A consortium of International Women’s Whatever NGOs put out a frantic statement in advance of the vote scheduled for July 24 to oust Karim Khan as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). No such vote had ever taken place before in the history of the ICC, founded only in 2002, and no prior prosecutor had ever been removed. Hardly anyone seemed to understand the inscrutable bureaucratic vagaries of the process that led to this vote — or who would even be voting, and under what authority. But according to the NGO Ladies, what really mattered was that a strong and decisive verdict be resolutely delivered, because at issue was not “genocide,” or “war crimes,” or other matters generally seen to fall within the ICC’s more typical purview. Rather, it was “non-consensual sexual contact” — allegedly perpetrated by the Chief Prosecutor himself. Even worse, the feisty NGO women reminded us, Khan had allegedly inflicted these unthinkable acts on a “junior staff member.”

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Left unmentioned in the strident statement: this “junior” victim was actually 37 years old at the time of the claimed infractions. And a working legal professional, with a Master’s Degree, who boasts that she “completed the Bar in England and Wales” nearly a decade ago — though whether this means she’s accredited to practice law is left ambiguous. Notwithstanding, the statement warned that “survivors of sexual violence” the world over were watching very closely to see how the ICC would resolve this problem — perhaps the most existentially threatening problem in the Court’s relatively short lifespan. Because should the opaque ICC governing mechanism fail to ensure proper “accountability,” the repercussions would be profound: survivors everywhere re-traumatized, “international law” itself imperiled.

Relevant stakeholders were thus put on notice “not to lose sight” of what this whole thing was really “about” — securing justice for the junior victim in her late 30s, yes, but as a proxy for all “survivors of gender-based crimes.” This meant stakeholders should avoid any needless distractions, such as, hypothetically, attempting to discern precisely what “misconduct” was even being alleged, or what definition of “non-consensual sexual contact” was even being asserted by the alleged victim. Dwelling on such considerations could unduly complicate matters.

Khan’s termination was soon to be voted on by something called the “Assembly of States Parties,” a nominal “legislative body” almost no one on Planet Earth has ever heard of, much less be able to explicate its apparent authorities. Which we are told include “management” and “oversight” of the International Criminal Court. OK. Any of the 125 signatory countries to the ICC may therefore send delegates to cast votes in this mysterious “Assembly,” and could take part in the ad hoc “special session” declared for July 24.

These enigmatic voters would’ve been under considerable pressure to plug their ears during the big “exclusive” CNN interview released July 16, in which we finally get a glimpse of the mythical “victim.” When she does drop some hints of what her definition of “non-consensual” might be, it’s probably better if prospective voters change the channel. Christiane Amanpour, who scored the “exclusive” sitdown, made sure to affect an air of “Solemnly Inquisitive, yet Survivor Sensitive” — presumably in accordance with various HR guidelines. At one point, she carefully asks the 39-year-old junior victim to please address the repeated categorical denials of her alleged abuser, Mr. Khan, that any sexual misconduct ever took place.

“There’s many ways in which I can answer this,” replied Sarah — identified only by her first name, for unspecified reasons, probably to do with “safety” — who affected her own studied posture of “emotional ticking time-bomb, but just barely holding it together, for the greater good.”

Sarah went on: “The first thing that I would say is that there is no way for something to be consensual when you have such a power disparity.”

Sooooooo… let’s get this straight. Because the ICC Chief Prosecutor was the “boss of all bosses” at the ICC, according to Sarah, it was inherently impossible that he could ever have engaged in any consenting sexual activity with her — a fellow legal professional in her late 30s — regardless of whatever behaviors she may have displayed at the time of the activity. That’s the theory Sarah waited 26 months to unveil on CNN; the “accusations” are said to have been first “disclosed” in May (April?) 2024, when she “had a breakdown” in the ICC office, and concerned colleagues rushed to her aid. By July 2026, the theory of consent she’d developed is that our professional adult victim could have literally sworn an affidavit to the gods of international law, declaring “I hereby consent to this forthcoming sexual activity,” and it still would have been non-consensual, because… something something “power dynamic.” OK. Lol.

Before proceeding any further, can we briefly pause to ponder who ultimately possessed the real “power” in this “dynamic”? Because yes, sure, it’s facially true that 39-year-old Sarah was subordinate to 56-year-old Karim, in terms of the relevant employment structure — she as a mere “Associate Legal Advisor” working out of his office, he as the Big Bossman Chief Prosecutor leading the global charge against Putin and Netanyahu. At the same time, here are some additional “power dynamics” that might be worth some fleeting consideration:

• Sarah enjoyed rigorously-enforced anonymity for the duration of the 2+ year ordeal she unleashed — until July 16, 2026, when she had the red carpet rolled out for her by CNN producers. And even then, despite appearing on camera for a 46 minute interview, CNN made the executive editorial decision that it would be “only identifying her by her first name, at her request.”

• What was the basis for this “request”? What was the journalistic rationale for acceding to it? Who knows! Who cares. Here’s one thing we do know: this was certainly not a luxury Mr. Karim Khan was ever afforded. He’s been called every name in the book since the “accusations” first started percolating, and then were leaked to likeminded journalists. (The NYT also inexplicably agreed to Sarah’s “condition” that she would only be quoted by her first name in an article announcing she’d finally “broken her silence.”)

It didn’t take too much intrepid investigative journalism to figure out the full name of this 39-year-old legal professional, so I went ahead and tweeted it out a few days ago: Sarah Hishan. Wow, I can’t imagine the grave re-victimization she must be suffering now because I have non-consensually posted “Hishan” in addition to “Sarah.” Sure hope I don’t end up in The Hague!

If you’d like, you can learn more about Sarah’s background by consulting a 2025 academic tract entitled “The International Criminal Court: Legal, Policy, and Political Challenges,” where she is thanked in the acknowledgements — by her (gasp) non-anonymized name and job title — for all she supposedly did to assist editor Richard H. Steinberg understand the “challenges” facing the Office of the Prosecutor, led by Mr. Khan, with whom Sarah so closely worked. (Notably, her “accusation” odyssey had already been in full swing by the volume’s publication date.) If anyone’s interested in purchasing the eBook for $214, let me know what specific “challenges” related to Ms. Hishan found their way into the text. Or perhaps email Professor Steinberg at UCLA Law School and inquire if he plans to issue a revised edition anytime soon, in light of newly revealed “challenges.”

When all was said and done, the reputed beneficiary of the “Power Imbalance,” Karim Khan, wound up professionally extirpated, personally humiliated, privacy thoroughly infringed, tarred with scandal-maximizing media leaks — which he was largely prevented from refuting, due to the maddeningly indecipherable ad hoc procedures of this bizarre international bureaucracy. And to top it all off, he was suspended from the Bar of England and Wales. Meaning he cannot practice law in his country of birth, on account of his presumed liability for “sexual misconduct” offenses. The list undoubtedly goes on. So maybe that’s worth bearing in mind as we contemplate the contention that it was Khan who wielded insuperable “power” in the situation.

The official evidentiary record has essentially all been concealed from public view, perhaps due to some sacred principle of “international law” we mortals lack the ability to comprehend. So the only real primary source we have to go by is Sarah’s recent CNN interview. I can’t exactly say I would “recommend” watching this interview. Just like I wouldn’t recommend watching someone being executed by lethal injection. You might learn something, but don’t do it for pleasure. Anyone who might consider watching Sarah’s interview should first acclimate into the right mindset. Here’s very much the wrong mindset: expecting to get the one thing “normies” might foolishly assume they’d be getting if they tuned in to such an interview. That is: lots of concrete detail about what specific “sexual misconduct” Sarah is alleging she endured. Because what we mostly get instead is a televised version of the famed June 2026 NYT expose that set into motion the spectacular downfall of a certain Maine resident.

I can pretty much just copy-and-paste from my description of that NYT article. What CNN fundamentally did here was give Sarah Hishan a sort of weird therapeutic self-realization forum, and invite her to “emotionally reconstruct and narrativize her past experiences with Platner Khan, creating a psychological profile from which the NYT CNN could purport to divine a pattern of his ‘unsettling’ ‘rageful, boundary-crossing’ behavior.”

We learn a great deal in the interview about Sarah’s “subjective emotional recollections of certain interactions with Platner Khan,” such as that when she made her initial “disclosure” in 2024, she was “exhausted” and “extremely emotional.” Which sheds some partial light on how it came to pass that one day a male colleague discovered her “visibly distressed,” and deputized himself to submit some sort of complaint on her behalf, to some inscrutable bureaucratic entity called the Independent Oversight Mechanism (IOM). Alright. Good info.

But again, most people who’d voluntarily watch this CNN interview for some reason would’ve likely assumed that the main reason they’re watching is to hear expounded for the first time — in a thrilling “world exclusive” — all the juicy details of the “sexual misconduct” which had been kept under wraps since April/May 2024. However, Sarah does just about everything but offer tangible details of her purported victimization. Instead she zigs and zags all over the place, weaving out a heavily emotionalized first-person narrative that she and CNN evidently decided the rest of the world needed to participate in. Here’s her full answer when Amanpour asks her to respond to Khan’s emphatic denials:

The first thing that I would have to say is that this did not happen in isolation. This was an environment where we were always on the move. There was always a crisis because that is what happens at the court, you have to deal with multiple things. And it’s also very emotional work that you’re doing. Mr. Khan himself, in my experience, was a very reactive individual. And he could go from being fine and collaborative, to angry, for example, at criticism in social media. And that would be this rage. And so, you kind of always felt like the ground was shifting under you. And there was a — I have no other way to describe it, but an escalation of attempts. And so, that escalation was happening in this environment, where you are trying desperately to almost emotionally regulate Mr. Khan. And as I would describe it, the point of the physical nature of it. But it didn’t start that way. Because it was kind of like encroachments on the boundaries slowly, not just physically, but emotionally as well.

Pray tell, what advanced degree in NGO studies do I need to acquire in order to decipher, based on the above collection of words, what “sexual misconduct” this woman is actually alleging she was subjected to?

As the interview meanders along, it becomes clearer and clearer that the crux of the claimed “misconduct” is rooted in whatever novel interpretive paradigm Sarah has constructed, met with solemn affirmation by Amanpour, according to which, in light of the purported “power disparity,” everything that might’ve taken place between Khan and herself — whether sexually or even “emotionally” — hath been decreed “non-consensual.” As though this judgment was handed down by the Supreme Heavenly Magistrate of International Law. Pressed gently to elaborate just a bit, Sarah goes on to say:

SARAH: I will give you two examples. One is there was a point in time when I said to Mr. Khan that if this continued, I was afraid that I might do something to myself.

AMANPOUR: So, you had suicidal thoughts?

SARAH: I never used that word internally, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. And Mr. Khan understood fully. He was actually very kind in that moment. And he said, I would never want you to harm yourself. And he stopped. I would say about two or three weeks, but that was worse. Because prior to that, it was like being a zombie or being in a fog. But in those two or three weeks, I was really hopeful, because he wasn’t retaliating against me. The work was happening. And so, I thought it was done. And that’s all I ever wanted for it just to be finished. And then it started again. And so, the crash was even worse.

(emphasis mine)

Huh? What is “this”? What is “it”? Why doesn’t our esteemed CNN interviewer ask these seemingly basic followup questions? We still have hardly any idea what the heck Sarah’s even talking about, beyond some supplemental info about her troubled emotional state, which has kind of been established already.

Absent further clarification, here’s one possibility a viewer might infer about the potential meaning of “this” and “it” — how about, “consensual adult relationship”? Which… unsurprisingly… this woman came to experience as emotionally taxing in certain ways? Perhaps… because… she was married at the time? …with a child? Just throwing a crazy theory out there. (Khan was also married.)

So in other words, a thing happened that extremely commonly happens among consenting adults, for better or worse, particularly in close-knit workplace environments that are “very emotional” and intense (as Sarah describes it). A certain feeling arises between male-female colleagues, whatever their existing marital status and… there you have it. No great puzzle here, really?

Object all you like to marital infidelity on ethical, religious, practical, or other grounds — but it’s simply not “sexual misconduct” in the way most commonsense people would have recognized the term, at least if they haven’t yet been educated on the latest frontiers in uncontrolled concept-creep, and therefore may not be aware of how easy it’s become to re-categorize and re-frame a limitless range of behaviors as “sexual misconduct,” “sexual assault,” or even (drumroll) rape. In the very recent past, “having an affair with a co-worker” would have never been widely viewed as something intrinsically violative. Buckle up though, and flip that antiquated attitude upside down, because as of July 24, 2026, a brand-spanking-new precedent has been enshrined in the annals of “international law.”

As we move along here, bear in mind that through a giant game of international media “telephone,” Karim Khan just spent the better part of the past two years being publicly branded as someone who stands credibly accused not just of hazy “misconduct,” but of “sexual assault”:

L’Orient Today — October 28, 2024: “Faced with accusations of sexual assault and abuse of authority, International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan denied the allegations”

Wall Street Journal — May 10, 2025: “ICC Set Plan to Charge Netanyahu Just After Prosecutor Was Accused of Sexual Assault”

New York Post — May 14, 2025: “ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan asked a woman who accused him of sexual assault to drop charges so he could issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”

The New Yorker — October 5, 2025: “The accuser has told the U.N. investigators that Khan sexually assaulted her in his office”

The Guardian — March 22, 2026: “Inquiry into sexual assault claims did not establish that chief prosecutor’s actions amounted to misconduct, judges advise”

Reuters — April 2, 2026: “ICC member states have voted to pursue disciplinary proceedings against Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan after receiving reports regarding sexual ​assault allegations against him, two sources briefed on the matter told ‌Reuters”

The Australian — June 19, 2026: “The court’s oversight body found sexual assault allegations against Karim Khan were credible”

The Times (UK) — July 17, 2026: “The woman who accused a British KC and chief international prosecutor of sexually assaulting her during a work trip has revealed her identity for the first time”

Washington Post — July 24, 2026: “Shortly before requesting the warrants in May 2024, Khan was accused by a staff member of sexual assault”

Al Jazeera English — July 25, 2026: “Khan was removed from office over sexual assault allegations”

Yet despite this deluge of condemnatory media, by no rational metric could what Sarah Hishan alleged in her lengthy open-ended CNN interview be reasonably characterized as anything close to “sexual assault.” She herself never once uses that term throughout the 46+ minute video therapy session, even though her support-sister Christiane Amanpour introduces the interview by intoning: “We do want to warn you that the accusations you hear may be triggering, especially for survivors of sexual assault.” And then Amanpour concludes the interview by giving out the toll-free number of the “US Sexual Assault Hotline.” (It’s 1-800-656-4673 if anyone reading this Substack has been inadvertently “triggered.”)

According to secret evidence Amanpour says she received, a witness told investigators sometime in the past two years that they “directly asked” Sarah if she was ever “raped” by Khan. And by way of response, Sarah “looked down, sighed, and shrugged.” So that’s apparently some disconfirmative evidence — otherwise concealed from the public, except for Amanpour’s leaked paraphrase — suggesting that when Sarah was asked contemporaneously if she endured the closest available corollary to “sexual assault,” she said nothing, and “shrugged.” OK.

Here’s her explanation to Amanpour for this odd behavior: “Throughout everything that has happened, I haven’t placed a label on anything. One, because I am not a lawyer in this. Even though that’s my profession. It’s not my place to label anything.”

Uh… really? She’s a lawyer by profession, but “not a lawyer in this,” and therefore it’s “not her place” to put a “label” on anything she claims happened to her? Well, that’s her prerogative I guess, but it’s curious that her own refusal to “label” things didn’t stop the screaming media headlines from freely affixing the most incendiary “labels” — namely “sexual assault,” sometimes interspersed with “sexual misconduct” or “sexual abuse,” I guess depending on the random whims of the journalist that day.

Sarah explains that aside from her self-imposed lawyerly disqualification, there is also another reason for her label-aversion, and it’s “a little bit more personal. If I would put a label, whatever that label is, I’m not sure how I can get through the day. And I have had to play multiple roles in this. And I’m also a mom. So, I have to function. So, it has been easier for me.”

I guess that roughly translates to: “It would be emotionally burdensome for Sarah to apply any discomfiting labels to the conduct she alleges she was victimized by, and which spawned a series of events that has now thrown the entire International Criminal Court into possibly unsalvageable disarray.” This is the evidentiary standard that “international law” is now gonna use going forward, as a matter of precedent, to designate somebody a presumed sexual assaulter? Which Karim Khan has most definitely been designated; the vote last Friday by 82 ICC member-states to oust him does nothing if not perceivedly vindicate the impression that he really must have committed assault, misconduct, rape, or [fill in the blank].

Just asking questions here: but what’s one possible way one might try to rationalize a consensual yet adulterous sexual relationship, to oneself or others, in the event that this relationship comes to be viewed (by you) as embarrassing or lamentable in some fashion — you don’t want your spouse or work colleagues to find out, because you fear they’ll think poorly of you? Well, apparently one thing you can do as of July 2026 — if you’re a professional adult woman in her late 30s, anyway — is re-classify the regretful relationship as having come about through some vaguely illicit process of “monthslong grooming.” That’s how the media outfit known as “DropSite News” bizarrely chose to describe the Sarah/Karim relationship dynamic on May 10, 2025, when Sarah was still fully anonymized, in a bombshell scoop that journalist Alice Speri was intrepidly able to “confirm”:

Drop Site has confirmed that the woman’s accusations were far more serious than what has been revealed so far, and include what she described to colleagues as monthslong grooming, psychological coercion, and sexual advances, which eventually escalated into “unwanted” and “coerced” sex that lasted nearly a year and continued even after she told Khan that his conduct had left her suicidal.

It would be interesting to go back and review whatever journalistic “confirmation” methods are in use over at “DropSite,” because for one thing, the claim that Sarah ever told Khan “his conduct left her suicidal” has now been disconfirmed by none other than Sarah herself. Whoops. (And just a quick clarifying Q. — How exactly are sexual relationships supposed to be initiated nowadays, other than by “sexual advances” one or another party chooses to initiate, and which the advance-receiving party can either accept or reject?)

Numerous other details also stand out in the historic DropSite report, such as Alice Speri relaying that “according to several people,” Khan and his supporters were orchestrating a shameful “smear campaign” against the purported “victim,” then unknown, today mercifully known to be sweet Sarah. These disgraceful “smears” portrayed Sarah as “unstable” and “with a distorted view of reality.” There couldn’t have possibly been an ounce of truth to any of this, according to DropSite — which must’ve “confirmed” its conclusion through an impeccable process of journalistic verification, located somewhere in the deep recesses of Ryan Grim’s lady-believing brain. (After all, Grim’s a bigtime believer in the likes of Tara Reade, Whitney Webb, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Maria Farmer, Christine Blasey Ford, Lisa Bloom, etc. — why pump the brakes now with Sarah Hishan?)

One of the funniest things ever is that this gravely serious DropSite report ended up getting cited by — wait for it — Israel, which DropSite otherwise algorithmically programs its content against at every conceivable opportunity. Any fleeting indicia of Israel coming within twelve emails of Jeffrey Epstein is insinuated as proof that Epstein must’ve been running some massive child rape operation at Mossad’s command. In a November 17, 2025 appeal brief submitted by Israel to the ICC, challenging the arrest warrants Khan sought against Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the momentous “Drop Site” article is referenced a hilarious 25 times — more than any other news source! Gilad Noam, the Attorney General of Israel, relays that “an online journalistic platform called Drop Site” had helpfully reported “significant new details about the sexual misconduct allegations” against Khan, and this should cast extreme doubt on the veracity of Khan’s requested arrest warrant. Indeed, he argued, Khan must be disqualified from any further ICC proceedings against Israel in light of DropSite’s report that he tried to “smear” Sarah McVictim by disgracefully questioning the accuracy of her reality-perception capabilities. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

(Netanyahu has been gloating since Khan’s ouster, of course, telling Fox News viewers that Khan has now been “completely exposed” for his “sexual crimes.”)

As perversely comical as all this is, from my perspective, the best part of DropSite’s contribution to the silly saga was definitely their pretension to be reporting that “far more serious” accusations were made against Khan than had been previously known at the time. Among these extraordinarily serious accusations: that Khan had mired Sarah in a depraved “monthslong grooming” campaign. Apparently no one in the DropSite editorial crew had the slightest flicker of doubt that a professional adult woman in her late 30s claiming she was “groomed” — over the course of many months, by a fellow adult legal professional — was as supremely super “serious” as any “accusation” could ever get. Grim & co. must’ve openly wept while they guided that little bombshell through their fiercely independent adversarial editing process.

“Seriously” though: this must be some kind of joke? The profoundly disturbing “sexual abuse” scandal (as DropSite described it) which has now culminated in a possibly fatal death blow to the International Criminal Court as a whole… is a scandal fundamentally about lawyer-on-lawyer “grooming”? Humble request: Can “DropSite” please add a sitcom laugh track to their website interface, to have on standby for the next time they purport to be weighing in on any matters of such “serious” nature?

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More to the point: it’s wild how rapidly “grooming” has been rocketed through the concept-creep wormhole, and can now just be casually used to encompass whenever an adult kinda feels bad about something that went on sexually / romantically / emotionally. This is so many light-years beyond what had previously been the uncontroversial normative conception of “grooming” that it’d be really funny if it wasn’t so dark. (OK, it’s still funny.)

See this 2018 journal article by retired FBI agent Kenneth Lanning, who’d spent decades as the Bureau’s point-person for investigating “child molesters.” In the article, Lanning sets out to systematically delineate the elements of “grooming,” since he’d noticed the term seemed to be exploding in popularity, and taking on usages so radically removed from what he’d previously understood as its accepted definition: when legitimately predatory adults employ certain behavioral techniques to habituate actual children into becoming receptive to their illicit sexual advances. Lanning writes:

Although increasingly used, there is still much confusion and disagreement over the precise meaning of the term grooming. It does not have one official, legal, mental health, or even lay definition. Anyone using the term, therefore, should clearly define it and consistently use their definition. Especially problematic for a clear understanding of communication are common terms with a wide range of possible definitions — all correct but often different. The term grooming has become one of these terms. To make this problem even worse, there is essentially no real difference between the definitions of the terms seduction and grooming.

I define grooming/seduction as the use of nonviolent techniques by one person to gain sexual access to and control over potential and actual child victims. The grooming or seduction process usually consists of identifying preferred or acceptable child targets, gathering information about interests and vulnerabilities, gaining access (i.e., sports, religion, education, online computer), filling emotional and physical needs, lowering inhibitions, and gaining and maintaining control (i.e., bonding, competition, challenges, peer pressure, sympathy).

At bottom, Lanning says, “grooming” is essentially interchangeable with “seduction.” The sole reason the term “grooming” can be rightly applied to adult-on-child scenarios is because it’s obviously considered illicit for any adult to ever sexually “seduce” a child. When children are “groomed,” he says, it’s typically by a “process” featuring some combination of “kindness, attention, material enticement, special privilege, and coercion.” But when it comes to adult-on-adult relations, according to Lanning, these very same “processes” may be employed! Which would be considered classic “seduction.” Because in his experience, predatory adults who set about “grooming” children do it in much the same way that adults set about “seducing” one another! “Between two adults or two teenagers,” Lanning says, “it might be considered part of dating.”

BINGO!

Unfortunately for anyone who may have bothered to think about it for two seconds, now engraved forevermore in the canon of “international law” is that conventional techniques of adult romantic seduction may be freely conflated with adult sex pests “grooming” vulnerable children. Thus, international prosecutorial bodies can be validly consigned to years of soul-sucking turmoil over “adult grooming” accusations. The media has played its usual role in facilitating this moral mania overhaul, refracting “adult grooming” to a lay audience with the offending conduct remade as “sexual misconduct,” “sexual assault,” and inevitably — just give it a few more weeks — “rape.”

Maybe on principle, the ICC deserved to be pummeled into crippling dysfunction, or maybe even eliminated entirely — a very good argument could be made! — but why does this always have to be done for the stupidest possible reasons, which solve nothing, and only intensify the salience of the stupidest possible pathologies — coming soon to a more favored institution near you!

That the basis for all this mayhem should’ve been the myopic personal drama of one troubled woman — whose proximity may have caused a lapse in Khan’s judgment — is truly remarkable. Particularly if you force yourself to sit through the only on-record account she’s known to have given of her Khan-related struggles. Perhaps because it’s tricky to synthesize “grooming” into a concise CNN-ready soundbite, the sole tangible instance of sexual interaction she ever really articulated in that interview is one that allegedly took place during an ICC mission to Colombia, sometime in 2023 or 2024, when she would’ve been 36 or 37 years old — during which she at some point wound up inviting Khan to her hotel room, and promptly climbed into bed with him… whereupon… she recounts… “I felt Mr. Khan sort of scooch over in the bed. And he started to put his hand down my leggings to grope me — to put his tongue in my ear. And I didn’t move an inch. Even when I remember, I think his fingernail must have caught my skin. I didn’t flinch — nothing. I just was still. Now, when you take that one incident alone, if you believe someone to be asleep, that is not consent. You cannot consent to that.”

Somehow my initial intuitions about the sheer stupidity of this story were not nearly cynical enough. Because if this is really the defining incident we’re supposed to believe implicates Khan as a serial perpetrator of “non-consensual sexual contact”... and not just because of the overarching “power dynamic” problem, which Sarah maintains rendered all their sexual activity non-consensual anyway, but because in this special episode, she claims she had been “pretending to be asleep,” though she was not in fact asleep. But because Khan must have somehow believed she was asleep, he surely must have known her consent could not be granted — even though she admits she was awake? This is the most egregious example of abuse / assault / misconduct / whatever she was able to confect after thinking about it daily for over two years? This is what makes Karim Khan not just an unwitting transgressor of the latest newfangled “consent” strictures, but a willful and conscious sex assailant? WTF? Am I the one being “gaslit” here???

At this point, let us cast our minds back to October 27, 2024, when the Guardian came out with one of the first public reports that a dreaded “accusation” cycle had commenced:

According to a document seen by the Guardian, the accusations against Khan, 54, include unwanted sexual touching and “abuse” over an extended period. They include an alleged incident in which he is said to have “pressed his tongue” into the woman’s ear. Khan denies such allegations of misconduct.

Omitted from this initial tone-setting report was some potentially illuminating context: that the ear-licking survivor — by her own eventual telling 20 months later! — had been voluntarily lying in bed beside Khan at the time, after she’d accepted him into her upscale Colombian hotel room, located one floor below his, on the stated premise that she was going to take a nap, and he would join her for this nap. And then her ear was mortifyingly licked.

Might’ve been some clarifying context for readers. Oh well.

One of the few moderately useful questions Amanpour managed to ask during the tediously long-winded Sarah interview was the following, thanks to a copy of the top-secret report(s) Amanpour was magically able to obtain:

AMANPOUR: Can I point some things out then, in this idea of — did he think it was consensual? You’ve explained exactly why that couldn’t be possible from your point of view, of course. And afterwards, according to the report, he would ask you whether you were comfortable or uncomfortable with anything he was doing. In other words, after you had these experiences that you allege, he would then say, of course, you’d — I’m paraphrasing, you’d tell me if you’re uncomfortable. Is that correct?

SARAH: He would sometimes mention that, or ask me that question. But if you know Mr. Khan, he’s not expecting a response from you. Mr. Khan does what he wants. And I, again, go back to that moment where I clearly told him, if this continues, I might harm myself.

OK… so… on at least some occasions, Sarah acknowledges Khan would expressly ask her if she was “comfortable” with everything that was going on. Amanpour did not inquire if Sarah had ever responded affirmatively, which might’ve been a solid journalistic followup, since the whole impetus for this interview was ostensibly to detail the “unwanted” and “coerced” sexual contact Sarah’s alleging she’d been ravaged by. Which according to the fearless DropSite crew, “lasted nearly a year, and continued even after she told Khan that his conduct had left her suicidal.” So what about the indeterminate number of months prior to her purportedly telling Khan that she felt bad — perhaps if not “suicidal” — or as she put it to Amanpour, that if “this” went on any longer, she might “do something to herself”? Here’s another potential High IQ journalistic followup: at any time during the nearly full year that she was regularly engaged in these seemingly quite frequent liaisons with Khan, did she ever respond in the affirmative to his proactively-made overtures seeking verbal confirmation of her comfort? I guess we can only speculate.

Actually, scratch that. For your own safety and comfort, it’s probably best not to speculate. Because some NGO thing called “Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice” has already answered all the questions we could possibly have, declaring that the ultimate answer lies in the ICC’s toxic workplace culture, which would’ve made catastrophically unbearable any of Sarah’s adult grooming travails, since the ICC is so well-known as a “rigidly hierarchical institution,” in which injustices like adult grooming are enabled and excused. What a truly hilarious way to describe this clearly walking-on-eggshells / hanging-by-a-thread quasi-prosecutorial entity, headquartered in the Netherlands, brimming as it must be with European Unionized gender-sensitive Liberal International Order types. It’s always the culturally liberal institutions whose dissidents on the lower rungs of the “hierarchy” end up denouncing as the most viciously repressive institutions of all! Reminds me of George Floyd Summer, when 26-year-old digital media staffers would bombastically pout on Twitter that their left-liberal journalism organization was actually Ground Zero for the most savage repression in Modern America. Their editors and peers would then be required to ritualistically validate these grievances, no matter how hallucinatory or ideologically blinkered, even though the pouters were never going to be placated regardless. Some ICC intern could declare tomorrow that the ICC is actually a “grooming gang,” and everyone who’s culturally or institutionally adjacent would have to nod in remorseful agreement.

One might reasonably ask: OK, so what really went on with this whole ICC shitshow? Because it couldn’t really have been all about an “adult grooming” kerfuffle… right? Of course, it’s tempting for a certain cohort of online commenters to immediately leap to the “Israel did it!” conclusion. Which increasingly explains everything that ever goes wrong anywhere. At least in this instance, Israel-related shenanigans are not some freakoid fever-dream — the Netanyahu arrest warrant sought by Khan, and the backlash this engendered, clearly did play some role in the overall shitshow chronology. And there was never any doubt that Israel would swiftly exploit whatever vulnerabilities might surface in the ICC operation — just like any defendant would do, frankly, if the person or agency trying to prosecute them had vulnerabilities exposed. But there was no way for Israel to surreptitiously engineer what was obviously the paramount factor here: an institutional culture in which “accusations” are just never going to be handled rationally. Whether it’s the ICC, or other places with broadly similar cultural profiles (see: Democratic Party, affiliated NGOs, myriad interlocking EU satellites) where at minimum, the default expectation should be that no matter how trivial or crazed the “accusation,” it will inevitably spiral out of control. Maybe on occasion there can be miraculous exceptions, and the damage can be somewhat contained, but as a baseline assumption, you really just have to brace for the maximally irrational outcome. And when you add in the extraneous political stuff — like, say, a Maine Senate Race ascribed with big national import, or god forbid Israel/Palestine — forget it. Just throw in the towel, go into hiding, kill yourself, etc.

An examination of the recent institutional record shows that even preceding Khan’s tenure, which started in 2021, the ICC’s culture was deemed so menacing to women that an urgent directive was issued — by some interchangeable entity that’d been tasked with issuing such directives, and was comprised of literal self-described “Experts,” who proclaimed:

Decisive action needs to follow the ASP’s and Court’s commitment to ensuring gender equality and providing a welcoming environment for all individuals affiliated with the Court. The Experts make a number of findings and recommendations throughout the Report addressing gender inequality, particularly in senior positions, through measures relating to elections, recruitment, working environment, training and professional development. Targeted interventions for gender equality should be complemented by gender mainstreaming. Attention should further be given to ensuring the dignity, wellbeing, safety and inclusion of LGBTIQ+ individuals in the Court’s working environment. The Experts welcome in this regard the ICCQ, an informal sexual and gender diversity network at the Court. In pursuing these goals, the Court should make use of dedicated focal points on gender issues, and sexual and other forms of harassment, best practices and expertise of specialised external partners, such as UN Women and dedicated NGOs.

One can only imagine the discussions that must go on at the “informal sexual and gender diversity network” that apparently exists in or around the International Criminal Court. Surely whenever some controversy arises, it’s met with a sober and deliberative conflict-resolution process, carried out in accordance with Robert’s Rules of Order or an appropriate Dutch equivalent. Surely, there is no steadier or more reliable “network” to which ideas for “best practices” could be outsourced.

We’re led to believe this 2020 investigation had to be urgently launched because previously, the ICC HQ was a cesspool of hyper-aggressive sexual impunity, with “bullying and harassment” allowed to run rampant, in large measure because of what the Report describes as “a certain lack of gender balance” at the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) — even though “the gender distribution in the OTP appears to be close to 50/50.” Because notwithstanding this near-perfect “balance,” there remained “almost a complete absence of women in senior positions — which is a general issue across the Court.” Does anyone want to take a wild guess at what gender the next Chief Prosecutor will be, once she/her/they emerges from the wreckage of the Khan demolition? The Report continues:

The Experts heard many accounts of bullying behaviour amounting to harassment in all Organs of the Court, though particularly in the OTP. They also heard frequent complaints that the culture of the Court’s workplace was adversarial and implicitly discriminatory against women. They heard a number of accounts of sexual harassment, notably uninvited and unwanted sexual advances from more senior male staff to their female subordinates. Female interns seemed to be particularly vulnerable to such approaches, underlining the extent to which this phenomenon, not just at the Court, but in business, government, law, academia and many other professional environments around the world, frequently has more to do with power relationships than with mutual attraction.

“Implicitly discriminatory”? Well, that should be a cinch to eradicate! Probably just need a few more bureaucratic tweaks. “Adversarial”? You mean like… in a courtroom? Also, sorry to belabor the point, but isn’t the whole reason why “sexual advances” are generally initiated because sexual interest may not have been explicitly “invited,” but still might be prospectively welcomed, and so once the advance is made, the recipient can either accept or refuse it, depending on whether they deem it “wanted” or “unwanted”? Eh… nevermind.

BUT WAIT… THERE’S MORE… UGH… SUBSCRIBE FOR PART TWO, COMING SHORTLY, WHICH WILL BE PAYWALLED. YES, SORRY, YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO PAY ME FOR SLOGGING THROUGH THIS BULLSHIT

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Thanks to all who came out last night for the “Great Epstein Debate.” It looked like a packed house to me. Somehow, I ended up losing per the Oxford-style debate format. I found this pretty amazing, at least per my own subjective perception of the quality of the arguments, which I grant is extremely biased in my favor, given that I’m the one who delivered my argument. I might have to self-interestedly attribute this outcome to the persistence of the “moral panic” itself! I was also told that fewer “libertarian autists” were in the audience than is typical. Whatever though — the people have spoken!

One of the organizers told me the debate was not “live-streamed” due to technical issues, but it was video-recorded, so it should be released relatively soon by Soho Forum/Reason.

In the meantime, below is the opening statement I more-or-less delivered last night, with some improvisation throughout. Along with a few other notes/thoughts I jotted down in preparation.

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Your final friendly reminder that this debate is happening tomorrow night! What a fabulous way to celebrate Bastille Day.

I realized I have some “comped tickets” available, so if you are a “PAID SUBSCRIBER” and would like a “comped” ticket or tickets, send me an email/DM or leave a comment here. If you are not a “PAID SUBSCRIBER” and would like a “comped” ticket or tickets, please become a “PAID SUBSCRIBER” and send me an email/message or leave a comment here.

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Benjamin Netanyahu reminisced today that when Congress was deliberating the size of a pending Israel appropriations package, Lindsey Graham would often astonish him by “outbidding the Prime Minister of Israel” — that is, by demanding an even larger pro-Israel sum than Netanyahu himself had the temerity to ask for. “I’m not getting a single vote in South Carolina for that,” Graham explained, according to Netanyahu. “Because, you know, there are very few Jews in South Carolina.” So unwavering was Graham’s pro-Israel conviction, he ultimately didn’t care if it conferred him with any political advantage or disadvantage.

Graham once made a similar argument to me regarding Ukraine; I’d asked how many Republican voters he figured would agree with his stated conviction that sending Ukraine enormous amounts of weaponry is emphatically in America’s national interest. Do average heartland Republicans really believe this? “In my state they do, overwhelmingly,” Graham said.

You’ll notice this logic appears to slightly contradict what he’s purported to have told Netanyahu. Because there are also “very few” Ukrainians in South Carolina. And yet, Graham had no trouble declaring South Carolina Republicans to be in overwhelming agreement with the supreme national imperative of subsidizing Ukraine for indefinite attritional warfare against Russia.

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His logic becomes a bit more internally consistent once you get down to its utilitarian essence, which is that Graham would say or do whatever he found necessary to advance his sincerely-held ideological convictions, whether that be in relation to Israel, Ukraine, or the many other initiatives of American interventionism he championed over the decades. Projecting unified GOP support for generous Ukraine war subsidies, whether grounded in empirical reality or not, was what he deemed politically necessary at the time to get done the only thing that really matters in the end: getting the dang appropriations bill passed. Likewise, I’m sure a more thorough obituary than this one could find plenty of quotes in which Graham projects certainty that his strident support for Israel would in fact garner him lots of votes in South Carolina, contrary to what he reputedly told Netanyahu in private.

Because when you get down to it, Graham was a resolutely conviction-driven politician. He was pure ideology — that of muscular American primacy, no matter the cost, and without a whole lot of concern for whatever machinations or tradeoffs might be needed to advance that overriding objective. John McCain, his former best “amigo,” basically adhered to the same ideological paradigm, although he and Graham ended up taking slightly different tactical paths — most glaringly in the “era of Trump,” when McCain, at the twilight of his career and life, just couldn’t stomach all the performative sycophancy required to remain in good personal standing with Trump. Graham, however, was willing and eager to play another decidedly gainful role, and become arguably the single most effective Trump ingratiator of the past decade or more.

When I was covering the colossal Ukraine/Israel/“Indo-Pacific” war funding bill barreling through Congress in April 2024, I spoke to several individuals involved in the behind-the-scenes process by which Trump came to provide the crucial political backing needed to get the measure passed, as it had been otherwise stalled in complex legislative wrangling, and would require some external political heft to get across the finish line. Particularly with a restive GOP House caucus that was wary of supporting any funds at all sought by the Biden Administration. Trump, who at that point had just effectively secured the Republican presidential nomination for the third consecutive time, was the only figure in the country with the requisite political “pull” to give certain Republicans the cover they needed to hustle the bill to passage. Indispensable in this effort was Lindsey Graham, who Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) described to me as the undisputed “Trump Whisperer” of the Senate Republican Conference. In this capacity, Graham was able to seamlessly facilitate Trump’s sign-off, in part by incorporating some supposed Trump policy preferences, such as structuring a portion of the Ukraine funding in the form of a “loan” (which never had to be paid back). Whatever methods were necessary to achieve Trump’s backing, Graham knew precisely how to utilize them, and the bill was eventually passed thanks to some ingeniously crafty maneuvers by “MAGA Mike” Johnson. Indeed, that gigantic April 2024 appropriations package is almost certainly still underwriting Ukraine-bound expenditures to this day.

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So how did Graham attain this stature as “Trump Whisperer”? Raw political acumen, first and foremost, driven by what was undoubtedly Graham’s core ideological commitment: untrammeled American primacy. Trump was more than amenable to becoming the vehicle through which Graham could further this agenda, despite the nominally existential stakes of the 2016 GOP primaries, when Graham and others who ran against Trump had professed to be so very distraught that he was going to destroy the Conservative Movement, doom the Party’s electoral fortunes, and most importantly, undermine American power abroad. But soon enough, when political reality set in, Graham thereafter set about assiduously ensuring that his most doom-and-gloom forecasts did not come to pass. Instead, he and others of his ilk realized that Trump could in fact be a priceless opportunity to actually reinvigorate their cherished American hegemonic project, since Trump had managed to convince lots of voters that he was ushering in a bold new era of “America First.” Which, functionally, could just be treated as little more than a clever re-branding exercise. “Democracy promotion” of the kind Graham had championed during the Bush/Cheney years was no longer going to sell, so it was actually a Godsend that Trump burst on the scene and introduced a new rhetorical strategy for selling much the same product, albeit with some Trump-specific adjustments around the edges, which Graham was more than happy to accommodate.

Because what did Graham get? What was the return on his investment? War with Iran — check. That was a dream Graham probably never could have imagined would be realized with the likes of Bush, Romney, or perhaps even McCain at the helm. No, it would take a “circuit-breaker” like Trump to ignore Congress, definitely ignore the United Nations, and just go right ahead and launch a dead-of-night sneak attack, in full military coordination with Israel, to kill the Supreme Leader and impose regime change. Such a thing was hardly a glint in Graham’s eye back during the 2016 primary mania, when the pundit and operative consensus agreed that Trump would unleash a frightening wave of “isolationism,” causing America to surrender its hard-won rightful place atop the post-war international order.

But what a difference a decade can make! 100+ hours on the Golf Course together can really go a long way. It also didn’t hurt that Graham and Trump seemed to genuinely come to like and admire one another. (How the hell else could you tolerate spending so many friggin’ hours hittin’ the links one-on-one, sometimes in the sweltering heat?) Seriously, though — did these two fall in love? Does anyone care to speculate if Trump has spent 100 hours total with Melania? (“I love you,” Graham once said to Trump.) By the time Lindsey became the first US Senator to endorse Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, nearly three years in advance, he didn’t have to do this out of some shot-in-the-dark gambit to potentially influence his dear friend Donald, but because he and Donald’s political and policy interests had been shown to be demonstrably aligned. Any lingering upset from 2016 was just a distant memory, relevant only for amusing trivia questions at Capitol Hill watering holes. Because by 2024, with Trump’s enthusiastic blessing, Graham had appointed himself to grandiloquently expound on the true meaning of “America First.”

Arguably only Marco Rubio has been more adroit at merging his fortunes with Trump’s, after the carnival-like rancor of the 2016 primaries, which were widely assumed at the time — foolishly it turns out — to be an existential showdown between starkly divergent visions of US foreign policy. The term “neocon” could once have been reasonably said to capture the essence of both Rubio and Graham, but as I’ve argued, that term is long overdue for retirement. Because most of the time, it only gets fallaciously used to set up some figmentary contrast between Trump and his supposed “neocon” adversaries — the dark saboteurs always scheming against him, or tricking him into compliance despite his true “instincts,” which are supposedly not at all congruent with the “neocons.” Time to retire that tedious little pet theory too. Because let the record show that there is really no grounds for doubting what Trump said today on his impromptu TV tour honoring Graham in memoriam: “Essentially we agreed on almost everything.” Such “agreement” can come about through a great multiplicity of political and interpersonal routes — Graham clearly mastered all of them.

On a different note, as I remarked earlier today, it’s always been strange that so many naysayers on both Right and Left have given Graham such a hard time for his private life — or lack thereof. With the Right this is doubly strange, because when it comes to gay men who are simply and unalterably gay — of whom there are lots, it should go without saying, in right-leaning political orbits — what would the Rightoid Taunting Squad have these men do, exactly? Take up with a woman under false pretenses? Graham appears to have led a life of long-term celibacy, or perhaps he was asexual. Whatever! “Gay” was never made part of his public identity. Did this mean he was “closeted”? Perhaps. But it could also have meant he voluntarily decided to forego any interest or investment in that particular area of life, which is what some minority of humans have always done, and instead he chose to immerse fully in public service. (I personally detested much of that public service on the merits, but it was public service all the same.) So again — what else could (presumably) gay men such as Graham possibly do to satisfy the Right-Wing “anti-gay” jeering brigades? Kill themselves? Sheesh. Congress essentially became his priesthood, and he didn’t even violate the clerical vows (that we know of) in contrast with many priests.

As to the Left snarling at him for his perceived sexual hypocrisy, given that he also supported conservative social causes, including around LGBTQIA++ or whatever — hey, there’s no hypocrisy if Graham was not actually doing anything in private which in public he would’ve condemned. Maybe it’ll come out that he really was running around having gay hookups in bathhouses, or had a prolific burner account on Grindr, but I’ve never seen any credible indication of that, and intuitively it seems implausible. Regardless of whether he theoretically had some traces of same-sex attraction extant somewhere in his psyche, this was clearly not something he ever evinced any desire to foreground, or apparently act upon. And… so what? It doesn’t make him a betrayer of some cause he never supported. If anything, there are reassuring lessons to be gleaned in how immutable identity traits do not inherently destine any particular individual to embrace any particular set of political beliefs. But neither Right nor Left tend to sit comfortably with that revelation.

As for the circumstances of Graham’s death — sure, let’s see the pathology report. He was 71, but seemed to be in decent enough health, and had just returned from yet another energetic trip to Ukraine. Who the hell knows why Kash Patel found it necessary to X-post that the FBI is involved for some reason. Trump said he spoke on the phone with Graham yesterday evening at around 6:30pm EST, and then by 8pm, he was gone. One could say — only half-jokingly — that if this was really Graham’s time to exit stage left, there could be no more fitting sendoff than to check out right in the middle of doing what he absolutely did best: expertly sweet-talking Trump to approve the latest round of American hegemonic expansion.

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Another friendly reminder: I will be doing this Epstein Debate on Tuesday, July 14, in NYC

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Why do I say the hit has been manufactured? Why use that particular word? Because literally, it’s been openly divulged that the “rape accusation” rollout was facilitated by a specific individual, Cheyenne Hunt, who had openly declared her mission to take out Platner, following what she boasts was her integral role in vaporizing Eric Swalwell several months before. After which, she had joined with Democratic House members, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Debbie Dingell, Rashida Tlaib, and Becca Balint, to announce the formation of a new pressure outfit, “Reckoning Action,” and likewise announce that the next target on her list was Graham Platner. She then made good on these threats, and was openly credited for engineering the POLITICO article that spurred the denunciatory mob this week, in concert with a CNN interview of the alleged victim. It would defy reason to not also suspect that she could have been “behind” the accuser’s accusations escalating so radically since June 4, when the accuser had merely told the New York Times that she perceived Platner’s behavior to be “reckless” and “unsettling.” Then by July 6, the allegation morphs into full-blown rape. Go figure. “Rape” — the magic word everyone knows would send the Democratic Party hurtling into a frantic tailspin. So there’s just no question Platner’s neutralization was manufactured. It’s not being hidden! It doesn’t require any wild speculation. It’s being openly bragged about!

“Manufactured” is also an apt word because the initial POLITICO article was clearly framed to convey to casual news consumers — the vast majority of whom will not forensically read it, of course, and only absorb the headline takeaway — that rock-solid corroboration had been uncovered that made the accusation supremely credible, and should be assumed unassailably true. But… there is no corroboration whatsoever presented in the article for the claim that Graham Platner raped Jenny Racicot in 2021. None. And yet, even news consumers whom you’d think might be a bit more sophisticated, like Nate Silver, falsely described the article as containing precisely the corroborative evidence it did not contain. The literal opening sentences of Nate’s post on the matter featured two egregious falsehoods. I wrote a Substack Note yesterday (tagging Nate) that explained these errors in detail, and never received a response, nor has there been any correction made to Nate’s post:

So if this “rape accusation” rollout could have succeeded at getting Nate Silver to falsely proclaim “corroborating materials” had been produced — and thus every right-minded citizen should agree it’s been proven that Platner committed rape — that’s a phenomenal PR masterstroke. Bravo. Even though Nate himself was already primed to believe any “accusation” that might be flung Platner’s way, since he’d already been arguing for weeks/months that Platner was a big political liability for Dems, and Maine primary voters were extremely un-savvy to support him. Sensing vindication for his thesis had arrived, Nate confirmation-biased his way to the most damning interpretation of a single POLITICO article — that’s all it took — and announced the rape claim was “well-supported,” because the accuser provided “corroborating materials” such as “communications about the assault with her therapist and with a friend.” Yet it’s 100% false that any “communications” provided to POLITICO had “corroborated” that an assault or rape took place in 2021. The “communications” POLITICO cites, with both the therapist and the “friend,” corroborate no such thing. See the Substack Note for further details. The point here is that someone such as Nate, who styles himself a highly discerning media aficionado, bought into the idea that dispositive proof of Platner’s raping had been revealed — a testament to the shrewdness of the PR-manufactured initiative.

I was asked on the stream tonight how I would theoretically advise Platner to proceed. Well, I know what I wouldn’t do — I wouldn’t pull a Morris Katz, the boy-wonder strategist reputed to be some brilliant political thinker, and tell Platner he ought to instantly capitulate to a raving mob, which had formed its implacable consensus in a matter of minutes on Monday. PLATNER MUST GO. Because if there’s anything we can be reasonably certain of with mobs, it’s that the furious insta-verdicts they proclaim do not tend to reflect a rational evaluation of the facts and evidence. It would therefore be foolish for Platner to bow to the mob, as a hostage to the moment, because it’s reasonably likely the fire-and-brimstone uproar will subside soon enough, and perhaps at least a smidgeon of rational thinking can eventually be introduced.

What’s the alternative? Bowing to the mob is functionally the same as Platner agreeing to be branded “rapist.” Because 99% of people who ever hear about this story will never hear about any exculpatory facts or evidence that might emerge weeks, months, or years down the line. They will instead have heard that Platner was accused of rape, and that he seemingly validated this accusation by withdrawing on the spot. Even though he had just received more Democratic primary votes than any Maine senate candidate in history. So for him to terminate his candidacy even under those circumstances must mean he really did do something horrible and rapey. Purely from the standpoint of his own personal self-interest, and self-preservation, I can’t imagine telling Platner to assist in the nuking of his own reputation.

But on top of that, anyone who’d claim they know for certain that Platner couldn’t possibly win in November is blowing smoke out their ass. You absolutely do not know, one way or another. Have people really not gotten wise to the folly of over-confident pundit-like projections of future electoral outcomes? Almost certainly, 2026 is going to be a sizable pro-Democrat wave year — which means even “flawed” Dem candidates will be lifted to victory by national trends. Dems and Dem-aligned independents are inevitably going to consolidate around the Dem nominee to some extent, as always happens in October/November when most people’s minds get concentrated on the general election stakes. Unlike in, say, July.

But even if we stipulate that Platner’s chances of beating Susan Collins have diminished by virtue of the latest “accusations” — regardless of whether they’re credible or true — how far could his odds have really fallen? Let’s go with a harsh estimate and say he’s now only got a 30% chance of winning. That’s… not so bad? Plenty of candidates have contested plenty of elections facing far longer odds, and a 30% chance of becoming the junior Senator from Maine is a gamble plenty of political operators wouldn’t think twice about taking. Plus, I doubt the odds have even gotten that low. Sure, you can imagine some subset of voters now saying they won’t vote for Platner who otherwise would have — a percentage of older liberal women, perhaps. But I don’t buy that hardcore Democratic partisans in Maine are going to decide en masse that they’d rather have Republicans control the Senate for the second half of Trump’s term, than have a Democratic senator with some “accusations” trailing him — however appalled these voters might now purport to be in the immediate wake of the Accusation Train leaving the station.

Further, Platner is adamant that the accusations are not just false, but blatantly fabricated. Why preclude that he could be vindicated on this score? The rape claim has already fallen apart to a large extent, and it’s only been like three days. Who’s to say it couldn’t be wholly disproven, or at least widely discounted for non-credibility, in the next several months? This could be accomplished, for instance, by demanding that if rape is going to be alleged, let the alleging party go and file a police report, since a rape offense that allegedly took place in 2021 is well within the Maine statute of limitations. It’s not a crazily far-fetched proposition that the claim could soon be investigated through some official government channel, and be found to lack merit. Again: what’s the alternative? Just comply with your own destruction? That would pretty much be Platner raping himself.

Part of the reasoning Platner cited in the video he put out yesterday for why he “intends” to withdraw — despite maintaining that the accusations are patently, 100% false — is that national Democratic power-brokers were going to deprive him of the resources necessary to mount his campaign. Meaning, they were going to cut off his funding from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and also deny him access to the DNC voter file. So in light of these newly-imposed roadblocks, he needed to withdraw.

But hold up a sec. Sure, those would be legitimate hindrances. But he could still raise money on his own, through his own campaign organization. No national entity controls that. He doesn’t have to rely on infusions from any national party vehicles to stay afloat. And he could probably raise a lot of money on his own, were he to actually be defiant, and refuse to back down in the face of what he’s declaring (with good reason) is a manufactured political and media class snowjob. He could still hold rallies, he could still hold town halls. Maine isn’t a huge state, so he could probably even run plenty of TV ads.

In addition to all the stuff he could continue doing on his own, when these Dem bigwigs dramatically claim they’re going to withhold national funding, or prevent him from accessing the voter file… yeah, OK, that’s what they’re saying in July. How much you wanna bet they’d have a miraculous change of heart by the fall? (What are they gonna do — forfeit the race to Collins?) This is what they’re threatening right now in order to force Platner out. I’d wager it’s actually more likely than not they would conveniently forget about all these boisterous threats by the time September/October rolls around, and unlock the national resources as though nothing happened.

So that’s what I would advise Platner. But I’m not an overhyped, overrated, and overpaid consultant, so what do I know.

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Graham Platner has been knifed in brutally expedited fashion, and a conclave of Democratic Party officials is already preparing to hand-pick his replacement, through an as-yet-unknown process that will mercifully bypass any inconvenient input from Maine primary voters, who had already voted for Platner in overwhelming fashion on June 9. This can be summarily discarded, however, thanks to the one thing that reliably catalyzes the Party’s apparatus into swift and decisive action: a transparently contrived rape claim. Of course. So how did this happen? The answer contains useful insights about the nature of the current Democratic coalition, with implications that go well beyond the superbly-executed takedown of Platner.

Dems had already shown during “peak MeToo” that they were willing to toss aside even some of their most leading-light figures — such as Al Franken, infamously — at the first blush of some sexual impropriety, real or imagined. And in Franken’s case, for something as trivial as a photograph of him reenacting a lame comedy skit that involved outstretching his arms in the direction of an asleep woman’s breasts, while they were aboard a US military aircraft, and while the woman was wearing a flak-jacket. One might have thought the hair-trigger frenzies that brought about this kind of goofy “peak MeToo” crossfire had substantially abated since 2017-2018. Maybe in the wider culture they have. But not so much the institutional Democratic Party. Because the mechanisms of internal party reprisal are now so well-oiled, and can be sprung into action at such blinding warp-speed, that it’s probably the only thing that gives the various Party factions any kind of collective cohesion, apart from opposing Trump. “DSA” renegades or “establishment” bogeymen — doesn’t matter, all will join the latest denunciatory crusade just as readily.

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To apprehend the mechanics of the no-mercy Platner hit, we must all set our gazes on a character named Cheyenne Hunt. For it is fearless women like she who will undoubtedly charter our course to the future. An interestingly-timed July 2 puff piece by NBC News describes the lovely Ms. Hunt as a 29-year-old “progressive social media influencer” who recently became “involved in an effort” to oppose Platner. Through this “effort,” she was actively “working with multiple women who have had past personal relationships with Platner,” and providing them with “help navigating the media,” as well as “pro bono legal counsel.” These “efforts” were apparently being coordinated through some outfit of hers called “Reckoning Action,” which had just popped into existence only in “late May.” For starters, one might reasonably ask, who is funding this outfit? Dumb question. Because the thought clearly never occurred to Natasha Korecki of NBC News, much less does the journalist take any discernible steps to inquire. We’re told Ms. Hunt had initially endorsed Platner in October 2025, in her prior capacity as “executive director for Gen-Z for Change, a progressive advocacy group,” and she appears to have been greatly chastened by the experience, given that she subsequently decided to declare jihad against Platner, after rescinding her endorsement in response to the June 4 New York Times article that got this whole ball of destruction rolling. Recall the marquee findings of that blockbuster months-long investigation: that Platner had previously exhibited behaviors which several ex-girlfriends or dating acquaintances of his described years after the fact as “emotionally wrenching,” “volatile,” or even (gasp) “toxic.” This was sufficient for Ms. Hunt to loudly retract her endorsement of Platner (as if anyone should have given a shit in the first place who this person chose to “endorse,” or not, in the Maine senate race).

Ms. Hunt has clearly been hard at work since June 4, as the NBC News item foretold, because in the bombshell POLITICO article that dropped Monday afternoon — debuting the big rape claims and setting off the fierce cascade of repudiation — Cheyenne Hunt is disclosed as the woman who so skillfully made it all happen:

So there you go: the resourceful Ms. Hunt engineered this new round of what one might call “accusation escalation,” because the person whom she “connected” to POLITICO was Jenny Racicot, who had already been quoted in the NYT entry a month before, wherein the sum total of her “accusations” was that over the course of an “off-and-on relationship” with Platner, there was an episode in 2021 where he allegedly exhibited behavior she claimed to perceive as “reckless” and “unsettling” — although “she declined to elaborate” on whatever allegedly transpired. (In the meantime, she was apparently also reviewing his recently-unearthed cache of old Reddit posts, which enabled her to connect the dots and conclude that Platner “does not respect women.”) But now, with the unspecified “help” of Ms. Hunt, she was confiding to POLITICO — for a curiously-advertised “exclusive” — that she’d actually been “sexually assaulted” all along in the 2021 episode she’d cryptically referenced to the NYT, but had declined to expand on. What guidance might Jenny Racicot have received from Cheyenne Hunt in the past month, so as to best reformulate her accusations, and achieve the maximum political impact Ms. Hunt explicitly sought? We’re all left guessing. All we know is that she was reportedly upset by the reaction to the NYT article, felt obliged to support other women who’d allegedly alleged stuff, and that she’d been “working with” Cheyenne’s advocacy outfit — with its declared mission to become the hottest new launchpad for “the next generation of women having their #MeToo moment.” Of course, no sane Democrat dare mention any of these possibly mitigating details in the context of a “deeply troubling” new sexual assault claim.

Rather, the rock-solid consensus is that to even contemplate examining the accusation with any degree of critical detachment would be an act of pure wickedness, and perhaps career suicide. Nationally consequential political judgments, like Platner’s fate in Maine, should instead be outsourced to behind-the-scenes operators like Ms. Hunt, herself a failed 2024 Democratic congressional candidate, who is said to have previously “played a central role in bringing forth sexual misconduct allegations against Eric Swalwell in the California governor’s race.”

Oh yeah! Remember that whole “Eric Swalwell” thing? Seems like only yesterday. (It was April.) Just out of curiosity, what is the current status of those earlier earth-shattering allegations we are told Cheyenne Hunt played such a “central role” in “bringing forth”? You might recall a big press conference convened in Beverly Hills on April 14, 2026, and dutifully aired live by much of the pliant media, in which a woman named Lonna Drewes dramatically “came forward” to debut shocking new rape claims against Swalwell. She was seated alongside Lisa Bloom, a lawyer with a track record of accuser-representation that you’d think would be terminally blighted by the outright hoax she once attempted to orchestrate, whereby she claimed that a mystery person named “Katie Johnson” had been viciously double-raped by Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein at 12 years old. Then, without further explanation, Bloom’s explosive lawsuit outlining these claims got dropped on the eve of the 2016 election. Strangely, the past debacle seemed to give no one a second thought about Bloom swooping right back in to represent this sensational Swalwell accuser, whom Bloom had insisted would promptly provide contemporaneous corroboration for her charges… but no such corroboration appears to have ever been forthcoming. In fact, there’s been hardly a peep about any of those life-wrecking Swalwell accusations in the nearly three months since they were introduced with such fanfare — which in a matter of hours led to Swalwell’s resignation from Congress, and the House threatening instantaneous expulsion if he did not relent. Of course, Swalwell had already been bludgeoned into withdrawing from his poll-leading position in the California gubernatorial primary.

Lisa Bloom said her client Lonna Drewes had undergone “EMDR” therapy — perhaps not a quack technique in every conceivable respect, but definitely straight-up quackery when it’s alleged to have facilitated the discovery of repressed memories, such as the ones Drewes claimed to possess of being raped by Swalwell in 2018. But nevermind that, because the now-ancient Swalwell accusations have been buried in a thoroughly forgotten memory-hole, likely never to be heard of again, unless some eccentric journalistic sleuth decides to eventually undertake a lonesome followup inquest. But even then, the results would be barely noticed.

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The key thing was that Cheyenne Hunt had willed into life a torrent of headline-grabbing sex crime allegations, thanks to what her website boasts is a “sophisticated command of how political narratives are won and lost in the digital era” — and then, with dazzling alacrity, the entire Democratic Party apparatus mobilized to effectuate Swalwell’s blistering impalement, and cast him into the wilderness.

**Not that this qualifier should even be necessary, but yes, I personally always found Swalwell to be objectionable on ordinary political grounds. Which doesn’t even matter here. Because wherever a (male) Democrat happens to fall on the Party’s ideological spectrum, they are liable to be nuked in this same choreographed manner, should there be any hint of a romantic/dating history that can be strategically “narrativized.”

Since everyone in the Democratic Party high command, along with their loyal media adjuncts, either has the memory of a fruit fly, or more probably, refuses to ever develop politically substantive memories in the first place, they of course burst into similarly rapid action to impale Graham Platner — who, unlike Swalwell, had just received an overwhelming electoral mandate from their own Party’s most high-engagement voters, in the state we’re breathlessly reminded will be the crucial battleground to ensure that Chuck Schumer is rightfully installed as Senate Majority Leader come 2027. Platner’s improbable rise in the Maine Democratic Primary had been so resounding that the incumbent two-term Democratic governor, Janet Mills, was forced to prematurely abort her botched candidacy, recognizing she could not compete with Platner among the Dem rank-and-file.

But then in saunters Cheyenne Hunt. Maine electorate be damned, this gal had some big professional credentials to burnish, and she had media allies waiting patiently to be operationalized. Her website declares that she had already triggered a historic “national reckoning” through her victorious Swalwell “efforts,” and she humbly takes credit for having the fortitude to “break one of the most consequential political misconduct stories in recent memory” — simply by “working from a group chat with two other women” (imagine that) from which she claims to have organized her strategic “influencing.” She also quotes herself in heroically italicized font:

And she is now determined to leverage her smashing Swalwell success to “confront misogyny and gender bias in American public life,” wherever it may rear its ugly head, and defeat the “subjugation of women.” Which she takes to be the most urgent political challenge facing 2026 America. Enemy Number One in this quest was evidently Graham Platner. Not a bad target, since the media she’s shrewdly “connecting” with is so petrified of even the slightest critical discernment toward anything Ms. Hunt can present as a momentous new “rape” claim; it’s seen as egregious and unthinkable for anyone to observe, for instance, that the statutory deadline in Maine to replace Platner on the ballot happens to be coming up in just a few days. The shrewd Ms. Hunt surely would have been mindful of the calendar:

The POLITICO article she planted was cleverly framed to suggest corroborating evidence had been uncovered that proves the 2021 rape, though if you spend approximately two minutes diligently scouring the article, no such evidence is presented. There are some ambiguous 2023 Facebook messages between Jenny Racicot and an apparent acquaintance, in which they discuss Platner; the most incriminating excerpt is when Racicot obliquely describes Platner as “consensually careless” on occasion, which if she’d intended as a euphemism for literal “rape,” should definitely be in the running for some kind of glorious euphemism-of-the-year award. Also odd is Racicot’s noticeably favorable characterization of her purported rapist: he’s “charming and funny,” she tells her Facebook correspondent, as well as “a decently intelligent person” and “not all bad.” Which would have to be in contention for the most charitable description any woman has ever made of her purported rapist.

Not to mention the standout oddities from the CNN interview that Ms. Hunt and her cohort expertly stage-managed to coincide with the big POLITICO drop, in which Racicot tells a deeply sensitive Jake Tapper that she felt she had been in a “situationship” with her rapist, offering a theory that this “situation” of theirs was emblematic of “modern dating.” Huh. She also reveals that she’s had to “recall” certain memories of the alleged 2021 rape, which she had otherwise either attempted to forget or forgotten — raising obvious “red flags” about potential “recovered memory” contamination — and furthermore, that she actually “complied” with her own rape. Huh. She divulges that she allowed her rapist to sleep in her bed for the night, and slept in bed with him herself following the rape. She explains she didn’t want to let him leave the house, because she was concerned he might get in trouble with police for drunk driving. There was apparently no thought that the police might be of assistance in apprehending her rapist — she actively did not want Platner to face any police repercussions. (The statute of limitations in Maine for sexual assault offenses is 20 years — we’ll have to see if she changes her mind.) She also said she felt “fine” after the rape, although she was confused when Platner got up and left the next morning without speaking to her first, which was a conversation she apparently desired to have with her purported rapist. Some time after the alleged incident, she says she sent Platner some followup DMs over Instagram, to which he did not reply; she was actively monitoring to see if Instagram marked the messages as “seen.” In these purported messages, she claims she had notified him that his actions that night were non-consensual. Should these messages actually exist, they could potentially be corroborative of something. Adam Wren, the POLITICO journalist responsible for the hugely impressive scoop — which he intrepidly received from Cheyenne Hunt and her “Reckoning Action” outfit — cited the purported Instagram messages when he was asked on Tuesday to clarify what corroborating evidence he’d managed to locate for the story. His answer was the purported Instagram messages — which Racicot had merely described to him. Meaning, whose accuracy or even existence he had not independently verified. This evidently counted as ample “corroboration” for the Plucky Politico, who had no trepidation about Racicot’s inability to produce the messages in question. So he just decided to accept at face value her second-hand “description” of the claimed messages, and likewise accepted at face value her explanation that the messages had mysteriously vanished. Cool.

The POLITICO article was published July 6, 2026 at 3:18pm EST. The Maine Democratic Party had already called for Platner to terminate his campaign by 5:50pm EST, in the panic-disavowal sweepstakes that was instantly launched. Ro Khanna (5:21pm EST) and Ruben Gallego (5:23pm EST) were somehow even quicker — they of course being two nationally ambitious male Democrats who, by dint of that alone, are in a constant harried race against one another to show who can rush out their statements the fastest, whenever some alleged sex problem arises. The in-house Dem podcast studio likewise leaped into action, as Jon Favreau of “Pod Save America” clocked in with his call for Platner’s elimination at 5:33pm EST. Inevitably, soon came the Grim Reaper decree from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee chieftains, at 6:34pm EST, pulling the plug on Platner financially. The chair of the Democratic National Committee straggled forth at the wee hour of 7:45pm EST. Formerly ride-or-die pro-Platner pundits funneled in along the way. Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders probably did themselves no political favors by shamefully waiting till the next day to drop their anvils.

If you think this is sufficient time to rationally evaluate the relevant facts and evidence, and make a considered judgment about such reputation-immolating charges as rape — and perhaps most consequentially, proclaim that the expressed will of Maine’s primary voters ought to be voided by Party fiat, in what we’re always frantically told is the country’s most pivotal Senate race, because it’s all-hands-on-deck to overthrow the menace of Susan Collins — well, I don’t know what to tell you.

What the whole thing most vividly highlights is that once again, Dems do not have a collective action problem. At least when roused into action by youthful innovators like Cheyenne Hunt, who has accurately surmised there is no better way to stimulate the languid Party infrastructure than by contriving some lurid sex crimes. Because in that event, Democrats have shown over and over again they can be ruthlessly, coldly decisive.

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Friendly reminder that I am doing this Epstein Debate on July 14 in NYC. You are invited. Yes, you.

One of the countless civic gatherings held to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary Saturday could be found at the Sagamore Hill National Historic Site in Cove Neck, New York, nestled on the old-monied North Shore of Long Island. Visitors were invited to tour a well-preserved replica of President Theodore Roosevelt’s stately “Summer White House,” from which he conducted government business circa 1902 to 1909; inside, many striking artifacts can be viewed, perhaps most prominently a set of enormous elephant tusks said to have been gifted to Roosevelt by Emperor Menelik of Abyssinia — the largest elephant tusks currently on public display anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, according to a park ranger.

Much of the historic site’s day-to-day upkeep is overseen by Friends of Sagamore Hill, a volunteer group consisting mostly of retirement-aged locals, one of whom, Treasurer Jay Perrell, was asked (by me) to reflect on the significance of “America 250.” While he said the milestone was “great,” he also lamented the conspicuous lack of anniversary-themed signage adorning the property — a result of what he said was a “political issue” he and his group encountered in the lead-up. They had ordered some generic 250th anniversary banners from Amazon.com, but were informed by the National Park Service superintendent responsible for Sagamore Hill that the signage was unacceptable. Perrell surmised that this was down to a political dispute between two rival commemorative factions, “America250” and “Freedom 250” — the latter having been created by the Trump Administration to orchestrate its own branded festivities, and the former stemming from a more anodyne bipartisan commission originally set up by Congress ten years ago. So, this small group of volunteer hobbyists were told the banners they had innocuously attempted to display were “not National Parks Service-certified” — and they couldn’t even get a clear answer as to what they were permitted to display. “We kept asking the superintendent,” Perrell said. “There’s no answer — they can’t make a determination.”

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An email (by me) to NPS superintendent Jonathan Parker was not returned. And indeed, on the drive back and forth to the site, no “America 250” signage of any kind was visible, although some of the young children in attendance Saturday afternoon were happily wearing this year’s version of the classic “Old Navy” branded USA t-shirts, which did permissibly reference the 250th Anniversary, likely without the need for any direct federal approval.

Moving on from the strange bureaucratic mishap, Perrell was asked (by me) if he reckons that America as we know it will continue to exist in another 250 years. A woman sitting at a nearby picnic table, doing patriotic arts & crafts with a cheerful little girl, confidently interjected: “Oh, definitely.” I replied that denizens of the Roman Empire may have exuded similar confidence at an analogous juncture in the lifespan of their overarching political entity. “Well, Italy’s still there,” the woman said, as she continued twisting red-white-and-blue ribbons onto miniature objects. Drawing out the parallel a bit further, the woman was correct to observe that in 2026, there is a European landmass with a political entity situated upon it called “Italy” — though the modern Italian Republic is of course unrecognizable from the sprawling entity of which Rome was the seat of power during the lost days of Empire. Any surviving relics of imperial Rome are now museum pieces and tourist attractions.

It would likewise seem reasonable to suppose that in the great sweep of history, 250 years hence there could still exist a landmass commonly referred to as Long Island. But considerably less certain is that the political entity situated upon it will be exactly the same — whether that be the State of New York, or the United States of America. Especially for a federal entity so vast and outstretched as the present one, spanning as it does up to 8,000 miles west of Sagamore Hill, a whole fourteen timezones away in the Northern Mariana Islands — perhaps a locale more obscure to the average American than Long Island, but nonetheless ruled under the same umbrella of centralized political authority.

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Seven years ago (yesterday) — July 2, 2019 — Jeffrey Epstein was indicted by a federal Grand Jury for perpetrating a “sex trafficking conspiracy,” based on conduct alleged to have taken place between 2002 and 2005, and which the Feds had largely already investigated over a decade before, culminating in a 2007 determination that any indictment brought against Epstein would’ve faced such severe evidentiary and legal “challenges” that prosecutors actually feared he could be acquitted at trial, which is extremely rare in the federal court system.

Today it’s received wisdom that the 2019 case against Epstein must’ve been airtight, bulletproof, no-doubt-about-it: such an obvious slam-dunk, that to even give it a second thought would be absurd. Of course he was heading straight for the slammer — it was only a matter of the Feds going through with the formalities.

Well…….. don’t be quite so sure. Like most received wisdom, this conceit is something that gets blithely assumed, studiously unexamined, and automatically believed by the same kinds of people who think they know everything there is to know about Epstein because they listened to some dopey podcast, swallowed some social media slop, and maybe half-watched a Netflix propagandocumentary.

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If you read my previous article, you will be familiar with the exciting legislative history behind the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, and how radically it’s been transformed into a catch-all statutory fly-trap that now essentially enables prosecutors to charge whomever they want, whenever they want, for whatever they want, thanks to the infinite conceptual elasticity of “trafficking,” and the infinite bend-ability of the elements underpinning it.

Epstein was charged in July 2019 with a “sex trafficking conspiracy” per the TVPA. As far as the government alleged at the time, it was a conspiracy of one. Re-reading the indictment again, one gets the sense this was intended as a major “work in progress” — which is to say, Maurene Comey and her colleagues in the Southern District of New York had a lot of work on their hands, and a lot of heavy “trafficking” theory to weave out in the months ahead. Such creativity didn’t turn out so well for Maurene & Co. in 2025, when she was brought along to help convict Sean “Diddy” Combs on a similarly convoluted “trafficking” theory; at that point, even Manhattan jurors weren’t buying it, and they voted to acquit Diddy of the government’s headline “trafficking” charge. Despite this sizable mishap, it’s doubtful that the Feds have dampened their enthusiasm for pioneering “novel” applications of their favorite “trafficking” statute. An interesting discovery in the “Epstein Files” is how profusely the DOJ and FBI were congratulating one another for going so hard after Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell — so boldly and imaginatively — including by stretching the bounds of “trafficking” law to such soaring new heights. Literally, they were giving each other awards for this:

They even held a big “awards ceremony” on May 3, 2023 to kiss each other’s asses for this superlatively “superior performance” — coming up with all these impressively “novel” methods to get Epstein indicted and hauled off to jail, where he soon wound up dead. Oddly, the DOJ party-throwers and award-givers do not seem especially chastened by that outcome. Maybe because they were able to lock up Maxwell in his stead, and this was all the reason they needed to celebrate. What’s curious is that it should’ve taken such “novel” prosecutorial and investigative efforts to accomplish their task, since we’ve been so loudly told that Epstein and Maxwell were running the most prolific “child sex trafficking” operation in recorded human history. You’d think the means by which to punish such blatantly heinous acts would have been rather straightforward, and not require any elaborately conjured “novelties.”

Nor is it necessarily the most heartwarming thing for prosecutors and FBI agents to be jumping around giving high-fives for the brilliant new strategies they’ve innovated to toss people in prison for multiple decades, based on their private abstruse statutory re-constructions, indecipherable as they may be to ordinary citizens of average intellect — but hey, what do I know.

Be all that as it may, you might be asking: surely there’s no question they would have secured a conviction of Jeffrey Epstein? Surely I can’t be suggesting that even the most dimwitted set of prosecutors would have failed to convince a jury that Satan Pedo Hitler himself was guilty of “sex trafficking” crimes?

Well.…… again……. not so fast. First off, there are a million ridiculous misconceptions about what actually went on the first time the Feds considered prosecuting Epstein. And there’s a reason why they didn’t go through with it! No, not because he was “intelligence,” or because they were corruptly bought off by some cabal of nefarious pedo conspirators, but because the merits of the case they would have to prove were just nowhere near as solid as you’ve been lazily led to believe. That they compelled Epstein to accept the now-infamous “Non-Prosecution Agreement” was probably about the best the Feds could have hoped for in 2008, given the mountain of evidentiary and legal complications they encountered — the basis for which would only grow in the years that followed.

For instance, the lead detective in the initial Palm Beach police investigation, Joseph Recarey, who later got glorified as a truth-telling-justice-seeking folk hero by the Netflix-brained narrations of the tale, sat for a series of depositions in 2010, pursuant to one of the many Jane Doe civil cases brought against Epstein. On April 27, 2010 he was questioned by Martin Weinberg, one of Epstein’s defense attorneys; Epstein himself was also apparently in the room that day. To my knowledge, the full deposition wasn’t available in the public domain until January 30, 2026, upon the mass-dump of “Epstein Files.” (Or at least wasn’t findable enough that I was ever able to find it when I’d previously looked.) Recarey’s testimony could have raised a bunch of decidedly awkward issues for any hypothetical prosecution of Epstein, whether retrospectively in 2008, or prospectively in 2019. A choice excerpt:

WEINBERG: So Ms. [Jane Doe] did not engage in prostitution, but others did, during the course of the investigation?

RECAREY: I wouldn’t say others did. It’s a negotiation. If you’re paying for a sex act, it’s a negotiation. You get X for Y.

WEINBERG: So that if the negotiation was purely for a topless massage, then there was no prostitution?

RECAREY: Not in my eyes, no.

WEINBERG: So in your eyes, were any of the so-called victim/witnesses, did any of them engage in prostitution?

RECAREY: Do you mean since that time, or—

WEINBERG: Well, let’s start with that time, when Mr. Epstein was the customer. Were any of the women going to his house engaging in prostitution, in your opinion?

RECAREY: In my opinion?

WEINBERG: Yes.

RECAREY: No.

WEINBERG: And that included those who were going to his house who were above 18 as well as below 18, correct?

RECAREY: Like I was told, people that I interviewed that were above 18, what happened between them were between two consenting adults.

[…]

WEINBERG: And therefore, in your opinion, the women going to see Mr. Epstein were not going there pursuant to a prostitution agreement, correct?

RECAREY: Correct.

WEINBERG: They were going there as consenting adults or even consenting minors to do something other than prostitution?

RECAREY: They were going there to provide the massage but, you’re right, it wasn’t prostitution.

WEINBERG: And in fact, had some of these girls that went there who were under 18, had they been over 18, then this entire case would have been a consenting massage case, correct?

RECAREY: If they were over 18?

WEINBERG: Yes.

RECAREY: That it would have just been what, a massage case, you said?

WEINBERG: It would have been a case between two consenting adults, other than prostitution.

RECAREY: Unless we got a complaint.

Several things stand out here. First, bear in mind that Recarey was highly zealous in pursuing maximum criminal sanctions against Epstein. That’s why he complained to the Feds, in July 2006, when he felt the Palm Beach County State Attorney was settling for an insufficiently punishing solution to the Epstein question. Somewhat bizarrely, Recarey said his Epstein-related communications with federal officials came about by way of his assignment to a “Joint Terrorism Task Force,” through which he was already in daily contact with the FBI. In any event, whatever statements Recarey might have made that tended to lessen Epstein’s culpability would have to represent an “admission against interest,” and therefore carry particular weight. Recarey’s testimony in the 2010 deposition could thus plausibly pose a number of problems for the Feds to establish the “sex trafficking conspiracy” they eventually charged Epstein with masterminding. Recarey did not even regard the acts Epstein committed with the various Palm Beach girls, whether they were above or below the age of 18, as “prostitution” — meaning, in modern “trafficking” lingo, Recarey did not believe there was a “thing of value” exchanged for any sex act, so the acts in question would not have been, to his mind, “commercial sex acts” — a required element to prove “sex trafficking” under the TVPA.

(For the record, I would actually tend to agree with Recarey that none of these girls did anything that should be rightfully labeled “prostitution” — an inherently derogatory term. Where I would disagree is that the matter was ever best resolved through a brute-force intervention by the criminal justice system, which did nothing to ameliorate any legitimate harms, and only instigated a giant years-long fiasco for everyone involved.)

Recarey’s apparent logic was that none of the activity he investigated from 2005-2006 — and his investigation was quite extensive — could be characterized as “commercial sex acts,” because there was no “prostitution agreement” ever made by Epstein with any girl. That is, no advance agreement that Epstein would pay a certain amount of money for a particular sex act, which Recarey took to be the hallmark characteristic of “prostitution.” You negotiate up front, he says — X amount of money for Y sex act. But nothing like that ever happened with Epstein, he says. In addition, for all the girls he interviewed who happened to be over the age of 18, he concluded that any sexual activity they might have engaged in was “between two consenting adults,” and therefore not illegal. For the subset of girls who were not above 18, he says if they had been of legal age, their sexual activity with Epstein would have also been legal — consenting activity between two adults. Of course, it still would have been a statutory offense for Epstein to engage in sexual activity with any girl below the legal age of consent in Florida (18). But Recarey’s assessment of the larger circumstances is still material, because he rejects the idea that any alleged victim, regardless of age, had been subject to “force, fraud, or coercion” — another element needed to prove a “sex trafficking conspiracy” under the federal TVPA. Elsewhere throughout the 2010 deposition, Recarey is asked by Weinberg if a particular alleged victim had ever been “forced” or “coerced” into doing anything, and every time Recarey replies in the negative. Again, this is coming from a police detective whose entire professional reputation at that point was thoroughly intertwined with his handling of the Epstein affair, so he had every reason in the world to portray Epstein’s behavior in the most damning possible light.

Now, here comes a big whopper of a qualifier: the federal TVPA does not require that “force, fraud, or coercion” be proven where a purported victim was “caused to engage in a commercial sex act” and also “has not attained the age of 18 years.” It is only necessary to establish “force, fraud, or coercion” in relation to persons who have attained the age of 18 years. Although in practice, this distinction has been steadily eroded, especially in a civil context, where lawyers can come up with the most cockamamie formulas to scramble and contort the essential meaning of those three magic words. David Boies, the leading “victim” lawyer of so much lucrative Epstein litigation, explained to me in April that an adult woman can be properly designated a victim of Epstein’s “trafficking” venture, even if she participated in what she contemporaneously perceived as consensual sex acts with either Epstein or his putative “associates.” Because years after the fact, she may retroactively conclude that she had engaged in this activity under the auspices of a “false promise,” which meets the threshold for “fraud” under the TVPA. And a “false promise” could mean as little as claiming — again, with many years of hindsight — that when she had engaged in these consenting sex acts, she had done so with the understanding that at some point in the indeterminate future she would receive “something of value,” whether tangible or intangible, and she ultimately did not receive this hypothetical “thing.” In principle, she could even have expected to receive “something” of emotional or psychological “value.” So… good luck empirically evaluating that claim. Not that her claims would have to be seriously scrutinized anyway, given the “non-adversarial” and “confidential” nature of these big-money settlement schemes.

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In terms of establishing Epstein’s criminal liability for a “sex trafficking conspiracy” circa 2019, the Feds probably wouldn’t have had too hard a time meeting the first bare-minimum threshold: showing that Epstein had engaged in sexualized contact, to one degree or another, with persons who had not yet attained the age of 18. That’s not really disputable, in view of all the evidence, and Epstein pretty much admitted it himself. But simply proving the under-18 sexual activity would not be sufficient to prove a “sex trafficking conspiracy” per the federal TVPA. Otherwise, anyone in the United States who ever engages in consenting, though unlawful, sexual activity with a person not yet 18 could be federally prosecuted as a “child sex trafficking” perpetrator, and that is not generally what happens. (Yet.) You could argue that something akin to this has been happening more and more frequently, given the head-spinning advancements in “trafficking” theory. But in 2006-2008, it had literally never happened before in federal criminal law. Nothing had ever been charged before as a federal “sex trafficking conspiracy” based on a set of facts and evidence that bore the slightest resemblance to what Epstein was accused of doing. That’s why Alex Acosta and his colleagues in the Southern District of Florida were so conflicted about how best to go about penalizing Epstein. If they just charged him willy-nilly with a “sex trafficking conspiracy,” as one of the more adventurous prosecutors in the office had been demanding all along (Marie Villafaña), they would be blowing right past all existing precedent up to that point, and encroaching on matters that were understood near-universally to be within the proper purview of States. (Classic prostitution-style offenses with no clear interstate nexus.) Back then, there was still some residual hesitancy, especially among Conservative Republicans like Acosta and his compatriots in the George W. Bush administration, against the Feds just cavalierly storming in to override the States’ properly-demarcated jurisdictional interests. Particularly in a manner that would create an uncharted new “federalism” precedent, and authorize Federal supersession of authorities hitherto viewed as the settled remit of the States. But today, forget about it: any such hesitancy has been totally vaporized. Feds are happier than ever to Federalize whatever the heck they want, especially under the banner of intrepid “trafficking” enforcement.

To best apprehend the Epstein legal trajectory, we have to bring ourselves back to 2006-2008, when SDFL prosecutors were deliberating whether to indict him, and there was fairly strenuous disagreement within Acosta’s office about how to proceed. “Trafficking” was still a relatively unsettled area of the law, from a federal standpoint. The TVPA had only been scantily enforced. If they just went ahead and indicted Epstein using this “novel” statutory paradigm, it would carry a much bigger downside risk than most prosecutors, particularly federal prosecutors, are typically willing to tolerate. Acosta ultimately opted against indicting, and instead decided to broker the infamously convoluted Non-Prosecution Agreement, which was genuinely “novel” in various respects, and later became the object of such overwrought consternation — still getting denounced left and right today as the most repugnant “Sweetheart Deal” since the dawn of the Republic. But that frivolous “Sweetheart Deal” moniker has always been idiotic. I’m sorry — if you think it’s a “Sweetheart Deal” for the government to require you to register for life as a Sex Offender, you simply have never bothered to look into what that actually entails. Please go talk to literally any registered sex offender in the United States, regardless of the offense they committed or were alleged to commit, and ask if they agree that life on the Sex Offender Registry could ever amount to a “Sweetheart Deal” in any respect, with the unrelenting extra-Constitutional strictures this condition imposes. They would laugh, or maybe cry, in your face. (Especially in Florida, for Christ’s sake.) Sure, Epstein had inordinate amounts of money, and didn’t have to reside in Florida year-round, but the label of “Sex Offender” alone is enough to be a nasty life-changer for anybody, whatever the size of their bank account. That’s just reality. Anyone who tries to claim Epstein totally escaped social censure following his 2008 conviction is simply wrong. He might not have been the world-historic household name that he is today, but he was sufficiently high-profile to be consistently dogged by the stigma; see this 2015 Reuters article detailing the chorus of people who, even then, were rushing to renounce any association with him.

As far back as 2006 — well before any “Sweetheart Deal” was struck! — Eliot Spitzer, then the Attorney General of New York and running for Governor, was hectored by his Republican opponent for taking a $50,000 campaign contribution from Epstein, and swiftly returned the “tainted” money:

In another lovely twist of fate, of which there are so many in this saga, Spitzer himself would later have to resign over his own “prostitution” snafu. I continue to hypothesize that if the same set of circumstances transpired in 2026 — a Governor caught patronizing a high-end escort service — he would at minimum get promptly sued for “trafficking,” and perhaps even wind up criminally charged. (It’s also unclear how the Associated Press determined Epstein was a “billionaire” in the above 2006 article. This was never true, as far as the evidence has ever shown. He was plenty rich, just not a billionaire — when they arrested him in July 2019, his lawyers declared to Judge Richard M. Berman that his “total assets” were $559 million. For what it’s worth.)

Since we’re reflecting on the somber July 2019 indictment anniversary, another thing nobody seems to appreciate is that even at a very early stage of the federal re-prosecution, Epstein’s lawyers had already assembled a slate of credible arguments which were at least going to be facially plausible as they sought to contest his indictment. These arguments included the government’s brazen abrogation of the Non-Prosecution Agreement, or “Sweetheart Deal” in the dumbed-down Julie K. Brown / Netflix parlance. The text of the NPA had plainly stated that the NPA’s overarching purpose was to “globally resolve [Epstein’s] state and federal criminal liability,” as pertaining to matters the Feds had investigated in 2006-2008. Epstein went on to satisfy the conditions enumerated in the agreement: he pled guilty to the mandated Florida state charges, he served a term of incarceration, he registered for life as a sex offender, and he agreed to another highly “novel” and convoluted mechanism for paying civil restitution to the 30 or so individuals whom the government had claimed, but not proven, were his “victims.” And then eleven years later — poof. Under sustained political and media pressure, the Feds suddenly renege on their ostensibly binding deal, and start concocting an elaborate rationalization for why the NPA was actually never a “global resolution” at all, and Epstein could be permissibly re-prosecuted in 2019 — including for some of the very same conduct the Feds had already investigated over a decade prior, and for which he was expressly supposed to have been relieved from any criminal liability. That was the whole point of the friggin’ NPA! Does anyone seriously think Epstein’s stupendously expensive legal team of nationally-renowned defense attorneys would have inexplicably acceded to a “deal” — after months and months of arduous negotiations — if it had been made remotely clear to any party involved that this “deal” could just be summarily voided at a moment’s notice, and at the government’s arbitrary discretion?

Now, it is true that in 2018-2019, the Southern District of New York did at least some original investigation that might have not completely overlapped with what the Southern District of Florida had already investigated in 2006-2008 — giving SDNY prosecutors some remote semblance of an argument to claim they were not just shamelessly contravening the still-in-effect NPA. In particular, they shifted their investigative focus to offenses Epstein purportedly committed in New York, although even that aspect is highly questionable as to the NPA’s applicability, since the glorious 2026 “Epstein Files” have enlightened us with records detailing how SDFL prosecutors actually made previously-undisclosed treks to New York for investigative purposes in 2008. Which is a fascinating wrinkle I’ll have to expand on at a later date. For now, the point is that the NPA issue was highly contestable and unresolved as of July 2019; Epstein’s lawyers had perfectly sensible arguments at their disposal, and every reason to let them play out in the courts. Meanwhile, the government’s argument was chock-full of backwardly-reasoned mental jujitsu, a transparent post hoc gambit to justify how they could acquiesce to political/media clamor and finally put Epstein away for good — NPA or no NPA.

Clearing the NPA hurdle would’ve been necessary for the Feds before they even got to any of the other big evidentiary or statutory “challenges” — like the applicability of the TVPA to offenses the indictment alleged took place at least 14 years prior. Strangely, SDNY prosecutors couldn’t find any illicit sexual contact from the years 2005-2019, which you’d think would’ve been trivially easy if Epstein was really the most prolific pedophile predator to ever walk the earth. Genuine child-sex superpredators presumably lack the impulse control to contain their predatory urges — that’s why it’s believed they need to be locked up — whereas Epstein, by all accounts, demonstrably did modify his behavior starting in 2005, when Palm Beach police first launched their investigation, and he was never again accused in a criminal or civil context of illicit sexual activity with anyone under 18. So the Feds were stuck making a case based on allegations of conduct that was nearly two decades old at that point. They’d have to show Epstein violated the TVPA by “causing” persons under 18 to engage in “commercial sex acts” — which might seem eminently doable given Epstein’s reputation, but then again, the lead detective in the local Palm Beach phase was on record averring that none of the conduct he ever investigated met the standard for a “commercial sex act.”

The Feds would also be stuck with the original statutory language of the TVPA, way back from the year 2000, which could also have given Epstein some lines of defense. Though he admitted sexual interactions with persons who had not yet attained the age of 18, he always maintained he had never consciously known any of these persons were under 18 — and in fact he had believed they were all at least 18. There was significant evidence his defense team could marshal to this effect. Some of which we only now know about thanks to the glorious 2026 “Epstein Files” — and no, not the “files” that the podcast geniuses have dwelled on. For example: previously non-public testimony by Haley Robson, the adult female who has long acknowledged she’s the one who propositioned 14-year-old Saige Gonzales to perform a wonderful “massage,” and transported her to Epstein’s house for this purpose — the fateful 2005 event that prompted Palm Beach police to investigate. Haley told a federal Grand Jury on April 24, 2007 that Epstein “never told me to go find underaged girls.” Her standard practice, she explained, was to instruct the girls “that if they are underage, just lie about it and tell him that you are 18.” Which is precisely what Saige Gonzales subsequently did, after Epstein explicitly asked her how old she was during their one lovely liaison together. And she explicitly told him she was 18, even though she was actually 14.

The defense had lots of other evidence on this theme. Because when the Feds had first considered “trafficking” charges against Epstein, it was seen as a major impediment that a substantial number of girls Epstein could theoretically be charged with “trafficking” had openly lied about their ages, admitted as much, and also advised one another to lie about their ages if they were not yet 18. Among the biggest “challenges” in this regard was a purported victim named Tatum Miller, who had steadfastly denied she was even a “victim” — despite at one point receiving an FBI “Victim Notification Letter” — and was adamant that she saw no reason why Epstein should be prosecuted, because she believed he had done nothing wrong, and was an “awesome guy.” (Direct quote.) Tatum told the FBI in an April 25, 2007 interview that she was originally introduced to Epstein by Carolyn Andriano, who had approached her one day and said “Hey, would you like to make a couple dollars. And I said sure.” Carolyn explained that she knew this fellow named Jeffrey who lived on Palm Beach Island, and she’d been bringing girls over there to give him friendly massages. “Well, what about my age?” Tatum recalled asking Carolyn — since she was 16 years old at the time. “[Carolyn] said well, just make sure that you tell him that you’re 18. And I had a fake ID at the time and we went there.” Asked by the FBI agents to expand on why she was concerned that her age could be a problem, Tatum said: “I was young and I was pretty stupid and I didn’t want to get — I didn’t want to get in trouble. So I always made sure — I had a fake ID, anyways, saying that I was 18. And she [Carolyn] just said make sure you’re 18, because Jeffrey doesn’t want any underage girls.”

It’s not 100% clear from the 2019 indictment if the Feds were planning on resurrecting Tatum or Carolyn as victim/witnesses, but their victimization had always been alleged to have taken place exclusively in Palm Beach, and indictment does sprinkle in some ancillary Palm Beach allegations, even though it was mostly focused on New York to ostensibly circumvent the Florida-centered NPA. We know the Feds did eventually resurrect Carolyn as a marquee witness against Ghislaine Maxwell; she testified at Maxwell’s 2021 trial, and declared in open court that she was actively schizophrenic, claiming to hear voices inside her head that were threatening to come “sex traffic” her children. In 2023, Carolyn died of an apparent drug overdose. So if the Feds did plan for Carolyn to be their Palm Beach-based victim for an upcoming Epstein trial, they would have had to deal with her fellow “victim” Tatum potentially being called to explain why she had previously told the FBI that Carolyn was the one who first recruited (or “trafficked”?) her to Epstein — and had told her to lie about her age, after which Tatum followed suit and told numerous additional girls to lie about their ages. The prosecution would also have to contend with some other interesting disclosures from Tatum’s 2007 interview, which featured the hard-charging SDFL prosecutor Marie Villafaña, flanked by the two primary FBI agents working the Epstein case. Villafaña asked Tatum if there were “some types of girls [Epstein] really liked and others he didn’t like? Did he have any preferences in terms of blondes, brunettes?”

“He liked girls like me,” Tatum replied.

“Okay,” said Villafaña. “Thin and attractive?”

“I guess, yeah,” said Tatum. “Very attractive women. And he didn’t say girls. He said women all the time.”

Awkward.

One of the FBI agents sitting in on this interview, E. Nesbit Kirkendall, herself testified before the federal Grand Jury on May 8, 2007, and was asked about the girls brought by Tatum to Epstein. “They were all told to say they were 18,” Kirkendall verified. “But not on every occasion would Mr. Epstein inquire about their age.” Hmm.

Why would this be relevant for the purposes of convicting Epstein under the TVPA? Because again, the Feds would have to go by the original statutory text, as enacted in 2000 — that’s the version that would apply to offenses purportedly committed between 2002 and 2005. And the original language of that statute specifies that to be guilty of “child sex trafficking,” a person must have “knowingly… caused” an under-18 person to engage in a “commercial sex act.” Proving this would require establishing some degree of mens rea on Epstein’s part — that he consciously “knew” a particular girl was not yet 18, but still “knowingly” caused her to partake in a “commercial sex act.” The defense had reams of evidence to refute the government’s contention that Epstein had consciously known certain girls were under 18. BUT TO BE FAIR — other evidence also existed indicating Epstein indeed might have “known,” at least in some instances, that a particular girl was under 18. After all, he did plead guilty in 2008 to the federally-mandated Florida state charge of “PROCURING PERSON UNDER 18 FOR PROSTITUTION,” which related to one girl, Ashley Davis, who did credibly tell both Detective Joseph Recarey and a Florida Grand Jury that over the course of their approximately 15 sexualized encounters, Epstein had become aware she was 17 years old.

My point here is not to proclaim with unbridled confidence that Epstein would have achieved a favorable disposition of the 2019 criminal case: that he would’ve gotten the charges dismissed on legal/technical grounds, or found Not Guilty if it had gone to trial. He ended up dead, as you might have heard, so we’ll never know. The SDNY in all likelihood could have come up with some way to safely convict him, aided by the surrounding political and media rancor. They were able to convict Ghislaine Maxwell on arguably even flimsier grounds. So here is my point: the 2019 federal case against Epstein was not nearly as “slam dunk” as everyone just reflexively assumes. Remember, this was Maurene Comey & Co. splicing together another characteristically “novel” application of the infinitely-elastic TVPA statute. That elasticity can be a huge advantage for prosecutors much of the time, but not always — nobody knows what the hell “trafficking” even is anymore, except insofar as prosecutors seek to fit it with their own set of preferred facts, and sometimes their efforts go off the rails to the point that jurors’ credulity is exhausted. (See: Diddy). In the Epstein case, the Feds would’ve had a much easier time nailing him on “trafficking” charges if his inculpating conduct had allegedly occurred in, say, 2016-2019, rather than 2002-2005. Congress passed a major amendment to the TVPA statute in 2008, which vastly reduced the government’s operative burden of proof. Whereas the government was previously required to establish that a “child sex trafficking” culprit had knowledge of a victim’s true age, this requirement was abolished thanks to the pompously titled “William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008.” Upon passage of this Act, the government now needed only to show that the “child sex trafficker” had a “reasonable opportunity to observe” an under-18 victim — in which case, it no longer needed to be proven “that the defendant knew that the person had not attained the age of 18 years.” And voila: any annoying obligation to establish mens rea was effectively eliminated. Luckily for Epstein, this sweeping statutory overhaul post-dated all his charged conduct! Check out the “Ex Post Facto” clause of the US Constitution sometime.

Could they still have put him away, notwithstanding any of these pesky complicating factors? Yeah. They definitely could have. But the popular folklore around the open-and-shut inevitability of his guilt being proven, beyond a reasonable doubt — like most things Epstein-related — is almost entirely a function of pervasive low-info mythology, rather than any informed examination of the relevant facts and evidence.

The big twist of this article is that I haven’t even gotten to the most mind-boggling deficiency in the 2019 indictment — one that should massively upend any rational person’s assumptions about what could or could not have been proven. This isn’t some peripheral issue, either — it goes straight to the core of what the Feds chose to hinge their entire case on. Because new evidence has emerged that certainly casts things in a phenomenally different light. These revelations will have to wait for another day, though. For now: Happy Epstein Indictment Anniversary. I don’t know of any other significant national anniversaries coming up, so this is an appropriate one to celebrate.

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When Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, it was hailed as a monumental step forward in the critical fight against “modern-day slavery.” And who could possibly be against fighting slavery? Our history class textbooks might have taught us we got rid of it during the Civil War, but sometime around the turn of the 21st Century, an impressively diverse cross-section of NGO activists, politicians, and law enforcement officials began gravely informing the public that “slavery” never actually went away, and in fact remained shockingly pervasive. Resolute action, they explained, would be needed at once to stamp out this hidden scourge.

The phrase “modern-day slavery” thus entered wide circulation as the default image meant to be associated with “human trafficking” — a term which itself does not necessarily carry any clear-cut definitional reference. Most people in the year 2000 probably would have been familiar with “drug trafficking,” as in the large-scale transport of illicit drugs, but it wasn’t so straightforward what the illicit transport of “humans” or “sex” might mean, as opposed to the “trafficking” of controlled substances or other inanimate objects. Hence, there would need to be a highly concerted effort to educate the apparently clueless masses, such that when Joe or Jane Schmo would hear someone cry out “human trafficking!” — or its popular subcategory, “sex trafficking!” — they would immediately call to mind the most grisly manifestations of “modern-day slavery.” Which is to say: something really, really bad. Bad enough that any decent person would be utterly appalled it could still exist at such staggering proportions, and worse, that society has been so complacent, or even outright complicit, in its grotesque perpetuation!

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This was an effective bit of rhetorical strategy by the burgeoning activist consortium. Because to invoke “human trafficking” would soon conjure the most harrowing visions of 11-year-old girls being held in depraved sex captivity, perhaps somewhere in the frightful foreign dungeons of Thailand or Guatemala. Such images were supposed to especially resonate with Americans, because it was said that these poor hypothetical girls were being systematically shipped to the United States, like chattel for Pete’s sake, and then farmed out to our homegrown deviants for sick sexual gratification. And hey, you never know, maybe the helpless trafficking victims are right around the corner from your local Panera Bread, getting viciously raped while you enjoy your Chicken Frontega Panini. That these mass enslavement practices could be allowed to persist, including in our own affluent suburban backyards, was so intolerable that it necessitated a panoply of ambitious interventions — not least endowing the state with expansive new prosecutorial powers. Only then could we have any hope of abolishing the last shameful vestiges of “slavery.”

Chris Smith, a Republican Congressman from New Jersey, was the chief sponsor of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) — and wouldn’t you know it, he’s still in the House to this day, getting ready to seek his 25th consecutive term in November. So congratulations on the undoubtedly well-deserved longevity, Sir. “My legislation was designed to give our government the tools we believed it needed to eliminate slavery, and particularly sex slavery,” Smith said on the House floor in a November 29, 2001 speech, reflecting on the one-year anniversary of his landmark bill’s passage. “The central principle behind the TVPA is that criminals who knowingly operate enterprises that profit from sex acts involving persons who have been brought across international boundaries for such purposes by force or fraud, or who force human beings into slavery, should receive punishment commensurate with the penalties for kidnapping and forcible rape.”

Foreign criminal gangs capturing beleaguered women and girls, and then coercing them into sex bondage for profit, remained the popular imagery associated with “trafficking” well into the 2000s. When the George W. Bush administration occasionally highlighted its own “anti-trafficking” efforts, the emblematic victims it described would be toiling in conditions of quintessential “servitude” — women and children ”trafficked against their will across international borders,” then smuggled surreptitiously into the United States, for “servitude” such as “prostitution, sweatshops, domestic labor, farming, and child armies.” While the government never appears to have located any purported “child armies” marching across Missouri or whatever, if they were insisting additional authorities were needed to thwart organized crime of similar depravity, who was going to object? This stuff sounded like pure hell on earth, and somehow the American People had been letting it go on right under their noses!

Setting aside the specific details — such as the actual prevalence of this alleged “trafficking” crime wave, or what any forthcoming enforcement actions would exactly consist of — surely, in the main, a broad-based collaborative effort by the private and public sectors to unite against “trafficking” was a uniquely heartening example of everyone finally getting together to do something uncontroversially virtuous, notwithstanding other differences on political or cultural issues. Surely, this was something on which we could all enthusiastically agree! And while such instant, unexamined consensus might be seen by the more cynical among us as a bit of a red flag, nevermind that — the government and their NGO “partners” are proclaiming there is so much to be done, NOW, to expeditiously to crack down on “modern-day slavery.” So let them get to work!

It would not be an exaggeration to say that in the 25+ years that have elapsed since the passage of the TVPA in 2000 — when “trafficking” really first became a “thing,” having been reified with a comprehensive new statutory framework — a quiet revolution has been unleashed across American law and culture. What makes this revolution extra astonishing is how chronically under-recognized and under-scrutinized it is — hence, the eerie “quietude.” Certainly for the poor saps who wind up getting caught in the web of hyper-punitive “anti-trafficking” consensus, the consequences can be anything but “quiet,” except perhaps for occasional moments when the noise abates in their prison cell. And though some fleeting attempts have been made to shout from the hilltops about how “trafficking” has strayed so outlandishly far from its original inception as enumerated by Congress, the shouting tends to fall on deaf ears — because who wants to “defend” a “trafficker”? And if you’ve been designated a “child sex trafficker”? Forget it. Might as well just screech into the void.

The “trafficking” revolution has accelerated greatly over just the past decade or so, and even arguably within just the past handful of years. The public has simply not been made aware of how the conduct that now gets routinely charged and labeled as “trafficking” bears zero resemblance to anything a normal, sane person would have understood as “trafficking” when the concept was first introduced at scale — that is, the paramount form of “modern-day slavery,” the continued existence of which was supposed to shake us all to our core. Indeed, the limitless conceptual expansion of “trafficking” has gotten so extreme that it’s now virtually impossible for anyone, including those in positions of serious public authority, to put forward a modestly coherent description of what “trafficking” even is — if they ever could. While the definitional criteria have always been deliberately vague, and therefore ripe for generous modification over time, the original depiction as ruthless, organized sexual subjugation has been so severed from the present-day formulation that we might as well be talking about entirely unrelated phenomena, requiring an entirely novel set of descriptive devices.

The obsolete notion that the government’s crusade against “trafficking” would entail tracking down hardened criminals who “knowingly operate,” for financial gain, monstrous commercial sex rings of enslaved women and children — that’s now just a bad joke, and a very unfunny one for those who’ve been ensnared by the new “trafficking” apparatus. Forget the prototypical preteen girls held in squalor, then smuggled across borders to provide forced sexual services: that’s gone, even though it was the mental image initially promulgated to convince all conscientious citizens they should be inordinately concerned about “trafficking,” and should acquiesce to the adoption of sweeping new retributive state powers. Today, a more typical “trafficker” is someone who haplessly chats to a police decoy on an app, or offers “intangible entertainment” in exchange for some potential sex act, or unwittingly “grooms” an adult woman by engaging in playful banter. Truly, it would not be much of an overstatement to say “trafficking” can now mean anything and everything, and is squarely in the eye of the beholder — namely prosecutors and plaintiff’s attorneys. If there is a more drastic example of government-backed “concept creep” in recent decades, I’ve yet to encounter it.

These revolutionized concepts of “trafficking” have been woven throughout virtually all layers of contemporary statecraft. Following the TVPA’s enactment in 2000, states began to draft their own “anti-trafficking” laws — often featuring even more porous definitional criteria than the federal model. Frequently, these measures were sprinted to passage without any appreciable debate at all, thanks to the gloriously bipartisan consensus that emerged — and anyway, what politician in their right mind would “debate” the merits of going after ghastly “trafficking” criminals? In 2003, Washington State and Texas became the first to adopt standalone “anti-trafficking” statutes. By 2013, all 50 states had followed suit, with Wyoming the final straggler. This is rather astonishing when you think about it, because until 2003, no state had a single such “anti-trafficking” statute. So we’re supposed to believe that before the year 2003 — basically the Stone Age, I guess — each and every American state, from the most compassionately “progressive” to the most law-and-order “conservative,” was tacitly condoning the mass-scale perpetration of “modern-day slavery.” But then, by 2013, they all achieved enlightenment, and realized slavery was bad.

Even among the states that were relatively early in passing this critically important legislation, actual enforcement of “trafficking” law remained sporadic throughout the 2000s. For a time, it seemed like these trafficking measures were mostly symbolic, with unclear practical impact — basically just a way for lawmakers to uncontroversially affirm their profound moral revulsion toward “modern-day slavery.” The same was roughly true at the federal level. In fact, the conspicuously minimal enforcement of the TVPA was what compelled Chris Smith to deliver his November 2001 floor speech, wherein he complained: “Like all laws, however, this law is only as good as its implementation. And, frankly, I have been deeply concerned at the slow pace of implementation of the TVPA… I do not say this to complain or criticize. I know that many things move too slowly in the first year of a new Administration, and that since September 11 our attention and resources have been diverted elsewhere, but to emphasize that from now on, we do not have a minute to spare.”

Smith’s dire warning that there was not a “minute to spare” stirred negligible buy-in at the time, at least compared to the prerogatives of the newly raging “War on Terror.” But by the 2010s, “terrorism” had largely receded as an all-consuming national preoccupation, and Smith would get his long-awaited wish. You might even say a “War on Trafficking” was declared, sometimes literally, but more often through the steady accumulation of legal and NGO infrastructure, undergirded by a profusion of “trafficking”-related academic jargon — the makings of what today has become an enormous full-fledged “anti-trafficking” industry, so vast and multi-disciplinary that it’s essentially impossible to quantify with any precision, not that 99% of the media and political class would be interested in doing so anyways. Like other makework industries in which professional livelihoods, credentials, and grant monies are at stake, the “anti-trafficking” industry is self-perpetuating and self-fulfilling, and subsists on the continual ever-presence of an acute “trafficking” menace. Thus, there is every incentive for industry participants to classify more and more conduct, of greater and greater variety, as within the ambit of “trafficking.”

The first administration of Our Favorite President, Donald J. Trump, once claimed it was on a righteous mission to “eradicate” trafficking — except to eradicate “trafficking” these days would be akin to eradicating “misfortune” or “unkindness,” or some other intrinsic vagary that does not consistently correspond with anything in particular. So nebulous has the concept of “trafficking” grown that although it can be ostensibly defined by reference to various federal, state, and municipal codes, the typical wordage has been so creatively interpreted and re-interpreted that the relevant statutes now pretty much function as a catch-all license for prosecutors to define “trafficking” however they want, whenever they want, against whomever they want, in their infinite humanitarian wisdom, based on whatever exigent circumstances may arise.

Take, for instance, Mark Alan George of Ohio, a poor sap who had the extreme misfortune of logging onto a website called “Skip the Games” on January 5, 2024, and responded to an advertisement for sexual services that appeared to have been placed by an adult woman, but was actually Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force Agent Joe Chamberlain. George, then age 37, agreed to pay $100 for oral and vaginal sex, and arrived at an agreed location in Salem, OH. At which point he was promptly arrested and charged with violating section R.C. 2907.231(B) of the Ohio criminal code. The law, which had just been revised in 2023, prohibits engaging in “sexual activity for hire” — defined as any “implicit or explicit agreement to provide sexual activity in exchange for anything of value paid to the person engaging in such sexual activity, to any person trafficking that person, or to any person associated with either such person.” Which, as usual with these kinds of statutes, is quite an inscrutable mouthful. Although the crime George was convicted of is technically titled “ENGAGING IN PROSTITUTION” for shorthand, it had just been updated to comport with the latest frontiers in “trafficking” theory. George was also busted by a self-proclaimed “Human Trafficking Task Force,” of which there are now countless operating in the United States, with steadfastly opaque authorities and command structures, and which mostly seem to sit around manufacturing otherwise non-existent crime under the guise of heroic “trafficking” interdiction — even as we’re constantly told “trafficking” is so incredibly rampant that there’s such a pressing need for these “Trafficking Task Forces” to exist in the first place, and of course be plentifully funded by taxpayers.

To his credit, George at least had his lawyers challenge the Ohio law on Constitutional grounds, for “vagueness” and other infirmities. It didn’t succeed, but some useful questions were still raised. “What is an ‘implicit agreement’?” his lawyer, Ronald D. Yarwood, justifiably asked in a court motion that is worth reading (see file below). “No one really knows,” writes Yarwood. “The statute is written in such a way that one must wait and see if they went too far in the eyes of the government officer who levels the charge. Ohio’s engaging in prostitution statute as written is impossible for a person of average intellect to know what is lawful and what is not.”

He goes on:

As written, R. C. 2907.231 criminalizes what would be considered as generally accepted courting, dating, and marriage norms. All relationships carry implicit and explicit agreements between the couples to provide various services of value to one another. It could be moral support, financial support, companionship, love, and physical intimacy. Even conventional marriage vows include implicit and explicit covenants. Many conventional relationships between couples that lawfully have intimacy with one another would fly afoul of R. C. 2907.231 simply because during the relationship one offered the other anything of value in exchange for receiving sexual activity. Even “unconventional” relationships between consenting adults are lawful - for instance, one-night stands, multiple participant relationships, “friends with benefits” and the list is truly limitless. Individuals have a due process right to have engage [sic] in private sexual conduct. See generally, Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). Therefore, any statute attempting to limit an individual’s lawful right to exercise their liberty is unconstitutionally overbroad. During any of these types of relationships inevitably at some point no matter how fleeting, there will be an implicit or explicit offer to provide anything of value in exchange for sexual activity.

Ultimately, as written there is an arbitrary enforcement of the statute based on the whims of the government. This cannot stand.

Mark Alan George

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I fail to see where this argument is wrong on the substance. I also fail to see what public interest is served by the police trolling adult-only websites to nab lonesome lads like Mark Alan George, who are seeking run-of-the-mill transactional adult sexual activity, and then charging them with convoluted crimes which, while technically a “prostitution” offense in this case, vaguely carry the tarnish of a “trafficking” offense. Nor do I see why the state has any business criminalizing what it calls “implicit agreements” between adults who may engage in sexual contact for “something of value,” especially since, as we will see, a “thing of value” can also increasingly mean everything and nothing. Our unfortunate defendant here did apparently offer to exchange actual US currency for his intended sex acts, which puts his conduct more squarely in the remit of what would be considered a classic “prostitution” offense. But even if you think it should rightfully be a huge priority of the state to pour extensive taxpayer resources into nailing guys like George for their quintessential “prostitution” conduct — by having cops creepily pose as ladies on adult hookup sites — it’s still extremely unclear why, in order for the state to carry out this very important task, it would also be necessary to criminalize “implicit agreements” between consenting adults who, over the course of facilitating some sexual interaction, may at some point “implicitly” exchange a “thing of value.” This seems to give the state way too much discretion to intrude on the private affairs of otherwise law-abiding citizens, and moreover, there is no obvious “public safety” rationale either, if you have to get so semantically bizarre about the elements of “prostitution” or “sex trafficking.” Because if there’s a legitimate victim to rescue, you’d think that would be easily discoverable for any commonsense investigator, without having to divine what “implicit” agreements may or may not have been made.

This all gets to why whenever someone asks me whether or not something is “trafficking,” such as related to allegations against Jeffrey Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell — or increasingly, anybody else — I have no choice but to hedge, contest the premise, and deny that “trafficking” is something that has any stable definitional criteria any longer, if it ever did, because it’s impossible to know what we’re even talking about anymore when we use the word “trafficking.” People just do not know, or do not care to know, how radically the contours of “trafficking” have expanded in only the past several years — with impressively little debate, oversight, or critical interrogation in the legal/academic literature, much less in the political arena, where the glorious bipartisanship prevails. Here’s another noteworthy example, having to do with someone slightly better known than the poor sap in Ohio:

In August 2018, it was ruled that Harvey Weinstein could be held civilly liable for “sex trafficking” offenses by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, Robert W. Sweet, who, it should be noted, was 95 years old at the time, having been first appointed to the bench by Jimmy Carter. Sweet would unsurprisingly die the following year. Still, he was apparently thought lucid enough at the time to opine that Weinstein was culpable for violating the federal TVPA, and therefore culpable for sex trafficking violations, because in 2014, he was alleged to have invited an actress named Kadian Noble to his hotel room at the Cannes Film Festival, as the two had made plans to view her “film reel” together. Over the course of this appointment, Weinstein allegedly groped the woman’s breasts and masturbated himself. What transformed the sequence of events into “trafficking,” so the theory went, was that Weinstein had offered the woman “something of value” — whereupon a “commercial sex act” was created, and Weinstein had engaged in “sex trafficking.”

The “thing of value” in this case was Weinstein prospectively offering to help Noble’s movie and modeling career. Noble was deemed a legitimate “trafficking” victim in the eyes of the law, per the aged Judge Sweet, because she claimed to have “felt compelled to comply” with Weinstein’s sexual requests, owing to the “tangible and intangible benefits [Weinstein] offered to advance her career,” and the benefits she could prospectively “receive from a favorable relationship with him.” This is what purportedly coerced her into submission. And so, American jurisprudence transmogrified “trafficking” from the most savage form of “modern-day slavery” to situations where an adult actress consentingly engages in sex acts with a prominent movie producer, in hopes of advancing her career, but when the desired career advancement does not pan out, she retroactively declares herself to have been “trafficked,” and seeks millions of dollars in compensation. This was determined by the 95-year-old jurist to be a sound application of the federal TVPA statute. Which on one level is just hilarious: the idea that back in 2000, when Congress was drafting this landmark law, a single one of them ever seriously contemplated that it could encompass such activity as alleged by Miss Noble. In his October 28, 2000 signing statement (just before that year’s presidential election, interestingly), Bill Clinton had trumpeted all the usual cliches, boasting that “the Act’s anti-trafficking provisions represent a major step forward in my Administration’s ongoing effort to eradicate modern-day slavery.” Fast-forward to the not-so-distant future, and what the Act was actually being used to “eradicate” were perhaps sleazy, if unremarkable, luxury hotel room rendezvous between adult actresses and producers at the glitzy Cannes Film Festival in the south of France.

Weinstein’s lawyers tried in vain to argue that nothing Weinstein was accused of doing bore the slightest bit of resemblance to what Congress had said the TVPA was for — creating “a comprehensive regulatory scheme that criminalizes and attempts to prevent slavery, involuntary servitude, and human trafficking for commercial gain.” The lawyers contended that any attempt to shoehorn Weinstein’s alleged hotel room behavior into a “trafficking” violation would represent “a novel and expansive interpretation of the Trafficking Statute for which there is no precedent.” They were entirely correct on this score, but they perhaps failed to anticipate that the ailing Judge Sweet was eager to invent just such a precedent. “It is fair to say that these allegations present an extension of an element of [the TVPA] on which there is little to no prior authority,” wrote the geriatric judge. “What follows is an effort, aided by the tools of statutory construction, to navigate these uncharted waters.”

Indeed, if the “uncharted waters” were ever going to be “navigated,” the perfect catalyst for doing so would be the supremely villainous Weinstein, on whose behalf there would be no public sympathy marshaled, even if he was being used as a test case for a radical new interpretive paradigm that would thenceforth affect the entire population. Mega-villains like Weinstein, and later Epstein, are perfect foils to inaugurate these inventively “novel” legal precedents, because everyone is expected to be so mandatorily repulsed by them that thinking critically about anything they’ve been involved with is strictly forbidden. Thus, the theory debuted by Judge Sweet in 2018 was especially far-ranging. Weinstein’s lawyers had tried to point out that by the time Noble filed her TVPA lawsuit, the statute of limitations had expired on any “traditional sexual assault claims” she might have brought. But the statute of limitations for “trafficking” was much more permissive, thanks to a provision of the TVPA that was nominally intended to give “slavery” victims appropriate latitude to seek civil remedies against their enslavers. Noble and her lawyers made clever use of this provision to “create a jurisdiction in the United States” for a sex act that allegedly took place in France — by describing the hotel room liaison as a crime scene of Weinstein’s international “sex trafficking” venture. Noble purportedly being assured by Weinstein that “everything would be taken care of” regarding a possible future movie role was transformed into a binding “false promise” under the TVPA, as this would satisfy the “force, fraud, or coercion” element of the statute. Judge Sweet found that in the months and years following the hotel room encounter, “no actions were taken by Harvey to further Noble’s career as an actress or model” — so even though she had “complied” with his sexual entreaties, she had only done so on the fraudulent understanding (or “false promise”) that this would eventually result in Harvey making her a star on the silver screen. “Although Noble saw Harvey three times after the alleged 2014 sexual assault, no film role materialized,” according to a summation by the soon-to-be-deceased Judge Sweet. Imagine that! This adult woman went back and “saw” her trafficker and/or assaulter on at least three additional occasions following the traumatic “trafficking” incident. Surely, that’s another key detail every normal person in 2000 would have intuitively recognized as dispositive of “trafficking.” (Did she “traffic” herself on those subsequent three visits???)

Judge Sweet, in his enfeebled wisdom, did at least acknowledge that Noble’s claims were “not an archetypal sex trafficking action,” but he nonetheless determined that Weinstein could be liable for “sex trafficking” violations per the TVPA. The “archetypal sex trafficking action” Sweet cited by way of contrast was a 2016 case involving an individual who allegedly “recruited vulnerable women” across several countries with false promises of modeling careers and other perks, only to “force numerous women into prostitution by beating them, humiliating them, and threatening to kill them.” Stipulating that the allegations in that case are true, for them to be lumped under the same statutory umbrella as what Harvey was accused of doing is a spectacular expansion of “trafficking” — and proves the term had evolved to a point where no one “trafficking” offense would ever again have to bear any necessary relation to another.

“Harvey effectively ended his relationship with Noble the moment he ejaculated on the bathroom floor,” Judge Sweet oddly remarked, because for him, this ungentlemanly cold-shoulder treatment showed Harvey had engaged in conscious “fraud,” sufficient to make him culpable for “trafficking.” Harvey himself did appear to concede there had in fact been some sort of intimate encounter with Noble, but he argued that any “promises of future benefits” he might have made to her, even if not ultimately fulfilled, were so “indefinite and vague” that they could not conceivably constitute a “commercial sex act” for the purposes of TVPA litigation. Diluting these statutory requirements, Weinstein’s counsel argued, “would unfairly expand the federal sex trafficking statute to all sexual activity occurring between adults in which one party holds a superior position of power and influence.” While this dramatic interpretation might not be totally accurate — yet — it’s at least in the ballpark of how trafficking law has indeed come to be so liberally applied. The traditional notion of a “commercial sex act” requiring a “thing of value” be exchanged — most commonly money, as in the case of that Ohio schlub — has been watered down and engorged into a vast conceptual ocean, far beyond the 2018 Weinstein precedent, which had only codified that a “thing of value” can be as little as an intimated offer of non-specified future career assistance. “For an aspiring actress,” wrote Judge Sweet, “meeting a world-renowned film producer carries value, in and of itself.”

As one would expect, in the years since this precedent was propounded, the applications have grown all the more expansive and unwieldy, including in the domain of criminal law. It would not be a major stretch to say that in 2026, a “thing of value” is more like an amorphous metaphysical condition than anything which must necessarily exist in the observable, material world. Here is what Judge Valerie E. Caproni instructed jurors in the trial of the Alexander Brothers in March 2026, as to what elements must be proven to establish a “sex trafficking” conspiracy:

The “thing of value” given or received in connection with the sex act need not involve a monetary exchange and it need not have any financial component; instead, it may be any tangible or intangible thing of value, including, for example, recreation or entertainment. The thing of value can be given to or received by any person, including the victim. Whether a thing has value depends on the recipient’s subjective view of the purported “thing of value.”

Got that? We’re so far past the “thing of value” needing to have any old-fashioned “financial component” that we’re hurtling deeper and deeper into the mystical realm of “intangibility,” where a “thing of value” can now be “recreation” or “entertainment.” Whatever that might mean to any given individual. But it doesn’t stop there! Whether the “thing” in question is seen as “recreational” or “entertaining” depends solely on the “subjective view” of the recipient — and is therefore immune to any non-subjective evaluation methods. You could theoretically give me a crumpled-up piece of scrap paper, or even a steaming hot pile of dog shit, and if I, as the “recipient,” subjectively perceive what you have given me as containing some intangible “value,” tough luck, because that would satisfy a crucial element of the “sex trafficking” statute. And oh, by the way, it doesn’t even have to be the “victim” who receives the valuable pile of dog shit! My dumbass friend could receive it, ascribe it with subjective value, and this could suffice to prove I was victimized in your “sex trafficking” conspiracy.

Going back to the Weinstein civil precedent, that the gambit actually worked is a credit to lawyer Jeffrey Herman, who represented the innovative trafficking victim Miss Noble, and is one of the most prolifically imaginative “victim” lawyers in all the United States. In fact, it was he — because there is always an Epstein connection with this stuff — who (of course) had been one of the earliest lawyers to track down purported Epstein victims in Florida, way back in 2008, for the purposes of using them to extract giant monetary settlements from Epstein, which partly set into motion the fateful chain of events that continue to rattle much of the world today. Wouldn’t you know it, a decade before his watershed “sex trafficking” action against Weinstein, Herman had gamely inserted himself into the saga of Saige Gonzales — yep, that’s right, the very Palm Beach girl whose onetime “massage” encounter with Epstein is what precipitated the initial 2005 police investigation against him. So, one could plausibly argue that Herman has been a startlingly integral player in multiple decisive pivot-points of the great “trafficking” revolution. And the more you look into this guy, the more you’ll have no choice but to conclude that if a character such as he could have exerted such far-reaching influence, any system that would’ve enabled this must be declared fatally unsalvageable, and razed to the ground. Really. I’ll substantiate this admittedly grandiose claim in much greater detail for a subsequent installment of my little “trafficking” series, so make sure to subscribe if you haven’t already — I can promise the carnival of insanities is boundless, and I’ve barely scratched the surface here. Dulled as my limbic system now is after getting so unhealthily immersed in this crap, I still manage to have my mind blown on a disturbingly regular basis by the depths of the insanity. If, after reading the series, you feel I have oversold the pitch, and have enticed you with a “false promise,” feel free to sue me for “trafficking” — you’ll probably win.

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Amy Coney Barrett’s majority opinion today as to the permissibility of States counting ballots that are received after Election Day is perfectly reasonable, and well-reasoned. The issue before the Court was a relatively narrow one: whether Mississippi state law, which permits counting ballots “postmarked by Election Day, but received up to five days later” is in violation of federal election law.

Justice Barrett finds to the contrary — that Mississippi may lawfully count ballots postmarked by Election Day, but received up to five days later. Her ruling in no way precludes the Mississippi state legislature, or any other state legislature, from modifying state election laws to prohibit the counting of ballots received after Election Day. About two thirds of states already maintain this prohibition, and require that that only ballots received by the statutorily-designated Election Day deadline be counted. Another third of states allow for ballots postmarked by Election Day, but received after, to be counted, within a certain window of time that varies by state. The laws around this are constantly in flux; North Dakota previously allowed ballots received after Election Day to be counted, but amended its law in 2025, and the counting of ballots received after Election Day is now barred.

Barrett’s argument today is thoroughly sensible, both from the standpoint of statutory interpretation and historical precedent. Notably, she points to numerous states enacting laws during World War I that permitted the counting of soldiers’ overseas ballots received after Election Day. Addressing the Dissent’s citation of a Montana Supreme Court decision from 1944, which “held unlawful a new Montana statute that allowed soldier ballots to be received after Election Day,” Barrett notes that this decision “turned on existing state law, which the new law did ‘not . . . amend or repeal,’” and which had required that all ballots be “delivered to the election officials and deposited in the ballot box before the closing of the polls on Election Day.” This, Barrett convincingly explains, in fact gives additional credence to the idea that states may regulate elections so as to either allow or disallow the counting of ballots received after Election Day. During the 1940s, she observes, at least seven more states “authorized the receipt of ballots after Election Day, reflecting the belief that they were free to do so.” She also notes that “today, roughly 30 States count at least some absentee ballots mailed by Election Day but received afterward.” It would be strange if a majority of states have been violating federal election law for decades, and Congress simply chose to do nothing about it.

Ironically, Barrett and the Majority have strengthened the principle of permitting States to regulate the manner in which elections are conducted, while the Dissent endorses greater Federal intervention in States’ election-regulating procedures. Which is the opposite of where one would generally expect the more left-wing Justices to land on this sort of thing, even though they incidentally side with Barrett, since they are otherwise disposed to tolerate a more expansive federal role in overriding states’ sovereignty to administer elections — typically for liberally-oriented reasons such as the enforcement of civil rights, or preserving majority-minority representation. Likewise, the more right-wing justices would generally be non-disposed to tolerate the over-federalization of state election protocols, even though that’s functionally what they’re advocating in the Dissent. There’s a good argument to be made that Amy Coney Barrett is the only Justice on the Court exhibiting philosophical consistency here.

Of course, 99% of the people mad about this decision don’t actually care about the underlying judicial reasoning. They’re mad because they perceive a partisan disadvantage to Republicans when States are permitted to count votes received after Election Day, and they yearn for the Court to rule in such a manner that bolsters Republicans’ partisan advantage.

Even though it’s far from clear in practice that any potential partisan advantage or disadvantage shakes out in the simplistic way they imagine it does. They are probably just thinking about California, which does have a notoriously shambolic system of Election Administration, and broadening out their California-focused grievances to the entire country — even though this case is about… Mississippi.

And even though it’s far from obvious that Mississippi, Texas, West Virginia, and Alaska currently maintain laws permitting ballots received after Election Day to be counted because those states’ legislatures secretly want to advantage... Democrats? Or that Colorado, Minnesota, Hawaii, and Connecticut prohibit counting ballots received after Election Day because those states’ legislatures secretly want to advantage... Republicans? See map below:

Trump and other GOP windbags grousing about this latest “betrayal” by Barrett fundamentally just want her to do what they perceive to be the GOP’s partisan bidding — even though, again, it’s wholly unclear that they are even substantively correct about the partisan advantage/disadvantage they’ve assumed must inherently flow from laws governing when ballots may be counted. California is definitely the most notorious for its painful slowness in counting and reporting votes, joined by a few others like Nevada, which do permit counting ballots received after Election Day. Arizona is also definitely on that list, however, and it prohibits counting ballots received after Election Day. Which suggests the key variable as to the efficiency or inefficiency of election administration may not be, in every respect, whether a state permits the counting of ballots received after Election Day. But whatever — who wants to think too hard about it, when you can just launch reflexively into partisan crybaby mode, as usual, and comfortably circumvent any burdensome need to independently reason about stuff.

When she was first nominated to the Supreme Court before the 2020 election, armies of Shrieking Libs warned us that Amy Coney Barrett was going to be a mindless Trump/GOP stooge. She has since consistently demonstrated that she is nothing of the sort, even though that’s exactly what the Trump/GOP cheerleaders desperately want her to be:

In fact, Barrett demonstrated she was no airhead Trump lackey within just a month or two of taking her seat, when she joined every other Justice in rejecting the cockamamie theories Trump and various Republican state Attorneys General were advancing at the time to effectively negate the 2020 election. Numerous other rulings have since followed where she directly contravenes the personal interests of Trump, even as her record is still straightforwardly “conservative” by any recognizable metric, having provided the decisive 5-4 vote on landmark cases such as overturning Roe v. Wade, etc.

And even in this case, Barrett makes clear that her ruling does not bear on larger partisan initiatives that might still be undertaken to nakedly enhance Republican electoral power — such as the scope of Congress’s ability to regulate elections, which Trump is constantly hyperventilating about with his daily demands to pass the “SAVE America Act.” Nor, Barrett clarifies, does today’s ruling bear on the overall practice of mail/absentee voting, the potential regulation/curtailment thereof, or a host of other contested issues related to the Constitutionality of election administration. Rather, her ruling is narrowly tailored to whether current federal law pre-empts current Mississippi state law. Barrett finds that it doesn’t, for perfectly explicable and sensible reasons. But in certain quarters, where shrill partisan screeching rules the day, this makes her a vicious traitor!

QUICK UPDATE: Notably, the dissenting justices in this case endorsed what would essentially amount to a nationwide upheaval in election law. Samuel Alito’s logic is that federal law requires all ballots to be “received” with finality by election officials on Election Day itself. This would necessarily invalidate laws in the majority of states, including notorious left-wing hotbeds such as Arkansas, South Carolina, and Utah, that permit military and overseas ballots to be counted, even if received at some point after Election Day.

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Where would I carry out my theoretical anti-Podcast mass shooting? That’s a funny concept to perhaps ponder for a future manifesto. (DEAR FEDS AND/OR TROLLS: THIS IS WHAT’S KNOWN AS “A JOKE.”)

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Nobody needs to tell me that the “grooming gang” issue in the United Kingdom is “different than Epstein.” I have never conflated the issue with “Epstein,” nor have I claimed there is nothing that differentiates the issue from Epstein — despite social media naggers telling me for the past several days that I have somehow conflated “grooming gangs” with Epstein. Because again, I have never done anything remotely like this. The real idea behind their little talking point, I gather, is that I should for some reason support the promulgation of demonstrably fake statistics relating to the purported prevalence of “grooming gangs,” since I should realize it’s so very different than Epstein. And whereas I am correct about Epstein (at least according to this latest wave of weird mini-consensus, which would’ve been RADICALLY different a year ago), I am terribly ignorant about “grooming gangs,” because I just don’t appreciate how incredibly different these issues are.

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OK. For one thing, I have never claimed to have deeply examined every conceivable aspect of the “grooming gang” phenomenon. Yes, I have occasionally followed it over the years with varying levels of interest, but I’ll freely admit it’s not something I have spent day after day intensively contemplating, reporting on, or researching. That said, if the almighty algorithms are going to be jiggered into blasting comically fake statistics about “grooming gang” prevalence onto my feeds, and it’s being widely demanded that I join a furious clamor for some sort of dramatic transatlantic reckoning, I think I’m entitled to formulate a few tentative thoughts on aspects of the issue that I have examined, and which relate to other areas of interest I have considerably greater pre-existing knowledge in. So here’s what I’ve just got done examining:

1. I’ve read the “Rape Gang Inquiry Report” issued last week by Rupert Lowe, a Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom who got booted out of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, and is now on some sort of one-man rightoid wrecking crew mission. He gets massively amplified by his benefactor Elon Musk, who previously denounced Farage for whatever petty reasons happened to be bouncing around in Musk’s politically-addled brain sometime in early 2025. Lowe’s new minor party, “Restore,” nearly cost Reform UK a victory in the all-important Makerfield by-election last week. Prime Minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham still would have won for Labour, even if the Restore splinter votes were numerically combined with Reform, but it would’ve been significantly closer, and it’s likely that Restore will be a legitimate spoiler in other constituencies in the future. Lowe’s outfit was running Facebook ads in Makerfield touting his “Rape Gang Inquiry,” so there’s absolutely no doubt that this is a straightforwardly political document — as in, timed to specifically coincide with a nationally consequential by-election. Americans enthusiastically passing around the “report” as though it’s some impartial, professionally-conducted assessment of “grooming gang” phenomena are total dupes, but of course most Americans have no clue about the intricacies of UK political affairs — understandably enough. So they take this “report” to be some sort of officially-sanctioned, methodologically-rigorous blockbuster investigation of hidden “grooming gang” truths. My sense is that the Report’s composition and release was actually just as much geared toward an American audience as it was to a British one, if not more so — as evidenced by the manic Musk dissemination, and his American hangers-on leaping feverishly to join the Twitter/X outrage parade.

2. I’ve read the “National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse” issued in June 2025 by Baroness Casey of Blackstock, who was commissioned to conduct the report by outgoing UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who resigned yesterday under circumstances that are so extremely British in their procedural peculiarity.

3. I’ve read assorted transcripts from a 2019 trial in Bradford, England having to do with alleged “grooming gang” activity. The transcripts were published by an organization called “Open Justice UK.”

Having read these documents, am I permitted to articulate public views on anything pertaining to the “grooming gang” matter? Hard to say anymore. There’s a section of loud online nitpickers who love to pronounce themselves OG GG analysts, so if you haven’t been deeply immersed in the material on a full-time basis since at least 2010 or so, you should just shut up and give thanks to Musk and Lowe for bequeathing us this awesome public service. Well, whatever. I have intermittently read about Grooming Gang controversies for enough years now that nobody needs to snidely “educate” me, as though I’m just now hearing about the concept for the first time, because I’m a dumb-dumb American who can’t possibly know stuff about the mysterious foreign land of Great Britain.

Here’s what I’m not doing:

• Making any sweeping statements about “grooming gangs” whereby I entirely accept, or entirely dismiss, the totality of claims around this multi-faceted subject. That would be very stupid. The relevant source material spans multiple decades, jurisdictions, criminal investigations, committee reports, and so on. With such a mammoth record to pore through before making anything close to a comprehensive assessment, how could one responsibly spout off a simple binary generalization? It almost reminds me of when I used to get badgered by self-righteous trolls to declare a childlike Good Guys vs. Bad Guys moral assessment of World War II. Really? You’re going to reduce the deadliest conflict in human history to a comforting little Disney Movie nostrum? Well, I’m never going to do that. And although the “grooming gang” matter is of course wildly dis-analogous in a million different ways to WWII, it’s analogous in the narrow sense that I would also not blithely reduce it to a simple cartoonish morality tale.

• I’m not claiming to be comprehensively well-versed on every conceivable aspect of “grooming gangs.” And neither should you, if, for instance, you’ve never read the 2020 Home Office report, the Heal Reports pertaining to South Yorkshire (2006), the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report (2014), and what I’m sure are an enormous slew of other reports/materials/transcripts/articles that 99% of the people who so confidently opine on the topic have also never read.

• I am not claiming that no girl in England has ever been raped by a person who is a Muslim. That would be idiotic.

Here’s what I am doing:

• Reacting to a political controversy that was just ignited by way of the Rupert Lowe “report” brouhaha, and the giant social media amplification thus engendered, thanks to the gamified algorithm shenanigans of the richest man on Earth, our first Trillionaire overlord, Musk. (No, that does not mean there is not also organic interest in the issue. Of course there is. Please spare us the tedious nitpicks.)

• Observing that dimwit American politicians and “influencers” are spouting provably fake statistics from the Lowe/Musk report, and in so doing, propagating the latest chapter in their ongoing marvelous Pedo Panic odyssey. Case in point: Nancy Mace, fresh off her decisive defeat in the South Carolina GOP gubernatorial primary, after getting hilariously nuked by Trump, has decided to light up Twitter/X with shrieking proclamations that 250,000 girls have been “r*ped by a gang of Muslim men in the UK” — so if you’re not running around with your hair on fire about this in June 2026, you’re a bad person. Moreover, if you deem other political issues relatively more important than this one, you’re also a bad person, and probably support MUSLIM PEDO RAPE GANGS. The bloated Congressman Randy Fine has similarly chimed in, after what I’m sure was a very careful study of the underlying source material, to declare as fact that “250,000 Christian British girls” have been found raped. Which he spins into some kind of implicit “pro-Israel” point about Muslim “invaders.” Because, of course, absolutely everything has to ultimately collapse into the perpetual proxy battle over Israel. “Zionists” and “anti-Zionists” could figure out a way to make Peanut Butter vs. Jelly a proxy dispute about Israel.

• If this “report” is going to be blasted into everybody’s faces, I think I’m entitled to note that its marquee claim, which leads the “Executive Summary” and has been circulated furiously across the internet — including by numb-nuts elected officials — is complete statistical hogwash. The report states: “250,000 young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma. The true number is probably higher.” There is no valid empirical basis for this sensational claim, which if you’ll notice, is deliberately weasel-worded to start with. We don’t even know what the claim precisely is — almost certainly by design. What are they saying? That a minimum of 250K young white girls were raped by Muslim predators? Or that a minimum of 250K young white girls were subject to an impossibly wide array of diverse victimization: some raped, some “trafficked,” some impregnated, some forcibly converted to Islam, and some afflicted with general “trauma”? Because if they believed it could be credibly alleged that there are over 250K straight-up rape victims, the authors of this report would surely jump at the chance to come out and explicitly say that. But they don’t. They instead make this infinitely loose claim that’s almost impossible to parse with any precision, but which is inflammatory enough that it gives ample ammunition for dunces like Mace and Fine to twist the statement into a factual-sounding assertion that 250K+ girls were brutally raped. Which is not even what the report asserts, if you actually read it carefully, which is of course not what the authors are looking for anyone to do. NOTE: If there were a valid evidentiary basis for the claim that 250K+ girls were raped, or even just more generally “victimized” in some way, I would have zero problem acknowledging this. I am in no way constrained in my ability to theoretically acknowledge such things, should there be rational reason to do so; I am not hobbled by some emotional bias in favor of exonerating Muslims, nor do I feel some need to lecture the White Working Class why they should love living in proximity to Pakistanis. Likewise, I am not addled by some vengeance crusade to extirpate all Muslims from the West. I am pretty much agnostic on the matter, normatively speaking, for better or worse. I am also not analytically hobbled by some freakish hatred for rape victims. Not to get too boilerplate, but I have always genuinely thought that bonafide rape is a serious crime and should be treated as such. Which is not well-served by diluting “rape” to mean “sex acts that a participant contemporaneously perceives as consensual, but later deems to have been grooming or trafficking or something.” I don’t know why it’s suddenly so shocking to say that a sexual situation can be ill-advised, or even genuinely harmful in certain respects, without necessarily having to be rape. I don’t know, I guess I’m a stickler for the English language, and keenly attuned to how “concept creep” can infiltrate words and phrases that once would have had a commonly-understood definitional correlate, but now get systematically over-extended by activists/politicians/cops and whomever else wants to commit Language Genocide to advance a particular pet cause.

• Nor do I harbor some bleeding-heart liberal bias in favor of mass immigration. For that matter, I have no desire to accommodate virtually any “liberal” sensitivities, or guard against the transgression of liberally-oriented taboos, because I sooooo need to “virtue signal” to all my colleagues at the Ford Foundation, the Martha’s Vineyard wine party circuit, or the Democratic Party. I honestly could not give less of a shit about placating such people. I have no particular investment in what the proper levels of immigration to the United Kingdom should be, or frankly to the United States, because it’s just not an issue that viscerally animates me in terms of personal political preference. You can deride me for failing to have a strong political preference on this policy question, but that won’t change whether or not I can consciously perceive one in my own mind — and that’s what happens to be relevant for establishing my own ideological basis for discussing “grooming gangs” and related matters. I also have zero problem acknowledging that there could be legitimate problems with the assimilation of Muslim populations in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, that are distinct and “different” from whatever assimilation dynamics exist in the US. I have always fully accepted that in a pluralistic society, having a political preference for more restrictive immigration policy, including around Muslim immigration in particular if you want, is a position that people are entitled to hold, and need not make one “racist.” And even if there is some racial undertone to why one holds this position — alright. So what. At a certain point, get over it. You’re never going to eradicate every last trace of conscious or subconscious racial bias in how people formulate their political/social/cultural opinions. You’re not even required to aspire to eradicate such racial biases. That said, an inordinate number of people who are especially exercised about these matters definitely don’t shy away from declaring open animus towards Muslims, Pakistanis, etc. as a driving factor in their political views, especially online. I personally don’t relate to this in terms of my own inclinations, but I’m also not going to throw a fit about it, because I’m not on a quest to socially-engineer everyone’s “bad” beliefs out of their brains, and yeah, I agree that “multi-culturalism” as a kind of state religion can often be cringeworthily hollow. But I have no reason to inhibit myself from carrying out as impartial an evaluation as I can on “grooming gangs,” due to some pre-existing political commitment to any particular ideological dispensation regarding Muslim immigration to the UK, or even whether Muslims perpetrate sex crimes at a greater frequency than non-Muslims. They well may! The true facts wouldn’t bother me one way or another. Honestly. I’ve also been to Muslim enclaves in the UK, namely Birmingham, and can attest that it can be a bit of a strange scene. I happened to go in October 2023 when there was a big protest action happening after Oct. 7, so maybe my experience was a bit skewed by unfolding events, but yeah, I did get the impression that Muslim populations there are quite a bit more insular — politically, culturally, religiously, yadda yadda — than what might be expected among comparable demographics in the United States. No problem at all acknowledging this! I’m not hiding my secret neuroses.

• However, I’m sorry, but if you simply don’t care that this “report” sponsored by the world’s richest man — which is clearly designed to influence American political attitudes as well as British — contains, at the very top, in what basically amounts to a thesis statement, an outlandishly nonsensical statistical extrapolation about the alleged prevalence of “grooming gang” activity, then you simply do not care about what is true versus untrue, and you only care about advancing your political prerogatives when it comes to immigration/Islam/racial stuff — or whatever else is motivating your passionate interest in “grooming gangs.” You are entitled, I guess, to not care what is true vs. untrue, and to believe that advancing your political and propaganda interests is of paramount priority, but that’s never been my M.O. on this or any other subject, and never will be, for as long as I remain sentient.

I frankly don’t even remember why I broke up the above paragraphs into bullet-points, because this thing I’m writing now had no pre-ordained organization. So anyway, back to the core question: why are we being told that “grooming gangs” are suddenly of such enormous transatlantic concern as of June 2026? As lots of online commenters will gladly remind you, it’s certainly not because the “grooming gang” issue is remotely “new.” It’s been a controversy for many years, off and on. Voluminous materials have been produced for all to sift through if they really want, with or without a splashily exciting Lowe/Musk “report.” Here’s a reason why this came up again in June 2026: the sponsors of the “report” are demanding various political and legal action. And they’re demanding this on the basis of completely fabricated statistical claims, designed to exaggerate the prevalence of the purported threat. Am I supposed to be in favor of empirically indefensible threat inflation now? Nope. Never. Never will I agree to that tradeoff, on this or any other issue.

If you would like a full explanation of why the “250,000 raped girls” figure is completely fake, please read this guy’s Substack, which goes through the fakeness of the figure in admirably meticulous detail. And before anyone chimes in with the standard brainless rebuttal, please just see this tweet:

I’m not saying there is “no problem” regarding the treatment of British girls by Muslim men. I’m saying that the way in which the purported problem is being represented in the form of the newly-published “report,” and ensuing social media commotion, is 100% fakery. If you don’t care about propagandistic fakery, or you actively support the dissemination of propagandistic fakery, I can’t help you.

This particular bit of propagandistic fakery is of special interest to me because it’s so emblematic of the statistical chicanery that is rife throughout the modern “trafficking” industry, with all its endless NGO makework oufits, government subsidies, law enforcement collaboration, unanimously uncritical bipartisan political support, and so on. The amount of sheer statistical fakery these organizations and their “partners” get away with is truly astounding. Take, for instance, the annual proclamations of “Human Trafficking Awareness Month” — the reason why January is obviously everyone’s favorite month.

Wow! 25 million people are being “human trafficked” around the world at any given moment? Seems bad. Especially since we are told that “human trafficking” is “modern-day slavery.” Therefore, it would seem that 25 million people, many of whom are reportedly in the United States, are languishing in conditions of literal enslavement, right under our noses. In order to learn more about this dire predicament, why don’t we dig a little deeper into the source for the statistic?

As I wrote in 2023: “Well, here’s the methodology for the 25 million figure the State Department endorses to be used across the federal government. It’s produced by something called the ‘Minderoo Foundation’ in conjunction with the UN. You might as well generate statistics using seances and telepathy.”

Some convoluted amalgamation of “probabilistic surveys” conducted by some goofy-ass NGO? That’s what we’re basing our confident quantitative declarations on — that millions of people are being human-trafficked, sex-trafficked, and/or enslaved all around us? And then these gargantuan numbers, which have little to no hard evidence underlying them, are what routinely get printed on official materials of government agencies, eagerly touted by lavishly endowed philanthropic ventures, and “virtue signaled” by multinational corporations, as though they’re just conveying established facts to the general public? Wow, interesting.

I could go on forever about the phony Trafficking Stats industry, but the point is I have a long-standing and pre-existing interest in the chronic misuse of these bogus hokum figures, and the absurd methodology behind them. So the “250,000 girls raped and/or trafficked by Muslims” claim is just the newest right-wing manifestation of this oft-observed trend. Notice that Low IQ elected officials such as Nancy Mace, as well as like-minded online influencers, have taken it upon themselves to declare that all 250,000 of these purported English girl victims were outright RAPED by the Muslim pedo groomer gangs, when the Report itself deliberately clutters up the statistic with a bunch of other stuff that need not include rape, by any stretch, and in fact could be extremely vague imputations of victimization that would bear no resemblance at all to anything a rational person would consider rape. Here’s the claim again: “250,000 young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma.” They are purposely conflating victims of “pregnancy” with victims of “rape.” HUH? Not to mention victims of “trauma.” No truth-seeking “inquiry” or “report” would do this. You know who would do it? A group of political operators looking to make a political point, perhaps at the behest of their trillionaire patron?

Alright, so again, why are the pushers and propagators of this report so keen on getting everyone worked up about “grooming gangs” in June 2026? The authors tell us why. They are demanding specific political and legal action. For one thing, they want the Modern Slavery Act 2015 — the British version of all-purpose “trafficking” law — to be more zealously enforced, so as to put more people in prison. They can certainly take inspiration from their American counterparts on this score, with all the wildly inventive new ways that “trafficking” law now gets applied here by state and local authorities. (Stay tuned for more on that in a subsequent article.) So a key purpose of this latest surge in “grooming gang” fury is to strengthen “trafficking” law, which in my humble opinion, is a total sinkpit of incoherent nonsense, and a nightmarish threat to civil liberties that is only growing more extreme by the day. In practice, it hands vast unfettered powers to prosecutors to punish whomever they want, whenever they want, for whatever they want, given the boundless conceptual elasticity of “trafficking,” which has no stable definition, and is hugely susceptible to whatever the latest moral mania is, and whatever political pressures may commensurately arise. Elon Musk and Rupert Lowe demand that “a comprehensive Childhood Sexual Exploitation Act must be enacted at once.” Why do they want this, you ask?

This new statute should create a specific offence of “organised group-based child sexual exploitation” – understood as participation in networks that groom, traffic, or exploit children for sexual purposes, whether or not each individual act can be separately proven – with mandatory minimum sentences and aggravating factors for racial or religious motivation.

They want to lower the government’s burden of proof for throwing people in prison, of course. That’s one of the great joys of “trafficking” law in the United States, and why prosecutors are so very effusive about how wonderful these laws are. Because “trafficking” charges can encompass such a wide range of variegated conduct, individual acts of wrongdoing don’t have to be proven so much anymore. Ghislaine Maxwell, for example, was convicted partly on the Maurene Comey-devised theory that she participated in the “grooming” of victims — that is, engaged in conduct that no one involved need have contemporaneously perceived as sexually violative in any way, and which could include such things as friendly gestures, jokes, and the giving of gifts. So long as sexual misconduct of some sort could be alleged to have been committed somewhere down the line, any “grooming” which might be retroactively asserted to have occurred in the lead-up now carries grave criminal liability. Including, in Ghislaine’s case, activity with females who would have been legal adults in her native England, where the age of consent is 16 (just as it is in numerous US states.) But that doesn’t matter for the Feds, because for their purposes, 18 is the no-exceptions age of consent for anything to do with federal “trafficking” law — superseding states whose legislatures have decided the age of consent ought to be lower. So that’s the kind of paradigm Rupert Lowe, Elon Musk, and all these rightoid Twitter/X warriors want swiftly imported to the United Kingdom. Good luck with that! Aren’t these guys always complaining about the erosion of civil liberties in the UK — oftentimes with good reason? Well, they want to accelerate that process ever-further, under the auspices of newfangled “trafficking” enforcement.

Rupert and Elon explain that their desired law “must reverse the presumption that a child can ever consent to sexual activity with an adult, especially in a grooming context.” This is stated as though there is universal consensus as to what “a grooming context” even is, which there emphatically isn’t. One of the most cutting-edge new innovations in “grooming” theory is that there exists something called “Adult Sexual Grooming,” meaning behaviors that the term “grooming” was first coined to describe — habituation by adults of genuinely vulnerable children to become receptive to illicit sexual acts — now applies just as squarely to adults “grooming” fellow adults. So expect that to be coming soon to a criminal codebook near you.

But what about the real English children, you ask? Shouldn’t the “presumption” indeed be reversed, such that they could never consent to sexual activity with an adult? The current “presumption” seems obviously awful and wrong! Well, OK. I agree that on its face, the statement “children can’t consent to sexual activity with adults” seems intuitively correct. But when you get down in the weeds, as is unfortunately necessary in the legal field, what this would functionally mean is the British importation of American-style statutory construction, whereby if, say, a 17-year-old tells her friends, parents, and police that she consented to sexual activity with an adult, that can’t be taken into account for any purpose, because it’s automatically a “statutory” crime, and no mitigating factors may be considered. What both parties might have perceived as consensual conduct becomes, for the purposes of criminal law (and public perception) — “rape.” In England, when a person below the legal age of consent (like age 14 and 15) engages in statutorily illegal sexual activity with another person, the judge can take into account factors like whether there is evidence that the activity was consensual, in terms of determining what kind of punishment is appropriate. In the United States, this is strictly forbidden in most contexts. Without arguing that it’s “good” for a 15-year-old to engage in any sexual activity with anyone ever, if it does happen, I fail to see why it can’t be considered “bad,” but also that factors such as consent (or lack thereof) couldn’t also be taken into account to evaluate the severity of offense, and the punishment thereby warranted. Seems pretty commonsense to me. But not Lowe and Musk, who are really super eager for American-Style Justice to be thrashed down on the streets of South Yorkshire. OK.

The duo also implore Parliament to enact “the harshest possible sentences” for these offenses, so that’s another muscular American intervention for ya — max sentences doled out as indiscriminately as possible, till you eventually get an oversized beastly prison state like ours, which at one point in the 2000s had ballooned to Gulag-surpassing levels. “The overarching legislative objective should be to recognise organised sexual exploitation as a form of structural criminality,” the authors write. “This requires a shift in both legal doctrine and institutional culture.” I have no idea what “structural criminality” means. It sounds like a “reverse woke” slogan where you have to take twelve courses in “intersectionality” jargon to apprehend the approximate meaning. Meanwhile, as the rest of us labor in definitional ambiguity, prosecutors skirt right past the confusion and arrogate sweeping new powers to themselves — they’ll worry about the interpretative nuances later.

Although these Musk-fantasized statutes are purportedly intended to “eradicate” the scourge of adults preying on children, get ready for much child-on-child prosecution coming down the pike. Here’s a fairly mind-bending stat from the 2025 Baroness Casey report, on which the Musk/Lowe report builds. Among the matters investigated in the report are the population-wide ages of “Perpetrators of Group-Based Child Sexual Exploitation,” which is another way of saying “grooming gangs,” I suppose, or at least the kind of conduct that could be categorized as “Grooming Gang”-related. The report states:

In 2023, 39% of suspects were between the ages of 10 and 15 at the time an offence took place (reflecting child-on-child offending), while 18% were between the ages of 18 and 29 (57% were under 18 and 43% were 18 or older). The most common age range for suspects was 14-15 (20%).

Got that? Apparently children as young as ten are now being classified as child sex offenders in these extremely necessary and I’m sure methodologically flawless government statistics. A majority of all sex offenders are under the age of 18? Does this not seem strange to anyone? Does it not seem like children are actually being stigmatized, and potentially subjected to criminal repercussions, under the banner of supposedly protecting… children? Just another paradox that I guess we can sweep quietly under the rug while the Social Media Warriors enjoy their Righteous Fury Circle-Jerk.

Finally, what I find most blatantly objectionable about this garbage “report” — which is really saying something, since so much of it is so painfully shambolic — is the sleazy underhanded incorporation of “Satanic Panic” revival nonsense. Because that’s really an awesome phenomenon we should all be super eager to re-introduce in 2026. The investigative protocols the “report” authors employ are so preposterously lax (by design) that they don’t even bother troubling themselves with any irksome formalities like, gee I don’t know, corroborating a single detail of the wild and sensational claims before hurling them outward for mass online consumption. So we get reported, as though proven fact, and with unflinching credulity, the following kinds of “rubbish,” based on anonymized interviews with wholly unknown persons:

Efforts to conjure a Satanic Panic 2.0 are already well underway, and it’s incredibly heinous, given the catastrophes that piled up the last time this stuff was allowed to proliferate unchallenged — a lot of innocent people spent a lot of time in prison. Also, a lot of families were destroyed, reputations ruined, and needless crazy-making political hysteria unleashed. But have no worry, because the Musk/Lowe social media gang now want to groom us all into thinking it’ll be for the best. To use another favorite Britishism — piss off!

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Here’s an article I had published today at UnHerd on the latest upsurge of consternation around Graham Platner, who I suppose is on the verge of becoming, or has already become, something like a new household name for anyone minimally attuned to US political affairs. I admit I hadn’t followed the Maine senate race very closely until about a week ago. Of course, I’d occasionally see some flicker of controversy involving Platner, whom I knew had unconventionally ascended to presumptive Democratic nominee despite being a pure political novice. And of course, I am well aware of Susan Collins. One of the funniest outcomes of the 2020 election was that she sailed comfortably to victory over a much-hyped Democratic challenger, despite virtually every poll in the lead-up projecting Collins’ defeat. I guess I shouldn’t overstate my ignorance too much; I’m sure I’d read an article here or there on Platner’s improbable rise in the past couple months. But I hadn’t really done a proper “deep dive” on the main controversies animating the race.

The principal controversy I’d sporadically heard about was that Graham Platner apparently had some sort of “Nazi tattoo,” and claimed he’d only been recently informed that the tattoo was connected to Nazism. Whereupon, he got another tattoo to cover up the offending image. It occurred to me last night that I couldn’t recall ever seeing the actual tattoo. So I pulled it up, and saw this:

“Wait, really?” I thought. I had always kind of vaguely assumed the tattoo in question must be so obviously evocative of Nazis or Hitler that the average American would take one look at it and immediately know the connotation. Foolish naivety on my part. I’ll acknowledge, perhaps embarrassingly, that the symbol did not even immediately leap out to me as obviously associated with Nazism. While I’m far from the biggest World War II nut to ever exist, I do know a fair amount, including about Nazi Germany. But for whatever reason, I genuinely would not have recognized the symbol at first blush as Nazi-related. To me, it kind of just looks like a generic “skull and crossbones” symbol that one could imagine rabble-rousing guys in the military thinking looks cool. Someone should commission a poll to ascertain what percentage of Americans would proactively identify this as a “Nazi” symbol, because I’d guess the percentage would be quite low.

Anyway, Platner continues to be excoriated for his now-infamous “Nazi tattoo,” since he shamefully failed to consult the Anti-Defamation League “hate symbol” database before getting himself tatted up years ago. My take is that whatever the exact details of Platner’s tattoo folly, everyone should just relax in general about Nazi-related symbols, because they’re really not that big of a deal anymore.

One might retort: Hey, what about that big controversy over the past several years about a certain military unit in Ukraine, the Azov Battalion/Brigade/Regiment? Didn’t you used to complain that soldiers in this unit were routinely being spotted with Nazi insignia emblazoned on their uniforms, vehicles, and so forth? OK, fair question. It’s true that I would sometimes point out the prevalence of Nazi-type imagery among Azov fighters and followers, and I’d comment on various political tensions brought to bear by this conundrum: namely, that Democrats and left-liberals were deafeningly silent about the heavy arms being funneled to the seemingly Nazi-friendly unit, even though they’d otherwise be on hair-trigger alert to declare a blithering moral crisis anytime some schlub loosely affiliated with Trump or “MAGA” could be claimed to have exhibited a tenuous, theoretical affinity with purported Nazis.

The most subtle possible indicia of such Nazi-related offenses were vigorously monitored by Dems and likeminded busybodies, especially outfits like the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League, neither of which would provide me with a comment when I asked them to weigh in on Azov supporters holding political rallies in the United States — see this 2022 article. No comment, they said, despite the ideological lineage of Azov being far more straightforwardly redolent of bonafide Nazism than most of the ticky-tack stuff we’d been instructed to freak out about multiple times a week in the Trump era. Infamously, the “OK” hand gesture was deemed at one point to be a nightmarish display of Literal Nazism. When contrasted with the decidedly muted response to the sudden adulation of Azov, which was not just receiving political and media plaudits, but armaments from US military contractors, the farcical insincerity of earlier Nazi-related freakouts was made too painfully obvious to not sardonically ridicule.

However, the article I wrote on the matter was principally a meta-critique of domestic American political hackery — that the moment a glimmer of purported Nazism was sighted anywhere, it would ordinarily be cause for the most spectacular sputtering meltdown, and yet when this far more tangible manifestation of purported Nazism appeared in the wild — Azov and its boosters — it could be simply ignored by the very same people who just got done telling us that ascendant Literal Nazism was a defining feature of American life. That was the thrust of what I was trying to convey in my article, as opposed to carefully analyzing the precise ideological contours of Azov, or drawing any firm conclusions about the extent to which Azov adherents circa 2022 could be substantively tied to Nazism.

In fact, I was skeptical that each and every fighter in that unit could be reasonably described as full-blown Nazi. That just didn’t seem plausible, notwithstanding the origins and/or founders of the group, who at one time were very explicit and unapologetic about their Nazi-adjacent ideological commitments. And even if the ideological forebears of Azov could be downgraded to mere “right-wing nationalist,” that still would’ve been more than sufficient for American liberals to have a frothing panic attack, except for the overriding political imperative at the time to Stand Unflinchingly With Ukraine.

That said, even though it became a popular talking point on Russia-supporting social media, and among Russian state actors, to uniformly condemn anyone and everyone associated with Azov as outright unambiguous Nazis, my intuition was always that this was probably not accurate. Groups that start out on the fringes, like Azov in 2014, inevitably “moderate” to some degree as they become more institutionalized and “mainstream.” Ukraine was seen as the vanguard for some grandiose defense of “liberal democracy,” and as such, one could imagine that new recruits with non-Nazi predilections were being increasingly drawn to Azov as of 2022. Furthermore, even well before the war, one of Ukraine’s state objectives was to join the EU, which would entail shorning itself of distasteful ideological elements, such as Nazism, thereby proving to EU chieftains that Ukraine had firmly embraced “liberal democratic values” or whatever.

So while it stood to reason that there were likely some factions of Azov who did espouse something akin to Nazism, it also stood to reason that other factions, and perhaps even the most rapidly growing ones, were not at all sympathetic to Nazism, and in fact would genuinely deplore being conflated with Nazis. Does this make the American pundits and elected officials any less clownish for having zero compunction about gifting Azov commanders with high-powered weaponry? Not really, because again, even the faintest whiff of Nazism would usually be enough for them to howl with the fury of a thousand Resistance Warriors. But as to the nature of Azov’s true ideological composition circa 2022, to me the reality was likely more ambiguous. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

Now, one might reasonably ask: isn’t this whole “Nazi” angle a bit overblown? After all, in the U.S., that label gets blithely slapped onto anyone who’s slightly more right-wing than Mitt Romney. And it’s not an unfair point. The elasticity of the term “Nazi” has become so preposterous, and it was deployed so indiscriminately during the era of Trump, that one could be forgiven for having an urge to immediately eye-roll whenever they hear it uttered.

Here’s the point, though: in a prior political context, the purported existence of Nazis was supposed to prompt an earnest outpouring of shock, horror, and counter-Nazi mobilization. But in the current political context, the existence of Nazis is supposed to be carefully ignored — in service of what is now the superseding imperative, namely to “Stand with Ukraine.”

Because even if not every Azov fighter actively subscribes to full-fledged Nazi ideology — which is plausible — they would still resoundingly meet the media’s typical criteria for instant explosions of hair-on-fire condemnation. There are currently mountains of evidence, much of which was contemporaneously gathered over the course of the ongoing war, that Azov “defenders” at the very least physically adorn themselves with unabashed Nazi symbols. Examples of such symbols that have been recently observed on their uniforms include the Wolfsangel, the Black Sun, and even a crest of a division of the SS — the paramilitary organization of the actual, historical Nazis. You know, the ones commanded by Hitler who exterminated lots of Jews. If a bunch of Trump supporters were running around with these symbols stitched onto their clothing, do you suppose the U.S. media would be extra charitable in deciphering whether they really subscribed to Nazism?

Notwithstanding the meta-political points I was trying to make about Azov in 2022, I would’ve continued to maintain — then and now — that the knee-jerk moral mania around anything vaguely to do with Nazis is beyond tedious, and should no longer be legitimized. Sure, if someone really does venerate Hitler, or really wants to impose the governing program of the Nazi Party, that’s something I would personally object to on the merits. You could reasonably hold such views against a person politically. But the instant hysteria generated by any fleeting mention of “Nazi” is so trite and performative at this point, it’s tiresome. Nazi Germany hasn’t existed for over 80 years. Hitler has been dead for slightly longer. There is no Nazi-related emergency upon us in 2026, notwithstanding the occasional presence of political actors whose ideological lineage could arguably be traced back in some roundabout fashion to historic National Socialism.

But even if that genealogy is plausibly well-established in some cases… so what? You don’t have to agree with it! In fact, you are more than entitled to enthusiastically oppose it if you feel moved. But there is no longer need for the reflexive moral outbursts. Any putative concern about Nazi-related views in 2026 can be easily addressed through ordinary modes of political disputation, without a mandatory eruption of overwrought screeching — the same way that potentially objectionable views associated with liberalism, socialism, communism, conservatism, anarchism, or other ideological tendencies can be rationally addressed.

In light of this, I would argue that even if Graham Platner did vaguely know that the tattoo he got in 2007, while on leave from the military in Croatia, was in some roundabout sense associated with “Nazism,” it’s just not that big of a deal. It’s certainly not worth proclaiming as the central fact of his political identity or governing plans. Especially if there’s no good reason to suppose that he subscribes to a worldview that has anything to do with Literal Nazism. Because in Platner’s case, he almost certainly and conclusively does not. He seems to be a generically left-wing-ish guy who likes Bernie Sanders, but has also inhabited more masculine or even right-wing-coded cultural milieus — such as serving in the military — than is perhaps typical for the average “progressive Democrat.” (Which is probably part of his appeal to a certain segment of voters.)

So in other words, there is no sensible reason to believe, as far as everything I’ve seen, that Platner acquired the purportedly offensive tattoo in order to signify his own personal affinity with Nazism. Even if he knew all along, or eventually came to know, that the tattoo was aesthetically stylized in a manner reminiscent of Nazi symbology — so what? What is that supposed to demonstrate? Do you really think he’d get into office as a Democratic senator from Maine and start agitating for the extermination of Jews or something? Please. This is all just hackneyed political blather — a “liability” for Republicans, and probably some Democrats, to eagerly slam him for. But it just doesn’t matter that much on the merits.

I’d go so far as to say that even if he did hypothetically get the tattoo to signify some affinity with historic Nazism, that too would not matter all that much. Because I’m sorry — Nazi symbols do not contain any dark magical substrates, whereby anyone who’s ever displayed them is cursed for all eternity and forever frighteningly evil. I just don’t believe that, as much as I would substantively object to the imposition of a political program modeled on National Socialism. But it would still be moot in Platner’s case, because I think the most you could credibly argue is he might’ve been notionally aware that the “skull and crossbones” on his chest was aesthetically evocative of Nazi iconography, or perhaps had been appropriated by the Nazis — even as he himself never conceived of the tattoo as signifying his own personal support for Nazism.

If you gave him truth serum, I’d bet he would probably give a convoluted rationale along these lines for why he got the tattoo in the first place, and then kept it unperturbed for 18 years. I gather that lots of people end up getting tattoos to which they assign their own semi-private meaning. But explaining this “semi-private meaning” to the public is probably not something he’d be easily able to do in the context of a high-profile Senate race, so he cut his losses and got the thing blotched out last fall. Maybe he would’ve been better off just keeping it though, because the “cover-up” doesn’t seem to have dulled the controversy at all, and kind of just hobbles his ability to explain it convincingly.

I honestly can’t bring myself to care that much one way or another about whether Platner beats Susan Collins, or by extension, whether the US Senate is controlled next year by John Thune or Chuck Schumer. That’s just not something I envision myself getting overly exercised about, or psychically invested in. To the degree I am currently interested in the Maine senate race, it’s to document the deluge of propagandistic sleaze being pelted at Platner, with a nice assist yesterday from the New York Times, whose star correspondents Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer decided it was of paramount journalistic importance to survey Platner’s ex-girlfriends, going back to his 20s, and have them pontificate on his character traits.

The journalists additionally thought it was of utmost importance to have several of these chagrined “exes” emotionally reconstruct and narrativize their past experiences with Platner, to create a psychological profile from which the NYT could purport to divine a pattern of his “unsettling” behavior. Of supreme newsworthiness, evidently, is that a handful of these women recalled their past relationships with Platner could sometimes be “volatile” and “emotionally wrenching.” If this is super-newsworthy stuff, then as I proposed in the UnHerd piece, it’s only right that Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer also have their ex-boyfriends canvassed, and invited to share their recollections of any “volatile” or “emotionally wrenching” relationship dynamics they might call to mind from back in the day. This would undoubtedly give us all much-needed insight into the subtle influences permeating the political coverage of the New York Times — at least if they’re saying such information gives us crucial insight into the office-holding ambitions of Graham Platner.

Also of interest for my admittedly niche, peculiar purposes is that the Maine Senate race is poised to become yet another national bellwether of the Great Pedo Panic, with Platner having been predictably declared a pedo already, on predictably scurrilous grounds — because there are seldom any non-scurrilous grounds on which pedo accusations are flung as of late. His crime: having an account on the app “Kik,” which featured a profile picture of him shirtless and wearing a towel around his waist. The app is claimed to be disproportionately populated by vulnerable, underaged minors getting sexually preyed upon by adults, so the mere fact of Platner having an account is seen as adequate to call him a pedo. Despite zero evidence that he ever did anything sexually predatory with anyone of any age, much less children.

Republican polling firms have excitedly reported that when they test out the resulting attack line with Maine voters — that Platner has been caught patronizing an app known as a “paradise” for “child predators” — his favorability ratings unsurprisingly plummet. So we can expect to see this Pedo Panic trolling amplified at full blast for the next several months, as millions and millions of dollars pour into Maine, where the balance of power in the Senate could be decided. Lots of deep-pocketed donors are so very passionate about whether the chamber is controlled by John Thune or Chuck Schumer.

This agglomeration of slime hurled at Platner is outlandishly scummy, in my view, and so the race does merit some critical attention, notwithstanding my sincere lack of strong feeling one way or another about the desirability of his candidacy, compounded by my general apathy about which party obtains a majority in Congress. Not that I won’t be covering the midterms in some form — I inevitably will. I’m just saying that from the standpoint of my own personal preference, I simply do not care all that much about the ultimate electoral outcome. Even so, there will be plenty of insights to glean about the latest pathologies of US political culture, and so in that spirit, I guess I will be intermittently following the Platner/Collins race. Maine’s nice in the summer anyway!

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The Soho Forum Debate: Michael Tracey vs. Marcella Szablewicz

Resolution: The Jeffrey Epstein scandal has become a case of moral panic.

July 14, 2026

6:30pm

The Sheen Center

New York, NY

Eventbrite link

I have done several debates affiliated with the “Soho Forum” in the past, but this will be the first one to take place on the “main stage.”

When I was approached about doing it, I immediately expressed doubt that the organizers would be able to find anyone willing to debate me on the subject of “Epstein.” And then, to my surprise, they did in fact find someone. OK then!

It’s structured as a formal “Oxford-style” debate, with a winner declared based on audience participation.

If you are in the NYC area, or would like to travel to the NYC area in mid-July, I encourage you to come! (No, not to pack the debate hall in my favor — that wouldn’t work regardless, given how the vote-tabulation system works.) Feel free to get in touch if you think you might attend! I believe there is also a reception afterwards and so forth.

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It’s hard to imagine anything more blatantly disqualifying for an elected official than to falsely accuse random citizens of heinous child sex crimes, then once the citizens you’ve accused are confirmed totally innocent, not even have the decency to apologize — and instead blame others for your spectacularly egregious behavior. But that’s exactly what Thomas Massie has done for the past three months. So desperate was he to proclaim that he had discovered the mythical “coverup” he presumed must exist in the “Epstein Files” he’d so doggedly campaigned for releasing, that he and his cohort Ro Khanna couldn’t even take two seconds to properly contextualize the “files” they were knocking themselves over to screech about. And so they rushed before the cameras to declare, as Massie did, that these four men in New York City with zero public profile — who had absolutely nothing to do with Epstein — were “likely incriminated” in pedophile sex-trafficking crimes, the mere suggestion of which is enough to utterly destroy anyone’s reputation. Especially if you’re just a lowly auto mechanic or IT technician, like the men Massie wasted no time castigating. His buddy Ro Khanna then ran to the House floor and read their names aloud, like he was revealing some momentous government secret, and denounced them as “powerful men” the DOJ was shamefully conspiring to protect. Soon enough, Massie and Khanna were shown to have defamed these thoroughly “non-powerful” men as depraved child-sex criminals, but the two Congressmen proceeded to blame everyone but themselves. To my knowledge, neither Massie nor Khanna have ever bothered to apologize to the men. Instead, they both barrel forward with their stream of uninterrupted Epstein theatrics, as if they have absolutely nothing to be sorry about.

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For this and many other reasons, Massie richly deserves to lose his GOP primary race in Kentucky tomorrow. Which does not mean that those contriving to oust him deserve to “win.” As the tedious cliche often goes, “two things can be true at the same time.” Massie has plainly engaged in a host of discrediting conduct, which is more than sufficient to render a judgment that he is worthy of electoral defeat. At the same time, the crude donor-class intrusion into his congressional primary, now the most expensive in history at $36 million — which is probably a lowball estimate — is impossible to endorse. His nominal ghostlike opponent, Ed Gallrein, has pathetically ducked debates, barely does any real interviews, and almost nothing is known of his background beyond that he was hand-picked by Trump. When he does occasionally deign to speak, Gallrein loves to give himself tough-guy credit, claiming the details of his vaunted military service are too “classified” to inform voters about. So he’s basically just relying on a massive influx of outside cash to muscle his way to an ignominious victory.

It’s also true that Massie’s opponents appear to disdain him for reasons that have nothing much to do with the reasons he so richly deserves defeat. Everyone knows Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and the other filthy rich donors pouring in astronomical amounts of money are doing so because they perceive Massie to be intolerably unsupportive of Israel. And they would’ve harbored this disdain whether or not Trump had declared Massie persona non grata. But his Trump feud presents the donor clique with a rare opportunity to oust a meddlesome incumbent, because ordinarily the built-in advantages of incumbency make this nearly impossible. Trump, however, commands such outsized influence with Republican primary electorates that if he’s already fuming mad about Massie — enough to wage an electoral jihad against him — the pro-Israel donors have every reason to swoop in and capitalize.

Trump’s repeated posts on Truth Social intimating that something vaguely nefarious went down with the timing of Massie’s marriage to his second wife is gutter-level stuff — but nothing particularly new for Trump, whose premier skill has always been knowing exactly what “buttons to push” with his political foes. Nothing is off limits when he really wants to make it hurt. He’s even been promoting a new set of “allegations” against Massie, related to a bunch of similarly vague intimations of supposed misconduct with a woman Massie purportedly dated after the death of his first wife. The whole thing looks incredibly flimsy. But no, the idea that Massie now karmically deserves to be slimed with cheap innuendo, because he’s been flinging similar nonsense in all directions for the past ten months, is not a logic that can be countenanced, as it validates the idea of meritless rumor-mongering, so long as the target can be deemed sufficiently “deserving,” according to whatever criteria anyone wants to invoke to make that inherently subjective determination. Still, eleventh-hour flimsy accusations against Massie do highlight that he might’ve been well-advised to exercise greater caution before hurling evidence-devoid attacks at others, especially if he and his supporters would like that courtesy extended to him. Bear in mind, the “allegations” against Massie, such as they can even be ascertained, are trivial compared to the allegations Massie has gratuitously leveled against the many alleged sex-trafficking “associates” of Epstein.

One tragedy of Massie is that for years, he really was an anomalously independent-minded member of Congress — otherwise a body that puts a premium on relentless conformity. I’d say he was even one of the very few members I would have personally reported having any degree of admiration for. Take, for instance, his nimble intervention in April 2024 to marginally impede passage of the TikTok ban, which Speaker Mike Johnson had tried to fast-track using the existing legislative vehicle of a pending National Security Supplemental bill. Massie could not block the measure entirely, and it did end up getting passed, but his quick-thinking efforts at least helped to galvanize public awareness of Johnson’s sneaky maneuver, and a significantly larger number of his colleagues joined him in voting NO than had been anticipated. Massie was always unusually adept at monitoring the arcane minutiae of legislative procedure, including the extra-arcane workings of the Rules Committee, on which he previously sat — and which most members of Congress can barely explain, nevermind the average citizen. Massie consistently performed a useful public service by elucidating various inside-baseball machinations in a manner the general public could comprehend. He’s also been known to make a point of explaining every vote he casts, rather than just coasting on the assumption that a critical mass of his constituents will never pay attention to the ins-and-outs, which is what most members of Congress bank on.

Massie’s willingness to vote against the slew of performatively “pro-Israel” resolutions which endlessly lard up the House agenda is one of his more praiseworthy traits, so of course, that’s what he is now being attacked for in the ads swamping his district. It remains an open question how many Kentucky GOP voters even care about this issue, but the messaging may be effective among older Evangelicals who watch a lot of TV — perhaps the most reliable GOP voting bloc. Conversely, Massie’s refusal to grovel for “pro-Israel” nonsense could conceivably nudge other segments of the electorate toward a more pro-Massie direction, although those potential voters are unlikely to be watching the TV stations where the ads are being aired. “Spots” assailing Massie for failing to support the Iran War could have a similarly uneven impact, but the Republican Jewish Committee strategists placing the ads are probably clever enough to discern which demographics to target. The ads’ emphasis on Massie being “disloyal” to Trump, and entering into alliance with the likes of AOC and Ilhan Omar, is probably enough to inflame the id of the median Republican primary voter, whatever their precise views on the Iran “excursion.” Shameless use of AI to generate fake video vignettes of Massie holding hands with AOC/Omar makes the ads especially odious. Despite a cursory “AI” disclaimer, the vast majority of Kentucky GOP primary voters will likely not be familiar with the latest frontiers in AI technology, and will probably just assume the footage real.

So there can be no doubt that Massie is being inundated with an enormous deluge of sleaze, uncorked by his crime of not bowing to Trump, whose pique has invited “pro-Israel” operatives to flood Massie’s district with agitprop. Would it be regrettable if this anti-Massie torrent is effective enough to beat him? Sure, that would be regrettable. But it also wouldn’t magically negate Massie’s own “regrettable” conduct. (Just like AIPAC & co. successfully ousting Democratic incumbents Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush in 2024 didn’t magically absolve them of critique, either.)

Because leaving aside Trump, the “pro-Israel” donors, and every other variable in this race, let the record show that once Massie decided he would dive head-first into the swirling toilet-bowl vortex of Epstein mania, he went completely off the rails.

At the “Epstein Survivors” press conference Massie co-organized last September, one of the “survivors” he loves to venerate so much, Lisa Phillips, famously caused a media sensation when she declared that her trauma sisterhood was going to produce their own “list” of sex-trafficking perpetrators, and hand it off to Massie and/or Marjorie Taylor Greene to then read on the House floor. Massie told reporters after the press conference that he was “encouraged and surprised to hear that they are going to create a list,” and he would be glad to be of service. “We need to start with the list,” Massie said, “and find out who on the list is guilty, and what crimes did they commit.” Which represented a stark inversion of the “presumption of innocence” ideal one might’ve thought Massie would cherish as a longstanding civil libertarian. He volunteered that he’d be happy to “go to the floor of the House and read the list,” thereby condemning unknown men for unknown child sex crimes, with zero corroboration necessary, because thanks to the Constitution’s “Speech or Debate” clause, Massie would personally “not suffer any defamation cases” for doing this, even if he were to falsely incriminate loads of guys. “A list of three dozen names would not be hard to carry to the floor of the House of Representatives and read in five minutes,” Massie explained. “And perhaps read it everyday.”

Of course this prospective stunt never happened — no “list” was ever produced. Which strangely never impelled Massie or his compatriots to reconsider their assumptions as to the veracity of the “survivor” claims. Nor did they revise the certainty with which they had inveighed against the scores of purported child sex-traffickers they assured everyone were being covered up in the “Epstein Files.” Instead, the new talking point became that we mustn’t burden the poor “survivors” (or their profit-seeking lawyers) with any expectations of disclosure, because “it’s not their job to release the names,” as Massie told me in November 2025. He’d go on to repeat this same emotional-blackmail talking point on National TV — a talking point that’d been provided to him and other “survivor” advocates by the Bradley Edwards “victim” lawyer syndicate, with whom Massie and Khanna were collaborating on trauma-informed PR strategy, and even the legislative text of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. It was a gambit that worked out exceedingly well for Edwards & co., as they leveraged the public uproar around “Epstein Files” made possible by Massie’s bill to secure at least two additional class-action settlements, worth approximately $108 million, from which Edwards and his colleagues will receive another generous 30% cut. Who says government can’t create wealth?

After the Survivor-furnished “client list” idea fizzled, by February 2026, Massie eventually took matters into his own hands with a dramatic speech on the House floor in which he demanded the mass-arrest of Epstein confederates, for what he said was the “unspeakable” conduct revealed in the Epstein Files. As per usual, he did not specify what criminal conduct he was referring to — nor did he identify what criminal statutes had been so obviously violated. As I wrote at the time: “Thomas Massie is innovating a fascinating new slant on libertarian philosophy by constantly running around accusing private individuals of heinous crimes, demanding their arrest, pre-supposing their guilt, and calling on the government to disregard basic notions of due process.” It was in this Floor Speech (delivered under the immunities of the “Speech or Debate” clause) that Massie finally named a bunch of men he claimed ought to go down for their complicity in pedo trafficking. One he flamboyantly named was Leon Black, declaring: “You don’t even have to see past the redactions to see that this man needs to be investigated… it’s right there in the files.” For all that Massie loves to self-righteously pontificate about what he claims is right there for anyone to see in the “files,” he clearly hasn’t spent much time actually reading them — otherwise he presumably would’ve known that Leon Black was in fact investigated, by both federal and state prosecutors, for totally fabricated child-sex crimes, as I detailed in my lengthy two-part series last week on the monumental fraud of “Jane Doe” and her enablers.

What might be most galling about Massie’s routine is that he has still never bothered to learn the most basic facts of the Epstein case — the very thing he has staked his political career on, and can’t stop thundering about day after day. Because he’s such a media darling now (just like every Republican who feuds with Trump inevitably is) he was recently interviewed on the BBC, and gravely intoned to this international audience that a vast Epstein Coverup remains in progress: despite millions of records coming out pursuant to the Epstein Files Transparency Act that Massie co-sponsored, the DOJ continues to maliciously conceal “internal memos and emails” related to Epstein’s federal Non-Prosecution Agreement from 2006-2008. “They haven’t given us any of those documents,” Massie told his solemn British inquisitor. It really must be stressed how catastrophically uninformed one must be about the “Epstein Files” to seriously believe this. Like, you must have spent under 10 minutes total looking through the “files” you claim you so desperately wanted to unveil. Because there’s an absolute mega-avalanche of exactly these records available in the public domain — the very records Massie astonishingly claims are missing. Email threads, prosecution memos, and a giant expanse of other records depicting prosecutors’ internal deliberations related to the Epstein federal NPA. Some of the materials had already been public prior to the latest DOJ productions, and countless more were subsequently released. I even made a little explanatory video highlighting a tiny fraction of the “documents” Massie claims were damningly withheld. As usual, it turns out Massie was talking straight out of his “assie.” But you can see why he has to keep the intrigue going. Never will there be a point where he’ll just come out and say, “OK folks, looks like we’re done here!” The sinister coverup, by dogmatic necessity, will have to go on indefinitely.

Massie’s position on the Epstein fiasco has always been a straightforward example of willfully-fallacious reverse reasoning. He kicked off his crusade in July 2025, when by his own admission he had very little knowledge of the facts or evidence underlying the actual Epstein case, and preemptively decided there was a massive child sex-trafficking scandal waiting to be exposed. As he conceded on a February 2026 podcast, prior to last year, he “wasn’t paying a lot of attention” to the whole Epstein thing. But then the infamous DOJ/FBI memo dropped on July 6, 2025, and whammo: social media erupted, re-igniting the controversy on a grander scale than ever before. Massie correctly perceived a political opening he might profitably seize — especially as he was on course for a Trump-backed primary challenge the following year. By that point, Massie had already opposed the signature domestic legislation of Trump’s second term, the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” and Trump had already started threatening to primary Massie as early as March 2025. By June 2025, the threats were overt, with Trump announcing he’d begun to assemble the requisite political infrastructure. Given this precarious political predicament for Massie, who had previously lobbied for Trump’s endorsement in 2024, and endorsed Trump himself that year, he now needed to devise an audacious strategy to withstand the coming Trump-backed onslaught. Which would be no small feat, given Trump’s demonstrated ability to pick and choose GOP primary winners on a dime, with something like a 90% success rate, especially in Congressional races — a singular power Trump aggressively wields that is virtually without precedent in modern American history.

And so, with perfect timing, a five-alarm-fire Epstein Uproar drops right into Massie’s lap. You can’t dispute the political logic that led him to leap into the “Epstein Files” sinkpit. There’s no question it has exponentially expanded his national profile — and even made him one of the most high-profile politicians in the entire country. Because it was going to take something extraordinary (in a literal sense) for Massie to have any chance of overcoming the mad Trump vendetta. And it may even work! Massie constantly solicits donations on the basis of his wild Epstein quest, and sure enough, the online contributions have flowed steadily in. It may not rival the billionaire largesse of his opponent, but it’s enough to at least stay competitive. And all other things being equal, there is something laudable about being “beholden” to a pool of small donors, rather than a narrow cabal of obscenely rich “elites” whose entire political project revolves around a certain Middle Eastern client state. If Massie does manage to fend off the primary challenge tomorrow, it will be one of the most impressive electoral feats in recent times.

But the soundness of the political logic Massie has employed does nothing to negate his substantive free-fall into algorithmic oblivion. Which is a virtual inevitability whenever anybody decides to integrate “Epstein Maximalism” into their public persona. On the same dopey podcast where he acknowledged having little or no pre-existing knowledge of the issue before roughly ten months ago, Massie explained his belief that Epstein is alive — today — because with the help of a shadowy intel cabal, our friend Jeffrey mysteriously “disappeared” from the federal jail facility, and “we can’t find him.” How did Massie come up with this fascinating theory? He admits to basically outsourcing it to his social media followers, having posted a poll on X in February 2026 asking what people really think happened to Epstein — and a solid plurality voted for “He is still alive.” So that’s become Massie’s take, too. The most high-profile champion of Epstein “accountability” in Congress just parrots whatever lunacy floats across his social media feed. Despite the subject-matter expertise one might have thought he’d garnered after so many months as foremost Epstein authority. Because he apparently never got a chance to look through the autopsy photos of Epstein’s dead body, found in the Epstein Files he loves preaching about, to at least clarify how they are consistent with the “still alive” theory he spins out on podcasts.

NOTE: While the volume of ads dumped into Massie’s primary race is insane, outside groups supporting Massie have also gotten rather nasty. Whatever “edgy” and “based” political pro thought it was a genius move to plaster an LGBT flag-colored “Star of David” on a pro-Massie ad was going out of their way to stupidly troll and outrage-farm. Whatever instinct gave rise to this is probably closely related to whatever brain-disease resulted in Massie’s “Money Bomb” fundraiser showcasing the likes of Dave Smith rambling about how we might finally “crack the code” — of pizza and grape soda in the Epstein Files — by electing lots of mini Massies, to which Massie himself responded with a brag that he had personally “uncovered the pedophiles.” Once again, he avoided getting into further detail about which “pedophiles” he claims to have triumphantly uncovered.

On a personal note, I can’t help but point out that after I was ejected from the “Epstein Survivors” press conference Massie co-organized last year, at the direction of Marjorie Taylor Greene and a mob of angry “survivors,” for the crime of asking a question they didn’t like about the chronic recantations of Virginia Roberts Giuffre — who was otherwise being declared an “American Hero” that day for her heroic Epstein victimhood — Massie told me he thought I was “really rude.” I asked him to please elaborate on what he meant, and he kind of just mumbled a non-answer and drifted off. This, after I’d been threatened with arrest for asking a question at a press conference to which I’d been invited by the staff of Ro Khanna! It was sadly emblematic of Massie’s recent devolution into logically-garbled foolishness — a far cry from the version of him I had, until very recently, regarded as among the few examples of laudable Congressional service. Massie has even adopted the tedious sloganeering jargon of “Believing Survivors” and so forth — like he’s suddenly some big hero for “women.” He routinely praises the three female Republican colleagues who joined him in signing the discharge petition for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and accusatorially wonders why his male Republican colleagues refused to follow suit. As if everyone should strive to emulate the sterling political acumen of Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, and Marge Greene.

Would I be thrilled if Massie loses tomorrow? No — the obscene sleaze-fest marshaled against him, and the risible person selected by Trump to take his place, make that impossible. But should he be cheered onto victory, after his nonstop clown-show antics over the past ten months? Also, emphatically, no. Sometimes everyone involved deserves to be tainted with the stench of defeat.

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Anyway, after the panel, I saw Bret Weinstein sulking around at something called the “Speakers Lounge,” and we had a few sporadic followup chats. He had already tweeted that my behavior on the panel was “pretty despicable,” and accused me of “ambushing” him. He also suggested that I had a hand in orchestrating the panel on false pretenses. I replied that I had simply been invited to attend the Web Summit, and was asked for suggestions on what might make for an interesting panel. So yeah, among my suggestions was something along the lines of, “Should we abolish all podcasts?” I’d been solicited to suggest topics with media or political relevance; obviously I wasn’t being brought there to discuss “tech,” AI, or blockchain. The guy organizing the conference did in fact take one of my suggestions, and formulated a panel premise on that basis. Or at least that’s my understanding of the unremarkable sequence of events. I had no notion that Bret Weinstein would be on the resulting panel. I honestly had little notion of what I would even be doing, or what the Web Summit even was — I’d just never been to Vancouver before, and kinda wanted to visit regardless, so this was as good an excuse as any. Turns out fellas like Aaron Mate (a Vancouver native) were also present, along with various other media types whom it would also not be 100% intuitive might get invited to such an event: Ryan Grim, Chris Hedges, Cenk Uygur, Curtis “Moldbug” Yarvin, Lauren Southern, Nate Fischer, Julius Krein, Eoin Higgins, among others. So, it was worth making the trek. But beyond that, I had no involvement in orchestrating the panel, despite Bret predictably spinning a theory that I had elaborately conspired with the organizers to “sandbag” him.

I want to correct one error I made on the panel. (See, I actually correct stuff where necessary). I incorrectly referred to the March 16, 2026 podcast Bret appeared on as the “Chris Jones Show,” when in actuality it was the “Danny Jones Show.” I regret the error. I’m not sure why I jotted down “Chris” rather than “Danny” in my notes, but I did, and have no problem admitting this error! Here is the exchange I was referring to, at 27:57:

DANNY JONES: And you know, that was also around the time of the George Floyd riots, and all that stuff, where people were burning cities down, and destroying everything in the streets, over one person being murdered. And I can’t help but wonder why we don’t see anything like this, now that this Epstein stuff has come out. When there’s evidence of people eating children, and molesting and trafficking children.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, it’s unfathomable. Because the implications -- it’s not just that you had this group of monsters apparently engaged in all of this unthinkably evil behavior. But the relationship to power is so clear in the so-called Epstein Files that the question is, you know, we have monsters near power. That’s extremely dangerous.

Bret and Danny then went on to expound a whole master-theory of Pedo Protecting Power on the basis of this totally batshit premise — that the “Epstein Files” had conclusively revealed evidence that scores of children were “eaten” by Epstein and his “monstrous” associates.

Bret apparently thought that my citing this extremely recent example of his podcast oeuvre was a despicably unfair “ambush,” even though it seemed perfectly sensible that if I was going to be on a panel about how we should “abolish podcasts,” I would be well-advised to cite a couple of concrete examples of the larger critique I was making. Which, to be clear, is not that we should literally “abolish all podcasts.” That’s impossible, obviously, and podcasts themselves are a neutral medium. What I am arguing is that we should somehow dislodge the current podcast-dominant online media ecosystem, which has become an engine of lucrative hysteria-fomenting, with zero factual standards, and zero repercussions (socially, reputationally, etc.) for peddling a constant slew of garbage. Because of this warped incentive structure, garbage-peddling is actually rewarded with increased revenue, stature, and political influence. Hence, Bret going on a podcast and doing something as insane as affirming that children have been cannibalized, before an audience of millions, and then facing zero consequence for this whatsoever, is a perfect example of what I’m critiquing when I semi-facetiously proclaim that we should “abolish all podcasts.”

Bear in mind, Bret has also espoused versions of his Epstein master-thesis on the #2 “News” podcast in the United States, the Tucker Carlson program. It was on the March 11, 2026 edition of that illustrious program that Bret spun out a postulation that Trump went to war with Iran because a “hidden power structure” coerced him into doing so, and of course this “hidden power structure” somehow intermingles with Epstein. Bret is so deeply disturbed by Trump attacking Iran — something he never could’ve fathomed Trump possibly doing, back when Bret was holding pro-Trump campaign rallies in 2024 — that he now feels he’s obliged to search for the real truth of how this eventuality could’ve possibly happened. And he’s landed on a hidden Epstein power structure being the real reason. Excerpt from the Tucker podcast:

BRET WEINSTEIN: The reason that the Epstein phenomenon, whatever it was, is so important, is that it suggests a hidden power structure that was there for leverage. It is unfortunate that in the edit that we have been shown, we don’t have conclusive evidence of who, what they were after, or even how the leverage worked. All we can see is strong evidence that there was something. Logically it is implied that it was connected to intelligence services. Ours, likely Israel’s, who knows who else. When you see your government, your president functioning in ways that do not add up, it’s like watching a planet behave oddly because of the gravity of some object you haven’t found yet. There’s the implication that there’s something with power in this system that is undeclared, as far as we know it is unnamed, and the central question is what is it, how does it work, and how much effect is it having on what we do.

Bret has similarly argued (on various podcasts) that the “Epstein Phenomenon,” as he oddly calls it, represents “the most fundamental question in the democratic republic that is the United States.”

But… he thinks it makes me a contemptibly “bad person” to “ambush” him by bringing up these remarks — on a panel expressly devoted to the insanities of the current podcast media environment? OK, lol.

Anyway, I have more to say about the “Web Summit,” and the various hilarities that it spawned on account of my humble presence there, but I gotta go take a ferry. I figured I would spend at least a day viewing some of the “sights” to be seen in Vancouver while I am inexplicably here.

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Often it will be suggested that to express misgivings about the defamatory maelstrom of Epstein hysteria, one must be suspiciously concerned with the reputational interests of “powerful elites.” Because even if certain “elites” might get wrongly impugned as child-sex criminals from time to time — what’s the big deal? They have plenty of power, money, and connections to comfortably withstand this minor inconvenience. So why waste one’s breath lamenting their woes, which they probably deserved in some deeper sense anyway? After all, members of the so-called “Epstein Class” can be assumed “spiritually” guilty of something really bad, even if the specifics of a particular child-sex crime allegation might not be totally accurate. If you find yourself overly bothered by this besmirchment of “elites,” you must have some suspiciously warped priorities.

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First off, let’s set aside how insane it is to rationalize a tornado of unrelenting slime, spewing forth noxious falsities in every direction, so long as those on the receiving end of the splatter can be deemed sufficiently “powerful.” Such a logic could only be condoned if one has decided to repudiate the very aspiration of truth-seeking, and no longer even pretends to value fidelity to facts. If you’ve got some grievance with a particular “elite,” or even with some under-defined group of “elites,” you are perfectly entitled to enumerate those grievances however you see fit. But if your grievances are so well-founded, why would you be reduced to just making stuff up? Why would you go out of your way to tolerate a tsunami of pure sleaze? Shouldn’t there be tons of legitimate material available for you to predicate a reality-based critique on, aimed at whatever elite(s) you claim to most revile? Well, evidently not, if you’ve set about rationalizing the massive defamation-tornado — perhaps because you find the fallout “funny,” or socially/politically pleasing in some way, per whatever half-baked theory you’ve cobbled together. If that’s the case, you’ve shown you have no problem with the lunatic second and third-order effects, namely: infesting the public mind with loads of demented garbage, thereby ensuring any critique of “elites” that might gain popular traction will be mired in crass delusions, and therefore not much of a reasoned critique at all.

For now, though, let’s leave aside the question of whether or not we should care about the capricious reputational damage inflicted on “elites” at the hands of Epstein mania. That’s a question easily bracketed at the moment. Because what seldom gets anything close to enough emphasis is that the collateral damage extends far beyond the opulently well-monied, or politically well-connected. Plenty of “normal” people have found themselves slimed with incendiary filth, and with little recourse at their disposal. The four random men who were falsely implicated in child sex crimes by Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna — including an auto mechanic and an IT technician — have still yet to receive so much as a piddling apology from the two Congressmen most responsible for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and the resulting mass production of “Epstein Files” by the DOJ. A great many more “non-elites” could be cited as among those similarly pelted with slime on account of some tenuous Epstein “connection” that some nutbag internet sleuth tried to invent.

Which brings us back to Kristy Makuta and the monumental “Jane Doe” fraud — chronicled by me in Part One — that on its own could easily rank as one of the craziest cons in all of Epstein lore. Crazy enough that lawyer Jeanne Christensen of the extortionist Wigdor firm — who formerly represented Kristy before the fraud was conclusively exposed — had zero compunction about asserting, to take just one creepy example, that Kristy “had sex with Larry Summers” — as though this had been unassailably confirmed after exhaustive rounds of due diligence. In reality, no such due diligence was performed at all. If anything, the opposite. To somehow make matters impossibly worse (this story always manages to get worse), Christensen was so shameless as to make her assertion not in some casual off-hand chat, but in written communications she proactively transmitted to federal prosecutors, with the unsubtle objective of coaxing the Feds to bring criminal charges, on the supposed strength of evidence that was later found, in an April 23, 2026 ruling by Judge Jessica Clarke, to have been brazenly faked. This necessitated the imposition of severe sanctions against Jeanne Christensen individually, as well as her entire rotten Wigdor law firm, and even Kristy Makuta herself, aka “Jane Doe,” given her present capacity as a pro se plaintiff. But there should never have needed to be a belated court judgment for anyone anchored in minimal sanity to recognize that Kristy’s claims, and the evidence supposedly proffered to substantiate them — phony sonogram images, mocked-up decades-old “diaries” — were a whirlwind of unvarnished lunacy. That should’ve been painfully obvious from the very first second, at least if one was not blinkered by such deliriums as “trauma-informed” ideology, or the insatiable lust for extracting gargantuan financial payouts.

The wholesale abolition of critical discernment is what makes the Kristy episode all the more remarkable, and indeed disturbing. Because it’s one thing to castigate Larry Summers; he’s been through the ringer already on Epstein stuff. You can see why ideologically-captured lawyers and prosecutors might’ve been inclined to blithely accept the premise, however unfounded, that Summers had committed grave child sex crimes, since he did in fact have a well-documented relationship with Epstein, and would also himself qualify as an “elite.” But here’s where it gets much sicker: Christensen and her law enforcement colleagues were just as willing to malign a bunch of consummately “normal” people, with zero public profile or stature whatsoever, as perpetrators of the most heinous child-sex villainy imaginable, based on the very same crackpot evidence that should’ve been discounted by any sane observer in roughly two seconds. Those consequently slimed include Kristy’s former cheerleading/dance coach, her biological parents, her late grandfather, and other “non-elites” who unwittingly got thrown into the steaming pile of slime.

Thanks to the confabulatory tales confected by Kristy, in concert with her so-called “adoptive mother,” Amy Duffey, and her now-sanctioned lawyer, Jeanne Christensen, a random woman who once ran a cheerleading/dance studio for high school-age girls in Northern Virginia has now been traduced as someone who brutishly “groomed” and “sex trafficked” a helpless autistic child with a rare form of Down Syndrome. Christensen outrageously told federal prosecutors that this unsuspecting woman “forced [Kristy] to perform sexual acts with adult men since she was very young,” and from there it was only a short step to force her into the hellish pedophile captivity of Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, Leon Black, and about two dozen other culprits. Worse yet, Christensen claims to have eventually pried out of Kristy, after many intense lawyer-client recovered memory sessions, the revelation that her dance instructor/cheerleading coach “handed [Kristy] off to Maxwell and Epstein” at the direction of Kristy’s biological mother.

I won’t name the dance coach here, but for the record, she is completely exposed in the DOJ’s repository of “Epstein Files” — full name, date of birth, phone number, residential address, name of partner/spouse, employment history, maiden name, etc. And consequently, her info is splashed all over the internet for the rest of time as somebody state and federal law enforcement suspected of the most grotesque child sex crimes. Kind of interesting, isn’t it, who does or does not receive the courtesy of generous redactions in these “files,” so as to shield their “identifying information” from the glare of frothing online hordes? Because this random woman certainly did not receive any such courtesy, despite by all accounts being a totally innocent “victim” of what amounts to a deranged, systematic fraud — perpetrated with the connivance of government agents who are supposed to exercise bare-minimum discretion with the awesome powers they’ve been granted to destroy people’s lives, whether by throwing them in prison or nuking their reputations. Instead, this confirmed female victim has been paraded for all to see, while fraudulent “Epstein Survivors” such as Kristy continue to enjoy indefinite anonymization, per edicts from the DOJ, Congress, the media, and the courts. Even prosecutors involved in the absurd hustle are mostly redacted in their humiliating email exchanges, though I was able to identify some using my expert computer skills. Which does not negate the underlying fallacy of the redaction criteria: that anyone who can claim Epstein-related “victimization” is shielded from public scrutiny forevermore, lest they be “re-victimized” — and even if their “victimhood” is judicially ruled to have been based on a slew of ridiculous fabrications. Meanwhile, “normal” people like this dance instructor, who were appallingly maligned along the way, possibly unbeknownst to them, are freely un-redacted and now available for every crank on the internet to “investigate.”

Let’s recall the “evidence” we’re talking about here:

The above “diary” is the slam-dunk evidence that lawyer Jeanne Christensen was so eager to inform federal prosecutors she had successfully “decoded,” and was therefore in a position to report Kristy’s biological mother for sadistically orchestrating her own daughter’s brutal rape, because according to these “decoded” messages, the mother and father were both knowingly in the vicinity of Epstein’s NYC townhouse when Kristy was delivered to Leon Black for sex-servitude, at which time Black psychotically bit off chunks of Kristy’s genitalia and rammed sex-toy devices into both her vagina and anus — splattering blood across the carpet in Epstein’s chamber. Again, this was said to have occurred while Kristy’s parents waited nearby, sneering with delight at the gruesome scene, because they were about to get paid for “trafficking” their own daughter for a night of crazed child-sex bondage.

Christensen told prosecutors that after Kristy became upset about Leon Black viciously raping her, she requested to see a doctor, but “the reaction from Epstein, Maxwell and her parents” — all supposedly working in collusion — “was one of anger,” not toward the rapist, but toward Kristy. She was thus reprimanded for ruining her parents’ pleasant weekend jaunt to NYC, because apparently Epstein stepped in after the bloody climax and decided the Makuta parents would no longer receive the cash they’d been promised for “trafficking” Kristy to Leon. So after she was brutally raped with their knowledge and approval, Kristy’s parents “drove her from NYC back to Woodbridge Va.” Which on top of making them out to be the most vile parents on the planet, also straightforwardly implicates them in a child-sex trafficking conspiracy, for which they could conceivably be prosecuted. Which is of particular relevance here, as again, Christensen was passing along this information to federal prosecutors.

On July 21, 2023 — surely by happenstance, four days before Kristy’s original Leon Black lawsuit was filed — Christensen sent off an indignant late-night email to the same set of federal prosecutors, opining how “outrageous” it was that “criminal charges have not been brought” against Leon Black. By necessary extension, the many claimed co-conspirators responsible for tormenting Kristy would also have to be charged — all on the strength of evidence produced by Kristy, which was then dispatched to federal prosecutors by Christensen, who attested to its clear-cut reliability. This means Kristy’s own parents, not to mention her former cheerleading/dance instructor, should’ve been headed to prison right alongside Leon Black, at least if Christensen had her way, as she had alerted prosecutors to this sprawling cross-section of “non-elite” persons who once conspired to “groom,” physically assault, and “traffic” Kristy, thrusting her into the unthinkable sex-torture vortex of Epstein, Maxwell, Black, et al.

And it was all 100% made up!

Judge Jessica Clarke’s ruling on April 23 shows that Christensen kept up the ruse for as long as possible, however:

In an internal memorandum dated December 11, 2023, Ms. Christensen described how she had learned—two weeks earlier—that Plaintiff’s biological mother first introduced Plaintiff to Ghislaine Maxwell in Clearwater, Florida. Id. at 1–2. Plaintiff also testified multiple times at the March 2024 JPMC Hearing that she first met Ghislaine Maxwell in Clearwater, Florida. March Hearing at 10:3–25, 73:3–7.

The December 11, 2023 memorandum also reflects Ms. Christensen’s contemporaneous impression that Plaintiff’s biological mother knew about and helped strategize how to traffic Plaintiff. ECF No. 233-5 at 2–3. At the March 2024 JPMC hearing, Ms. Christensen told Judge Rakoff that Plaintiff’s biological parents “play[ed] important roles in trafficking [Plaintiff] to Jeffrey Epstein.” March Hearing at 6:4–6. And in June 2024, Ms. Christensen stated on the record in the JPMC Action: “I am saying that [Plaintiff’s] biological mother 100 percent is the person who, in the very first instance, sent her to Ghislaine Maxwell, and then had been telling her about this very important wealthy man.” June Conference at 17:14–17. “So, yes, I am saying that her mother was intimately involved.”

Here is Christensen sending copies of the fraudulent “journals” created by Kristy, supposedly documenting the fake child sex torture, as email attachments to her contacts in the US Attorney’s Office:

Apparently, this is the type of conduct that earned Jeanne Christensen prestigious awards in the legal industry, recognizing her “Elite Women” achievements in both 2024 and 2025. One can only hope that the awards will keep coming her way in 2026, notwithstanding the recent judicial finding that she “repeatedly lied” to the Court, and evinced flippant non-concern about ensuring her submissions were factually correct.

I will note that Kristy’s mother appears to be a staunch Trump supporter, as indicated by her various social media pages. Whether this has anything to do with the mother being hallucinated into chief trafficking villain per the narrative invented by Kristy, Amy, and Christensen is difficult to say, given the continued concealment of so much information in this case, but it’s at least a plausible hypothesis that warrants further investigation.

What makes the whole thing even more mind-blowing is the unwavering credulity with which federal and state prosecutors responded to this onslaught of extortionist fantasies: not by ignoring or rebuking Christensen, but springing instantly into action; within nine minutes of receiving the Christensen email about how “outrageous” it was that nobody had yet been prosecuted, one of the prosecutors forwarded along Christensen’s defamatory missive to a colleague — at 10:04pm on a Friday night! — asking if anyone had been able to “circle back with Jeanne.” Then by the following Monday morning, the colleague confirmed that he/she would indeed “circle back directly to Jeanne,” and “touch base” on how to go about further squandering taxpayer resources on tacitly legitimating this slimeball con.

The prosecutors depicted in these “files” almost come across as impossibly gullible, and therefore dumb — but the thing is, they are not dumb. They are quite intelligent. They should be understood as shrewdly advancing a behind-the-scenes legal and political strategy that has proven astoundingly effective — simply look at how the Epstein furor now registers in the public arena, amongst members of Congress, journalists, and countless others. Prosecutors associated with “Special Victims Units” tasked with handling these matters seem disproportionately comprised of women, and perhaps most pertinently, women who have clearly calculated that their paramount ethical duty is to instantly project steadfast, credulous acceptance of all claims involving sexual abuse, with the label of “victim” always being preemptively ascribed. “Epstein” was merely one high-profile forum for them to showcase the ideological constructs they’d been marinating in, with their elaborate “trauma-informed” dogma and new, infinitely elastic conceptions of “trafficking.”

For all the talk about the supreme imperative of “transparency,” these DOJ emails mostly redact the identities of prosecutors who dealt with the shambolic Kristy situation. So we don’t have a complete picture of who all it was that relayed in June 2023 — utterly astonishingly — that they “do not doubt” the veracity of Kristy’s extravagant tales. We do know the principal non-doubter was someone with the initials “AW,” from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, who conveyed her non-doubt to federal colleagues, as memorialized in a subsequent memo, composed about a month before Christensen filed the first iteration of Kristy’s lawsuit against Leon Black, as she was clearly angling for some prosecutorial heft to add to the complaint. Thankfully, “AW” can be identified as Alissa Wimmer — more on her to follow — but for the most part, prosecutors’ names are arbitrarily redacted throughout the “Epstein Files,” according to no discernible provision in the Epstein Files Transparency Act authorizing this, and even though the EFTA bars redacting material to spare public officials from “embarrassment.” Because one thing of which there can be truly “no doubt” is how humiliating this whole sordid episode is, and how nightmarish it is to contemplate such absolute dimwits wielding the power to throw people in prison on behalf of the state.

That said, the main no-doubter of Kristy, Alissa Wimmer, was an Assistant District Attorney then working under Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, until she moved to more lucrative pastures in July 2024. She is now a “Regional Public Safety Liaison at Uber.” (Unsurprisingly, she has not responded to my emails seeking comment.)

She’s the one who is recorded as having communicated to federal prosecutors in the SDNY that after assessing Kristy’s claims, she and her DANY colleagues “do not doubt her allegations” against Epstein and Leon Black, at minimum, and they had also come to “believe she was abused” by Jes Staley, a former JP Morgan executive known to have once been an Epstein associate. So non-existent was her doubt that she came to these conclusions despite having admittedly “not found any independent corroboration” for Kristy’s wild claims. This evidently had zero impact on their credibility assessment. Frickin’ incredible.

The June 28, 2023 memo in which these sterling law enforcement professionals express zero doubt in Kristy’s veracity was passed duly up the chain, first by an Assistant US Attorney, name redacted, and then to a Special Agent at the FBI New York Field Office, name also redacted — the two Feds then make an appointment to meet and discuss this undoubted information. The FBI agent summoned is described in an email signature as some sort of specialist in “Child Exploitation/Human Trafficking,” which is certainly a window into the prevailing mindset within that subset of the modern law enforcement profession. Kristy is presented by these federal officials not as someone who made a bunch of outlandish claims with zero corroboration, but as a “victim who recently came to our attention with connections to the Epstein/Maxwell case.” Any notion that Kristy might be best described at this preliminary juncture at least as an “alleged” victim, or a purported victim — or choose your bare-minimum qualifier — was apparently not something that occurred to these seasoned professionals, who by 2023/2024 had clearly embraced a professional code whereby truth-value would be pre-assigned to any claims of Epstein-related victimhood, no matter how “far-fetched,” as Judge Clarke eventually characterized Kristy’s story by 2026.

So now, Alissa Wimmer works in a senior role at Uber. That’s the high-salary reward a taxpayer-funded prosecutor received for displaying such catastrophically poor judgment that she personally met with Kristy, as well as her purported “adoptive mother” Amy Duffey, and was totally confident to tell federal prosecutors in February 2023 that Kristy had been factually established as someone who was “trafficked by Maxwell and Epstein,” and had bravely “come forward and alleged sexual abuse by Leon Black.” State and federal collaboration on the matter continued for months, with a June 2023 memo recording that Wimmer & colleagues had conveyed that “the victim and her mother would be ok with sharing more information with us” — “us” being the Feds — as the NY District Attorney’s Office “find her credible,” despite “very little corroboration,” and “no outcry witnesses until years later.” With the “outcry” being to the “adoptive mother.” How much information did these prosecutors have on file about the nature of this supposed “adoptive mother” arrangement? You know, the “adoptive mother” being Amy Duffey, who is around nine years older than Kristy, and met her as a “disability” administrator of some sort at George Mason University?

Here is Wimmer conducting an educational session earlier this year with law enforcement personnel in Hudson County, NJ:

She also testifies in court, explaining in a December 2025 trial that her job is to “assist law enforcement” on matters with some nexus to the Uber platform:

Over the course of their DANY investigation, Wimmer also incredibly uncovered “other allegations of sexual abuse unrelated to JE/GM,” including “sexual abuse from priest and a separate kidnapping,” but no followup on these bombshells is apparent. However, Wimmer and friends were quite interested in the Feds taking the lead on going after Kristy’s biological mother and father, since it is noted that they “drove [Kristy] over state lines,” placing them squarely in a federal purview for potential “trafficking” charges.

So there’s just a small selection of thoroughly “non-elite” individuals whom this Kristy-backing lawyer cabal were happy to slander with the most inflammatory slime, nuke their reputation, lobby for their imprisonment, and cast as uniquely malevolent sickos, even by the standards other alleged Epstein “associates,” because they were pegged as having been willing to sacrifice their own daughter for the perverse sexual gratification of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Leon Black, and others. And it was all… simply made up! Outright fabricated. As if this couldn’t get any worse, the now-sanctioned lawyer Jeanne Christensen would even progressively sprinkle in some additional sleazy details, telling her federal interlocutors that Kristy’s sister was also sexually abused — the same sister whom Kristy later accused in a judicial proceeding of physically assaulting her — and oh by the way, according to Christensen, the sisters’ paternal grandfather was also “in on it.” That’s the exact wording Christensen uses in her communications with federal law enforcement: Their long-deceased grandfather was “in on it.”

One of the outstanding mysteries of this whole fiasco is whether Amy Duffey, the “adoptive mother” who is often described as Kristy’s trusted “intermediary,” was ever made aware that in a July 8, 2024 hearing before Judge Jed Rakoff, Kristy — apparently not accompanied by Amy on this particular occasion — alleged that she was being abused by her so-called “adoptive father,” aka Amy’s husband, Bruce Marco. According to Kristy, as a woman in her late 30s, she was forbidden by Bruce “to drive, have a job, have friends, leave the house, or consume media without prior approval.” And on top of that, Bruce also sexually assaulted her. One can’t help but wonder what the Bruce/Amy marital dynamic is like — not to mention the larger dynamics of their purported household, since these people are all said to be living under the same roof together. (Bruce and Amy have still not returned any of my repeated messages.) Here’s a snapshot of Amy, for posterity:

Kristy appeared under the impression that her testimony before Judge Rakoff at the July 2024 evidentiary hearing in which she alleged “abuse” and sexual assault by Amy’s husband — whose surname “Marco” she has otherwise assumed in different versions of her alias — would be kept permanently secret, apparently not expecting that Judge Clarke would ultimately invoke her own discretion to quote from sealed excerpts. In recent pro se filings, Kristy has indicated that her representations in the JP Morgan proceedings overseen by Rakoff “were made under explicit assurances of confidentiality,” and that removing this protection after the fact “would violate the very principle of trust upon which survivor participation in legal processes depends.” Can someone please ask Amy Duffey about Kristy Makuta accusing her husband of sex crimes? Again, they won’t answer my calls…

In one email exchange, an Assistant US Attorney states, based on a discussion with Alissa Wimmer of the Manhattan DA’s office, that Kristy “was adopted by supportive family, mother is always there for interviews and she serves as liaison for meetings.” Apparently nothing about this curious adult “adoptive” arrangement was perceived as noteworthy enough to warrant the notation of any “red flags.”

Nor did it occur to the Guardian, in a curiously-timed May 6 article, that the “adoptive” arrangement might be cause for further scrutiny:

In late October 2023, Doe was interviewed by the claims administrator in the JPMorgan case. She later found out she was being allocated $2.5m.

It was a moment of elation for Doe, her adoptive mother told the Guardian, because it was the first time she felt that her trauma was being recognized.

Don’t you think Guardian readers might’ve been interested to learn some additional context about this “adoptive mother” dynamic, given that Amy only “adopted” Kristy approximately four years ago, thanks to a quirk in Virginia state law, when Kristy was an adult in her late 30s? Because when most people hear the term “adoptive mother,” they’re probably not even cognizant that “adult adoption” of this kind is a “thing,” and would surely assume that Kristy had been “adopted” as a vulnerable child. Which must be a deliberate omission of context. Because you don’t have to be a hard-nosed detective, or even especially cynical (like me), to infer that what’s really going on here is that Kristy and Amy are co-contrivers of some bizarre long-term plot, about which entire psychology textbooks could be written, and salacious Netflix “true crime” specials produced. (I haven’t received any reply to a list of questions I sent to Guardian editor Betsy Reed.)

Maybe the most important takeaway from the Kristy fraud is not so much about Kristy herself, but the structural fraud it indicates is rife in the wider universe of Epstein-related “settlement” vehicles. Because it’s exactly these settlement vehicles which have generated such grossly inflated estimates of “Epstein victims” — coloring public perceptions of the Epstein affair as constituting a vast trail of unpunished pedophilia crime. Recall that one of the genuine revelations from the “Epstein Files” earlier this year was that the figure of “over 1,000 victims” constantly cited by journalists and politicians, after making its debut in the notorious July 2025 FBI/DOJ memo that set off the larger Epstein meltdown, was completely phony, and based on cooked up statistical chicanery. The figure of those “harmed” by Epstein somehow included “family members” of purported Epstein “victims.” Uncles? Cousins? Who knows. Not to mention, most of these purported “victims” were adults at the time of their claimed victimization, despite (as usual) the eye-popping figure being cited to encapsulate the unthinkable scope of pedophilic sex criminality.

This is not a “past tense” issue, either. At least two additional settlement vehicles are currently in progress to compensate another indeterminate expanse of “Epstein Survivors” — one from Bank of America, as of March 27, 2026, in the amount of $72.5 million, and another from the Epstein Estate, as of February 19, 2026, in the amount of $35 million, even though class-action claims against the estate were supposed to have been resolved with finality years ago, through the establishment of the original Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program in 2020, which stopped taking new claimants in 2021. But that didn’t stop David Boies, Bradley Edwards, and colleagues enjoying their 30% “legal fees” from going back to the Gravy Train in 2024 and demanding yet another class action settlement against the estate, by suing its executors, Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn. By the time “Epstein Files” mania was in full-bloom again in early 2026, their latest litigation gambit paid off.

Sigrid McCawley, the lawyer who previously served as an intimate legal companion for Virginia Roberts Giuffre — not too dissimilar from the marginally-less-plausible role abortively played by Jeanne Christensen with Kristy — claimed that the “numerosity” requirement was satisfied for this new round of class-action settlements by citing the phony figure of “over 1,000” victims. As such, Sigrid maintained, “there remains hundreds of class members with valid claims” entitled to huge tax-free cash payouts.

In their Bank of America action, Boies and Edwards initially asserted that “thousands” of Epstein victims were still waiting to be discovered. I spoke to both Boies and Edwards at the April 2, 2026 settlement hearing at the Manhattan federal courthouse. Even though news of this settlement agreement was breathlessly reported throughout the media as further supporting the notion that a massive pedophile crime spree had gone shamefully unpunished, and finally another major financial institution would be held “accountable,” Boies candidly conceded to me that “based on prior cases, you could say that certainly, this time, the majority were over the age of 18.” That is, the vast majority of females in line for life-changing Bank of America money would have been adults at the time of their claimed victimization. Which must be true, because the period covered by the BoA settlement is June 30, 2008 (date of Epstein’s original guilty plea in Florida) to July 6, 2019 (date of Epstein’s federal arrest). Any female who can self-report as having been “harmed” by Epstein’s purported “sex trafficking venture” during this period is eligible for funds, on the logic that BoA ought to have blocked Epstein from banking services starting on the date he was convicted of state-level prostitution offenses. But based on all available evidence, anyone “abused” or “trafficked” during this period would have to have been adults, because Epstein has still never even been accused of any illicit sexual contact with any person below age 18 from 2005 onwards — including in the mountains of hyper-dramatized civil litigation, nevermind any actual criminal charges. So there’s another payout spigot opened up for women who can claim years after the fact that they were “trafficked,” as adults, under the resolutely confidential provisions of the court-approved settlement protocol.

As to the new Epstein Estate settlement mechanism, this one somehow dates back to 1995, so we’re now talking about 30+ year old claims that can potentially be submitted, with no adverse consequences for the claimant should anything be exaggerated or even outright falsified. And if you’re looking for a few bucks, act fast, because the truncated deadline (strangely) happens to be today, May 12, 2026, at 11:59pm EST.

The claims administrator for both funds? Simone Lelchuk. The same person who initially approved a whopping $2.5 million payout to Kristy!

Recall: Kristy had submitted fake evidence in the JP Morgan action, including the falsified sonogram images purporting to depict fetuses she was purportedly impregnated with by Epstein, which were then snatched right out of her uterus and in one case, flushed down a toilet. Even her former lawyers at Wigdor had to eventually admit they had no choice but to “disavow” those images, amid incontrovertible proof of fraud, and then withdraw their representation of her. But not before the falsified evidence was duly accepted by Claims Administrator Simone Lelchuk to award Kristy a $2.5 million jackpot. The lucrative scheme was only interrupted because Leon Black’s lawyers, embroiled in litigation brought by Kristy and Wigdor, caught wind of the payment and notified Judge Rakoff, who was overseeing the JP Morgan settlement, and is likewise now overseeing the Bank of America settlement. Rakoff accordingly said he had come to harbor “serious doubts about [Kristy’s] credibility” after being compelled to hold a series of evidentiary hearings with her — but he apparently “never made particularized factual findings on the record regarding [Kristy’s] allegations,” because sure enough, in swooped Simone Lelchuk to broker a side-deal “stipulation,” whereby Kristy was awarded a reduced amount of $200,000. Rakoff inexplicably approved this “stipulated” payment on August 21, 2024 — without having first issued the “detailed opinion” he apparently had in the works, which was to outline why he’d felt obliged to intervene and deny Kristy’s claim outright.

At the April 2 hearing I attended, Rakoff said he had every confidence in re-appointing Simone Lelchuk to handle the Bank of America payouts, because she has “performed extremely well in prior settlements.” Huh????? For his part, Rakoff commented that while “victims of Epstein’s monstrous acts can never be fully compensated,” they are surely “entitled to just compensation” — an insight into the rigor with which Judge Rakoff evidently feels it’s appropriate to evaluate any “victimhood” claims. Part of the new Bank of America claimant fishing expedition will entail publishing solicitation notices in USA Today, People magazine, and Gazeta Wyborcza, a Polish newspaper (?????) as well as devising a customized social media campaign to locate additional “victims.” In other words, a complete free-for-all, with every incentive for the lawyers to scour the deepest recesses of the potential claimant pool, including an expedition to Eastern Europe, in order to justify their 30% cut off the top-end.

For the new version of the Epstein Estate class-action settlement, submission materials are notably being made available in Russian and French, as well as English — so who the hell knows what this new constellation of “survivors” could consist of. Simone Lelchuk has stressed that her goal, above all, is to avoid “re-victimizing” the purported victims, using the well-established “trauma-informed” methods she is so expertly well-versed in, which in practice means doing little or no corroborative inquiry whatsoever, as indicated by her easy approval of Kristy’s batshit claims.

Again, what is “problematic” about all this is not necessarily that Bank of America has gotten hoodwinked into forking over another $72.5 million to Epstein Survivors Inc., just as JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank compliantly did before them, because whatever, the feckless corporate lawyers for these giant banks are total squishes, and barely even try to contest any of it — so desperate are their clients not to be tagged as malicious “trafficking” enablers. What’s most “problematic” is that the reams of newfound “victims” are being lured out of the shadows with giant cash prizes, and as a consequence, the total number of “Epstein” victims will continue to astronomically inflate — fueling the clueless, hysterical Pedo Panic narrative that has gripped the US political system, and indeed much of the world, on the basis of virtually nothing that could conceivably be described as “pedophilia,” and also on the basis of victim-evaluation criteria that we now know, with demonstrable certitude, has encouraged (and rewarded) the commission of outright fraud. The practice in prior settlements has been that the David Boies and Bradley Edwards lawyer gaggle hires an “investigative team,” who then “locate and correspond with dozens of potential Class Members on social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and via email, to provide notice of the underlying action and information relating thereto.” That’s being replicated once again. I asked Bradley Edwards if he reckoned there would be any more non-adult “Epstein Survivors” found pursuant to the Bank of America settlement. He said: “In the United States, I don’t think so,” but “who knows what he [Epstein] was doing in France.” Meaning, they have now turned their gazes to foreign frontiers to keep the profitable mega-narrative going.

Beyond the structural fraud incentivized by these settlement vehicles, helpfully illuminated by the Kristy case, there are plenty more sleazy mechanics of the Epstein mass-hysteria racket also to be illuminated. Consider the mind-bending ordeal of Dana Chasin, a Democratic Party fundraiser and far-flung heir to the Rockefeller fortune, by way of his late step-mother Laura Rockefeller Chasin, a great-great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller. Recall the bogus “diaries” manufactured by Kristy were consequently published by the DOJ pursuant to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, having been entered in government repositories as a result of Jeanne Christensen feverishly forwarding copies to prosecutors, since she was claiming to have oracularly “decoded” the fake diaries, and was imploring the Feds to hurry up and bring indictments based on this fabricated evidence. Chasin is fleetingly mentioned in one of these “diaries” as having flown Kristy around in a “small prop plane” on multiple occasions, including to a grisly sex-torture session in NYC. If true, he was at minimum guilty of “sex trafficking” an autistic, cognitively-impaired teen.

**Speaking of Kristy’s pretensions to cognitive impairment, her diagnoses seem to consistently coincide with the discomfort of her legal activities. Because by July 2025, Kristy was claiming in pro se filings that she was in the midst of an “acute medical and psychological crisis,” and therefore incapable of participating in further proceedings “at this time.” She requested a stay while she recuperated, clarifying: “This is not a voluntary delay or tactical decision, but a documented state of cognitive and emotional collapse.” (Apparently her “cognitive and emotional collapse” had not prevented her from drafting another lengthy and reasonably well-written legal letter. If the letter was in fact drafted by her “adoptive mother” Amy Duffey, whose life appears commingled with Kristy’s in ways that even the most battle-hardened psychology pros would struggle to fully apprehend — that certainly ought to have been disclosed to the court, but instead, Kristy represents herself as the author. Nevermind that Kristy’s original complaint against Leon Black in 2023 claimed that “developmentally,” she is 12 years old, despite paradoxically possessing an “above average” IQ.)

But anyway, once Dana Chasin was reported in the media as having been “named” in the dastardly Epstein Files, his erstwhile Democratic fundraising recipients were of course lightning-quick to throw him right under the bus. Congresswoman Sharice Davids (D-KS) promptly atoned for having once received donations from Chasin by sending an equivalent amount, $4,250, to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which, by the way, is a Congressionally-authorized NGO, and probably not in desperate need of the symbolic chump change. Dan Osborn, an independent Senate candidate in Nebraska aligned with Democrats, also instantly canceled a forthcoming fundraiser that was to be hosted by Chasin. (The Nebraska Senate race has since been dominated by tit-for-tat Epstein attacks, with both Osborn and incumbent Republican senator Pete Ricketts accusing one another of being tarnished in some fashion by Epstein.)

Despite the bizarre ambiguities around Kristy’s cognitive status, and thus the questionable reliability of her self-generated evidence, Dana Chasin was identified to federal prosecutors not just as one of Kristy’s many depraved “traffickers,” but as an outright rapist, at least according to the mystical “decoding” heuristic Jeanne Christensen claimed she had divined, endowing her with the miraculous ability to translate Kristy’s faked “diaries.” Christensen claimed to have made the discovery that childlike words found in the “diaries” such as “yucky” and “gross” were in fact “code” for criminal sex acts; this was sufficient for Christensen to matter-of-factly inform federal prosecutors that Kristy “had sex with Larry Summers,” a claim located in the same entry where Kristy also purportedly describes the “yucky” and “gross” things that were done to her by Chasin.

After enduring a fierce backlash for appearing in this fabricated “Epstein File,” Chasin eventually hired lawyers to submit a motion in the Leon Black court docket: “Again, these claims are false,” the filing said. “Mr. Chasin has never owned or leased a plane, much less a ‘small prop plane,’ and he never met Jeffrey Epstein, nor communicated with Jeffrey Epstein, nor visited any of his properties.” According to the motion, the falsified diaries were no barrier for Chasin to be denounced and disowned in droves. “Employees at his organization quit, and he has been unable to hire replacements. Many of his personal and professional contacts stopped associating with him.” Chasin argued he was entitled to petition that certain materials in the pending Kristy matter be unsealed, as they would prove exonerating of him.

No one needs to have any pre-existing affinity for heirs to the Rockefeller fortune, or Chasin’s donor/operative activities in support of the Democratic Party, to find this episode shockingly mendacious and certifiably insane. If we’re still using the verb “canceled” anymore, here’s a guy who’s been “canceled” in the truest sense of the word, circa 2026, for stuff so manifestly divorced from reality that it would almost be comical if it wasn’t so dark. You don’t like the Rockefeller intergenerational wealth transfers, or you don’t like Chasin’s fundraising practices in particular? Sure, have a go at him for that. But to just completely make stuff up? Or cite completely made-up materials to “cancel” a guy as a diabolical child-sex trafficker? In no universe can this possibly be defensible, even if the unlucky target may arguably qualify as some sort of “elite.” Because as I’ve hopefully shown, there are plenty of thoroughly “non-elite” bystanders who’ve gotten snagged in the same exact outburst of mindless hysteria. And whether elite or non-elite, society as a whole gets cheapened and demeaned with this unchallenged proliferation of a political and legal narrative which, the deeper you dig, the more you discover is predicated on a veritable whirlwind of cynical embellishment and/or brazen, outright fraud.

While it’s true that Kristy stands somewhat apart in having confabulated her whole tale from scratch, as well as her inclusion of far-out details like forcible impregnation with the offspring of Epstein and Maxwell — hence the falsified sonogram images she cooked up to try and substantiate this — the emphatic credulity with which she was treated by a grand consortium plaintiffs’ lawyers, journalists, and most alarmingly, state and federal prosecutors — who astoundingly said they had “no doubt” in the veracity of her fantastical fictions — gets right to the heart of the entire Epstein hysteria-machine. Which is a dynamic that really does cry out for some properly intensive “investigation,” if anything Epstein-related still needs to be investigated.

But it goes even further. (I told you, this story ALWAYS manages to get worse.) Here is the personal publicist of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a woman named Dini von Mueffling, emailing Kristy in February 2026 to tell her that she unreservedly “believes” her, and also wanted to offer undefined “personal” support, such as PR and legal services. She even encouraged Kristy to link up with other “Epstein Survivors” so she could benefit from their collective support system.

Kind of makes you wonder about the veracity of other stuff Dini von Mueffling has had a hand in pumping out for public consumption over the years, no?

Continuing in the “it only gets worse” department, Kristy told Judge Clarke in December 2025 that she had received “outreach from a member of Congress,” and spoken to Congressional staff about her claims, which she was surely thrilled to find were received with only the most reverential earnestness.

Finally, please take a gander at the following February 16, 2026 video report by Scripps News, the digital media wing of E.W. Scripps, one of America’s oldest newspaper conglomerates. Its material gets syndicated to local TV stations across the country.

HEADLINE: ‘I’m beyond broken’: Diary in Epstein files details abuse girl says she endured

SUBHED: In a style reminiscent of teenage scrapbook collages, the girl glued magazine words onto pages to describe her abuse.

The video segment, aired far and wide, represents Kristy’s “diaries” as presumptively authentic, with the author of the diary, Kristy, declared to be a presumptive “survivor,” whose diaries can therefore be surmised to accurately chronicle her horrific ordeal of forced pregnancies, abduction of newborn babies, etc. Again, these are the same diaries now judicially determined to have been filled with provably falsified and fabricated material. Scripps correspondent Alexandra Miller even credits the “decoded” messages as real, and solemnly recites them back to the viewer. She then brings on a lawyer commentator, Eliza Orlins, who states matter-of-factly that Kristy was a “sex slave,” and “we all should be screaming and yelling” about why there weren’t any investigations based on this material (which there actually were, mind-blowingly enough) and why no one was ever prosecuted for the (fake) crimes described therein. Amazingly, but not surprisingly, Alexandra Miller serves as some sort of “adjunct lecturer” in Journalism Studies at the University of Maryland. And altogether unsurprisingly, she has not responded to my requests for comment.

I usually try to maintain an air of detached bemusement about this stuff, and there’s no question that much of Epstein mania can be morbidly comical, not unlike the man himself. But seriously — what the hell? This latest wrinkle could not possibly get any darker.

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