Esther Did Not Win a Beauty Pageant. She Survived a Royal Trafficking System.

What an Epstein survivor recognizes in the elite architecture of the Persian king’s harem

Editorial note: This article applies contemporary trafficking concepts to an ancient narrative and includes allegations and personal testimony from Epstein trafficking survivor Victoria Cameron. Jeffrey Epstein died before trial on the 2019 federal charges. Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of crimes connected to facilitating and participating in the sexual abuse of children. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has denied sexual-abuse allegations made against him; the civil case brought by Virginia Giuffre was settled without an admission of liability. Historical conclusions are qualified where the available evidence is incomplete.

For generations, Esther’s entrance into the Persian court has been retold as an ancient beauty contest crowned by romance, divine destiny and the celebration of Purim. However, without the soft lighting, Esther 2 describes something else: young women gathered by imperial order, placed in official custody, prepared for sexual access to a king and transferred afterward into a second house from which they could return only if he called them by name.

Victoria Cameron believes modern readers have misunderstood the story because they have mistaken luxury for consent and royal preference for love. Cameron, a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking organization, says the machinery surrounding Esther resembles an elite form of sexual exploitation she encountered as a teenager: a powerful man at the center, women routed through him, an institution devoted to making them desirable, and other powerful people within reach of the system.

The two systems were not historically identical. One belongs to an ancient imperial king and the other to a modern criminal enterprise serving kings, princes and other men of power. But Cameron’s comparison is not based on palaces or superficial resemblance. It concerns the architecture of power: who selected the women, who controlled their movement, who received sexual access, and who determined what happened to them afterward.

The Story Beneath the Beauty-Pageant Retelling

The Book of Esther begins its central drama with Queen Vashti’s removal after she refuses a royal command. The king’s attendants then propose a search throughout the provinces for beautiful young virgins. Officers are to gather them into the women’s house at Susa, place them under the custody of Hegai, the king’s eunuch, and provide cosmetic treatments. The king approves the plan.

The text does not describe women submitting applications, receiving invitations they may decline or competing voluntarily for marriage. The Hebrew verb translated as “taken” or “brought” implies forced abduction by imperial royal command. The women are gathered across the empire; and after arrival they are placed under royal custody. Consent is never requested or recorded.

Esther—an orphaned Jewish woman being raised by her relative Mordecai—is among those taken into the palace. Mordecai instructs her to conceal her Jewish heritage and family. She gains Hegai’s favor, receives provisions, cosmetics and attendants, and is advanced within the women’s house. None of those advantages restores her freedom.

Each woman undergoes twelve months of preparation: six months with oil of myrrh and six months with perfumes and other treatments. When her turn comes, she goes to the king in the evening. In the morning, she is transferred to a second women’s house under Shaashgaz, the eunuch responsible for the concubines. She does not return unless the king delights in her and summons her by name.

Sex is not narrated graphically, but the sequence is difficult to mistake. The woman enters the king’s quarters at night and leaves in the morning classified among his concubines. Whatever ancient legal or court terminology surrounded the encounter, the narrative provides no evidence that she could refuse it, return to her former life or choose another future.

The Kingpin Examining the Product

“The kingpin was examining the product to see how he wanted to use it.” —Victoria Cameron

Cameron’s description is intentionally disturbing. It rejects the language of courtship because the king was not meeting free women as equals. 

“It’s disturbing to me that people call this courtship. The king involved in the Esther story was a human trafficking kingpin,” said Cameron. 

Every woman passed through the same controlled process. The institution altered her appearance,  delivered her to the king and then classified her according to his response.

In Cameron’s analysis, the king occupied the position of a trafficker evaluating human inventory. He alone possessed the power to elevate one woman, summon another, retain hundreds within the institution, permit officials to assign them other functions, or even sell them to other men of power. 

A crown could change Esther’s rank inside that system, but it could not retroactively create consent to the process that placed her there. She was a hostage.

This is also why the king’s attraction to Esther should not be confused with evidence of a mutual love story.  The text reports the king’s preference, favor and decision. It does not describe Esther choosing him, falling in love with him or acquiring an ordinary wife’s ability to approach her husband. In fact if she had developed an attachment to him, modern psychologists would label it “Stockholm syndrome.” 

Later, when her people face extermination, Esther tells Mordecai that approaching the king without an invitation can bring death—even for her.

Not All Trafficking Looks Like a Locked Cell

Popular trafficking imagery often emphasizes visible captivity: locked rooms, physical violence, armed guards and women sold openly on streets. Those realities exist, but they are not the only way exploitation operates. A system serving wealthy and influential men can be surrounded by beautiful homes, international travel, desirable clothing, expensive beauty treatments and apparent social opportunity.

Federal prosecutors accused Epstein in 2019 of operating a coordinated system that recruited and sexually exploited girls at his properties. In 2021, a federal jury convicted Ghislaine Maxwell on charges connected to facilitating and participating in the sexual abuse of children. The public record also established Epstein’s extensive social access to wealthy and influential circles. Association alone does not prove participation in his crimes, but that access formed part of the environment in which his organization acquired prestige and reach.

Virginia Giuffre alleged that Epstein and Maxwell trafficked her to powerful men, including Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Andrew denied Giuffre’s allegations. Her civil case against him ended in a settlement without an admission of liability. The allegations and denials require careful legal attribution, but the case illustrates the elite-access model Cameron is describing: exploitation can be organized for the benefit of men whose position makes the surrounding environment look privileged rather than criminal.

Cameron says that in Paris in 1996, where she was taken by Epstein after he and Maxwell child trafficked her and kept her as a hostage when she was a teenager, Epstein attempted to recruit her into his organization. She refused and her refusal angered him. Cameron reports that she was required to sit through meetings in which the organization and its expectations were presented to her. She understood that Epstein believed she was a virgin and chose not to rape her because he considered the sale of her virginity potentially more valuable.

According to Cameron, women associated with the operation could receive luxury clothing from any clothing designer they wanted, luxury cosmetics and beauty products from any store they wanted, beauty procedures, breast implants, liposuction and even plastic surgery. 

“What don’t you like about your appearance?” Cameron recalled Epstein saying to her. “Whatever you want to change, I’ll change it. But after I do this, you belong to me, and I decide what happens to you for the rest of your life,” she recalls he said. 

“I saw it like making a deal with the devil, and I told him I wasn’t going to participate,” she said. “This made him mad. He told me no one tells him no.”

Epstein’s willingness to finance changes to the appearance of the women working for him as escorts could resemble extraordinary generosity. Cameron understood it as investment in people he expected to control. The benefit was transactional: he enhanced the women’s marketability while retaining authority over where they went and whom they were expected to serve.

Cameron also recalls that some adult women in the Paris house described themselves at the time as willing participants who had deliberately sought access to Epstein’s organization. 

“I talked to women who told me they sought him out because they wanted to work for him. They told me they wanted to be escorts. They told me they chose that career because they didn’t want to work and it was better than status quo prostitution,” said Cameron. 

Now, that the organization has gone up in flames and their bosses have been arrested, and sentenced in the case of Maxwell, many of the women in Epstein’s workforce are now subsequently describing themselves as victims.

“I don’t understand how they were victims, at least not the ones I saw. In fact, I was horrified when they told me they chose this and acted like they had won the lottery by getting that job,” said Cameron. 

About some of the self described Epstein victims, Cameron said, “Sometimes it looks like to me that some of them may have had a fight with their bosses which is why they ganged up against them and turned against them and decided to call themselves victims. Or when they saw their bosses arrested, suddenly became afraid of criminal prosecution for what they willfully participated in, and decided to call themselves victims to get out of charges. Or maybe they were vindictive and wanted to punish their bosses or get back at them for something, or wanted to see if they could try their hand at blackmail or sue for a piece of one of their vast estates. When I was Epstein’s hostage in Paris, I watched him train some of these girls. They didn’t look like victims to me,” said Cameron, “in fact they were competing to see who could be the most sexual and erotic. I thought they were vicious.”

Cameron’s recollection of how the women she encountered presented their circumstances in 1996 cannot determine everything these women may have experienced, nor does it resolve questions of their alleged coercion or exploitation. It does help explain why elite trafficking can be difficult for outsiders to recognize: some participants may appear socially mobile, materially rewarded and physically free while the central organizer retains decisive control.

Luxury as Infrastructure

The year of oils, perfumes and cosmetics in Esther 2 has often been treated as evidence that the women were pampered. Cameron reads it differently. Beauty preparation can serve the desires of the person controlling access to a woman. It increase her value to the system without increasing her freedom within it.

The biblical text supports only certain details: the twelve-month schedule, myrrh, perfumes, cosmetics, provisions and attendants. It does not document the elaborate language lessons, sexual training, psychological conditioning, dietary cleansing or musical curriculum other historical writings allude about the activities of the women contained within the harem of the Persian imperial empire during this time in history. 

Why did the king invest a year of state resources, devoted to preparing the women for his evaluation and consumption? He was erasing their independent identities, cultural and family backgrounds. This is a common mechanism used in trafficking systems. It was his “breaking room” process. As a woman abducted into the Persian imperial harem system, once you enter the gates of the palace, you will never see your family again. You will never see your home again. You will never have a husband. You will never have a home or a family. You will live in communal living environment within a luxury palace for the rest of your life as a captive to the empire. If you are unfavorable to the king, you will either die there or be sold to other men of power for sexual use.

Therefore, in elite human trafficking, luxury and captivity are not opposites. A person can be well dressed, carefully groomed and surrounded by expensive objects while lacking authority over her body, movement and future. Indeed, luxury can make control more effective by disguising exploitation as favor and by teaching observers to envy the person whose choices have disappeared.

Esther’s Ordeal Inside an Imperial World

The Book of Esther does not tell readers what ultimately happened to every woman transferred to the second harem. According to historical records the Persian empire and other neighboring empires commonly treated women as currency, and the Persian king had a lot of disposable assets in the second harem. Therefore it is assumed that women from this particular group were most likely sold for sex to diplomats, men of power, and even other nations. 

The broader imperial and Near Eastern world treated women as instruments of political strategy. Royal daughters were sent to foreign courts in marriages intended to establish alliances or confirm peace. Captives and foreigners could be enslaved into royal or aristocratic households under varying forms of servanthood and domestic labor. Women with talents, skills, and those that had learned a trade were more marketable. 

Against that background, it is reasonable to conclude that women placed permanently under royal control in the second harem faced more than indefinite confinement in the palace. They were vulnerable to reassignment, sexual exploitation, compulsory service or transfer whenever the palace considered another use for them more valuable. Some may have remained available exclusively to the king. Others may have acquired household, ceremonial or economic responsibilities. Some may have been incorporated into sexual or political arrangements elsewhere. The surviving evidence does not permit a numerical calculation of how many experienced each fate.

Even if a woman was never transferred, she remained in danger of it because she possessed no demonstrated authority over her movement or future. Her value belonged to the institution controlling her.

An Elite-Access System

This is where Cameron sees the strongest resemblance to Epstein’s organization. Epstein was not merely an isolated offender secretly abusing women in a private room. In Cameron’s account, and according to what is now publicly known about him, he occupied the central position in a larger elite escort and trafficking structure. Women entered through sex with him; he assessed their value; he established the terms; and he determined how they would be used within a network serving powerful people. His workforce of escorts in many ways was the equivalent of a harem, with the women inside of it vying for power.

The Persian king in Esther’s story exercises a comparable kind of centralized authority within the narrative. Women entered through sex with him; he assessed their value; he established the terms; and he determined how they would be used within a network serving powerful people.

The comparison identifies a recurring power structure: a prestigious male gatekeeper controls access to women, elite surroundings conceal the loss of autonomy, and the woman’s apparent elevation depends upon remaining useful to the person who controls the system.

A Crown Is Not Consent

Esther eventually becomes queen, but survival and elevation do not transform the preceding system into a romance. A trafficked person may receive material benefits, preferential treatment or even influence without acquiring a genuinely free relationship with the person who controls her. Favor can improve a woman’s position within captivity while leaving the structure itself intact.

Esther becomes extraordinarily courageous and strategically capable. She studies the danger, plans two banquets, exposes Haman and risks death to intervene for her people. Recognizing her exploitation does not diminish that courage. It clarifies it. Her bravery does not consist in winning a beauty competition; it consists in learning how to survive inside a lethal court whose rules she did not create.

Nor should the king’s eventual responsiveness to her be retroactively interpreted as proof of a love affair or marriage by the standard definition of the term. It reads rather as a hostage who gained favor with her captor. He reads as a man who seized ownership of her and then elevated her as a more valuable piece of property than the other women he owned. When Esther approaches him uninvited, her survival depends upon his momentary decision to extend the golden scepter. A wife who may be executed for speaking to her husband without permission is not participating in an equal marital relationship, nor should she even view herself as a wife, but rather a victim of domestic violence. Cameron explains that Esther was a battered woman, a victim of domestic violence in a gilded cage, and even compares Esther’s situation at times to the horrific abuse and domestic violence endured by Princess Diana within her marriage to Prince Charles.

“No matter what way you want to look at it, Princess Diana was a victim of domestic violence,” said Cameron.

About Esther, Cameron says, “Esther was in a psychologically and emotionally torturous situation. How is that a marriage? She was walking on eggshells to prevent herself from being abused by a man who called himself her husband, but committed adultery at the drop of a hat, had sex with hundreds of other women, called it normal, and made it known that if she ever wants to initiate a conversation with him to talk to him about anything, he will kill her unless he just happens to be in a good mood and extends a ridiculous golden septer to her. It is outrageous that any woman had to deal with that circus of a marriage. That is domestic violence on steroids.”

Cameron says she wonders how many times Esther may have seen a woman at the palace beaten, tortured and even killed for approaching the king without an invitation. She wonders how many women he used as examples to keep their other women in their place. How many women did he kill to make the other women who thought of him as their “husband” understand he was serious about this rule, that he would kill them if they dared talk to him without an invitation. 

“Traffickers will kill a person they control in front of other people they control to teach them a lesson and to maintain psychological control over their victims. There is no way the kingpin of the book of Esther was an exception,” said Cameron. 

‘For Such a Time as This’ Is Not a Romance Slogan

The phrase most frequently used to romanticize Esther’s ordeal comes from Mordecai’s message in chapter 4: who knows whether she has come to royal position for such a time as this? The Christian culture has long revered this sentence as an inspirational slogan about destiny. In context, Esther is confronting the possible annihilation of her people and the possibility that approaching the king will cost her life.

Mordecai does not tell Esther that everything done to her was good. He tells her that silence will not guarantee her safety and that deliverance may arise elsewhere, if it arises at all. The moment is not a cheerful explanation for why God allegedly arranged her captivity. It is a crisis in which a woman already trapped inside an oppressive institution must decide whether to risk the limited protection her position provides. 

“I think Esther had a broken spirit by how she had been trafficked and was at the point where she didn’t care about her life anymore. She was abused by a rampantly adulterous man who was a pig, who sexually consumed women like a sandwich he ate for lunch, and then turned around and called himself her husband and forced her to accept that without wincing. He robbed her of the husband and life and family and home she should have had and would have had if this horrific trafficking crime had not happened to her. He’s the equivalent of Satan. He came to steal, kill, and destroy. He came and he killed her spirit, he stole her life and destroyed everything in it. She was miserable. I think she looked around at her circumstances, despite having the title of queen, which probably felt like an empty word to her, and didn’t see anything worth salvaging or protecting, and took the risk hoping for the best, while bracing herself for torture and death, but still hoping that God would care about her because her family member Mordecai prayed for her. I think she trusted in his faith that heaven would intervene, not hers. I sincerely doubt she had much faith left after what she went through, with the way her life was ripped to shreds and then the product of that crime was celebrated by the entire nation when they put her on a pedestal and made her queen. They were all there applauding their new queen, and she there completely devastated, crying inside. It had to have been utterly humiliating,” said Cameron. 

“And what do you think the sexual contact was like by a narcissist man who owned women like property and lived in sexual fornication daily with hundreds of women? I can promise you it was not romantic. It was animalistic, predatory, self centered, and sadism. That type of man is not capable of real love and connection. There is a twisted mindset that type of man has, and sexual fornication creates that mindset.” said Cameron.

“The reality of the situation in Esther’s life doesn’t match the sugar coated fairy tale Christians have presented for years,” said Cameron.

“But it was good that in those horrific circumstances, that she was able to be cooperate with God, that she had the type of heart position and posture of spirit that God was able to work with,” said Cameron.

God’s Intervention Does Not Sanctify the System

God’s ability to preserve life through Esther’s position is not an endorsement of the imperial collection of women, the king’s sexual entitlement or the threat of death governing the court.

This distinction matters for survivors. When every terrible event is described as something God arranged in order to produce a later victory, abuse can be spiritually repackaged as a gift. A more careful theology can say that exploitation was wrong, that the people responsible retained moral responsibility, and that God was still capable of bringing deliverance from circumstances that God himself did not romanticize.

The Women Who Did Not Receive Crowns

Traditional retellings end the selection sequence when Esther receives the crown. The other women disappear from view, just as they disappeared into the second house. Their absence from the remainder of the plot does not make their experience insignificant.

Each woman had a family, an identity and a future before becoming part of the royal system. Each underwent the same preparation and night with the king. Nearly all were then excluded from the one outcome that has allowed later generations to describe the process as providential success. The story’s celebrated heroine survived and gained influence; the institution continued to possess everyone else.

The moral weight of the events recorded in the book of Esther cannot be measured only by what happened to the woman who became queen. A system does not become benevolent because one person trapped within it later saves lives.

Reading Esther Without the Fairy Tale

Calling Esther’s experience trafficking is a modern ethical description. Modern trafficking definitions focus on acts such as recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of people through coercive means for exploitation. When children are involved in commercial sexual exploitation, proof of force, fraud or coercion is not required under modern law. The narrative in the book of Esther belongs to an ancient legal world, but the questions of consent, control and exploitation remain undeniable.

Esther 2 depicts state-directed gathering, official custody, institutional beautification, sexual access by a ruler and continuing confinement among concubines. The women were not allowed to leave. Those features justify a serious trafficking analysis even where the text in the Bible remains silent about instances of physical resistance or guards at doors. Abuse of power was what the Persian empire was known for at that time. It was a mechanism that kept the subjects in the palace and throughout the empire under their control.

Cameron’s comparison to Epstein makes the hidden mechanism easier to see. Exploitation does not cease to be exploitation when it occurs among powerful people. A palace can perform the work of a prison without resembling one. Cosmetics can prepare a person for consumption rather than freedom. Favor can be a trafficker’s business decision. A crown can elevate a woman inside a system that never asked whether she wanted to enter it.

The Book of Esther remains a story of courage, deliverance and extraordinary strategic action. It becomes more—not less—powerful when readers stop pretending that the road to the throne was romantic. Esther did not need the king’s system to be good in order for her courage to be real. She needed courage precisely because the system was dangerous.

Sources and Further Reading

1. The Book of Esther, chapters 2 and 4 (Sefaria)

2. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime: Human Trafficking

3. U.S. Department of Justice: United States v. Jeffrey Epstein, 2019 indictment

4. U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York: Statement on the Ghislaine Maxwell verdict

5. Encyclopaedia Iranica: ‘Harem i. In Ancient Iran’

6. Encyclopaedia Iranica: ‘Women i. In Pre-Islamic Persia’

7. Encyclopaedia Iranica: ‘Barda and Barda-dari i. Achaemenid Period’

8. Bryn Mawr Classical Review: Review of Maria Brosius, Women in Ancient Persia

9. Reuters: Public record concerning Giuffre’s allegations and Andrew’s response