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There is a particular kind of betrayal that cuts deeper than anything a man can do to you. It is the betrayal of a woman who looks like you, who speaks your language, who understands your vulnerabilities and uses every single one of them against you in service of a man. some of the most effective enforcers of patriarchy aren’t men at all. They’re women who’ve built their identity, safety, and self-worth around male approval.

This is not theory. This is documented history, written in court transcripts, in coroner’s reports, and in the testimonies of girls and women who survived things they were never supposed to survive.

We talk constantly about protecting women from dangerous men. That conversation is necessary and it is not going anywhere. But there is a parallel conversation that is long overdue, one that does not make the rounds on social media with the same frequency, one that makes people uncomfortable because it disrupts the narrative of universal female solidarity.

That conversation is this: some of the most dangerous people in a woman’s life are other women, specifically, women who have centered their entire identity, their survival strategy, and their loyalty around a man or a group of men.

The Blueprint Was Written Long Ago

If you look closely, this story stretches back centuries. In the 1600s during the Salem witch trials, many accusers were women. They weren’t pulling the strings, but they were essential to the machinery of persecution. To be “one of the good ones” meant standing beside men even as other women were dragged to their deaths.

The misogyny of those times was enforced not only from the pulpit or the court but also from the mouths of other women desperate to prove their purity and worth.

Fast-forward through history and the pattern repeats. In the 20th century, women in high society often aided in silencing or shaming victims of powerful men. Take the Hollywood system of the 1940s through the 1970s female assistants, publicists, and wives were often used to discredit young actresses who accused powerful producers or directors of misconduct. Their loyalty to men in power protected predators and destroyed careers.

Let us be clear about what that means and who those women are.

The Weapon They Do Not See Coming

The reason men-centered women are particularly dangerous to other women is the same reason they are so effective: they disarm you. A predatory man puts you on guard. Your instincts fire. You assess, you calculate, you prepare. But a woman who befriends you, who seems to understand the world the way you do, who offers warmth and access and opportunity, she bypasses your defenses entirely. That is not an accident. In many documented cases, it is a deliberate strategy.

The historical record is unambiguous. History is full of accounts of women aiding and abetting the sexual exploitation and abuse of other women and girls by men, usually powerful men. The pattern repeats itself across centuries, across cultures, across class lines. What changes is the costume. What never changes is the mechanism: a woman leverages the trust that her gender affords her to deliver other women into harm.

Ghislaine Maxwell: The Architect

No modern case illustrates this more clearly than Ghislaine Maxwell. The facts are not in dispute. They are federal.

According to prosecutors, Maxwell and her hired assistants enticed hundreds of girls to visit Epstein’s homes and nearby locations in New York City, Florida, New Mexico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as Maxwell’s own residence in London. There they were groomed for sex acts with Epstein and other individuals.

A federal jury in December 2021 found Maxwell guilty of five counts, including sex trafficking of minors, for recruiting and grooming teenagers for Epstein between 1999 and 2007. She was subsequently sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

Maxwell was not some desperate woman trapped in a corner with no options. She was the youngest child of a British media magnate. She was educated, socially connected, and possessed of every resource needed to walk away from Jeffrey Epstein at any point.

Ghislaine Maxwell was able to resume her wealthy lifestyle through her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, whose financial resources benefited her after her father’s death. That is the admission buried in plain sight. She chose access to wealth, power, and a man’s world over the safety of girls she was recruiting with trips to the movies and shopping excursions.

According to the indictment, Maxwell helped Epstein recruit, groom, and ultimately abuse victims who both Epstein and Maxwell knew were children, some as young as 14. Prosecutors accuse Maxwell of befriending the girls, sometimes taking them shopping or to the movies, and of encouraging them to accept Epstein’s financial assistance.

She used everything that makes a woman approachable and trustworthy, warmth, mentorship, the veneer of motherly guidance as a delivery mechanism for abuse. Maxwell is accused of doing much more than simply allowing Epstein to abuse children, not just allowing the abuse to happen under her nose, but participating in it.

The girls targeted were not just victims of Epstein. They were specifically victims of Maxwell’s womanhood, weaponized against them.

Allison Mack: Sisterhood as a Trap

If Maxwell operated in the world of elite private islands and billionaire social circles, Allison Mack operated on the terrain that is more familiar to everyday women: the promise of self-improvement, empowerment, and community. And she made that terrain into a minefield.

Mack, the actress best known for her role on the television series Smallville, became a senior figure in NXIVM, a group that presented itself as a self-help organization and, within it, operated a secret subgroup called DOS. Mack recruited several women as her “slaves,” according to court records. She approached young women and advertised the group as a secret women’s empowerment sorority.

Read that again: a women’s empowerment sorority. She used the language of feminism as bait.

Federal authorities began investigating the organization after The New York Times published an article in late 2017 detailing the inner workings of the secret sorority within NXIVM. After prosecutors announced the charges against her, other actresses said that Mack had tried to get them to join her “women’s group.”

Several female journalists also shared that they had received emails from Mack trying to pitch them on joining a female empowerment organization.

The women who were recruited were required to surrender what NXIVM called “collateral”, compromising information, explicit photographs, and financial assets, that would be used against them if they tried to leave or speak out. DOS members were branded with Raniere’s initials and were required to be filmed naked during the branding.

Mack later pleaded guilty. When she was sentenced to three years in prison, the judge said that Mack had “capitalized” on her celebrity while working for Raniere. Mack agreed with this assessment, calling her fame “a power tool that I had to get people to do what I wanted.”

She knew what she was doing. She acknowledged what she was doing. And what she was doing was recruiting women on behalf of a man.

Keith Raniere was sentenced to 120 years in federal prison. Allison Mack served under two years of a three-year sentence. The women she delivered to DOS carry what was done to them indefinitely.

Carolyn Bryant Donham: When a Lie Becomes a Death Sentence

Not every dangerous woman-centered-on-a-man operates in a criminal enterprise. Some operate in the space of marriage, racial hierarchy, and loyalty to a social order built by men, for men.

In August 1955, Emmett Till was 14 years old when he visited his relatives in Money, Mississippi, from his home in Chicago. The alleged teasing of white store clerk Carolyn Bryant by the 14-year-old African American Emmett Till led to his brutal murder at the hands of Bryant’s husband Roy and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, forcing the American public to grapple with the menace of violence in the Jim Crow South.

Carolyn Bryant testified in 1955 that 14-year-old Emmett Till grabbed her and verbally threatened her three days before her husband and brother-in-law abducted and tortured the teenager to death.

Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam dragged Till from his great-uncle’s home, beat him beyond recognition, shot him, and tied a cotton-gin fan around his neck with barbed wire before throwing his body into the Tallahatchie River. Bryant and Milam maintained their innocence and would eventually be acquitted of the murder by an all-white, all-male jury.

They later sold their story for $4,000 to Look magazine bragging about the murder as a form of Southern justice implemented to protect white womanhood. And the testimony of one woman made all of it possible. Five decades later, she confessed to a Duke University historian: “That part’s not true.”

Carolyn Bryant had falsely alleged that 14-year-old Emmett Till grabbed her at the grocery store, an accusation that led to his gruesome killing. She lived to be 88 years old. She died in 2023 without ever being held legally accountable. Emmett Till was 14.

Carolyn Bryant Donham was not being trafficked. She was not being coerced. She was a woman who told a lie to protect a social arrangement that served her husband and the racial hierarchy he benefited from. In doing so, she sent a child to his death.

Her loyalty was not to justice, not to truth, not to basic human decency, it was to the men around her and the world they had constructed. That is what men-centered allegiance looks like at its most catastrophic.

The Partners in Crime: Karla Homolka and Myra Hindley

If you think Maxwell was an anomaly because of her wealth, look at the "School of Hard Knocks" examples that prove this rot crosses all class lines. Take Karla Homolka. In the early 1990s, this woman helped her husband, Paul Bernardo, kidnap, rape, and murder at least three young girls in Ontario. One of those victims was her own sister, Tammy.

Homolka didn't just "know" about it; she was an active participant who videotaped the horrors. Her dedication to Bernardo was so absolute that she offered up her own blood relative as a "Christmas present" to satisfy his urges.

Then there is Myra Hindley, often called "the most evil woman in Britain." Along with Ian Brady, she was responsible for the Moors murders in the 1960s. She sat in the car, watched the children, and helped bury them. Both Homolka and Hindley are case studies in how a woman’s identity can become so fused with a man’s violence that she loses the ability to see other women or children as human beings. They see them as tools or obstacles in the way of their "man’s" happiness.

The Lesser-Known Enforcers

Harvey Weinstein’s empire didn’t survive for decades without women’s help. Public records and testimonies revealed that his assistants, both male and female, participated in the cover-up of his abuses, scheduling meetings, silencing complaints, and protecting his image. Many hoped their loyalty would lead to career advancement or simply survival in a brutal industry. Instead, they helped sustain a predator’s power for nearly three decades. The result? Dozens of women’s lives and careers destroyed.

In politics, the same pattern burns through the headlines. Remember Kayleigh McEnany’s defense of Donald Trump during his string of sexual misconduct allegations? Her position as a woman offered the illusion of balance: if a woman says it’s not abuse, then maybe the man’s innocent, right? That tactic, placing women in front of predatory men as human shields, has worked repeatedly in high places because it exploits society’s assumption that women naturally protect other women. But history shows that assumption is dangerous.

The Data Behind the Pattern

This is not anecdotal. The research has been done.

The latest UNODC report showed that in 30 percent of the countries which provided information on the gender of traffickers, women make up the largest proportion of traffickers. In some parts of the world, women trafficking women is the norm, to the extent that in Europe, women make up a larger share of those convicted for human trafficking offences than for most other forms of crime.

Criminological research published in Springer Nature examined 150 women convicted for human trafficking in the Netherlands between 1991 and 2016. The research findings add to the theoretical and empirical understanding of the phenomenon of human trafficking. Women should not only be viewed as victims, but can also play roles of offenders.

These roles are not exceptional, and for a large part, these roles cannot be explained by specific experiences such as a history of victimization of sexual exploitation before becoming a perpetrator. The types of roles women fulfill as offenders are not only low-ranking activities, but can be similar to those of men as offenders.

And perhaps most critically: the frequent presence of male co-offenders clearly shows that offending is embedded in social relationships, including intimate romantic relationships.

That is the through-line. The male co-offender. The man at the center. In case after case, a woman’s participation in the harm of other women is routed through her relationship with, devotion to, or dependency on a man.

Research published in the British Journal of Criminology found that almost half of the female traffickers studied were categorized in the quantitative data as victims of domestic abuse in their relationships. That is a necessary context. It does not, however, erase the harm delivered to the women and girls those women recruited, groomed, and betrayed.

Both things are true simultaneously: a woman can be a victim of a man’s control and a perpetrator of harm against other women. Understanding that duality is not about assigning blame with moral precision, it is about survival intelligence for women who may find themselves in the crosshairs.

That said, you do not need a federal case or extensive research to see this dynamic.

• It shows up in everyday environments:
• Women who defend abusive men despite evidence
• Women who discredit victims to protect a man’s reputation
• Women who compete for male validation by undermining other women
• Women who normalize harmful behavior because it secures their position

 Why This Matters Right Now

The Maxwell case remains in the news in 2026. Maxwell has been moved from a federal prison in Florida to one in Texas, and the case continues amid growing interest from the Department of Justice as well as congressional lawmakers regarding details on the Epstein case. President Trump would not rule out a pardon for Maxwell when asked about it.

The women and girls Maxwell recruited were real. Their pain was real. The systems that allowed this to happen for decades and the women who were part of those systems are still being reckoned with.

The lesson is not that women are as dangerous as men in aggregate, because statistically they are not. The lesson is narrower and more specific: a woman whose primary orientation is to a man, to his power, to his approval, to his world, that woman does not have sisterhood to offer you. She has a use for you.

The woman who brings you into the room, offers you opportunity, promises mentorship, extended friendship, a sense of belonging but whose ultimate loyalty is to someone else entirely, someone powerful, someone male, she is a door you do not want to walk through. The room behind that door has been decorated to look welcoming. It was built by someone else for someone else’s purposes.

Protecting Yourself Without Becoming Cynical

None of this is a call to distrust every woman in your life. That would be both irrational and self-defeating. Women’s solidarity is real, it is powerful, and it has driven every significant advancement in the lives of women throughout human history.

But solidarity requires discernment. It requires you to ask who a woman is loyal to when the stakes are high. It requires you to notice when a woman’s mentorship comes packaged with access to a powerful man. It requires you to pay attention when a woman consistently minimizes the harm men cause, defends abusers, or dismisses other women’s experiences in service of protecting a male figure in her life.

Historically, these women have always existed. The medieval court records referenced by historians document them. The early twentieth century trafficking cases document them. The federal dockets of the twenty-first century document them.

They will continue to exist. What has to change is how quickly women recognize them.

The most dangerous person in the room is not always the one who looks the most threatening. Sometimes she looks like a mentor. Sometimes she looks like a friend. Sometimes she looks like the most put-together woman you have ever met, with a wealthy boyfriend, a gorgeous home, and an invitation that feels like it could change your life.

Ghislaine Maxwell had all of that.

Look beyond the invitation. Ask who built the room and why they need you in it. Your instincts were given to you for a reason. In a world where women-centered-on-men have been weaponized against other women since the beginning of recorded history, those instincts may be the most important thing you own.

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