The Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal has fallen catastrophically short in the one place above all else where it should matter, legal experts Rachel Foster, Dahlia Lithwick, Mimi Rocah, and Joyce Vance wrote for Slate on Tuesday.

"So far there has been a specific and appalling omission at the heart of the continuing, and at one time relentless, Epstein coverage," they wrote — specifically, that all the focus is not on who was hurt by Epstein's child trafficking operation, but which public figures and politicians might have their careers ruined by it.

The scandal, they wrote, "is wielded as a kind of roving 'gotcha' narrative, in which we the public are encouraged to wait with bated breath for the drip-drip-drip revelation of the next big name to be outed as having been connected to Epstein and the one after that — Elon Musk! Peter Thiel! Prince Andrew! Bill Gates! Steve Bannon! Bill Clinton! Peter Mandelson! Alan Dershowitz! It then devolves into a sordid game of whether the man in question visited the island, got the massage, flew on the jet, as if the primary goal here is to pick off offenders until [holds breath] something finally implicates Donald Trump himself."

Looking at the Epstein case this way, they wrote, "disserves the only people who actually matter — the survivors — who have come together to decry the wholesale repeated failures of law enforcement, government, media, and public attention. They don't solely apportion blame to Epstein, or even to his top co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell — nor are they focused on how it can be politically weaponized.

Instead, they wrote, "the survivors correctly understand that the Epstein-Maxwell ordeal must be viewed through a massive reframing of our legal system’s devastating collective failures when it comes to them: This is not a whodunit so much as a What kind of society are we?"

"Time and time again, we have acceded to the winking, birthday-book gentleman’s agreement that young women exist to pleasure powerful men," they wrote. "What is also lost in this nothing-to-see-here (except the big, shiny names of potentially implicated powerful men), no-harm-no-foul narrative that people conveniently tell themselves are the young lives utterly shattered by cultural complicity and a lack of individual moral responsibility." As shown by Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's most famous victims, who lost her life to suicide this year.

The fact is, they wrote, Epstein's case is one of many where powerful men got away with systematic abuse and exploitation for years — such as Larry Nassar, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Sean "Diddy" Combs, who just got four years in prison for "brutally beating, drugging, sexually abusing, and threatening two women for years," suggesting our society has learned very little.

"Justice can still be achieved if we center the survivors, listen to their stories, and heed their demands for the system to work against the powerful — because, especially when it comes to this, no man should be above the law," they concluded.