How a crazy “Jane Doe” scam exposes the fraud at the heart of the “Epstein Survivor” machine
Often it will be suggested that to express misgivings about the defamatory maelstrom of Epstein hysteria, one must be suspiciously concerned with the reputational interests of “powerful elites.” Because even if certain “elites” might get wrongly impugned as child-sex criminals from time to time — what’s the big deal? They have plenty of power, money, and connections to comfortably withstand this minor inconvenience. So why waste one’s breath lamenting their woes, which they probably deserved in some deeper sense anyway? After all, members of the so-called “Epstein Class” can be assumed “spiritually” guilty of something really bad, even if the specifics of a particular child-sex crime allegation might not be totally accurate. If you find yourself overly bothered by this besmirchment of “elites,” you must have some suspiciously warped priorities.
First off, let’s set aside how insane it is to rationalize a tornado of unrelenting slime, spewing forth noxious falsities in every direction, so long as those on the receiving end of the splatter can be deemed sufficiently “powerful.” Such a logic could only be condoned if one has decided to repudiate the very aspiration of truth-seeking, and no longer even pretends to value fidelity to facts. If you’ve got some grievance with a particular “elite,” or even with some under-defined group of “elites,” you are perfectly entitled to enumerate those grievances however you see fit. But if your grievances are so well-founded, why would you be reduced to just making stuff up? Why would you go out of your way to tolerate a tsunami of pure sleaze? Shouldn’t there be tons of legitimate material available for you to predicate a reality-based critique on, aimed at whatever elite(s) you claim to most revile? Well, evidently not, if you’ve set about rationalizing the massive defamation-tornado — perhaps because you find the fallout “funny,” or socially/politically pleasing in some way, per whatever half-baked theory you’ve cobbled together. If that’s the case, you’ve shown you have no problem with the lunatic second and third-order effects, namely: infesting the public mind with loads of demented garbage, thereby ensuring any critique of “elites” that might gain popular traction will be mired in crass delusions, and therefore not much of a reasoned critique at all.
For now, though, let’s leave aside the question of whether or not we should care about the capricious reputational damage inflicted on “elites” at the hands of Epstein mania. That’s a question easily bracketed at the moment. Because what seldom gets anything close to enough emphasis is that the collateral damage extends far beyond the opulently well-monied, or politically well-connected. Plenty of “normal” people have found themselves slimed with incendiary filth, and with little recourse at their disposal. The four random men who were falsely implicated in child sex crimes by Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna — including an auto mechanic and an IT technician — have still yet to receive so much as a piddling apology from the two Congressmen most responsible for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and the resulting mass production of “Epstein Files” by the DOJ. A great many more “non-elites” could be cited as among those similarly pelted with slime on account of some tenuous Epstein “connection” that some nutbag internet sleuth tried to invent.
Which brings us back to Kristy Makuta and the monumental “Jane Doe” fraud — chronicled by me in Part One — that on its own could easily rank as one of the craziest cons in all of Epstein lore. Crazy enough that lawyer Jeanne Christensen of the extortionist Wigdor firm — who formerly represented Kristy before the fraud was conclusively exposed — had zero compunction about asserting, to take just one creepy example, that Kristy “had sex with Larry Summers” — as though this had been unassailably confirmed after exhaustive rounds of due diligence. In reality, no such due diligence was performed at all. If anything, the opposite. To somehow make matters impossibly worse (this story always manages to get worse), Christensen was so shameless as to make her assertion not in some casual off-hand chat, but in written communications she proactively transmitted to federal prosecutors, with the unsubtle objective of coaxing the Feds to bring criminal charges, on the supposed strength of evidence that was later found, in an April 23, 2026 ruling by Judge Jessica Clarke, to have been brazenly faked. This necessitated the imposition of severe sanctions against Jeanne Christensen individually, as well as her entire rotten Wigdor law firm, and even Kristy Makuta herself, aka “Jane Doe,” given her present capacity as a pro se plaintiff. But there should never have needed to be a belated court judgment for anyone anchored in minimal sanity to recognize that Kristy’s claims, and the evidence supposedly proffered to substantiate them — phony sonogram images, mocked-up decades-old “diaries” — were a whirlwind of unvarnished lunacy. That should’ve been painfully obvious from the very first second, at least if one was not blinkered by such deliriums as “trauma-informed” ideology, or the insatiable lust for extracting gargantuan financial payouts.
The wholesale abolition of critical discernment is what makes the Kristy episode all the more remarkable, and indeed disturbing. Because it’s one thing to castigate Larry Summers; he’s been through the ringer already on Epstein stuff. You can see why ideologically-captured lawyers and prosecutors might’ve been inclined to blithely accept the premise, however unfounded, that Summers had committed grave child sex crimes, since he did in fact have a well-documented relationship with Epstein, and would also himself qualify as an “elite.” But here’s where it gets much sicker: Christensen and her law enforcement colleagues were just as willing to malign a bunch of consummately “normal” people, with zero public profile or stature whatsoever, as perpetrators of the most heinous child-sex villainy imaginable, based on the very same crackpot evidence that should’ve been discounted by any sane observer in roughly two seconds. Those consequently slimed include Kristy’s former cheerleading/dance coach, her biological parents, her late grandfather, and other “non-elites” who unwittingly got thrown into the steaming pile of slime.
Thanks to the confabulatory tales confected by Kristy, in concert with her so-called “adoptive mother,” Amy Duffey, and her now-sanctioned lawyer, Jeanne Christensen, a random woman who once ran a cheerleading/dance studio for high school-age girls in Northern Virginia has now been traduced as someone who brutishly “groomed” and “sex trafficked” a helpless autistic child with a rare form of Down Syndrome. Christensen outrageously told federal prosecutors that this unsuspecting woman “forced [Kristy] to perform sexual acts with adult men since she was very young,” and from there it was only a short step to force her into the hellish pedophile captivity of Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, Leon Black, and about two dozen other culprits. Worse yet, Christensen claims to have eventually pried out of Kristy, after many intense lawyer-client recovered memory sessions, the revelation that her dance instructor/cheerleading coach “handed [Kristy] off to Maxwell and Epstein” at the direction of Kristy’s biological mother.
I won’t name the dance coach here, but for the record, she is completely exposed in the DOJ’s repository of “Epstein Files” — full name, date of birth, phone number, residential address, name of partner/spouse, employment history, maiden name, etc. And consequently, her info is splashed all over the internet for the rest of time as somebody state and federal law enforcement suspected of the most grotesque child sex crimes. Kind of interesting, isn’t it, who does or does not receive the courtesy of generous redactions in these “files,” so as to shield their “identifying information” from the glare of frothing online hordes? Because this random woman certainly did not receive any such courtesy, despite by all accounts being a totally innocent “victim” of what amounts to a deranged, systematic fraud — perpetrated with the connivance of government agents who are supposed to exercise bare-minimum discretion with the awesome powers they’ve been granted to destroy people’s lives, whether by throwing them in prison or nuking their reputations. Instead, this confirmed female victim has been paraded for all to see, while fraudulent “Epstein Survivors” such as Kristy continue to enjoy indefinite anonymization, per edicts from the DOJ, Congress, the media, and the courts. Even prosecutors involved in the absurd hustle are mostly redacted in their humiliating email exchanges, though I was able to identify some using my expert computer skills. Which does not negate the underlying fallacy of the redaction criteria: that anyone who can claim Epstein-related “victimization” is shielded from public scrutiny forevermore, lest they be “re-victimized” — and even if their “victimhood” is judicially ruled to have been based on a slew of ridiculous fabrications. Meanwhile, “normal” people like this dance instructor, who were appallingly maligned along the way, possibly unbeknownst to them, are freely un-redacted and now available for every crank on the internet to “investigate.”
Let’s recall the “evidence” we’re talking about here:
The above “diary” is the slam-dunk evidence that lawyer Jeanne Christensen was so eager to inform federal prosecutors she had successfully “decoded,” and was therefore in a position to report Kristy’s biological mother for sadistically orchestrating her own daughter’s brutal rape, because according to these “decoded” messages, the mother and father were both knowingly in the vicinity of Epstein’s NYC townhouse when Kristy was delivered to Leon Black for sex-servitude, at which time Black psychotically bit off chunks of Kristy’s genitalia and rammed sex-toy devices into both her vagina and anus — splattering blood across the carpet in Epstein’s chamber. Again, this was said to have occurred while Kristy’s parents waited nearby, sneering with delight at the gruesome scene, because they were about to get paid for “trafficking” their own daughter for a night of crazed child-sex bondage.
Christensen told prosecutors that after Kristy became upset about Leon Black viciously raping her, she requested to see a doctor, but “the reaction from Epstein, Maxwell and her parents” — all supposedly working in collusion — “was one of anger,” not toward the rapist, but toward Kristy. She was thus reprimanded for ruining her parents’ pleasant weekend jaunt to NYC, because apparently Epstein stepped in after the bloody climax and decided the Makuta parents would no longer receive the cash they’d been promised for “trafficking” Kristy to Leon. So after she was brutally raped with their knowledge and approval, Kristy’s parents “drove her from NYC back to Woodbridge Va.” Which on top of making them out to be the most vile parents on the planet, also straightforwardly implicates them in a child-sex trafficking conspiracy, for which they could conceivably be prosecuted. Which is of particular relevance here, as again, Christensen was passing along this information to federal prosecutors.
On July 21, 2023 — surely by happenstance, four days before Kristy’s original Leon Black lawsuit was filed — Christensen sent off an indignant late-night email to the same set of federal prosecutors, opining how “outrageous” it was that “criminal charges have not been brought” against Leon Black. By necessary extension, the many claimed co-conspirators responsible for tormenting Kristy would also have to be charged — all on the strength of evidence produced by Kristy, which was then dispatched to federal prosecutors by Christensen, who attested to its clear-cut reliability. This means Kristy’s own parents, not to mention her former cheerleading/dance instructor, should’ve been headed to prison right alongside Leon Black, at least if Christensen had her way, as she had alerted prosecutors to this sprawling cross-section of “non-elite” persons who once conspired to “groom,” physically assault, and “traffic” Kristy, thrusting her into the unthinkable sex-torture vortex of Epstein, Maxwell, Black, et al.
And it was all 100% made up!
Judge Jessica Clarke’s ruling on April 23 shows that Christensen kept up the ruse for as long as possible, however:
In an internal memorandum dated December 11, 2023, Ms. Christensen described how she had learned—two weeks earlier—that Plaintiff’s biological mother first introduced Plaintiff to Ghislaine Maxwell in Clearwater, Florida. Id. at 1–2. Plaintiff also testified multiple times at the March 2024 JPMC Hearing that she first met Ghislaine Maxwell in Clearwater, Florida. March Hearing at 10:3–25, 73:3–7.
The December 11, 2023 memorandum also reflects Ms. Christensen’s contemporaneous impression that Plaintiff’s biological mother knew about and helped strategize how to traffic Plaintiff. ECF No. 233-5 at 2–3. At the March 2024 JPMC hearing, Ms. Christensen told Judge Rakoff that Plaintiff’s biological parents “play[ed] important roles in trafficking [Plaintiff] to Jeffrey Epstein.” March Hearing at 6:4–6. And in June 2024, Ms. Christensen stated on the record in the JPMC Action: “I am saying that [Plaintiff’s] biological mother 100 percent is the person who, in the very first instance, sent her to Ghislaine Maxwell, and then had been telling her about this very important wealthy man.” June Conference at 17:14–17. “So, yes, I am saying that her mother was intimately involved.”
Here is Christensen sending copies of the fraudulent “journals” created by Kristy, supposedly documenting the fake child sex torture, as email attachments to her contacts in the US Attorney’s Office:
Apparently, this is the type of conduct that earned Jeanne Christensen prestigious awards in the legal industry, recognizing her “Elite Women” achievements in both 2024 and 2025. One can only hope that the awards will keep coming her way in 2026, notwithstanding the recent judicial finding that she “repeatedly lied” to the Court, and evinced flippant non-concern about ensuring her submissions were factually correct.
I will note that Kristy’s mother appears to be a staunch Trump supporter, as indicated by her various social media pages. Whether this has anything to do with the mother being hallucinated into chief trafficking villain per the narrative invented by Kristy, Amy, and Christensen is difficult to say, given the continued concealment of so much information in this case, but it’s at least a plausible hypothesis that warrants further investigation.
What makes the whole thing even more mind-blowing is the unwavering credulity with which federal and state prosecutors responded to this onslaught of extortionist fantasies: not by ignoring or rebuking Christensen, but springing instantly into action; within nine minutes of receiving the Christensen email about how “outrageous” it was that nobody had yet been prosecuted, one of the prosecutors forwarded along Christensen’s defamatory missive to a colleague — at 10:04pm on a Friday night! — asking if anyone had been able to “circle back with Jeanne.” Then by the following Monday morning, the colleague confirmed that he/she would indeed “circle back directly to Jeanne,” and “touch base” on how to go about further squandering taxpayer resources on tacitly legitimating this slimeball con.
The prosecutors depicted in these “files” almost come across as impossibly gullible, and therefore dumb — but the thing is, they are not dumb. They are quite intelligent. They should be understood as shrewdly advancing a behind-the-scenes legal and political strategy that has proven astoundingly effective — simply look at how the Epstein furor now registers in the public arena, amongst members of Congress, journalists, and countless others. Prosecutors associated with “Special Victims Units” tasked with handling these matters seem disproportionately comprised of women, and perhaps most pertinently, women who have clearly calculated that their paramount ethical duty is to instantly project steadfast, credulous acceptance of all claims involving sexual abuse, with the label of “victim” always being preemptively ascribed. “Epstein” was merely one high-profile forum for them to showcase the ideological constructs they’d been marinating in, with their elaborate “trauma-informed” dogma and new, infinitely elastic conceptions of “trafficking.”
For all the talk about the supreme imperative of “transparency,” these DOJ emails mostly redact the identities of prosecutors who dealt with the shambolic Kristy situation. So we don’t have a complete picture of who all it was that relayed in June 2023 — utterly astonishingly — that they “do not doubt” the veracity of Kristy’s extravagant tales. We do know the principal non-doubter was someone with the initials “AW,” from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, who conveyed her non-doubt to federal colleagues, as memorialized in a subsequent memo, composed about a month before Christensen filed the first iteration of Kristy’s lawsuit against Leon Black, as she was clearly angling for some prosecutorial heft to add to the complaint. Thankfully, “AW” can be identified as Alissa Wimmer — more on her to follow — but for the most part, prosecutors’ names are arbitrarily redacted throughout the “Epstein Files,” according to no discernible provision in the Epstein Files Transparency Act authorizing this, and even though the EFTA bars redacting material to spare public officials from “embarrassment.” Because one thing of which there can be truly “no doubt” is how humiliating this whole sordid episode is, and how nightmarish it is to contemplate such absolute dimwits wielding the power to throw people in prison on behalf of the state.
That said, the main no-doubter of Kristy, Alissa Wimmer, was an Assistant District Attorney then working under Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, until she moved to more lucrative pastures in July 2024. She is now a “Regional Public Safety Liaison at Uber.” (Unsurprisingly, she has not responded to my emails seeking comment.)
She’s the one who is recorded as having communicated to federal prosecutors in the SDNY that after assessing Kristy’s claims, she and her DANY colleagues “do not doubt her allegations” against Epstein and Leon Black, at minimum, and they had also come to “believe she was abused” by Jes Staley, a former JP Morgan executive known to have once been an Epstein associate. So non-existent was her doubt that she came to these conclusions despite having admittedly “not found any independent corroboration” for Kristy’s wild claims. This evidently had zero impact on their credibility assessment. Frickin’ incredible.
The June 28, 2023 memo in which these sterling law enforcement professionals express zero doubt in Kristy’s veracity was passed duly up the chain, first by an Assistant US Attorney, name redacted, and then to a Special Agent at the FBI New York Field Office, name also redacted — the two Feds then make an appointment to meet and discuss this undoubted information. The FBI agent summoned is described in an email signature as some sort of specialist in “Child Exploitation/Human Trafficking,” which is certainly a window into the prevailing mindset within that subset of the modern law enforcement profession. Kristy is presented by these federal officials not as someone who made a bunch of outlandish claims with zero corroboration, but as a “victim who recently came to our attention with connections to the Epstein/Maxwell case.” Any notion that Kristy might be best described at this preliminary juncture at least as an “alleged” victim, or a purported victim — or choose your bare-minimum qualifier — was apparently not something that occurred to these seasoned professionals, who by 2023/2024 had clearly embraced a professional code whereby truth-value would be pre-assigned to any claims of Epstein-related victimhood, no matter how “far-fetched,” as Judge Clarke eventually characterized Kristy’s story by 2026.
So now, Alissa Wimmer works in a senior role at Uber. That’s the high-salary reward a taxpayer-funded prosecutor received for displaying such catastrophically poor judgment that she personally met with Kristy, as well as her purported “adoptive mother” Amy Duffey, and was totally confident to tell federal prosecutors in February 2023 that Kristy had been factually established as someone who was “trafficked by Maxwell and Epstein,” and had bravely “come forward and alleged sexual abuse by Leon Black.” State and federal collaboration on the matter continued for months, with a June 2023 memo recording that Wimmer & colleagues had conveyed that “the victim and her mother would be ok with sharing more information with us” — “us” being the Feds — as the NY District Attorney’s Office “find her credible,” despite “very little corroboration,” and “no outcry witnesses until years later.” With the “outcry” being to the “adoptive mother.” How much information did these prosecutors have on file about the nature of this supposed “adoptive mother” arrangement? You know, the “adoptive mother” being Amy Duffey, who is around nine years older than Kristy, and met her as a “disability” administrator of some sort at George Mason University?
Here is Wimmer conducting an educational session earlier this year with law enforcement personnel in Hudson County, NJ:
She also testifies in court, explaining in a December 2025 trial that her job is to “assist law enforcement” on matters with some nexus to the Uber platform:
Over the course of their DANY investigation, Wimmer also incredibly uncovered “other allegations of sexual abuse unrelated to JE/GM,” including “sexual abuse from priest and a separate kidnapping,” but no followup on these bombshells is apparent. However, Wimmer and friends were quite interested in the Feds taking the lead on going after Kristy’s biological mother and father, since it is noted that they “drove [Kristy] over state lines,” placing them squarely in a federal purview for potential “trafficking” charges.
So there’s just a small selection of thoroughly “non-elite” individuals whom this Kristy-backing lawyer cabal were happy to slander with the most inflammatory slime, nuke their reputation, lobby for their imprisonment, and cast as uniquely malevolent sickos, even by the standards other alleged Epstein “associates,” because they were pegged as having been willing to sacrifice their own daughter for the perverse sexual gratification of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Leon Black, and others. And it was all… simply made up! Outright fabricated. As if this couldn’t get any worse, the now-sanctioned lawyer Jeanne Christensen would even progressively sprinkle in some additional sleazy details, telling her federal interlocutors that Kristy’s sister was also sexually abused — the same sister whom Kristy later accused in a judicial proceeding of physically assaulting her — and oh by the way, according to Christensen, the sisters’ paternal grandfather was also “in on it.” That’s the exact wording Christensen uses in her communications with federal law enforcement: Their long-deceased grandfather was “in on it.”
One of the outstanding mysteries of this whole fiasco is whether Amy Duffey, the “adoptive mother” who is often described as Kristy’s trusted “intermediary,” was ever made aware that in a July 8, 2024 hearing before Judge Jed Rakoff, Kristy — apparently not accompanied by Amy on this particular occasion — alleged that she was being abused by her so-called “adoptive father,” aka Amy’s husband, Bruce Marco. According to Kristy, as a woman in her late 30s, she was forbidden by Bruce “to drive, have a job, have friends, leave the house, or consume media without prior approval.” And on top of that, Bruce also sexually assaulted her. One can’t help but wonder what the Bruce/Amy marital dynamic is like — not to mention the larger dynamics of their purported household, since these people are all said to be living under the same roof together. (Bruce and Amy have still not returned any of my repeated messages.) Here’s a snapshot of Amy, for posterity:
Kristy appeared under the impression that her testimony before Judge Rakoff at the July 2024 evidentiary hearing in which she alleged “abuse” and sexual assault by Amy’s husband — whose surname “Marco” she has otherwise assumed in different versions of her alias — would be kept permanently secret, apparently not expecting that Judge Clarke would ultimately invoke her own discretion to quote from sealed excerpts. In recent pro se filings, Kristy has indicated that her representations in the JP Morgan proceedings overseen by Rakoff “were made under explicit assurances of confidentiality,” and that removing this protection after the fact “would violate the very principle of trust upon which survivor participation in legal processes depends.” Can someone please ask Amy Duffey about Kristy Makuta accusing her husband of sex crimes? Again, they won’t answer my calls…
In one email exchange, an Assistant US Attorney states, based on a discussion with Alissa Wimmer of the Manhattan DA’s office, that Kristy “was adopted by supportive family, mother is always there for interviews and she serves as liaison for meetings.” Apparently nothing about this curious adult “adoptive” arrangement was perceived as noteworthy enough to warrant the notation of any “red flags.”
Nor did it occur to the Guardian, in a curiously-timed May 6 article, that the “adoptive” arrangement might be cause for further scrutiny:
In late October 2023, Doe was interviewed by the claims administrator in the JPMorgan case. She later found out she was being allocated $2.5m.
It was a moment of elation for Doe, her adoptive mother told the Guardian, because it was the first time she felt that her trauma was being recognized.
Don’t you think Guardian readers might’ve been interested to learn some additional context about this “adoptive mother” dynamic, given that Amy only “adopted” Kristy approximately four years ago, thanks to a quirk in Virginia state law, when Kristy was an adult in her late 30s? Because when most people hear the term “adoptive mother,” they’re probably not even cognizant that “adult adoption” of this kind is a “thing,” and would surely assume that Kristy had been “adopted” as a vulnerable child. Which must be a deliberate omission of context. Because you don’t have to be a hard-nosed detective, or even especially cynical (like me), to infer that what’s really going on here is that Kristy and Amy are co-contrivers of some bizarre long-term plot, about which entire psychology textbooks could be written, and salacious Netflix “true crime” specials produced. (I haven’t received any reply to a list of questions I sent to Guardian editor Betsy Reed.)
Maybe the most important takeaway from the Kristy fraud is not so much about Kristy herself, but the structural fraud it indicates is rife in the wider universe of Epstein-related “settlement” vehicles. Because it’s exactly these settlement vehicles which have generated such grossly inflated estimates of “Epstein victims” — coloring public perceptions of the Epstein affair as constituting a vast trail of unpunished pedophilia crime. Recall that one of the genuine revelations from the “Epstein Files” earlier this year was that the figure of “over 1,000 victims” constantly cited by journalists and politicians, after making its debut in the notorious July 2025 FBI/DOJ memo that set off the larger Epstein meltdown, was completely phony, and based on cooked up statistical chicanery. The figure of those “harmed” by Epstein somehow included “family members” of purported Epstein “victims.” Uncles? Cousins? Who knows. Not to mention, most of these purported “victims” were adults at the time of their claimed victimization, despite (as usual) the eye-popping figure being cited to encapsulate the unthinkable scope of pedophilic sex criminality.
This is not a “past tense” issue, either. At least two additional settlement vehicles are currently in progress to compensate another indeterminate expanse of “Epstein Survivors” — one from Bank of America, as of March 27, 2026, in the amount of $72.5 million, and another from the Epstein Estate, as of February 19, 2026, in the amount of $35 million, even though class-action claims against the estate were supposed to have been resolved with finality years ago, through the establishment of the original Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program in 2020, which stopped taking new claimants in 2021. But that didn’t stop David Boies, Bradley Edwards, and colleagues enjoying their 30% “legal fees” from going back to the Gravy Train in 2024 and demanding yet another class action settlement against the estate, by suing its executors, Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn. By the time “Epstein Files” mania was in full-bloom again in early 2026, their latest litigation gambit paid off.
Sigrid McCawley, the lawyer who previously served as an intimate legal companion for Virginia Roberts Giuffre — not too dissimilar from the marginally-less-plausible role abortively played by Jeanne Christensen with Kristy — claimed that the “numerosity” requirement was satisfied for this new round of class-action settlements by citing the phony figure of “over 1,000” victims. As such, Sigrid maintained, “there remains hundreds of class members with valid claims” entitled to huge tax-free cash payouts.
In their Bank of America action, Boies and Edwards initially asserted that “thousands” of Epstein victims were still waiting to be discovered. I spoke to both Boies and Edwards at the April 2, 2026 settlement hearing at the Manhattan federal courthouse. Even though news of this settlement agreement was breathlessly reported throughout the media as further supporting the notion that a massive pedophile crime spree had gone shamefully unpunished, and finally another major financial institution would be held “accountable,” Boies candidly conceded to me that “based on prior cases, you could say that certainly, this time, the majority were over the age of 18.” That is, the vast majority of females in line for life-changing Bank of America money would have been adults at the time of their claimed victimization. Which must be true, because the period covered by the BoA settlement is June 30, 2008 (date of Epstein’s original guilty plea in Florida) to July 6, 2019 (date of Epstein’s federal arrest). Any female who can self-report as having been “harmed” by Epstein’s purported “sex trafficking venture” during this period is eligible for funds, on the logic that BoA ought to have blocked Epstein from banking services starting on the date he was convicted of state-level prostitution offenses. But based on all available evidence, anyone “abused” or “trafficked” during this period would have to have been adults, because Epstein has still never even been accused of any illicit sexual contact with any person below age 18 from 2005 onwards — including in the mountains of hyper-dramatized civil litigation, nevermind any actual criminal charges. So there’s another payout spigot opened up for women who can claim years after the fact that they were “trafficked,” as adults, under the resolutely confidential provisions of the court-approved settlement protocol.
As to the new Epstein Estate settlement mechanism, this one somehow dates back to 1995, so we’re now talking about 30+ year old claims that can potentially be submitted, with no adverse consequences for the claimant should anything be exaggerated or even outright falsified. And if you’re looking for a few bucks, act fast, because the truncated deadline (strangely) happens to be today, May 12, 2026, at 11:59pm EST.
The claims administrator for both funds? Simone Lelchuk. The same person who initially approved a whopping $2.5 million payout to Kristy!
Recall: Kristy had submitted fake evidence in the JP Morgan action, including the falsified sonogram images purporting to depict fetuses she was purportedly impregnated with by Epstein, which were then snatched right out of her uterus and in one case, flushed down a toilet. Even her former lawyers at Wigdor had to eventually admit they had no choice but to “disavow” those images, amid incontrovertible proof of fraud, and then withdraw their representation of her. But not before the falsified evidence was duly accepted by Claims Administrator Simone Lelchuk to award Kristy a $2.5 million jackpot. The lucrative scheme was only interrupted because Leon Black’s lawyers, embroiled in litigation brought by Kristy and Wigdor, caught wind of the payment and notified Judge Rakoff, who was overseeing the JP Morgan settlement, and is likewise now overseeing the Bank of America settlement. Rakoff accordingly said he had come to harbor “serious doubts about [Kristy’s] credibility” after being compelled to hold a series of evidentiary hearings with her — but he apparently “never made particularized factual findings on the record regarding [Kristy’s] allegations,” because sure enough, in swooped Simone Lelchuk to broker a side-deal “stipulation,” whereby Kristy was awarded a reduced amount of $200,000. Rakoff inexplicably approved this “stipulated” payment on August 21, 2024 — without having first issued the “detailed opinion” he apparently had in the works, which was to outline why he’d felt obliged to intervene and deny Kristy’s claim outright.
At the April 2 hearing I attended, Rakoff said he had every confidence in re-appointing Simone Lelchuk to handle the Bank of America payouts, because she has “performed extremely well in prior settlements.” Huh????? For his part, Rakoff commented that while “victims of Epstein’s monstrous acts can never be fully compensated,” they are surely “entitled to just compensation” — an insight into the rigor with which Judge Rakoff evidently feels it’s appropriate to evaluate any “victimhood” claims. Part of the new Bank of America claimant fishing expedition will entail publishing solicitation notices in USA Today, People magazine, and Gazeta Wyborcza, a Polish newspaper (?????) as well as devising a customized social media campaign to locate additional “victims.” In other words, a complete free-for-all, with every incentive for the lawyers to scour the deepest recesses of the potential claimant pool, including an expedition to Eastern Europe, in order to justify their 30% cut off the top-end.
For the new version of the Epstein Estate class-action settlement, submission materials are notably being made available in Russian and French, as well as English — so who the hell knows what this new constellation of “survivors” could consist of. Simone Lelchuk has stressed that her goal, above all, is to avoid “re-victimizing” the purported victims, using the well-established “trauma-informed” methods she is so expertly well-versed in, which in practice means doing little or no corroborative inquiry whatsoever, as indicated by her easy approval of Kristy’s batshit claims.
Again, what is “problematic” about all this is not necessarily that Bank of America has gotten hoodwinked into forking over another $72.5 million to Epstein Survivors Inc., just as JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank compliantly did before them, because whatever, the feckless corporate lawyers for these giant banks are total squishes, and barely even try to contest any of it — so desperate are their clients not to be tagged as malicious “trafficking” enablers. What’s most “problematic” is that the reams of newfound “victims” are being lured out of the shadows with giant cash prizes, and as a consequence, the total number of “Epstein” victims will continue to astronomically inflate — fueling the clueless, hysterical Pedo Panic narrative that has gripped the US political system, and indeed much of the world, on the basis of virtually nothing that could conceivably be described as “pedophilia,” and also on the basis of victim-evaluation criteria that we now know, with demonstrable certitude, has encouraged (and rewarded) the commission of outright fraud. The practice in prior settlements has been that the David Boies and Bradley Edwards lawyer gaggle hires an “investigative team,” who then “locate and correspond with dozens of potential Class Members on social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and via email, to provide notice of the underlying action and information relating thereto.” That’s being replicated once again. I asked Bradley Edwards if he reckoned there would be any more non-adult “Epstein Survivors” found pursuant to the Bank of America settlement. He said: “In the United States, I don’t think so,” but “who knows what he [Epstein] was doing in France.” Meaning, they have now turned their gazes to foreign frontiers to keep the profitable mega-narrative going.
Beyond the structural fraud incentivized by these settlement vehicles, helpfully illuminated by the Kristy case, there are plenty more sleazy mechanics of the Epstein mass-hysteria racket also to be illuminated. Consider the mind-bending ordeal of Dana Chasin, a Democratic Party fundraiser and far-flung heir to the Rockefeller fortune, by way of his late step-mother Laura Rockefeller Chasin, a great-great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller. Recall the bogus “diaries” manufactured by Kristy were consequently published by the DOJ pursuant to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, having been entered in government repositories as a result of Jeanne Christensen feverishly forwarding copies to prosecutors, since she was claiming to have oracularly “decoded” the fake diaries, and was imploring the Feds to hurry up and bring indictments based on this fabricated evidence. Chasin is fleetingly mentioned in one of these “diaries” as having flown Kristy around in a “small prop plane” on multiple occasions, including to a grisly sex-torture session in NYC. If true, he was at minimum guilty of “sex trafficking” an autistic, cognitively-impaired teen.
**Speaking of Kristy’s pretensions to cognitive impairment, her diagnoses seem to consistently coincide with the discomfort of her legal activities. Because by July 2025, Kristy was claiming in pro se filings that she was in the midst of an “acute medical and psychological crisis,” and therefore incapable of participating in further proceedings “at this time.” She requested a stay while she recuperated, clarifying: “This is not a voluntary delay or tactical decision, but a documented state of cognitive and emotional collapse.” (Apparently her “cognitive and emotional collapse” had not prevented her from drafting another lengthy and reasonably well-written legal letter. If the letter was in fact drafted by her “adoptive mother” Amy Duffey, whose life appears commingled with Kristy’s in ways that even the most battle-hardened psychology pros would struggle to fully apprehend — that certainly ought to have been disclosed to the court, but instead, Kristy represents herself as the author. (Nevermind that Kristy’s original complaint against Leon Black in 2023 claimed that “developmentally,” she is 12 years old, despite paradoxically possessing an “above average” IQ.)
But anyway, once Dana Chasin was reported in the media as having been “named” in the dastardly Epstein Files, his erstwhile Democratic fundraising recipients were of course lightning-quick to throw him right under the bus. Congresswoman Sharice Davids (D-KS) promptly atoned for having once received donations from Chasin by sending an equivalent amount, $4,250, to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, which, by the way, is a Congressionally-authorized NGO, and probably not in desperate need of the symbolic chump change. Dan Osborn, an independent Senate candidate in Nebraska aligned with Democrats, also instantly canceled a forthcoming fundraiser that was to be hosted by Chasin. (The Nebraska Senate race has since been dominated by tit-for-tat Epstein attacks, with both Osborn and incumbent Republican senator Pete Ricketts accusing one another of being tarnished in some fashion by Epstein.)
Despite the bizarre ambiguities around Kristy’s cognitive status, and thus the questionable reliability of her self-generated evidence, Dana Chasin was identified to federal prosecutors not just as one of Kristy’s many depraved “traffickers,” but as an outright rapist, at least according to the mystical “decoding” heuristic Jeanne Christensen claimed she had divined, endowing her with the miraculous ability to translate Kristy’s faked “diaries.” Christensen claimed to have made the discovery that childlike words found in the “diaries” such as “yucky” and “gross” were in fact “code” for criminal sex acts; this was sufficient for Christensen to matter-of-factly inform federal prosecutors that Kristy “had sex with Larry Summers,” a claim located in the same entry where Kristy also purportedly describes the “yucky” and “gross” things that were done to her by Chasin.
After enduring a fierce backlash for appearing in this fabricated “Epstein File,” Chasin eventually hired lawyers to submit a motion in the Leon Black court docket: “Again, these claims are false,” the filing said. “Mr. Chasin has never owned or leased a plane, much less a ‘small prop plane,’ and he never met Jeffrey Epstein, nor communicated with Jeffrey Epstein, nor visited any of his properties.” According to the motion, the falsified diaries were no barrier for Chasin to be denounced and disowned in droves. “Employees at his organization quit, and he has been unable to hire replacements. Many of his personal and professional contacts stopped associating with him.” Chasin argued he was entitled to petition that certain materials in the pending Kristy matter be unsealed, as they would prove exonerating of him.
No one needs to have any pre-existing affinity for heirs to the Rockefeller fortune, or Chasin’s donor/operative activities in support of the Democratic Party, to find this episode shockingly mendacious and certifiably insane. If we’re still using the verb “canceled” anymore, here’s a guy who’s been “canceled” in the truest sense of the word, circa 2026, for stuff so manifestly divorced from reality that it would almost be comical if it wasn’t so dark. You don’t like the Rockefeller intergenerational wealth transfers, or you don’t like Chasin’s fundraising practices in particular? Sure, have a go at him for that. But to just completely make stuff up? Or cite completely made-up materials to “cancel” a guy as a diabolical child-sex trafficker? In no universe can this possibly be defensible, even if the unlucky target may arguably qualify as some sort of “elite.” Because as I’ve hopefully shown, there are plenty of thoroughly “non-elite” bystanders who’ve gotten snagged in the same exact outburst of mindless hysteria. And whether elite or non-elite, society as a whole gets cheapened and demeaned with this unchallenged proliferation of a political and legal narrative which, the deeper you dig, the more you discover is predicated on a veritable whirlwind of cynical embellishment and/or brazen, outright fraud.
While it’s true that Kristy stands somewhat apart in having confabulated her whole tale from scratch, as well as her inclusion of far-out details like forcible impregnation with the offspring of Epstein and Maxwell — hence the falsified sonogram images she cooked up to try and substantiate this — the emphatic credulity with which she was treated by a grand consortium plaintiffs’ lawyers, journalists, and most alarmingly, state and federal prosecutors — who astoundingly said they had “no doubt” in the veracity of her fantastical fictions — gets right to the heart of the entire Epstein hysteria-machine. Which is a dynamic that really does cry out for some properly intensive “investigation,” if anything Epstein-related still needs to be investigated.
But it goes even further. (I told you, this story ALWAYS manages to get worse.) Here is the personal publicist of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a woman named Dini von Mueffling, emailing Kristy in February 2026 to tell her that she unreservedly “believes” her, and also wanted to offer undefined “personal” support, such as PR and legal services. She even encouraged Kristy to link up with other “Epstein Survivors” so she could benefit from their collective support system.
Kind of makes you wonder about the veracity of other stuff Dini von Mueffling has had a hand in pumping out for public consumption over the years, no?
Continuing in the “it only gets worse” department, Kristy told Judge Clarke in December 2025 that she had received “outreach from a member of Congress,” and spoken to Congressional staff about her claims, which she was surely thrilled to find were received with only the most reverential earnestness.
Finally, please take a gander at the following February 16, 2026 video report by Scripps News, the digital media wing of E.W. Scripps, one of America’s oldest newspaper conglomerates. Its material gets syndicated to local TV stations across the country.
HEADLINE: ‘I’m beyond broken’: Diary in Epstein files details abuse girl says she endured
SUBHED: In a style reminiscent of teenage scrapbook collages, the girl glued magazine words onto pages to describe her abuse.
The video segment, aired far and wide, represents Kristy’s “diaries” as presumptively authentic, with the author of the diary, Kristy, declared to be a presumptive “survivor,” whose diaries can therefore be surmised to accurately chronicle her horrific ordeal of forced pregnancies, abduction of newborn babies, etc. Again, these are the same diaries now judicially determined to have been filled with provably falsified and fabricated material. Scripps correspondent Alexandra Miller even credits the “decoded” messages as real, and solemnly recites them back to the viewer. She then brings on a lawyer commentator, Eliza Orlins, who states matter-of-factly that Kristy was a “sex slave,” and “we all should be screaming and yelling” about why there weren’t any investigations based on this material (which there actually were, mind-blowingly enough) and why no one was ever prosecuted for the (fake) crimes described therein. Amazingly, but not surprisingly, Alexandra Miller serves as some sort of “adjunct lecturer” in Journalism Studies at the University of Maryland. And altogether unsurprisingly, she has not responded to my requests for comment.
I usually try to maintain an air of detached bemusement about this stuff, and there’s no question that much of Epstein mania can be morbidly comical, not unlike the man himself. But seriously — what the hell? This latest wrinkle could not possibly get any darker.
This has to be one of the greatest scams ever: any female who had any connection with Epstein at all, can now claim victimhood, and score a nice payoff -- and the attorneys who file all the paperwork are laughing all the way to the bank.
Great article, Michael!
Kirsty Makuta should be charged with fraud. I doubt that'll happen given the current climate.
We are doing the Salem witch trials all over again. When Tracey urges caution, the finger is pointed at him.