I did another random podcast thing on Saturday, having little or no information about what I’d actually agreed to do, but recognizing that the in-house studio thingamajig was only like 20 minutes away from where I live in NJ, so there would be really no reasonable justification for refusing. It turned out to be pleasant enough — I was not sexually assaulted or otherwise harmed. The two gay rightoids who run this rinky-dink podcast claim they do not get down and dirty together when the cameras are off, but I’m not sure I believe it, as the sexual tension was palpable. (NOTE: When I say “gay,” I mean literally homosexual — an attribute that seems to reflect a conspicuously large share of online right-wing demographics as of late.) Anyway, they too declared they would be putting the episode behind whatever paywall apparatus thing they have going on, so in light of this, I sternly requested that I too be able to make the episode available for my own paid subscribers. To which they damn well obliged. See below:

Read more

My genuine sympathies if you find this way too self-involved and/or repetitive by now — but really, what else am I supposed to do? I can’t find a public email address for Christa Price (which is slightly odd for any journalist, but whatever) so had to send the message below to the general “editor” inbox at “The Appalachian” newspaper, which is affiliated with Appalachian State University in Boone, NC.

October 24, 2026

In an October 23 article entitled “Men need to hold each other accountable,” Christa Price, Associate Opinion Editor, writes: “Michael Tracey, a self-proclaimed journalist and political commentator, has been actively posting calls to action for the release of Doe’s personal information and other offensive comments on X under the username @mtracey.”

I never posted any general “call to action” — I have no idea what that even means. I solicited crowd-sourced information, which is something journalists do every single day on all manner of subjects, so I could verify Jane Doe’s identity using standard journalistic methods. Which I subsequently did, because she is the litigant in a massively consequential civil complaint. I have spelled out the public interest rationale for this decision ad nauseam now.

I also notice that I am characterized as a “self-proclaimed journalist,” in what appears to be an attempt at a snide little dig, as though the only basis for me to be described as a journalist is that I personally “self-proclaim” as one. While it’s technically true that I do “self-proclaim” as a journalist, I have also recently been “proclaimed” a journalist by the New Yorker, New York Times, Reuters, Wall Street Journal (in my own article), Washington Post, Hollywood Reporter, NewsNation, among many others. One can find my byline at places like the New York Daily News, where I was a regular columnist for many years, in which I am aptly described as “a journalist,” or the New York Post, where I am likewise described as a journalist, or The Nation, where I had my first journalism job, and am still described on my bio page as a “journalist.” When I’ve appeared on the BBC, or NPR, or SiriusXM, or Fox News, or the Piers Morgan show, or the South African national broadcaster — or countless others — I’ve been unremarkably described as a journalist. So I’m just wondering why Christa Price chose to identify me instead as a “self-proclaimed” journalist, as though I’m the only one who’s ever groundlessly tried to “proclaim” this.

Christa Price also writes:

He followed this post up with several more disrespectful comments and insults, accusing Doe of telling investigators “she supposedly WANTED to be raped” and she “deliberately decided to get herself gang-raped” as a “bizarre ploy to charge the guys with rape.”

These are characterized as rash “insults” I decided to fling out of nowhere, rather than observations expressly based on Jane Doe’s own words, as quoted in the New York Times, which were as follows:

“I had become extremely uncomfortable with how this night was turning out, so my thought was, if I do ketamine again, maybe I will pass out,” it quotes her saying. “My thought was that if I passed out and these men had sex with me, then they could be charged with rape.”

If you have a way to characterize this statement other than Jane Doe apparently telling investigators that she at some point made the decision to be knowingly subjected to rape, so that the alleged perpetrators “could be charged with rape,” I would very much like to hear it. Why would you omit the actual quote from Jane Doe that I was plainly referencing, and instead make me out to be some kind of barbarian, when I was literally referring to a very specific quote, stated by her directly, in which she describes her own thinking and motives? Does it really not strike you as at least worth noting that according to Jane Doe herself, there came a point when she decided that rather than extricate herself from a situation in which she could purportedly be raped, she instead consciously chose to enable herself to be raped, so that the purported offenders “could be charged with rape”? SHE is the one who said that — not me.

I was also misleadingly quoted here:

Tracey went on to write he knows “the seven guys have been brutally harassed and faced awful consequences.”

Why on earth would you exclude the previous sentence, which was my whole basis for making this remark about the harassment of the seven defendants? I wrote: “Please do not harass her, her family, or anyone else associated with her. I’m serious. I wish her no harm. I feel bad for her in a way.”

You also excluded the sentences immediately FOLLOWING the partial quote you strangely decided to excerpt, in which I wrote that “I primarily blame the sleazebag plaintiff’s lawyers for this debacle of an outcome. Sure, Jane Doe has agency in the matter. But I don’t wish to impugn her personally. I honestly wish her the best. I don’t think this should define the rest of her life.”

Did you exclude this obviously crucial before-and-after context because to include it would’ve disrupted the condemnatory narrative you were trying to cobble together?

I would be happy to speak to Christa Price, or anyone else at your publication, about this directly.

Best,

Michael Tracey

Subscribe now

Share

Monday evening I drove straight from Ithaca, NY to the Red Scare flophouse, to give the ladies an urgent update on all the latest Women’s Issues that have dramatically taken the Nation by storm: Cornell, Gang Rape, Epstein, Lindsay Clancy, and so on. A splendid time was had by all. The ladies have placed this episode behind their paywall, but graciously agreed that I could also make it available to my own paid subscribers — a kind of cross-pollinating reproduction exercise, if you will. Which is subtly arousing. In any event, you’d be well-served to independently subscribe to the Red Scare Podcast, of which I’m told I’ve been a member of the “Extended Universe” since around the time of my first appearance in 2019, to discuss Russiagate — another quintessential Women’s Issue.

Episode enclosed below…

Read more

Cornell administrators belatedly put out audio and video of its October 14, 2026 meeting of the Faculty Senate, which readers may recall I tried to attend in person, but was relegated to milling around the perimeter with a gaggle of other mediocre journalists, as we waited for professors to come out and enlighten us about what went on.

Well, to absolutely no one’s shock, it turns out the actual meeting was a carnival of preposterous defamation and hysteria. What might be most striking is the utter absence of any remotely countervailing perspective. Even the Faculty Senators who registered tepid objections to the proposed motion of No Confidence against the University President and “central administration” (whatever that is) only expressed the most bare-bones requests for further information before acting. Virtually no one challenged any underlying premises or conceits, such as that there is currently an “ongoing crisis of sexual assault” ravaging this Ivy League university — a circumstance which has rendered the entire “Cornell community” deeply “unsafe,” and in need of urgent administrative interventions.

Subscribe now

Claims of such a deep and systemic “crisis” mostly revolve around the phony-baloney statistic that’s been circulated so widely of late: that 35% of Cornell undergraduate females reported “experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact” in 2025, a purported factoid which, according to outspoken faculty member Iris Packman, is “the definition of rape.” So the working assumption, according to the most purportedly fearful and activist-minded segment of the “community,” is that over a third of female students have been raped with no meaningful consequence. Packman even asserted at the meeting that under the August 2026 edition of the Student Code of Conduct, “if you rape someone, you can still mitigate your sanctions by writing an essay.” Which is of course totally fake and ludicrous — but no one dared to correct her, as it’s not an exaggeration to say that the mere act of simply correcting her could very plausibly run the risk that one could subsequently be accused of “endangering” her and/or others, and/or making them feel “unsafe.” Nobody really wants to stick out their necks and do that, if they don’t have to. One current student told me over the weekend that anecdotally, sentiment regarding the veracity of the “gang rape” accusations seems to have shifted markedly in the past ten days or so, at least based on his personal observations — but even so, nobody’s really going to say much in public, and these taboo thoughts will mostly remain whispered in private, if they’re even articulated at all. Because again, who wants to deal with the headache?

Also on vivid display was these faculty members’ cavalier willingness to slime and slander the seven defendants named in the huckster lawyer’s plaintiff-anonymized civil complaint as confirmed “rapists” — whose very existence poses some mortal threat to the “safety” of anyone who might have the terrible misfortune of finding themselves in their vicinity. Particular fear was invoked as to the two defendants who are now back on campus — reportedly Gillio Lopes and Winston Lee, who were defamed the most outrageously at the Faculty Senate meeting. The biggest “perpetrator” of this defamatory onslaught was undoubtedly a person named Noah Tamarkin, Associate Professor of Anthropology:

Professor Tamarkin joined the meeting by Zoom to morosely ask the University President, Michael Kotlikoff, how on earth it could be the case that two of the men who were found to have “raped Jane Doe,” namely Lopes and Lee, could be permitted to roam around campus this semester; he’s heard from so many students and colleagues that the mere presence of these Gang Rape “perpetrators” in their midst has made them feel deathly “unsafe.”

POINT OF INFORMATION, PLEASE: Not even the shambolic Kangaroo Court Title IX process, which shouldn’t even exist in the first place, found Lopes and Lee guilty of anything close to “rape.” The brainless university bureaucrats running this fake tribunal had the option to give the harshest punishment — expulsion — to Lopes and Lee, but instead chose to temporarily suspend them, unlike the other two individuals with whom Jane Doe had her initial (consensual, by her own telling) sexual encounter: Matthew Ingalls and Jonathan Newell. Those two were both expelled, with Ingalls reportedly found “responsible for sexual assault,” according to the early wave of New York Times leaks. But bear in mind, even this “finding,” which was deemed to necessitate the most severe university-decreed punishments, would have been based on the “affirmative consent” standard that now governs collegiate sexual interactions. And “affirmative consent” has nothing to do with the actual criminal standard for “sexual assault” or “rape” — yet these concepts have been mercilessly conflated, including by a parade of Ivy League Professors, to impugn the seven civil complaint defendants as full-blown “rapists” — even though they’ve still never even been charged with a crime.

Here’s the full transcribed Zoom-based comments of Professor Tamarkin:

“When perpetrators see that nothing’s gonna happen to them, they’re emboldened. We’ve learned that in Jane Doe’s case the Title IX process found two of the men to have raped Jane Doe. But under this process they received temporary suspensions, and so like the other 86% of perpetrators, these two men are now back on campus, they’re attending classes, and freely interacting with other students. We’ve heard repeatedly from our students, both undergraduate and graduate, as well as our colleagues and other staff, that they don’t feel safe with these men on campus.” — Professor Noah Tamarkin, 10/14/2026

What made his weepy little sermon extra damning and humiliating is that Tamarkin had to be swiftly corrected on the facts by the University President himself. “I have to say Noah, the two people you said have been found responsible for rape — that is not the charge, and that was not what they were found responsible for, for those two,” clarified President Kotlikoff.

So… what now? Is Tamarkin going to apologize for blurting out these false, reputation-obliterating statements in a public forum? Is he even going to correct the record at all? He had an opportunity to do so later in the Faculty Senate meeting, but conspicuously declined. Where is the “accountability” for this “perpetrator” of peddling such defamatory garbage? Unsurprisingly, Tamarkin has not replied to my emailed requests for comment.

A host of other faculty members should also be “found responsible” for similar “misconduct” only marginally less severe than Tamarkin’s whopper of an offense:

• Andrew Moisey, an Associate Professor in the Department of “History of Art & Visual Studies,” declared that “every time… there’s a Jane Doe rape, it is not just a crime between seven men, but an act that by association dishonors all of Cornell.” Thereby declaring that all seven defendants conclusively committed the “crime” of “rape,” which Moisey apparently feels can be defensibly declared based on nothing but one huckster lawyer’s increasingly discredited civil complaint. Moisey also did not respond to my request for comment.

• Another faculty member named David — who I haven’t been able to definitively identify yet, due to the muddled audio, but would like help doing so if anyone can — ripped into President Kotlikoff with the following mushy-mouthed diatribe: “You went to the New York Times to talk about pathways to peace — you didn’t go to the New York Times to talk about gang rape when it happened.” Thereby, of course, he too presupposed that the “gang rape” did indeed occur as alleged in slimeball lawyer Thomas Giuffra’s civil complaint. (By the way, Giuffra has been waging a slimy behind-the-scenes media attack campaign against me — more on that later.)

• Corinna Löckenhoff, Professor of Gerontology in Medicine, complained to the President how appalling it was that he’d supposedly allowed one of the two currently-on-campus defendants to live this semester “in a shared room in a co-ed dorm, on a mixed gender floor, with a gender neutral multi-stall bathroom” — which she claims posed a “clear security risk,” for reasons she of course did not elaborate, but were just taken to be self-evident. According to Löckenhoff, administrators only took action to rectify the pernicious bathroom-related predicament “the day after Jane Doe was Swatted.” Assuming any of this is true as claimed, it would appear that Löckenhoff is spreading putatively confidential information in a public venue, but it could also just be bogus rumor — so who knows. Someone should totally ask her to clarify.

• Jennifer Colt, a faculty member who works for the campus library system in some capacity, bewailed that the President and his confederates “let criminal charges against rapists fall through the cracks” — thus taking as established fact that “rape” was actually committed, and that the defendants in the civil complaint have been credibly established as “rapists.” She also conclusorily called the alleged incident a “horrific sexual assault.” I emailed her to ask what independent investigation she’s evidently undertaken to reach such a firm, unshakeable conclusion — and moreover, how she determined that “criminal charges” were warranted in this matter, notwithstanding the District Attorney’s initial declination to bring them in November 2024. No answer.

• Trevor Dolan, described as a Climate Jobs Associate — whatever the F that is — Zoomed in to decry the “ongoing crisis of sexual assault” at this bucolic Ivy League locale, which he claimed was more than sufficient to pass a Motion of No Confidence against the University President, whether or not there is adequate information presently available regarding the specifics of “Jane Doe’s assault.” No response yet to my email, which asked him: “Is it your view that Jane Doe having been ‘assaulted’ can be taken as a matter of established fact, and if so, on what do you base this view?”

• Our lovely friend Iris Packman, who also happens to be an elected Tompkins County, NY legislator, proclaimed not just the moronic fiction that “essays” are still somehow considered an acceptable punishment for “rape,” but that it should shake everyone to their core that maintaining such an unacceptable status quo is “what this administration has done, two years out from the gang rape” — meaning she also takes the occurrence of a “gang rape” to be factually established beyond any reasonable doubt. (See my exchange with her last week for the mind-blowing inability she exhibited to defend this proposition with any coherence… despite herself being a lawyer!)

Other absurdities from the Faculty Senate meeting include Justine Modica, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, announcing that she is personally “paralyzed by fear,” adding: “I am so afraid to speak, I am shaking.” Shaoling Ma, who is described as “an interdisciplinary scholar and critical theorist of global Chinese literature, culture, and history,” decided to ask President Kotlikoff the following question: “Is rape a less destructive expressive activity than protesting against genocide?” Which is yet more evidence that some sort of Gang Rape Genocide has beset the unlikely setting of Ithaca, NY. Julia Chang, an Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Studies, explained that her faculty duties include regular dealings with “first year, first semester students” — and they are “absolutely terrified” at the moment. They “feel unsafe,” she warned, because whenever they walk around a corner on campus now, they apparently believe they could be swarmed and gang-raped with impunity. Evidently, in no way does the perceived role of Cornell Faculty include disabusing their students of such wild delusions, if they do in fact harbor them, but instead to reinforce the reality-devoid delusions. For his part, President Kotlikoff has not helped the situation by repeatedly referring to Jane Doe as a “survivor.”

Perhaps the most touching moment was when Ariana Kim, a professor of something or other in the Music Department, performed some sort of dramatic self-revelatory poetry reading, to her colleagues’ sensitive applause:

What does it feel like when those who are meant to protect you do not?

What does it feel like when systems break down, and protocols are breached?

What does it feel like when accountability vanishes?

What does it feel like to be so steeped in fear culture that speaking up feels paralyzing?

What does it feel like to be gaslit into believing that harassment, bullying, and violence are your fault?

What does it feel like to be broken by another human being?

I can answer those questions…

So for now, while we all await the appropriate imposition of “accountability,” feel free to watch the below video compilation from the 10/14/2026 Faculty Senate meeting, courtesy of yours truly:

UPDATE: Can’t believe I forgot to share how Susan Pannullo, Director of Neurosurgical Radiosurgery and Neuro-oncology at the Weill Cornell Medical Center, and Arianna Schindle, “Training and Organizational Development Associate,” chose to comport themselves at the meeting:

Subscribe now

Share

After I was swarmed by an Angry Mob earlier this week at a “Justice for Jane Doe” rally in Ithaca, NY, the scant local media on hand did its thing: produce quick hit news-style reports that characterized the events with maximum uncharitability toward me, and maximum ideological deference and/or credulity toward the “organizers.” This is nothing new, of course — I wouldn’t have even paid it much mind here, except that the Ithaca Voice, a local news-oriented type outlet, decided to state as objective fact that I was “removed” from the rally by police, which is emphatically not at all what happened. In fact, it was pretty much the opposite: in their desperation to placate the raving mob, cop after cop was pleading with me to please leave on my own accord, and while I refused at first — on the ground that I did not want to just meekly capitulate to a post-rational mob frenzy — I eventually gave up and agreed, as a courtesy to the begging officers, and voluntarily departed.

Subscribe now

But of course that sequence of objectively true events did not comport with whatever weasel-worded little narrative these Ithaca Voice junior journalists wanted to convey. It doesn’t take a genius to infer that they were almost certainly in reflexive ideological affinity with the rally-goers. Which is fine — knock yourself out. But ideally, the practice of journalism calls for impartially relaying the truth of whatever’s transpired, as best one can reasonably discern it, and notwithstanding any ideological “priors” one might be operating with. In this most basic of tasks, journalists Megan Zerez and Fernando Figueroa failed spectacularly.

What really ground my gears was not that they wanted to depict me in a negative light. Lots of people want to depict me in a negative light — cool, whatever, comes with the territory. My problem was that in doing so, they would dress up their barely-disguised hostility in this obnoxiously feigned “tone” of a supposed straight “news” article, when it was really more like a lightly-narrativized activist press release. Excerpt:

The rally was not without confrontation.

The Ithaca Police Department was on hand and removed several people, including political commentator Michael Tracey, who has gained notoriety on social media as a critic of Jane Doe’s civil lawsuit and for his attempts to uncover her identity. At the start of the rally, organizers asked attendees not to interact with “agitators,” naming Tracey as an example.

Wait, what? Unnamed “organizers” openly declared me an “agitator” at some point? I’d actually missed this — I came toward the tail-end of the rally, so at least the diligent reporters produced a small tidbit of useful information. (BTW, why weren’t these purported “organizers” quoted by name?) Note that the journalists simply recite the apparent injunction that was made against me, as though it should’ve been assumed prima facie credible — it evidently never occurred to them that instead of just dutifully repeating this strange command, they maybe could’ve spent two seconds evaluating the alleged basis for it. But nope, too much work! So having re-circulated the claim that I’m an up-to-no-good “agitator,” the narrative not-so-subtly followed that I must therefore have been “removed” on totally justifiable grounds. Due to all my, you know, agitation. Even though when the mob first formed, I had literally done nothing except walk around for less than 10 minutes in total silence, observing without incident, and maybe snapped one or two quick photos.

So what I really objected to was the verb “removed,” and how this was sneakily tied in with the laughable designation of me as an “agitator,” who must have posed some grave threat to attendees’ welfare. Or that I was “escorted” off the premises in disrepute by the cops — which would be a weird way to describe “walked away on my own initiative after the cops’ repeated requests that I do so voluntarily.” Or that it was somehow “not clear” who in the world might have “instigated the altercation or whether it became physical.” These oddly un-inquisitive journalists had every opportunity to seek “clarity” from me in real time, or look up my readily-available contact information, and I would’ve been happy to “clear up” any confusion they might’ve had. Instead, of course, they pressed right ahead with their seedy faux-ambiguity, to give readers the strong impression that while the precise sequence of events might not be entirely “clear,” the natural inference is that I must have been going around instigating and agitating and hence, needed to be “removed.”

Here’s my complaint, sent via email, to editor Jimmy Jordan. The journalists were also CC’d, but never bothered answering themselves. Enjoy the entire tedious exchange:

By the end, you’ll notice that it took me vowing to come in-person to their office for Jimmy Jordan to at least finally call me on the phone, which he did yesterday. Prior to this, he’d only agreed to slap on a half-assed non-correction, which had required me to supply the corrective reporting for, by passing along video footage to rectify their lack of clarity as to what could have possibly unfolded. Even though the video footage was widely accessible everywhere on the internet. Among the outstanding issues the footage plainly clarified was whether the “confrontation” I had probably instigated ever “became physical.” Because you can “clearly” see me get whacked on the shoulder by some kind of stick/rod/paddle by some excitable lady. Not that this was any kind of grievous injury or anything, but it’s weird that if the journalists are going to publicly wonder if any “physical” interactions took place, they wouldn’t spend two seconds seeking out the readily available evidence of such.

So after doing their own work for them, they begrudgingly amended the article’s text to the following:

The Ithaca Police Department was on hand and removed several people, including political commentator Michael Tracey, who has gained notoriety on social media as a critic of Jane Doe’s civil lawsuit and for his attempts to uncover her identity. At the start of the rally, organizers asked attendees not to interact with “agitators,” naming Tracey as an example.

Police later escorted Tracey away from an apparent confrontation with some protestors. A video of the event later posted by Tracey shows him surrounded by a small group of police, media and demonstrators as he and rallygoers yelled at each other. One demonstrator called Tracey a “rape apologist.” At one point in the video, it appears as if someone swung an object at Tracey. He said in an email that he was “whacked with a stick or paddle.” He added that he was not “removed,” but “exited voluntarily” after repeated requests from police.

Jimmy Jordan maintained that these revisions were sufficient to address my complaints, even though the article continues to assert, in the publication’s own disembodied voice, that I was “removed” — i.e. forcibly ejected by police, which is just 100% not true. But he apparently didn’t care. So he humored me by giving me a perfunctory phone call yesterday, which lasted 24 minutes. He said he wasn’t going to make any more revisions to the article, and planned to leave up the false information. While advising him that I found this completely pathetic, I nonetheless suggested a compromise: that they at least let me submit some kind of “letter to the editor,” or whatever they would like to call it, in which I would endeavor to provide conclusive “clarity” on the matter. Because maybe this is old-fashioned, but I really would prefer not to have it forever on record, in an ostensibly reputable-seeming local news publication, that I was “removed” by police from a public event, on account of my nefarious “agitation.” Jimmy said he couldn’t make any guarantees, but he would take a look at the letter. Which I then wrote and sent back to him. And I just received his reply: he will not be publishing the letter.

So now I’m compelled to memorialize this whole annoying mini-saga on Substack, partly because yeah, I do find it personally obnoxious, but also because it may offer interested readers a brief little glimpse into what it’s like dealing with these kinds of local media nincompoops, who pretend they’re steadfastly committed to impartially reporting The Facts, but are really just neck-deep in unexamined reality-distorting ideological presuppositions, which they might not even be fully conscious of here, given how baked-in it surely must be that of course the “Ithaca Voice” would be spiritually “on the side” of the trauma-informed survivor Jane Doe rally-goers.

Boring, boring, boring stuff. Bleh. So anyway, for posterity I guess, here’s the letter-to-the-editor I drafted, and which Jimmy Jordan just wrote me back to reject:

I wanted to clarify the nature of my attendance at the October 13, 2026 “Justice for Jane Doe” rally held on the Ithaca Commons.

Contrary to how it was characterized in the Ithaca Voice’s subsequent news article, published the same day by Megan Zerez, I was not “removed” from the event by police. Instead, what happened was various police officers continuously pleaded with me to leave the premises on my own volition, in order to mollify the mob that had converged against me, apparently incensed by my very presence — not by anything I had actually said or done at the rally. Indeed, my intent upon arrival was to simply observe, as inconspicuously as possible. I had literally only walked around in silence for less than ten minutes, not speaking to a soul, before the beginnings of the mob formed, and I found myself trailed by one or more individuals who were deliberately seeking to obstruct my movements — as in, they were physically blockading my ability to walk freely about the event. Please do not take my word for it; this is documented on video. Which I only started recording for my own protection — not because I ever felt seriously endangered or threatened (I did not, and do not) but because I didn’t want someone to potentially make a false claim about my conduct, and preferred to have my own independent record of what actually transpired.

In no meaningful sense was I “removed” from the rally. If I ask you to leave some event, and then you voluntarily choose to comply with my request, you have not been “removed.” On the other hand, if I take some coercive action to eject you from the event — by dragging you out under protest, for instance, or perhaps imploring the cops to do so — THEN it would be fair to say I have effectuated your “removal.” And you were thereby “removed” from the event.

Why is this a significant semantic distinction? Because the Ithaca Voice article paints a picture of me as some malevolent outside “agitator” who showed up with foul intent, and was then rightly “removed” as a result of my agitation. Which could not be more demonstrably false. But the article is framed around this premise, as it repeats — totally uncritically — a quote from an unnamed “organizer,” who was apparently heard specifically naming me, Michael Tracey, as one of several potential “agitators” that the crowd should be on the lookout for. At least one rally-goer was also seen waving around a pre-made laminated sheet of paper with my photo on it, to assist the crowd in identifying me, should I appear.

It might have been edifying for Ithaca Voice readers to be apprised that the sole reason any of these rally-goers could’ve conceivably had for designating me an “agitator” is that I recently reported information in the public interest that they did not want to see reported. Yes, it is true that I briefly published the identity of “Jane Doe” from the now-infamous “Cornell 7” lawsuit, after spending several days employing standard journalistic methods to ensure the accuracy of the information. The accuracy has since been confirmed, including by Jane Doe’s own lawyer, as well as CBS News, the New Yorker magazine, and others. So, the truthfulness of what I reported is not in dispute: what’s in dispute is simply whether it should have been reported. The crowd at the rally clearly disagreed with my logic for reporting this information. Which is perfectly fine in a pluralistic society. Indeed, I have proactively sought to engage with all manner of critics, to spell out my rationale for this reporting decision. In short, I regarded it as journalistically imperative to identify Jane Doe, so as to not aid and abet what I regard to be a chronically overused and misused litigation tactic leveraged by profit-seeking plaintiff’s attorneys — in this case Thomas Giuffra, who represents Jane Doe. The tactic is to make sensational, lurid, reputation-destroying claims under the cover of their client’s anonymity, and then funnel those claims out into the media, whereupon the claims get hugely amplified and repeated with excess credulity. This tactic is carried out with an eye toward obtaining maximum settlement payouts, by heaping as much public pressure as possible on the lawyer’s litigation targets. In the meantime, unbridled hysteria is fomented, as journalists and “influencers” do the lawyers’ PR bidding not just by eagerly circulating these claims, but effectively taking them at face value.

I consider this pattern of lawyer-media collusion to be highly corrosive — for basic civil liberties, public sanity, and even public policy. It certainly did not take long for Gov. Kathy Hochul to demand an overhaul of the New York State criminal code based on her own face-value reading of this particular lawyer’s entirely untested and uncorroborated civil complaint, which omitted all manner of potentially exculpatory evidence that has since emerged after the complaint was first filed. Contesting this insidious lawyer-media practice was my overriding motive for the publishing decision — NOT to demean, denigrate, or “doxx” Jane Doe. Indeed, I have only ever DISCOURAGED anyone who follows me from doing anything of the sort. NOTHING I have done, or even suggested doing, is remotely in the realm of anything that could be reasonably called “doxxing” or harassment. I have no ill-will whatsoever toward Jane Doe, and wish her no misfortune. In fact, I communicated these sentiments to her directly before I published my article and accompanying social media post. I have never disseminated any private information of hers beyond her legal name, as a litigant in a massively consequential civil complaint. (I also included her hometown, to establish that it was her, rather than some other potentially same-named person elsewhere in the country.) But that’s it. This is not “doxxing.” It’s called “reporting.”

All that said, if anyone still disagrees with my decision, they are more than entitled to do so. In fact, I welcome it — and I invite them to engage me directly with their critiques, ideally in as reasoned a fashion as possible. But even if they wish to berate or insult me, that’s OK too — all’s fair in the public arena. What crosses a worrisome Constitutional line is the use of physical force. Which is precisely what happened at the October 13 rally. I was whacked with some kind of paddle or stick, had objects shoved in my face, and was impeded in my ability to walk unencumbered in a public space. Please note: I am NOT saying I’m any sort of victim, or that I was seriously physically injured, or anything like that. I wasn’t. I am simply describing what happened, on account of these rally-goers’ rabid disdain for something I had journalistically reported.

This made it all the more regrettable that I would’ve been depicted by the Ithaca Voice as someone who had to be forcibly “removed” by police, because of my supposed “agitation.” I did not agitate, for a single second. Again: I had literally said nothing at all to anyone when the mob started to rapidly converge — all I had tried to do up till then was calmly and inconspicuously observe. But within a matter of minutes, I was surrounded, and had dozens and dozens of people chanting “rapist” at me, hurling every possible epithet, and reporting me to the police as some kind of active threat. The police tacitly enabled this mob behavior by repeatedly requesting that I be the one to leave, when I had not verbally or physically done anything to possibly warrant my ejection. However, I understand the police saw it as their objective to maintain order, which in this case required placating the mob, at least as they saw it. So after initially declining to capitulate to these mob demands, I eventually acceded to the police requests. I was not “removed.” I left entirely on my own volition.

It was disappointing to see this sequence of events presented to the readers of the Ithaca Voice in such a manner that I was portrayed as some wanton, trouble-making instigator, which couldn’t have been farther from the truth. Had anyone at the event wanted to engage me via speech that day, I would have happily obliged — even if their preference was for vituperative or incendiary speech. However, it’s another thing altogether when my movements are physically curtailed, my face is stuffed with posters and other materials, I am struck on the shoulder with an unknown object, and the police choose to inform me that I am somehow responsible for making the rally-goers “uncomfortable” — even though I had literally done nothing that could have even arguably caused anyone the slightest bit of “discomfort.” (And even if I had, theoretically, it would still be extremely Constitutionally dubious to cite vague, non-particularized claims of “discomfort” as grounds for why I, or anyone else, should be expelled from a public political event.) I caused no disruption, disorder, or anything of the sort. At the same time, I was more than willing to “mix it up” (verbally) if that’s what anyone there wished to do. Unfortunately, the police evidently determined that maintaining “order” would be best achieved by persuading me to leave voluntarily. Which I eventually did. I invite anyone to inquire with the Ithaca Police themselves for verification of this.

In sum, I was not “removed” from the “Justice for Jane Doe” rally, and DEFINITELY not on account of any “agitation” I carried out. For the record — just in case anyone might have gotten the wrong idea — I have never considered myself politically right-wing in any way. Not that it should even matter in this circumstance, at least in principle, but feel free to take a look at virtually anything I’ve said or written about Donald Trump in the past several years. That’s ultimately a minor point, though. What I lament most is that Ithaca Voice readers would’ve been given the impression that I showed up that day to “agitate,” and thus had to be “removed” by the cops for reasons of “safety.” That is not what happened.

Subscribe now

Share

Below is a compilation of the impromptu interviews/exchanges I had this week on the campus of Cornell, mostly with an assortment of professors who staggered out of the “critically important” Faculty Senate meeting on Wednesday, where they’d debated whether to oust the University President for his perceived failings in dealing with the Jane Doe Gang Rape crisis.

Weirdly, the first Cornell-affiliated individuals who agreed to have an impromptu “press conference” were a trio of freshman students, only one of whom actually spoke. If you notice, this young fellow acknowledges (to his credit I guess) that he wasn’t very familiar with the details of the case, after I’d asked him what he meant by the phrase “swept under the rug,” which is what he accused the President of doing with respect to the Jane Doe incident. Because far from “sweeping anything under the rug,” the University undertook an extremely protracted — and almost tediously over-extensive — investigation into the matter, by way of the cockamamie “Title IX” process, which spanned many months, included dozens and dozens of interviews, etc. Notwithstanding Jane Doe’s initial statements, within 36 hours, when she presumably had the freshest recollection of that night’s events, describing the sexual activity at issue as consensual. “Our Body Our Choice,” she texted one of her alleged gang-rape assailants. So that’s an incredibly lengthy “investigation,” given that precipitating set of facts. One might even argue university bureaucrats have no business in the first place “investigating” the private sexual affairs of adult students, even when something improper allegedly occurred. If someone is saying they were raped, they have just as much access to the regular criminal justice apparatus as anyone else in society — why it was ever decided that there needed to be this farcical administrative tribunal quango thing, hopefully future “social historians” will look back on with morbid bemusement.

But anyway, the freshman student concededly having no knowledge of these basic facts, despite choosing to stand before the cameras and opine on why he believed the University President ought to be removed, provides some insight into the folklore that is evidently circulating so heavily around this matter, whereby lower-info commentators — even on the campus itself! — assume there must have been some sort of grievous “cover-up” or “rug-sweeping” carried out, given the shockingly lurid allegations cooked up for the original civil complaint by the slimeball huckster lawyer, Thomas Giuffra, which were then strategically funneled out into the wider media ecosystem — initially thanks to a credulous “journalistic” assist from a cohort of supposedly Heroic Student Reporters. That some sort of insidious rug-sweeping scheme must be responsible for the Drugging and Gang Rape horror not being adequately prosecuted seemed self-evident to this impressionable student — probably based on the snippets of incomplete ambient chatter he’s absorbed just by dint of being physically present at Cornell. “I’m not that knowledgeable about it,” he conceded to me, when I asked for more specifics about what precisely he thought had been “swept under the rug.” The “accurate information deficit” is not even really his fault, if you think about it — he’s probably got a full courseload, midterms, friends, etc. to worry about, as opposed to scouring through dense court dockets all day, which is what lunatics like myself do.

Still, his comments are a useful insight into whatever has generated this giant collective mania, whereby not only does he hold the opinion that the University President ought to resign, he also supports his own collective punishment, despite not even being on campus himself in 2024, when this whole sordid saga first got started. “I think it’s a necessary step,” he said when I asked about the City of Ithaca’s prohibition on all student-organized events that require the issuance of a municipal permit. This decree led to the cancelation of a Homecoming Concert that was supposed to be held this weekend, featuring the musical act “Between Friends.” The student told me he was really looking forward to going to this concert, but he still supports being deprived of the experience by way of government force. Again: a very clarifying insight into human behavior/reasoning amid a morally-panicked frenzy such as this.

With regard to the professors I spoke to, that dynamic will take another robust Substack post to elucidate with any justice, because those people are truly out of their friggin’ minds.

Full video below:

Read more

Yesterday I moseyed around the Cornell University campus for several hours, and while I spotted no obvious signs of unrestricted Gang Rape — nor was I accosted by any additional Angry Mobs — there were still some clarifying observations to be made.

Subscribe now

The main event was a meeting of the Cornell Faculty Senate to debate a Motion of No Confidence in the University President, Michael Kotlikoff, as well as the rest of the university “central administration,” for their allegedly abominable mistreatment of Jane Doe — the former student understood to have suffered a hideous drugging and “Gang Rape” attack in October 2024. President Kotlikoff’s attempt to go on a pleading Apology Tour, most notably to the New York Times, does not seem to have mollified his legions of enraged internal and external critics. Indeed, he still seems to have not gotten the memo that attempting to placate a post-rational mob will only further embolden that mob, and surely seal one’s own fate.

I wanted to attend the Faculty Senate meeting myself, but was informed by “Media Relations” bureaucrats that this was strictly prohibited, for reasons they failed to ever intelligibly articulate. So I strode dramatically into Rockefeller Hall, site of the fateful meeting, and then up the stairs toward the Schwartz Auditorium, the actual deliberative chamber. There I was rebuked by “Senior Media Relations Specialist” Adam Allington, and verbally barred entry. I of course was not going to physically defy his commands, but I was still curious about the underlying basis for this “no media” decree, given the obvious nationwide interest in the ongoing Jane Doe Gang Rape saga. Allington claimed to have nothing to do with the strange prohibitionist policy, and instead blamed the Faculty Senate; I therefore asked what rationale the Faculty Senate had articulated for excluding outside observers. He again claimed ignorance, though he would also not say if he ever even sought to inquire about the purported rationale. It was a standard brain-melting exchange with a designated individual whose “one job” is to deflect and dissemble on behalf of the well-endowed institution that employs him. So I eventually admitted defeat and hauled my butt outside. (Faculty Senate members would later blame the Media Relations people for the media-barring ordinance. Nobody knew anything!)

Share

In the shadow of Rockefeller Hall, I waited around with a small gaggle of other mediocre journalists — not nearly as many as one might have thought would be present that afternoon, given the massively “viral” reach of the Jane Doe fiasco, and the unquenchable online thirst for additional “content.” It was mostly some local TV reporters, who almost never ask any interesting questions by default, as well as a young fellow from CBS News filming TikTok-style update videos on his phone. (I light-heartedly trolled him, saying I demanded accountability for the fact that CBS New York had recently “doxxed” Jane Doe.) Some guy from the NYT also weaseled his way into the assemblage, but he seemed to have a bad attitude. (As one would expect.)

In any event, we were all reduced to milling about aimlessly on this outdoor perimeter — as uninterested students walked by — waiting for any Faculty Senate members who might graciously agree to enlighten us about what exactly went down at this Top Secret Meeting.

Several of the professors who did eventually amble forth relayed the observation that there appeared to be an inter-disciplinary divide inside the chamber: while approximately 80% of Faculty Senate members supported ousting the university president forthwith over his perceived disgraceful mishandling of the Gang Rape situation, the remaining 20% expressed either substantive opposition or procedural criticisms — such as a desire for more information before rendering final judgment, which the supporters of the resolution flatly rejected. Us journos were informed that these suspicious dissenters seemed to be drawn primarily from the “hard sciences,” meaning academic departments such as engineering, mathematics, and economics. (Yes, I’m aware that the precise pedological classification of “economics” is debatable — STFU.) By contrast, the vast majority of faculty who supported the president’s immediate ouster were disproportionately from the “social sciences.” Or at least, that was the summary relayed to us by several of the clambering professors.

Unfortunately, none of the “dissenting” faculty members wandered out to our little makeshift media area in front of Rockefeller Hall. Initially, it was basically just me and videographer Ted Shaffrey of the Associated Press yukking it up. He’d erected a livestream recording device on the lawn adjacent to the building’s entrance, desperate for anyone to interview who might have a serviceable thought to share, to the point that he even resorted to briefly interviewing me, live, on camera. So I now appear somewhere in the AP video archives discussing the great Jane Doe Gang Rape. However, according to Shaffrey, you have to be a paying “client” of the AP to access this footage, and thus he could not send me the clip directly, even though he’d suggested yesterday that he could easily do this. Hmm, weird. I even offered by text this morning to potentially purchase the short clip myself, but Shaffrey claimed it had been mysteriously edited out of the material distributed to AP clients. Even though he’d suggested yesterday that the unedited raw footage was being provided to clients. So who the hell knows. Semi-fortunately, it turns out I was inadvertently recording on my phone during the interview, so you can listen to a (slightly muffled) audio version of what I told the AP here:

Following this bemusingly unplanned interview, for awhile it was still just me, the AP videographer, and maybe one or two others kibitzing in front of the building entrance, waiting for something to happen. We were joined by several representatives from the Cornell Administration’s “Media Relations” squad; an esteemed colleague of theirs had been inside the actual building, diligently guarding the entrance to the Schwartz Auditorium, where the Faculty Senate session was in progress. Although I had emailed several days in advance to request that outside press be granted admission, and received the standard bureaucratese ostensibly rejecting this, I still thought I’d try to show up anyway — despite the official notice that’d been promulgated declaring this “critically important” meeting would be limited only to members of the “Cornell community,” and/or those who could present a satisfactory “Cornell ID.” The argument that I’d made over email, and was happy to reiterate in person, was that the Jane Doe Gang Rape issue had obviously taken on an outsized national and even international significance — sorry to repeat this same line again — not least in terms of the public policy ramifications, such as Gov. Kathy Hochul and others claiming the initial civil complaint alone necessitates a swift overhaul of the New York State criminal code. So it made little sense to close off a university governance meeting wherein it would be deliberated whether to remove the embattled President — a potential action which at this point, for better or worse, has implications far beyond the “Cornell community.” And as such, it would be crazy to uniformly bar all outside journalists or citizens from observing. But my arguments clearly rung hollow.

A purported secondary option for members of the “Cornell community” to watch over Zoom also turned out to be a bust, as a Cornell-affiliated mole of mine was unable to even log on in real time. Whether this was a genuine technical glitch or something more devious remains to be seen. However, some materials from the meeting have at least now been supposedly disseminated, if only to humor those of us who were barred in-person entry.

Per usual, the meeting apparently started with a solemn “land acknowledgement”:

But the real action was when the professors in there finally sauntered out to describe the secret happenings. A particularly edifying exchange I had was with Victoria Netanus Xaka, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music. She is described on her university bio as “a black feminist sound theorist and abolitionist educator.” Which is something I will freely admit I had no idea existed prior to yesterday. But you can always count on learning something new on the ol’ College Green, right? That’s why parents pay the big bucks to send their little Sally and Johnny!

This professor had just attended the Faculty Senate session, and was among the relatively select few who agreed to come over and have an impromptu “scrum” with the assembled media mediocrities. (Most of the professors, when queried for comment by the AP videographer and/or me, declined.) Right off the bat, it was highly illuminating that Professor Xaka had somehow managed to incorporate allegations of “genocide” into her disquisition on the necessity of ousting the “central administration.” Whereas on more technical matters, she was slightly less verbose. For instance, I asked her who the “central administration” precisely consists of other than the President himself, and she indicated that she did not know, despite just participating in a parliamentary meeting where a resolution had been debated to declare “no confidence in the ability of the central administration to effectively address the ongoing crisis of sexual assault at Cornell University.” So she couldn’t even define for us what the “central administration” was. But whatever — her heart seemed to be in the right place, as she also brought up the menace of “white supremacy” and “patriarchy” that apparently plagues this bucolic Ivy League institution, after I requested examples of the “extreme violence” she alleged the Administration had failed to adequately “protect” the enfeebled faculty and students against. (Beyond the Jane Doe affair, that is, which of course was the primary impetus for this motion of “No Confidence.”)

Just when you thought the purported Gang Rape was bad enough — now it turns out we actually have a Patriarchal White Supremacy Gang Rape Genocide on our hands! Yikes! Might have to just raze the entire university and surrounding environs in another ritual sacrifice, as though Jeffrey Epstein once spent an afternoon there or something.

As you can tell by the final bit of our exchange, a key piece of folklore these “Cornell community” members seem to believe is that it was the brave student journalists at the Cornell Daily Sun newspaper who really blew the lid off the whole Gang Rape scandal. Hence the contention from Professor Xaka that she “doesn’t get her information from lawyers” — with the idea being that the scandal was finally unearthed not because of any “lawyers,” from whom she definitely does NOT get her information, but rather because “really remarkable young women student journalists here at Cornell” had heroically told the long-overdue story of the purported Gang Rape victim. “I believe Jane Doe, I believe survivors, I believe my students,” the Professor declared. So she thinks that in believing the Gang Rape allegations, she’s not believing in anything that stems from “lawyers.” Which is such a morbidly hilarious concept on so many levels. Because again, the only reason this story burst onto the national scene with such ferocity is that a particular scumbag lawyer, Thomas Giuffra, crafted a sensationally lurid civil complaint, which was then pumped out into the public domain, and taken at face value by hordes of dimwitted journalists and “influencers” — starting with those very same vaunted Student Reporters at the Cornell Daily Sun.

Please, don’t take my word for it. Here is how the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, Sophia Dasser, describes the sequence of events in a Substack interview she just did with another admired Cornell Professor, Kate Manne:

KM: I wanted to begin by asking you to help catch my readers up on how this case has unfolded for you as editor-in-chief of the Cornell Daily Sun and what the editorial process looked like, both in publishing Cereese’s story and also your blistering editorial naming the defendants in the case.

SD: All credit to Cereese for the story. I began as editor-in-chief at the end of February this year, and Cereese was abroad at the time. She called me, and told me that she wanted to investigate the incident. She knew Jane Doe. I told her, “OK sounds good. But this is a sensitive piece. Let’s keep it just between us for now.”

By the end of the spring semester, we had a pretty good understanding of the situation and knew we could write a piece about what had happened. But we were getting no response from the university in response to our request for statements. We continued to work over the summer, and then, by August, we had a piece that laid out what occurred.

And then we asked Jane Doe about it. She told Cereese, just wait a couple of weeks, because you’re going to see a lawsuit soon. And that’s what we did: we waited, and Cereese had a skeleton of the story prepared. When the suit published we were ready to go: it came out on Wednesday, and we published that Friday. We weren’t the first to break the story but we had the exclusive interview with Jane Doe. So I suppose we were the first to cover the story in a way that humanized the alleged victim.

So there you have it — while the New York Times tearfully hailed them as “The Student Journalists Who Never Let the Cornell Assault Case Go,” by the admission of the vaunted Editor-in-Chief herself, all they ever had was a “skeleton” of a story they had intermittently “prepared.” And then in collusion with Jane Doe herself, agreed to “just wait a couple of weeks, because you’re going to see a lawsuit soon.” At which point, they claim, their big history-making story was “ready to go” for the moment the big lawsuit dropped on September 16. But then it strangely took another two days to polish off the accompanying article, which dropped on September 18 — and amounted to little more than a bare-bones take-it-at-face-value quick-hit summary of the lawsuit, reflecting virtually no original reporting or investigation whatsoever. Aside from a pre-packaged quote they threw in from the anonymized plaintiff, lamenting that she was “deeply disappointed by the lack of support I received from the student community.” That first article was then followed up with a brave truth-telling editorial published three days later, in which the Student Journalists boldly name the seven alleged Gang Rape defendants. Evidently, this is the kind of journalistic fortitude that makes the professional trauma-informed media class squeal with glee. “So proud of you Cereese. Keep fighting,” effused Julie K. Brown, the country’s premier Epstein Journalist, no doubt inspired by how closely this journalistic excellence mirrors her own — namely, receiving strategically hand-delivered rape claims devised by plaintiff’s attorneys, repeating them at face value, and then acting like it’s some masterful accomplishment of Investigative Reporting to do the PR bidding of the profit-seeking lawyer syndicate. The comments to me from Professor Xaka yesterday indicate that this fictional “Cornell’s own mini Woodward and Bernstein” tale has already been successfully implanted, however, so congratulations to all on that bogus achievement.

As to Kate Manne, some readers might find it contextually relevant to recall a May 5, 2020 article she published in The Nation magazine, declaring that she preemptively “believes” a person who went by the name of “Tara Reade” (one of several aliases) and demanding that everyone else also “believe” this person. “Tara Reade” had just been surfaced by certain Low IQ segments of the media ecosystem as someone who was credibly accusing Joe Biden of a decades-old “rape” — timed right at the tail-end of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary cycle. As I wrote at the time, and has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt in the years since, these “rape” claims by “Tara Reade” were a complete hoax — the ravings of a lifelong scammer and fabulist who hoped that by alleging Biden “raped” her in 1993, she would thereafter be vaulted into media stardom. The gambit was actually right on the money, at least to the degree that she wound up getting some kind of punditry sinecure from the Russian wartime propaganda outfit RT, and then pretended to be persecuted by US federal authorities so she could melodramatically claim “asylum” in Moscow — a farcical journey which culminated, mind-bogglingly enough, in her engaging in a bizarre televised colloquy with Putin himself, whom she had once sexually fantasized about in blog posts, given how attractive she found his shirtless physique. Last I heard, she was sending hallucinatory DMs to other journalists claiming I secretly filmed her in NYC, and was threatening her pets. I have never even seen this person IRL, anywhere, at any time — thank God — and I definitely have never threatened her pets. She’s just a nutty scam-artist. But this is who Kate Manne, celebrated Cornell Professor, had demanded the world reflexively “believe” — and not only that, demanded that Biden be ousted from the presidential race on account of these alternate-reality rape claims.

In fairness to Kate Manne, though, when the “Tara Reade” fan fiction began to definitively unravel a few weeks following her Nation outcry, she begrudgingly amended her initial demand for uncritical “belief,” and conceded that new information had made it so that she “no longer felt sure of what/whom to believe.” However, Professor Manne maintained that she continued to adamantly “stand by” her “original assessment of the evidence, given the facts to hand at the time, and the strong moral and epistemic presumption in favor of believing women.” So her “epistemic presumption” was still to resoundingly “stand by” the evaluative standards that had just resulted in her publicly demanding that everyone join hands to “believe” a total hoax. No word on whether the Professor has updated this “epistemic presumption” with her evaluation of the Jane Doe Gang Rape. Indeed, she just appeared on “Call Her Daddy” — described as “the most-listened to podcast by women” — as the perfect expert guest to discuss recent Gang Rape developments, and took the opportunity to postulate, for instance, an inherent thematic connection between the “Epstein Files” and the “Cornell 7.” I have sent repeated requests to Kate Manne for an interview, discussion, or some other form of interaction while I am here in Ithaca, but have yet to receive a response. I guess I better not show up to her office or anything crazy like that though, since she’s on record recounting how deathly fearful she was one time somebody came and twisted the doorknob leading to her office without knocking first. When she reported this harrowing incident to Cornell Police, she felt they did not take her seriously enough, because they are fundamentally aligned with rapists, or something.

I’d write more about my gregarious interactions with Cornell students and faculty, but I’m heading out soon for some kind of local Ithaca TV interview. I will publish additional video footage in a forthcoming post, available only to paid subscribers, so please fork over the measly $5 if you wanna see it.

Subscribe now

Share

Below is a compilation of “I am Jane Doe” phone calls I’ve received over the past week and a half. It’s only a relatively small percentage, as I haven’t always been in a position where I’ve been able to record. (No one needs to lecture me about New Jersey’s “one-party consent” laws, I’m very familiar.) Calls which I did not record include a handful of guys in their 20s who wanted to just neutrally chit-chat about stuff — not even really specifically about the Jane Doe controversy. Which was kind of interesting. I wasn’t able to record the craziest threat of them all, from when I was driving to Ithaca a few days ago, and a guy named “Ryan” called under a masked number to declare that I was going to be rounded up in the street with all the other “Little St. James enjoyer” pedophiles and executed with a bullet to the head. Then there was James from Michigan who called up and started screaming FUCKING RETARD PUSSY FAGGOT RAPIST, which I unfortunately did not record. I have also not been able to pick up every phone call, as I would’ve probably spent all day doing nothing else at the height of it. Anyway, I’m making the compilation available to paid subscribers only, because hey, freedom isn’t free:

(NOTE: I HAVE JUST UPLOADED A VERSION WITH IMPROVED / ENHANCED AUDIO)

Read more

Everyone around me seems to be behaving normally. Which is odd because I thou…

Read more

A local guy in Ithaca, NY messaged me on Signal a few days ago asking if I would please attend last night’s meeting of the Ithaca Common Council, which is Ithaca’s municipal governance body. I would not have known about this meeting otherwise. I agreed and drove the four hours yesterday from NJ to Ithaca.

Before I arrived at City Hall for the 6pm meeting, the guy, Zach, submitted a request for me to speak during the public comment section, in accordance with normal procedures. This entailed writing down my name on a card and handing it to the clerk. Specifically, I was to speak about a resolution proposed by Mayor Robert Cantelmo to impose a moratorium on all Cornell student events requiring a city-issued permit, so as to purportedly mitigate the “significant threat” of student-led Gang Rape to the larger Ithaca Community, as revealed, purportedly, by the now-infamous Jane Doe lawsuit.

Here is Cantelmo’s September 28, 2026 statement demanding this blanket prohibition on student-organized events, which he frames as a “new policy directive” that he supposedly had “no choice” but to declare:

If you notice, Cantelmo summarily condemns the seven defendants named in the Jane Doe lawsuit as “perpetrators” of heinous “drugging and raping” crimes. And because there is such a “significant threat” posed to Ithaca residents by this scourge of unpunished brutal gang rape, he’s therefore going to decree a “moratorium” in the name of emergency rape prevention, and deploy government power to block students from holding any permit-required events for the next month. The nonpartisan free speech organization FIRE denounced this ludicrous measure, which makes zero rational sense from any angle, and I was planning to speak in opposition myself during the designated public comment period. (As far as I could tell, the vast majority of other people who spoke on the measure were adamantly in favor.)

Here is the concurrent resolution Cantelmo introduced to implement his bold “policy directive” to save the frightened people of Ithaca from the hordes of gang-raping Ivy Leaguers, until such time as Cornell gives some vague “accounting” of how it will more aggressively “prosecute crimes” that Cantelmo has decided ought to be prosecuted:

The portion highlighted in yellow is literally just a straight-up copy-and-paste of the civil complaint filed last month by the huckster money-grubbing self-proclaimed “Epstein Maxwell Survivor Lawyer” Thomas Giuffra, who failed to even ensure that his own client was competently anonymized — having screwed up the redaction of her signature on her affidavit, as well as going on TV to announce that Jane Doe was previously a student at the Hotel Administration school at Cornell, which matches the resume she left up on the internet. Among other witless disclosures Giuffra has recently made, which resulted in it being not very difficult to identify Jane Doe. (See a further explanation I gave this afternoon on NewsNation.) Mysteriously, the civil complaint also left out today’s big evidentiary revelation: that around 36 hours after the purported gang rape, Jane Doe told one of the individuals now accused of being her lead gang-rape assailant that she regarded the group sexual encounter as a consensual “gangbang,” and did not “think we should feel any shame... our body our choice.” Nonetheless, the original complaint — though entirely unvetted, uncorroborated, expressly settlement-seeking — is still what Mayor Cantelmo and the council decided to go with, not just in terms of forming their perceptions of the wider Jane Doe hoopla, but now also integrating verbatim into city governance.

The portion of the resolution highlighted above in greenish blue is not just a totally bogus statistic, but a bogus characterization of the bogus statistic. It claims that over one third of all undergraduate female students at Cornell have reported being victims of “non-consensual sexual contact” — a shocking thing to fathom! Over 1/3 of all females at this bucolic Ivy League university have been effectively raped on campus? Huh?

One of the council members, Robin Trumble, who of course went on to vote in favor of the moratorium resolution, repeated this staggering claim aloud for emphasis: that according to Cornell’s own self-administered survey of the student body, “more than one in three undergraduate women reported non-consensual sexual contact involving force, threats, or incapacitation.” (Ironically, this survey was conducted in the aftermath of the initial news of the Jane Doe incident in 2024, to signal the university’s commitment to sexual safety or something — which has now blown up in their faces.)

At bottom, the claim could not be more ridiculous garbage — another junk stat in a genre absolutely suffuse with them. First, Cornell’s 2025 “survey” from which this figure derives is publicly available; anyone can read the criteria for its finding that over 1/3 of female undergraduates were effectively “raped,” and it definitely does not require that they were ever subjected to “force, threats, or incapacitation.” Contrary to what the text of the resolution and the council-member asserted. But who’s checking, right? At least as per the radically-expanded, ideologically-driven definition of the word “rape” that’s currently in vogue, all bets are off. And rest assured: whatever your intuitive conception of “rape” might’ve been a decade or two ago, that’s gone completely out the window. Because now it can include the following:

Got that? If, over the course of a consensually-initiated sexual encounter, one partner “goes ahead without checking in,” that would satisfy the criteria for “rape,” such that a respondent could answer “yes” to the survey question these people keep frantically citing. That’s where you get the ostensibly mind-bending claim that 35% of Cornell undergraduate females were “raped” in 2025 — or as the dopey administrators who conducted the survey word it, “experienced nonconsensual sexual contact.” Which, yes, is considered tantamount to literal “rape,” according to the predominant school of thought around this issue — and not merely in the more adventurous academic literature, or among the more politically-exercised activists. Nope: According to the current administration of President Donald J. Trump: “Sexual contact without consent is sexual assault or rape.” Which is just a minorly re-worded tweak of the Cornell survey definition. As to the nature of “consent,” the federal government also employs what is essentially the same “affirmative consent” standard as Cornell does, according to the handy reference guide available at WomensHealth.gov. But of course in a university context, these concepts are then inevitably stretched even further to the limit, and from that springs a “survey” that specifies one sexual partner failing to adequately “check in” over the course of a consensual sex scenario can be designated “non-consensual sexual contact” — also known in popular parlance as “pretty much rape.”

Cornell’s 2026 policy as to “Sexual and Related Misconduct” defines “sexual contact” as:

intentional sexual touching, however slight, as follows: (a) touching of the breasts, buttocks, genitals, or anus; (b) making another touch anyone or themselves with or on any of these body parts; and (c) touching another’s body part (including strangulation) for the purpose of sexual gratification, arousal, humiliation, or degradation.

So again, within these newly-decreed ideological parameters, it’s really no exaggeration that the touching of a buttocks in a manner that is not accompanied by what one party deems to have been sufficiently proactive “checking in” by the buttocks-toucher could be defined as “rape.” PLEASE NOTE: I’m not saying it’s “good” for anyone to touch a woman’s buttocks in manner she does not welcome. Indeed, there are many many imaginable circumstances in which doing so could be legitimately “bad.” However, it’s not “rape” — at least in terms of how “rape” used to be commonly understood until about two minutes ago. Newsflash to Zoomers and whoever else might be confused: something can be “bad,” but also not “rape.”

Perhaps this inflated conception of “rape” might partially explain why there’s now believed to be such an intolerable “threat” faced by the citizens of Ithaca (highlighted in red above) — necessitating that the municipal government swiftly impose a moratorium on all permitted student gatherings, so they can’t all get together and gang-rape one another, or perhaps gang-rape unsuspecting townspeople.

Fear not, though, because Mayor Cantelmo and the Council, in their infinite gracious wisdom, have allowed for an exception involving Constitutionally-protected speech. Meaning if you want to hold a political rally or something, and need a city-issued permit, you can still supposedly get it. Yet… what qualifies as Constitutionally-protected speech? That’s a question that has been debated for centuries, and now this podunk self-righteous Mayor has appointed himself the one schmuck who will personally adjudicate it. What’s to stop a fraternity from holding a “political discussion”-themed party, and therefore in theory bypass the “moratorium”? The dearth of actual reasoned thought that went into this resolution might be what is most amazing. They simply don’t care — they just felt they had to show no hesitation in their principled resolve to inflict “accountability” on whoever, for whatever.

So these are some of the points I was going to try to more succinctly make in my planned three-minute public comment, in opposition to the resolution. Here are the notes I jotted down:

The mayor’s September 28 statement summarily denounced the defendants named in the so-called Jane Doe lawsuit as “perpetrators” of “crimes,” namely “drugging and raping,” on the basis of nothing but a wholly untested civil complaint, from which the corresponding resolution to impose a “moratorium” on all student events simply copy-and-pastes.

It’s frankly appalling any elected official would take at face value the lurid, sensational allegations inserted into a lawsuit expressly designed to extract maximum settlement payouts, orchestrated by a notoriously unscrupulous lawyer, Thomas Giuffra, who has failed to even preserve his own client’s anonymity, attempted to issue service on an entirely wrong individual who happens to share a name with one of the seven defendants, and has been recently rebuked over and over again by judges presiding over his similarly fact-impaired lawsuits against the likes of Sean “Diddy” Combs. This the person you’re still taking at face value? Really?

To approve such a rash, ill-considered resolution would be a rank capitulation to mob hysteria and threat inflation, a validation of irrational vengeance mentality, as well an affront to basic civil liberties — including but not limited to the First, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth amendments to the US Constitution. There have been no remotely adjudicated “victims” or perpetrators in this matter, and yet you, Mayor, have conclusorily impugned seven individuals as “perpetrators” of some of the most heinous crimes imaginable. GANG RAPE? Seriously? That you would even consider such a resolution is a disgrace, and you, Mayor, should resign.

But then I was mysteriously not called upon, even though the guy who invited me, Zach, submitted a speaker-request card for me through the normal process. Mayor Cantelmo claimed my card was nowhere to be found when Zach objected — Zach then insisted he’d handed the card in without incident. I frankly assumed Zach must’ve screwed something up, and stuck the card in his pocket by accident, or dropped it, or something. But then, in desperation, Zach scoured through the trashcan next to the clerk’s little table, and eureka, discovered that my speaker request card had actually been crumpled up and tossed in the trash! Wow! Was my name recognized by someone, and therefore my speaking request surreptitiously blocked, given all the crazed TikTok and Instagram videos lately proclaiming “I am Jane Doe” in defiance of me, Michael Tracey? I don’t know. The card-trashing culprit has still not been identified.

Regardless, I chose to speak anyway. First I attempted a parliamentary motion, since that is theoretically how these proceedings are governed — motion to interject, on the ground that I had been improperly denied an opportunity to speak. Mayor Cantelmo replied I was not eligible to speak. I replied that I was asserting eligibility. He ignored and moved on with the meeting agenda. Eventually I wound up just ignoring his dumb little dictates and spoke unsanctioned — the acoustics in the room were perfect for it anyway.

Apparently a brave Cornell Student Reporter on hand recorded a partial clip of my contemptible remarks. Notice these Student Reporters describe me as an “online commentator,” rather than “journalist,” since they’ve now been anointed as the new Guardians of Serious Journalism, ever since they “blew the lid off” the Jane Doe Gang Rape scandal — by taking at face value the civil complaint filed by a notoriously unscrupulous plaintiff’s attorney. They also published an editorial, melodramatically entitled “Cornell Won’t, We Will,” which named the seven young men as gang rapists. (If they’d bothered to actually read the lawsuit they were courageously cribbing from, they would have known it’s not even alleged that all seven of the men engaged in any sexual activity. So their incredible journalistic acumen caused these Cornell Daily Sun staffers to impugn, by name, multiple young men as gang rapists, who are not even alleged to have made any sexual contact whatsoever with Jane Doe.)

Zach went back to City Hall after the meeting, and one of the council members, Pat Sewell, suggested to him it was not a city worker who tossed my speaking request into the trash — he instead indicated that over the course of the five-and-a-half hour marathon deliberations, my request card ended up in the trash can by some other means, perhaps an Act of God. I called/texted Sewell today to request any further information he might be able to share, and he still wouldn’t tell me who threw the card in the trash. I also tried council member David Shapiro, to no avail — at one point during the meeting, he had stood up and ushered me into the hallway, claiming that he personally would hear my statement, since the Mayor was refusing. I said uh, OK, and joined him in the hallway, where I weirdly recited a version of my comment to him one-on-one. Afterwards, however, I decided to just go back in the main room and speak to the entire assembly, given that my speaker request card had just been found deposited in the trashcan by an unknown perpetrator, and because I wanted to address Mayor Cantelmo, so I could call on him to resign. Which I did. And then left.

The resolution ultimately passed 9-1, with the lone dissenter objecting largely on technical grounds, rather than to the substantive purpose of the resolution. So that should give you some insight into the current political climate in Ithaca — they have barred all student-organized events that require a city permit under the auspice of some vague pretension to “accountability,” with no one really caring to spell out whom is actually being held “accountable,” and for what. Instead, they frame it in terms of generic “safety,” of course, as if collective punishment of all students is the most obvious way to go about curtailing an alleged epidemic of Ivy League Gang Rape.

One moratorium-supporting council member, Kayla Matos, thanked the mayor for “taking the needed steps and holding Cornell University accountable for their complacency in Jane Doe’s case, and the rape culture that is among [sic] the campus.” She added that the imposition of this moratorium would somehow demonstrate that some collective “we” is “done normalizing, and even rewarding, reprehensible behaviors — forcing survivors to be brave while their abusers get away scot-free.” Another council member, Jorge DeFendini, declared his support for the moratorium on the ground that something had to be done to non-specifically punish Cornell for allegedly fostering “a culture of domination and entitlement” that “trickles down all the way to fraternities that assault women.”

Again, these people live in some blinkered alternate universe. Anyway, here’s a version of my unsanctioned remarks I found on the city’s livestream:

Subscribe now

Share

Well, that’s what various media organs have been proclaiming in recent days. Hilariously.

So I guess I’ll take CNN, NYT, AFP, Reuters, and the German national broadcaster’s word for it, and hereby take credit for launching the New #MeToo Movement: #IamJaneDoe. Even though I prefer to call it the #ZombieEpstein Movement.

I apparently sparked this historic movement by doing what else — Tweeting. (Which also sparked MeToo back in the day, if memory serves, so I guess that bookends nicely.) What I tweeted was a crowd-sourced solicitation for info about the Cornell Jane Doe — a journalistic method that the NYT et al. use every single day. But me doing it in this instance has apparently changed the world forever. Lol.

Subscribe now

Well, it worked, because I was able to journalistically verify the identity of Jane Doe, after talking to multiple people who knew her personally at Cornell and in her home town, and cross-checking this with court records, university records, sorority records, social media, and more, as well as conferring with various lawyers and fellow journalists. After publishing her identifying info on the night of October 1, I made the independent discretionary decision to take down the info shortly thereafter, not because it wasn’t 100% accurate as to Jane Doe’s identity, but because the objective I had sought to achieve had been achieved: contesting the totally fallacious, untenable premise that any sex-abuse claimant who gets thrown in a melodramatic civil action is entitled to enjoy perpetual media-bestowed anonymity, to assist in their lawyers’ sleazy tactical ploy to extract the largest possible settlement payouts. And which in the case of Cornell Jane Doe has now also triggered renewed criminal investigative activity, followed by the appointment of a Special Prosecutor — which only further strengthens the public imperative for transparency / disclosure. And then there’s the chorus of screeching politicians, NGO activists, corporate-backed “influencers,” and untold others who are out there demanding urgent legislative reforms based on the spectacular “gang rape” allegations promulgated by the anonymized complaint. Governor Kathy Hochul promptly rushed forth to endorse a punitive new “rape” law in the state of New York, to further enhance the ability of prosecutors to throw people in prison for rape stuff.

So the public interest in identifying the litigant who catalyzed all this couldn’t have been more obvious. But given the truly bonkers-level of intense vitriol around this matter, I did not want to bring any more negative attention to Jane Doe herself than was necessary, as I have no animus toward her as an individual, and wish her no harm whatsoever. I even communicated this to her directly over text on Thursday. SO I’LL REPEAT AGAIN: PLEASE DO NOT HARASS JANE DOE, HER FAMILY MEMBERS, OR ANYONE ELSE ASSOCIATED WITH HER.

Meanwhile, I’m still getting deluged with literally thousands of these “I am Jane Doe” missives, such that it would be impossible to actually read through them all, much as I would love to. Here’s one I just picked out at random:

Sandra’s message is comparatively quite mild, which I greatly appreciate. Many, many others threaten me with brutally extreme violence, such as gang rape — curiously enough — as well as murder and so on. I guess these are the fruits of the new “movement” I hilariously spawned? I don’t know, you tell me — I’m not the one who proclaimed the movement’s existence! Though yes, I’ve seen a small sample of the thousands and thousands of videos posted by women, mostly to TikTok and Instagram, in which they stare at one of my Tweets:

Typically these videos are set to the same musical score, “LABOUR” by Paris Paloma, which is a legitimately genius song I hadn’t heard before, and is now dangerously stuck in my head. So I guess that’s one upside to this whole fracas!

Another bemusement is that to underscore how journalistically anathema I am for seeking to publish information plainly in the public interest, Big Kahunas like the NYT are describing me as anything but a “journalist” — since that would ascribe me with far too much Seriousness. So instead, I am a mere “political commentator,” according to today’s important NYT update from John Leland and Emma Goldberg. This despite the NYT describing me before as a “journalist” — but, you know, whatever. USA Today says I’m a “content creator,” which I would rather gouge my eyes out than ever earnestly self-describe as. AFP says I’m simply “a man named Michael Tracey,” which I’ll admit is very funny. NJ Dot Com curses me with the title of “podcaster” — perhaps the one thing that could actually drive me to suicide, unlike the tsunami of “kill yourself” emails currently clogging my inbox. Reuters was at least gracious enough to go with “journalist,” which I so deeply appreciate. I actually just did an interview for “Reuters TV,” and it was fair/reasonable. Not sure when or if it’s coming out.

Alaina Demopoulos of The Guardian continues the subtle derogatory fun, though, and declares me a “content creator and commentator.” By which, of course, she not-so-subtly means I have forfeited my Serious Journalist Card, as I have defied “decades of established journalistic norms for reporting on alleged rape victims.” From whence do these purported “norms” arise, Alaina? Certainly not American law, since in 1971, a television reporter in Georgia reported the name of an alleged rape victim, the alleged victim sued, and eventually the Supreme Court held in Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn (1975) that any state action to prohibit or punish the publication of such information was patently unconstitutional. To the extent that media institutions choose to abide by certain self-censorship “norms,” that’s a function of ideology — namely, their dogmatic adherence to the idea that anyone who ever claims any kind of sexual victimization, and wishes for their identity to not be made public, will have their wishes eternally granted by pliable journalists. Rather than scrutinize whether these demands for secrecy have merit, or are tied to allegations with any credible substantiation, journalists instead have a sacred duty to take all secrecy demands at 100% face value, 100% of the time, and enforce a totally optional prohibition on transparency and disclosure. Even if the anonymized allegations have been orchestrated by skeevy plaintiff’s lawyers to castigate others, BY NAME OF COURSE, as perpetrators of the most heinous, reputation-destroying crimes — such as, say, “gang rape.” And subsequently use this media-enabled anonymity as leverage to extract maximum settlement $ from their well-endowed litigation targets. Don’t take my word for it, though: this is the explicitly-advertised business model of Thomas Giuffra, lawyer for Cornell Jane Doe, as found on his own website.

“Most abuse cases settle, and what a survivor is offered in a settlement depends heavily on whether the institution across the table believes the case will actually be tried if it isn’t resolved,” Giuffra writes, in hopes of soliciting new clients and therefore, of course, big-money business for himself. The idea being: if you hire Giuffra, the entities or individuals you sue will have such fear struck in their hearts, given his sterling reputation in the field and track record of success, that they will be highly incentivized to settle forthwith, and for a very generous sum. “Mr. Giuffra has recovered over $250 million on behalf of survivors of sexual abuse and sex trafficking, including a $14 million trafficking settlement,” Giuffra adds, apparently speaking in the third-person, and under a website URL that is as follows:

https://survivorsofabuseny.com/epstein-maxwell-survivor-lawyer-ny/

Which is a little too on the nose, even for me. Are you enjoying the #ZombieEpstein era yet?

I’m trying to figure out which alleged “Epstein Survivors” Giuffra actually represented, if any, and in what precise litigation. He claims explicitly to have had Epstein-related clients at some point, but I can’t find any evidence of this in the court dockets:

Whereas there’s plentiful evidence of his settlement-seeking pursuits in relation to Harvey Weinstein, Sean “Diddy” Combs, etc. So who knows. You can’t take a single thing this guy says or does at face value — he could just be bullshitting to juice Google searches. But his firm still has dedicated pages up to specifically solicit Epstein/Maxwell-related claimants, teasing salacious speculative “newsy” lawsuit hooks like “Trump’s & Clinton’s Possible Connections” [sic] and “Epstein’s Fascination with Transhumanism & Control.” He also posted a blog post of some kind under his own byline in August 2020, titled “Chasing Jeffrey Epstein Beyond the Grave,” which heralds a particularly demented suit brought in New York State by another notorious huckster firm, Merson Law, purporting to represent a slew of “Jane Does” against Epstein’s estate.

“Jane Doe XIV,” for instance, claims that “in or about 1978, and continuing for a period of time thereafter” — when this strategically anonymized litigant “was approximately thirteen years old” — “Epstein sexually assaulted, abused, battered and raped her multiple times.” There’s not a shred of evidence anywhere amongst the now-millions of publicly-available “Epstein Files” that our favorite deceased financier raped a 13-year-old domiciled in Tennessee in 1978, when he would’ve been 25 years old. Even to go all the way back to the 1970s shows Merson, applauded by Giuffra, had zero scruples about who they were enticing to throw spaghetti at the wall adorned with dollar signs. It could have easily just been another straight-up mentally ill person who never met Epstein, and maybe hallucinated something decades later, but who could still be instrumentalized by these money-grubbing lawyer syndicates to manufacture big paydays. Made all the more possible by their demands for strict anonymity, which severely limited the ability of anyone, including opposing counsel, to evaluate the claimants for bare-minimum veracity.

It’s unclear precisely what happened with these mystery Jane Does circa 2020, but a bunch of their claims ended up getting “discontinued with prejudice,” such as “Jane Doe XVII” from Missouri (???), who claimed some sort of “abuse” in 2001-2002, when “she was approximately 25 years old.” She remains comfortably anonymized, to the best of my knowledge, since her claims were dropped on November 11, 2020. Unfortunately, the lawyers for the Epstein Estate were known to settle with any wackadoodle accuser, so it’s possible the minders for this allegedly adult-victimized claimant just pivoted to some other means of financial extraction. More claims were dropped when the judge finally ruled, on April 5, 2021, that the previously operative confidentiality order was “unduly burdensome,” as the Epstein estate lawyers were supposed to be producing a “key that contains the true names and identifying information for [identified] individuals,” and the sweeping anonymity requirements then in effect would “disturb defendants’ factfinding attempts.” Subsequent to this, a bunch of the Jane Does seem to have transitioned over to the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program, which preserved stringent anonymity. So, that probably means not one, but two Tennessee-based Jane Does who claimed to have been viciously raped by Epstein as young teens in the 1970s and 1980s, despite zero known evidence that Epstein ever even set foot in the state of Tennessee, got their sought-after monetary reward, with the Giuffra-allied lawyers of course receiving a handsome cut.

So that’s the big Epstein Survivor claim Giuffra was promoting in 2020; I would love to ask him which claimant(s) he’s represented individually, as he boasts of doing on his website. Because I’m very confident the answer would be an absolute hoot. I’m likewise very confident he was adamant about preserving any and all anonymity privileges related to these theoretical clients, ideally till the end of time, because otherwise the whole exercise would almost certainly look extremely silly, even to the most true-believing “trauma-informed” victim advocates.

By 2024, Giuffra took a detour into making stuff up about Sean “Diddy” Combs, coupled with a big media tour very similar to the one he’s currently on with respect to Cornell Jane Doe. The prior tour was to hype up the lawsuits he brought on behalf of three anonymous (male!) clients who were accusing Diddy of “rape,” and demanding that their anonymity be preserved forevermore. Giuffra’s demands for anonymization have since been rebuked over and over again by the presiding judges in these cases, and the once-anonymous Diddy claimants have been judicially “doxxed,” to use the now-popular parlance. Feel free to search “Louis Reed” AND “Diddy” for additional information.

As illustrated above, Giuffra’s desperate attempts to keep secret the identity of his Diddy Rape Accusers have been repeatedly rejected, because it’s been ruled that asserting “generic claims” of potential “physical and psychological harm,” or “embarrassment,” is wholly insufficient to override the public’s presumptive interest in transparency in the legal system. Ding ding ding.

Also see these related rulings from Judge Lewis J. Liman:

Something tells me soon enough, the “movement” I allegedly sparked is not going to be happy with how things pan out. But I will always be grateful for the role I allegedly played in this historic moment. Thank you.

#IamJaneDoe

#NoYoureNot

(Don’t miss this joyful phone call I had last night with an especially passionate “Jane Doe” supporter. There’s plenty more where that came from!)

Subscribe now

Share

It’s destructive, and an egregious abuse of the legal system by huckster plaintiff’s lawyers. This practice has to end. Lawyers who seek to monetize this sleazy tactic should have to think A LOT HARDER about the claims they’re willing to throw out into the public domain, using impressionable clients who may not even know what they’re getting themselves into.

So why have I now removed her information?

Because I don’t believe she’s the main “villain” here. I primarily blame the bottom-feeding, media-manipulating, sleazebag lawyers who’ve made a whole cash-grab industry out of this racket.

Thomas Giuffra in particular has a lot to answer for. He’s the central reason for the current debacle.

Given the intense nationwide and global interest in this case, I don’t want to bring any further negative attention to this woman. I don’t believe she ought to be punished or subjected to any retribution or humiliation. I believe a RATIONAL solution is necessary here. Not more character assassination — of her, the seven young men, or anyone else. Truly, that is my genuine view.

I also recognize there are unique factors that must be taken into account given the hugely outsized publicity of this case.

So that’s why I have removed the information. The aforementioned principle has been served: eroding the premise that anyone who claims any form of victimization is entitled to permanent anonymity, even as their lawyer(s) use the courts — aided by a compliant media — to name & shame others for the most heinous of crimes. No matter how lacking in credibility their own claims might be, or contradicted by mountains of other evidence.

That’s all I ever sought to accomplish here. Not to impugn this young woman on a personal level. I have no animus toward her, and never have. I sincerely wish her the best, and hope her life is not defined by this calamity.

I completely stand by the accuracy of what I reported as to Jane Doe’s identity. This is not a retraction — it’s an independent discretionary judgment I alone have made. No lawyers or anyone else have influenced this decision.

Subscribe now

Share

Well, I’m apparently the big trending topic right now on TikTok, over my interest in reporting on the Cornell “Jane Doe” and her sleazy profit-seeking lawyers. One of whom, Thomas Giuffra, somehow made the seamless transition from making stuff up about Sean “Diddy” Combs, and soliciting anyone who ever came within twelve football fields of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell to get a nice fat financial settlement, to now going after an Ivy League university with a very plentiful endowment — supposedly for covering up a Congo Warzone-Style Gang Rape. How noble and altruistic of this hero lawyer. (Who happens to be a male, if you couldn’t tell.)

Because of my journalistic activity on this matter, my family members are currently being bombarded with crazed calls and messages, because numbskulls on the internet think it’s me. (My dad has the same first name.)

They’re also inundating the current owners of my childhood home in West Caldwell, NJ, thinking I live there, which I do not. My parents sold the house in 2022, and I have not resided there for any period of time since 2018.

People are such absolute lunatics on this stuff.

If you want to troll me over my shockingly deplorable interest in reporting on the identity of a claimant in an extortionist huckster lawsuit, troll ME, please. Not others who have nothing to do with it.

I’d be happy to explain how the capricious application of anonymity has been egregiously and cynically misused in recent civil proceedings. For example, here’s a Jane Doe in an Epstein-related matter whose name and identifying information I published in May. Her identity is STILL being shielded by the courts, despite it being judicially ruled that she literally fabricated wackjob evidence, and hallucinated her entire sick tale. That is, she never even met Epstein or Maxwell. She defrauded the court system, and also the DOJ through her repellent cadre of lawyers, one of whom miraculously had to “retire” days after I published my article. And yet, she was still awarded a $2.5 million JP Morgan settlement.

Or how about the lead litigant in the Bank of America / Epstein lawsuit, whose lawyer Sigrid McCawley had frantically argued would be terribly re-traumatized and re-victimized if her identity were ever made public. Or at least, that’s what Sigrid argued from October 15, 2025, when the lawsuit was filed, to August 27, 2026, when Judge Rakoff approved the $73 million settlement. Mysteriously, the dire concerns that were previously raised about protecting this purported victim’s identity, and ensuring she was forevermore a “Jane Doe,” vanished on September 5, 2026 — days after the big $$$$$$ payout was approved, and our lovely “victim” decided to make a voluntary PR rollout, via one of the professional victim industry’s favorite journalists at the Wall Street Journal. Congratulations to “Julia Molchanova” on overcoming her desperate fears of public exposure shortly after becoming an official multi-millionaire.

So yes, I continue to regard it as squarely in the public interest to erode this preposterous norm which says anyone who ever claims victimhood of any kind, even if there’s not the slightest smidgeon of corroboration or vetting — and then accuses others BY NAME of the most sensational, reputation-destroying crimes — is entitled to permanent anonymity by judicial fiat, which then gets further reenforced as a matter of ideological dogma by bamboozled, cowardly media.

Oh by the way, the latest development with the Cornell “Jane Doe” — according to the deluge of leaks now curiously appearing in the New York Times and elsewhere — is that she told Title IX investigators she supposedly WANTED to be gang-raped, so the men could later be charged with crimes? WHAT? Get the hell out of here with this bullshit.

I’m not going to be cowed, sorry. Just leave my family members and other random people out of it.

Subscribe now

Share

I’ve been saying this was in the works for months, but as usual, found myself gaslit by the world!

According to a September 23, 2026 leak in the Wall Street Journal, a federal criminal investigation related to our favorite deceased financier is currently underway.

Subscribe now

My view has long been that the Feds were likely to bring some sort of new federal “sex trafficking” case in relation to Epstein. “How could that be?” you ask, befuddled. “He’s been dead for over seven years!” And the relevant conduct tied to his purported “sex trafficking conspiracy” would have taken place so very long ago!

Well, please recall that Epstein’s status as a decedent did not prevent the government from subsequently charging Ghislaine Maxwell as a co-conspirator in his alleged “sex trafficking” conspiracy. Her trial took place in 2021, and the “conspiracy” posited by the government was alleged to have taken place several decades prior, encompassing conduct that allegedly spanned from 1994 to 2004. This length of time having elapsed was clearly no impediment for the government to press forward with its favored “trafficking” theory.

According to a bevy of recent civil litigation that has gained approval by the courts, Epstein’s trafficking “venture” purportedly continued all the way up to his death in 2019. So a mere seven years elapsing should be a “piece of cake” if the Feds really want to bring some new “conspiracy” charges. Further, designating Epstein’s supposed activity a “sex trafficking venture” creates a multitude of lax criteria for how the government can proceed to construct its case.

Share

Here’s how I discerned there was likely a new Epstein-related federal criminal investigation underway — centered on, but not necessarily at all limited to, his former accountant, Richard Kahn, and former in-house lawyer, Darren Indyke.

First off, I’m one of the vanishingly few maniacs who actually sat through the entirety of their 6+ hour depositions before the House Oversight Committee in March 2026. See here, and here.

Of note is that both the Republican and Democratic staff, as well as at times the actual members of Congress who popped in, were about equally aggressive in their questioning. And arguably, the Republicans were even more aggressive. Which may seem counter-intuitive given the current partisan valence of the wider “Epstein” mania.

Over the course of those many painstaking hours, Indyke and Kahn were pelted with question after question that could easily constitute a “perjury trap,” depending how inventively some theoretical prosecutor would like to go after them.

Perhaps more relevant, though, is how certain questions were framed, and what information the questioners were apparently seeking to extract.

Here’s a notable excerpt where Congressman William Timmons (R-SC) makes a point to show up in person for the Indyke deposition. More than four hours into the proceeding, Timmons drops the cordial formalities, and declares “the American people are pissed” about Epstein. Among the things they’re “pissed” about, claims Timmons, is that “the names” of child sex abusers have still not been disclosed. He also claims Americans are “pissed” because there has not yet been adequate “accountability” imposed on persons who “conspired” with, and were “instrumental” to, Epstein’s alleged continuation of his “scheme” after 2008-2009, when he was released from carceral custody in Florida. Timmons accuses Indyke himself of being one of those persons, and thereby laments that the desired “accountability” has not yet been imposed upon him. He then tries to elicit a bunch of information from Indyke that could plainly be used in furtherance of a potential “sex trafficking” prosecution:

Note that Timmons invokes his prior experience as sex crime prosecutor in South Carolina. Also note that being a Republican, Timmons is likely to have far more of an “open line” with the Trump DOJ than any Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. Thirdly, note that Timmons accuses Indyke of being “part of” Epstein’s purported “trafficking scheme,” including via the making of “false promises” to purported victim women — which echoes the statutory language of the Trafficking Victims’ Protection Act. An element of which is that “commercial sex acts” be facilitated by use of “false promises.” In other words, Timmons is using this legislative inquest to assist in creating the factual predicate for a potential “sex trafficking” prosecution, which he adamantly desires to see forthcoming. Timmons also expresses his view that every adult woman in Epstein’s employ, with the exception of Lesley Groff, is a “survivor” — and opines that Indyke was “instrumental” and/or “complicit” in Epstein’s victimization of these “survivors” through his repellant “human trafficking” enterprise.

There’s also been a flood of recent civil litigation, in both state (NY) and federal court, that likewise accuses both Indyke and Kahn of being co-conspirators in Epstein’s “sex trafficking” operation. See, e.g.:

Sure enough, WSJ says the recent federal criminal investigative activity has been based out of the Southern District of New York. Which is also incidentally where Trump’s November 2025 directive was aimed (see below.) Todd Blanche said on January 30, 2026 that Jay Clayton, then the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York — and who was interfacing with “Epstein Survivors” and their lawyers to impose any demanded redactions on “Epstein Files” — was the point-person “in charge of any potential investigations” related to Epstein.

Other clues:

• On May 29, 2026, a cohort of “Epstein Survivors” associated with World Without Exploitation, the “anti-trafficking” NGO founded by Lauren Hersh — who I hope to share a bevy of startling information on at some point — gathered outside the House Oversight Committee’s interview of Pam Bondi and took questions from journalists. Among the subjects discussed was who could potentially be prosecuted to satisfy these Professional Survivors’ demands for retributive state action. Dani Bensky, a professed Survivor who I also intend to write more about at some point — since she’s evidently become a full-time political activist over the past year — declared to the TV cameras that “there are lots and lots and lots of leads in the files” as to who ought to be prosecuted, especially “regarding Indyke and Kahn.” She waved around printouts of emails purportedly showing that Indyke and Kahn had facilitated money transfers which were integral in Epstein’s orchestration of his “sex trafficking venture.” Bensky is one of the leaders of the full-time “survivor” crew who’ve been relentlessly hectoring Todd Blanche and Kash Patel to prosecute somebody, for something.

Still other clues:

• At a hearing in federal court on April 2, 2026, Brittany Henderson — law partner and now-wife of Bradley Edwards, the leading “Epstein Victim” lawyer — declared to me that there ought to be further criminal prosecutions of Epstein associates. When I asked who she specifically had in mind, she expressly cited “his lawyer, his accountant” — meaning Indyke and Kahn.

Why does it matter who this particular lawyer thinks ought to be prosecuted? Well, her hubby Edwards said on a February 12, 2026 podcast that he was actively providing “information” to the government, since these unspecified government actors had “asked us, you know, who else was involved.” Edwards/Henderson were also actively liaising with the DOJ to implore that certain “Epstein Files” be redacted or removed from the DOJ’s website, on the ground that “victim-identifying information” had been egregiously compromised. And the DOJ — at the direction of then-Deputy AG Blanche — appears to have invariably acceded to these histrionic demands, progressively removing and redacting whatever “files” the outside lawyer consortium was frantically calling attention to.

The context for my April 2 exchange with Edwards and Henderson were some recent curiosities that had appeared on the court docket for the Bank of America class-action lawsuit. On March 10, lawyers for BofA sent a letter to Judge Rakoff declaring it “has now become clear” that a criminal investigation relating to “Epstein’s sex-trafficking venture” was “pending.” The reason the lawyers had pieced together this information was because they were arguing that Rakoff should grant a stay for the BofA civil action, since the pendency of any criminal investigation on materially relevant matters is often cited as basis to hold civil litigation in abeyance. Rakoff rejected this argument, and granted preliminary approval to the class-action settlement on April 2, followed by finalized approval on August 27. (Total amount: $73 million, plus 30% for “attorney fees.” Cha-ching.) Notwithstanding the failure of the BofA lawyers’ argument, some of the evidence for an ongoing criminal investigation they marshaled sure seemed to be at least preliminarily valid:

Blanche did state on January 30, 2026 that among the records the DOJ was withholding in its massive “Epstein Files” production were “anything that would jeopardize an active federal investigation.” Which suggested that some sort of “federal investigation” was indeed “active.” Although Blanche hedged with vague legalese when journalists inquired as to whether an active criminal investigation was actually happening. However, Blanche had gone out of his way to divulge that no files were being withheld on the basis of “national security or foreign policy,” which was one of the exceptions included in the text of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. At the same time, he made no comparable statement in relation to the “ongoing investigation” exception, which was also included in the text of the Act.

Recall this post from Trump on November 14, 2025:

That’s a directive from Trump for the FBI and DOJ to initiate some sort of active criminal investigation related to Epstein, and his purported associations with various individuals and entities, namely high-profile Democrats whom Trump figured would make optimal scapegoats. Edwards denied to me in April that he had direct knowledge of any ongoing criminal investigation, and maintained that the communications with DOJ he’d referenced had only been more general discussions “over the years,” rather than pertaining to any tangible, discrete investigation. Yet we now know from the WSJ leak that an investigation has been underway for some unspecified number of “months.”

Those who purport to be demanding “accountability” via further criminal prosecution have long honed in on Indyke and Kahn as the ripest available targets. Strangely enough, recent “Epstein Files” show us that Denise George, the former Attorney General of the US Virgin Islands, complained to the FBI in 2023 about supposedly being stifled in her own intrepid pursuit of these alleged Epstein co-conspirators. George claimed that over the course of her island-centric “investigation” — which eventually yielded $243 million for a USVI slush fund across at least three separate settlements (Epstein Estate, JP Morgan, Leon Black) — she took the liberty to make certain findings of fact, namely that Indyke and Kahn “were participants in the [Epstein] human trafficking operation.” Which one might think would mean the two men could face some rather severe criminal liability.

George was mostly focused on cash rewards, though. The fruits of which remain conspicuously insulated from public inspection. I’ve had a records request pending with the USVI Department of Justice since November 10, 2025, related to its “historic” 2023 settlement with JP Morgan for $75 million, and can still barely get a response. A separate request for records related to its settlement with the Epstein Estate, dated September 8, 2025, has similarly yielded nothing. Some unknown portion of the JP Morgan sum was supposedly earmarked for “local charities” and “initiatives to enhance public safety,” as well as other generic banalities, according to then-USVI Attorney General Ariel M. Smith. But records which might illuminate the actual destination of those funds have not been forthcoming. USVI seems to perhaps have some sort of archaic Caribbean public records procedure, alien to the rest of the Nation, despite being a full-fledged US territorial holding.

The most I’ve gotten was a May 13, 2026 message falsely claiming I had submitted my request to the wrong entity:

When I replied correcting Ms. Goomansingh, and confirming that I had indeed intended to direct my request to the USVI Department of Justice, since that is the entity which effectuated the settlement in question, I was greeted with (checks calendar) over four months of silence. They also don’t answer the phone at least 80% of the time, and when they do, the person who picks up will inevitably direct you to somebody else, who then also claims they too are the wrong person to ask.

Anyway, there have long been signals pointing to the existence of this federal “sex trafficking” investigation. I doubt a ton of people would have predicted that the Trump DOJ would be seeking to prosecute any Epstein-related matters whatsoever. After all, a huge contrived political controversy for the past year has been their supposed refusal to pursue new criminal investigations that the mass public supposedly craves.

Bear in mind, however: if the period of anticipated prosecution relates to the years 2008-2019, precisely zero of the females understood to be putative “Epstein victims” would have been under age 18 at the time of their claimed victimization. So in other words, this would strictly be an “adult sex trafficking” prosecution — and therefore would have nothing to do with the “accountability” the public supposedly demands in recompense for unpunished, large-scale “pedophilia” atrocities.

Still, the political logic for some federal criminal action is explicable for the Trump Administration. If there’s a new prosecution launched in which Trump himself is not an alleged participant, that could allow desperate Republicans to emotionally proclaim: HEY GUYS, look, the “accountability” you were all in such an uproar about is finally being delivered! (Trump himself would have no conceivable role with anything that transpired post-2008). This could superficially mollify certain segments of the GOP/MAGA “base” who remain disenchanted with the Admin’s handling Epstein-related developments from 2025-present. And who will of course not examine the details with any precision. Rather, they’ll just see cacophonous headlines about EPSTEIN CO-CONSPIRATORS INDICTED or some such, and give thanks to Savior Don for ushering forth this long-awaited justice.

Also bear in mind that Leon Black was just held in contempt of Congress last week by a unanimous bipartisan vote in the House of Representatives. Black is one of the perceived Epstein co-conspirators whom Thomas Massie, for example, has flamboyantly demanded the prosecution of (and pre-judged the guilt of). Relatedly, Black is often alleged to have been the chief financier of Epstein’s post-2008 “operation.” So it would be conceivable for federal prosecutors to attempt to ensnare him in their newly-revealed investigation. The imbroglio that led to the contempt resolution against Black was largely the handiwork of another stalwart Republican, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. Certainly it would behoove Republicans to triumphantly announce that they did right by their constituents, and made sure once and for all that the Epstein affair was resolved through the infliction of harsh criminal penalties.

Democrats would likely also be compelled to begrudgingly cheer. For instance, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) inserted the following demand for vengeance in his August 2026 report: “DOJ must conduct criminal investigations into Darren Indyke, Richard Kahn, Harry Beller and other Epstein aides.” Elected officials suddenly deciding it’s just swell to publicly petition for criminal prosecutions of certain private individuals might be a bit questionable on the merits, but hey, it’s the political climate we’re all currently in.

It also would not be surprising if the concomitant state-based criminal investigation now underway in New Mexico borrows, in some form or fashion, from this federally-tailored “trafficking” theory, although what the NM Attorney General could actually prosecute to that end is more ambiguous.

So anyway, as usual, a hearty congrats to all involved. We can hereby expect “Epstein” to stretch on for at least several more years in the federal law enforcement apparatus.

Subscribe now

Share

On March 5, 2026, Congressman Maxwell Frost, Democrat of Florida, strode to the floor of the House of Representatives, armed with a selection of oversized placards to display for the waiting C-SPAN cameras. While few Americans may habitually watch C-SPAN for their daily fix of hot legislative action, House members are certainly aware that some well-timed footage can be strategically clipped out and posted online, in hopes of stirring a Viral Video Moment which, if calibrated correctly, can bring forth a glorious groundswell of accolades, national media hits, and donations.

Subscribe now

Frost, who was first elected to Congress in 2022 at the ripe old age of 25, and remains the body’s youngest member, soon announced his purpose for seizing the floor that day: he “went online to Reddit, and different websites, to ask folks what I should look at, and what they wanted transparency on, as far as the Epstein Files were concerned.”

In other words, Frost was determined to take full advantage of the Epstein-enthralled uproar that had reached an absolute apex, and demonstrate how in tune he was with the modern infotainment environment, by outsourcing his legislative tasks to the Almighty Algorithm Gods — peace be upon them. “Here today, I wanted to come to the floor to share some of the files that people online have asked me to look into,” Frost declared.

And indeed, you can find the thread he posted on the notoriously crazed r/Epstein subreddit, where he invites the most addled Epstein chroniclers on all the internet to tell him what “files” they deemed most excitable, and desired that he investigate further. The thread is a morbidly useful historical artifact of sorts, as it crystalizes whatever had gone so spectacularly haywire in the cultural, political, and technological firmament circa early 2026.

So out sauntered Frost onto the House Floor, ready to catalogue the top “files” his online correspondents had notified him of, and the steps he’d subsequently taken to decipher any exciting pedo scoops that might’ve been hidden beneath the nefarious DOJ redactions. He began by announcing he’d just gotten done rushing in and out of the DOJ HQ on this Reddit-fueled mission, and was now in a position to valiantly report back with his findings.

Read more

Satanic sex abuse rings, child sacrifice coverups, grotesque cult-like depravities of various stripes — why get too bent out of shape if people still believe in this stuff circa 2026? It’s “nothing new,” right? Humans have always believed lots of weird stuff — including the most gnarly, demented stuff. Given the seemingly limitless human capacity for superstitious thought and harebrained fantasy, beliefs of such kind may simply be an unalterable fact of life.

Well, maybe. But the collateral damage from the “ritual child sex abuse” mania of the 1980s and 1990s is genuinely staggering, and kind of speaks for itself in terms of the prudence of being on the lookout for any signs of its potential re-emergence.

Enter Epstein.

Subscribe now

The more lavish, demonically-oriented beliefs were not especially prominent features of “Epstein Mythology” until earlier this year, upon the mass-release of “Epstein Files,” and the resultant rapid mainstreaming of every extreme, fantastical theory you could ever hope to conjure as to what those “files” supposedly signified. Almost invariably, the wildest of the theories were inspired by snippets of de-contextualized DOJ records that spread like wildfire across social media. From there sprung the utter avalanche of monumentally crazed “content,” often from “creators” you’d never heard of, but who are nonetheless astoundingly popular. Such people argued, for instance — and with supreme earnestness, it appears — that when you really drill down to the heart of the matter, the movie “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999) had just been proven resoundingly real by the “Epstein Files.”

I’ve still never seen the movie myself, but it became a widespread meme that the bizarre occult sex rituals it depicts, apparently carried out by cabals of twisted elites, have been shown not only to be a true representation of our terrifying new reality, but also to accurately portray how society writ large, and perhaps the entire world, is fundamentally governed in furtherance of hidden pedophilic interests. Scenes like these, we were informed, might as well be documentary footage:

Or at least that’s what the masses were told by a fellow named “Volksgeist,” who gravely intoned it in a February 23, 2026 “video essay” which has now received 6.4 million views on YouTube. Set to ominous background music, this fellow declared:

The masked parties, the trafficked women, the implication that anyone who looks too close will be silenced, the idea that the real world operates on a set of rules that ordinary people are never allowed to see. It’s not fiction anymore. If anything, the reality appears like it’s probably far worse.

He goes on to surmise that the most unthinkable of all “narratives” has been gruesomely confirmed: that “powerful people involved in the systemic abuse of children were communicating using words for food as a code.” Much as some tried to dismiss these theories in the past, we now know for sure it “wasn’t crazy at all. In fact, it’s exactly what was happening.” The evidence, he says, is plain as day: “Pizza is far from the only word that gives credibility to this theory. In fact, there are others that are way more suspicious.” He goes on to list these pedophilically implicative foodstuffs: “jerky,” “frozen white tuna,” “grape soda,” “Chinese cookies,” etc.

Presumably, an outsized share of the 6+ million viewers who’ve consumed this incredible content must be younger-ish people, perhaps on the slightly impressionable side, who actually take this guy to be some sort of truth-telling online sage:

And let’s not forget the flurry of TikToks on approximately the same theme, like this one that garnered more than 10 million views in the span of a single month, for blaring out claims such as OMG, SIT DOWN Y’ALL — we’ve just made the wrenching discovery that “babies were killed and eaten” by Epstein and his sick pedo friends. Even worse: they’ve gotten away with it! The proof is in the “Epstein Files”! Or rather, a tiny subsection of files in which mentally ill people are shown calling up the FBI tip-line en masse after Epstein’s death. The mind-bending claims these people made were then duly transcribed by the FBI intake agents, as standard operating procedure — with zero expectation that any of the memorialized ramblings would ever be released indiscriminately onto the internet for TikTok stars to herald as bombshell BREAKING NEWS to pliable teens.

If you happen to have different media-consumption habits, and never would’ve organically come across this kind of stuff, I think it can be difficult to appreciate how ubiquitous it really was, and to some extent still is. And to therefore underrate the effect it’s been having on how large swaths of the public process information about the world. Which then goes on to inform how they develop political views, etc.

It’s probably also worthwhile to cognize this stuff as forming the cultural ambience in which insane, ridiculous things keep happening. Which gets me to the “point” of this article.

Last month, I filed a FOIA request to the Sheriff’s Department of Grand Traverse County, Michigan. Why did I do this? Well, I read a “report” that had just been released by the Interlochen Center for the Arts. The unhealthily Epstein-brained among us will recognize Interlochen as the school that Jeffrey himself attended as a 14-year-old bassoon player, and then went on to donate a bunch of money to as an adult. He was a donor and semi-regular visitor from 1990 to 2003, during which time, prosecutors later alleged, he was also running the most prolific child-sex trafficking operation in recorded history. As you might imagine, this apparent revelation caused a fair bit of disquiet over at Interlochen.

Before this year, school administrators had already conducted multiple “reviews” related to Epstein — in 2009 and 2019 — and made all the obligatory PR statements renouncing him, expressing solidarity with survivors, pledging cooperation with law enforcement, and so forth. But by 2026, this was of course deemed to be nowhere near sufficient. Another “review” was desperately needed — and far more extensive this time. For justice. And accountability. Leave no stone unturned! The preliminary findings were published on July 27, 2026, in a document entitled “Investigation Report: External Investigation of Historical Abuse.” Ultimately, matters pertaining to Epstein (and Ghislaine Maxwell) comprised only a relatively small portion of the “report.” The “investigation” had since broadened out to any and all claims of “historical” sexual misconduct tied to the school and its current or former students. An outside law firm was retained for this weighty endeavor.

“Importantly,” the report notes, “the Investigative Team did not determine whether the conduct occurred as reported.” Right. So from the very outset, the purpose of this “investigation” was never to determine whether anything in particular actually happened. Rather, its purpose “was to seek and document historical reports of abuse in a candid and comprehensive manner, to give voice to the experiences of alums, and to learn from those past experiences.” Whatever that means.

This peculiar investigative effort was overseen by Elizabeth Sanghavi, who describes herself as a onetime “civil rights attorney” for the US federal government — specifically the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. To establish their bonafides, Sanghavi and colleagues made doubly sure to stress the “extensive experience” they’ve accumulated “investigating historical abuse in a trauma-informed and sensitive manner.” If you’re still unfamiliar, the term “trauma-informed” can be considered code for “deliberately empirically non-rigorous” — or “as a matter of principle, accepting at face value anything anyone might care to claim, without the trouble of overly-cumbersome corroboration procedures.”

To assist this grand undertaking, Interlochen administrators promulgated large-scale invitations for all persons ever affiliated with the school to “come forward” and make allegations about stuff. Accordingly, the investigation dealt with alleged conduct that “spanned from the 1950s to the 2010s.” Testimony was sought in relation to “any form of sexual misconduct by an adult affiliated with Interlochen, including physical conduct, non-physical conduct, and/or potential grooming or other violations of professional boundaries.” Lots of time was therefore spent getting to the bottom of “potential grooming” activity that might have occurred multiple decades in the past. Among the “non-physical” conduct that was investigated — a very strange category unto itself — were purported emotional sensations such as “feeling uncomfortable around certain adults.” Over the course of these inquests, the concept of “grooming” — already amorphous enough to begin with — was apparently expanded even further, to encompass “Conduct Characterized as Grooming, Uncomfortable, Inappropriate, or Odd.”

Here are just a few examples of the “conduct” chronicled for historical posterity by these seasoned (and undoubtedly well-compensated) investigators:

Alum 6, who attended Interlochen in the 1960s, said that she, along with other students, ate lunch with Respondent 1 in the cafeteria. Alum 6 indicated that she did not recall Respondent 1 acting inappropriately towards her or kissing her while she was at Interlochen. Alum 6 noted that after she graduated from the Academy, she and Respondent 1 kept in touch, and they began a sexual relationship when she was in college.

[…]

Alum 11 said that when she was at the Camp, Respondent 5 asked her out on a date, took her to his apartment, and then tried to take Alum 11’s clothes off. Alum 11 stated that Respondent 5 “got aggressive,” undid her bra, kept putting his hands on her breasts, took off her dress, and wanted to remove her girdle but that she told him not to and he did not. Alum 11 said that she dressed herself and asked Respondent 5 to take her home.

[…]

An alum stated that starting when she was a camper in the 2000s, an arts faculty member groomed her by being close to her emotionally, “narrowed in” on her, and made a comment in front of her mother that she was really special and was mature beyond her years. In addition, several alums indicated that they perceived certain adults at Interlochen as “creepy” or as “creeps,” without providing specific information about conduct that led to this perception. In addition to the conduct described in this section, although at the time it was standard practice for some arts faculty members to make physical contact with students in class and/or during private lessons to assist with instruction, some alums indicated that this type of touching made them uncomfortable.

It goes on and on like this. Some instances of outright sexual contact are also alleged, mostly from the 60s and 70s, involving music teachers who are now mostly deceased. In terms of Epstein, though, the best investigators could evidently come up with were two conspicuously vague, anonymized claims:

Investigators interviewed six people, including two alumni who reported meeting Epstein at Interlochen more than five years before his first criminal conviction. One alumna reported meeting Epstein and Maxwell at Interlochen and being invited to the Epstein Lodge (later renamed Green Lake Lodge), and that while there, Epstein brushed against her body over her clothes.

We’re not even told the year in which this conduct allegedly took place, because that would be far too “identifying” of the anonymous claimant — a risk no “investigator” dare take. Even though the person making the claim would now have to be in their 40s, at minimum. The authors even refrain from using generic “identifiers” for Epstein-claiming individuals, because “given the national conversation around conduct by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell… it could be clear who these identifiers referred to.” Consequently, “the Investigative Team provides limited details regarding them and the reported conduct.”

However, the report does state that whoever alleged Epstein once “brushed against her body over her clothes” — at the lodge on school grounds he’d funded the construction of — also subsequently went on to accept several plane rides to New York paid for by Epstein. Three of these allegedly occurred while she was still a student at the school, although she accepted at least one more after she graduated. On the trips to NYC, this person “described being in Epstein’s home and massaging his feet and rubbing his back.” However, she describes no explicit sexual contact with Epstein, aside from one instance, on the post-graduation trip, when she allegedly performed a massage, and “he may have asked her to remove her top.” Evidently this episode was not seared enough into her memory that she could be sure of her toplessness one way or another. Indeed, the person “indicated that she did not tell anyone about Epstein’s conduct towards her until decades later.” Perhaps that’s because she never found it particularly remarkable or memorable, until it was impressed upon her, long after the fact, that her forgotten interactions were of such allegedly earth-shattering legal and political importance?

Here’s the real kicker:

Finally, although many individuals who participated in this investigation shared concerns related to Epstein and Maxwell and their engagement with and connection to Interlochen, most of these individuals did not report knowing, encountering, or engaging with Epstein and/or Maxwell… Others reported that although they did not have firsthand experiences with Epstein and/or Maxwell, learning that Epstein and Maxwell were present on Interlochen’s campus at the same time as the alum impacted them and caused them to rethink certain events that occurred there.

Right. As to those who might have “rethought” certain events that occurred at Interlochen, in light of the latter-day public consternation, a plausible candidate could be Nadia Bjorlin, who the Epstein-brained among us will know was one of the four government witnesses called to testify (under a fake name) against Maxwell at her 2021 criminal trial. Bjorlin’s origin story centers on Interlochen: that was where she allegedly first met both Jeffrey and Ghislaine as a young, musically precocious teen. (Her late father was an accomplished violinist.) The timeline gets a bit fuzzy from there, but prosecutors ultimately alleged Bjorlin had been heinously “sex trafficked” from around 1994 to 2002. Where the timeline gets considerably clearer is after Epstein’s 2019 death. Because in 2020, Bjorlin — by then an established actress on the soap opera Days of Our Lives — demanded a combined $75 million from Epstein’s estate and Maxwell. In an August 28, 2020 submission to the mediator disbursing payments from the estate, pursuant to a class-action settlement, her Los Angeles-based personal injury attorney, Robert Glassman, touted that both he and Bjorlin had “been actively involved” in the government’s then-pending prosecution against Maxwell. With the idea being that all the valuable help they provided should entitle Bjorlin to the maximum possible payout. And indeed, she did receive the max of $5 million. (Tax free.) While not yet divulged in any public documents, it’s a virtual certainty that Bjorlin would go on to receive many more millions from the additional settlement funds that were subsequently made available, courtesy of JP Morgan and others.

The dogged Interlochen investigators never specify if they spoke to Bjorlin, but it would seem inexplicable that they wouldn’t have at least attempted to do so, given her unique notoriety as an Interlochen-affiliated Epstein accuser. Shrouding whatever account she might’ve given to these investigators in continued chronological mystery would’ve been imperative to preserve the narrative the government had presented at Maxwell’s trial. Recall, the jurors in that trial spent six days deliberating, so it was hardly an “open and shut” case; some were reportedly skeptical of Bjorlin’s veracity. This would’ve been a big problem for prosecutors, as much of their prosecutorial theory hinged solely on the testimony of Bjorlin, regarding events 25+ years earlier. But as deliberations wore on, the mood shifted when one juror stood up and delivered a dramatic oration to declare that he too had been a victim of child sexual abuse, and implored his fellow jurors to join him in “believing” the government witnesses. (He had falsely claimed on his pre-trial jury questionnaire that he’d never been a victim of any childhood sex abuse. Because if he’d replied in the affirmative to that question, he would’ve been tossed right off the jury.)

In any event, this thespian juror was evidently quite effective with his heart-felt exhortations. Even if it meant convincing the other jurors to set aside whatever lingering doubts they might’ve harbored in view of the slightly awkward evidence that’d been presented at trial, such as that while Bjorlin was an adult actress in LA, she mailed a glamorous “headshot” to Epstein, inscribed with the caption: “Jeffrey — Thanks for rocking my world! You’re the best!!!” Or that until 2002, at age 22, she admittedly continued to take free flights aboard Epstein’s private jet. Or that she initially told the FBI on February 27, 2020 that she “did not recall specific abuse that may have occurred” at Epstein’s storied ranch in New Mexico; she only recalled “going hiking” and “not doing too much… just sitting around mostly.” Only to have the memories suddenly rush back a year and a half later, on the witness stand in November 2021, when she did purport to recall specific abuse in New Mexico. Incidentally, this miraculous recovered memory was very helpful to the government to establish an “interstate” nexus for the “trafficking” charges it was trying to prove against Maxwell.

Anyway, in 2026, Interlochen had arrived at the conclusion that further measures were sorely needed to cleanse itself of the lasting institutional taint of its past association with Epstein. They’d already renamed his donor-funded namesake lodge in 2009, but even the continued existence of that fateful structure was enough to reverberate throughout time with untold traumas. Or something. Thus, it was determined that a ritual sacrifice would be held. For final absolution, the entire lodge would have to be razed to the ground. “The lodge had, over time, come to carry associations that were not reflective of who we are as an institution or the values we strive to uphold,” administrators announced. Due to “associated risks,” which were not specified, as well as “the broader impact on our community,” which was also not specified, the school’s Board of Trustees made the decision to demolish and repent. Have no fear though, because “the demolition was done in close collaboration with local authorities, who visited the lodge prior to demolition to take photos and survey for any evidence.”

That’s where the Grand Traverse County Sheriff’s Department comes in. I was curious what possible “evidence” these law enforcement officials could have obtained from a nondescript cabin that Jeffrey Epstein hadn’t set foot in for more than twenty years, and which in the meantime had been used for routine “lodging” purposes. This symbolistic “healing” exercise — knocking down a perfectly serviceable residential dwelling — is exactly the type of thing that could only be made possible, or perhaps made to appear sensible, by the wider climate of internet-fueled mania bellowing at such intensity around Epstein. Which had given rise to the vague, yet unavoidable impression that any structure which might have once bore his name, or in which he’d spent any time at all, must necessarily be the site of unfathomable atrocities. So it needed to be “razed” — and extirpated for good. Not dissimilar to how Germans purified their lands by razing Nazi-related landmarks after WWII.

I got the police report, photos, and bodycam footage from the bizarre series of visits the Sheriff’s Office made to the frightful lodge on June 4 and 8, 2026. The “incident” to which these officers were responding is categorized in the report as a “Suspicious Situation.” Which is probably true on some level. Their point of contact for the visit was Ned Hartwick, “Director of Campus Safety” for Interlochen, who appears to have been tasked with liaising for this strange side-quest. “I was advised this venue was scheduled for demolition,” writes Detective Luke Anderson in his incident report. “This venue was formally [sic] known as the Green Lake Lodge and prior to this, it was named the Jeffrey Epstein Scholarship Lodge. At this time, this report does not have an identified victim from this venue.”

NOTE: The police report is notated as having been created on August 28, 2026 — three days after I filed my records request. One has to wonder if the officers involved never even bothered to generate any sort of “incident report” concurrent with their actual visit, almost three months earlier.

If you want, you can see the police report here:

Interlochenpolicereport

1.58MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

On the June 4 visit, Detective Anderson apparently walked around taking iPhone photos of the cabin’s interior and exterior. He then went back on June 8, this time joined by Detective Deborah St. Croix, to take additional pics with a more professional camera setup. None of the images I received seem very remarkable, other than to show a perfectly normal, well-kept cabin that it would seem utterly ridiculous to just randomly tear down. But such are the modern superstitions run amok, and given official credence, in solemn recognition of any and all Epstein-related sins, real or imagined. (Semi-amusingly, a few of the photos catch the officer taking selfies of himself in a mirror. Whether this was intentional or not, I don’t know. I choose to assume it was intentional, for amusement’s sake.)

The bodycam footage I was given, filename “Suspicious.mp4,” likewise reveals little of obvious import. It was recorded June 8, apparently on the big return visit. Present that day was the accompanying female officer, Detective St. Croix, who the Grand Traverse County website describes as a “Crime Lab / Evidence Technician.” So this probably would’ve been quite an unusual expedition for her, as the nature of the “crime scene” she was supposed to be inspecting, or even the “evidence” she was supposed to collect, was quite enigmatic. Nonetheless, she diligently unloaded a bunch of heavy-duty audio/visual equipment from her car, which she rigged up to an iPad. The twosome of detectives then casually stroll around the premises for about 10 minutes, cracking jokes and chatting. At one point, the male detective does mention he was “creeped out a little bit” by a bedframe he saw propped up against a wall in the basement. The onsite liaison, Ned Hartwick, clarifies this is just “storage.” He also adds that Interlochen had been using the fabled lodge as a “hotel”-type facility for the past several decades. The detective comments: “It’s real easy, in something like this, to let the mind wander.”

Soon enough, mission accomplished — the structure was promptly “razed” on June 16 or thereabouts. Hopefully a ceremonial dance was performed, the earth salted, and any debris thoroughly incinerated, with the ashes spread across nearby Lake Michigan.

So… there you have it. Congrats to all involved. Another timeless example of your tax dollars hard at work, pursuant to whatever weird nationwide ritual is going on here.

Subscribe now

Share

Two decades ago, a somewhat infamous July 2006 poll found that 51% of Democrats believed the Bush Administration either “assisted in the 9/11 attacks” or knowingly allowed it to happen.

These beliefs correlated with regular use of the internet to consume news and information, as opposed to more “mainstream” sources.

Age, therefore, was also a strong predictor: younger people were considerably more likely to believe the 9/11 theories, while older people were considerably less likely — consistent with who tended to use the internet at the time.

In the ensuing 20 years, though, almost everyone, regardless of age, now receives some or most of their news / information from online and/or social media. It’s become by far the most dominant medium in shaping people’s views about current events.

This has coincided with partisan polarization increasingly coming to be commingled with the most maximalist, online-fueled theories.

Case in point: a February 2026 poll found 91% of Democrats believed “Donald Trump is trying to cover up Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes” — 86% believed Trump was personally “involved” in those (unspecified) crimes.

This can be placed in the same rough continuum as a November 2018 poll which found that 67% of Democrats believed “Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President.”

Don’t get the idea it’s a Democrat-specific phenomenon, though.

Relatively few Republicans (18%) believed the 9/11 theories in July 2006 — but this can be understood mainly as a function of the standard partisan polarization effects. Almost certainly, the numbers would have been flipped if, say, it was Bill Clinton still in the White House at the time, rather than George W. Bush.

In a February 2014 poll, 66% of Republicans stated their belief that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. (A theory notoriously promoted, and later retracted, by Trump himself.)

This was after five or six years of mounting negative polarization against Obama. Just like Dems’ views on Bush and 9/11 had peaked in 2006, after roughly the same length of time for negative polarization to mount against the incumbent president.

And with Trump, it’s been over a decade of beating red-hot vitriol — Dems will believe almost anything negative about him.

So, in conclusion... happy 9/11.

Subscribe now

Share

I didn’t expect to get sucked into such a Gloria Steinem rabbit hole, but there’s just too much irresistible stuff here, and the best time to surface it is while the reverential tributes are still coming in hot and heavy.

Subscribe now

Her official New York Times obituary is truly a boundless source of wonder. For instance, without a hint of irony detected, it reports that Steinem once famously titled herself “an entrepreneur of social change.” I find it difficult to imagine ever encountering anyone, regardless of sex, who would earnestly introduce themselves as such, and not feel a giant wave of sardonic disbelief and/or existential despair wash over me. “Good evening Ma’am, I’m an entrepreneur of social change. Make sure to follow me on LinkedIn.” But it’s ridiculous self-descriptions such as these that organs of mainstream American liberalism have decided to accept with total credulity when it comes to Savior Steinem. Because we mustn’t forget, per NYT, that she “helped usher in sweeping cultural transformations across virtually every facet of American life, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom.” How did she manage to finagle herself into all these vaunted “rooms,” anyway?

It certainly couldn’t have been by utilizing her uniquely penetrating insight, or impressive original thinking. Because if you survey enough of Steinem’s oeuvre, what may stand out the most is how banal, cliched, and uninteresting it invariably is.

Note: this observation is distinct from saying “I disagree with her.” It’s very possible for someone to have thoughts, opinions, and theories that one might disagree with, but still find edifying on any number of levels. In and of itself, disagreement is no good reason to peremptorily discard the work of others. A much better metric, I’ve found, is whether the work reflects originality — if any useful insights can be gleaned from it, or other kinds of value derived, above and beyond the narrow question of whether one might personally “agree.” But in Steinem’s case, it’s difficult to find much of anything that could conceivably fall into this category.

Here’s a telling example. In her latter years, she came up with a weird dogma about how “women of all races and men of color” share inherent political interests, and are implicitly in coalition with one another against the repressive monopolizing power of white men. This came to a head during the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, when the two top candidates squaring off were a white woman and black man, and many vituperative debates ensued between their respective supporters. So as a seasoned Grand Poobah of the Democratic Party, Steinem saw fit to pronounce from on high how everyone should go about soothing these nasty intra-party tensions.

In February 2007, she rattled off one of her many timeless NYT op-eds, and repudiated what she called the “irrelevant debate” that was raging over the relative virtues of Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama. The idea was that all Steinem-minded Democrats should join her and vaguely embrace both candidates. This gave no insight whatsoever into how any Democrat should decide which candidate to actually vote for — kind of the whole point of a primary contest. As historical basis for her vague injunction, Steinem purported to reprise a well-known quote from the 1940s: “The parallel between women and Negroes is the deepest truth of American life.” This was supposed to resolve any consternation between Obama and Hillary supporters: both were equally suitable, Steinem insisted, given the “deep truth” of their intertwined destinies. She updated this dogmatic precept in 2019 to a newfangled “intersectional” platitude: “There’s no such thing as trying to uproot racism without also uprooting sexism, and vice versa.”

Ultimately, Steinem’s warmed-over 1960s pretensions to “radical” activism/critique were subsumed into the supremely boring prerogative of preserving internal Democratic Party cohesion. In the 2007 column, she made a slew of dubious empirical claims about this purported natural political alliance between white women and blacks. Maybe the actual “source” was just her own head? “White women have been more likely than white men to support pro-equality candidates of color, and people of color have been more likely to support pro-equality white women.” First of all — [citation needed]. Second of all — this is just a bunch of hooey, signifying nothing.

It’s not even that her argument, such as it can be ascertained, is necessarily wrong — though the NYT sure let her get away with a doozy of an unsourced statistical assertion. Still, one could theoretically imagine an argument along these lines that was at least compellingly rendered, or persuasively crafted, or which reflected some measure of novel observation/insight. But with Steinem, one finds over and over again that she really just churned out a steady stream of hackneyed tedium. Which then got received by Default Libs as though it were awe-inspiring wisdom — delivered from the sacred mountaintop of another intellectual dimension. If you take a cold hard look though, she seldom had anything interesting to say. (Which I would not reflexively say of all well-known “feminists” — whether or not I personally agreed with them.) At the very least, the caliber of her political/cultural “analysis” is nowhere near commensurate with the overblown effusive stature she’s granted by NYT obituarists and other disciples.

Mouthing weird platitudes to maintain Dem racial and sexual unity for purposes of party coalition management during a contentious presidential primary is not some profoundly radical endeavor, either — if anything, it’s more like a bland fundraising tactic. Because that’s ultimately what Steinem spent much of her life doing: soliciting donors to keep afloat her sprawling “women’s movement” NGO apparatus, which was running on reputational autopilot since the 1960s. Her “brand” was typically sufficient for deep-pocketed “friends” to keep forking over cash to continue this “work.” Circa 2007-2008, alienating or embittering half of the Democratic Party donor base would not have been productive to that end. So she authors this wholesome “unity” op-ed, on the pretense of some convoluted theory for why blacks and white women must unite to secure their alleged joint interests. This likely paid dividends in terms of her fundraising receipts; indeed, in an obituary pre-interview she gave to the NYT, just one year later in 2008, Steinem reflected on her “career” as a “writer, organizer, and fundraiser” — the latter almost certainly the most determinative facet of her day-to-day “work.”

Although it should be said that by 2016, she did decide to temporarily abandon her coalition-management impulse, and infamously ridiculed Young Progressive Women for overwhelmingly supporting Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in that cycle’s Democratic primaries. According to Steinem, the girls were only doing this because they were boy-crazy: “When you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys?’ The boys are with Bernie.” A backlash ensued, and she gave a thoroughly unconvincing “apology,” claiming she “misspoke.” But she never actually clarified what she supposedly “misspoke” about, or had regretted saying on the merits. It was another odd instance of Steinem playing the role of de facto cookie-cutter politician, who every now and then would make a “gaffe” she had to clean up. There was no good reason to think she didn’t actually believe the underlying point of her remark denigrating young women. After all, she’d basically said the same sort of thing before.

In 2000, she was dispatched around the country as one of the lead surrogates for the notoriously exhilarating Al Gore presidential campaign. In The Nation, Alexander Cockburn recounted a last-minute “carpet-bombing by flacks for Gore like Gloria Steinem” across the state of Oregon, where polls were looking increasingly precarious. (Indeed, Gore only ended up winning the state by a fraction of a percentage point over George W. Bush.) In this pre-election Dem crisis mode, Steinem was tasked with striding through university towns to hector college-age supporters of Ralph Nader, whom the Gore operation was worried (not unreasonably) could siphon off just enough votes to tip the election to Bush. On the campus of UCLA one day, Steinem scolded: “There is a reason why Nader’s support is overwhelmingly white and middle class and more male than female. It’s because these are the people who do not suffer as much if Bush were in the White House.” This wasn’t quite identical to her later “Bernie Bro” attack, but it was somewhere in the same ballpark — deriding young voters’ candidate preferences on the basis of their identity traits. UCLA’s student newspaper reported Steinem proclaiming that the 2000 election would perhaps be the “most important of her lifetime.” And this made it all the more troubling, in her mind, that “Nader disparages the women’s movement.” By election eve in November, she had the obligatory dire op-ed ready to go, and declared without reservation that “there has never been in my lifetime an election that was more important.”

Steinem’s self-description as “entrepreneur of social change” was apt here, because she had clearly mastered the “politically entrepreneurial” art of bloviating that every US election in which she had a personal/professional stake was “the most crucial election in my lifetime” (Bush vs. Kerry 2004). She once wrote in a fundraising appeal, “I want to alert you to an emergency” — with the “emergency” being the 1980 Senate election in South Dakota. She even managed the impressive feat of declaring much the same about the 1996 election — yes, the one between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, maybe the most objectively low-stakes presidential election in the past century, which she said was “the most crucial and frightening [election] in my lifetime.” This was in response to a student interviewer at the University of Iowa who had asked her: “What is the newest battle for feminism?” Her stock answer was always the same: comically inflate the enormity of every US election coming down the pike, as a service to her friends in the Democratic Party high command! Indeed, Hillary Clinton was just on “Morning Joe” today (September 10) reminiscing about how she’d been “fortunate enough to know [Steinem] over a lot of years… she was a great friend.” More than a “friend,” though, Steinem was a dedicated partisan functionary for the Clintons and every other conventional Dem figure — a key node in the party’s adjacent professional class network. It was from this vantage point that Steinem would launch into her five-alarm-fire haranguing whenever the next election approached, and invoke her Top Woman Leader credentials to lecture weary voters about the existential necessity of installing Dems to power.

“I’ve never, ever, ever, in my very long life, seen an election that is more crucial,” Steinem said of the 2016 election, even diverting some of her own fundraising prowess to the cause: “The Clinton campaign also is sending out a number of surrogates for fundraisers. Capricia Marshall, the former US Chief of Protocol, will headline a fundraiser at the Beverly Hills home of entrepreneur Victoria Jackson on Friday, with Gloria Steinem co-hosting. Tickets are $1,000 per person.” Albeit with slightly deflated enthusiasm, given that it was Joe Biden rather than Hillary, she still kept up the refrain four years later, dutifully announcing that the 2020 election was “the most important election in my lifetime, ever.”

This long-term banality even extended to what was supposedly her most fervent of all issues: abortion. After the Supreme Court overruled Roe vs. Wade in 2022, Steinem was summoned to Woman Oriented Podcasts to say things, such as that without abortion, “there is no democracy.” She bolstered this contention with the standard all-purpose historical parallel: “The first thing that Hitler did, as you know, when he was elected, was to declare abortion a crime against the state... Mussolini followed suit.” In addition to being historically inaccurate in all manner of ways, this also suggested a curiously half-baked worldview, and even a stunted grasp of the relevant policy debate. To posit that abortion is somehow interchangeable with “democracy” — and that any curtailments to abortion access is tantamount to Hitler — isn’t even a good argument in favor of abortion! And yet, these were still the words of wisdom sought by the Associated Press when the Supreme Court decision came down, because who else would they ask to opine on behalf of all concerned women. Steinem obliged by declaring there would henceforth be “no democracy” in the United States, due to abortion no longer being a protected “right” under the federal Constitution. Even though it remained readily available in jurisdictions such as the one Steinem had continuously lived in (New York) since the 1970s.

Her full June 2022 quote to the AP was as follows: “Obviously, without the right of women and men to make decisions about our own bodies, there is no democracy.” There is nothing “obvious” about the logic conveyed by that sequence of words. It’s really just a bunch of cliches strung together, which may sound superficially nice to certain readers who already spiritually agree with the “cause” or the “movement,” and don’t believe the topic of abortion requires any further thought. But most conspicuously: it’s not even a decent argument for preserving the legality of abortion! Assembling some buzzwords to galvanize the already-converted, stuck in some obsolete Ms. Magazine timewarp, is arguably counter-productive to efforts at pro-abortion persuasion.

But fine, she was pretty old by then, so maybe we give her a pass. What about her origin story?

Steinem’s reputedly landmark Ms. Magazine only came into existence as an insert of New York magazine, we learn from the NYT obituary, thanks to the largesse of an apparently licentious male named Clay Felker — an editor whom the NYT describes as “Ms. Steinem’s mentor.” We’re informed Felker once said he gave Steinem an early writing assignment (circa 1960) because she had “great legs.” In any event, Felker would go on to finance and promote the creation of Steinem’s media venture, which soon spun off into its own standalone magazine. Whatever exactly went on between Clay and Gloria — he aged 35 at the time of the “nice legs” editorial assignment, she aged 26 — it sounds like something that in the 2010s could’ve easily been denounced as “problematic,” and even warranted a presumptive “MeToo” excoriation. (“Mentorship”? Heh.)

And yet… so what if Gloria may have used her physical beauty to get ahead? We all have to play with the hands we’re dealt? I wish I had some “nice legs” to show off when I was 26 and trying to convince magazine editors to take my forlorn article pitches. Maybe they would’ve even funded me to launch a new publication altogether! So I can’t begrudge anyone making the most of their God-given assets. But at the same time she was receiving these apparent benefits, Gloria also bewailed her larger womanly plight, including in May 6, 1970 testimony before the US Senate that she’d been invited to give for some reason — not long before she’d been revealed as a CIA-subsidized “youth” activist. “During twelve years of working for a living,” Steinem lamented at age 36, “I have experienced much of the legal and social discrimination reserved for women in this country” — such as exclusion “from professional groups,” and refusal of “writing assignments on so-called ‘unfeminine’ subjects such as politics.” But most damningly, she was “denied a society in which women are encouraged, or even allowed to think of themselves as first-class citizens and responsible human beings.” This was after 12 years subsisting as freelance writer in New York City, by way of her immersion in a media clique that for whatever its “unfeminine” faults, seemed to work out rather well for her in the end, despite the non-enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment.

For an account of Gloria’s blessed trajectory, we can look to a Publishers Weekly profile of her life and times from 1983. (One gets the sense that she might have been constantly profiled for being a person who was constantly profiled):

Another turning point, this one momentous not only for Steinem alone, came in 1972. She, Jane O’Reilly and others had tried unsuccessfully to raise money for a new, collectively run, slick feminist magazine. Clay Felker came to the rescue, offering to put up production costs–the staff would all work gratis–for a first issue of the magazine. In addition, New York’s 200,000 copy special year-end double issue would contain a 30-page excerpt from the new magazine. The first issue of Ms. itself, which contained over 100 pages, had a print run of 300,000 copies and came out in January 1972. “We called it Spring so that it could lie there on newsstands for a long time.” They needn’t have worried: within eight days all 300,000 copies of Ms. had been sold. The magazine was launched.

What a fortuitous spell of success! Even in an era where obtaining opportunities might have required women like Gloria to navigate a more openly “sexualized” workplace environment. She somehow found this success before she subsequently helped bring the term “sexual harassment” into the popular lexicon. Which may be a bit ironic, because if the “anti-harassment” strictures she would later champion had been in place at New York magazine in the 1960s, it may well have precluded her own advancement. She seems to have felt no particular need back then to catastrophize the “legs” remark from her older male superior — the same one who went on to enable the founding of her own proprietary media enterprise.

But fast forward to 2019 and Post MeToo, and Steinem was decrying the mere prospect of any workplace sexual tension on the grounds that it “turns work into prostitution; in order to continue to get paid you have to put up with this unwanted sexual attention.” Her own endlessly profiled life would seem to belie this simple assessment; perhaps her past allure as an attractive, resourceful young lady was something she was able to skillfully leverage? And why shouldn’t she have? It worked! Good for her! Again — there but for the grace of God go I.

For anyone who might be stupidly getting the wrong idea: no, none of this is to justify any legitimately crude/boorish male behavior that can cross the line into something legitimately “harassing,” or even at the far-extreme, predatory. But to pathologize any latent “sexual” undertone in or around a workplace as something that must be inherently woman-subjugating, and needs to be ruthlessly stamped out with HR bureaucratic dictates, or brute-force litigation, perhaps did not lead to the wondrous outbreak of “empowerment” that Steinem and her admirers seem to imagine it did. For the most part, rational adults of both sexes should probably be assumed capable to navigate any “sexual” dynamics that might arise without the whole thing having to automatically blow up into a soul-crushing fiasco. In the odd cases where there’s something genuinely abusive at issue — sure, other measures might have to be taken. But with more run-of-the-mill stuff, like the fateful “legs” comment to which Steinem was once shockingly subjected, it should tell us something that she apparently never thought it warranted a blistering “call out,” or internal reprisal — and may have even been something that she smartly used to her advantage. Indeed, her widespread depiction as a “pretty girl” in the 1960s and 1970s is framed by the NYT obituary as a degrading roadblock, but… it doesn’t seem to have blocked her off from much? Kind of… the opposite? Yeah, she was an attractive young woman! Great! This probably conferred her with certain advantages and disadvantages — likely weighed quite a bit more heavily toward the “advantages.” As Frank Sinatra once said: “That’s life.”

But it also may be useful context when pondering how implausible it seems that anyone could have actually looked to Steinem for incisive political insights. More plausible: people looked to her because she was “Gloria Steinem,” and therefore her utterances were accorded a presumed sagacity. Which stemmed from the grand “Leader of Women” accolade she was bestowed with early on — by men! That’s how her NYT obituary recounts it, anyway: With the rapid success of Ms. Magazine, “the male-dominated news media all but anointed Ms. Steinem as the [women] movement’s spokeswoman.” And she essentially just coasted from there!

Perhaps the only semi-interesting, or at least amusing thing I’ve come across so far about Steinem is that in 2009, our late financier friend Jeffrey Epstein was informed (by Ghislaine) about an upcoming reception for Manhattan DA Cy Vance — featuring none other than “special guest” Gloria Steinem. Ghislaine asked Jeffrey what his thoughts were about this event. Did he even care? “No,” Jeffrey replied, without elaborating. Steinem later claimed after Epstein’s death that she always “thought we should have a street demonstration” in front of his estimable townhouse, located just a few blocks away from her own stately brownstone on the Upper East Side. But she strangely never got around to it.

Subscribe now

Share