Today, Trey Tucker is a therapist and an author, but he used to go on undercover human trafficking raids — rescuing young girls out of the dark clutches of sex slavery.
In total, Trey helped rescue 20 underage girls and women out of trafficking rings. The memories he carries still haunt him.
But they also give him insight. On this episode of “Relatable,” Allie Beth Stuckey asked Trey to weigh in on Jeffery Epstein’s sinister sex trafficking operations and his ability to wield enormous influence over so many people. His perspective gave her chills.
“How is it possible that some of the most powerful people in the United States, some people that we’ve looked to as moral exemplars, some of the most powerful people in the world, are apparently part of a pedophile trafficking ring?” she asks.
“The stuff that I was hearing long ago that … most people dismissed as conspiracy theories, I said, ‘No, that’s probably real,’” Trey says. “I didn’t have firsthand access to whatever was going on on that island, but I’ve seen the depravity enough to know, yeah, that can happen to any of us if you really let that go that far.”
He describes the elite world as a “power club” that can only be accessed by doing something that gives the group “blackmail” against you.
“It’s hard for me to understand the hold that [Jeffery Epstein] had on so many people,” Allie says.
She asks, “From your therapist perspective, when you’re looking at those power dynamics and just his personality, like, what do you see?”
Trey says he sees the primordial human struggle to attain “satisfaction” — not just in Epstein himself but in all the people who occupied his power circle.
“Epstein himself, he was just the puppet or the pawn. Like, he just had that magnetic charisma about him, and he was the guy at the door, like the bouncer that could let you into this world that you thought was going to satisfy,” he explains.
Allie wants to know more about the “psychology” behind a charisma like Epstein’s. “What makes someone publicly appealing even if we know that they’re not good people?” she asks.
“It comes down to really two major categories: identity and psychological safety,” Trey says.
Someone’s identity, he explains, can essentially be hijacked and manipulated by a powerful public figure.
It is entirely possible, Trey tells Allie, to “take someone’s beliefs, political or otherwise” and “transform them” so that they become the core of that person’s identity. Anyone who then opposes those beliefs isn’t just disagreeing with that person; they are “attacking” their very identity.
What is happening at the neurobiological level, Trey says, is “you’re moving beyond somebody’s logical brain and … into their subconscious, and when the subconscious takes over, it shuts down the prefrontal cortex — the logic brain.”
This produces fear, causing the individual to “fight and argue no matter what the actual facts are.”
“And so these politicians know how to take what should be just a nuanced issue where the front of your brain is just thinking evaluatively, and they know how to go right to that subconscious and put you into fight or flight mode instead,” Trey explains.
The second component, psychological safety, exploits someone’s inherent need to feel safe. This need is so strong that people will often override their sense of logic just to get it.
“Any politician that really is charismatic, they know that people are anxious, they’re uncertain, and if they can bring a level of strength and certainty, then people will look past their record,” Trey says.
He warns that this isn’t a partisan issue. “It really doesn’t matter the party. Like, all these politicians, I believe they’re just actors within the same play.”
To hear more of the conversation, watch the full interview above.
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