Dear Pam Bondi, (A Letter From A Father)
Feb 11, 2026
I’m writing to you as an American citizen, a former pastor, and the father of a
daughter.
I spent today, as much of the nation, watching you speak
before the House Judiciary Committee in a state of stunned disbelief, which
surprised me, as I thought you’d reached a moral bottom many weeks ago.
I witnessed you posturing and protesting, feigning
indignation in the face of reasonable questions you repeatedly refused to
answer.
I looked on as you deflected and pivoted, performing the
wildest verbal gymnastics to keep from providing the simple clarity that our
elected representatives asked for and deserved—and wondered why anyone would do
that.
I sat incredulous, watching you appear to lie with great
ease, even perverse joy, seeming, to my ears, to contradict both irrefutable
evidence and your own words in the past. It was a tour de force in distraction,
a true masterclass in gaslighting.
And while a thousand thoughts ran through my head, when it
was all over, I was left with a single question:
How does someone become Pam Bondi?
I’m not speaking about your education, your professional
experience, or your career path, which are easily retrieved with a few
keystrokes. I’m talking about the meandering road to losing one’s soul.
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I wonder how an apparently intelligent human being finds
themselves sitting in that chair in front of the watching world in a moment of
such gravity, so completely bereft of empathy, so seemingly unencumbered by
other people’s suffering, and so strident in the face of simple accountability.
I try to imagine how you, the person entrusted with
stewarding the Law in the highest seat of power here, arrives at a place where
that Law has seemingly become irrelevant.
Are the money and the power so intoxicating that they have
rendered your conscience inoperable?
Has your journey been filled with a million small moral
compromises that burdened you in the beginning, but slowly emotionally
anesthetized you to the point that now you feel nothing?
Are you so beholden to the redacted man who enabled your
ascension to this lofty space that you are willing to shield him from the
litany of heinous sins that you must know well he is guilty of?
Maybe you don’t even have the answers.
Maybe you can’t explain it either, though I’m sure there’s
a story you have to tell yourself to keep the self-loathing at bay and let you
sleep at night, at least I hope so.
I see that you do not have children of your own. Perhaps,
if you did, I wonder if you might see this all differently. I don’t know. Tens
of millions of people without children are as furious as I am.
But you are someone’s daughter, and I do wonder how that
girl became the woman sitting there at that table today, so dismissive of other
women who have survived trauma. I imagine there may be some answers there
somewhere.
But as the father of a daughter, I want you to know that I
fully detest what you are doing to so many other people’s children right now.
I abhor your callous disregard for the daughters who stood
courageously before you today, whose eyes you did not have the dignity to look
into; women whose black, cavernous hell you know full well, because you’ve
pored over it countless times in words, photos, and videos that are still being
concealed.
It sickens me to my core to know that thousands of
survivors, girls and young women not unlike my daughter, have experienced
unspeakable horrors and are finding in you, not a fierce and willing advocate,
not a steadfast warrior who will deliver them justice, but an unsuspecting,
shame-throwing avatar of the men who brutalized them.
And if you truly do care for survivors, then I’d like to
hear how you justify your treatment of them. They deserve that. We all do.
I’m not sure what you believe in, but I am a person of
faith, and my religious tradition tells me that we will all face accountability
for our misdeeds and transgressions beyond this life, even if we evade them in
this one. That possibility does provide a small bit of comfort, but I hope you
don’t have to wait that long.
I hope that you will face a legal reckoning for any
betrayals of our nation that you are guilty of, for the chaos you are willfully
creating, and most of all for the sorrow you are exacerbating for the daughters
(and the sons) throughout this nation who feel less safe and less protected.
I stand with and bear witness to those who are afraid
because the Law seems to be refusing to drag the monsters out into the light,
because people like you appear so willing to curate the darkness.
I hope whatever you got for your soul was worth it to you.
It sure as hell isn’t for the rest of us.
