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.” 

“Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent….”

In Lincoln’s day, and in the Gilded Age, and in the 1930s, Americans pushed back against those trying to establish an aristocracy in the United States. That project appears to be gaining speed as well in today’s America, where the rich and powerful are increasingly operating in cryptocurrencies and avoiding accountability, but where a majority of people would prefer to live in a world where a child does not have to sell her body to older men in order to save enough money to get braces on her teeth.