Sex Abuse Scandals News Stories

Excerpts of Key Sex Abuse Scandals News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on sex abuse scandals from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

There was once a time - before the investigations, before the sexual abuse conviction - when rich and famous men loved to hang around with Jeffrey Epstein, a billionaire money manager who loved to party. President Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy” back in 2002, saying that “he’s a lot of fun to be with. He likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Now, Trump is on the witness list in a Florida court battle over how federal prosecutors handled allegations that Epstein, 64, sexually abused more than 40 minor girls, most of them between the ages of 13 and 17. The lawsuit questions why Trump’s nominee for labor secretary, former Miami U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta ... cut a non-prosecution deal with Epstein a decade ago rather than pursuing a federal indictment that Acosta’s staff had advocated. Epstein pleaded guilty to a Florida state charge of felony solicitation of underage girls in 2008 and served a 13-month jail sentence. Epstein’s unusually light punishment - he was facing up to a life sentence had he been convicted on federal charges - has raised questions about how Acosta handled the case. In [a] 2011 letter explaining his decision in the Epstein case, Acosta said he backed off from pressing charges after “a year-long assault on the prosecution and the prosecutors” by “an army of legal superstars” who represented Epstein.

Note: For more on this disturbing story, see this article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

A Florida mother first brought billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s peculiar caprices to the attention of Palm Beach police in 2005. Eventually, federal investigators and prosecutors built a case against Epstein ... that involved 17 witnesses and five other underaged women. But in September 2007, a Florida federal prosecutor named R. Alexander Acosta cut a secret plea deal with Epstein’s lawyers giving him ... an unusually lenient part-time, eight-hours a day county jail sentence, rather than the ten years or more in prison that a less powerful person might have gotten for repeated sex with minors. Acosta also deviated from legal norms when he granted the deal without first notifying the young women who had spoken to investigators about their experiences with the billionaire. Details of the deal were not made public until a federal judge unsealed it as part of a civil lawsuit brought by four women in 2015. Epstein was allowed to plead guilty to a single charge of soliciting prostitution from girls as young as 14. He ultimately served only 13 months in prison. On Wednesday, Acosta ... testified in front of the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee as Donald Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Labor. Asked about the Epstein deal, he characterized it as within the bounds of normal prosecutorial behavior. “Acosta is pretending the failure to prosecute was routine,” [a] former prosecutor told Newsweek, asking for anonymity. “But that’s bullshit. What happened here was completely and totally out of the main.”

Note: For more on this disturbing story, see this article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

An Associated Press investigation of U.N. missions during the past 12 years found nearly 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers and other personnel around the world. More than 300 of the allegations involved children. Only a fraction of the alleged perpetrators served jail time. In Haiti, at least 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers exploited nine children in a sex ring from 2004 to 2007, according to an internal U.N. report. 114 peacekeepers were sent home. None was ever imprisoned. In March, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced new measures to tackle sexual abuse. But the proclamation had a depressingly familiar ring: More than a decade ago, the United Nations commissioned a report that promised to do much the same thing, yet most of the reforms never materialized. For a full two years after those promises were made, the children in Haiti were passed around from soldier to soldier. And in the years since, peacekeepers have been accused of sexual abuse the world over. The AP found that some 150 allegations of abuse and exploitation by U.N. peacekeepers and other personnel were reported in Haiti alone between 2004 and 2016. Aside from the Sri Lankan sex ring in Haiti, some perpetrators were jailed for other cases. Alleged abusers came from Bangladesh, Brazil, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Uruguay and Sri Lanka. More countries may have been involved, but the United Nations only started disclosing alleged perpetrators' nationalities after 2015.

Note: In 2015, UN officials unsuccessfully attempted to cover up an internal report alleging sexual abuse of children by peacekeeping troops in Africa. Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads directly to the highest levels of government. A second suppressed documentary, "Conspiracy of Silence," goes even deeper into this topic in the US. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

In early February 1987, an anonymous tipster in Tallahassee, Fla., made a phone call to police. Two "well-dressed men" seemed to be "supervising" six disheveled and hungry children in a local park, the caller said. The cops went after the case like bloodhounds - at least at first. The two men were identified as members of the Finders. They were charged with child abuse in Florida. In Washington, D.C., police and U.S. Customs Service agents raided a duplex apartment building and a warehouse connected to the group. Among the evidence seized: detailed instructions on obtaining children for unknown purposes and several photographs of nude children. The more the police learned about the Finders, the more bizarre they seemed: There were suggestions of child abuse, Satanism, dealing in pornography and ritualistic animal slaughter. None of the allegations was ever proved, however. Today ... the Justice Department has begun a new investigation into the Finders. One of the unresolved questions involves allegations that the Finders are somehow linked to the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1987, when Customs agents sought to examine the evidence gathered by Washington, D.C., police, they were told that the Finders investigation "had become a CIA internal matter." The police report on the case had been classified secret. Even now, Tallahassee police complain about the handling of the Finders investigation by D.C. police. "They dropped this case," one Tallahassee investigator says, "like a hot rock."

Note: For lots more on the disturbing group called "The Finders," see the excellent research available at this link. As US News & World Report does not have archives for older articles like this, the link above takes you to a scanned copy of the the article taken directly from a copy of the magazine we obtained.

Choate Rosemary Hall, the elite Connecticut boarding school, said on Thursday that at least 12 former teachers had sexually molested - and, in at least one case, raped - students in a pattern of abuse dating to the 1960s. A report prepared by an investigator for the board of trustees [said that] the parents of a Choate student complained to the school in the early 1980s after their daughter contracted herpes from an English teacher. And in another case, the report describes a student’s rape on a school trip to Costa Rica. None of the teachers’ actions were reported to the police. Choate ... is the latest in a string of prestigious private academies that have faced accusations of sexual abuse by faculty members, including St. George’s School, in Rhode Island, and Horace Mann and Poly Prep in New York City. In a letter to members of the school community that accompanied the report, Michael J. Carr, the chairman of the board of trustees, and Alex D. Curtis, the headmaster, apologized and thanked the victims who came forward. The report names 12 former faculty members who it says abused students, both male and female. In some cases, faculty members had sexual relationships with students for months. For years, the school kept allegations of sexual misconduct from getting out, according to the report. “Sexual misconduct matters were handled internally and quietly,” it said. “Faculty was ... was cautioned to say nothing about the situation if asked.”

Note: Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads directly to the highest levels of government. A second suppressed documentary, "Conspiracy of Silence," goes even deeper into this topic in the US. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

Authorities say they’ve uncovered a massive international sex trafficking ring in Southern California. Prosecutors announced the arrest of four people connected to the Orange County-based enterprise that allegedly placed thousands of ads for sexual services in 29 states over the past two years. The ring was based locally in Irvine. Women and girls from China were forced to sell themselves for sex and sometimes forced to work 14 hours a day in homes purchased specifically for the purposes of prostitution. Investigators tracked the ring through thousands of ads selling sex on Backpage.com. “There’s a townhouse in Cottage Grove [Minnesota], that was bought and paid for with cash. And when police entered, they saw two beds. That’s it. But they also saw a line of guys waiting on a couch, waiting for their turn,” said Pete Orput, an attorney with Washington County. The actual bust took place in Minneapolis but ... two of the ring leaders live in Irvine. Advocate Jim Carson helps rehabilitate victims of human trafficking in Orange County, and says Irvine might be consistently named as one of the safest cities in the U.S., but not for the young women he helps. “I think the tip of the iceberg, we hear about [trafficking data], we go, ‘my God these numbers are so huge’, but I honestly think it’s much, much bigger than people realize,” said ... Carson. He says on just one day recently between 1-9 p.m., he saw 51 ads on Backpage.com for escorts in Irvine. “Every ad on that internet, they’re seeing five to twenty dates a night,” said Carson.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

Child trafficking referrals in the UK have hit a record high after rising by 30 per cent in a year, statistics have revealed. The number of children referred to the UK Government’s National Referral Mechanism (NRM), which identifies victims of human trafficking, increased to 1,278 in 2016, the highest figure on record, according to the latest figures from the National Crime Agency. More than a third of all potential victims of trafficking were children aged 18 and under, with a majority of children drawn into exploitative labour, including forced criminality. Trafficking covers children moved within the UK, as well as move to the country from abroad. The largest increase was the number of UK national children reported to have been abused in sexual exploitation, which showed a staggering 104.8 per cent rise on the previous year - a rise that it is hoped reflects a growing awareness that child sexual exploitation often manifests in the form of trafficking. Also featuring highly in the figures were countries affected by conflicts ... indicating that children fleeing war and instability are also vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation. A large number of these cases are thought to have travelled ... in the back of lorries facilitated by traffickers or people smugglers - indicating that they can remain at risk of exploitation by the same networks after they have arrived in the UK. Alarmingly, while numbers of potential victims of trafficking increased, positive conclusive decisions - which enable victims to access support - decreased to the lowest point in NRM history.

Note: Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads directly to the highest levels of government. A second suppressed documentary, "Conspiracy of Silence," goes even deeper into this topic in the US. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

Europe is becoming the global hub for the hosting of child sexual abuse images and videos, suggests a report. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) found that 60% of worldwide abuse material was now in Europe - an increase of 19%. The Netherlands topped the list of European nations hosting the illegal content, said the IWF. Improved reporting and policing by net firms in North America are believed to have driven the shift. The IWF is the UK body that acts to find and remove abuse content from UK networks. In 2015, about 57% of the web pages containing abuse content could be found in North America. In 2016, this had dropped to 37% with the majority now in Europe. About 34,212 web pages were found to be displaying abuse content in Europe - which also includes Russia and Turkey. Arda Gerkens, a Dutch MP who helps to oversee the nation's anti-abuse hotline, said it too had seen an "overall" rise in the number of reports to ISPs about material both in 2016 and 2015. A spokeswoman for the UK's National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) said ... "We must never forget that there is a victim behind every child sexual abuse image. Every time these horrific pictures are viewed a child is re-abused. Anyone who wilfully seeks out this material is complicit in fuelling this appalling industry."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

A British man who traveled to Poland to give a lecture on conspiracy theories and was found dead in his Warsaw apartment was conducting an investigation into alleged pedophilia that took place in a US Army-run facility. Prior to his death, [Max] Spiers texted his mother to say 'If anything happens to me, investigate'. He was ruled to have died from natural causes despite no post-mortem examination being carried out on his body. Friends have claimed he died ... after he 'vomited a black liquid'. Now it has emerged that Spiers was inquiring about allegations of widespread sexual abuse against children that was committed at a military base in California by employees acting under the influence of a satanic cult. In 1987, the US Army demolished a child care center at its Presidio base in Northern California just one year after as many as 60 children were sexually abused there. One civilian employee of the center, Gary Willard Hambright, was indicted for molesting 10 children. Charges against him were ultimately dropped. One US Army officer at the base, Lt. Col. Michael Aquino, was alleged to have taken part in the abuse. Aquino was known as the self-confessed founder of a Satanic movement known as The Temple of Set. Despite rumors of his involvement and a police investigation, he was never charged. Spiers was looking into the Presidio affair and Aquino's role, which he believed to be part of a larger underground movement that entailed ritual sexual abuse of children in San Francisco in the late 1980s.

Note: For lots more on the Presidio affair, see this excellently researched piece. Read a great essay on several cases of pedophilia rings involving top politicians. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

The Army announced it is closing and demolishing a child-care center at its base at the Presidio after allegations that as many as 60 youngsters were sexually abused there. Gary Willard Hambright, 34 years old, a former worker at the center and a former Southern Baptist minister, has been charged with abusing 10 boys and girls there. He worked at the center as a civilian employee for 18 months. A Federal grand jury in San Francisco spent 10 months investigating abuse allegations surrounding the Presidio center, and almost 100 children were examined for physical or psychological signs of sexual abuse. At least four children were discovered to have chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease. An assistant United States attorney, Peter Robinson, said Mr. Hambright was charged with molesting only 10 children because other victims were so young they would not be allowed to testify in court. More than 70 children had been interviewed by Army therapists as potential abuse victims. Parents have said as many as 60 children were molested at the center. A 16-member Army review team recently inspected the Presidio center as part of an investigation of the almost 300 child-care centers run by the Army, which care for an estimated 94,000 youngsters daily. Allegations of sexual abuse have surfaced at more than 10 percent of those centers since 1984. Among them are the centers at Fort Dix in New Jersey and the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Note: Charges against Mr. Hambright were eventually dropped. Is this justice? For lots more critical information on this disturbing case, see this excellently researched piece. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

Sex trafficking wasn't a major concern in the early 1980s, when Beth Jacobs was a teenager. If you were a prostitute, the thinking went, it was your choice. Jacobs thought that too ... until [a] violent pimp forced [her] to work as a sex slave. The awareness of sex trafficking has changed a lot since then. Just last year, an old motor home parked at a truck stop caught the eye of trucker Kevin Kimmel. "I saw a guy go in it," Kimmel says. "And then I saw what I thought was a young girl peek out and be abruptly pulled back from the window." Kimmel called the police - and ended weeks of ... forced prostitution for the victim. Kylla Lanier says that Kimmel's actions "epitomizes the mission" of her group, Truckers Against Trafficking. She founded the group with her mother and three sisters a few years ago. "Trafficking happens everywhere," Lanier says. "It's happening in homes, in conference centers, at schools, casinos, truck stops, hotels, motels, everywhere. You know, it's an everywhere problem, but truckers happen to be everywhere." And these days TAT stickers, wallet cards and posters - showing a phone number for a sex trafficking hotline - are becoming ubiquitous in the trucking industry. TAT teaches drivers to try to spot sullen, hopeless-looking children, teens and young adults. Jacobs managed to escape her life of forced prostitution. Now she counsels other survivors and works with TAT. Calls to the hotline [promoted by TAT] have freed hundreds of trafficking victims.

Note: Watch this inspiring video to see how these truckers are saving lives.

The former president of Penn State University was convicted Friday of keeping a lid on the scandal surrounding notorious child-abusing coach Jerry Sandusky. A jury [found] Graham Spanier guilty of one count of child endangerment. The charge stemmed from Spanier's handling of a complaint against Sandusky, a once-popular assistant football coach whose career at Penn State spanned three decades. The trial centered on how Spanier and two other university leaders handled a complaint by a graduate assistant who said he reported seeing Sandusky sexually molesting a boy in a team shower in 2001. The administrators told Sandusky he could not bring children on to the campus any longer, but they did not report the matter to police or child welfare authorities. Sandusky was not arrested until 2011 after an anonymous tip led prosecutors to investigate the shower incident. He was convicted the next year of sexually abusing 10 boys and is serving a decades-long prison sentence. Four of the eight young men testifying at Sandusky’s trial said the abuse occurred after 2001. “Evil in the form of Jerry Sandusky was allowed to run wild,” Deputy Attorney General Patrick Schulte told the jury. The scandal ... resulted in the school paying out more than $90 million to settle civil claims by over 30 accusers. Two of Spanier’s former lieutenants, athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor child endangerment charges a week ago and testified against Spanier.

Note: Read more about how senior Penn State officials covered up Sandusky's crimes due to fears of bad publicity. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

When Angus Crawford, a journalist at the British Broadcasting Corporation, started reporting on sexualized images of children on Facebook, he knew he had to proceed with caution. Mr. Crawford ... began investigating the presence of obscene images of children on Facebook last year, [and] found that pedophiles were using secret pages to share images of children. A subsequent police investigation led to one man being imprisoned. This year, [Mr. Crawford] followed up and found that there were still images on the website that appeared to break Facebook guidelines, which state that the social media company will remove any content that promotes sexual violence or exploitation. Mr. Crawford reported the images using Facebook’s internal system, but the company took down only 18 of the 100 that he flagged. He then contacted the social network directly ... and was asked to provide examples of images that he had reported. When he provided examples ... the company reported Mr. Crawford and the BBC to the police. The company filed its report with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center. Facebook has said it is improving its system for reporting offensive content, but the incident has raised questions about exactly how it polices its site. Mr. Crawford ... noted an apparent contradiction between the view of Facebook’s moderation system, which determined that the photos were not in breach of the social network’s guidelines, and the company’s decision to report the BBC to the police.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

Anguish over the abduction and death of girls as young as eight at the hands of a convicted sex offender, Marc Dutroux, together with persistent allegations of official cover-ups, has been revived by an announcement that [Jacques Langlois], the chief investigating magistrate in the case, wants to reopen medical evidence of sexual assault on the children. And, in further disclosures ... a book by [Marc Verwilghen], the highly respected chairman of a parliamentary inquiry into the case, claims that his commission's findings were muzzled by political and judicial leaders to prevent details emerging of complicity in the crimes. In August 1996, [the children's] bodies were found buried in Mr Dutroux's back garden in Charleroi. They had disappeared 14 months before, and had apparently starved to death, locked in a cell in Mr Dutroux's basement. The bodies of two teenage girls were also found buried in the garden, with that of Bernard Weinstein, an associate with whom he had fallen out. Two other teenage girls were found alive in the basement cell after the police, who had previously searched the property three times without noticing it, finally broke into the house. Although there is plenty of evidence that Mr Dutroux kidnapped the children ... Mr Langlois now apparently wants to establish whether he [or anyone else] also sexually assaulted them. One of the rescued girls, Sabine Dardenne, 12, who was locked up in the cell for three months, told police of being taken to a 'beautiful white house' by Mr Dutroux and being sexually assaulted.

Note: Explore more excellent research proving a major cover-up of this case. Read a highly revealing essay on several cases of pedophilia rings involving top politicians. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

Lawyers in Pennsylvania say their client was sexually exploited at a motel for years, alleging the teen girl was a victim of human trafficking. “This child was forced into sex slavery,” attorney Nadeem Bezar told reporters. The teen’s lawyers are using Pennsylvania’s human trafficking law to sue the motel where they say their client was sexually exploited, marking the first civil suit under the law since it was enacted in 2014. Lawyers allege employees at the Roosevelt Inn in northeast Philadelphia knew that a 14-year-old girl was being held against her will for two years. She was forced to have sex with more than 1,000 men. The girl, now 17, wants the hotel to pay for what happened to her. She’s suing the motel’s owners, the motel’s management company and the manager himself. According to the [Philadelphia] Inquirer, the girl managed to escape and reconnect with her family after two years at the motel. Those responsible for trafficking the teen were convicted and sentenced to prison. The motel is well-known to Philadelphia prosecutors as “the epicenter of human trafficking” in the city. An assistant district attorney, Erin O’Brien, told the Inquirer that [motel manager Yanga] Patel had cooperated with police in previous investigations, but said “almost every trafficking investigation we have, we see the victim is at Roosevelt Inn.” “You can’t have a line of johns out the front door and around the room waiting without them knowing,” [Attorney Tom] Kline said. “The front desk would direct the traffic to the room of this child.”

Note: Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads directly to the highest levels of government. A second suppressed documentary, "Conspiracy of Silence," goes even deeper into this topic in the US. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

Two former high-level Penn State administrators pleaded guilty Monday to misdemeanor charges of child endangerment, for their roles in covering up child sex abuse by disgraced assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. Former Vice President Gary Schultz and former Athletic Director Tim Curley each took a plea bargain that - if accepted by the judge - will carry a penalty of up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. As part of the plea bargain, the felony charges they originally faced were reduced to misdemeanors. The pleas also open the possibility they may testify against former university President Graham Spanier ... who has been charged with a conspiracy felony and a child endangerment misdemeanor. The charges against all three men pertain to how they handled the multiple allegations of sexual abuse against Sandusky, who in 2012 was convicted of sexually abusing 10 boys over a 15-year span. "Prosecutors said Spanier, Curley and Schultz knew of complaints involving Sandusky showering with boys in 1998 and 2001," The Associated Press reported in 2012. A series of 2001 emails — now key to the government's case — show that the men at least considered the situation serious enough to possibly warrant police intervention. They ultimately rejected the idea of calling authorities. "This was not an oversight," then-Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly said in 2012. "It was not misjudgment on their part. This was a conspiracy of silence by top officials to actively conceal the truth."

Note: Read more about how senior Penn State officials covered up Sandusky's crimes due to fears of bad publicity. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

A former child sex slave sold into a Belgian aristocratic paedophile ring where boys and girls were raped, tortured and murdered has revealed the horrors of her five years of abuse. Anneke Lucas, 53, was sold into the murderous paedophile network in Belgium when she was just six years old in 1969. Recalling her sickening abuse, she said: 'I was raped many, many, many times. 'Usually it was a full night and weekend and so I gathered I was raped for about six hours a week - more than 1,700 hours before I reached the age of 12.' Speaking to MailOnline, she said: 'I was first taken to the paedophile ring when I was six by a woman who worked as a cleaning lady for my mother. 'Later on, my mother got involved and then she started to take me herself.' She said: 'The adult men that were part of the network were there for various reasons. 'There was a lot of alcohol and a lot of drugs. The children were a commodity ... and used for sex. 'Children were killed. Boys were more often tortured but girls were killed.' At the age of 11, having spent five and a half years inside the twisted aristocratic sex ring, it was decided she was 'of no use anymore' and was to be killed. However she was saved when one of her abusers made a deal with the politician in charge of the peadophile network while she was tortured. The man who tortured her was one of the defendants in the Dutroux case, which, when it broke in 1996, was believed it would blow up the Belgian pedophile network. Eight years later, only Marc Dutroux received a life sentence.

Note: Read an excellent essay on several cases of pedophilia rings involving top politicians. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

Oscar-winning actress Jane Fonda has revealed she is a rape survivor and suffered sexual abuse as a child. In an interview with fellow Oscar winner Brie Larson ... the 79-year-old also said she had once lost a job because she refused her boss's sexual advances. The star added she thought being a young actress now was "terrifying" because of female sexualisation. "You have to get naked so much. There is even more emphasis on how you look." Fonda said she "felt diminished" growing up because the men in her life were "victims of a [patriarchal] belief system". "To show you the extent to which a patriarchy takes a toll on females - I've been raped, I've been sexually abused as a child and I've been fired because I wouldn't sleep with my boss and I always thought it was my fault; that I didn't do or say the right thing. "I know young girls who've been raped and didn't even know it was rape. They think, 'It must have been because I said no the wrong way'. "One of the great things the women's movement has done is to make us realise that [rape and abuse is] not our fault. We were violated and it's not right." Fonda has been a long-time activist and advocate for women's rights and supporter of the Rape Foundation and Rape Treatment Centre in Los Angeles. She revealed at a benefit in 2014 that her mother, Frances Ford Seymour, was sexually abused as a child aged eight. She eventually took her own life at 42, when Fonda was 12.

Note: Jane Fonda's revelations about sexual abuse in Hollywood highlight a longstanding problem. Other well-known actors have suggested that organized abuse networks operate freely in the entertainment industry. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

President Donald Trump says he will bring the "full force and weight" of the U.S. government to combat an "epidemic" of human trafficking. The president is meeting at the White House with senior advisers and representatives of organizations that deal with trafficking. His daughter, Ivanka Trump, is among those in attendance. Trump calls human trafficking a problem that is "not talked about enough." He says he will order the departments of Justice and Homeland Security to take a hard look at the resources they are devoting to addressing the issue.

Note: Many believe Trump is aware of the pedophilia rings leading to the highest levels of government, as has been exposed in the suppressed documentary "Conspiracy of Silence." In this CNN video, Trump calls the problem "an epidemic." Immediately after his swearing in ceremony, Attorney General Jeff Sessions' first act was to sign an executive order on stopping and preventing international trafficking, including "trafficking and smuggling of human beings." 9/11 hero Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney has also exposed this major problem.

The unthinkable is happening at facilities throughout the country: Vulnerable seniors are being raped and sexually abused by the very people paid to care for them. It's impossible to know just how many victims are out there. But through an exclusive analysis of state and federal data and interviews with experts, regulators and the families of victims, CNN has found that this little-discussed issue is more widespread than anyone would imagine. In cases reviewed by CNN, victims and their families were failed at every stage. Nursing homes were slow to investigate and report allegations because of a reluctance to believe the accusations - or a desire to hide them. Police viewed the claims as unlikely at the outset, dismissing potential victims because of failing memories or jumbled allegations. State regulators failed to flag patterns of repeated allegations against a single caregiver. It's these systemic failures that make it especially hard for victims to get justice - and even easier for perpetrators to get away with their crimes. Using inspection reports filed between 2013 and 2016 [a CNN analysis] found that the federal government has cited more than 1,000 nursing homes for mishandling or failing to prevent alleged cases of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse at their facilities during this period. And nearly 100 of these facilities have been cited multiple times during the same period. These numbers likely represent only a fraction of the alleged sexual abuse incidents in nursing homes nationwide.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.