This week, the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released an incisive accounting of how Trump’s Department of Justice has managed to avoid – nothing to see here – investigating ANY of the men in the Epstein files accused of sexual assault and rape, including Trump himself. It is the most damning official document yet published, not only linking Trump to Epstein’s crimes against women and girls but accusing Trump himself of rape.

The House Judiciary Democrats’ report makes clear what we at the Freakshow – and anyone even casually familiar with the files – already know:

The record shows that Epstein and Trump, working with other predators like Paolo Zampolli and John Casablancas, exploited the thin veneer of professionalism offered by the 1990s modeling industry to lure victims into their orbit. The evidence, much of it still hiding behind redactions in DOJ vaults, shows that Trump lied about kicking Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club and strongly suggests that Epstein introduced Trump to his wife Melania. The evidence demonstrates that Trump has lied about the nature and extent of his relationship with Epstein dozens of times—incriminating behavior for someone who supposedly has nothing to hide.

Whether the report turns out to be a blueprint for future investigations if and when Democrats control the committees, or does nothing more than gin up pre-midterm attention on the Trump-Epstein connection, remains to be seen.

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But its release coincides neatly with the sentencing of Tal Alexander and his year-younger twin brothers Oren and Alon for sex trafficking. They are the only people in America, other than Ghislaine Maxwell, mentioned in the Epstein files to be investigated and sentenced to prison despite the known cohorts and fellow travelers in the files. Meanwhile, as we’ve noted before, European countries including France, England and Norway have opened investigations into high profile men, all the way up to and including the de-princed Andrew.

The brothers were convicted of federal sex trafficking. They deny guilt, but a jury convicted them of a laundry list of heinous sex offenses, mostly involving group roofie rapes and the videotaping of inert victims. Their “sex trafficking” doesn’t appear to have involved the kind of commercial sex Epstein orchestrated, just inducements to party in fancy hotels and resorts – venues that, for the women, turned out to be the horror equivalent of Bluebeard’s cave.

Since late 2024, the three Alexander brothers have been sitting in a federal prison in New York that now also houses Luigi Mangione and Nicolás Maduro. They will soon be moved to institutions where they will serve out 30 year sentences. Prosecutors had asked for life.

For more than a decade, the Alexanders occupied a privileged position in the Trump-Epstein demimonde and luxury real estate world. They were well known to Trump and Epstein, Leon Black, the Witkoffs, Ivanka and Jared (whose Indian Creek mansion purchase two of the brothers handled in an off-market $24 million deal in April 2021) and other Trump pals.

The Southern District of New York arrested the brothers in December 2024, after Trump’s second election and not long before his inauguration. Their trial commenced in January 2026, the same week the DOJ dropped a huge tranche of Epstein files into public view under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The Alexanders appear in both images and email exchanges.

But on the night of the document dump, the BBC ran images of a government spreadsheet from the files in which allegations against the Alexanders were placed just below a box naming Trump and Clinton. That box included a 14-year-old victim’s allegation that Trump punched her in the head during sex. That accuser turns out to have been a woman who, as we reported earlier this year, the FBI had earmarked as “Protect Source” and whose FBI interviews have been held back from release for unknown reasons.

The Alexander-Epstein Venn diagram is worth studying.

For at least a decade, they were millennial members of the same skeezy underworld inhabited by Trump, Leon Black, Epstein and other horny, powerful, desiccated men. They palled around with Alex Witkoff, the son of Steve Witkoff, a billionaire real estate dealer (for whom Oren handled at least two deals in Miami) who currently serves as Trump’s Special Envoy for Peace Missions.

Oren and Tal, in red MAGA hats, were at the Trump 2016 victory party in New York, along with their boss and one of Trump’s closest pals, Howard Lorber – a scene captured on Israeli TV. After Trump lost in 2020, Oren and some of his family were guests at the White House Hanukkah party. “Spare your political views. The president just served us kosher food in his house and wished us a Happy Hanukkah,” he wrote on Instagram.

They were welcome at Trump Tower and the White House, but the brothers insist they never went to Epstein’s properties – even though one woman has claimed they raped her upstairs at his mansion.

In the Epstein files, Oren appears in photographs with some of the high profile female recruiters/victims, and appears to have dated at least one of the girls Epstein was trafficking.

One of their pals was Ukrainian Anastasiya Siroochenko (who goes by Siro), a recipient of so many off-the-books millions from Leon Black that she attracted the attention of the IRS. Siroochenko was supposedly “selling major works of art” to Leon Black in 2014, including a Louise Bourgeois. In 2015, when Anastasiya was spotted around town with Oren Alexander, she received more than $1 million in gifts from Black, listed separately here.

The trafficking of Siroochenko is explicit in the files, in exchanges like this one between Epstein and model “scout” Ramsey Elkholey in 2011:

Images and emails in the files also indicate that the brothers ran around with Anastasiya’s buddy and Epstein attaché Svetlana “Lana” Pozhidaeva. We profiled Pozhidaeva in our Red Sparrows column earlier this year, as a prolific recruiter of Russian girls who now calls herself a victim and is living under a new name.

In one exchange in the files, Jeff – ever the love guru – advises Lana on how to confess to a boyfriend that she made out with Oren. In another, he asks for details about Oren and Alon’s birthday party.

In the decade before their arrests, the Alexanders were dynamic, high profile luxury real estate agents working the high end Manhattan-Miami-Hamptons scene as protégés of Howard Lorber (according to Trump, Lorber is one of his only two friends in New York, the other being real estate magnate Richard LeFrak).

Oren became a sort of made man in New York real estate when, in 2013, at the age of 26, he handled a record Trump Tower sale – a $16.5 million condo. He went on to do other Trump real estate deals, including the first Trump Tower sale after the 2016 election. On January 12, 2017, a week before Trump’s first inauguration, the NY Post reported Tal and Oren Alexander as listing brokers on a “blinged-out” condo that had been on the market for almost a year.

The Alexander team also sold a Trump Park Avenue condo for $9.9 million in 2019. They represented Qatar in a 2014 purchase of a $100 million New York townhouse. And as Trump rose to power, the brothers were flying high: in March 2016, the Alexander Team listings included, in addition to a Trump Tower condo, a $50 million Upper East Side townhouse, a $39 million listing in Tel Aviv, and a $39 million house in the Hamptons.

The brothers also handled a $47 million deal on Indian Creek Road in 2012, at the time the most expensive home in Miami. But the brothers’ biggest Miami deal was Faena House, an ultra-luxury condo building developed by Argentine hotelier Alan Faena and Ukrainian-Russian billionaire Len Blavatnik, who poured a million dollars into Trump’s 2016 inaugural fund. Leon Black bought a condo there for $16 million, seemingly never lived in it, paid it off and then sold it almost immediately in a 2016 deal handled by Oren.

In 2012, Anastasiya Siro, then a model at Jean-Luc Brunel’s agency (and Epstein’s trafficking front MC2), was under a one-year contract as a model to Faena.

Among his other off-work diversions, Oren and sometime Epstein pal multi-millionaire Benny Shabtai co-chaired Friends of the IDF galas at least three times. In November 2023, they hosted an IDF fundraiser at the Faena Forum in Miami Beach, raising $9.2 million for the Israeli military. At that event, Oren publicly played the role of host. Disgraced Hollywood producer and Epstein files figure Brett Ratner, who had absconded to Israel after a major sexual abuse scandal but who sometimes still hung his hat at Faena Hotel, sat front and center with Mike Tyson.

The connections between Donald Trump, Leon Black, and Howard Lorber go back years and involve moneymaking ventures together in the lawless frontier of post-Soviet Russia, as we reported in What Happens in Russia.

A quick thumbnail history of that web: in 1994, businessman Bennett LeBow managed to retain control of a company he had founded called New Valley through a restructuring of debt controlled by Leon Black’s Apollo Global Management. LeBow was already doing big business in Moscow and had acquired commercial real estate across from the Kremlin. Leon Black’s brother-in-law was LeBow’s right-hand man at the time. A restructuring of New Valley enriched Black, and Howard Lorber was installed as president and CEO.

In 1996, Lorber, Black and Trump went to Moscow together. Black soon formed a joint venture with Lebow and Lorber to develop the Kremlin real estate. In the early 2000s, after selling the Moscow properties to an offshore entity, New Valley gained control of real estate concern Douglas Elliman, where Howard Lorber became chairman and CEO.

Later, Lorber partnered with Paolo Zampolli’s real estate company Paramount (where Zampolli bragged that he drew inspiration from Trump and used models as brokers). Lorber also gave the Alexander brothers their own group and made Oren an Elliman vice president.

And that brings us to today.

The investigation, arrest and convictions of these relatively junior figures in the Epstein files – but no one else – suggest that maybe the feds found it easier to go after the low-hanging fruit while leaving the whales alone.

The Alexanders were close enough to Epstein, Black’s Russian “friends” and some of the other younger women the brothers knew to be “working girls,” that the old bulls might have seen them as loose ends.

They were young, ambitious, and well-connected in Epsteinworld. And now they’re going to prison.

The question is: What did they see, hear or know about the old bulls? Does anyone in power have an interest in finding out?

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The podium is empty. The open call has some specifications: Rapunzel locks or Heidi of the Alps hair extensions, pancake HMU. Willingness to undergo Mar-a-Lago face alteration. Experience playing borderline personality disorder and/or scheming diva preferred. Non-negotiable skill: running on grass in stilettos while smiling.

Other than always needing one super-efficient matron – from his long gone German Grossmutter to Susie Wiles – to keep the show running behind the scenes, the American President has a very particular use for women in his employ.

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He learned that sex sells at Daddy’s knee. Fred Trump used T and A to promote his real estate, including, infamously, one of New York’s most notorious tear-downs. In 1966, he put four models in bikinis, chests out, hard hats on, into the bucket of an earth mover and handed them axes to advertise his destruction of a beloved Coney Island landmark. The historic stained glass was smashed so he could replace it with mid-century middlebrow apartments.

Modern Sydney Sweeney ads notwithstanding, the role of women in Trumpworld is about more than sex. It is the 21st-century reality show stock female character: the histrionic, pretty bitch that audiences love to hate. In the White House, Trump is the impresario of his own reality show. He does the casting himself.

There is a through line that connects Trump’s first term out-of-control femme Omarosa to Guilfoyle, Noem, Bondi, Zacharia and the photogenic but out of their depth attorneys Alina Habba and Lindsey Halligan (the latter was so inept that a federal judge formally disqualified her from her post as federal prosecutor in Virginia). These women are brought in to play a role, promoted to the outer limits of their abilities and then allowed to crash and burn. The crash is part of the entertainment.

Why else select unqualified but gorgeous women for jobs that any number of experienced, competent women with natural hair color and unreconstructed faces could perform brilliantly?

For marketing purposes, the sexy, camera-craving and possibly unstable woman is reality show gold. She satisfies the well-known low-brow appetite for despising women. Remember Hollywood PR maven Melissa Nathan’s famous text during her stint running protection for Justin Baldoni: “Socials are really, really ramping up … In his favour, she must be furious. It’s actually sad because it just shows you have people who really want to hate on women.”

Trump feels this pulse in his blood. He knows well the satisfaction his people get from grinding their gears over a “nasty woman” who doesn’t smile, doesn’t know her place and plots villainously to rise above it.

Meanwhile, the cast of male fuckups are all still standing: Hegseth with his weird testosterone obsession, Signalgate mess, and lies about the Iran war; Bessent careening around the U.S. Treasury, punching enemies and lying about the economy; and the epic corruption of Lutnick, Witkoff and Kushner. Manly, mendacious pillars of strength.

Disposability is the ultimate qualification for these women. Here is Politico’s Dan Lippman with the scoop on Trump’s exact words about Zacharia, a woman he had personally selected apparently without staff consensus: “One White House official told me that President Trump, in an earlier meeting that Katie Zacharia was not present for, told attendees that she had no talent and shouldn’t be on television.”

Brutal.

And then came the glee. And the mean jokes. She lasted half a Scaramucci (your Freakshow guide indulged in this, alas). Her lie about being a lawyer was exposed, followed by the inevitable “She’s at the bar” memes.

In Athens, Guilfoyle is still playing her role on the way out like Norma Desmond. She is reportedly – according to the Daily Mail, one of the media outlets that, like Trump, understands well how to make bank on troubled women – “screaming at the staff” as she is “evicted” from the ambassador’s mansion.

Bondi looked the part but lacked the presentation. Too restrained, too low on histrionics. Screaming at and insulting a Congressman came too little too late to save her job.

Plastic-fantastic cowgirl Noem worked well for a while – the pushup bra and the $50,000 watch in front of the cage at the El Salvador torture chamber were Trumpshow gold. But she failed to cut The Boss in on the no-bid, $220 million ad campaign she gave her pals. Now, Noem is posting pictures of herself with another hunting dog, eternally banished to the Circle of Hell reserved for dead puppy jokes.

The press room podium is empty. Casting is on.

My personal favorite is Laura Loomer, that profane Zionist Omarosa knockoff. After Zacharia’s fall, Loomer posted a picture of herself with AI-adjusted long blonde locks, proclaiming “I’m Ready.” Loomer as a Trump 2.0 press secretary seems like a very overdue appointment.

As one of my Twitter followers put it, “It would be the most cynical appointment since Caligula made his horse a senator.” Caligula’s horse appointments are, of course, one of the hallmarks of Trump 2.0. What else is convicted felon Charles Kushner doing at the ambassador’s residence in Paris?

Loomer checks all the boxes but one: she made the strategic error of dying her naturally fair hair raven a few years ago. And as pro-Israel as the administration is, there are no Jewish women anywhere near the Oval, unless you count Katie Miller, and the occasional visit from Miriam Adelson.

In his dotage, as has been noted, the President wants to cozy up with Ivanka lookalikes, Marla lookalikes, or young Ivanas. People forget about Ivana, but personally I believe that resemblance is what Natalie Harp has going for her.

Besides blondes, Donald has acknowledged a preference for women who are a little crazy. “Can you imagine the sex with this troubled teen?” Howard Stern once asked Donald about Lindsay Lohan. “She’s probably deeply troubled and therefore great in bed. How come the deeply troubled women, you know, deeply, deeply troubled, they’re always the best in bed?”

Beyond his private tastes, though, there’s canny public strategy at work in the selection of this particular type of woman to high profile positions. The genius of selecting women for idiotic, retrograde reasons is that it reinforces the white Christian nationalist and secular manosphere’s misogynistic certainty that women are, by nature, confused, useless, hapless, hysterical, incapable, “stupid” and “nasty.” It sends a clear message about the essential un-qualification of all women.

Trumpworld women agree to play caricatures – and to serve the reality show presidency version of the female role in Trump’s business years, either as accoutrements for deal-making or as brand enhancement (which is, of course, still Melania’s job).

At the Freakshow, we kind of feel sorry for these disposable women. Instinctive compassion, going the way of suicidal empathy.

Blondeness, whiteness, self-mutilation, the willingness to go under the knife and wake up looking like Lamia, the Mother of Beasts or Mistress of Insanity.

Poor Susan Dell. Poor Kimberly. Poor Loomer. Poor Noem.

Then reason kicks in: why expend a drop of pity on women willing to sell their sisters out for a chance to be cool chicks at the Predator’s Ball?

SUBSTACK LIVE: I will be discussing this with author and journalist Virginia Heffernan later today at 11 AM ET.

Get the full receipts every Monday in The Cover-Up

The people who swore they barely knew Epstein keep turning up in his emails. We're keeping score in our new Contradictions Tracker. New receipts every Monday in The Cover-Up.

Three weeks to go and this season of The Trump Show is barreling toward its riveting midterm denouement.

A dawn DHS raid on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s house – a timely stunt to remind xenophobes that their hero can do something about a brown woman in a headscarf. ICE blasting away with live ammo on the streets of New York for maximum attention. Armed National Guardsmen posing by DC ballot boxes.

And now, the big crowd-pleasing reveal: a shrieking diva cast into oblivion.

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Yes, they’re throwing Kimberly “The Best is Yet to Come!” Guilfoyle under the bus. The Mar-a-Lago-faced hellion has had a long career as a brazen hustler; her game was well known before she was confirmed as America’s ambassador to Greece. Trump always casts a few women who can play borderline personality disorder, and Guilfoyle will serve as a timely pre-election distraction from the catastrophes of war, gas prices, environmental ruination, self-dealing and the Grand Grifts of the Brothers and Son-in-Law.

Plus – someone else has likely bid high to live in the State Department’s luxurious Athens mansion for the next two years.

If you’re not MAGA, you’re probably not tuned in to the chief midterm narrator explaining all this. But “War Room” podcaster and Trump whisperer Steve Bannon continues to mesmerixe millions of MAGA sheeple who still buy that he’s a populist on their side – even though, just like the man he shills for, the most cursory reading of the Epstein files shows him to be an Epstein Class A all-access passholder.

As we have reported before, with receipts, Bannon is one of the great wannabe globalists, leveraging his insider knowledge of the White House and Epstein’s contacts to gain access to the highest echelons of Gulf royalty and the EU’s Nazi-adjacent political backrooms.

The House Oversight Committee has not yet bothered to subpoena Bannon, even though he was one of Epstein’s closest late-in-life buddies and his communications with Jeff suggest at least an awareness of the trafficking schemes. Bannon did prison time for blowing off his last congressional subpoena, so that might factor into the committee’s considerations. His “I fought the law and the law won” four month prison stint followed by Trump’s pardon have made him as immune as Big Daddy in some ways. For the moment anyway.

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Since 2020, Bannon has been cheerleading a right-wing coup, broadcasting twice a day via a media company called Real America’s Voice (RAV). He admits that The Big Lie is the tentpole of the MAGA movement, calls for armed guards at polling places and urges his listeners to serve as election deniers (aka meddlers) on precinct committees. He even suggested that they might carry weapons to their polling places. At a “Fraud Fighter Summit” this summer, he gave activists a dozen congressional districts to target, adding that legal sidearms would not be a bad idea. “We need to be at every precinct. If you’re armed or not, that depends upon what your state laws are.”

The claque of supervillains behind RAV, the media company that platforms Bannon’s two-hour twice-a-day bray, is so baroquely evil that the concept of it probably wouldn’t even fly in a Marvel Comics writers’ room.

RAV founder Robert Sigg makes Rupert Murdoch look like Jimmy Stewart. He is a convicted felon and fraudster with a long rap sheet. The federal case against him involved a large identity theft scheme in which he and his cohorts ran help-wanted ads in a Denver newspaper to solicit job applicants, “promising salaries of more than $100,000, for the sole purpose of obtaining the applicants’ personal identification information to obtain the fraudulent mortgage loans.” His rap sheet, according to a Denver news site, also includes: selling or distributing drugs; burglary; assault; assault and battery; resisting or obstructing arrest; domestic violence; driving under the influence of drugs; being a habitual traffic offender; harassment; and drug possession.

But wait – there’s a chip off the old block! Sigg’s son Austin is currently serving a 40-year prison sentence in Colorado for kidnapping a fifth grader off the streets of suburban Denver when he was 17, zip-tying and sexually assaulting her before dismembering her. The lad’s defense included the allegation that his mom – one of Robert Sigg’s wives – sniffed glue while pregnant.

Austin’s younger brother, Parker Sigg, is RAV’s vice president and has been serving as Bannon’s War Room White House pool reporter. When the five major pool outlets recently boycotted Trump coverage in solidarity with their banished colleagues at CNN, Parker Sigg and RAV stepped in to do their own “free pool coverage.” They are continuing to provide it to this day, meaning this super sketchy “news” outlet now has top-level security access to the White House and Trump’s travel.

“We’re gonna continue giving real time updates to everybody,” the younger Sigg chirped on a recent War Room podcast. “This is extremely unique. There are other systems that have been around that the legacy media has used. I don’t believe there’s been anything as streamlined or sophisticated as this. We did this in little to no time. We set this up and beta tested it in 24-48 hours. People are really enjoying it. We’re going to continue to put updates out, make it easier to use, and make it more accessible.”

Through RAV, Bannon is in deep with the Siggs financially, as was his corrupt Chinese pal Guo Wengui, whose backers bought in early. It is still possible to be amazed at how, even for bottom-feeder Bannon, there is no rock under which the failed Hollywood auteur won’t look for a business partner.

Maybe it pays off: RAV is becoming the media home of choice for die-hard election deniers and conspiracy theorists too far gone for FOX or OAN. RAV platformed Jack Posiobiec, the first person to tweet “Stop the Steal,” and just launched a new Ed Martin show to platform his election conspiracy theories. The former Missouri politician and lawyer was a lead organizer of Stop the Steal and a fundraiser for the J6 rioters, who also oversaw their mass pardons as acting DC Attorney. He left the DOJ in August after overseeing another raft of eye-popping and allegedly corrupt Trump pardons but – to his professional detriment – failed to fulfill The Boss’s lawfare vengeance schemes.

Among RAV’s other graduates cavorting in the sweaty DC MAGA clubhouse is Beni Rae Harmony, who once posed in a “Fuck Biden” shirt with an AR-15 strapped across her chest. Big Daddy Donald has made Beni Rae understudy to the new White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia. (Zacharia is another lady nutter who could be in the running to become Trump’s next Guilfoyle/Noem/Omarosa. She apparently agrees that Trump sends QAnon-coded messages from rally podiums, with the number of times he sips from a water bottle supposedly carrying a secret signal.)

Last week, War Secretary Hegseth announced, during a RAV interview with Jack Posobiec, that Nidal Hasan’s execution by firing squad would be livestreamed for the public. Will RAV get the exclusive pay-per-view?

In the run-up to the election, Real America’s Voice is ever more a contender in the contest for market share of MAGAs with an appetite for crazy. FOX News is giving more play to Trump criticism, even inviting Muslim “communists” like Abdul El-Sayed to parlay with Jesse Watters. The DOJ is pursuing an antitrust probe against the mainstream media companies over their boycott last month, while the White House press office veers deeper into the extremist swamp. RAV and Bannon are uniquely positioned to fill the widening gap between reality and unreality with the laughing gas of MAGA midterm delirium.

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Get the full receipts every Monday in The Cover-Up

The people who swore they barely knew Epstein keep turning up in his emails. We're keeping score in our new Contradictions Tracker. New receipts every Monday in The Cover-Up.

His latest book is Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue. In it he explores what he calls the cultural crisis of pervasive misogyny-magnified by Trump and his predatory pals, and “manosphere” figures like Andrew Tate and his many imitators. It is a crisis that crosses lines of ethnicity, race, and socioeconomics and does enormous damage to women, girls, and men themselves.

Katz should be on Joe Rogan, not preaching to the choir here — so spread the word. He has a lot of insight and ideas. Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

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His new book is called “Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue,” —it is short energetic and important! Buy it for your boys and men.

As you might imagine has some thoughts on the Cornell 7.

…

“The great question that has never been answered... is Was will das Weib?”

That was Sigmund Freud, famously struggling in German with what he identified as the supreme unsolved problem of early 20th-century human psychology: What do women want?

Female desire endlessly mystified the Viennese shrink. He was never able to come up with a better answer than “penis envy.”

It deserves to be revisited today, but for different reasons, not least the security and safety of women and girls. The question that vexes us now is: What do men think women want?

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It’s urgent because in recent years it’s become increasingly clear that a significant subset of men not only prefer an incapacitated female to a coherent and conscious sexual partner – they believe that women like it that way.

The allure of the incapacitated female is pervasive. From Gisèle Pelicot to the online “rape academy” (where tens of thousands of men contribute videos and drugging tips), to the roofie-rape allegations that our American “War Secretary” silenced with a monetary settlement, all the way to the Cornell Seven. It’s the same shared fantasy: having your way with an inert female form.

It is so widespread that the obvious questions go unasked. If seven men are in a room with a naked, drunk woman, what makes those men think they should have sex with her? What makes them think she wants it? And, more to the point, how is it legal?

The Cornell Seven join a list of young men involved in high profile incidents involving gangs assaulting incapacitated females, including Richmond High School (2009), Steubenville (2012), Audrie Pott (2012), which I covered for Rolling Stone, and Rehtaeh Parsons (2011).

The Pott and Parsons cases ended in the terrible tragedies of two teenage girls committing suicide. Their assailants were never punished. The only case in which the perps got prison time was Richmond High School, where the boys were urban, majority Latino and working class.

All those incidents provoked a moment of public indignation. But we know how the cycle goes: outrage, gendered tribalism, naming and shaming of perpetrators and the victim, then a slap on the wrist, if any punishment at all. Then the forgetting. And the slogans, too, gone with the wind: Take Back the Night. Believe All Women. Time’s Up. Me Too.

I would like to think that the Cornell Seven are downstream from the Predators’ Ball that is our world: the Trump White House and its philharmonic accompaniment, the manosphere. Even at this echelon, the predilection is clear. Besides roofie-rape-accused Hegseth, Special Envoy for Global Partnerships Paolo Zampolli is also accused of drugging and raping a woman in a lawsuit filed by Victoria Drake.

The “grab ‘em by the pussy” hot mic was greeted with horror at the time, but it didn’t stop Trump from getting elected twice. Trump 2.0 even flew the rape-cheerleading, rape-accused, self-described trafficker Tate brothers into Miami and gave them safe haven.

Barely a blip of notice until the UK demanded their extradition.

And the women? Liars all!

The sentiment crosses political lines. Aging Bernie bro and leftie manosphere defender of the free-range male Michael Tracey has made a shtick of feeding the “heterodox” outrage machine. Last week on Piers Morgan, he came to the rescue of the named Chi Phi men and solicited public help to doxx Jane Doe. (Tracey has a long history of doxxing women. And Julie Brown has accused Tracey of physically harassing her, so yeh, he’s creepy.)

Libertarian-leftie Glenn Greenwald is also upset about the naming. He posted about how ID-ing the Cornell guys tramples on our system of justice (the Western tradition is always under threat these days!), of due process and innocent until proven guilty. Commenters drew their swords. One of Glenn’s fans, posting as “qwert,” blamed “the illogical dogma of feminism amplified by media hacks who want to be heroes” for replacing rights with social media vigilantism. He wrote: “Also, the idea women don’t have their own sexual proclivities and agency is bloody sexist and patriarchal.”

Only bluestockings and prudes would deny a barely conscious woman the alleged enjoyment of being pounced upon by seven men at 4 am.

Now mind you, all this “bloody” reverse sexism is happening against the backdrop of Cornell logging 1,200 sexual assault cases from 2018 to 2024. Only seven of them ended in expulsion or dismissal. The vast majority of those found responsible remained on campus, according to USA Today.

During those same years, the FBI logged a thousand women now redacted and deemed trafficked in the Epstein files. Not one man has been charged.

Of course, the presumption is that those 1,200 women are lying. Or to quote the many Xitter commenters, male and female, they are regretting “slutty” behavior and rebranding themselves as victims.

The poster child for the college assault out-liar is the woman at the center of the Charlottesville rape case. I wrote occasionally for Rolling Stone and know a little about how that journalistic disaster played out: An overly protective survivor network in charge of the campus sexual assault crisis center convinced an experienced journalist and her experienced editors and fact-checkers – who should have refused to comply and ended the reportage at that point – that asking too many questions, even the basics like who where and when, would be too psychologically damaging for the victim.

Voila! A new, all-purpose, long-lasting “all women lie” poster girl for the ages. And a notch for the “fake news” crowd. Some women may indeed lie. I suspect they are outliers. Out-liars, if you will.

To believe a victim like Cornell’s Jane Doe is a liar is to imagine a young woman brazen enough to sign up for global shaming, online and probably IRL harassment, and a lifetime wearing the letter V for victim. Because there is no way she gets out of this with her dignity intact or identity shielded forever.

A better question than “Is she lying?” is: Why do seven men in a room think a drunk, drugged woman wants them to “whip it out,” in the argot of the Chi Phi chat, on her?

The great philosopher Martha Nussbaum has an answer in her 2021 book Citadels of Pride. The title comes from Dante’s Purgatorio in which the proud spend eternity bent over – crooked and blinded by their own deformity – a metaphor for their inability to see the humanity of others. Much of Nussbaum’s book concerns the experience of “moral injury,” a syndrome seen in soldiers as well as sex assault victims. Moral injury is the deep emotional, psychological, and spiritual damage caused by doing, seeing, or failing to prevent something that violates your core moral beliefs.

Back to the men: What are the origins of the fantasy of the unicorn female who is borderline unconscious but who has “proclivities,” to quote Glenn Greenwald’s fan?

Is it nature? The caveman clubbing the future mother of his spawn in service to the continuation of his DNA, as the evolutionary biologists and their reactionary friends on the right would have it?

Emma Camp, writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, offered a more modern answer: violent internet porn. “Watch enough porn, and you’ll think it’s perfectly normal for a woman to want group sex with strange men. Watch enough porn, and you’ll think it’s perfectly normal to strike a woman while you’re having sex with her.” Watch enough porn, and you’ll think that women like to be choked while giving blowjobs – that they enjoy a man’s hands squeezing their windpipes.

Meanwhile, studies are starting to show unusual numbers of younger women with signs of brain damage from the practice, from temporary incoherence to permanent disability. For some men perhaps, nothing could be more alluring.

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Substack Live this Wednesday 10/7 at 12 pm ET

I’ll be hashing out all these issues with author and educator Jackson Katz, co-founder of Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP), the first large-scale gender violence prevention initiative in North American sports culture and all branches of the U.S. military. More recently, he co-founded the Young Men Research Project, which looks at young men’s voting habits and patterns, with a special focus on the digital ecosphere they inhabit. He writes In the Arena with Jackson Katz on Substack.

I met Katz some years ago and interviewed him for Elle Magazine. He has a new book out, Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, and How You Can Make a Difference. We will discuss his “bystander approach,” and what he describes as the relative absence – and failures – of men’s leadership at every level: personal, institutional, and political. He identifies those failures as the root of the problem.

What’s really happening at the Supreme Court?

Join COURIER and Americans United on October 20 for Weaponizing Faith: Christian Nationalism at the Supreme Court. Featuring Rachel Laser, Stasha M. Rhodes, Michael Podhorzer, and moderator Lisa Graves, this panel uncovers how political allies are reshaping our legal system and what we must do to reclaim it.

Attend in person at The Milton Theatre in D.C. or watch the live stream online. RSVP today!

Get the full receipts every Monday in The Cover-Up

The people who swore they barely knew Epstein keep turning up in his emails. We're keeping score in our new Contradictions Tracker. New receipts every Monday in The Cover-Up.

It’s UNGA week: the annual U.N. General Assembly gathering in Manhattan. Diplomats from all over the world descend on the city, sporting lanyards and sidestepping placard-waving protests. Sirens blare all day, clearing the way for the motorcades of global leaders. The gridlock makes Uber and taxi drivers lose their minds.

For the rest of us, the Babel pinging around the canyons of steel is our yearly reminder of the broken promise of global cooperation – and the fact that the human species just can’t get its shit together.

This year promises to be especially heartbreaking. It’s the third year of a real-time, video-broadcast genocide, with no nation willing or able to mount any meaningful resistance.

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UNGA 81 provides a good opportunity to rethink one of the greatest exercises in diplomatic can-kicking in modern history: the Oslo Accords, the much-lauded attempt at a solution to “Israel and the Arabs” that now appears to end with the Gaza genocide.

The Epstein files have much to tell us about the strange game that left the Palestinians no better off, but won three men – Arafat, Rabin, and Peres – a Nobel Prize in 1994, and lionized Terje Rød-Larsen, a Norwegian politician, diplomat, and an eminently corruptible buddy of Jeff’s.

Oslo and Jeff go together like peanut butter and jelly in modern Middle Eastern history – not because Epstein was in the room from the beginning, but because he attached himself to the main players in the same inexplicable way that the Accords themselves played out. The ultimate accomplishment of the Accords was to sideline Palestinian claims to property and nationhood while giving the appearance of progress – a mile marker on the road to Gaza today.

The Oslo negotiations started in secrecy in 1992, sponsored by the Norwegian government. The process created the Palestinian National Authority (PA) and involved the return of exiled leaders like Yasser Arafat to Palestinian territory. But the ultimate goal of the talks was always vague. Israel refused to formally accept the creation of a Palestinian state, maintained military control over a majority of the occupied territory, and further divided Palestinians by severely restricting travel between Gaza and the West Bank.

The Accords also allowed Israel to chop the West Bank into strictly defined, military-checkpointed areas designated A, B and C – with C containing roughly 60 percent of the occupied territories and remaining under Israeli control. The delineated area included superhighways reserved for settlers who had access to modern irrigation systems, while Palestinian farmers just across the arbitrary line were relegated to dirt roads and pre-industrial water systems. The militarized checkpoints on the borders of the “areas” meant – for Palestinians – long waits, strip searches and other humiliations and sometimes deadly delays for people needing hospitals, including women in childbirth.

Benjamin Netanyahu was not one of the Oslo negotiators. But he played a role in their application. He was first elected prime minister in 1996. A year later, he and Arafat signed an agreement regarding Israeli military presence in the violently contested Hebron area. Netanyahu later claimed the so-called Hebron Protocol would allow Israel to unilaterally decide what constituted a military location. He boasted to a group of settlers: “Why is that important? Because from that moment on, I stopped the Oslo Accords.”

It’s not clear he gets to claim that credit, though.

Netanyahu’s political rival Ehud Barak, a nominal liberal and soon-to-be close personal friend of Epstein’s, was elected prime minister in 1999. While less confrontational than Netanyahu, Barak was more effective with the facts on the ground, as the settlements were sometimes called. In barely two years, Barak approved more new settlements on Palestinian land than Netanyahu had in three.

The Oslo Accords officially died under Barak at a Clinton-sponsored meeting between the two sides at Camp David in 2000. The Israelis showed up with no formal written offer and Clinton officials conveyed their proposals to the Palestinians. When the meeting ended without an agreement, Clinton praised Prime Minister Barak’s “courage,” and blamed Arafat, who had refused to back down on the right of Palestinians to return. The narrative stuck and the Israeli slogan henceforth would be: We have no partners for peace.

Meanwhile, the human tide continued pouring out of the former Soviet Union, a process that started in the 1990s, financed in large part by Epstein’s great benefactor, Les Wexner. By 2010 – 18 years after the first secret Oslo meetings – the number of settlers had tripled. According to the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU), the Palestinians later concluded that the Oslo Accords had merely inaugurated a tradition of Israel repeatedly using the appearance of negotiations as cover for expanding settlements.

The Accords led to a dramatic influx of settlers into the Occupied Territories, along with the incremental loss of freedom and property for Palestinians, relegating them to be labeled “terrorists” and turning them into international poster people for the world’s oppressed.

So where does Epstein come into all this?

Though he seems to have really started skulking around the U.N. after his prison term in Palm Beach, he had met Barak for the first time in the early 2000s. The two men became fast friends, and numerous pictures in the files show them together. In one shot of Epstein in his Manhattan townhouse, Barak has sketched and signed a map of Israel on a chalkboard, complete with the various corridors and areas delineated by the Accords.

After Barak lost his leadership position, he returned to politics and served as defense minister for nearly seven years. During that period, he met with Epstein in person at least 19 times and had dozens of additional phone calls, according to communications in the files, like these:

Weeks before Epstein entered prison in 2008, he even visited Israel and toured IDF bases with approval from Barak’s office. Before long, Epstein was embedded into the post-Accords Middle East “peace process” and laying the groundwork for cooperation from Gulf royal families who would ultimately become allied with Israel via the 2020 Abraham Accords.

Epstein was still under house arrest in 2010 when Barak hooked him up with Oslo Accords hero Terje Rød-Larsen. After 2010, as we have revealed in previous Freakshow columns, the Norwegian diplomat remained a fixture in the background of Epstein’s global networking life – an eminently corruptible Viking, scurrying around the Middle East building a network that he shared with Epstein.

That network was so powerful, and Epstein’s access so deep, that he even managed, according to the New York Times, to acquire Islamic relics from the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest site, for his Caribbean island. Rød-Larsen’s wife, Mona Juul, also a diplomat, was even more powerful, eventually even chairing the U.N. Security Council. The couple were later revealed to have taken a personal loan from Epstein.

By the mid-2010s, during the Obama years, the Oslo accords were widely regarded as having failed. But they still carried a public pretense of success: a Broadway play about the Accords was mounted in 2017, and Epstein forked over $70,000 to host a private viewing. An HBO movie was made in 2021.

The Epstein files make clear that, by that point, for people like the little Scandinavian diplomat and Epstein and Barak, the process had devolved into a lot of scheming around two things: 1) hooking up with the Gulf oil powers and 2) making some money.

Nowhere is this more evident than in this audio recording from the DOJ files, which anyone can cue up:

The day after Valentine’s Day, February 15, 2015, Ehud Barak, Epstein, and former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers had dinner at Epstein’s house. They discussed: Israeli demographics and how to keep Israel a Jewish-majority state; Palestinian peace in terms of Israeli regional security and Iran; and concerns about Iran as a nuclear power. Barak also casually shared sensitive information with Epstein from his discussions with then-Secretary of State John Kerry.

But the real meat of the conversation comes when Barak – in his last month as Defense Minister – pitches Summers on a plan he, Epstein and Rød-Larsen had cooked up to make some serious money selling security and economic advice to small autocratic governments. After Summers leaves, Barak and Epstein discuss how Epstein will stay “behind the scenes” if the consulting project gets legs.

In sum: the Palestinians really never had a chance.

In February 2011, Ehud Barak – in his capacity as Israeli Defense Minister and Deputy Prime Minister – met at the White House with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. They discussed “events in Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia and Turkey as well as the status of negotiations with the Palestinians,” according to a press release afterward.

The top US officials “expressed their expectations that Israel would move forward in negotiations with the Palestinians.”

But of course, the Palestinians were not in the room. After the Oslo Accords, they were deemed unfit “partners for peace.”

The next morning, Barak had breakfast at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. Eventually, he would use an apartment in Epstein’s 66th Street building – where Epstein housed his trafficked women – to write his memoir, published in 2018.

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Contemplating art along the curvilinear ramps on the edge of the open air atrium at the Guggenheim Museum is always a little dizzying, whether it’s Warhol, Rauschenberg or Maurizio Catalan. But Taryn Simon’s Father Country I Do Love You, the six story building-wide exhibition of photos and video related to an anonymous FBI agent’s career, is an exceptionally queasy stroll. The major crimes and catastrophes of America’s last three decades make strange and haunting art: Clinton impeachment, Vince Foster, embassy bombings, mysterious plane crashes, child porn, the predations of al Qaeda.

Remember TWA Flight 800, down off Long Island in July 1997? Crashed after takeoff from JFK with 11 eyewitnesses from different points on the ground claiming they saw missile-like flash in sky just before the explosion. Cause unknown to this day. Text near a giant photograph of the wreckage says the FBI suspected a bomb hidden in a box of iced corneas for transplant loaded on the plane just before takeoff.

The 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi killed 210 innocent people. That horror show had dropped out of my head, maybe somewhere after the televised ISIS beheadings. Here on the Guggenheim wall is the reminder, including a dog nosing up a body in the cracked concrete pile and a wall of photos of survivors, in color.

The Clinton impeachment is here represented by large scale photos of cairns of messy files and CDs - just some of the mountains of evidence gathered and entered into the impeachment trial. A life size photo of Clinton defense lawyer Cheryl Mills, stalwart friend of Hillary, looking cold daggers at the camera, accompanies the images.

Anonymous FBI agent also looked into Vince Foster, Exhibit A in the Clinton body count conspiracy. When the FBI combed the grounds of Fort Marcy National Park where Foster shot himself, they recovered dozens of Civil War era projectiles but never found the suicide bullet. Did everyone know that? Here is a wall of photographs of the Civil War artifacts.

Photos of dead rats are leitmotif throughout the building. Rats. Get it? Simon snapped them on the gutters and crannies of the city in her daily walks around Washington Square Park.

The FBI’s own rats get their own star turn: Here is FBI cooperator Rasheeda Moore, disgraced DC Mayor Marion Barry’s ex girlfriend, turned state’s evidence, now geriatric, and here starring in three huge videos teaching viewers how to properly wrap a turquoise jersey wrapdress.

Simon also persuaded Priscilla Sue Galey, a DC stripper, to get back in a red bikini and pose for another large scale photo. Galey was the love obsession of convicted FBI double agent Robert Hanssen, the Opus Dei Catholic who turned out to be selling secrets to the Soviets. Galey believed he was just a rich gentleman who wanted to rescue her from the demimonde, and only learned after he pled guilty (to avoid the death penalty) that he was gifting her from his earnings from the Russians. In the show, Galey presides over her own corner of the Goog, larger than life, septuagenarian skin and varicose veins on unabashed display.

Behind a red velvet curtain with a posted warning that the space beyond will expose visitors to mentions of sexual abuse , there is a closet door sized video screen with individual women of Phoenix 11, an advocacy group of people in child sexual abuse material (CSAM) recounting horror stories of childhood victimization by predators. The CSAM women presumably stand in for the dozens (or per Pam Bondi, thousand) Epstein survivors, some of whose calls to the FBI (see the Farmer sisters) went ignored.

Next to that, an exhibit centers a giant horizontal photo of January 6 felon Gina Bisignano. Blonde, supine and enclosed in an anti-aging cryotherapy machine - one of the devices in the beauty salon she operates out west. In the photo, the 1776 patriot is posed reading her phone, only her upper torso, head and calves and naked feet visible, a court-ordered cellular tracking bracelet gracing one ankle.

My old friend and colleague Washington political journalist Matt Cooper got the Simon treatment in a series of black and white video and stills shots taken while he was undergoing HMU before a cable TV hit in DC. The audio on one of the screens picks up the makeup artist prattling on about Tucker Carlson’s phenomenal TV skills.

The immediate effect of this barrage of bizarre sidelong glances at relics of forgotten national traumas and famous era-defining crimes, is to disinter the accretion of buried disgust, horror and dread that has shaped our collective insecurity since the 1990s.

On reflection, “Father Country I Do Love You” is something else too: It strikes one as being a contender as the first major piece of post-woke Big Art - that is, art not curated by Trump administration anti-intellectual patriotic art philistines but by a major New York cultural institution. It is not explicitly pro-cop. But it is uncritical, red white and blue, an artworld mashup with the surrealism of X-Files and the white hats FBI: Most Wanted.

One begins the journey up the Goog ramp expecting Simon to do what modern art always does with the security state, which is to say, ridicule, monsterize and expose the soul-dead machine. But advancing up the ramp, one realizes that what’s going on here is more complicated. Around every curve, the show is imbued with the now familiar Trump era sensibility in which evil coexists with, nestles within, the clownish and bizarre. We consume the caricature and roll our eyes.

The show also leans into homage of the hardworking G-man - not necessarily without reason. Who wants to pick through bits of flesh in airplane and bomb wreckage, look at CSAM, surveil phones and lure in and wire up collaborators? Simon includes a prominent call-out to the IDF for, according to the artist label next to a 12 by 12 foot wall size photo of a body in wreckage, being first on scene at the Nairobi embassy bombing.

So. Post-Woke Art - with the very notable exception of an epater le bourgeoisie close-up blow-up photo taken by the artist herself, a perfect circle of a vagina around the crowning head of a baby - vagina and baby both anonymous - meant to represent the birth of unnamed FBI agent, now reportedly 70.

Simon is a Gen X East Coast establishment thoroughbred - Philips Exeter, Brown University. She lives in downtown Manhattan and was at the opening, distinctive and fey with long, dark hair styled half pinned up, clad in a lacy black jumper that resembled an Amish Goth birthday party dress - a self-designed daily uniform of which she has, according to the New York Times, 100 versions.

Google search tells us major New York art museums and galleries give solo exhibitions to women only 25 percent of the time. I would have guessed a lot lower than that. By that metric, the show is obviously Big Woke, not post-woke. I’m all for galleries giving female artists big shows and can forgive garish close-ups of childbirth, but maybe not the gratuitous aspect. Using that image to complement art made from a quarter century of federal police work is the epitome of aesthetic equivocation, a strange-bedfellows, culture wars political rapprochement — but one whose time has maybe come around.

Poor Donny Jr. can’t escape the reek of Epstein, no matter where he goes. It follows him and his siblings from bedroom to boardroom, from New York to Palm Beach to Indian Creek Island, the Bahamas and beyond. Like a leaky propane tank.

Everyone in Manhattan knows Junior’s daddy was Epstein’s closest buddy in the city for more than a decade. Undeniable.

But eau d’Epstein permeates Florida too, including Junior’s fairytale marriage to “classy” Palm Beach blueblood Bettina Anderson. Junior’s new father-in-law, Harry Loy Anderson, was not unlike so many powerful men who did business with Epstein and gave him special treatment.

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Anderson, according to communications and other records we have discovered in the DOJ’s Epstein files, was listed as the primary officer on Epstein’s personal accounts in Anderson’s bank. He personally intervened to give Epstein special consideration in the early 2000s, while Epstein was using these accounts to pay for his “massages” and the “young females” who visited him.

As owner and president of Palm Beach National Bank & Trust Co. in the early 2000s, Anderson - who died in 2013 - repeatedly instructed bank employees to bypass normal requirements to issue credit cards or raise credit limits for Epstein, his employees, and Ghislaine Maxwell’s personal assistants in New York. In one instance, Anderson phoned in special instructions regarding the Epstein accounts – from Utah.

When Palm Beach National Bank was sold to a holding company in May 2002, Anderson remained president of the branch. The most damning evidence about the cash withdrawals and payments involving Epstein comes under the name of that holding company, Colonial Bank. Under Anderson’s ownership, not a single Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) was filed with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network regarding Epstein’s activity.

Within six months of Colonial’s purchase, however, their corporate HQ began filing a series of SARs about what it described as a pattern of structured cash withdrawals from Epstein’s accounts at the Palm Beach branch headed by Anderson.

The amounts were not insignificant. In December 2002, JPMorgan filed a SAR, flagged for suspected money laundering, over about $1.9 million in cash withdrawals from an Epstein account that was being funded through his Colonial account in Palm Beach. JPMorgan had filed a SAR about similar activity earlier in 2002, before Anderson sold the bank, concerning suspicious cash withdrawals funded from Epstein’s account at Palm Beach National Bank.

And yet, as late as 2005 – the year police learned Epstein was receiving sexual massages from teens at Royal Palm Beach High School – his employees were still routinely able to withdraw cash in $1,500 increments, often multiple times a week, from the “household” account at Anderson’s bank. Anderson’s daughter Bettina graduated from the elite St. Andrew’s school that same year.

Epstein and the Andersons are also connected through Epstein’s assistant and paralegal Story Cowles, who visited him in prison around 130 times per CNBC (“no one visited Epstein more”). Cowles dated Epstein’s assistant and self-described victim Sarah Kellen and claimed on his resume that, during the same period he was working for Epstein, he was president of a charitable fund founded by Bettina and her brother, Loy Anderson, called The Paradise Fund (The fund itself doesn’t list Cowles as president in its tax filings, but he is listed as a member of the “Host Committee” on an archived website and was photographed with Bettina and her brother at Paradise Fund events; in a 2012 email, after Cowles asks a redacted person if they plan to attend a Paradise Fund event, the person responds: “Are you involved with the charity again?”).

The late Trump chronicler Wayne Barrett, and later the New York Times, reported that Anderson once wrote a letter supporting Epstein’s application for tax breaks in the U.S. Virgin Islands. In the letter, he described Epstein as “a gentleman of the highest integrity” who “enjoys an excellent reputation in our community.”

The connection between Harry Loy Anderson, the Anderson family and Epstein is not really shocking. Florida is rife with slimeballs, and banks do business with them. In one 1997 newspaper item, Anderson is even quoted giving a character reference for one Paul Prosperi – a sometime Epstein business associate who was on trial for tax fraud and money laundering – describing him as “a very honest, forthright individual.” The item also says the banker was “taken aback” when prosecutors reminded him that Prosperi had given his daughter a car. (The daughter could not have been Bettina, who was 11 at the time.)

Bettina Anderson is about the same age as the girls Epstein abused in Palm Beach. She is their generational peer – but born on the right side of the tracks. Bettina is the kind of insider who might have been found sitting across from Jeff at a dinner party, not unlike Kathy Ruemmler – except not a buddy, just a social acquaintance – clinking champagne flutes over candlelight. She is definitely not the girl living a mile away across the causeway bridges giving naked happy ending massages to the old man in the creepy house of horrors run by G. Max. Maybe Jeff Bezos can fork over some money to help Bettina, who played lacrosse and attended parties at the Polo Club, produce or even star in a series: a tale of two cities, a Rich Girl Poor Girl about the interconnected flipsides of the Palm Beach in which she grew up.

Her mother, Inger, was a Swedish model. Coincidentally, Epstein had a thing for Swedes. His longest-running girlfriend was Eva Andersson, a Miss Sweden who remained a close confidante until his death, and whose Swedish nannies have talked. More on that here in Jeff and the Blondes.

Of course Bettina – now Bettina Trump – would have a fairytale wedding to her beloved on a private island in the Bahamas. Little Pipe Cay: 38 acres, five plantation estates, infinity pools, tropical sunsets. The set and setting, owned by longtime friends of the Anderson family, was everything a girl could dream of. (It turns out the files also contain evidence that the owners of Little Pipe Cay were also very tight with Epstein.)

Big Daddy Trump, notably, chose to miss number one son’s second wedding. It’s not entirely clear why he felt compelled to give a speech at Rockland Community College in New York while the blessed event was taking place thousands of miles south. Trump watcher Rob Shuter claims the President and Barron boycotted the wedding because Melania refused to go. It is well known that there’s no love lost between the First Lady and Ivanka – who did attend.

The wedding pictures are all high production value, involving drones, HMU, multiple cameras, videos and stills, all edited and released on social media to incite envy in wannabe billionaire wives and longing in online MAGA fans whose own future wedding dresses will come off the rack from TJ Maxx. Maybe a little overpriced – thanks to Dum-ocrats and Biden!

The pictures are mesmerisingly disgusting: a glimpse into a dime-store tropical version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death. In the middle of the US-Israel war on Iran, a month after The Boss promised “a whole civilization will die tonight,” there’s Bettina walking on the sand in a sheer dress, Junior in his white linen. The drone shots of the couple entering the little chapel look like a spectacle produced to mimic the JFK Jr.-Carolyn Bessett secret wedding off the coast of Georgia.

But even Bettina’s Palm Beach pedigree can’t quite deliver the thing the Trumps are always trying to buy: class. The Trump family has raked in hundreds of millions from World Liberty Financial crypto, an intake valve open for influence and bribes. Even the crooks are shocked; read the interview with their ex-partner Justin Sun in New York Magazine. The Trumps are richer than ever, but will never be more than the degraded version of the Kennedys as America’s “First Family” presiding over the sunset of an empire.

There is no greater evidence of that than Bettina and Junior accepting a six-figure, two-day wedding party from a Putin pal. According to the investigation by Pro Publica:

Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin … footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.

Junior has seen his wealth increase by hundreds of millions, not just through WLF but through taxpayer-financed mining deals and Pentagon contracts. Conservative estimates say the Trumps have been enriched by at least $2 billion during the second term alone.

The boys learned from their dad: If the government or taxpayers or fleeced investors or Trump U suckers or one or Putin’s tools will pay up, be my guest.

Responding to the story, Bettina posted more wedding party pictures on Instagram and declared that “our dear friend Umar” did not finance their very private family-only wedding, but only threw them a big two-day party later. Kremlev is a former member of the fascistic Russian Night Wolves biker gang who went to China with Putin and is personally sanctioned by Ukraine for his role in abducting children, according to journalist and author Anne Applebaum, who writes frequently about Russia.

But hey. What are dear friends for?

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Twenty-five years ago at 9 a.m. I was two hours from New York City preparing to take my almost two year old son to a play date. We were actually supposed to be in France on 9/11, where we were moving to live while I worked on a book. But at the last minute, I had panicked about unfinished stateside work and delayed the ticket by a month.

Norman Rockwell rural USA kind of day. Sparkling September morning. The rumble of a harvester across the road where a lone farmer was cutting his still green crop for winter silage. Eagles soaring over the river valley.

America the beautiful. God shed his grace on thee.

And a toddler on the floor.

We were in a ramshackle house we’d recently bought on our freelance photographer and writer incomes. Had not gotten too far with the fix-up. No radio, no TV nor wifi (actually the option was only dish or dialup and we had neither).

I strapped the child into his car seat and drove ten miles down river,stopping to gas up and that’s where I learned about the disaster. People were clustered around a TV, talking about the buildings, the Pentagon being hit, and maybe the White House!

“Are we at war?” I asked. A young man turned and hissed “If not we oughta be!”

Ten minutes later two riveted mothers stood watching towers fall on TV while babies gamboled nearby. After a while we went outside and they played on some swings. The sky was bright and utterly silent. We watched our baby boys and tried to imagine them in the future. Soldiers?

An editor called that afternoon asking for a column. What did it mean? Want to write about that? I thought: Whatever this means won’t be understood for years. I probably wrote exactly that.

We spent the next two and a half years in France, watching from afar the W regime and its inexorable Iraq war planning. Our country seemed crazier from the outside looking in. As the “shock and awe” came ever closer, the French held regular “manifs” - street protests against the war. Our son’s first memories probably include sitting on his father’s shoulders near the Place de la Republique and watching an effigy of W burning.

When we went back home, people had tied yellow ribbons on trees near our ramshackle house. Support our troops. Ask nothing but what you can do for your country.

If not we oughta be!

The leadup to the iraq war was long. They had to prepare the ground with lies about WMD, remember? Anyone who knew the region understood the difference between the secular dictator Saddam Hussein and the Wahhabi Muslim extremists influenced by Saudi Arabia. Saddam was locking up and torturing them.

Didn’t matter. To most Americans it was all the same. Ay-rabs. Eye-rack. Eye-ran.

Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Feith, the neocon pro-Israel elves behind the scenes, took great advantage of the general ignorance.

Fact: Our warfighters chased the mastermind into a tunnel in the Afghan mountains. They had Osama bin Laden cornered. But just finishing off Al Qaeda would waste an opportunity and opportunities don’t knock every day. So they left him in there. If you still don’t believe this, read this account by CIA agent and former nuclear security agency official Bruce Held, who, among many others, has explained how the neocon elves around W wanted a war with Iraq so badly that they diverted the military from almost certainly capturing bin Laden in November 2001 to focus on war with Iraq.

They had a better idea about what to do with such an opportunity.

Cheney did too, with his Iraq oilfield map, meeting with the CEOs. Duty number one, how to keep it pumping, and second, divvy it up.

The word “terrorists’ was and still is a useful catchall label, a way to dehumanize whole swathes of oppressed people, as explained in this essay by the American lawyer John Whitbeck.

The label did a lot of lifting for the project. Among our American friends in Paris those years was a professor on sabbatical who I recall looking my husband in the eye when he suggested America was going after Iraq for Israel and saying. “That’s antisemitic.” The stakes were clear, the sides drawn. The professor later went on to write a novel channeling Arab women kidnapped by Isis.

Is it anti-Semitic, though, to see American wars in the Middle East as adjunct to support for Israel? A country into which we have poured record billions in defense dollars? And which has spent lavishly in return on lobbying and influence for decades?

A quarter century on, we’re in another war in the Middle East, and no one even bothers to pretend that it’s not for Netanyahu. That’s progress of a kind, I suppose.

Who else wanted those wars? The Saudis and their cousins in the royal families of the other Gulf monarchies didn’t mind it at all. No love lost between Wahhabis in charge of trillion dollar sovereign funds and the regional secular strongmen. Now the secular dictators are gone, the oilkings secure in their theocracies are allied with religious ethnostate Israel and lavishing the American president and his family with crypto cash, which the Trumps bank while spending tax dollars on more weapons for Israel.

Eye-rack. Eye-ran.

I think back on the editors’ request 25 years ago today. What did it mean? I didn’t know then.

But a quarter-century on, surely we know what 9/11 meant by now?

We try. A friend of mine argues that 9/11 differs from Pearl Harbor in that America has remained essentially about the same - or at least not as altered as it was after World War Two. That’s one way of looking at it. We haven’t entered a world war. Yet anyway.

But in all other ways, helplessly, we’ve changed utterly and with us, so has the planet. Our government blew through more than $5 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan that could have been used on any number of actually needed things – education, health care, public works, climate change mitigation. Instead, those wars displaced 37 million people, most of them staggering north into Europe, upending the social order. If you don’t think that has anything to do with the rise in right wing parties in Europe, I suggest you visit any town along the south of France up against the Mediterranean where women in hijabs are pushing strollers, and men in skullcaps sit on the mairie steps.

It is in the rise of the European right feasting on the backlash to displaced millions pouring into Germany France the UK in the wake of the folly of the Iraq war and the wrecking of Syria and Libya and Afghanistan.

It’s here in the xenophobic contagion of that faraway migration, in the lie that terrorists are sneaking over our borders with other brown people, and in the normalization of masked secret police dispensing with due process.

It’s in our populist kleptocrat Trump, the people’s choice after a decade of wasted blood and treasure on the “war on terror” and lies about the grand project of remaking the Middle East.

It’s in the cynicism that bought us this lawless regime and its pharaonic corruption, a trickling down of soak the suckers Trump banditry that infects the entire economic system.

It’s in the malicious gleeful dismantling of systems and norms that once made Americans and, we thought, the world - believe in our exceptionalism.

It is in the chest beating reactionaries spawned by the unmanning effect of the event itself. The manosphere is all about burying a quarter-century of shame at the wave of fear that for a few hours infected - indelibly - the hearts of a certain kind of man.

Yesterday I watched a long video taken from a news chopper of the first tower burning while the announcer talked about getting a better view. The second tower is intact for most of the clip.

Watching it is almost unbearable, as minutes go by, and first one then another plane appears in the sky, but they fly away west - incredible that air traffic was still moving at that last minute, until finally, one darts in and the second great fireball erupts.

These days, we can see such murderous fireballs almost daily in our handheld devices, in real time video of high-tech savagery in Gaza. Yesterday the AP published a great shot of a missile hitting a refugee camp. The whizz-zip of the missile, the orange explosion, the rising belch of smoke.

The vague awareness that oh yeah, there are incinerated people in that cloud

The sound of gunfire, off in the distance … getting used to it now.

Tie a yellow ribbon.

In America, people in the strip malls and boarded up towns in flyoverland were lied to and fooled about this and they know it. Faith in media and government has chipped away. At least the Brits looked back, tried in the Chilcot report to place some accountability for great folly, finding the UK chose to join the U.S. “before peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted.” And based on dishonest and flawed “intelligence.”

AKA lies.

The farther away you were from ground zero the stronger the jingo-ism, that was another lesson learned. Islamophobia is still a guaranteed crowd-pleaser for Republicans with their low propensity voters and rural base. Witness the revolting spectacle of “America’s Mayor” Rudy Giuliani and others telling New York’s Muslim Mayor to stay away from today’s memorial downtown as Fox News’ wallpaper for these past days.

Are we at War?

If not we oughta be!

Perception is more important than reality. If someone perceives something to be true, it is more important than if it is in fact true. This doesn't mean you should be duplicitous or deceitful, but don't go out of your way to correct a false assumption if it plays to your advantage.

– Ivanka Trump recounting lessons she learned from her father in an excerpt from her book

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Trumpworld survivors know that good optics are the cardinal rule with the big guy – second only to successfully executing open-air corruption.

Thick-browed Pete Hegseth is nothing if not a Trumpworld survivor – for now anyway. We expect the day will come when this Fox Weekend chest-beater, currently running a real war involving the smoking ruin of U.S. bases, death and global havoc, is finally thrown under the bus.

Hegseth arrived as a Trump nominee plagued by alcohol abuse and roofie-rape allegations. Once confirmed, he delivered exactly the performance the White House reality show casting director wanted. He dubbed himself “War Secretary,” and, with a cartoonish strut, became a walking case study in steroid overuse.

A warrior caricature is as essential to the Trump show as Betty Boop femininity. But when Trump faced the greatest real challenge of his presidency – the forced release of the Epstein files in January 2026 – he needed extras as backup.

Enter Hegseth’s three social media influencers, riding to the rescue. Between them, these Three Musketeers have a combined one million X followers, more fans on podcasts and TV, and, as it turns out, Trump government positions too.

The Washington Post’s Dan Lamothe broke this delicious story (he also revealed the airport food cart caper and is one reason to maintain your Wapo subscription – despite Bezos, the place still has great, well-sourced journalists on staff).

Lamothe did not report on the substance of the trio’s social media activities in relation to the Epstein files, but the timeline speaks for itself. About a week after the files were released, Hegseth announced he was cutting Pentagon ties with Harvard and creating a task force to review military war colleges and other academic institutions. He staffed this woke-hunting task force with the aforementioned trio of former military men turned right-wing social media figures. They were given civil service acronyms – HQE (Highly Qualified Expert) or SGE (Special Government Employee) – and “.civ” government emails. The Pentagon refused to tell Lamothe whether, or how much, they were paid, or what their jobs were or how long they would be in them.

Retired Air Force colonel Kurt Schlichter, a popular right-wing flame-throwing trial lawyer, Townhall columnist, and former standup comic, is probably the best known of the three. He has 620,000 X followers whose favorite word – judging by their enthusiastic, if often grammatically incorrect, replies to his posts – is “retarded.”

Schlichter, a self-proclaimed “major influencer,” is a reliable source of MAGA snark on Fox, Newsmax, and beyond, having been around since Andrew Breitbart hired him years ago. Whether he’s still actively practicing law is anyone’s guess – his name is no longer on his firm’s website (he was still listed as recently as June).

In a crowd of surly manosphere influencers, though, Schlichter’s woman problem stands out as particularly… acute. He rarely misses a chance to trash females.

Responding to former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade, he wrote: “Frigid wine women fear and loathe the things of men. This is why they should be patted on their empty heads and directed to the kitchen to prepare sandwiches” (you might recall that “make me a sandwich” is a rape-propaganda Tate Brothers meme spewed at female teachers by brainwashed preteen boys).

Schlichter has also called Democratic political women “fat, ugly and retarded” and liberal white women “an abomination.”

Given this penchant, it’s no surprise that he frequently dismisses Epstein’s victims as “hookers” or prostitutes and liars. From his very first comments on the files – in the form of a ranting YouTube video – he cited his experience as a trial lawyer, called the case “lies” and “nonsense,” and, apropos of nothing, mentioned that his mother is a judge. Unlike Hegseth’s mother, Kurt’s mommy has yet to weigh in on her son’s radical misogyny. He has repeatedly called those interested in the Epstein case “retarded.” He insists there is “no global sex trafficking ring.” and that he, along with Rep. Thomas Massie, “is laughing at how stupid” people are for believing there is.

The second Musketeer, is another former colonel and civilian lawyer named Thomas R. Anderson, who has racked up 320,000 followers on X under the nom de guerre Cynical Publius. As the files came out, Publius too shifted right on cue to slamming the Epstein case. There is no “there there,” he whined in one tweet. Some other greatest hits include: “We know everything there is to know;” There is “very little” in the files; Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna are “narcissistic charlatans bent on harming Donald Trump;” “Trump was the first person to report [Epstein] to the police” (despite not having a shred of evidence to back that up); and our personal favorite, “There is no ‘Epstein List.’”. Anderson/Publius also claimed that making any Trump and Epstein connection was defamatory and slanderous.

Mississippi-based podcaster Rob Maness, the third Musketeer with a Pentagon HQE title, spent months calling for the release of the Epstein files. But on the day the Wall Street Journal dropped its story on Trump’s contribution to Epstein’s 50th birthday book, Maness abruptly reversed course. After firing off two final tweets on July 17, 2025, he never mentioned Epstein again:

Predictably, Kegseth and his very online MAGA patriots ran for cover once the Post story broke. Publius squealed that he was only hired to serve on the task force and had nothing to hide. Maness accused the Post of defaming him, claiming the information about his Pentagon work was “illegally obtained personally identifiable information from government data sources.” Schlichter published an entire Town Hall column calling the Post “regime media” that “hits like a girl” – notably without ever denying that he had the government gig.

We all know it takes a social media village to make a sick bully named thousands of times in the Epstein files palatable. Lockstep messaging from Posobiec to Loomer to Schlichter to the Foxbots has been the name of the MAGA game for a decade. But War Sec. Hegseth now appears to be so freaked out by the exposure of his optics games and war disasters that he’s running polygraphs on dozens of officials, desperately hunting leakers while our Gulf bases go up in smoke – off camera.

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To preteen girls of my 1970s junior high, there was no other way to be. Hiphuggers, short skirts, aviators, long swingy hair. A lot of sass. And for many of us, the first post “Women’s Lib” generation, the expectation of an adventure-filled, self-reliant future with marriage and motherhood as options not imminent requirements.

To her peers in the adult public square at the time, she had threaded the needle of sexy and smart in a way that made male detractors look like idiots. The record of their blustering scorn and contumely and the open ridicule heaped on her, and the women she led, is part of history.

Feminazi. Furry Legged fanatic. C-word. B-word. And the perennial favorite: Man-hater.

They couldn’t take it. Her wit and panache drew out their scorn the way certain salves drain boils. The casual insolence and open diminishment toward her and her peers was part of the cultural wallpaper of the era. Among the men engaged in it, the psychological temperature ranged from lightly snide to psychotic.

Reporting on the creation of Ms. Magazine, ABC news anchor Harry Reasoner said on national television, “I give it six months before they run out of things to say.”

By the 1980s, the Viagran Centurions of the media had mobilized. The shock jocks - Limbaugh, Imus Stern - can’t you take a joke? - and their spiritual grandsons the fight club rape propagandist Tate bros and their herd of manosphere sheep. The disappointed entitled, the preternaturally insecure, the incels, and their insidious cousins, the fascist tiki-torch carrying “You Will Not Replace Us” troops.

Gay Talese, revered chronicler of the famously misogyinistic Italian Mafia, sharing a taxi with Steinem and another great 20th Century phallocrat the author Saul Bellow - once famously said: “You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.”

To her face.

Can’t you take a joke?

Charles Manson, weighing in from prison in a 1970 interview uttered a phrase that decades later is close to an actual slogan dripped from the mouths of men from JD Vance to the Tate brothers: “Gloria Steinem and all those girls’ libbers, they’re taking the manliness out of the man. They want to be the men, but they don’t want to carry the weight.”

Replacement was always the underlying fear.

Millions of men now share the views of a psychotic mass murdering cult leader.: Taking the manliness out of the man.

Steinem saw this coming back in 1972: “Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” In later speeches she would add to that: “But too few men are becoming the women they wanted to marry.”

She could name the core issues like no one else. Cut to the chase. “Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon.”

And: “She will need her sisterhood.”

Where is that sisterhood half a century later?

It boggles the mind that successful right wing American female leaders like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Karoline Leavitt, Nancy Mace, Erika Kirk and the millionaire influencers and online trad wives and their followers do not revere this woman who demanded their equal humanity and enabled their rise from second class citizenship. Among other things they enjoy, they owe their professional status, credit cards and bank accounts and freedom to divorce to this woman’s leadership.

Instead of insisting that their men change to accommodate the new reality, they have decided to solve the problem of reactionary Tate-ish, manosphere incel-hate and preacherman misogyny disguised as the Lord’s word, by cheerleading for it, by promoting a retreat to primordial female roles. And taking that to the bank — from which they hire the nannies to watch the children they like to claim progressive women hate to care for.

Everything old is new again. For now.

Gloria has sailed into her rest. As Yeats wrote in his epitaph for Jonathan Swift, savage indignation there cannot lacerate her breast.

But in the era of state-regulated forced childbirth, wormy so-called Christian pastors calling for the return of god-given, man-only voting, and the resurgence of Trump style transactional sugar-daddy relationships between bloated, insecure Viagrans and surgically disfigured foot-bound younger women who have given up the fight, indignation is now ours to nurture and maintain.

“We did not redact images of any men unless it was impossible to redact the woman without also redacting the man. We did not protect President Trump. We didn’t protect or not protect anybody.”

That was Todd “Boy Cohn” Blanche earlier this year, explaining how the Department of Justice was handling redactions of sensitive information as it complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA).

At the same press conference, Blanche also promised DOJ was going to prosecute men involved in trafficking. “If we learn about information and evidence that allows us to prosecute them, you better believe we will.” But then he added this qualification: “I don’t think that the public or you all are going to uncover men within the Epstein files that abuse women.”

Regular readers of the Freakshow will know at a glance that that statement is not true. The files contain plenty of information and evidence suggesting that some men – both named and unnamed – appear to have participated in Epstein’s trafficking operation as scouts or johns, while many, many more appear to have been aware of the activities but done nothing about them.

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And over the past six months, we have uncovered the names of numerous men – and one non-victim woman, Kathy Ruemmler – whose identities are concealed in some or all versions of the files. Among the mysteriously redacted: the late sex traffickers Daniel Siad and Jean-Luc Brunel; Steve Bannon; former Prince Andrew’s top aide David Stern; Epstein’s brother Mark Epstein; Epstein’s great benefactor Les Wexner; Wall Street titans Leon Black and Glenn Dubin; former Colombian president Andrés Pastrana; former British ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson; disgraced Dubai businessman Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem; Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman; former French minister Jack Lang; Kathy Ruemmler; and former Sen. George Mitchell.

How we uncovered these names varied from case to case. In many instances, there was another, unredacted copy of the same email, text message, or photo elsewhere in the files (suggesting a concerning lack of consistency in the redaction process). We also made some determinations based on an abundance of context clues.

Here is a sampling of some of the mystery-man redactions we have identified:

Daniel Siad is redacted in this conversation with Ghislaine Maxwell. The context of the email is that Epstein and Maxwell had just returned from Havana, where they had a five-hour lunch with Fidel Castro. Four days later, Siad sent Maxwell an email (“Hello from Havana”), which she forwarded to Epstein. For some reason, DOJ saw fit to redact Siad’s name.

Peter Mandelson can be identified as the redacted sender of this email reading: “Find me someone to be really nice to in Dubai.”

References to Leon Black are redacted multiple times in this email from Epstein recruiter Irina Chernova, discussing with Epstein a “good bye gift” she had received from Black (more on the relationship between Black and Epstein’s Russian recruiters in our The Billionaire and the Recruiters Freakshow series). Black is also redacted in this court filing from the U.S. Virgin Islands’ litigation against JPMorgan over the bank’s financing of Epstein’s trafficking there. Many other men are named in the document – but another Wall Street titan, hedge funder Glenn Dubin, is redacted. Dubin and his wife spent considerable time on Epstein’s island and they are also named in a deposition by an Epstein employee who alleged that one of their nannies was a terrified underage Swede who said Ghislaine Maxwell had taken away her passport in the Caribbean.

Les Wexner, the Ohio billionaire who was Epstein’s great benefactor, and Jean-Luc Brunel, the modeling agent accused of procuring girls for Epstein, are both mysteriously redacted in some copies of a 2024 internal FBI document summarizing the Epstein case and laying out the investigation timeline.

Former Colombian president Andrés Pastrana is the redacted sender of this email; the redacted recipient is Ghislaine Maxwell. Pastrana mentions Maxwell’s plans to “be in Arkansas with Clinton” and he is redacted again in an email from Maxwell mentioning Jeffrey’s “ideas for the conference.” Pastrana had flown to Cuba with Maxwell and Epstein a week earlier and afterwards sent Ghislaine a warm email in Spanish – his name again redacted – saying that el Comandante had a wonderful time.

Note: In an email the previous day, Daniel Siad mentioned that he was in Havana “taking care of” someone he calls “Andreas a great gentelement [sic],” a possible reference to Pastrana. The Freakshow has so far not determined what “taking care of” meant.

Some redactions look less like victim protection and more like protection from embarrassment.

The DOJ went to town with the blackout ink on former Prince Andrew’s aide David Stern. Stern can be identified as the redacted sender in numerous emails to Epstein on the topic of “lots of P” (P being Pussy), because in other messages, he is not redacted while discussing exactly the same thing.

Here is Stern wishing Epstein “lots of P” for his birthday in 2012, and again for the new year; making plans with Epstein to buy the Dukes Hotel in London with “room for lots of P”; on the lookout for new assistant P for Jeff in St. Moritz; and lamenting the hot weather and lack of good P in London.

Here, comedian Bobby Slayton is redacted while wishing Epstein a Happy New Year and, of course, a year with lots of pussy.

Some of the redactions do indeed look accidental. Tom Pritzker is all over the Epstein files, but is redacted in one entirely anodyne Maxwell email from 2001: “See you at 71st at 9.15pm Then I will feed you [sic].” It’s also possible that this single redaction is only one of others yet unmasked.

Other examples are harder to explain. Why would the late Wall Street tycoon and Epstein mentor Ace Greenberg’s name be redacted from Epstein’s Bear Stearns background check paperwork? Reputation protection? Brother Mark Epstein’s name and relationship to Jeff are redacted in the same file.

There are mysteriously redacted male faces in photographs, too. Redactions in two photos cover the face of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Two men flanking a woman or girl are concealed in this image. And in another redacted image, Sen. George Mitchell sits beside Jeffrey Epstein, holding a redacted small child (probably Mitchell’s child and not a victim).

Some redactions were contested early on. In February, Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, who had seen both the original and redacted documents, grilled Blanche about the hidden identities. Massie pointed to a document containing 20 names, 18 of which had been redacted. Blanche claimed the document had “numerous victim names” and that DOJ had “unredacted all non-victim names.”

At the same hearing, Blanche also defended the redaction of Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem’s name in a notorious email in which Epstein tells the redacted Sultan that he “loved the torture video.” Blanche claimed it was initially redacted because the material contained an email address constituting personally identifiable information.

A February 2026 report to Congress, signed by Pam Bondi and Blanche, alphabetically listed the names of dozens of men and a few women – from Alexander Acosta to Paolo Zampolli – who were government officials or “politically exposed” and/or appeared in the files at least once. The letter stated that “No records were withheld or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure or foreign dignitary.”

Melania Trump is on the list, along with Donald Trump, but based on our review, that list is incomplete. The missing include Dubin, Stern, Pastrana, Greenberg and Mitchell. Mitchell’s omission can’t be explained simply by his being deceased since Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin are both included.

If we take DOJ at its word that nobody was omitted or redacted to spare embarrassment or reputational harm, then there must be some other explanation for masking those men.

The only official excuse is in a footnote to the February report:

Any omissions from the list are unintentional and, as explained in the previous letters to Congress, a result of the volume and speed with which the Department complied with the Act. Individuals whose names were redacted for law-enforcement sensitive purposes are not included.

It’s entirely possible that some of the redactions (and un-redactions) are mistakes. But others are clearly deliberate. And Blanche has never defined what “law-enforcement sensitive purposes” actually means.

Blanche made his first public statement on the Epstein files on July 22, 2025 to announce that he would be interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell in person.

Six months later, announcing DOJ’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, he cautioned that the public’s “hunger or a thirst for information” would probably not be satisfied by the documents because he “[didn’t] think that the public or you all are going to uncover men within the Epstein files that abuse women.” Now that he is Attorney General, Blanche has repeatedly doubled down on that position.

Meanwhile, his and DOJ’s explanations for what remains hidden continue to evolve. Tellingly, the excuse they’re using now for withholding handwritten FBI notes – that they are “duplicative” – was never mentioned in the early explanations.

Journalist Katie Phang’s lawsuit against Blanche prompted the DOJ to acknowledge that 200,000 pages in the files had been redacted or withheld based on various privileges. The judge in that case has so far appeared to side with Phang on the transparency issue and has threatened the DOJ with a contempt of court citation for failing to adequately explain various mystery redactions.

Protecting the men in the files from embarrassment or worse is apparently of higher importance than investigating any of them for knowledge of or involvement in Epstein’s crimes.

This is not the case in Europe. Norway is investigating two Epstein pals. At least two of the DOJ’s redacted men – Lang and Mandelson – are under investigation in France and the UK. Daniel Siad was also under investigation in France before he died.

So we have another sordid Trumpy milestone: his top law enforcement agency stands alone among the Western nations, not only turning a blind eye to a global trafficking and influence network with abused girls and women at its core, but actively hiding their names in file releases demanded by Congress.

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The Indy 500 is zipping around our capital, but the wheels of American justice are slow. Attorney General Todd “Boy Cohn” Blanche – with the help of FBI agents flagging documents with the acronym POTUS for special review – has thrown enough roadblocks into the Epstein Files Transparency Act to defend his boss for now.

Maybe not for long, since a judge is threatening him with contempt of court.

And at least one other powerful man is feeling the heat.

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That man is Epstein’s biggest “tax client,” master of the universe and Wall Street billionaire Leon Black, whose lawyers and fortune have managed to shield him from accusations, responsibility and questions for years. His imperial impunity may finally be reaching its limit, at least at the congressional level, where the House Oversight Committee is threatening to hold him in contempt of Congress if he continues to refuse to turn over nondisclosure agreements.

Earlier this summer, when the NDA issue came up, Black stalked out of the Oversight Committee with his phalanx of lawyers. The Committee has been hashing out next steps with them ever since and has apparently ran out of patience: Black is now threatened with a contempt citation next week.

“If Mr. Black refuses to provide the Committee with responsive documents or refuses to appear for his scheduled deposition on September 3, 2026, the Committee will use all tools at its disposal, including contempt,” Comer said in a letter to Black’s lawyers.

Black was Epstein’s biggest known client, having paid him about $170 million, according to Senate Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden. Black has said the money was for “tax and estate planning,” and documents in the files indicate that Epstein was indeed involved in his financial life.

But there are also plenty of communications between the two men – or between Epstein and his recruiters referencing Black – to suggest that their relationship edged in the direction of Epstein’s side business trafficking women, and is worth further investigation.

We covered Black’s involvement with two of Epstein’s Russian recruiters in a Freakshow last month. And now, in newly discovered communications, we see Victoria Housez telling Epstein that an office space she was looking at for her “scouting” business with trafficker and spy Daniel Siad would be a place where “Leon” “can feel comfortable.”

Black has specifically denied to the Oversight Committee that he knew anything about the sex trafficking operation until Epstein was arrested at Teterboro stepping off his private jet: “With the benefit of hindsight, I now know -- as does the world -- that Epstein was engaged in horrific, sordid activities. I feel terrible for Epstein’s victims. I want to state clearly that I did not know about this nefarious activity until Epstein was charged with trafficking in July 2019.”

But we have discovered previously unreported messages between Black and the global sex trafficker that suggest otherwise. Their communications are filled with Epstein’s innuendo about his real business.

In August 2017, Black and Epstein had the following exchange:

Leon: “You OK? Hopefully not overexerting …”

Jeff: “Home tonight. Did you see mickey mouse as the sorcerers apprentice. Fantasia . Overwhelmed bu what he wished for [sic]”

Leon: ???

Jeff: You used to be able to understand when you were younger! Soooo many new

A year later, in August 2018, they shared another exchange, this one with casually racist undertones.

A few hours later, Black replied, prompting Epstein to explicitly mention “photos.”

And then there are the photos themselves.

We have uncovered previously unpublished photos of girls that Epstein sent to Black without explanation. One thing we know from Epstein’s communications with recruiters is that he was avidly collecting – often demanding – pictures of potential marketable women and children.

A reasonable person might assume that the recipient of the images Epstein sent without comment was at least dimly aware of the sender’s habit of (at the very least) collecting photos of young women to share with his friends.

Below are some examples of photos Epstein shot into Black’s phone or inbox.

He sent this one in August 2011, four days after the first exchange between Epstein and recruiter Victoria Housez mentioning Leon Black:

In July 2016, on Black’s 65th birthday (for which Black’s wife Debra had solicited a story for a birthday book), Epstein sent the below photo, unlabeled, off to Leon personally:

Epstein sent the following image to Black in November 2016, apparently taken while Epstein was in Saudi Arabia visiting MBS on the eve of the 2016 election. An hour earlier, Jeff had texted Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen: “I’m in Riyadh,” and later sent Terje a photo of himself laughing with MBS. (Michael Wolff has said that Epstein told him he smuggled “girls” disguised as flight attendants into Saudi Arabia – a serious crime there.)

The above photo appears in the same thread in the DOJ files as two screenshots related to Jared Kushner and a photo of Leon Black at the US Open with Jared and Ivanka.

Black, who claims his relationship was entirely businesslike, also appears in the files making milkshakes with Epstein’s redacted “assistants.”

Just good clean fun.

Throughout these newly unearthed communications, Black not only seems to be a friend of Epstein’s – he explicitly calls him “friend” and even “dear friend.”

“Happy New Year my friend!!!” he wrote Epstein during the Jewish holidays in 2018.

Black told the committee he decided to give Epstein a “second chance” but now regrets it: “I did know that Epstein pleaded guilty in June 2008 to State charges relating to prostitution involving a minor. Epstein had told me that it was an isolated incident resulting from a fake ID. Five years after his conviction, I gave Epstein a second chance, as did many others. I wish I had not.”

In fact, he was giving Epstein a second chance quite a bit sooner than that. As we reported last month, an Epstein recruiter named Irina Chernova – who ultimately became a recipient of Black’s largesse – planned to accompany Black in 2009 to visit Epstein while Epstein was still under house arrest for his Palm Beach conviction.

In the email arranging the visit, Chernova said she would also bring at least one [redacted] girl; Epstein replied that he would “talk to Leon” about the visit and says [redacted] “can bring her sister or friend” (apparently some new girls Epstein had not yet met).

Like Trump, Black is in the infamous 50th birthday book, with a sexually insinuating note. He called Epstein “dear friend,” and signed it “love and kisses, Leon.”

When the committee pressed him on those effusions, he said, “Friendship is an amorphous term … We were never best friends. Was I friendly with him from the point of view of enjoying his Rolodex? Yes. Did I think he was very smart as a professional adviser? Yes.”

Black was also dismissive about the significance of his family foundation, which he appointed Epstein to run. “I don’t think that entity did a whole lot,” he said.

Depends on your definition of “whole lot,” apparently.

In just the five years between 2000 and 2005, IRS 990 forms filed by the Leon Black Family Foundation show that it donated over $19 million to at least 41 different organizations. During that period, the forms list Epstein as the foundation’s only director other than Leon Black and his wife.

Time will tell whether Black’s lawyers can keep running interference between the Wall Street whale and Republican-led Congressional committee. Team Black, picking up the refrain from Epstein’s other non-friend friend, Donald, calls it a “witch hunt.”

But whatever happens, there are ominous signals here for Epstein’s old buddy, the Predator-in-Chief.

In his letter to Black’s lawyers threatening contempt, Comer described the investigative “scope and intent” in terms that should put both Todd Blanche and Donald Trump on notice.

The scope includes:

(i) the alleged mismanagement of the federal government’s investigation into Mr. Jeffrey Epstein and Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell, (ii) the circumstances and subsequent investigations of Mr. Epstein’s death, (iii) the operation of sex-trafficking rings and ways for the federal government to effectively combat them, (iv) ways in which Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell sought to curry favor and exercise influence to protect their illegal activities, and (v) potential violations of ethics rules related to elected officials.

The Oversight Committee chairman (a Tennessee Republican, remember) also made clear that NDAs, documents Trump relied on to shut people down throughout his career, are not ironclad against the eyes of the law. At long last, the legally binding, lip-zipping bribes that wealthy predators use to silence victims and witnesses might be subject to some legislative oversight or restriction.

Comer wrote:

Mr. Epstein, and his associates, used a variety of tools to control his victims and other individuals in his orbit. The Committee is aware that Mr. Epstein used non-disclosure agreements to silence his associates, some of whom have since come forward as victims and survivors of his abuse … The Committee is also aware of the existence of at least one non-disclosure agreement between your client and a woman who was connected to Mr. Epstein. The pursuit of this investigative pathway––and relevant facts surrounding it––is necessary to determine the nature and extent to which Mr. Epstein and his associates used these confidential agreements, which in turn will help determine whether legislation is necessary and if so, how to craft such legislation to prevent such activity from reoccurring.

Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff is, for the moment anyway, the Democratic Party’s living legend in effective rhetoric. And he struck a hell of a nerve this week just by stating the obvious: Trump, he said, “doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

On its face, that statement is difficult for any sentient political observer, right or left, to disagree with. It has been obvious for months that Trump would much rather spend his days on his Bob the Builder projects, take a few public naps, and spend the wee hours exulting and giggling over racist memes and AI renderings of himself as Genghis Khan or Jesus – delivered by Natalie Harp, the woman his own staff calls his “Binky,” his security blanket.

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Even Forbes, The Capitalist Tool, noticed, publishing a story headlined, “Natalie Harp Seen Everywhere With Trump Lately.”

Meanwhile, his lawfully wedded spouse of two decades hasn’t been spotted anywhere, let alone anywhere near him, for almost a month.

Cat’s away, mice will play! Oops…

But the right has gone crazy. Scandalized pearl-clutching all around!

Trump himself feebly insulted Ossoff, calling him Pee-wee Herman. His allies, however, rushed to the defense of his chivalry and Harp’s honor in a ferocious eruption of performative hypocrisy.

Megyn “blood coming out of her wherever” Kelly went to the mat – figuratively, if not literally – for the disgusting cad.

Kelly was joined in moral outrage by the whole gang, playing the same tune in concert, like the Philharmonic, from Newt Gingrich – who famously discussed his divorce papers with his hospitalized wife – to Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, who, like Kelly, accused Ossoff of “sexism.””

Mentioning in political speech that the President is spending time with “Natalie” is apparently a level of offense above that of mainstream journalists quoting solid White House sources claiming Harp is so devoted to Trump that she:

• Slept in a Trump golf club locker room for a summer rather than be exiled from his glorious presence.

• Left him mash notes that alarmed even his devoted chief of staff, including, “You are all that matters to me,” “I don’t ever want to let you down,” and “I want to bring you joy.”

• Was one of the chosen ones invited aboard the sneaky Presidential food cart on the tarmac in Ankara, conveying him away from possible harm, leaving reporters and Cabinet members behind as live decoys for the Iranians Israel had promised were coming to get him.

• Apparently reads him to sleep at night with racist and sexist memes and conspiracy theories he can push out on “Trump Social.”

• Inspired the White House nickname “Binky,” because, as the Times’ Maggie Haberman said, “She is sort of his binky, for lack of a better way of putting it, a comfort blanket.”

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As we noted almost a year ago in The Body Horror of the Trump Years, after that tense weekend during which Trump disappeared, a brown something was seen tossed out of the White House residence window, and rumors were rife that he was dead or dying at Walter Reed:

The MAGA movement has undeniable aspects of body horror, a subgenre of horror that involves grotesque degeneration, mutation, or transformation of the human body … The doddering old man’s body is metaphor for the ghastly corrupting effect he has had on our country: a decade-long descent of our public discourse into profane spectacle, the jettisoning of common decency and empathy in favor of rudeness and cruelty, the daily rituals of public humiliation, open racism and sexism, and the craven terror of the disfigured Republican Party.

Natalie Harp’s arrival in Trumpworld is itself body-horror adjacent. She emerged, fully formed as a useful political prop, out of California around 2018, when she first tweeted support for Trump. The following year, she appeared on Fox and Friends, claiming she had a bone cancer that standard chemo was not helping. She credited Trump’s “Right to Try” law with giving her access to an experimental treatment that supposedly saved her life. (Her story has been convincingly challenged, but letting facts get in the way of a good political story is not the MAGA way.)

Trump, watching his favorite show, was enchanted by the Ivanka-Marla lookalike Liberty University graduate. He soon invited her onstage at one of his speeches. Before long, she was on national alt-right fake-news TV, spouting Bible verses and eventually Big Lie election trash as an anchor on OAN. She also landed a coveted speaking slot at the 2020 Republican convention.

By the summer of 2024, she was bunking in the locker room at the Trump National Golf Course Bedminster, so as to not let too much daylight get between her and The Donald. Melania was said to be irked and the staff alarmed, but nothing put a dent in her clutch behavior, least of all the object of her devotion.

Last week, Michael Wolff shared one of his best Inside Trump’s Brain reflections on Instagram, challenging one of the anti-Trump world’s most cherished certainties: the ubiquitous meme that Trump wears a diaper. Wolff is convinced it isn’t true, and there is little reason to doubt his access to Trumpworld insiders; the Epstein files made that crystal clear. He blames our universal attachment to the Trump diaper on a psychological syndrome that afflicts us all: the utter disbelief that obese, vituperative, rambling Trump “exists at all – an 80 year old man who lives on junk food and has never exercised a day in his life.”

As Wolff put it, we are riveted by the survival of this visibly decaying man: “How is that possible?”

The diaper, in other words, is less a medical claim than a tangible symptom of the Body Horror of Trump. And it is indeed horror. The kind that sticks.

Which is why Ossoff’s comment so unnerved the Red Team.

I am not alone in sharing this piece of feminine wisdom, dear Freakshow fans: There is no ladylike sensibility in the nation that doesn’t recoil at the thought of those giant, swollen, bruised paws coming anywhere near a young one’s flesh. And there is not a woman alive whose stomach doesn’t churn in unison with that of any young woman – even a devotee there by choice – confronting those flaccid turkey giblets (to steal a metaphor from the poet Anne Sexton), let alone interacting with that in any way.

Ossoff didn’t need to spell anything out. He didn’t need an allegation, a punchline, or even an adjective. He just said “Natalie” and everybody filled in the blanks of their own volition.

That is also what makes the ensuing Republican outrage so spectacularly funny. The party that has coalesced around a decaying, profane misogynist – who introduced America to the coarsest level of political discourse and misbehavior toward women in living memory – accusing a Democrat of gutter politics for simply mentioning the name of a woman constantly at the president’s side is one of the best laughs of Summer 2026.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

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The moral cadavers in the crypt that is the U.S. Senate have now confirmed Donald Trump’s personal attorney Todd Blanche as our next Attorney General. Raising their pale, bony hands in unison last week, they gifted Donald the lawyer of his dreams, a man he expects to finally fill the shoes of his great mentor in mob-style lawlessness, Roy Cohn.

Blanche begins his new job as Chief Epstein Coverup Officer on an appropriately macabre anniversary. Seven years ago yesterday, Epstein was found hanging in his New York jail cell, leaving countless trafficked victims without justice, untold numbers of johns and habitual pedophiles shaken to the core and in danger of exposure, and a web of conspiracy theories that have powered whole political movements, including Donald Trump’s.

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Blanche has already proven his eagerness not merely to preside over the Epstein Files Coverup, but to personally engineer it – from executing an apparently illegal quid pro quo with sex monster Ghislaine Maxwell, to overseeing the redaction of names of rich predators in the files, to publicly promising to flout the Epstein Files Transparency Act entirely and withhold millions more pages of evidence that Congress has demanded be released.

His primary purpose appears to be to protect the men.

That is the main concern of a White House that has more mercy for men accused of domestic violence and roofie rape than for raped preteens with unwanted pregnancies. After stating that he was aware of three million more pages of documents, Blanche claimed, “There’s not some tranche of super-secret documents about Jeffrey Epstein that we’re withholding. We’re actually not withholding anything.” And he later told journalists: “This review is over.”

Lawyer and journalist Katie Phang, in her lawsuit against the DOJ over the Epstein coverup, is trying to force the department to explain who each redacted person actually is – victim, law-enforcement officer, etc. – and exactly how the statute permits their concealment. Congress authorized the protection of victims, not the protection of men from embarrassment or scrutiny. The judge in that case so far appears to be siding with her, making the Justice Department prove its case rather than simply taking Trump regime lawyers’ word for it.

Blanche is willing and able to play the role, but he is not really Trump’s Roy Cohn. He lacks the whiff of infernal sulphur that trailed his greatest predecessor in Trump’s long and sordid legal history.

Blanche is his “Boy Cohn.” And Boy Cohn has an origin story.

He is the son of a preacherman who – as we broke in a previous Freakshow – fought the law for years, trying to win the so-called “religious liberty” to host a twice weekly holy hoohaw in his suburban home. There, little Todd watched as his family split-level living room was transformed into a rave of dozens of falling-on-the floor, glossolalia-babbling, moaning and sobbing, God-orgasming Pentecostals.

The heavenly caterwauling bothered the neighbors. The city had an ordinance about such gatherings and told Todd’s father to stop. He called on “religious liberty” theoreticians in the nascent national Christian legal community. And off to court they went, for years.

This was in the 1980s, when the Christian right was just mustering its legal squadron for what has since become a full-on assault on American society. Little Todd was a preteen, watching it all from the corner of the living room. Or, who knows, maybe falling down in a Lord-struck stupor with the adults. More likely he was staring wide-eyed, absorbing the kookiness – and, behind closed doors, his father’s anguish at being denied what he considered to be his God-ordained right to host a revival in his suburban home whenever the lightning of the Lord pierced his head.

Decades later, Boy Cohn gets to avenge his actual daddy’s legal defeat by playing hero to an even Bigger Daddy who also considers himself a victim of the law.

It should come as no surprise that “Boy Cohn” Blanche, whose worldview was formed in a clash between religious fanaticism and secular law, plans to go well beyond advancing Trump’s Epstein coverup. He is now the preeminent legal defender of a Predatory Man’s White House: a regime that profited financially and politically off the pimp-pornographer Tates, is headed by a serial sex offender, and employs a roofie-rape accused “War Secretary.”

And Blanche has promised to go after the remaining rights of American women as well.

Just before his confirmation, Blanche was on a “White House Faith Office” call promising anti-abortionists “religious”liberty” for their cherished scheme to criminalize women from New York City to Baton Rouge and beyond. For Trump and his political strategists, the alliance with the god squad is just Politics 101. Trump couldn’t care less about the Bible or abortion. But for the regime’s White Christian nationalists like Russ Vought, the end goal is much bigger than denying Epstein survivors justice: it is putting 150 million women and girls on the back foot.

These religious liberty for me but not for thee fanatics now have a cool customer on their side: an experienced Manhattan federal prosecutor whose primary motivation is serving a Big Daddy who sees himself as a victim. On the Faith Office call, Blanche promised activists that DOJ, HHS, FDA and the White House were working on “permanent solutions” to prevent states and organizations from circumventing state abortion bans, and making Dobbs “permanent in every single state.”

What did women ever do to these men to deserve to be put on the back foot en masse like this? Maybe nothing, other than being a large and potentially powerful oppositional force to fascism. Maybe a lot more, having found autonomy and self-reliance preferable to the domination that Trumpism demands of men.

Historian of autocracy and friend of the Freakshow Ruth Ben Ghiat has written extensively about the link between controlling women and the rise of autocracy. “In an authoritarian state,” she has written, “women are as much the enemies of the strongman as the press, prosecutors, and the opposition.”

Your Freakshow Guide recently met the brilliant writer and Nazi era historian Rebecca Donner, author of a bestselling book about an American woman hero in the German resistance who stood up to Hitler. In an excellent Nation essay before the 2024 election, “Project 2025 in the Original Language,” Donner pointed out the parallels between the blueprint for Trump’s second term and the Nazi regime when it comes to women. Just four months after Hitler took power, women lost their reproductive rights and abortion was criminalized. And that was just the start. Women’s clinics were shuttered and 19,000 women who held positions in regional and local government offices were abruptly fired. Women lawyers were barred from serving as judges or public prosecutors, and female doctors were thrown off government-sponsored insurance plans.

Hitler shrieked: “We do not think it proper for woman to invade the world of man, to enter his territory; instead, we think it natural for these worlds to remain separate.” Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels echoed: “The first, best, and most suitable place for the woman is in the family, and her most glorious duty is to bear children.”

Third Reich comparisons aside, as 21st Century Americans, we can still maintain our faith that accountability is coming for this claque. Donald Trump’s approval ratings are lower than any president’s in polling history. His MAGAs are cracking up over the Epstein “hoax.” He might have SCOTUS-granted immunity for himself, but that immunity doesn’t extend to an appointee – even one sitting at the top of the justice system, who brazenly moved a sex monster to a friendly Camp Fed in exchange for lies and who is flouting a statute.

Boy Cohn is riding high now.

Every dog has its day.

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Now that the Brits have charged the Tates and their long criminal history is out in the open and undeniable, Trumpworld wants to slither away from its old pals. But it can’t hide those long-standing ties to the pimp-pornographer rape cheerleaders for very long. The brothers are integral to the larger Trump Predators’ Ball: No White House in American history has been so packed with, or allied with, men accused of domestic violence, roofie rape, infidelity and pedophile protection.

For years, the Trump team has cynically nurtured and profited from its connection to the Tates – to the detriment of American women’s health and safety, and with quantifiable political and economic gain.

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As we wrote last week, Barron Trump could and should be subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee. He is widely credited as the link that brought the Tates and their blinkered, insecure younger male followers into Trump’s orbit. Men under 30 swung toward Trump by 15 to 20 percentage points in 2024.

But Barron is hardly the only Trumpworld character with Tate ties who should be hauled in. And the family’s relationship with them isn’t just political. Don Jr. – back in his weak-chinned, pre-beard days – first invited Andrew Tate to Mar-a-Lago in 2017.

As Tate has described it, the bromance started online and ended up with him inside Trump Tower for four hours, meeting Big Daddy himself.

“I followed [Don Jr.]. He followed me back. I DM’d him and said, ‘You guys are literally the heroes of the West.’”

Tate soon began tweeting support for Trump, with his signature brand of enthusiastic profanity (the n-word).

Now remember, at that point, Andrew Tate was already promoting sex trafficking online and teaching young men how to do it. He appeared on livestreams bragging about emotionally manipulating vulnerable women into sex work (much like his predecessor Epstein) and beating them to keep them in line. He was running a super creepy subscription-only “War Room” that would be exposed as a cultish sex-trafficking op.

But “creator” Andrew Tate was going to be useful for far more than just fluffing the bros. He would soon be making the Trump family and its allies money.

The Tate-Trumpworld connection lives inside a parallel economy that builds an audience and enriches itself – literally – off a sewer of misogynistic propaganda and trafficked women.

Why would Don Jr. and the self-described “patriotic capitalists” behind 1789 Capital (including Chris Buskirk and billionaire spawn Rebekah Mercer) want rape-promoting dirtbags like the Tates in their investment portfolios?

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One reason, of course, is political. The Trump 2024 strategy was to juice and inflame male resentment over MeToo and DEI, redirecting their grievances (that should have been aimed at the financialized titans laughing at them all the way to the bank) toward women.

In an interview with Vanity Fair last week, Tate lawyer Joseph McBride – whose ignominious client list includes NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere, Alex Bruesewitz and a pigpen of J6 rioters – warned that “if Trump doesn’t support him, and if the next people who are going to be running for office potentially are just like, ‘Yeah, down the river he goes,’ that young cohort of people will break with the Republican Party in the next election.”

But the other reason – perhaps the more important one in the long run – is cash.

By 2022, Meta had banned Tate, YouTube had removed him, and TikTok was suppressing him and related content. That left millions of Tate followers with nowhere to go. Trumpworld didn’t simply hand him a microphone. It built an economy around the audience he brought with him.

Junior was an early investor in the right wing media platform Rumble (like Peter Thiel and JD Vance, who had invested in 2021). He soon banked himself a $7 million multi-year contract to platform his “Triggered” podcast. In late summer 2022 (right before now-Commerce Secretary and Trump pal Howard Lutnick took it public), Rumble reportedly gave the Tates a $6 million contract (Andrew claims it was $9 million) to produce five days a week of programming after they had been deplatformed almost everywhere else.

What influencer could possibly be worth that kind of money? Even Tucker Carlson, freshly booted out of Fox in 2023, couldn’t resist flying to Romania for a two-and-a-half hour interview (in a previous shorter interview on Fox, he had allowed Tate to get away with lying that he had not been criminally charged). The show was Carlson’s first post-Fox interview and has reportedly been viewed 110 million times.

To put that in venture-capital terms: Tate isn’t just content – he is a customer acquisition channel.

The Tates delivered millions of highly engaged viewers to Rumble after being banned or restricted on mainstream platforms. Rumble monetizes through ads, branded campaigns, “premium” subscriptions and livestream revenue, all areas where the Tates generated value. Even just a small percentage of Tate followers creating Rumble accounts and subscribing to Premium would have been lucrative.

Former Bank of America banker Omeed Malik invested alongside Don Jr. in Rumble before forming 1789 Capital, a fund explicitly created to support businesses in the “anti-woke economy.” Its founders – people from the Trump political donor network – see strategic value in platforms like Rumble, Truth Social and PublicSquare as distribution networks for politically useful dirtballs like the Tates.

Malik – surprise! – has had his own problems with women. An allegation of workplace harassment (which he denied) is probably the defining point of both his financial and political career.

Of course, 1789 Capital has also invested big money in Tate ecosystem allies, including, a few months after his big Tate interview, Carlson’s digital media company, Last Country, Inc. The financiers also invested in Happy Dad hard seltzer, the principal consumer brand of Tate ecosystem node and Nelk Boys founder Kyle Forgeard. Forgeard is another social media meathead with ultrawhite veneers and a key cross-promoter of the Tates. He and other performative Neanderthals* endlessly fluff one another through livestreams, podcasts, and exclusive clubbing at places like Executive Branch in Georgetown.

Besides the Tates, the crew includes people such as Alex Bruesewitz (the media strategist behind Trump’s most racist and offensive Truth Social memes), the Full Send Podcast, and Justin Waller, a Deep South version of the Tates sometimes called their “third brother,” who is also credited with connecting Andrew to Barron Trump.

Beyond Junior’s investment, Trump Media purchases cloud, video, advertising and infrastructure services from Rumble in a “wide-ranging” technology partnership.

The Trump family benefits in other ways too. Andrew Tate has promoted and traded their World Liberty Financial token. He steered millions of his gullible crypto-obsessed followers toward the Trump crypto business, even though he himself lost around $67,500 while shilling for it. Later reporting calculated that his overall crypto losses were close to $1 million, much of it tied to the WLFI token.

But whether Tate made or lost money is beside the point. He repeatedly directed his millions of followers toward a Trump-family financial product.

Another point of affinity between Trumpists and the Tates is a sense of victimhood and shared scorn for legal norms. Trump’s own felonious history needs no recounting here, but even Chris Buskirk, aforementioned 1789 founder, has a sketchy record. According to Reuters, court records show that “between 2011 and 2015, Buskirk and his wife were sued at least 11 times over unpaid debts – by business partners, debt collection companies, their dry cleaner and others.”

Do the real victims in this sick game – American women – have any recourse? A functioning civil society would offer some route to legal retribution. Impunity for a similar large-scale propaganda movement like the Tates’ promoting violence against Black people or Jews in this country would be unthinkable.

Alas, any lawsuit would be unlikely to survive a motion to dismiss, thanks largely to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the so far ironclad shield protecting everyone from Nazi-promoting Musk to rape-promoting bros from liability for content posted by “third-party users.” When Andrew Tate uploads misogynistic or violent content, Rumble can simply claim to be the platform not the speaker.

But Rumble doesn’t merely host the Tates. It employs them. Investors like Don Jr. profit from that relationship. Rumble recruited Tate, negotiated a multimillion-dollar contract, paid him to produce specified amounts of content, and promoted him as a featured creator. A plaintiff could reasonably argue that Rumble wasn’t merely carrying Tate’s speech; it was financing, commissioning, marketing and amplifying it as part of its business strategy.

Bottom line, although this is hardly news: There is no point too low on the anti-social behavior scale for the Trumps or their Trumpworld strategists and donors.

*It has been pointed out by readers that the Neanderthals were far better men than the Tates and Trumps, and I thereby apologize and welcome suggestions for a better prehistoric analogy.

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President Donald Trump and his family could soon be confronted with “one of the biggest scandals” he’s ever faced, scholar and journalist Sidney Blumenthal suggested in our conversation on the legal commentary network “Legal AF.”

IN the current milieu of epochal corruption and pharaonic abuse of democracy it’s hard to imagine what “biggest scandal” could be . But the shocking impunity and more - respect - granted by Trump affiliates and White House insiders to these men multiply accused of rape and trafficking (see this week’s Freakshow) over a decade begs to be investigated by the House Oversight Committee.

The brothers raked in millions in Rumble podcast contract money and from their trafficking-connected private paid chat “War Room” and their “Hustler’s University” that fleeces preteens with promises of lessons to create a life of luxury cars and “hot” women. They have enjoyed global impunity in part thanks to a “bro media” network of right-wingers like Ticker Carlson and Candace Owen (now backing off) and Trump affiliates and members of the Trump family including Barron Trump.

The Tate-adjacent Trump underworld includes Barron Trump, Don, Jr., the family crypto bank World Liberty Financial and Zach Witkoff, “Special Envoy for Global Partnerships” Paolo Zampolli, various manosphere hustlers, many of whom have been getting very very rich off their links to each other and the Trumps.

As I told Blumenthal: “They’re the millennial version of Epstein; they have a type of network that is similar in that it relies on the trading of females and the abuse of women as the glue that connects them to each other. But it’s also a financial and political power node that they inhabit.”

WATCH: Trump’s Link to Tate Brothers Exposed by Inner Circle! by Legal AF

“Slap, slap, grab, choke. Shut up, bitch. Sex.” – Andrew Tate

For more than a decade, Andrew Tate has publicly advocated for and bragged about personally choking, slapping, and violently dominating women into submission across dozens of podcasts, interviews and online broadcasts. Rumble, the video hosting service backed by investments from the likes of Peter Thiel and JD Vance, paid Tate at least $6 million a year to spread his brand of propagandized violence against women.

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During that same period, at least eight women have publicly alleged that Andrew or his brother Tristan Tate strangled them during sex, several saying they lost consciousness. They include Lauren Southern, Brianna Stern, three women pseudonymously quoted in the New Yorker, and four anonymous women in a UK civil case. The brothers deny the allegations, but given their long public history of bragging about doing exactly that to unnamed women, their denials ring hollow.

The Tate brothers are Sons of Epstein. There is an ideological and criminal lineage between the Boomer global sex trafficker and these Millennial monsters: shared misogyny, assumption of impunity, underage victims and of course, the pimping business model. Only the style has been updated. Every video of the brothers oozes psychopathy. Their brand of caricatured manhood is derangement on steroids.

To our shame, the American government has treated these stranglers like international heroes instead of global pariahs and a significant threat to women and girls worldwide.

One of the Trump administration’s first acts was helping the brothers escape rape and trafficking charges in Romania by flying them to Miami. Ric Grenell, a “diplomat” with the extra special title of Special Envoy for Special Missions of the United States, pressured Romanian officials to lay off the Tates, who had been released from prison but ordered to remain in the country. A month after Trump’s 2025 inauguration, they were out and delivered to Miami by private jet. No announcement, no explanation – unless you count this deleted Roger Stone tweet crediting Grenell:

Just another pair of freaks for the Predators Ball assembling in Washington.

A year and half after getting his mojo back, Andrew was interviewed at the Milken Conference by Melania’s former “agent” and Trump Special Envoy for Global Partnerships Paolo Zampolli – who had just distinguished himself by having ICE deport the mother of his child. The Tates’ Trump-granted impunity and connections opened doors for them in Dubai, Russia and Kazakhstan.

Meanwhile, the brothers never stopped upselling their PHD (Pimping Hos Degree) to millions of men and boys. Their followers are a new class of young men who insult their female teachers and classmates, creating such a negative impact at schools that educators have held conferences about it.

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The unofficial official administration position on this pair of stranglers came from occasional Laura Loomer walker, tiny incel Paul Ingrassia, who has called Andrew Tate the “embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence” for his “sheer physical prowess,” “sharp as a tack” and full of “willpower and spirit.” Ingrassia has since been demoted from his personnel office perch near the White House inner circle to the GSA – not due to his support of the Tates, but because his Nazi-adjacent views came to light.

It turns out Ingrassia was not the Tates’ real White House connection. Don Jr. has called their prison time in Romania “absolute insanity.”

But according to reports in Forbes and the New York Times, the real Tate link is the Boo Radley of the Trump family: Barron Trump. During the 2024 campaign, Barron reportedly became such a fan of the Tates that he turned his father onto the notion that they could help him with young men.

Barron has largely escaped scrutiny. First, because he arrived on the national scene as a preteen. And second, just by virtue of the parental combination of an icy mother and a depraved father. Now a young adult, this towering spectral figure, publicly silent, still gets a pass, despite reportedly being tied not only to the Tates but also to the family crypto business and rumors that he cashes in on prediction markets via insider knowledge of his father’s antics.

Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) has formally asked the House Oversight Committee to investigate the Tates’ access to the administration, including subpoenaing Barron Trump to determine whether he used his position to interfere in any of the brothers’ legal proceedings.

Her request is completely reasonable: investigating why and how the Trump administration aided two men credibly accused by at least eight women of strangling them – some to the point of unconsciousness – is at least as urgent as the Epstein investigation.

Naturally, her office has been deluged with hate mail for daring to suggest Barron answer for himself.

Beyond exposing the Trump incels and misogynists who welcomed the stranglers back onto American soil, the Rumble platform should be investigated for giving the brothers a $6 million contract (that Andrew Tate claims was actually $9 million) and platform from which to spew their violent misogyny.

In a functioning civil society, women and girls would have some avenue to sue the Tates, along with the companies that have disseminated their messaging. This isn’t just hate speech. It has quantifiable effects. Researchers are finding that the increasingly common teen habit of strangling women during sex has become so widespread that young women are suffering brain damage. That research briefly made headlines and disappeared while Andrew Tate continued proselytizing to millions of boys in junior high (and maybe, younger, who knows) that nearly murdering a woman can be sexually gratifying.

Tate stans blame women instead. John Mac Ghlionn wrote in the Hill last year:

Schools, particularly in Western countries, have become increasingly hostile to traditional expressions of masculinity. Boys are expected to behave like girls — to sit still, be passive and suppress their natural instincts ... A toxic society, not toxic masculinity, made Andrew Tate famous.

This combination of whining – hostile to traditional expressions of masculinity – and sweeping framing – Western countries – rather than just, say, Oberlin, is standard rhetorical fare among the MAGA literati.

Cheering on men who publicly celebrate – and are credibly accused by multiple women of – choking women to unconsciousness are laundered into soldiers in Project 2025’s greater campaign against feminism.

That narrative began to crack on July 19, when the Brits decided to not only reopen their investigation but to add dozens of new charges. They may have been shamed into action after journalist Heidi Blake published her exhaustively reported New Yorker article in early June, documenting harrowing stories from women in England, Romania and elsewhere. (If Blake doesn’t win a Pulitzer, the oversight will rank up there with the egregious long delay in Julie K. Brown’s recognition for her 2018 Epstein series.)

After the arrests, there was a burp of MAGA support online. But as the deeply distracted, disaster-ravaged White House hasn’t signaled it will get involved, the usual suspects have not been stepping up. That includes women like Trump lawyer Alina Habba, who once told Andrew Tate on his podcast, “I’ve got your back.”

The Tates’ own lawyer (a meathead named Joe McBride who posts pictures of himself packed into suits like warm, rancid sausage in a casing) warns that comparing his client to Epstein will get him murdered in jail.

Desperate to get some traction with Big Daddy, McBride is using Twitter to try to gin up conspiracy theories, curry favor with Trump, play the commie card and threaten Rep. Ansari – sometimes all in a single post:

If Andrew Tate were free, he would be dismantling this communist psychopath in real time and raising an army to unseat her for going after Barron Trump.

The Tate Bros are one of the most powerful weapons the conservative movement has.Their absence is the point.

The thing is, Tate is no Epstein. And Barron Trump, Ric Grenell, Paul Ingrassia and Joe McBride are definitely not an assemblage of white shoe lawyers waiting to save his sorry ass.

Soon, one hopes, Andrew Tate will be pulling kitchen duty in prison, where inmates can line up and bark one of his favorite misogynistic slogans – the same one his legion of preteen fanboys have been scrawling on papers they turn in to their female teachers: “Make me a sandwich.”

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