You Don’t Just Protect, You Correct: A Teachable Epstein Moment

Posted on February 2, 2026 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

I had to stop reading what was in this recent release of more Epstein Files. I am not sure if I can look again because the sickness in it is far more insidious than one can stomach. I have access to all of them that can be accessed so I can access the details of more of them should I choose to do so. Don’t send me any of them, please.

Many of the men who have clamored for the release of these files have done so primarily to make political capital out of them. They don’t actually care that much about what happened to those girls. And I don’t care if they get angry about what I just wrote.

These are the same men who rarely, if ever, confront men who have sexually violated women and who never organize as a collective group to publicly state that this behavior is wrong. They tend to just tell women and girls in their orbit how to avoid certain types of men. That is honorable, but…

the responsibility is still left on women and girls to police men’s behavior. And before I hear that typical smokescreen that says “she should have known better than to…” please know that those kinds of statements not only prove that this heinous sexual behavior exists, but it also tacitly condones that behavior since the men in these scenarios are allegedly not responsible for their behavior because the girls and women should have expected to be violated based on their location or their appearance, not on certain men’s inability to behave themselves.

An excited 16-year-old girl who just met her favorite male singer and who foolishly follows him up to his hotel room when he says, “I have invited a few friends up, come join us,” should not expect to be raped. He never should have invited her up for a variety of reasons—the first reason being her age and the second reason being that she is a stranger that he just met.

An impressionable 16-year-old boy with a crush on his neighbor, a 35-year-old woman, should not expect to be forced/seduced by her because he mowed her lawn and then helped her take her groceries in the house. Importantly, his initial feelings of violation should not be replaced with congratulatory praise for his participation in the act which confuses her wrong behavior towards him as some male rite of passage for him.

These same men crying out for Trump and his sexually perverted team members to be brought to justice are not trying to destroy or collapse the current legal system at least until they have covered their asses and the asses of men they know that might not easily swim out of the Epstein quagmire. Illegality and sexual impropriety were built into the system. It’s still there.

(from The Arbitrary Ages of Consent: The Epstein Files by Leslye Joy Allen on Substack)

It is not that all men (or women) are potential sexual abusers; it’s just that the ability to get away with it or have it somehow described with less severity is enshrined in the very definitions and expectations of masculinity. Rape is rarely forgiven by ethical men, but excessive male sexual prowess and promiscuity often is.

So here’s where it gets dicey, particularly for women. I have several good Black male friends, most of whom I have known since elementary school. There isn’t one of them that would not protect me if they witnessed me being physically harmed in any way by anyone.

There isn’t one of them who would not go, or at least want to go, after someone they believed had assaulted me sexually. Yet, if something like that happened I would not be likely to tell them because they would either end up in jail due to a physical confrontation with my offender or they would be injured or killed for their efforts. That kind of love is gratifying; yet some of the things that kind of love can produce is scary, and it can occasionally make certain scenarios worse. So…

the real onus for ethical and righteous men is not simply protection, but correction. If men do not confront other men about their behavior, their sexism, their misogyny, their misogynoir, and their double standards then the process of bringing sex offenders to justice will always be processed first through that “Boys will be boys” lens.

(from “The Evidence of Things Not Seen” and the Epstein Files by Leslye Joy Allen on Substack)

Furthermore, a woman’s chronic need for protection from rape or other forms of assault essentially means that the problem remains chronically intact. The only way to end this is to end the manner in which men think of women and how they interact with and talk to other men; and whether they can do the most unpopular thing to do, which is: confront other men.

Additionally, the sexual violation of boys by men and women will continue to be swept under the rug by the perverted tenets of masculinity that insist that a boy or man should be silent because to speak up about his abuse is anathema to the myth that all men are physically and psychologically strong simply because they are men. It is male sexual assault victims’ equivalent to that nonsense that says, “Big boys don’t cry.”

Every opinion, good or bad, biased or unbiased, informed or uninformed, is also a confession. Silence, when the needs of the hour demand that you speak, can be proof of cowardice or a desire to conform to the status quo or an admission that you are protecting the guilt of someone else or even your own.

Justice for Epstein’s victims and prison time for the participants in these heinous actions is only a first step. Yet, we won’t correct the alleged norms that generated and aided and abetted Epstein and his cronies as long as their actions are seen as some anomaly rather than proof of a perpetual problem.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work and research with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp or become a paid subscriber to me on Substack to help me sustain my research.

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Privilege Can Make You Really Dumb

Posted on July 28, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

A few years ago, I received an email from a Black male performance artist that I know who is now retired. He dogged out another Black male performance artist after having attended a function. Don’t ask. I am not naming any names.

In this particular email he had nothing but vitriol for the other artist. I read his jealousy in every line because there was a time when the writer of this email was a hot topic of conversations. Yet, that ship had long since passed.

The performance artist that criticized the other performance artist did not know that who he was criticizing was loved by one of my most beloved and righteous late cousins. She was a cousin who helped damned near every Black performer who ever entered her orbit. You have seen her acting mentees, because they are everywhere. My cousin was one of the founders of The League of Professional Theatre Women.

The man doing all of this unnecessary critiquing did not know that the artist he criticized spoke at my cousin’s memorial services. For him to not know that simple fact basically meant he never listened to me. Men do that quite often. He never realized how completely offensive he was because I never bothered to respond to his unnecessary email. He never did any research before he opened his mouth. Or maybe he did know everything and just didn’t care.

An intelligent, well-educated Black woman not only does her background work but she also assesses what is best left unsaid as well as said. If she is in the process of cutting a good business deal with your Uncle, and she knows that you are on the outs with your Uncle, she will never mention you in any conversation with him.

Male privilege in any man of any color or race or ethnicity teaches men that they don’t really have to be all that concerned with the ideas or issues that women are interested in. Male privilege teaches that it is not really necessary for men to pay that much attention to the ideas or issues important to women in order to function. One of the men who did not succumb to the effects of male-centricity was the late tennis champion Arthur Ashe.

Ashe (above) was the only Black male athlete I ever heard who said things like, “The average man who talks about how many women he has bedded can’t even explain the hormonal changes that occur when a woman is menstruating.” I never forgot that because when he said it I knew that he could explain a woman’s menstrual cycle. He was a scholar, and an athlete that thought further than the head of his dick or the size of it.

Well, white privilege operates the same way as male privilege. Many white people assumed that they knew/know all they needed to know about Black folks, Latinos, Native Americans, and other peoples of color. Yet, now many of the most honorable among them are groping in the dark as to how they arrived at this moment in time in the United States where democracy and their liberties are at stake.

Have you ever wondered why school shooters in the United States are 95 percent male (and roughly 52 percent white males) and damned near no one raises the question “Is there something wrong with young males?”? You hear or read the occasional commentary or the occasional essay raising this point, but the obvious problems affecting boys and young men are swept under the rug for the sake of the illusion of male supremacy while the malevolence these crazy bastards inflict on children and adolescents are treated like isolated incidents.

If you do a quick Google search about the American population you will learn that Americans of every color, race, gender, and ethnicity only make up roughly 4.2 to 5 percent of the world’s population.

Let me repeat it another way. Roughly 95 percent of the population of the entire world exists outside of US borders; and 85 percent of the world’s population are people of color. There’s a little chart in Consumption by the United States that compares our consumption to other countries. Although this analysis was conducted in 2008, it does paint a disturbing picture of American excess.

There is a severe penalty for not paying any real attention to the thoughts and circumstances of people of color, and of people who are not Americans. There’s a penalty for not paying attention to the thoughts and circumstances of women, and particularly of women of color. I have written about American-centricity before; and the perils that go along with it.

As I write this, Felon 47 is in Scotland trying to fend off every question from Scottish journalists who want to know why he will not release the Epstein Files. Americans of all stripes need not think this will not reflect badly on all of us.

News is not always reported American-style everywhere in the world. What is important to us here in the United States is not always a headline somewhere else. Add the fact that Americans are primarily unilingual, and you can be sure there will be those moments when we just don’t know how damaged and inept we appear to the rest of the world because for most of us, all we speak is English.

The penalty is that we automatically know less than the people who we believe are less important than us; and we don’t find out how in the dark we are until we’re all in trouble. It is not Felon 47 that we need to worry about, but rather the future he is designing for us long after he is gone.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

You can also subscribe to my writings on Substack and stay in the loop with the best new research, history, journalism, prose, poetry, and etcetera.

Chronic Ignorance

Posted on July 12, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by ©️Leslye Joy Allen

Felon 47 was recently stunned to hear a Liberian official speak good English when the fact is the state that became the nation of Liberia was established by former African-American slaves with the assistance of the American Colonization Society in 1822.

In 1847, the state of Liberia established itself as a Republic and was recognized as such by several European nations.

Yet, Trumpolini was amazed to hear a Liberian speak grammatically correct English when English has been Liberia’s official language ever since its inception as a settlement, then later as a country over 200 years ago.

It gets worse. Back when George W. Bush was president he admitted to Condoleeza Rice that he didn’t know that there were Black people in Brazil. Brazil has more people of African descent than any other nation outside of the continent of Africa itself.

During the trans-Atlantic slave trade 4.9 million Africans were transported to Brazil. Yet, George W. Bush—never the sharpest crayon in the box—was surprised that there were Black folks in Brazil.

This kind of ignorance ranks right up there with the people who don’t know and never knew that the majority of Africans were not transported to the American Colonies/United States, but were transported primarily to Latin America and the Caribbean.

And the worst ignorance of all is the notion that Africans learned specific skills once they left the continent. Africans in the Senegambia region of Africa had been planting rice for over 2,000 years before Yeshu’a ben Yosef (aka “Jesus”) was born. For the record, there is no letter “J” in the Hebrew and Aramaic languages that he spoke.

(Graphic of an African Blacksmith)

The Nok culture, the Kingdom of Kush and the Shona people of the continent of Africa were specialists in Iron smeltingthousands of years before there was any trans-Atlantic slave trade. Many African ethnic groups arrived here as Blacksmiths. Africans were transported to what Europeans called the “New World” or the “Americas” to do two things—perform the work Europeans did not want to do and the work Europeans could not do.

Now, just look at what is sitting in the White House: a man meaner than a rattlesnake and dumber than a box of rocks who doesn’t know how to do anything but mistreat people.

©️Leslye Joy Allen

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

You can also subscribe to my writings on Substack and stay in the loop with the best new research, history, journalism, prose, poetry, and etcetera.

Normalizing Evil

Posted on April 15, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

In the past week or two there have been doctors saying how healthy Felon 47 is, along with Fund Managers openly wondering if he is insane. I have another hypothesis.

I don’t really think Felon 47 is insane, I think he is evil and crazy (there is a difference). I still remember when the late Dr. Frances Cress Welsing wrote that we have never scientifically studied “Evil.” She noted that at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazis where they were tried for “Crimes Against Humanity,” where they exterminated millions of Jews, Gypsies, Afro-Germans, LGBTQIA, and the Disabled, those Nazis were ruled to be perfectly sane by the world’s leading psychologists.

Now, I don’t want to make light of anyone’s mental health or this nation’s severe mental health crisis. Yet, every time some man does something horrible, particularly if he’s a white man, people speculate about his mental health instead of calling him the evil son-of-a-bitch that he is. I feel the same way about these school shooters who are overwhelmingly white and male who try to kill everybody they can, all because they can’t get a girlfriend.

Felon 47 is trying his best to get rid of every brown skinned person who migrated to the USA without giving any of them due process as he shreds all the basic tenets of our Constitution. He’s sending a majority of people who are not criminals off to other countries while his sycophants explain these actions as a part of keeping America safe. Short of putting them all into ovens to get rid of them the way Nazis would, he has ordered them all to an uncertain fate somewhere else in the world.

Everything Felon 47 is doing to immigrants and legal citizens, who happen to not be white, is going to make this nation a hundred times less safe. Go piss off the world and you will find out that the world is not majority white; it never has been.

People who voted for Felon 47 are also crazy and evil too—and dumb. Did this previous italicized sentence upset you a bit? Did it sound like I was unfairly vilifying an entire segment of the US population without giving them an opportunity to explain their choices or even redeem themselves? Well, I don’t give a damn because that is exactly what Felon 47 and his supporters are doing to immigrants, women, Black folks, Latinos, LGBTQIA, and the Disabled.

Felon 47 supporters voted for this; and even if some of them can prove they didn’t think Felon 47 would do all of this harm, no self-respecting Black or Brown person with half a brain is going to try to weed out who might be on their side from those who would kill or harm us. We have never had that kind of time to deal with anyone or anything that normalizes evil.

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

DEI: Flipping the Script With ARRAY

Posted on April 7, 2025 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

I remember when master filmmaker Ava DuVernay started AFFRM which stood for African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement. Later she modified it and renamed it ARRAY which has gone on to release one masterpiece independent film after another by Black women, Women of Color, white Women filmmakers and other Black filmmakers.

Goddess knows that Ava’s television series Queen Sugar remains my all time favorite television series of all time, right up there with POSE. Her film ORIGIN completely shattered every boundary of how a film infused with activism and history could be made and change minds. If you haven’t seen that film, I really don’t consider you a member of the Left if you haven’t done so. If you watch it, you will not be the same. You will never think the same; and every assumption you ever had, you will rethink it.

(Ava DuVernay here with Dr. Suraj Yengde who portrayed himself in the film ORIGIN. The film received a 9-minute standing ovation at the Vienna Film Festival in 2023.)

There was one thing Ava did when Queen Sugar hit the airwaves. She decided that only women, and particularly Black and other women of color, would direct the show. She gave over 40 women directors their television directorial debuts because, she reasoned, if she did not do it they would never be given the chance.

The irony is that DuVernay’s production of Queen Sugar earned recognition as one of the most ethnically and racially diverse crews in television history. Ain’t that something?

So, here’s something to think about. Ava DuVernay has some real badass men around her. Yet, ARRAY was and still is staffed primarily with women; and this company has run like a top since its inception.

So, here’s something else to ponder. Since Felon 47 is hellbent on controlling women, eliminating the histories of Black people and other POC from the record, and granting companies the right to not give a good Got-damned whether any of us will be hired for any job, isn’t it just as plausible for us to not hire or phuck with any of them?

I mean, if I am a Black woman running a successful business and I don’t want to be bothered with sexism or racism, then I can simply not hire any man of any color and not hire any white person of any gender. And what I will be doing will be perfectly legal under the administration of this president. Marinate on that for a moment.

I am an Independent Historian, Oral Historian and Dramaturge. Please consider supporting my work with a few bucks for Coffee and Eggs via my CashApp.

Leslye Joy Allen

Social Commentary, History, Theatre, Jazz, and the Environment

Category Archives: Gender History