In 1917, an 18-year-old named Grace Fryer walked into the United States Radium Corporation factory in Orange, New Jersey, and started painting watch dials. America had just entered World War I, and Grace wanted to do her part. The paint glowed in the dark, a beautiful, eerie green made from radium. She was paid a penny and a half per dial.
The supervisors taught Grace and the other young women a technique called “lip-pointing.” You’d dip your brush in the radium paint, bring it to your lips to shape a fine point, then paint the tiny numbers on the dial. Lip, dip, paint. Lip, dip, paint. Hundreds of times a day. The women painted their nails with it, dabbed it on their teeth so their smiles would glow, dusted it on their eyelids before going out dancing. They called themselves the Ghost Girls because, at night, their skin, hair, and dresses shimmered with an otherworldly light.
Here’s the thing. The men in the same building wore lead aprons and used ivory-tipped tongs when working with radium. They knew. The company knew. The radium industry had known since Marie Curie suffered radiation burns that this substance could destroy human tissue. But the dial painters? They were just girls earning $3.75 a shift. Nobody bothered to warn them. Nobody bothered to give them tongs.
By the early 1920s, they started getting sick. Toothaches that wouldn’t go away. Jaw pain. Bones that fractured for no reason. Anemia. One woman’s dentist pulled a tooth and her entire jaw came with it. One woman bled to death when an infection in her mouth ate through to a major blood vessel. These women were in their twenties.
And here’s the part that should make your blood boil: the company didn’t just deny responsibility. They actively covered it up. They hired a man named Frederick Flynn to “examine” the women. Flynn had no medical training and no license to practice medicine (because why would you need credentials to declare poisoned women healthy?). He pronounced them fine. When a real pathologist proved that radium had embedded itself in their bones and was eating them alive from the inside, the radium industry tried to discredit his findings. And when that didn’t work, they reached for the oldest play in the playbook for discrediting women: they had some of the sick and dying dial painters diagnosed with syphilis. Let that sink in. Women whose jaws were literally disintegrating were told it was a sexually transmitted disease. Because apparently, even when a woman’s face is falling off, the first instinct of powerful men is to blame her morals.
Grace Fryer spent two years trying to find a lawyer. Attorney after attorney turned her down. She eventually found one, and in 1927, five dying women sued the United States Radium Corporation. A physicist measured the radioactivity in their breath and testified that these women had ingested so much radium that their very exhalations were toxic.
The women got a fraction of what they deserved. In Ottawa, Illinois, a dial painter named Catherine Donohue testified from her bed after collapsing at her own hearing. She died at 35, the day after the company filed yet another appeal. The final legal victory came three months after her death.
Grace Fryer once said: “It is not for myself I care. I am thinking more of the hundreds of girls to whom this may serve as an example.”
She was thinking of the future. She assumed we’d learn.
We didn’t.
The Radium Girls were not an anomaly. They were a chapter in a story that’s been playing on repeat since the beginning of medicine. For four thousand years, the answer to women’s suffering has been some version of: “We’ll decide what’s wrong with you, and we’ll decide what to do about it.”
Ancient Greek physicians believed the uterus was a rogue animal that wandered around inside a woman’s body, pressing on organs, causing anxiety, breathlessness, fainting, irritability, and too much (or too little) sexual desire. They called it hysteria, from the Greek hystera, meaning womb. The “cure” was marriage, pregnancy, and intercourse, because the uterus was supposedly hungry for semen and would settle down once satisfied. Ancient Greek writers literally described the uterus as a living creature with a mind of its own, suffocating women from the inside and causing every ailment imaginable. The prescription? Get pregnant. Problem solved.
By the Victorian era, hysteria was one of the most commonly diagnosed conditions in women. It was a catch-all for virtually any behavior that fell outside the narrow band of acceptable femininity. Too sad? Hysteria. Too angry? Hysteria. Too sexual? Hysteria. Not sexual enough? Also hysteria. In extreme cases, the cure was to remove the offending organ altogether. The word hysterectomy literally carries this lie in its name: the surgical removal of a woman’s uterus, named after a fake disease invented to explain why women had the audacity to have feelings.
Hysteria diagnoses continued into the 1970s.
We still use the word hysterical to dismiss women today.
And the pattern keeps going. Right now. In real time.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, at least 19 states have enacted abortion bans or severe restrictions, even when medically necessary. Women are dying. Not in the abstract. Not as statistics in a future study. Right now, with names and faces and families.
Amber Nicole Thurman, a young mother in Georgia, died from a delayed D&C that could have saved her life. Her doctors hesitated under the state’s abortion ban. By the time they acted, it was too late. Tierra Walker, 20 weeks pregnant in Texas, died from preeclampsia and seizures after no one offered to end the pregnancy that was killing her. Her husband couldn’t understand how no one suggested it. Porsha Ngumezi bled to death during a miscarriage because her doctor was afraid of prosecution. Nevaeh Crain was 18. Josseli Barnica was 28. Both dead in Texas. A group of OB-GYNs wrote an open letter to Texas officials stating plainly: these women should still be alive. The state called it “fear-mongering.” Tell that to their families.
A 2025 report found that pregnant women in abortion-ban states are almost twice as likely to die during pregnancy or shortly after giving birth. Black women are 3.3 times more likely than white women in the same states. Doctors describe being unable to do their jobs. Women with ectopic pregnancies (never viable, always life-threatening) have had to file federal complaints just to get treated. Some drive hundreds of miles across state lines. Some can’t afford to. Some bleed out while lawyers and ethics committees debate whether they’re dying fast enough to qualify for an exception.
This is not a policy disagreement or political debate. This is women dying because someone else decided they couldn’t be trusted with their own medical care.
And now, in 2026, the Epstein files.
Over 6 million pages of documents, 180,000 images, and 2,000 videos have been released or identified by the Department of Justice since the Epstein Files Transparency Act became law in November 2025. What they reveal is a decades-long operation in which girls, some as young as 13, were trafficked, assaulted, and silenced by some of the most powerful men in the world.
These girls came forward. They reported to the FBI. They testified under oath. One woman, who was 13 or 14 years old at the time of the alleged assault, has accused the sitting President of the United States of forcing her to perform oral sex on him and hitting her afterward. The FBI interviewed her multiple times. Those interview records, over 50 pages, appear to have been withheld from the public release. When members of Congress reviewed unredacted files at secure federal facilities, they confirmed the materials exist. A separate woman, known as “Jane,” who testified at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, described being introduced to Trump by Epstein at Mar-a-Lago when she was 14 years old. “This is a good one, huh?” Epstein reportedly said, elbowing Trump. Both men chuckled. She was a child.
The DOJ has called some of the allegations “untrue and sensationalist.” The Attorney General insists no records were withheld based on “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.” Meanwhile, 53 pages of material appear to be missing from the public database, files have been removed from the DOJ website without explanation, and faulty redactions allowed the public to uncover content officials had tried to hide.
These girls did everything right. They reported. They cooperated. They testified under oath while still processing the trauma of what had been done to them as children. And the system that was supposed to protect them is, once again, protecting the men who hurt them.
And here’s where this story comes full circle.
Because buried in those same Epstein files are names that some of you will recognize. Not politicians. Not hedge fund managers. Names from the wellness and longevity world. Men who have built enormous platforms telling you how to live longer, how to optimize your health, how to take control of your biology. Men whose names now appear in the files of a convicted child sex trafficker, sometimes hundreds or thousands of times, in email threads and calendar entries and appointment logs spanning years.
I’m not going to name them here. You’ve seen the headlines. What I want you to sit with is the pattern.
These are men who continued professional and personal relationships with Jeffrey Epstein well after his 2008 guilty plea to charges involving an underage girl. Men who visited his homes, exchanged chummy emails, and maintained contact for years. Men who wrote things like “the life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul,” and now claim they meant nothing by it. Men who have since issued carefully worded apologies while insisting they never saw anything, never knew anything, never suspected anything. The PR teams really earned their retainers on those statements.
Where have we heard this before?
The men at the United States Radium Corporation wore lead aprons. They used ivory-tipped tongs to handle the same substance they told young women to put on their lips. They knew. And when the women got sick, the company hired fake doctors to declare them healthy and then diagnosed the dying girls with a sexually transmitted disease.
It’s the same story. It has always been the same story.
Look at the through-line.
Wandering wombs. Glowing paintbrushes. Abortion bans. Men in lead aprons. Men on Epstein’s calendar.
Every time, someone other than the woman decided what she could know, what she could access, and what she could do with her own body. Every time, someone other than the girl decided whether her story got told.
And here’s the part that might make some of you uncomfortable: it’s not always men doing this to us. Sometimes it’s us doing it to each other.
Women in exam rooms dismiss other women’s symptoms with the same paternalism they’d never tolerate from a man. Women share posts shaming other women for choosing hormone therapy, or for choosing abortion, or for choosing anything that doesn’t align with their personal version of what a woman should do. We convince ourselves that other women need policing, need guardrails, need someone to protect them from their own decisions. We tell ourselves it’s concern. It’s not. It’s the same pattern, wearing a softer face.
Every time a woman looks at another woman’s medical choice and thinks “she shouldn’t be allowed to do that,” she’s picking up the same playbook that’s been used against all of us for four thousand years. She’s just running the play from the inside.
Who gave them the right?
Nobody. They just took it. Over and over. For four thousand years.
The only thing that has ever broken the pattern is women who refused to accept it. Grace Fryer, dying of radium poisoning, spending two years finding a lawyer because she was thinking of the girls who would come after her. The families in Texas and Georgia telling their daughters’ stories so other families don’t have to live theirs. The women in the Epstein files who reported, testified, and refused to disappear, even when the most powerful institutions in the country tried to make them.
This isn’t a history lesson. This is happening right now.
The question has never been whether the pattern will repeat. It always does. The question is whether enough of us will finally say: not this time.
Sources:
Radium Girls:
Library of Congress — “Radium Girls: Living Dead Women”: https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2019/03/radium-girls-living-dead-women/
ORAU — “Radium Girls: The Health Scandal of Radium Dial Painters”: https://www.orau.org/blog/history/radium-girls-the-health-scandal-of-radium-dial-painters-in-the-1920s-and-1930s.html
HowStuffWorks — “The Radium Girls’ Dark Story”: https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/radium-girls.htm
Abortion Ban Related:
Amber Nicole Thurman (Georgia) — ProPublica broke her story. She died after a delayed D&C under Georgia’s abortion ban. Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-abortion-ban-amber-thurman-death
Tierra Walker (Texas) — ProPublica reported her death at 20 weeks pregnant from preeclampsia/seizures in San Antonio, December 30, 2024. Source: The Ms. Magazine running list references the ProPublica reporting: https://msmagazine.com/2024/11/04/women-die-abortion-ban-elections-vote/ (updated January 2026 with Walker’s case)
Porsha Ngumezi (Texas) — ProPublica and the Texas Tribune jointly reported her death from hemorrhage during a miscarriage after her doctor opted against emergency procedure. Source: https://www.texastribune.org/2024/11/27/texas-abortion-death-porsha-ngumezi/
Nevaeh Crain (18) and Josseli Barnica (28) (Texas) — ProPublica reported both deaths. A group of OB-GYNs wrote an open letter to Texas officials stating both women should still be alive. Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/abortion-ballot-measures-reports-miscarriage-deaths-rcna178660
The Gender Equity Policy Institute stat (twice as likely to die, 3.3x for Black women) — April 2025 report “Maternal Mortality in the United States After Abortion Bans.” Source: https://thegepi.org/maternal-mortality-abortion-bans/
Epstein related:
Department of Justice database: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/doj-disclosures
Woman alleging Trump sexually abused her at age 13-14, FBI interviewed her four times, 50+ pages withheld
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NPR investigation, February 24, 2026 (the primary source — this is the one that broke the story): https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5723968/epstein-files-trump-accusation-maxwell
Peter Attia (1,700+ mentions, emails, apology): CBS News, January 31, 2026: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dr-peter-attia-epstein-files-emails/
Rep. Robert Garcia statement, reported by CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/24/epstein-trump-doj-garcia.html
NPR follow-up on House Democrats opening investigation: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5724926/house-democrats-to-investigate-dojs-handling-of-missing-epstein-files-related-to-trump
NPR follow-up transcript with Stephen Fowler: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5724865
PBS NewsHour, December 23, 2025: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-the-latest-epstein-files-release-reveals-and-where-trump-is-mentioned
This article was originally published on Dr. Amy Killen’s Substack newsletter. Subscribe for free to get new posts delivered to your inbox.
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