(James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family. Image source: RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post/Getty Images)

On January 30, 2026, the Justice Department released its fifth installment of the Epstein Files, consisting of more than 3 million pages of documents, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images. Buried deep within the files is a pdf image of an iMessage conversation between Epstein and a woman, presumably one of his victims. In their conversation, the woman mentions a difficult relationship with her father—a dynamic she and Epstein apparently discussed at length offline. Epstein tells her to “ask yourself why are you so angry at him,” and follows this advice with a link to a blog post by Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, from Dobson’s website, titled “Resentment and Anger Toward a Father.”

Dobson was an enormously popular evangelical parenting psychologist and infamous advocate for traditional gender roles and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and policy. Millions of conservative Christian families looked to him for guidance on marriage, parenting, and cultural and political engagement. Others despised him for creating and endorsing a cultural norm of spanking and for his virulent homophobia, promotion of conversion therapy, and opposition to gay marriage. His organization, Focus on the Family, is listed as an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Dobson, who acted as an advisor to five different U.S. presidents, appears in the Epstein Files, not as a predator but as a source of wisdom.

Although not an evangelical himself, Epstein benefited from the moral framework presented in Dr. Dobson’s advice. Dobson’s gender essentialist worldview grants excessive power and authority to men while disenfranchising all others, creating a structure that fosters abuse.

The Article Epstein Shared

In his blog post, “Resentment and Anger Toward a Father,” Dobson responds to a woman who asks him how to deal with her anger toward her father “for what he did to me and my mother when I was a child.” Similar to the woman who was corresponding with Epstein, the advice-seeker expresses strong negative emotions toward her father complicated by a desire not to hurt him. The blog post, published online in 2014, comes from Dobson’s 1984 book, Emotions: Can You Trust Them?—a question that in and of itself can be used to undermine the testimonies of abuse survivors.

In his response, Dobson dismisses the woman’s feelings, along with any consideration of actual harm, and releases the man from accountability. “I would guess,” Dobson writes, “that your dad’s own childhood experiences account for his emotional particularities, and can perhaps be viewed as his own unique handicap.” He suggests empathy for the father, framing the man’s neglect as something beyond his control. In this way, Dobson shifts the burden of responsibility onto the daughter. She is the one who can rectify the situation, by correcting her attitude. The man is absolved.

Dobson implements a tactic that survivor advocates label as DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. He brushes off the neglect, framing it as something innocuous and beyond the father’s control. “He is unable to see your needs. He is unaware,” Dobson writes. “His handicap makes it impossible.”

Next, Dobson attacks the advice-seeker by naming what’s wrong with her approach: “You will be less vulnerable to pain when you accept the fact” of the man’s inability to care, he writes. Dobson wants the woman to accept less from men and, in so doing, asserts that she will experience less pain and disappointment.

Finally, Dobson positions the father as the one deserving of sympathy—what philosopher Kate Manne would call “himpathy”—and pressures the woman to love her father regardless. “Accept your father as a man with a permanent handicap,” Dobson instructs, “one which was probably caused when he was vulnerable.” Dobson strips this woman, and by extension all women, of recourse and instructs them to support their abuser and abide his behavior, which they cannot expect to change.

This is the advice that Epstein extended by proxy to the woman he was messaging. Dobson and Epstein treat these women as foolish for imagining they could expect men to behave better. Dobson’s writing describes a world where men are expected to fail the people around them, and the people around them are expected to get over it. At no point does Dobson encourage the woman to seek accountability from the man who hurt her.

Gretchen Baskerville, a Christian relationship writer who runs the blog Life-Saving Divorce, interprets Dobson’s article as “redirecting a victim’s moral compass away from self-protection and toward empathy for male wrongdoing.” For Dobson, “male wrongdoing” is so normal that it is inconsequential, a teaching Epstein apparently found valuable.

While the Epstein Files only show this one instance of Epstein referencing Dobson’s work, this worldview is consistent across all of Dobson’s writing and should be cause for concern for anyone who ever appreciated Dobson’s teachings. What matters here is the principle that undergirds the example: Dobson takes for granted that men will harm women as a matter of course—an expectation that proceeds naturally from Dobson’s combined beliefs in total depravity (the Calvinist doctrine that all humans are inherently sinful) and the evangelical insistence on male authority.

James Dobson and Gender Essentialism

Dobson rose to prominence in the 1970s and 80s as an evangelical child psychologist whose parenting philosophies proceeded from the conviction that children are naturally sinful. The role of the parent, according to Dobson, is to “shape the child’s will.” Dobson’s work promotes an authoritarian, patriarchal family structure with rigid rules enforced by corporal punishment.

In 1977, Dobson founded Focus on the Family, a nonprofit organization and an unofficial epicenter of conservative evangelicalism. Dobson expanded into public policy in 1983 when he founded the Family Research Council which, according to journalist Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangelicals, “grew into a powerful evangelical think tank that has worked to promote abortion restrictions and anti-LGBTQ+ policies nationwide and around the world.” Dobson himself became one of the most prominent voices of the Religious Right, alongside contemporaries Tim LaHaye, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell; Dobson’s influence continued into the twenty-first century.

In addition to his conviction that children are born sinful, Dobson promoted gender essentialism: the belief that men and women are fundamentally and biologically different. In his 1975 book, What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women, Dobson wrote that “males and females . . . are unique in every cell of their bodies,” and that “men derive self-esteem by being respected; women feel worthy when they are loved.” Divinely ordained gender differences were a bedrock of Dobson’s worldview.

Epstein, too, promoted such ideas. In the same text exchange in which he cited the Dobson article, Epstein sent a link to the 1990s pop psychology bestseller, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. This classic text of gender essentialism overemphasizes uniformity among people of the same gender, suggesting that all men are one way, and all women are another.

Within conservative evangelical circles, gender essentialism goes by the label “complementarianism,” a theological framework that portrays men and women as different and complementary, not equal. The term was coined in the 1989 Danvers Statement released by the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), a group of conservative theologians that formed as a way to push back against feminism. Describing this moment in her book, Jesus and John Wayne, historian Kristin Kobes du Mez writes, “In asserting female submission as the will of God, [the Danvers Statement] foregrounded a biblical defense of patriarchy and gender difference.” Complementarian theology like Dobson’s effectively prioritizes the needs and preferences of men over those of women.

These same principles of gender essentialism support what psychologist Nicola Gavey calls “the cultural scaffolding of rape.” The complementarian beliefs espoused by Dobson and other evangelical leaders create the cultural conditions that lead to sexual abuse. Philosopher Manon Garcia, in her book Living with Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial, recaps Gavey’s argument, writing, “Our representations of sexuality are structured by three myths which are false and yet foundational: that men only want sex, not love; that women only want stable, monogamous relationships and have sex only in order to obtain them; and that sexual intercourse is the penetration of a vagina by a penis, ending with ejaculation.” These three beliefs—which Garcia and Gavey identify as the foundational myths of rape culture—are consistent with the gendered ideology promoted by Dobson and Focus on the Family.

These views argue that, based on divinely ordained gender differences, men should not and cannot be held accountable for acting on their sexual urges, and women should not expect fair and decent treatment.

Liz Charlotte Grant, author of The Revealer article, “Elisabeth Elliot, Flawed Queen of Purity Culture, and Her Disturbing Third Marriage,” reflects, “advice like [Dobson’s] is exactly how so many young women found themselves dehumanized and trapped within Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring. . . From their abusers, they learned that their bodies, their physical and psychological distress, their autonomy should be sacrificed for the sake of men’s desires.”

Dobson elevates the comfort of the male abuser over the needs of the female victim, which was consistent with the circumstances Epstein sought to create. Dobson’s work enabled an environment conducive to abuse by neglecting to hold men accountable for causing harm, by stigmatizing women’s responses, and by disempowering women from seeking help.

(Image source: Stephanie Keith/Getty/The Atlantic)

Dobson’s worldview was inherently hierarchical, rooted in control. Bare Marriage writer Sheila Gregoire explains that within authoritarianism like the kind Dobson taught, “the only people who get their needs and wants met are those at the top of the hierarchy. Everyone else’s needs are suppressed.” This reality is reiterated by what Epstein sent to the woman immediately after he sent her the link to Dobson’s website: “I suggest you learn to give,” Epstein messaged, followed by a string of vague suggestions about how she might demonstrate her appreciation for his help.

Bradley Onishi, co-host of the Straight White American Jesus podcast, writes, “Dobson did not create this dynamic for Epstein, but he gave it language, legitimacy, and moral cover.” When Epstein invoked Dobson’s work, Dobson’s cover of legitimacy extended to him as well.

The Conspicuous Absence of Accountability

One of the points that Dobson makes in his blog post is that the woman to whom he is speaking should not hold her father accountable for his neglect, but should regard him “as a victim of cruel forces in his own childhood…a man with a handicap.”

Dobson’s description of the “handicapped man” mirrors Epstein’s own self-presentation, according to survivor Virginia Giuffre in her memoir Nobody’s Girl. Sheila Gregoire summarizes, “Epstein portrayed himself as almost having a disability. He just NEEDED sex in a way other people didn’t. He saw himself as naturally having these predilections in a way that other people didn’t, but he saw them as outside of his control. Exactly as a handicap.”

Many sexual abuse survivors have recorded their abusers’ tendency to depict themselves as helpless in the face of overpowering desires. In her award-winning memoir Sad Tiger, French author Neige Sinno writes that according to her abuser, “He was the victim, and somehow I was the executioner: me, the little girl who had set off the process simply by existing.”

This is DARVO taken to its fullest extreme: the abuser denying responsibility and maligning the victim by insisting that he, the perpetrator, was preyed upon by a drive which dominated him, a force beyond his control. This depiction of male libido as an insatiable need will be familiar to those who grew up in purity culture, the white evangelical movement that emphasizes strict sexual abstinence outside of marriage. According to the gendered messaging of purity culture, men are constantly trying to navigate their need for sex, and women of all ages are responsible for keeping men from lusting after them. Stephanie Stalvey, in her graphic memoir Everything in Color, writes, “Purity culture…reinforced, rather than challenged, tenets that encourage predatory behaviors in the larger world, like the abject sexualization of young women, and the fear of them owning their own desire. It reiterated the age-old notion that a woman’s body was for a man and made girls responsible for mitigating the predatory thoughts men had about them.” By centering the sexual aspect of every encounter, purity culture sexualizes girls. The warning that women of any age can be a sexual temptation for grown men normalizes pedophilia. In Dobson’s own book, Bringing Up Girls, he mentions that “some fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girls already have the bodies of women, and their dads are not supposed to notice—but they do.”  Exhortations toward male responsibility are conspicuously absent.

However, at the same time as Dobson espouses male superiority, he ignores any kind of power differential between adults and children. In an interview I conducted with writer and researcher D.L. Mayfield, whose post originally alerted me to Dobson’s presence in the Epstein Files, Mayfield said, “Dobson clung to these Christian beliefs of original sin and taught millions of parents to view their children as developmentally the same as an adult. That’s why he used all these descriptors: tyrants, dictators, willful children, willfully defiant.” In his landmark book The Strong-Willed Child, Dobson depicts the family home as a battle ground. Parents must establish their authority through physical dominance, or they risk ceding control to their “sour, complaining child.” According to Dobson, it was a child’s rebellious and sinful nature, rather than any developmental milestone, that caused them to resist parental authority. Accordingly, such challenges to authority should always be met with punishment, Dobson believed. This framing overemphasizes the child’s agency at the expense of the parent’s. Manon Garcia echoes this observation in Living with Men, writing, “One of the mainsprings of patriarchal society consists in thinking that men are naturally stronger and more powerful, and that in principle this superior nature justifies their domination, while at the same time invariably exonerating them for their weaknesses, always emphasizing their supposed immaturity or incapacity.”

As part of their research, Mayfield learned that serial child predators tend to view children as developmentally indistinguishable from adults. “What Dobson has been teaching in all of his books matches up with how serial child predators view children,” Mayfield told me.

This absence of accountability around male sexuality is especially strange given one aspect of Dobson’s work. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan appointed Dobson to be part of the Meese Commission on Pornography. The Commission spent 14 months studying obscenity and pornography in order to make legislative recommendations.

“We know,” Mayfield writes, “that Dr. James Dobson was aware of the true dangers facing children—serial child predators and intrafamilial incest—because this was one of the topics talked about extensively on the Meese Commission.” Despite knowing that the people most likely to commit child sexual assault are white Christian men, Dobson did not use his influence to create or disseminate materials that shared information about these dangers to children. Instead, according to Mayfield, Dobson and his ministries “helped create the conditions where these abuses could thrive and flourish.”

* * *

Whether or not Dobson intended for his work to provide cover for child predators, Epstein’s invocation of Dobson’s writing shows that his worldview benefited abusers.

Dobson is dead, but his work lives on. Evangelical parents hungry for guidance continue to look to Focus on the Family and its late founder for advice on how to raise their children. Little do they know that serial sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein also turned to Dobson for insight.

Dobson’s glorification of gender hierarchy and gender difference creates a context in which men are granted power and authority while women and children are silenced and discredited. As long as that dynamic remains, abuse will continue to occur.

Mckenzie Watson-Fore is a writer, editor, and critic focused on the female experience within white American evangelicalism. She serves as the executive editor for sneaker wave magazine, the inaugural critic-in-residence for Mayday, and writes regularly at mwatsonfore.substack.com.