Danielle Bensky’s ambitions are unremarkable: to own a house one day, to have a dog, “literally just to have a normal existence where we’re not trying to fight the government and constantly be facing our own abuse.” In Victoria Bekiempis’s Guardian feature, that sentence functions as an indictment of how recovery is financed in the United States. The injury is done to a person; the treatment is billed to that person, and the coverage that exists arrives as a patchwork of settlements and funds rather than as care.
Bensky is uninsured. Her mental-health treatment comes through a fund created by a settlement between an investment bank and US Virgin Islands authorities. Everything else is hers to carry: physical therapy for a post-traumatic injury at roughly $200 a visit, which she says she should attend more than twice a month and cannot afford, and the yoga that keeps her centred at about $250 monthly. “I’m paying for everything out of pocket.”
What recovery costs, line by line
The article’s accounting is its argument. Jess Michaels, a former professional dancer, describes a career dismantled by the assault — losing her nerve at auditions, then spending much of her twenties “stuck in bed, frozen or crying,” without insurance for much of it. She attributes gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, immune and endocrine problems to years of untreated nervous-system harm. “There’s something that happens when you have PTSD for a long period of time,” she says. “It doesn’t just go away.”
Annie Farmer, who testified against Ghislaine Maxwell, spent “many thousands” of dollars on therapy between 2019 and the near-present before the Virgin Islands fund began paying for it. Others in the same position are not so covered.
What is striking is which treatments insurance declines. A functional-medicine doctor who understands chronic trauma is expensive and, Michaels says, “often not covered by insurance” — leaving her to navigate her own care “with AI, my PCP, my insurance company.” The modalities patients describe as most useful, from hands-on therapy to the movement practices that manage a dysregulated nervous system, sit outside the reimbursable core.
A restitution fund, with long odds
Bekiempis anchors the policy question in a bill introduced by Representatives Ayanna Pressley, Teresa Leger Fernández and Deborah Ross. The Survivors’ Rights Restitution Act would establish a restitution fund in the judicial branch for survivors of sexual violence whose rights were violated by the federal government, naming survivors of Epstein and Maxwell explicitly.
Pressley’s statement is the clearest statement of the problem in the piece: the financial burden survivors carry, “coupled with mental and physical trauma, can be debilitating,” producing time away from work or the end of a job entirely, lost income, and medical and mental-health expenses that keep accruing. The article is candid that the bill is unlikely to clear both chambers and win the president’s signature soon; it is a long-term prospect, not relief.
Pay-outs have been uneven on their own terms. Spencer Kuvin of Goldlaw says awards tracked the severity of the abuse and its effects — “Some survivors received tens of thousands while others received millions.” Michaels, told comparable non-Epstein settlements can reach $2.5m, says she received “a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that.”
The bill for speaking up
The feature also documents a cost that rarely enters these discussions: advocacy. Bensky took unpaid time off work and now finds employers reluctant, some calling survivors “too political”; she paid her own way to the State of the Union address and to Pressley’s press conference. Travel reimbursements do not cover dog-sitting at $175–$200 a day.
Julie Roginsky, who pursued a harassment claim against Roger Ailes and co-founded Lift Our Voices, describes the aftermath as a private collapse that outlasts the public applause: “you’re lying in bed at night at 2 o’clock in the morning, looking at the ceiling and wondering: what the hell just happened to my life?” She tells survivors that coming forward is a personal decision because the professional penalties can be brutal — a point Michaels makes in one line: “People go, ‘Oh, you chose to do it,’ but who’s going to do it for us?”
Read together, the accounts describe a system in which healing is a budget line and access depends on which fund your case happened to generate. The alternative the bill proposes is modest by comparison: that the cost of recovery be treated as an obligation rather than a fee.