Here's what happens if you ask trivially basic questions about Epstein, Part 2

Nick Bryant, center, on the July 30, 2025 edition of “Breaking Points”

Nick Bryant describes himself as an “activist and writer.” He has also been described as an “expert on human trafficking,” and one of the few journalists who was courageous enough to blow the lid off the Epstein story. “Hi, my name is Nick Bryant,” begins a recent video he recorded for Change Dot Org. “I’m an investigative journalist and the founder of the non-profit organization Epstein Justice. For the past 13 years, I’ve dedicated my life to demanding justice for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein.”

Sounds impressive. So, what happens when you ask this accomplished investigative journalist some basic factual questions about the claims he makes in his public media appearances? You’ll never guess! That’s right: He calls you a pedophile.

Bryant’s been a hot commodity on the podcast circuit lately. A recent video of him in conversation with Chris Hedges has over 1.2 million views. Just yesterday (July 29) he was on the inexplicably popular FLAGRANT podcast with Andrew Schulz, an individual who I gather is supposed to be some sort of comedian, but who I’ve never heard say anything funny. He’s also been on the Jimmy Dore show as their in-house Emergency Epstein Expert. And today, July 30, I saw him pop up on Breaking Points — a show I have appeared on occasionally, and which I know to abide by a modicum of journalistic standards, unlike the various failed-comedian podcasts. So despite largely ignoring Bryant up to this point, I figured I would give it a watch.

It turns out the segment was definitely worth watching, but only to understand how preposterous it is that this person gets credulously elevated as any kind of journalistic authority, on Epstein or any other subject.

First off, Bryant tells hosts Krystal Ball and Emily Jashinsky that he alone was able to determine that there were “well over 100 victims” listed in Epstein’s so-called “Little Black Book,” and this is what convinced him of the existence of a “nationwide pedophile network” that continues to be covered up, now by the malfeasants in the Trump Administration.

And it’s true that Bryant was in fact the first journalist to publish portions of what came to be known as Epstein’s “Little Black Book,” meaning the infamous book of contacts maintained by Ghislaine Maxwell. Many of the people listed were subsequently found to have either never met Epstein, or met him only the most passingly. Bryant’s article was published in January 2015 by the now-defunct website Gawker; he later said he obtained the mythical Book from a victim’s lawyer in Florida, after it’d been stolen from Epstein’s house in Palm Beach by one of his staff.

In that original 2015 Gawker article, the only purported “victim” Bryant vaguely identifies as having been listed in the “Little Black Book” is Chauntae Davies, a softcore porn actress who later clarified that she was a “21-year-old trainee massage therapist” when she first encountered Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein, and then remained in their circles for another four years. Davies is quoted as telling Bryant by email, “I really am not interested in being slandered in the media for having known this person a time ago.” Which would seem to imply she did not perceive herself as a “victim” in 2015, when she was around 35 years old. Then, by 2019, she started saying she was “groomed”/abused/raped, and no doubt collected a generous settlement.

So who exactly are these “well over 100 victims” that Bryant claims he discovered in the “Little Black Book” — a discovery which Bryant told the Breaking Points audience is what convinced him that a staggeringly expansive “nationwide pedophile network” not only existed, but was being covered up at the highest levels?

There are now searchable databases of the contacts in the book. So it shouldn’t be that difficult to specify the 100+ individuals whom Bryant claims to have definitively identified as “victims,” especially if he has an original copy of the Book, pilfered directly from Epstein’s lair. But when I asked him about this today, instead of just answering what seemed like a perfectly sensible question, he instead called me a pedophile, as you’ll see at the end of this article.

In 2020, a journalist with Mother Jones spent months calling every phone number in the “Little Black Book.” The only person described in the ensuing 12,000 word article who could be remotely categorized as a “victim” was a woman who said a friend encouraged her to go on a date with Epstein in 2001 as an adult art school student. She was hesitant at first, but eventually met up with him after the friend told her Epstein might fund a screenplay she was working on. “We had an interesting talk for about two hours,” the woman told the cold-calling Mother Jones journalist in 2020, but then Epstein groped her.

Even assuming this story is 100% unadulteratedly true, it would provide zero substantiation for Bryant’s tale of realizing that a “nationwide pedophile network” existed based on his expert evaluation of the contacts contained in the “Little Black Book.” Leland Nally, the Mother Jones journalist, told me he ascertained “nowhere close to 100” purported victims in his months-long quest to call every phone number in the book.

In the absence of any known factual basis for Bryant’s claim that he was able to uniquely identify “well over 100 victims” in the “Little Black Book,” and this convinced him that there was a sprawling “nationwide pedophile network” that needed urgent exposure, I tried emailing him for clarification. And he responded by calling me a pedophile. (See exchange at the end of this article.)

Elsewhere in the Breaking Points appearance, Bryant intoned a bromide that seemingly encapsulates his general philosophy of investigative journalism: “The best thing that you can say to someone who’s been sexually abused as a child, or someone who’s been sexually assaulted, is I believe you. The worst thing that you can say to someone that’s been trafficked as a child, or sexually assaulted, is I don’t believe you.”

Bryant apparently missed what used to be a more commonplace bromide among journalists: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Meaning, you’re supposed to be skeptical of everything, take nothing at face value, and insist on corroboration/verification for even the most trivial assertions. Bryant evidently rejects this concept, instead insisting that certain claims must be reflexively “believed” — particularly claims associated with pedophilic sex-trafficking rings and blackmail networks. In this sense, he’s just another exponent of the classic #MeToo mantra, “Believe Women,” which is ironic, because the podcast audiences to whom he’s being touted as some intrepid journalistic authority, like the Andrew Schulz crowd, would almost certainly consist of viewers who are predominantly skeptical of #MeToo — or at least its most simplistic and hectoring forms, which Bryant apparently endorses. Weirdly, the legions of erstwhile #MeToo skeptics in Podcast La La Land seem to have carved out a giant all-purpose exception for anything Epstein-related, and don’t even notice any dissonance.

Byrant told Breaking Points he was of the opinion that the Trump Administration was shamefully saying “I don’t believe you” to hundreds of Epstein victims. Which victims? Where? We already know that between at least 150 and 200 self-identified “victims” received giant payouts from some combination of the Epstein Victims Compensation Program, the JP Morgan class action settlement, and the Deutsche Bank class action settlement — entitling each individual “victim” to receive many millions of dollars if they can merely claim they were “harmed, injured, exploited, or abused” by Epstein, “or by any person who is connected to or otherwise associated with Epstein.” Claimants were eligible for huge sums even if they were above the age of 18 at the time they purport to have been sexually victimized. And their submissions for settlements were to be adjudicated “confidentially” and “non-adversarially.” So please, can Nick Bryant or anyone else clarify exactly which “victims” continue to be heinously “victimized” in July 2025 by the fact that Trump’s DOJ and FBI put out some dopey Epstein memo?

Bryant says he was “friends” with proven serial fabulist Virginia Giuffre, whose claims he undoubtedly also “believed” without reservation. In this way, he is of one mind with Tara Palmeri, who terminated a livestream last week when I gently asked about her personal and journalistic relationship with Giuffre. Bryant is most in demand among alt-media podcasters, Palmeri on CNN and MSNBC, but they converge on the same irreproachable conclusion — that a deceased serial fabulist they were once personal “friends” with must be unquestioningly “believed.”

By the way, did you know that in Giuffre’s very first public comments about her involvement with Epstein, she seemingly denied ever having any sexual contact with Prince Andrew? Since this person, Giuffre, is now back in the headlines again after Trump appeared to mention her on Air Force One, it’s worth briefly dwelling on the remarkable scale of her serial fabulism, which goes well beyond the child sex-trafficking accusations she made for nearly a decade against Alan Dershowitz, and then had to recant.

In 2011, Giuffre received a cool $160,000 from the Daily Mail for the arduous labor of participating in an interview, and handing over the now-infamous photo of herself with Prince Andrew (the authenticity of which remains in dispute). You can still read this article online — her first public commentary on anything related to Epstein, years before she would introduce her wild and fantastical child-sex trafficking claims. The article says: “There is no suggestion that there was any sexual contact between Virginia and Andrew.” By 2021, Giuffre claimed she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by Andrew, and the following year she received $13 million.

Emails eventually unearthed in civil litigation show Giuffre and the Daily Mail journalist, Sharon Churcher, conniving as to how they could get her a lucrative book deal. Ideas included throwing out whatever names of prominent people in Epstein’s orbit that Giuffre could muster, in hopes that this would entice prospective literary agents and publishers. Churcher suggests Dershowitz, an Epstein “buddy and lawyer,” who she says she suspects is a “pedo,” despite having “no proof.” Thereafter, Giuffre would go on to claim in court filings that she was indeed criminally sex-trafficked to Dershowitz on at least six occasions, until she was eventually compelled to retract the accusation.

This is only the tip of the iceberg with Virginia Giuffre, the person who Nick Bryant and Tara Palmeri demand we uncritically “believe,” as they considered her a “friend.”

Finally, toward the end of his Breaking Points appearance, Bryant asks for an extra minute to educate the audience about some startling facts. “The Department of Health and Human Services commissioned a study that found that 240,000 to 325,000 women and children were sexually trafficked in the United States every year,” Bryant says. “So we’re talking about millions of people.”

Wow, sounds disturbing. OK, where is this alleged study? As expected, there is no such study that “found” what Bryant claims it found. What he’s apparently referring to is a report by Estes and Weiner (2001) which, in addition to being conspicuously out of date and employing bizarrely speculative methodology, does not remotely “find” what Bryant confidently proclaimed to the Breaking Points audience. The report offers an estimate (again, using bizarre methodology, but that’s another issue) of the number of children in the United States who are deemed “at risk” of “commercial sexual exploitation” for a host of purported reasons, such as “use of psychotropic drugs” and belonging to “sexual minority groups.” The authors explicitly state that these numbers “do not... reflect the actual number of cases” of child sexual exploitation in the United States, nor even an estimate of children/women who have been purportedly sex-trafficked, but an estimate of the number of children who could theoretically be “at risk” for exploitation. Go read the report for yourself if you want. I somehow doubt that Bryant ever read it. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

The estimated figures to which Bryant was seemingly referring also appeared in a 2009 “review of current literature on human trafficking into and within the United States,” produced by the Department of Health and Human Services. Citing Estes and Weiner (2001), the authors write: “Only a recent estimate of minors at risk for sexual exploitation comes close to estimating US domestic trafficking. Between 244,000 and 325,000 American youth are considered at risk for sexual exploitation.” Again, this is totally different to what Bryant was pompously asserting.

So where might activist and investigative journalist Bryant have gotten tripped up?

Anti “trafficking” NGOs — of the sort Bryant professionally affiliates with — have repeatedly fudged this estimate over the years, usually to justify their supposed mission. An example is the “Deliver Fund,” which says: “It is estimated that between 15,000 to 50,000 women and children are forced into sexual slavery in the United States every year, and the total number varies wildly as it is very difficult to research. One study from the Department of Health and Human Services estimated the number between 240,000 and 325,000.” But of course, that’s not what the Department of Health and Human Services report estimated. Somehow a methodologically suspect estimate having to do with the total number of minors purportedly “at risk” of “commercial sexual exploitation” morphed into a shocking claim that as many as 325,000 women and children are being sexually enslaved every year. Perhaps Bryant never bothered to look at the original study he’s citing, and only goes off bungled NGO activist summaries, which wouldn’t be surprising.

It’s extremely unclear what the “Epstein Justice” 501(c)(3) that Bryant founded and is now the “director” of actually even does, other than solicit donations and be “supported by” a constellation of anti “trafficking” NGOs, like the Evangelical Christian group Exodus Cry and the (multi-denominational) National Center on Sexual Exploitation.

One of Bryant’s big expert credentials is that he contributed a chapter to a 2014 book entitled “Global Perspectives on Dissociative Disorders: Individual and Societal Oppression.” The chapter contains paragraphs like this one:

The events delineated in The Franklin Scandal include parallels to the amnestic barriers that exist between a dissociated alter personality and the host personality in Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) in the respect that societal institutions entrusted with the task of protecting children instead functioned, in effect, as an “alter” invested in disavowal of these crimes, dissociated from the larger society that seeks to protect children. As the cover-up of child abuse affected by these institutions proliferated, the child-protective laws and values of the body politic and citizenry were thwarted, much as abuse-denying, abuser-aligned “alters” can thwart life-affirming, self-protective functions in individuals with DID.

If anyone can translate that from gobbledygook to English, let me know.

Anyway, here’s the grand finale: where Bryant calls me a pedophile for asking him incredibly basic factual questions. See below!

For those of you who might not be aware, and why should you be, NAMBLA is the North American Man/Boy Love Association. I have no clue if this organization is still active; I recognize it mostly as a punch-line on Howard Stern in the 1990s. Something tells me Bryant is much more familiar with this organization than I am.