Darryl Cooper was tying it all together. He’d just spent the past two and a half hours with Tucker Carlson, laying out everything that we, the people, absolutely needed to know about Jeffrey Epstein. It appeared as though Cooper, also known as “Martyr Made,” had been summoned as a kind of Emergency Epstein Expert; if you wanted to know the real story behind Epstein, helpfully broken down in digestible audio-visual form, this was the podcast for you. And indeed, as of current writing, there are 2.2 million views on the YouTube version alone. Untold more have undoubtedly downloaded or streamed the July 17, 2025 episode on other platforms.
So by the two-and-a-half-hour mark, Cooper was nearing the finish line. It was time for a little conclusory flair. Time to throw out some summarizational info to really put a bow on the story he’d been telling, add some emotional weight and factual heft, and make the whole thing feel just a bit more real for all the enraptured viewers and listeners. So he decides to quote a federal judge.
“And eventually a federal judge found,” Cooper says — making a point to underscore for emphasis, “these are the words of the federal judge” — that “the government… had engaged in a conspiracy with Jeffrey Epstein to make this deal. This illegitimate, illegal deal.” As a result, Cooper claims, the deal had been judicially “stricken.”
The “deal” referenced by Cooper was the 2007-2008 federal Non-Prosecution Agreement, by which Epstein was required to plead guilty to two state-level prostitution charges in Florida. If a federal judge had indeed found that the US government “conspired” with Epstein to bring about that agreement, it would surely bolster the argument Cooper had been making all throughout the podcast — which is that powerful forces had long worked in concert with Epstein to cover up his “mass pedophile ring,” as Cooper described it, because public exposure of this vast pedo-network would implicate an astonishing cross-section of prominent people in horrific, blackmail-worthy sex crimes.
Only problem: no federal judge ever said this. No such ruling exists.
Cooper purports to quote a federal judge declaring that “the government… had engaged in a conspiracy with Jeffrey Epstein.” But nowhere, in any ruling ever, did any federal judge make such a declaration. It just never happened.
Cooper was possibly referring to a February 21, 2019 ruling by District Court judge Kenneth A. Marra, who found that the federal government had violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act (CVRA) by not providing what the judge deemed sufficient advance notice to “victims” ahead of Epstein’s state-level guilty plea in Florida, on June 30, 2008. But Marra never accused the government of “conspiring” with Jeffrey Epstein. “The Court is not ruling that the decision not to prosecute was improper,” Marra wrote. “The Court is simply ruling that, under the facts of this case, there was a violation of the victims rights under the CVRA.” In other words, Judge Marra found that the government had failed to provide adequate notice to government-designated victims under the CVRA, a statute signed into law by George W. Bush in 2004, only about a year before the initial Palm Beach criminal investigation of Epstein commenced. Marra did not rule that Epstein’s Non-Prosecution Agreement was “illegitimate” or “illegal,” and Marra certainly never decreed that the NPA was therefore “stricken” — despite Cooper falsely claiming such on the podcast. It simply never happened.
Marra’s ruling was later reversed on April 14, 2020, when the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled: “We hold that at least as matters currently stand — which is to say at least as the CVRA is currently written — rights under the Act do not attach until criminal proceedings have been initiated against a defendant, either by complaint, information, or indictment. Because the government never filed charges or otherwise commenced criminal proceedings against Epstein, the CVRA was never triggered.” Another ruling by the 11th Circuit on April 15, 2021 also denied that an alleged Epstein victim was entitled to relief under the CVRA.
None of these rulings contain any claim by any federal judge that the government had engaged in a “conspiracy” with Epstein, or that the NPA was consequently “stricken.” In 2019, Epstein was indeed federally re-prosecuted, notwithstanding the provisions of the still-active NPA, which prosecutors in the Southern District of New York merely argued on technical grounds was not applicable to the new indictment. Not that the NPA had been wholly nullified, which it hadn’t been. In fact, Ghislaine Maxwell is currently appealing to the Supreme Court on the argument that she ought to have been covered by the NPA. The government counters that she was not covered by the NPA. If the NPA had been “stricken,” as Cooper falsely claimed, how could arguments around its applicability be animating a live appeal process, which is before the Supreme Court as we speak?
I figured I should put these and other questions to Darryl Cooper, regarding various claims of dubious factual veracity that he made on the Tucker Carlson podcast and elsewhere. After all, Cooper describes himself as somebody who has “been in the Epstein space for longer than most” — since “2014 or so.” And he’d been rushed in to authoritatively educate the masses about Epstein on one of the most popular podcasts in America; I had personally been hectored by lots of people to watch this particular episode, so that I may come to understand how sorely lacking my knowledge was on the subject.
I drafted a polite email to Cooper. Among other queries, I asked: Could you define what you mean by “the Epstein space”? I also asked about his purported quotation of the federal judge, and about a range of other factual issues I had come across after examining Cooper’s wider body of Epstein-related work — a task I’d been repeatedly implored to undertake by excitable internet commenters.
My first email to Cooper was sent on August 17, 2025. I also sent him DMs and left him a voicemail by phone. The next day, August 18, he responded. “Hi Michael. We just had an immediate family member unexpectedly pass yesterday, and I can’t focus on this right now. Maybe some other time. Take care.”
I replied, “Darryl, I’m sorry for your loss. Do you have any estimate as to when you might be able to respond?”
He then replied, “Thanks, but it’s fine. I don’t have anything to say. No comment.”
“No comment”? Really?
“I don’t have anything to say”?
I was perfectly willing to make reasonable accommodations given what Cooper said were extenuating circumstances involving a death in his immediate family. So the flat refusal to answer my questions was bizarre. I know if I had a legitimate family emergency, and legitimately could not respond to a journalistic inquiry while dealing with that emergency, I’d probably say something like, “Hey, I have a personal issue I’m dealing with right now, but I can get back to you by approximately this-or-that date.” I wouldn’t just outright refuse to address the inquiry, ever. So I contacted a few people who know Cooper to ask for their insight on what might be going on. Then, on August 20, I received another email from Cooper. “I will reach out to you next week if you still want answers to your questions,” he said. I asked if he would be able to respond by the following Monday, August 25. No response. I sent a follow-up on August 24, asking if he could respond by the next day. No response. It is now Tuesday, August 26, and I have received no further communication from Cooper. Hence my decision to now publish this article.
About an hour and a half into the July 17 podcast, Tucker interjects, and says to Cooper: “Can I interrupt you to say, our faithful and gifted researcher has just held up a note saying Acosta — apparently Alex Acosta has said, and this is different from what I described, that he never said that Epstein was connected to intelligence.”
Cooper replies, “So, that is not my understanding.”
At this point in the episode, Cooper had naturally spent a lot of time discussing the totemic quote that somehow became a central dogmatic tenet of online Epstein Mythology, which is that Alex Acosta, Trump’s first Labor Secretary and US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida during the negotiation of Epstein’s original Non-Prosecution Agreement, had been told by unknown interlocutors that Epstein “belonged to intelligence,” and that Acosta should therefore “leave it alone” — meaning leave Epstein alone, or something.
Of course, the sourcing for this purported quote is essentially triple-hearsay bunk — and almost certainly originates with Steve Bannon — but Cooper recites it over and over again on the podcast as the factual springboard for his weaving, multi-dimensional elucidation of what he suggests are Epstein’s clearly-established ties to intelligence agencies — and in particular Israeli intelligence. Apparently, despite Cooper fastidiously “researching” in the “Epstein Space” for more than a decade, he never got around to checking if there might be any countervailing evidence in the public record. Cooper’s refutation of the interjection by Tucker’s assistant strongly indicates that he had no clue whatsoever about the November 2020 DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility Report on Jeffrey Epstein, which contains the only direct, on-record, under-oath statement from Acosta addressing Epstein’s purported ties to intelligence. Asked if he had knowledge that Epstein was an “intelligence asset” at the time of the Florida plea negotiations, Acosta replied, under penalty of perjury, “The answer is no.”
As I’ve said before, you can believe Acosta was lying. You can try to make some kind of argument that despite his denial, Acosta really was motivated by fear of Epstein’s intelligence ties when he brokered the Non-Prosecution Agreement. You can say a whole bunch of things. But to not even evince any awareness that this countervailing information exists, when it’s been in public circulation for nearly five years, and you’re supposed to be this seasoned Epstein Expert with a decade plus of deep “research” experience — and you’re being eagerly sought out to come regale a massive podcast audience with your deep well of dangerous knowledge — it’s just too hilarious. Darryl Cooper wouldn’t be alone, though: Whitney Webb, another of the internet’s supposedly foremost Epstein “researchers,” also told me she had no idea the 2020 OPR report existed until I emailed her earlier this month.
The context of that fabled “belonged to intelligence” quote makes little sense to begin with, when you think about it for five minutes, because Acosta did not in fact “leave Epstein alone” over the course of the 2007-2008 plea negotiations — rather, he federally interceded in what up to that point had been a localized Palm Beach prosecution, and imposed a federal “backstop” whereby Epstein was compelled to plead guilty to two state-level charges which, among other things, required Epstein to register for life as a sex offender. Acosta insisted on this resolution over the vehement objections of Epstein’s high-powered defense counsel, who had tried every possible tactic to thwart Acosta’s involvement, including by appealing all the way to the senior-level echelons of the Justice Department in Washington, DC. And they failed: Acosta got Epstein to register as a sex offender. If there had been no intercession by Acosta, and the case had been left solely to the Palm Beach County District Attorney, it is likely that Epstein would have never had to register as a sex offender at all — because the state-level offense for which he’d already been indicted, on July 19, 2006, was a single “Felony Solicitation of Prostitution” charge. On its own, this would not have required him to register as a sex offender:
Because of Acosta’s federal intercession, Epstein was required to plead guilty to an additional state-level charge, “Procuring Person Under 18 For Prostitution,” which did require him to register as a sex offender:
I’m not sure what Epstein “researchers” like Cooper have been “researching” all these years if not this stuff, but it sure seems like there’s a glaring deficit in the “research” they’ve compiled.
Actually, scratch that. I do know what kind of stuff Cooper has been researching. It’s perhaps best encapsulated by his promotion of a June 2023 article he contributed to an online magazine called IM-1776:
If you’re of the belief that when it comes to the mysteries surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, “a satisfying answer emerges from the PizzaGate conspiracy theory,” I think that gives some useful insight into what you’ve probably spent your time “researching,” in lieu of reading the relevant court documents or government reports.
Cooper’s article is really something to behold. He reflects fondly on how “citizen investigators” trawling through John Podesta’s email archive, which was memorably pilfered during the 2016 presidential campaign, had intrepidly used their collective “decoder ring” to come up with investigative findings such as: “Perhaps, thought the researchers, ‘hotdogs’ is a code phrase for something else.” Cooper remarks that his “favorite bit” of this highly illuminating research relates to the name of the proprietor of Comet Ping Pong, the Washington, DC pizza restaurant that “citizen investigators” came to believe was housing a dungeon of child sex slaves. “Someone who’d paid attention in high school French class also pointed out that the name James Alefantis is remarkably similar to the French j’aime l’enfants,” Cooper wrote. “Which means, ‘I love children.’” This is stunning information. I’m about to overturn my entire worldview.
Later in the article, Cooper mentions Andrew Breitbart, the deceased right-wing media entrepreneur. According to Cooper, Breitbart “mysteriously died on the street near his home” shortly after posting a February 4, 2011 tweet about John Podesta’s alleged complicity in an “underage sex slave op.” However, some light research shows what Breitbart was manically tweeting about at the time, and it had to do with a Planned Parenthood sting conducted by his protégé James O’Keefe. To promote the story, Breitbart was accusing prominent DC Democrats of turning a blind eye to the depravities that O’Keefe had supposedly uncovered. Certainly, it had nothing to do with any of the online phantasmagoria that would later get dubbed as “PizzaGate,” and certainly had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein:
Still, Cooper observes that Podesta never sued Breitbart for what could’ve been serious libel, if what Breitbart had alleged was actually untrue. Indeed, Cooper notes with suspicion that “it turned out that Podesta did not have to take him to court, since Breitbart mysteriously died on the street near his home a short time later.” So we are invited to make the salacious inference that Andrew Breitbart was murdered by John Podesta or his confederates to bury what Breitbart knew about Democrat child-sex rings. Breitbart died on March 1, 2012, over a year after the tweet Cooper cites; Podesta must’ve waited a curiously long time to order the hit. In addition, what exactly does Cooper find “mysterious” about Breitbart’s death? Does he reject the autopsy finding that Breitbart died of congestive heart failure? I asked Cooper these questions in my polite initial email, to which he replied, “I don’t have anything to say. No comment.”
In the same magazine item, Cooper says there’s something we all need to understand to grasp the ultimate truth about Epstein: “Remember, it was not even Epstein himself, but his friends who nicknamed his private plane the Lolita Express.” Cooper reiterated a variation of this point on Tucker’s podcast, saying: “His airplane was nicknamed the Lolita Express. It was not given that nickname by him. It was given that nickname by other people.”
It’s true that “Lolita Express” was not a name that Jeffrey Epstein ever gave to his own plane, as much as podcast creatures and social media dwellers might want to fantasize about Bill Clinton calling out, “All aboard the Lolita Express!” So Cooper at least got that one right. But who are these “friends” and “other people” who Cooper says gave the plane its now-notorious “nickname”? This is another area where you have to wonder about the depth of the “research” that’s been done. Because by all accounts, the infamous “nickname” appears to have been an invention of tabloid newspapers, namely the UK Daily Mirror, which attributed the origin of the supposed nickname to “locals” in the US Virgin Islands — although no specific evidence is cited for which “locals” purportedly coined the nickname. I asked Cooper: Can you specify which of Epstein’s “friends” or “other people” you are claiming contemporaneously gave this purported nickname to Epstein’s jet? And just like every other question I asked him, no answer was forthcoming.
Another question I had for Cooper was if he had ever read the June 2023 DOJ Inspector General report on the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ custody of Epstein. I know, I know: another boring government report that the professional Epstein Researchers can’t be expected to actually read. Well, I read it. Because on the Tucker podcast, Cooper says: “For years we were always told, just until very recently, when they released that footage of the hallway outside [Epstein’s] cell, that there was no footage — that all three of the cameras that were relevant to that area of the jail somehow had malfunctioned or gone out of service at the same time.”
But here’s what the 2023 DOJ Inspector General report “told” us, on page 81:
Cooper claims we “we were always told” that there was “no footage” from Epstein’s prison cell block “until just recently” — presumably July 6, 2025, when the DOJ and FBI released their fateful memo declaring that additional investigative efforts by the Trump Administration had found no incriminating “client list,” no credible evidence for any blackmail scheme, and no prominent third-party individuals to bring any further charges against. That memo also included a link to some footage from a security camera located in a hallway near Epstein’s cell. Whether you think that footage is dispositive of anything or not — it may well not be — for Cooper to suggest that “we were always told” this footage didn’t exist is just wrong. A lengthy government report “telling us” something directly to the contrary had been available for public consumption for more than two years by the time Cooper hustled over to Tucker’s studio for the Emergency Epstein Podcast. Again, I know it’s a stretch to expect these vaunted Epstein “researchers” to actually research anything — anything of substance, anyway — but if you’re going to go before millions of people and make authoritative-sounding fact-claims, you’d think you might bother to double-check a few details. However, that is evidently not part of Cooper’s research methodology.
By the way, Bill Barr, the Attorney General in office when Epstein died, had also “told us” that there was video footage available from inside Epstein’s prison unit. In his 2022 book One Damn Thing After Another, Barr wrote:
A video camera inside the unit was not functioning that night, but a separate video camera located in the common area had clear coverage of the officers’ desk area, the open stairs, and the gated entryway. I personally reviewed that video footage. It shows conclusively that between the time Epstein was locked in his cell at 7:49 p.m. on the night of August 9 and the time he was discovered the next morning at 6:30 a.m., no one entered his tier.
Yeah, I know: why waste time with boring stuff like books or Inspector General reports when you can vegetate in front of a three-hour podcast and be imparted with all the hallowed “research” you’ve been pining for?
Here are some additional questions I put to Cooper that I was hoping he could enlighten me on, given the many years he’s spent toiling in the research trenches:
In the nearly three hour podcast with Tucker, you spend quite a bit of time discussing “PizzaGate,” but you hardly discuss at all Virginia Giuffre, whose allegations initially spawned the claim that Epstein orchestrated a “mass pedophile ring” (as you call it in the podcast) and ensnared prominent people in a “pedophile blackmail ring” (as you’ve called it elsewhere). How do you explain your almost complete omission of Virginia Giuffre in the lengthy podcast discussion with Tucker? Aren’t her allegations, and the huge credibility problems associated with them, highly relevant if you’re going to be giving a sort of introductory primer on the Epstein case to a mass audience, as you did on the Tucker podcast? Are you aware of Giuffre’s litigation with Alan Dershowitz, which resulted in her recanting claims that she had been sex-trafficked as a minor to Dershowitz on at least six separate occasions? Are you aware that Giuffre’s lawyers conceded in 2019 that her memoir manuscript, in which she made many allegations of sexual misconduct against prominent individuals, was a “fictionalized account” of her alleged experiences?
On the podcast, you postulate that everyone you know would’ve reacted very negatively if they were ever aboard a flight in which “six underage girls in their underwear come out” and offer massages to passengers. Can you cite a specific instance in which there was ever a flight by Epstein’s jet in which “six underage girls” came out in their underwear and offered massages to passengers? As I’m sure you know, the flight logs are publicly available and searchable. So can you point to a particular flight (with date/location) during which something like this happened?
As to purported Epstein victims, you said on the Tucker podcast, “It took a lot of courage for these girls to come out. These people were terrifying. Ghislaine Maxwell would tell them when they tried to get away that, you know, how easy it is to get rid of a girl like you.” Can you specify which “girl” was allegedly told by Ghislaine Maxwell how “easy” it would be to “get rid” of her?
Tucker asks you to name specific people who were “hanging with” Epstein “on his plane” or “on the island” after 2008 or 2009, following Epstein’s guilty plea in Florida. You respond by citing Bill Clinton. But Clinton maintains that he had no further contact with Epstein after 2005 [SEE BELOW] — and records show the last flight Clinton took on Epstein’s jet was either in 2002 or 2003. Clinton also maintains he never visited the island. Do you have any evidence that Clinton flew on Epstein’s plane, or visited Epstein’s island, after Epstein’s June 2008 entry of a guilty plea in Florida?
You said in 2021, “If you get tired of my Epstein posting, too bad, I’m blowing this horn until I run out of breath or the walls of Jericho come down. THEY RAPED CHILDREN. And they want us to forget about it. Follow people like @Cernovich, @EricRWeinstein, and trust no one who cucks on this issue.” Do you now consider Donald Trump to have “cucked” on this issue — therefore warranting your distrust? As I’m sure you know, Trump has repeatedly referred to the entire Epstein matter as a “hoax” and “bullshit.”
Your first Martyr Made podcast was published on March 19, 2015. Were you employed by the Department of Defense at this time? What date did you begin working for the Department of Defense, and what date did you depart?
You’ve said that you’ve been to Israel “well over a dozen times, for a total of about 6-8 months,” and that you have worked with IDF personnel “on joint air & ballistic missile defense projects.” When did these trips take place? What specific projects did you work on with IDF personnel in Israel? Did you ever interface with any Israeli intelligence assets?
You said on the Tucker podcast that you’re “not a journalist or anything,” but you’ve also said elsewhere that you consider yourself an “audio documentary maker.” Can you explain what you take to be the difference between “journalist” and “audio documentary maker”? Documentarians often consider themselves journalists, so I’m curious why you do not consider yourself a journalist?
I would still greatly appreciate if Darryl Cooper could answer these questions.
AS REFERENCED ABOVE, here is what Bill Clinton wrote in his 2024 book Citizen, My Life After the White House:
I had always thought Epstein was odd but had no inkling of the crimes he was committing. He hurt a lot of people, but I knew nothing about it and by the time he was first arrested in 2005, I had stopped contact with him. I’ve never visited his island. When it was suggested that I traveled there without my round-the-clock Secret Service detail, which would explain why there’s never been a record of me being there, in 2016 the Service took the extraordinary step of saying I had never waived protection and they had never been there. Another person reportedly said she’d seen me on the island, but that I didn’t do anything wrong. However, in early 2024, unsealed depositions showed that she’d only heard I was there but didn’t actually see me. Then there was one of my former staffers who fed the story to Vanity Fair. He knew it wasn’t true when he said it.
The bottom line is, even though it allowed me to visit the work of my foundation, traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward. I wish I had never met him.
I’ve found that ppl who are the most rabid about this online don’t even know the slightest bit about it, they haven’t read anything or done any research. It’s all low IQ lore at this point.
Tracey, you deserve more notoriety. You do great work. Watched your debate with Saagar Enjeti... good stuff. You would play well to a Piers Morgan platform. You deserve that exposure.
🤞