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Most anyone who worked in Tampa Bay news in the 2000s has a Pam Bondi story. Before her ascent to become this nation's most scurrilous attorney general, she was a constant contact for reporters covering crime and courts and a fixture on the Tampa social scene. She had panache and warmth, facets impossible to find in the monstrous character who last week shunned sexual assault survivors before a watching world.

If her metamorphosis from fair-minded prosecutor to petulant presidential insult comic is so difficult to rectify, that's because it embodies the subtle subjugation of an entire gender. For all the progress women have made in the past century, we have still been subconsciously molded to please men. It is painful to realize, and it is painful to watch.

I used to admire Bondi. As a fellow blondie in a male-dominated industry, I appreciated her ability to blend style and seriousness. For years, I helmed a fashion blog at the Tampa Bay Times. In 2009, when Bondi was spokeswoman for the Hillsborough State Attorney's Office, we named her one of Tampa Bay's best dressed. She posed in our studio nervously in a one-shoulder peacock dress, signature blond hair pushed to the side. She described her style as "conservative but trendy." She spoke of her classic 60-inch pearls, a gift from her parents. And of her 20-year-old Abercrombie & Fitch jeans, she said, "Every rip in them is legitimate."

I didn't interact with her as often as some other journalists, several of whom said she'd call them crying when negative press loomed. In my experience, she was a helpful and responsive communicator. The same year as the photo shoot, I was reporting on a serial shoplifter whose pillaging spanned three counties. Bondi phoned with information on the case after I'd asked for records. "Man," she said in her trademark folksy cadence. "She was just punchin' em!"

Soon thereafter, Bondi would transition toward Republican stardom, winning the race for Florida attorney general and campaigning for Mitt Romney. During her slide into the slippery arms of proto-MAGA, she fought against Obamacare and marriage equality, playing both sides on the latter -- she wasn't against gay people, she promised, just in favor of the Constitution. Her legacy would be cemented a decade later amid the vile pits of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, screaming at members of the House of Representatives about the Dow Jones while refusing justice to a room full of desperate women.

A recent profile by Stephanie McCrummen in the Atlantic asks the only sensible question: What happened to Pam Bondi? Or in the more pointed words of one of her friends, "What the f--- happened to Pam?" McCrummen details Bondi's rise as a determined legal mind who earned the nickname "Pambi" for her kindness. But through interviews and job performance evaluations, the writer also unearthed what might be the most telling thread in this story: a deep and crushing sense of self-consciousness. A near-pathological need to be liked.

If every rip in her Abercrombie jeans was legitimate, so is this one. When a person wants more than anything to be liked, a person will contort themselves in unimaginable ways. This detail cracks the whole thing open pretty succinctly, actually. She wants to be liked by Donald Trump.

Speaking of Trump, we know now that the noxious era in which this story unfolded was engineered by rich, powerful and possibly predatory men. The public is attempting to decode salacious arcana each day regarding the antics of the late Epstein and his associates, from Bill Gates to Bill Clinton to princes and sultans around the world. While almost every elite man in Epstein's orbit has so far escaped legal action, many sunk their hands into the businesses and culture that formed a generation of women.

It introduces a question: What happened to the rest of us?

Many of us who were girls in the 1990s and 2000s are coming to terms with the fact that our childhoods were cloaked in a costume of corporatized infantilization. Our ideal aesthetic was adjacent to the "Lolita" quotes written upon bare skin in the photos Bondi calls a distraction from the Nasdaq.

Epstein had a long relationship with Leslie Wexner, the businessman behind the Limited Too, Abercrombie & Fitch, Bath & Body Works, Victoria's Secret and other indelible cultural spaces. Epstein was a financial adviser for Wexner, and in the files, he describes doing "gang stuff" with Wexner, whatever that means. Wexner is named as an Epstein co-conspirator in a 2019 FBI document.

For a prepubescent girl, nothing was more enticing than those stores full of baby doll T-shirts and push-up bras. The children's brands greased the runway into a hypersexual millennial teenhood with implied goals: white, tan, blond, skinny, pliable, nubile, willing. We slathered our underfed bodies in cake-scented creams and wore low-rise pants with LOVE across the butt. We attempted a facsimile of womanhood in which we would be desired, and ultimately affirmed, by versions of the men who dressed us.

We thought women like Bondi who came from the embattled generation earlier had paved the way for us, lighting a path to power in a chic and confident manner. Now, a sadder picture comes into focus. In the end, it's a predictable story, one in which even the most accomplished woman would squander decades of goodwill and her good name to hold up a man.

What Bondi is doing with these files, exactly, remains to be seen. But she has sacrificed any possibility of inspiring young women in favor of serving as an unapologetic puppet for the whims of bad men. It is tragic, really, that she has become a proverbial baby doll T-shirt, one that will inevitably be cast off into a trash bag of hand-me-downs for the next generation to try on, take or leave.

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Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephrhayes on Instagram.

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