What does anger feel like to you? Are you tapped into the sound of your heart thumping through your body like a drumbeat, to your blood – hot and bubbling – in your veins? Does your breath quicken, your body tense up to be ready to fight? When did you last want to rip, shred, and tear?
For me, anger struck like a visceral, full-body thunderbolt when the latest tranche of the Epstein files dropped in January, with the US Department of Justice publishing more than three million pages of documents, 180,000 images and 2,000 videos.
Among those images were ones that try as I might, I can’t erase from my mind – particularly late at night as I lie there, thinking about the way young women were treated by the late paedophile financier, Jeffrey Epstein , and his baying social circle of rich and powerful men.
I think about the institutions, built on misogyny, that propped up and enabled decades of rape, trafficking and abuse and I think about the utter failure of duty to victims like Virginia Giuffre , who – before her tragic suicide in April last year – fought for more than a decade to be taken seriously.
She spoke out time and time again about how she was “sold” by Epstein to his “friends” when she was just a teenager. We witnessed her long and difficult fight for justice against the establishment – including settling a sexual assault lawsuit against Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in 2022, who she said had sex with her when she was just 17 (and on two other occasions), which he denies.
There were other women in the files, too – dozens of them, some as young as my own daughter. To read of 14-year-olds describing distressing accounts of abuse, assault and violation makes me, a mother, want to scream. When I think about them, you bet I feel angry.
More than that: I feel utterly enraged.
Where to put all this anger? Well, I found the perfect spot: I poured my grief, my bitterness and my heartbreak into art alongside dozens of other female-identifying and non-binary artists. We came together this weekend to attempt to make something beautiful – and, importantly, public – out of our collective fury.
Enter: All the Rage , a theatrical response to the Epstein files, which ran as a rapid-response “guerrilla play” over three rippling, angry days in London. It was written and performed by 80 furious women – I am one of them.
I wrote a poem called “A letter to my younger self” for the show, detailing the many times I’ve been wronged (to put it lightly) by men. Some of these incidents began when I was just nine years old.
It wasn’t easy – seeing my work performed has left me feeling deeply exposed – but then, it was never going to be. Alongside my own work, All the Rage featured monologues and powerfully performed scenes; walls plastered with printouts of poems and plays written in little more than weeks; underwear, embroidered with slogans like, “But I was wearing tracksuit bottoms”; a floor daubed with paint yelling “Reclaim” and a 50-minute collective piece performed by a core cast of nine professional actors. There was an entire room called “The Witch Files” filled with marked-up documents from the Epstein files, highlighting the thousands of times it was branded a “witch hunt”; another featured an exact copy of a teenage bedroom.
The audience were free to walk around the space for two hours, stumbling upon the horrors and revelations for themselves.
The titles of the pieces speak for themselves: one was called “Why Men Laugh”; another, “The Medical Room”; one, “A Day in the Office”; another, “Notes for my Daughter”. One was simply, “Male Anger”, another “Her Rage”; while one was “Too Old for This”. One live piece took place at a mock HR tribunal, another at an immigration office. I related to all of them.
It started, as these things tend to, with women telling each other stories – on WhatsApp . As our writer and director, Rebecca Lenkiewicz (screenwriter of She Said , the film about the #MeToo movement and Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein) put it initially: “Is anyone else enraged about the Epstein files and how it’s all about the men and the money?”
From there, within three months, we transformed from a grassroots group to holding a full-throttle production this weekend at Theatre Deli, a repurposed office building in Leadenhall in the City of London – aptly, an area dominated by men and by money.
The space is integral to the story: after all, a report by MPs in 2024 showed women working in London’s financial district are still routinely subjected to “shocking” levels of sexual harassment and bullying. Similarly, we know that Epstein’s social circle included tech titans, entrepreneurs, entertainment moguls and politicians, where money couldn’t just buy you influence – but underage women, too.
The show has now closed, but I can only hope its legacy will live on – that we’ve changed something. For in my livid and white-hot moments, I still think about those young women reduced to little more than numbers in t…
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