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At United Nations, Melania Trolls The World Her Husband Set On Fire

At United Nations, Melania Trolls The World Her Husband Set On Fire

As the Trump-provoked regional war expanded disastrously by the hour, the White House dispatched Melania to preside over the U.N. Security Council today. The Council is the U.N.’s principal organization responsible for safeguarding international peace and security. The chairmanship rotates monthly by nation and March is America’s turn.

“In a historic move, First Lady Melania Trump addressed the U.N. Security Council as the United States assumed its Presidency,” her office announced as she delivered a nugatory word salad of a speech titled “Peace Through Education.” Without the digital watermark, it’s impossible to be sure, but it had the emotionally vacant pablum flavor of AI writing throughout. For example: “Intellect blossoms humanity’s fundamental needs: shelter, food security, clean water, and health care. And predictably, almost all communities will have access to knowledge within our lifetimes.”

As children were being shredded under an American-Israeli carpet bombing of Tehran –Secretary Kegseth promised there were “no rules of engagement” in this war –Melania’s soigné presence was a middle finger from our warmongering nation to the international community. In its sheer grotesquery, it recalled Imelda Marcos collecting thousands of pairs of shoes while her husband’s secret police left tortured corpses in the gutters of Manila.

Melania at the Security Council is a wink-wink from the administration’s Groypers and Bronze Age Pervert fans to the MAGA sector that prefers the Taliban model when it comes to women and politics. Having a resume that starts and ends with being a mute human accessory makes her the Trump movement’s ideal woman.

I’m guessing the producers of this cynical spectacle are members of the Tate Brothers A-Team. This claque of Trump Administration incels and misogynists brought notorious rape-propagandists to the U.S., platformed pastors and other wackos who believe women should “submit” and should not vote, draped the Department of Education with a giant banner of a 19th-century anti-suffragist, removed women from leadership roles in the Pentagon and elsewhere, and erased government websites and plaques celebrating American women’s contributions to government, culture, and the sciences.

The Trump movement, from the day he rode down the elevator in 2015 with his silent “supermodel,” has always been about promoting the transactional femme as the ideal model for women. Melania wielding the gavel at the U.N. Security Council models to girls and women that if you do exactly what the patriarchy wants you to do – speak little, moisturize, provide sexual titillation, and learn to balance on hobbling fuck-me shoes – you too might reach high places, at least for that killer photo shoot.

There is a certain feminine strength in this work, don’t underestimate it. It is not easy to pick your way down jetway steps in stilettos without looking down. It is even harder to suppress your gag reflex at the breath of disgusting old men.

Melania comes from the same school of hard knocks that produced those tough, hustling Epstein-affiliated Russian women who endured revulsion and humiliation and carried on regardless – some of whom are now CEOs of their own Silicon Valley companies.

Melania’s path required less of her intellectually, but no less in humiliation.

What would you do for a free Trump Tower apartment for yourself and your family of chain immigrants? Dahhling, would you pose naked in a chain-mail bra and S&M blinders in a fake Air Force One cockpit? Pose again, naked and in handcuffs?* Coo to Howard Stern on live radio about your tubby, insecure, but rich boyfriend’s sexual prowess?

No. It is NOT a walk in the park to be a Melania. But if you can make it look easy, and better yet, look as though you like it (she has some challenges with that), there are rewards.

The Trump era opened with the slap-in-the-face 2016 election of a self-described “pussy grabber.” This second regime is an out and proud Predator’s Ball, from the convicted felon president himself down to our roofie-rape-accused “Secretary of War,” to sex-assault and stalking-accused DHS shadow boss Corey Lewandowski, to Nazi-loving manosphere minion Paul Ingrassia, the Tate bro fanboy lawyer who has written that the rape-cheerleading brothers represent “hope for the survival of manhood.” Kegseth recently befouled the halls of the Pentagon by bringing in for a prayer session his “pastor,” Doug Wilson, who believes marital rape is impossible because when a woman says “I do,” she consents for life.

Last week, video circulated of lunatic Christian nationalist pastor Dale Partridge instructing the women of his congregation to model “joyful submission” to their husbands as an example to “insubordinate feminist women” everywhere: “Our duty as the church is to tell the world what is normal.”

That is normal?

For millions of real American girls and women, the role model is Taylor Swift: a sexy self-made billionaire about to marry a hot football star whose dick works so well she has written songs about it. That combination enrages Trumpy predators and their fanboys.

One of martyred Charlie Kirk’s last Twitter chatrooms convened a gang of millennial assholes to debate: “Should Taylor Swift submit to Travis Kelce?” I tuned in for a minute. The last words I think I heard the living Kirk say were: “I don’t want a wife who tells me what to do with my money.” Ironically, said wife now controls his tens of millions of dollars. Oh.

In Trumpworld, normal is Epsteinism: a philosophy and way of life in which women are not human but mannequins to decorate the boys club – sex toys for entertainment. Despite the second wave, despite Me Too, despite women outpacing men in school and professional life, Epsteinism never really died out.

But oh, the rewards of trading your autonomy, dignity and self-respect in Trumpworld! Pose nearly nude and purr sexily to Howard Stern about how Donald beds you several times a day...

I really don’t care, do u?

The sum total of what Melania has done for the world so far: accessorized her oafish mate, tore up the White House Rose Garden, hated on her Christmas duties, and rehabilitated junior Harvey Weinstein (Brett Ratner).

She didn’t sign up with Donald to become First Lady of America. She has submitted to stumble-reading speeches written by Trump hacks with more crypto interests than brains. At least at the UN – the Tower of Babel – she could have finally spoken in Slovenian, her native language, the one she actually knows, thereby giving a little paid work to one of the translators who, along with much U.N. staff, will soon be out of work, if not already unemployed thanks to AI and the international organization’s declining budget.

Melania’s great legacy will be that she modeled submission to America’s insubordinate women.

In her willingness to serve as a silent prop for photo shoots and participate in the occasional trolling stunt like today’s at the U.N., Melania serves another political purpose. As Steve Bannon understood from Gamergate, misogyny is a powerful organizing force for the MAGA brotherhood of unhappy American men – men brutalized by forces that women have nothing to do with, starting with war.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

'Protect Source': Where Are Missing FBI Interviews With Trump Accuser?

'Protect Source': Where Are Missing FBI Interviews With Trump Accuser?

Here at the Freakshow, like everyone else, we sift through the millions of pages in the Epstein files with an eye for the elusive Trump connection, some proof behind the long-circulating rumors about his participation in the frolics Epstein arranged for himself and his coterie of wealthy ogres.

Earlier this week, journalist Roger Sollenberger published a piece examining evidence the FBI appears to have concealed involving Trump. It centers on a July 2019 interview with a woman who claimed to the FBI that she met Epstein in South Carolina in 1983 or 1984, when she was 13 years old. According to her account, Epstein tricked her into showing up at his vacation rental by claiming to need a babysitter. There were, in fact, no children. Instead, she says, he drugged her, took nude pictures, and raped her.

So far, another revolting Epstein story.

But this one scales up.

The redacted victim in that interview has biographical details that closely match those of another redacted-name woman. In separate documents within the Epstein files and in a court filing, that woman alleged that Epstein took her to New York and exposed her to “wealthy older men” as “fresh meat.” She further claimed that he introduced her to a man – Trump – who sexually assaulted and “punched her in the head.”

The Epstein files are full of outrageous allegations that can be dismissed for lack of corroboration: the FBI fielded and recorded wild claims of murder, child sacrifice, and even stories of Trump on a yacht in Lake Michigan tossing a baby overboard. The existence of large victim compensation funds from the Epstein estate to accusers and their attorneys naturally attracts con artists and grifters. It is a magnet for the fantasies and lies of untold numbers of celebrity-seekers and other lunatics. We can see the Satanic panic conspiracy of the Pizzagate era rising again in some of the Epstein DIY research and commentary.

This particular accusation, however, invites a closer look from members of Congress who have access to the unredacted Epstein material.

Here’s why:

  1. It appears that the FBI interviewed this woman four times over a period of a few weeks in the summer of 2019. But only one of the four interviews is in the released files.
  2. The agents clearly believed the woman had something to fear. Her name is always redacted but followed by the words in all caps: PROTECT SOURCE. This designation is nowhere else in the Epstein files. An FBI source we spoke with told us it is typically used for high-risk informants such as mafia rats.
  3. In the single interview included in the release, the woman showed FBI agents a photo of Epstein and Trump on her phone. She then asked if she could crop out the second person. When agents asked about the second man, her lawyer intervened, stating that “[REDACTED] was concerned about implicating additional individuals, and specifically any that were well known, due to fear of retaliation.”


  1. In an October 2019 call between the FBI and her attorney, also logged by the FBI, the attorney referenced “information regarding any investigation into a recent suspicious incident that occurred at [redacted] place of employment.” (Mentions of “suspicious incidents” confronting Trump accusers at work remind us of Stormy Daniels’ account of the creepy thug who threatened her and her baby daughter in a Vegas parking lot when she was preparing to go public about her tryst with Donald).
  2. The DOJ appears to have gone to great lengths to hide the fact that they removed pages of interaction with the woman. The released Epstein files use a secondary numbering system that appears sequential, but in this case conceals significant gaps in the primary record. The woman’s first interview with the FBI, labeled “Interview One,” begins at serial -001. In the released files, the documents then jump to -008, -009, and -010 for a series of photos that include one of Epstein and Trump, with Trump cropped out, followed by images of the accuser as a teenager with friends. Three numbered records then appear relating to her initial FBI phone interview and two contacts with the Bloom firm. The six missing items of evidence could be images or text. If they are text, they could amount to many more pages in total, as the first interview runs nine pages long.
  3. In one undated document that appears to be what the FBI calls a case index, there are four PROTECT SOURCE interviews listed, clearly with the same woman. We only have one of them. Where are serials 252, 264 and 312 – corresponding to Interviews 2,3, and 4?

  1. There is another tell. The one interview we have is titled “Interview One.” The standard FBI practice throughout the Epstein files is to title interviews “Interview of [person]” — unless there are multiple interviews, in which case they are numbered.
  1. We know this woman’s report concerned the DOJ because in July 2025, as the Department was facing calls to release the files, an internal email placed Trump at the top of a list of accused individuals on a PowerPoint presentation. His name was highlighted in yellow for “salacious” accusations, alongside Leon Black, Les Wexner, and others.
  2. Because of that email and an FBI powerpoint also in the files, we know that a search for Donald Trump’s name in July 2025 returned “a positive case hit” in FBI lingo. This email implies it was documented in an attached spreadsheet which is not in the files now.

The details in the internal FBI email and PowerPoint closely align with the allegations made by a South Carolina woman represented as Jane Doe 4 by attorney Arick Fudali of the Lisa Bloom firm, which currently represents 11 Epstein accusers.

From the FBI Power Point:

[Redacted] stated Epstein introduced her to Trump who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which is subsequently bite [sic]. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.

From the Bloom firm lawsuit:

Epstein’s sexual abuse of Jane Doe 4 continued across state lines. On information and belief, Epstein flew Jane Doe 4 to New York, New York on approximately three of four occasions. During these trips, Epstein brought Jane Doe 4 to intimate gatherings with other prominent, wealthy men. It was later made clear to Jane Doe 4 that Epstein brought her to these parties to essentially offer her up as “fresh meat” to these other men. Jane Doe 4 was brutally and forcibly battered, assaulted, and raped by these other men she met through Epstein. On one occasion, one of these prominent men forcibly slapped Jane Doe 4 in the face after she was forced to perform oral sex on him. This same man forcibly raped her, penetrating her both vaginally and anally.

Jane Doe 4 settled with the Epstein estate and was paid, according to her attorney, though the Victims Compensation Fund reportedly rejected her claim. Lisa Bloom, in an email to us Sunday night, declined to comment. Bloom also briefly involved herself in the media rollout of the pre-2016 Trump “rape” accusation by the pseudonymous Katie Johnson, which fell apart before the press conference and was never been corroborated nor litigated.

Experienced Epstein researchers, including Thomas Volscho, have stated good reasons why this allegation should be treated with caution.

At the Freakshow, we assume the DOJ aggressively sanitized the Epstein files of anything Trump during the frenzied order from Kash Patel (K$H) and Pam Bondi last March, which put a legion of FBI officers on 24-hour shifts to find mentions of Don. Victims have stated that some of their FBI interviews and naming of names are not in the released files. We also know the release itself has been chaotic, the whole operation carried out in a state of panic, and that mistakes have been made.

To recap: we have an FBI email and an FBI powerpoint both referencing the Trump allegation, but we do not have the records or interviews to which the email and powerpoint refer. We have a victim who asked that Trump be cropped out of a photo with Epstein on her phone. We have missing and renumbered documents.

This could be nothing more than a coincidence due to sloppy panicked document dumping.

Or it could be something else.

The woman stopped cooperating with the FBI, never filed a civil case, and never publicly mentioned Trump. This chilling note suggests one reason FBI thought PROTECT SOURCE was needed:


We respectfully suggest that our elected officials in DC take a closer look, especially the Congresswoman from South Carolina, Rep. Nancy Mace.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Women Or Children? Epstein's Johns Aren't All Pedos, But They All Hate Women

Women Or Children? Epstein's Johns Aren't All Pedos, But They All Hate Women

One popular shorthand for the Epstein story is “pedo elite.” But not all his johns are pedophiles and not all the women he trafficked were children. On that narrow point, his lawyer and occasional Lolita Express passenger, the odious Alan Dershowitz is correct: Epstein was not exclusively trafficking minors. From what we can tell, many of his victims were young women in their late teens or early twenties – procured, processed and trained by Epstein, then pimped out to men whose dirty little secrets might later prove useful for Jeff.

To sit with the files over days and weeks, as we have at the Freakshow, is to soak up Michel Houellebecq’s nihilistic analysis of global sex capitalism. These supercilious smirking men with stratospheric self regard have such contempt for what they regard as lesser beings – pretty young women, and more specifically the emotionally manipulated, reduced, and trafficked females whose humanity they are incapable of acknowledging.

Rank misogyny and casual social and legal collusion in the abuse of young adult women are the root of the Epstein saga. DIY investigators, spectators, conspiracy theorists, Q Anons and their MAGA brethren fixate on child abuse, insisting the victims must be children, rather than females of any age.

But why? Is there really a magical line of fortitude and resilience against abuse and manipulation that female humans cross between the ages of 16 and 18?

The insistence that female humans of any age be pliant dolls connects Epstein and his johns. If the victims happen to be under the age of 18, maybe better for malleability, but the acceptable age range in their kink is not textbook pedophilia. Their game is garden-variety commodification and pornification of females.

The unredacted list of recipients of Epstein females – Leon Black, Kimbal Musk, Tom Pritzker, Joshua Fink, Steve Tisch, Roger Schank, Henry Jarecki, Jes Staley – is long, and grows longer by the hour as Congressmembers review the files and press for more names to be made public. Taken together, the revelations expose the brazen lie Kash Patel – our FBI “director” – spewed, perjuring himself when he testified under oath before Congress that the files did not reveal any men besides Epstein abusing women.

These men prefer young but not necessarily underage. Youth is important to these desiccated trolls, but they don’t seem to be seeking out children. Beauties are always referred to as “girls.” The ugly ones, as Donald Trump so often likes to point out, are always women.

To concede that the victims were often not children complicates the narrative. It ventures perilously into the “sex worker” debate that has divided feminists for decades. In the “sex-positive” feminist camp, the sex worker is presumed to have agency – to have decided that selling her own flesh is a smart business move. The Epstein files challenge that assumption.

There are many references in the post-2012 documents to agreements Epstein made with women, which seem in at least some instances to have been formal or quasi-legal. Some of Epstein’s women were in fact regarded as sex workers, as this exchange with his pal New York Giants owner Steve Tisch – asking whether an Epstein woman is “pro or civilian” – suggests. Epstein shot back telling him to discuss it by phone as “I dont [sic] like records of these conversations.”

Yes, it is true that some of the women appear to have benefited financially from the hellish transactions. A handful of hardy Russian post-Soviet entrepreneurs, like Masha Drokova and Lana Pozhidaeva, emerged from Epsteinland as coronated queens with Silicon Valley fortunes.

Here is an exchange between Epstein and one of the self-commodified, ambitious Russians:

So far so good. But I now invite the sex worker support system to join us in reading the Epstein files with an eye to the concept of agency. The vast majority of now-public communications between Epstein and the women in his brothel, global harem, indentured servitude penal colony reveal shocking levels of psychological abuse, manipulation and sadism that seem to deprive them of confidence and self-respect – the building blocks of agency. Street pimps could do no worse.

The Epstein files reveal how the “cogs of the wheels of power are oiled by porn-saturated misogyny,” Helen Rumbelow wrote recently in the London Times. Epstein – like Trump with his pageants or predatory French freakazoid Jean-Luc Brunel with his “models” – got off on molding females to his pornified specs. He was a sadistic Pygmalion too: manipulative, peevish and cruel, attentive to “disobedience” and what he thought of as ingratitude. He relished expressing disappointment in misspelled, dashed-off angry messages to the young women.

They were always failing to follow his directions, breaking promises, lying, making excuses, whining, immature, ungrateful, spoiled brats, etc. In one long text exchange, he berates a young woman as lazy, childish, stupid and tells her “my girls in New York” can take art classes. They get that privilege, he explains “as a RESULT of their dedication, truthfulness, and doing as they are told. you didn’t, dont. And continue to whine, so you have what you deserve [sic].”

Epstein exercised a cruel pimp level of control over their most intimate concerns too, and sometimes issued veiled physical threats. In one exchange with an Eastern European newcomer, Jeff lectured her about how to treat her ovarian cysts, and then casually told her he didn’t want her to end up like his friend Ruslana Korshunova (also trafficked) who jumped out a window. He asks when her next period starts and tells her to take birth control. He finishes the conversation saying she should send him a sexy photo as a "thank you" and tells her it's "TIME TO GROW UP".

Here is another exchange with a different young woman in the same vein.

Again and again, the pattern repeats: emotional degradation packaged as mentorship. It is time to accept that labeling Epstein and his pals as simply “pedophiles” is to separate them from the greater sick herd to which they actually belong. When we pay attention only to the children, we disregard how this saga is part of the degrading miasma in which a generation of women struggled to work, get law degrees, and enter politics. The pantsuited mini Hillaries everywhere in DC, the rising numbers of women in college, in law and medical schools, and in corporations and law firms, were always subverted by the true relationship of women to power revealed in the Epstein files.

Yes, some women thrived in this era. Epstein pal Kathy Ruemmler, for example, could – until recently – grace any female empowerment conference dais to recount her stellar career path from Obama’s White House counsel to a $25 million a year job at Goldman Sachs.

Epstein and his pals let a few women like her – “cool girls” – into the outer sanctum of the club. They got to keep their clothes on, dignity intact. Epstein called Ruemmler an “arch feminist who is my greatest defender.” Ruemmler is on record teasing Epstein about trading “one of [his] Russians” for a comp and joking that he was her “Pygmalion.”.

Way to be a role model, Kathy! You go, girl!

Meanwhile, back at the mansion, her friend Jeff was ripping the confidence and self-respect out of one young woman after another.

For the strong of stomach, the documents offer hundreds of snapshots of the moral and emotional damage Epstein meted out while grooming women for his network of masters-of-the-universe. He may even have countenanced violence: The latest batch of files contain harrowing allegations by four women against Leon Black, of gruesome assaults with a similar MO.

Black has denied them but the allegations keep coming out. Incredibly, Jay Clayton, the man appointed chairman of Apollo, Black’s hedge fund, after Black resigned over the Epstein connection, now serves as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Manhattan – the same office that was investigating Black.

A deep loathing of women was always part of the deal with these men. Here is how Epstein talked to a 22-year-old Russian woman he appears to have trafficked to Black (who eventually became her “principal,” in the lingo the men used for, apparently, ownership or responsibility for a trafficked adult female):

Here he is complaining to another redacted young woman about how many ways she has “disappointed” him:


Here he accuses another woman – apparently Italian – of “childish tantrums,” to which the woman replies that survival is her “only mission in life” and “I’m already destroyed mentally”.

“Women have very little idea of how much men hate them,” Australian feminist Germaine Greer once opined. Reading the Epstein files will remove the blinders from your starry eyes.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

'Quiet Piggy': How Melania Trump's New Movie Insults Every American Woman

'Quiet Piggy': How Melania Trump's New Movie Insults Every American Woman

Next week, Melania will premiere at the “Donald J. Trump Kennedy Center” before being inflicted on the nation via Amazon streaming. I’m told tickets to this spectacle are expensive and hard to come by. DC’s Mar-a-Lago-faced lovelies and their MAGA dates will line up outside the renamed institution, reeking of duty-free cologne and teetering on the stilettos their queen trained herself to climb stairs in.

The history of this production begins with open-air graft, involves the (attempted) professional rehabilitation of a gross rape-accused toad known to women in Hollywood as a junior Harvey Weinstein, and ends with one of the greatest Emperor’s New Clothes events since the Republican Party first pretended the Big Lie was God’s truth.

When Jeff Bezos ponied up $40 million for a “documentary” about Melania at a dinner with the president-elect, entertainment industry insiders were already laughing. The most expensive documentaries barely cost $5 million; most are made for under a million. It was one of the first acts of utter obeisance by the one percent as the Trump family intake valve swung open.

The open-air graft was disgusting enough. But Melania’s choice of Brett Ratner is her “quiet piggy” to American women. And it is utterly on brand with the trademark “I don’t care, do you?” middle finger we’ve come to expect from the woman whose civic education stopped at East Bloc despotism.

Melania is Ratner’s first project since he was run out of Hollywood in the wake of sexual misconduct and rape accusations. I’m told Ratner, with Melania as “executive producer,” was hard-pressed to figure out what to do with all that money. He and his subject plotted out a 24-day shoot meant to provide an inside look at Melania’s “return” (known to be reluctant and short-lived) to the White House in 2025.

“He was saying he was going to shoot it like a feature film, with 40 cameras,” one insider laughed. “Forty cameras!” Rounding out the bizarre project’s team is Argentine millionaire Fernando Sulichin, a producer whose other documentary subjects include Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Putin and has worked with Oliver Stone and whom the Estonian secret service has accused of producing marketing for Russia.

The pussy-grabber’s First Lady is such a girlfriend to American women that she chose, to direct her film, a serial abuser whose picture is in the Epstein files shirtless and literally hugging the late sex trafficker Jean-Luc Brunel. Allegations from six women included forced blowjobs, masturbating in front of women and in one case, actual rape. He denied them all, but ran off to Israel after studios started ditching him and his projects.

Brett Ratner, right, with Jean-Luc Brunel

Like Epstein and Brunel, like Trump and most of his slobbering running buddies, Brett briefly operated a “model agency” called Rush Model Management with Russell Simmons. Ratner later admitted the agency was just a ploy to pick up women (Simmons admitted that’s how he captured his first wife when she was just 16).

How did this actual piggy land a share of the Bezos spoils? First, he shared the tendency of all the men in Melania’s orbit to treat actual women like mannequins. And, she’s fine with that, “It was born of him hanging out with her when her book came out,” one Hollywood insider told me. “He went on and on about how great it is, when it’s actually a big branding ad.”

Another said, “Somebody from the family picked him: Amazon wouldn’t pick him .”

And indeed, family he is. Ratner is reportedly now housed in a big house on Mar-a-Lago grounds – a craven public relations sentry who can produce expensive bullshit makes a much more suitable pet than any canine for the dog-averse Trumps. And Trumpland has been very, very good for him: he is now working on a documentary about the Abraham Accords.

All this is not to imply that the story of Melania could not be an interesting documentary. But it’s unlikely anyone will dare try, even if Michael Wolff manages to drag her into court to answer questions about Epstein and her timeline. The most interesting thing about Melania is the lacuna in her history between coming in second in a Slovenian top model contest in 1992 and washing up in Manhattan as Trump’s girlfriend. Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan wrote in her 2020 biography of Melania that she had an easier time writing about royals and drug cartel kingpins than the president’s soigné third wife.

Your Freakshow guide knows a little about this because in 2017, I worked on a book about the six women closest to Trump: German grandma Elisabeth, Scottish ma Mary Anne, the three wives, and Ivanka. Since four of these women are or were immigrants, reporting required dashes from a remote Hebridean island across Mitteleuropa. I learned some genuinely interesting things. Grandma Elisabeth started the Trump Organization. Mother Mary Anne, the tenth child of a Gaelic-speaking peasant fisherman, got her start in the U.S. as a maid in the Carnegie Mansion. Collectivist-educated, Russian-speaking Czech Ivana transitioned from communism to capitalism with legendary élan.

The only thing Melania had in common with those women, besides seeing Donald naked, was her non-American accent. She could barely speak English in 2015 and that was because, as far as I could tell, she spent most of her married years before the White House holed up with her Slovenian parents and sister, who had hit the chain migration jackpot and were living in apartments in Trump properties. She was an introverted beauty without any interests or pursuits beyond, as the late Vogue editor André Leon Talley noted, moisturizing herself and perhaps enjoying the feel and sound of pearls and diamonds clacking on a marble vanity.

The Italian toymaking heir and longtime Trump hanger-on Paolo Zampolli has taken credit for introducing Melania and Donald in 1998. He conceded in an interview with me that her arrival coincided with an oversupply of East European beauties, all self-commodified and seeking fame and fortune in the capital of capitalist America. There was not enough room for all of them at the top. Some of his models, he said, were really just party girls (Zampolli did not represent Melania as one of those).

There is a discrepancy between when she and Trump say they met and what she told photographer Alé De Basseville*, who shot the infamous “lesbian” pictures of her in 1995 for a British “lad” magazine. According to him, Melania Knavs told everyone at the shoot about her boyfriend, Donald Trump. I published that in the book and mentioned it in an article for the London Telegraph. Melania threatened the paper with a letter from notorious libel lawyer Charles Harder. The Telegraph yanked and apologized for running the story – precisely the discredit on my name they were after. But her people didn’t challenge the book in the U.S., where truth is an absolute defense. My lawyer’s response to the London shenanigans is here.

In small-town Slovenia, people were afraid to talk openly about her. Her lawyer had threatened a baker for selling a First Lady cake. Others had been more quietly and sinisterly visited, frightened into silence. Back in New York, people either shared rumors or knew nothing. The only thing I can report is that the fashion world was unanimous that she had never been the “supermodel” Trump claimed she was on campaign stages.

Many journalists have faced big threats and lawsuits, or have been forced to apologize and retract, for reporting on the mystery of Melania’s dark years.

This movie most certainly will not open that locked door.

*De Basseville has produced a lovely line of t-shirts featuring the nude First Lady of the United States. They make great Valentines and early Mother’s Day presents. Check them out here. Oh, and they’re Made in America.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow


Trump's Domination Distraction In Venezuela Won't Shut Down Epstein Scandal

Trump's Domination Distraction In Venezuela Won't Shut Down Epstein Scandal

A brand new season of the Freakshow opened with a bang: Donald Trump, ruler of the Western Hemisphere, on every screen in the world announcing the capture of a sovereign nation’s leader. But he looks… about to keel over, lips white, saurian lids drooping. Thank God he has handed the mic over to the virile courtiers. Kegseth – spray-tanned, hair-oiled and nose-powdered to “look commanding” – reads his script. Little Marco twitches nearby. By nightfall, these victors will have paraded their shackled captive through the streets of New York in an open van – a spectacle ancient Athenians and Trojans would have recognized.

Welcome to the boffo third season of the Freakshow. Its theme: DOMINANCE. From the Indo-European root domus, meaning home, to the Latin dominus, meaning lord or master over home or territory, it is the Viagran centurion’s obsession, the bully’s neurosis.

Was there ever any doubt that this is where the fetish for “masculine energy,” the prevailing aesthetic of the AI revolutionaries, was headed? Soft men with big, hard bank accounts cosplaying tough guys, with no real use for their own muscles or even the strength of actual working men – except for the fists of their hired goons.

Maybe there were reasons to remove Maduro, but were they really stronger than the evidence available to arrest Netanyahu? Or MBS? Murderous crooks can make effective allies; everybody knows it. A month ago, Trump pardoned the former Honduran president serving 45 years for trafficking tons of cocaine to the US. Trump now claims that Maduro works with an apparently fictional “Cartel de los Soles” to attack the United States with fentanyl – a drug the opioid-addicted wing of MAGA knows well… and which actually comes through Mexico.

The bleak circumstances of people in some nations south of the border have driven migration for decades. For the most part, the US government has ignored the core problem – or worse, sided with the grimmest of regimes on behalf of corporate oligarchs, like Chiquita, who needed to shut the peasants up. (See Kissinger and Pinochet, Kissinger in Argentina, and El Salvadors’s death squads for a refresher.)

This Venezuelan adventure is, as often in Trumpworld, simultaneously grave and ridiculous: it’s an Epstein files distraction and state-sponsored plunder, aimed at controlling a swath of South American natural resources. A “national security” rationale was explained in 2023 by retired General Laura Richardson, former commander of Southern Command. The Wall Street Journal reports that select American investors are already planning a Venezuelan field trip in March to scout possible projects. Trump supporter Paul Singer’s hedge fund is already deep into Venezuelan oil. Just over a month ago, Singer acquired Citgo, the US-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-run oil company (He had donated at least $5 million to Trump, and $37 million to Republicans in Congress in 2024).

Besides the oil-igarchy, it is not clear who is actually calling the shots in the White House where Trump dodders physically and mentally. Any combination of a motley crew of businessmen, the enhanced virility courtiers, race scientists and eugenicists, out Nazis, crypto-Nazis, and their self-mutilated Mar-a-Lago-faced auxiliary could be running the domination project.

Meanwhile, Trump has lulled voters with the refrain that their dissatisfaction is the work of “Mexican rapists,” making their man into the perfect tool for the global oligarchy that diminishes them in every way.

But has a smaller man ever acted on the world stage?

While nominally commanding the Maduro op, the old man was apparently on his phone, tending to the insatiable appetite of his MAGA movement for vile bullshit. As a handcuffed Maduro was on his way to New York on the warship Iwo Jima, and while Kegseth and Rubio were still showering off the war room sweat, the boss was hitting send on an unhinged MAGA conspiracy: that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz arranged the assassination of Rep. Melissa Hortman – whose murder (along with that of her husband) by a deranged white Christian nationalist, Trump has never once expressed outrage or sympathy for the survivors.

The video to which he gave the presidential seal of approval features “TheRealRyker,” a classic MAGA dopey white dude with a wispy mustache who looks like he smells of Doritos and Axe body spray. In his upclose selfie, Ryker raises his eyebrows theatrically over an embedded Tiktok video with the headline: ”Did Tim Walz really have (D) Melissa Hoertman [sic] assassinated?” A woman’s voice narrates: “Was Melissa Hortman “un-alived [sic] in her home by Vance Boelter who… later sent a letter to the FBI saying it was Tim Walz who forced him to do it?”




The presidential retweet is a matryoshka doll of deranged MAGA social media. The video originated from a TikTok account called Discernment Activated, whose profile states “we discuss the spiritual and prophetic implications of current events, pop culture, politics, history & the supernatural,” followed by emojis of a purple cross and the American flag.

Hortman’s murder by a white Christian nationalist freak is being sewn into the Minnesota Somali immigrant daycare fraud scandal that Fox, and other right wing influencer sewer lines, have been spewing for weeks to pump up anti-immigration sentiment. Minnesota Rep. Betty McCollum was the only public figure to object: “I call upon Republican elected officials at the federal, state, and local level, as well as the Republican Party, to condemn this outrageous and cruel lie about the murder of Melissa and Mark Hortman.”

Crickets.

Trump’s been projecting his own sense of personal inadequacy onto the national psyche for a decade. America has been so badly used, so humiliated! Is it really any surprise that a majority of Republicans polled this week – primed for dominance – are fine with our country behaving like Germany in the 1930s?

How did we get here? This is a good place to remind readers that Trump was wholly responsible for the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, whether the half of America that chooses to deny that agrees or not. Here are 255 pages of former prosecutor Jack Smith’s testimony that make that abundantly clear.

Trump masterminded his own coup attempt – but he isn’t really a war president. He spent the last half-year panicked about the exposure of his, his friends’ and his wife’s potential appearance in The Epstein files. He needed to go big, a crowd-pleasing diversion, something more than Somali immigration fraud. He clearly hopes the Epstein problem will fade with every act of dominance still to come.

Newsflash: It won’t.

Florida Men: How Trump Escaped A Sworn Deposition In Epstein Lawsuits

Florida Men: How Trump Escaped A Sworn Deposition In Epstein Lawsuits

Here at the Freakshow, we have observed that real life characters in Trumpland veer between the genres of Mario Puzo and Carl Hiaasen. There’s the New York mob boss dining out on fear and blackmail, and then there’s the Sunshine State Mar-a-Lago-faced greed-doomed, Ponzi scheming, why-read-a-book-when-you-can-golf protagonist. Often, and in the case of one man certainly, they are both.

A classic Hiaasen character plays a starring role in a forgotten bit of Florida Epstein-Trumpiana, which starts with a pair of emails buried in the House Oversight Committee’s recent drop. Two Florida paralegals – one working for the firm Epstein hired and the other working for the firm representing multiple trafficked girls suing him – discuss scheduling a deposition of Donald Trump in 2009 a few weeks after Epstein concluded his Palm Beach jail sentence.

These are curious artifacts because as far as is publicly known, Trump never did get deposed in Epstein civil cases. According to Fort Lauderdale lawyer Brad Edwards, who represented – and still does – many Epstein victims and requested the deposition, Trump avoided it by offering instead a casual office chat to share everything he knew. Edwards took him up on it, possibly knowing the wily real estate hustler had never met a legal challenge he couldn’t run out the clock on.

The difference between a recorded deposition and an unrecorded “friendly” chat is, in legal terms, the difference between filet mignon and a Big Mac. A deposition is sworn and lying carries a perjury penalty. There is no record of this chat other than Edwards’ description of it in his book, Relentless Pursuit. Among other dodges, Trump claimed Epstein had dictated to him his notorious New York magazine quote about Jeff being “a lot of fun” and liking beautiful women “as much as I do and many of them are on the younger side.” Trump said Epstein had told him he “needed people to say nice things.”

In spring of 2009, Brad Edwards joined the firm of Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler, carrying with him a pile of Epstein files. His new partner, Scott Rothstein, specialized in hawking “investments” in potentially gigantic civil settlements arranged for men just like Epstein who might rather pay off victims than face public odium. Rothstein also partnered in a two-man consulting firm with Roger Stone, and housed Edwards in an office next to him.

To Rothstein, the Epstein Jane Doe cases were less about the exploitation of minors and more a potential gold mine. Soon, Rothstein – “Scotty” to his friends – was going around telling people Epstein would pay $200 million to settle everything. Investors would share in the lawyers’ cut of this windfall. Rothstein would later confess that he regarded the case as “of potentially significant value against an extremely collectible pedophile.”

In her recent chat with Todd Blanche, Epstein’s procuress Ghislaine Maxwell claimed Rothstein’s firm demanded $10 million from her then-boyfriend billionaire businessman Ted Waite to protect her from litigation. “And that is the reason Ted and I broke up, was the basis of that,” she said, according to the transcript.

If Rothstein was blackmailing Ghislaine’s billionaire boyfriend, is it possible he was shaking down other recipients of Edwards’ deposition subpoenas? Like a certain New York businessman?

At some point Rothstein took the Epstein files out of Edwards’ office and showed them off to potential investors, even, according to court records, leaving them alone with the files for half an hour. Edwards eventually had to retrieve them from the FBI.

Edwards has always denied knowing anything about Rothstein’s scheme. Rothstein exonerated him and Edwards also won a formal apology in court years later from Epstein for claiming that he was involved in the scheme.

The coincidence is apparently just -- Florida, man.

Rothstein’s legal career ended colorfully. First he climbed into a bathtub in a business suit and held a gun to his head. Unable to pull the trigger, he absconded to Morocco with $16 million, then flew back to surrender. After Rothstein got caught, Stone wrote that his former sponsor had “ADD so severe he never finished a martini, a cigar, a thought” and – the ultimate insult from dandy Roger – he wore “garish $300 hand painted neckties.”

Rothstein pled guilty in January 2010 to running a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme. He was sentenced to 50 years in prison, but he’d blabbed so much about an Italian mobster who liaised between the Gambinos and a family in Palermo that he was put in witness protection.

Today no one knows whether Rothstein is in a federal dungeon under a new name or on a Phuket beach chair with an umbrella drink, watching waves break – the classic final scene in every movie ever made about successful scoundrels. He has literally disappeared.

In his book, Edwards isn’t specific about the Trump chat – he just says “summer of 2009.” But the emails indicate Trump was scheduled to be deposed in late August, then moved to late September. The paralegals had him on the same deposition list as Ghislaine Maxwell, who was also busy dodging them.





Edwards has mostly made a point of praising Trump’s helpfulness, but since Trump tends to bank dirt and secrets to be used when it suits him, it’s hard to know exactly what sort of help he provided. “The only thing I can say about President Trump is that … he is the only person who picked up the phone and said ‘lets just talk, I’ll give you as much time as you want, I’ll tell you what you need to know’,” Edwards said in a 2018 interview.

Eventually, Edwards wrote, he came to think that Trump left out (surprise!) a lot. “Over the next few years, I spoke to several witnesses who told us that they had been introduced by Epstein to Trump. Some had seen him at Epstein’s office, others at one of Epstein’s homes, at parties or social events, and even on his plane… Last year, I saw a 1992 video of Epstein and Trump together, suggesting that they were closer social friends than I had been made to understand.”

While at Rothstein’s firm, Edwards interviewed Epstein’s houseman Alfredo Rodriguez, and procured from him the infamous “black book” of 1,500 names. Rodriguez circled about 50 he claimed were the “holy grail” that would crack the case. Trump was one of those circled. (In his book, Edwards states that the circled names were men Rodriguez claimed “were involved with or had knowledge of the sexual molestation operation.”)

Some Epstein civil cases have been jackpots for the attorneys, although Virginia Giuffre got a relatively paltry $500,000. In 2023, JP Morgan agreed to pay $290 million to an unknown number of Epstein trafficking victims. Standard contingency fees in such cases range from 25 percent pre-suit to 40 percent at trial. Do the math. But as Thornton Wilder observed and as Scotty, wherever he is, would surely concur, money is like manure: it should be spread around.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

The French Connection: How Epstein's Trafficking Network Ensnared Hundreds

The French Connection: How Epstein's Trafficking Network Ensnared Hundreds

A Washington journalist and friend of mine who isn’t as enmeshed in the Jeffrey Epstein story recently asked me where the idea came from that Epstein trafficked “more than a thousand” humans (girls, women, and sometimes, it’s been suggested, boys) during his sinister reign as brothelkeeper to the elites. He thought it seemed impossibly high.

The number comes directly from a July 7 Trump Justice Department press release stating that an internal review of more than 300 gigabytes of “data and physical evidence” suggested “Epstein harmed over one thousand victims.” Putting aside the problem that Pam Bondi and Kash Patel are proven liars and Trump lackeys, we may take their assessment at face value, for inventing it would not seem to add a layer of protection to their Dear Leader.

The question remains, how was this feat accomplished by a single thug?

We know Epstein was a member of the borderless, nationless tribe of elites whose only allegiance is to the bankers. He had multiple passports (One Austrian with a Saudi address and two American). He was able to smirk past national customs officers without too much attention from nosy agents by flying in and out of airports – civilian and military – with luminaries like former President Bill Clinton and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak on his jet.

There’s a lot in the public domain already, but as we wait for the DOJ to disgorge its rancid vault, Epstein’s known communications with pals, his flight logs, and scheduling emails with staff do suggest how he might have racked up a thousand and one victims.

Between 2013 and 2019, Epstein frequently flew unnamed women to and from East European airports – Kyiv, Moscow, Yekaterinburg, and Warsaw – as well as Stockholm and Helsinki commercially through Paris.

These trips almost always include [redacted] passengers – nameless individuals whose screening in the documents suggests they are trafficked victims whose names are purposely shielded.

We know that as a “model agent” Epstein was in cahoots with fellow trafficker Jean-Luc Brunel in transporting and rendering stateless women and girls who he then housed in his Upper East Side New York building– often with control of their passports, visas, and other documents in his own hands. His deep involvement in the community of Eastern European beauties is one reason why it’s not unfeasible, as I wrote recently in this space, to believe that he knew the former Melania Knavs as well.

A lawsuit filed by Gloria Allred and other attorneys on behalf of a Russian Jane Doe in 2021 against Epstein’s attorney Darren Indyke, executor of the estate, laid out how the Paris game played out.

In 2017, according to the documents, Jane was in her early 20s, living in Moscow and looking for work. She answered an ad for a financial company seeking a personal assistant who could speak multiple languages. She was soon meeting Epstein’s female representative in Russia, who said the job was to be a personal assistant to a man. She was not told the man’s name nor company. Epstein’s assistants in New York sent her tickets to Paris.

At Charles De Gaulle airport, Jane was picked up by a driver and taken to Epstein’s apartment on Avenue Foch. Epstein took Jane and three other young women out to dinner at a restaurant near the Louvre. “Jane understood this to be a job interview,” according to the suit. Epstein asked her interview-type questions and gave her 500 euros in cash. After dinner they returned to the apartment. The Russian assistant who had interviewed Jane in Moscow was present (her photograph was displayed at the apartment). The Russian assistant then took Jane to the bedroom and told her to change into pajamas. The other girls had changed into similar pajamas.

Jane wanted to sleep but was told to stay awake. Eventually, the Russian assistant brought Jane to the “massage room” where she endured the “massage” and sexual assault that countless girls and women have since described as Epstein’s M.O. According to the suit, Epstein repeatedly raped and trafficked her for his personal sexual use and abuse over a two-year period in Paris, New York, Florida, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The Paris M.O. is hinted at in the scheduling emails: For one [redacted] they stopped and picked up “her friend” from Stockholm (this was a kind of pyramid scheme, paying girls to bring in others) . In another scheduling email, a [redacted] was put on a train from Paris to Geneva and “then car service on to Glion Hospitality School in Montreux” – very likely one of the actual carrots of job training that Epstein used to lure hapless young women into his project.

In September of this year another Paris-linked Jane Doe suit was filed against the estate, this by a woman from a “majority Muslim country in Central Asia,” alleging that Epstein got her a French student visa, then locked her in his Paris apartment and had his staff bring her food.

The scheduling emails are but a tiny keyhole glimpse into Epstein’s activities. As we previously reported, Epstein made 64 unexplained voyages through the Istanbul airport between 2010 and 2014, at a time when global watchdog groups were reporting a surge in human trafficking through that city in the wake of the Middle Eastern refugee crisis.

This new cache of scheduling emails suggests that he engaged in trafficking through Paris with [redacted] passengers right up until his arrest at Teterboro – on a return flight from France – in 2019.

They also show how the movements of presumably hapless, soon-to-be-trafficked voyagers through Paris were intermingled with Epstein’s social engagements with billionaire Eurotrash and European political dignitaries who, for some inexplicable reason, remained buddies with him throughout his post-jail years.

Epstein’s playmates in Paris included Fiat heir and mega-industrialist Eduardo Teodorani and Hermes billionaire Axel Dumas. Epstein dined with Norwegian diplomat and Oslo Accords hero Terje Rod-Larsen (who took Epstein money for a Greek island pad and visited his New York City mansion numerous times) and even hosted a three-day overnight stay at his Avenue Foch apartment for the Secretary General of the European Council, Norwegian politician Thorbjorn Jagland, during the 2015 Paris Fashion Week.

We know Epstein regarded Paris Fashion Week as deer hunters anticipate the shooting season in Pennsylvania. Witness this 2018 text exchange with Steve Bannon:

...

Last week I got a call from a talk radio show in London that occasionally asks me to comment on the Epstein story. The host wanted to know if the release of tens of thousands of pages of Epstein communications was “the smoking gun.”

The question was meant to refer, I guess, to some explosive irrefutable piece of damning evidence – photos or video of a rape – that might tie Epstein’s running buddy Donald Trump to something more heinous than what is irrefutably known about a serial predator and future President of the United States hanging around with an industrial-scale sex trafficker for years.

The fact is we know a lot already. And the unknown unknowns are in fact very much known to many: Epstein lawyers, certainly; some FBI agents and current and former federal prosecutors; Epstein’s paid enablers; his pals and playmates in the nationless, borderless elite, and of course, the trafficked women. The scheduling emails now in public view are almost always sent by Epstein’s trusty blonde aide Lesley Groff, now a Connecticut housewife cloaked in WASPy New Canaan respectability, who has so far eluded charges. In one email during the period when she was also scheduling [redacteds], she mentions that she’s taking her own kids to Disneyland.

Whether or not Groff or the other enablers and male participant/witnesses are ever forced to talk, IMHO, that “smoking gun” is already right there on the proverbial floor for all the world to see.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

The Last Picture Show: That 'Epic Epic Epic' Bannon-Epstein Bromance

The Last Picture Show: That 'Epic Epic Epic' Bannon-Epstein Bromance

The first time I encountered Steve Bannon was at a Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. in the early 2010s. He was hosting a seminar for aspiring conservative filmmakers, and in my memory, he was just a shaggy guy in a tiny airless conference room in the basement of the Marriott, bitterly complaining about Hollywood liberals.

Had Bannon made it as an auteur in L.A. we might be living in a different world. He certainly never got over the resentment, nor relinquished the dream: He was producing a Jeffrey Epstein documentary starring the man himself when the feds picked up Jeff at Teterboro Airport in 2019.

We know more about all this since the Republicans in the House Oversight Committee, seeking to dilute the impact of three carefully selected, eyebrow-raising Epstein texts about Trump, released some 20,000 pages of documents. It was a panic move that has backfired, as it only added to the DIY conspiracy hunting frenzy. Journalists and couch Miss Marples and Inspector Clouseaus have now produced thousands of articles, podcast discussions, and social media posts — not just Trump-Epstein, but the elite coterie that found Epstein charming and useful in ways we are still trying to understand.

The document dump (from a cache acquired from the Epstein estate, not the DOJ) is so vast and the print so small that it is impossible for your Freakshow guide to convey all the insane revelations. We have to focus on one: let’s call it the Jeff and Steve Show.

Oh, they were buddies. Steve called Jeff “brother” and “grasshopper” – a reference to the faithful pupil in the early 70s TV series Kung Fu. Jeff critiqued Steve’s media appearances, comparing his TV look at one point to the priest in The Exorcist.

More importantly, he shared his global contacts and arranged travel and meetings. For example, in 2018, Epstein arranged for him to fly to meet two Qatari sheiks in Paris, including former Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani (HBJ), a billionaire member of the royal family.

”Short notice for jet charter,” Jeff texted Steve in November 2018. “But can for tomorrow morning to Paris lunch in Paris then fly you to wherever”. Bannon replied, “What a life.” and “u r a pretty good asst.” Epstein responded, “Massages. Not included”.

Epstein made countless connections, from Yemen to Norway. He tried to get Bannon a meeting with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, apparently hoping Kurz could help arrange a Putin-Trump meeting. Before another meeting he helped arrange in Abu Dhabi, he gave advice about security: “Tomorrow meeting powerful. Reminder. Phones not secure AT ALL. Wait until you return for downloads.”

In exchange for all that international networking, Steve kept Jeff in the loop on DC action, including the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Trump-Russia investigation. After testifying himself, Steve reported to his pal that the committee was asking everyone about “50 names” – “25 Russian and 25 American” – and that Epstein and Leon Black were numbers three and four on the American side.

Jeff asked whether the committee was also interested in Trump’s casino executive Nick Ribis and Manhattan magnate Tom Barrack (whom Michael Wolff has named as one of the “three musketeers” with Trump and Epstein cutting a feral swath through the New York aspiring model scene in the 90s). Steve said no, but added that the committee did ask about the Epstein-Trump relationship.

“Did they ask you if i had the silver bullet,” Jeff replied.

Lots of “locker room talk” about women of course. “How was Paris fashion week,” Steve inquired in Spring 2018. “There’s nothing left in my testicles but a speck of dust .. and a puff of air,” Jeff replied. “Im putting up a poster of you in my apartment,” Steve wrote back.

Steve titled one missive about his visits with Gulf sheiks “eurabia” and Jeff replied, “more like your labia” adding “they are so like women” – “the worst aspects of women.” They joked about “ugly” Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis – one of Steve’s allies in promoting continental white nationalism – “do you think when she wakes up in the morning she looks a little like Donald?” Epstein wrote. Steve described one of his European female interviewers as “wet,” perhaps convinced that the seductive power of his new Bernard Henri-Levi hairdo was multiplied by orders of magnitude on the other side of the Atlantic.

While nothing in the texts suggests Bannon was indulging in the statutorily forbidden pastimes of other Epstein pals, Jeff did repeatedly offer him a trysting place with a mysterious girlfriend named Miller. “If you and a ‘ms Miller’ ‘want some privacy you can use island. Or palm beach house. Anytime”. Steve replied, “Thanks brother”.

Most of the texts date to the period when Bannon was out of the Trump White House. Taking his MAGA show global, he had grown out his hair into a BHL coif and was presenting as a white nationalist philosophe. As Steve hit the fleshpots of Europe, Jeff kept in close touch, watching his pal’s media appearances and offering advice. After a speech at Oxford, Epstein observed that he “hit all the points” but “btw your close in [sic] protection guy needs tweaking. Spends too much time looking at his phone.”

Male and female Trumpland oafs are obsessed with what Ivanka Trump called “optics” – the sine qua non of the reality show family. Epstein, a registered sex predator, was aware that he posed the greatest optics challenge in modern history.

Steve, apparently, was the man to enter that Augean stable.

The correspondence between the men reveals that they were planning a documentary project for which they needed to acquire “govt approval for casting.” Epstein’s networking power was being curtailed by Miami Herald writer Julie K Brown’s series about his Palm Beach wrist slap and the soon-to-be-public heinous depositions about him in Virginia Giuffre’s defamation suit against Ghislaine Maxwell. Epstein was in a panic, insisting the girls were “not 15, not 16” and were “prostitutes.”

Bannon suggested he establish “THE major center for human trafficking; teenage prostitution; etc etc etc; global problem” to which Epstein replied, “The pr guys think that may be seen to be an attempt to buy my way out. What the party of Davos would do.”

Steve wanted money – of course – and Jeff was keen to keep that confidential. The plan was to set the film up to look like legal services or training. The two men were still hashing out the financial details a few months before Epstein’s arrest. In one text, Jeff writes, “we need to talk about Kovel - letter and black bag” (a Kovel agreement cloaks a contract in confidentiality and attorney-client privilege).

“Can we make this deal today so I can pull my crew off other stuff they are working on and get this thing done - Burning daylight,” wrote Steve, to which Jeff replied in his unpunctuated fashion: “YEs do you have a lawyer . ? we need to document past and future, all needs surgical care.”

Bannon responded, “But we are in terms agreed???”

The texts don’t seem to reveal a dollar figure for the film deal. A month before he was arrested, Epstein ordered his lawyer Darren Indyke (now of counsel with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s top advisor Tim Parlatore, as we revealed in The Plumbers of Epsteingate) to fork over $100,000 so that Bannon wouldn’t be flying his crew around out of pocket.

The documentary moved ahead. A trailer for the film, with the producer label “Bannoncam,” is still on Youtube. Epstein is decked in avuncular mufti – peering from behind reading glasses, with whitened hair and beard (the men had discussed the preferred beard length in texts). Jeff sits in a chair across from Steve, who sternly scolds him over his predatory predilections, which the texts make clear didn’t bother them too much. The lighting is dark, the color scheme woody and royal. Things were looking up. Jeff reported that a public legal response to the new allegations against him was coming soon. Bannon rejoiced: “Epic. Epic. Epic.”

But that’s as far as the sanitation project got. (Bannon reportedly has at least 15 hours of Epstein video footage that House Democrats and Epstein’s brother Mark want to see.)

The last message Jeff sent Steve was on a sunny Saturday afternoon, July 6, 2019. His private jet had landed at Teterboro for what would be the last of more than 700 flights in and out since 2013. The feds were waiting on the tarmac.

At 4:32 pm New Jersey time, Jeff shot off a final message: “All cancelled."

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Great MAGA Crack-Up Features Antisemites, Ultra-Zionists And (Of Course) Misogynists

Great MAGA Crack-Up Features Antisemites, Ultra-Zionists And (Of Course) Misogynists

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

It was always only a matter of time: MAGA, with its racial purity obsession and America First tendencies, was always the strangest of bedfellows with the Miriam Adelson wing of the Trump administration. Shared Islamophobia, panic about sharia law coming to the local school board, and state harassment and deportation of pro-Palestinian professors, students and writers could only hold it together for so long.

The irreconcilable differences are exploding into the open at the Heritage Foundation, a formerly mainstream Republican policy shop that went all in for Trumpism and is now being accused of helping mainstream one of America’s coarsest Nazi sympathizers.

Last week, Tucker Carlson aired a long interview with Nick Fuentes, the young leader of the “Groyper” wing of the new right. With Carlson at his studio in Maine, Fuentes was more restrained than usual (he’s compared Jews killed in the Holocaust to “cookies baked in an oven” and has said “organized Jewry” is working to control banks, media and government). Carlson did not quiz him on his past statements. He did respond with gentle disagreement a few times, suggesting that as a multiracial and multiethnic nation, Americans should not be segmented into self-interested identity groups, as Fuentes was arguing. Of course, Tucker has spent a lot of his own media capital doing just that – hosting Darryl Cooper, a Nazi apologist whom he referred to as the “best and most honest popular historian in the United States” on his podcast, for example.)

The outrage (fake or real?) was swift. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal editorial board issued an op-ed about the fracas with the headline “The New Right’s Antisemites” – as if they were only just waking up to the fact that their ethnonationalists could not long co-exist with non-white non-Christian Americans. Florida Rep. Randy Fine (R-FLL) called Carlson “the most dangerous anti-Semite in America” and accused him of leading a “modern-day Hitler Youth.” Fine also cancelled a planned event with Heritage.

In Washington, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts voiced big support for Tucker Carlson in a tweeted video statement. “Conservatives should feel no obligation to support any foreign government” when such support doesn’t serve American interests, he said. “My loyalty as a Christian and an American is to Christ first and America always.” He then called out pressure from “the globalist class” – a phrase often seen as referencing Jews.

The video statement landed like the proverbial turd in the swimming pool. Lawyer Mark Goldfeder, who is Jewish, announced he was resigning from the Foundation’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. “I cannot serve under someone who thinks Nazis are worth debating,” Goldfeder wrote.

Roberts’ chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, then doubled down, calling out Heritage dissidents who were criticizing his boss online and accusing those who expressed outrage at Carlson’s softball interview of “virtue signaling.” Roberts then abruptly deployed Neuhaus to a different office – a wing of the Heritage foundation that happens to be run by a white Christian nationalist with open anti-Jewish inclinations of his own.

Scott Yenor is a misogynist superfreak from the great state of Idaho who entered the national MAGA mainstream via the odious hatchery of the Claremont Institute. He was forced to resign from a university board in Florida earlier this year after reports of his past statements about American Jews, including that they shouldn’t be considered for national leadership. The batshittery doesn’t end there. Yenor has advocated that the medical and legal professions ban women because they are “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” He is also a founding member of a secret society of prominent white Christian nationalist men planning for what they call a “national divorce.”

None of that was a hindrance to getting hired at Heritage. Last month, Yenor crowed on Twitter about his new job as Director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. While Neuhaus has since announced he is resigning from Heritage altogether, Yenor remains burrowed in at Simon Center, which the foundation’s website calls “the center that safeguards the heritage of Heritage … dedicated to preserving the intellectual and moral underpinnings of our nation’s Founding.”

None of this is surprising. Heritage Foundation founder, political strategist Paul Weyrich, was one of the most effective and extremist religious zealots to operate in American politics in the last century. Kevin Roberts is an ideal inheritor of that vision. Before coming to DC, he ran a Catholic university in Wyoming that produced righty culture warrior kids who would complain to local shops about the impropriety of advertising bras on mannequins (“upsetting to male students”) and who held anti-LGBTQ “traditional marriage picnics.”

This ugly war is breaking out all over. As John Ganz noticed in his essay Who Will Win the GOP Civil War? when right wing radio screamer Mark Levin criticized Fuentes, Tucker, and Candace Owens in a recent rant about their antisemitism, he sounded “less bombastic than shrill. The fact is, Levin seems nervous. And he should be. The momentum is not on their side. Go on YouTube and look at the comments. They are all anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. “

Russ Vought’s wife and Heritage VP of communications Mary Grace Vought – whose side hustle with a Texan out in Oklahoma we recounted in a recent episode of the Freakshow – took time out of whatever Beltway white Christian nationalist hypocrites do on Sundays to issue a tweet from her personal account. No, the policy tank was not about to cancel Roberts – not yet anyway: “Online rumors about a recent meeting of the Heritage Board of Trustees are completely baseless,” she announced.

Obviously those of us revolted by Project 2025 relish this spectacle. Anyone who has been paying any attention to the “no enemies to the right” Nazified big tent of American conservatism could not have predicted any other outcome. But it is also terrifying. To get a sense of sensibility, read this defense of young racist Paul Ingrassia today. The brain trust of the MAGA movement has always flirted with antisemitism – Bronze Age Pervert for example, whose revolting book is in the back pocket of most young Trumpist staffers on the Hill, is explicitly anti-Jewish. Most of the eugenicists, ethnonationalists, and trad Caths who comprise the MAGA movement’s intellectual core are all-in for racial and religious purity.

Now, these highbrow men with dirty fascist theories are angry about a midwestern rube who talks rough getting mainstreamed. Perhaps they’re jealous.

Laura Fields is a political scientist and author of the new book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. Fields told me:

It was only a matter of time until far-right antisemitism became a real issue for them. For years now people across the MAGA New Right, including Yoram Hazony, have been arguing and perhaps pretending that antisemitism is really a problem of the left. Meanwhile, again and again, influential young people and staffers on the New Right – in the chats and on X and beyond – keep being exposed for their gross antisemitic humor or use of Nazi symbology, and the leaders of the movement kept silent (the important exception here is Sohrab Ahmari, who proves the rule). Now Kevin Roberts has gone too far. But he and others have been giving cover to the extreism – and not just antisemitism but also misogyny, homophobic bigotry, and at times racism – for many years now.

AUTHOR NOTE: I will be continuing the conversation with Laura Fields on Substack Live Thursday, November 6 at 11 AM Eastern time. You won’t want to miss it.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow



Sexual Hypocrisy, Pious Corruption, And Why Russ Vought Is So Damn Mad

Sexual Hypocrisy, Pious Corruption, And Why Russ Vought Is So Damn Mad

In dark times, is there anything more cheering than a little white Christian nationalist hypocrisy scandal? Performative sanctimony is so embedded in American political culture that these moments come around with the seasons: Jerry Falwell Jr. and the poolboy, Robert Morris of megachurch Gateway going to jail for pedo sex abuse, American Conservative Union leader Matt Schlapp repeatedly accused of sexual transgressions with men.

Now comes Russ Vought, Trump’s little white nationalist budget manager, a barely-there but relentlessly scheming lifetime conservative Washington insider. Vought’s piety is matched only by his passionate loathing for government employees, who he famously promised to put “in trauma.” Given the power to do exactly that by Trump, he now gets some credit – though maybe not as much as Elon Musk – for putting hundreds of thousands of workers on the street.

In his strangely personal craving for vengeance, Vought (who we featured in a Freak of the Week earlier this year) has traveled far from the “love thy enemy” message of the messiah he claims to follow. But what made him so mad?

Around the time he told political donors that he wanted to put federal employees into trauma, he was experiencing a major trauma of his own: In August 2023, Vought was divorced by his wife, the mother of his two daughters. Details are buried in the Arlington County case record, but it took only 20 days from filing to decree.

Ex-wife Mary Grace Vought is at least as crazily right wing as Russ. She cut her teeth working for white supremacy-sympathizer Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, runs her own consulting company, Vought Strategies, and double-dips in MAGAland as vice president of communications at the Heritage Foundation.

Her longtime “personal and professional relationship” with a Texas political strategist is at the heart of a little mini-scandal out in Oklahoma that appears to have ended the political career of that state’s notorious Superintendent of Public Instruction, baby-faced Bible banger Ryan Walters. Starting in fall 2023, not long after her divorce, Walters was wildly overpaying Vought Strategies on a de facto no-bid contract, a situation that eventually came to the attention of the Oklahoma legislature.

Vought was granted a contract, apparently without any competitive bids, to arrange “national media appearances” for Walters. Walters would soon rocket into lib-baiting stardom on the national scene with stunts including forcing all Oklahoma teachers to have Trump-branded Bibles in their classrooms, initiating a statewide public school curriculum partnership with right-wing PragerU, and creating a library book review committee headed by controversial “LibsofTikTok” influencer Chaya Raichik.

For a while, LibsofTikTok and other MAGA influencers even pushed Ryan for Trump’s education secretary – a role that went, more appropriately given the administration’s stance on books and experts, to the World Wrestling Entertainment founder’s wife.

A local Oklahoma Fox affiliate tallied more than 400 national media appearances over two years by Walters as he sought to raise his national profile. The attention wasn’t cheap: Walters hired Vought Strategies to book media interviews and write op-eds for $200 per hour. The initial contract was for four months with three one-year extensions possible, for a potential total of at least $210,000 in taxpayer funds. And Vought’s bid for $5,000 per month was attached to the contract, along with an even more detailed pricing proposal totaling $5,000 per week.

The contract caught the attention of Oklahoma state representatives who were looking into another deal Walters had struck with his campaign manager turned chief policy advisor, Matt Langston. Langston runs a Texas-based consulting firm, Engage Right, LLC. After working on Walters’ campaign, he took a position as his chief policy advisor – making six figures.

By March 2024, state legislators discovered that Ryan Walters had never bothered to create a formal Oklahoma state employment agreement for Langston. In fact, Langston didn’t even live in the state of Oklahoma – he hung his hat in Texas. But his influence crossed the panhandle. “Matt Langston is the puppeteer,” Oklahoma Republican State Rep. McBride said. “He’s the guy that pulls Ryan Walters’ strings.”

It turns out the Vought and Langston contracts were connected. While investigating last year, Oklahoma City-based news station KFOR obtained thousands of emails between Mary Grace Vought and Matt Langston spanning more than a decade, indicating they had a personal relationship and had done business together for years.

A few months before the Vought divorce, Oklahoma City attorney Cameron Spradling tweeted the full text of a scathing email Langston’s ex-wife sent to a reporter. She called him a sociopath, accused him of tax evasion, serial infidelity including with a woman in Wisconsin, and failing to pay child support for their five children.

Meanwhile, earlier this year, Walters accidentally put up a porn video from his office computer while giving a staff talk.

By this fall, the game was up. Walters was forced to send Langston packing. And last month, Walters himself quit. He announced that he was moving on to run Teacher Freedom Alliance, an outfit that, according to its website, aims to assist educators in developing “free, moral and upright” American citizens. The organization of a few thousand members is dwarfed by the nationwide teachers’ union, American Federation of Teachers, with 1.8 million members, but Walters promised to tilt at that great Marxist windmill. Announcing his new job on Fox, Walters promised: “We’re going to destroy the teachers’ unions.”

Mary Grace Vought’s name made the Oklahoma news. But her DC reputation remains intact.

As a member in good standing of a clan of men who make fake uxoriousness a brand enhancer, the fact that Mr. Family Values Russ Vought was cut loose by his wife like Steve Carell in Crazy, Stupid Love has always amused the Freakshow. It turns out Vought’s personal life fascinates his boss as much as it does us!

Donald Trump has been trying to play wingman for the newly-minted middle aged DC stud with the Palm Beach ladies.

Here’s the nauseating report from Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo news correspondent Asawin “Swin” Suebsang:

By mid-2024, Donald Trump and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought were talking on the phone fairly regularly. But it often wasn’t about policy. Trump – when he had downtime from campaigning and plotting his fascist presidency – appeared preoccupied with getting the recently divorced Vought laid, two knowledgeable sources tell me. Trump spoke to Vought… about the ‘gorgeous’ and ‘beautiful ladies’ who roam Trump’s club, Mar-a-Lago, so often that it ‘weirded out’ some of his advisers, in one source’s words. Trump offered to be Vought’s wingman. And Trump spoke crudely of all the ‘p——’ that Vought would surely get as the president’s favorite ‘bachelor.’

The executive branch incel dipshits who craft AI clips of Trump shitting on America made a cartoon hero of Vought set to Blue Öyster Cult’s (Don’t Fear) The Reaper.

Russ is suddenly cool, maybe for the first time in his life. Look sharp, ladies. To update Jane Austen for Mar-a-Lago 2025: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single white man in possession of a White House job must be in want of a plastic-enhanced Florida femme.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Conspiracy Theory? That Time When Jeffrey Epstein Visited The CIA

Conspiracy Theory? That Time When Jeffrey Epstein Visited The CIA

At the Freakshow we don’t spend a lot of time on conspiracy theories – but we make an exception when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein, a career criminal burrowed deep into the American national security and foreign affairs establishment for reasons that are unclear and with effects that are not fully understood. Was he a spy? Alex Acosta, the Miami federal prosecutor who cut Epstein’s infamous sweetheart deal, supposedly said he was told to “back off” because Epstein “belonged to intelligence.”

So many of Epstein’s connections are well-known and hashed over. Rich men have lost wives and jobs and paid massive settlements for their involvement, while others squirm and deny or issue carefully worded apologies. We know their names. But there’s more to uncover. Epstein was a predator and pimp, yes, but it was never just about the girls.

House and Senate committees might wait forever for full disclosure from the Justice Department, but there are hoards of archives in the public realm that they could start looking into. A good place to start? The records of those old bogeymen, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. These organizations preceded Davos, serving something of the same purpose – hosting self-important gasbag speakers for audiences of men with even greater self-regard. They primarily serve as closed-door clubs where private interests can be quietly advanced into public policy.

Epstein showed up inside these lofty clubs in the early 1990s – the launch years of his utterly mysterious rise in the American establishment. As we reported in a previous Freakshow, the doors to global power opened wide for Epstein in 1991 after the gnomelike Ohio billionaire Les Wexner very questionably gave him power of attorney over his billions. That same year, Jeff got his first jet and Ghislaine Maxwell appeared on the scene as his enabler and sometimes girlfriend.

He put the Wexner pile to work on power-networking right away. By 1992, Epstein was loaning $100,000 to Bill Clinton’s inaugural committee. Between 1991 and 1995, he made 17 White House visits. The visits abruptly stopped in January 1995, the same year he joined both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.

In the June 12, 1995, roster of the Trilateral Commission, he is identified as Jeffrey E. Epstein, President, New Albany Property Inc. (New Albany was the planned village near Columbus that Wexner was developing and living in). He soon forked over $350,000 to the Council on Foreign Relations, which has since publicly disavowed him. The CFR has also claimed he only showed up for two meetings as a member, but club records suggest otherwise.

In October 1995, Les Gelb – an international affairs éminence grise and New York Times columnist who appeared in Epstein’s black book and traveled with him on his plane – arranged with Clinton’s CIA director John Deutch for a “private tour and briefing” at the CIA. The daylong agenda included briefings on “info. warfare,” “global humanitarian emergencies,” “proliferation” and “economic intelligence,” and even included a $12 lunch with Deutch (that the CFR told the members they would have to cover themselves).

...

Trip to Central Intelligence Agency; Council on Foreign Relations Records, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library

Epstein was among a small number of Gelb’s invitees to that CIA event, along with some white shoe lawyers, oil and weapons industry reps, and consultants from Kissinger Associates and the Carlyle International Group. (MAGA conspiracists will be sorry to see that in one of the records related to this lunch, Gelb hand-wrote “George Soros unable to attend CIA Day anytime Oct-Nov.”)

The CIA director who hosted the event, John M. Deutch, also served as Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of Defense, and was later accused of spectacular breaches of national security protocol. Official reports on his habits make Trump’s Mar-a-Lago classified documents bathroom pile look like Fort Knox in comparison.

He kept a running journal of his work at the agency on a computer disk that he carried home with him every night and subsequently accessed on computers designated for “unclassified” use that were connected to the internet. He refused home security that most DCIs get, attempted to reformat and delete files when the CIA asked him to turn them over, and had a computer expert visit him weekly to discuss encryption and other issues, according to one inspector general’s report..

“Dr. Deutch failed to follow even the most basic security precautions” read a Pentagon report on the matter. A CIA investigation concluded that he “intentionally processed... highly classified information” on his home computers in Massachusetts and Maryland.

Deutch refused to cooperate and was never charged; Clinton pardoned him two hours before he handed the White House over to George W. Bush in January 2001.

One could chalk up this behavior to being a bureaucratic tech Luddite – except that Deutch had been at MIT for decades by then, had served in the Pentagon and the Energy department and was regarded by a computer expert he worked with as a “fairly advanced” user.

After his government years, Deutch returned to MIT – another node of American national security and scientific power that Epstein was burrowing into with money and personal charm. He gave MIT $850,000 and struck up a friendship with, among others, Deutsch’s friend Noam Chomsky. Deutch was head of the Department of Chemistry, Dean of Science and Provost, and eventually served on the board of a company started by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, who had close ties to Epstein. Epstein connected Vekselberg with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2013, and the men went into business together. Deutch also helped Vekselberg create the Skolkovo Institute, a Russian-MIT collaboration that by 2014, Boston FBI warned could be a vehicle for Russia to steal US technology, and in 2022, the U.S. sanctioned it for its “close relationship with Russia’s defense sector.”

By 2003, Epstein had embedded himself all the way into the establishment. It had taken just over ten years. His birthday book is a record of the respect, love and affection of numerous extremely powerful men. At the Trilateral Commission and the CFR, he smirked and slunk and rubbed shoulders with U.S. Senators current and former, Secretaries of State current and former, chairmen of banks and financial firms and aerospace and international conglomerates – men who would go on to make decisions affecting the course of world affairs and millions of people’s lives, from Moscow to Tel Aviv, from Berlin to Abu Dhabi, from the status of Palestine to a nuclear-armed Iran.

These are all just breadcrumbs: facts over time that might suggest connections to larger events. Mostly they raise questions without answers. The Epstein motherlode is hoarded up in a Justice Department vault, currently guarded by K$H Patel and Pam Bondi. The Trump regime has gone to great lengths to divert attention from what had been their followers’ greatest conspiracy obsession. Besides provoking unrest in American cities, they are hiding the files, flagging (and presumably erasing) King Don’s presence in said files, slow walking or flat out ignoring Congressional subpoenas, and giving the royal prison treatment to Epstein’s depraved procuress Ghislaine Maxwell.

Even Bible Mike, our God-lovin’ House Speaker, is in on the coverup, refusing to swear in a duly elected member of Congress, apparently to delay or block a full House vote that would open the Epstein matter for discussion. To quote a song from one of Epstein’s Boomer era bands: “There’s something happening here… What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Donald's Diversionary Crackdown Is A MAGA Comic Book Spectacle

Donald's Diversionary Crackdown Is A MAGA Comic Book Spectacle

In recent days, the spectacle of state power abusing American citizens has reached critical mass. Coast to coast, masked thugs are dragging Americans off by their clothes and hair. Peaceful protestors branded as “terrorists” are being shoved into unmarked vans. Untold numbers of immigrants with and without documents have already disappeared into an American gulag. Even city cops are being tear gassed by masked federal agents.

All without due process.

Most of us are appalled. But not all. Some of these activities have been recorded, set to music and released by the Trump administration for the viewing pleasure, presumably, of MAGA fans. As artifacts of this time, these little works of art don’t reach for the mythologizing grandeur of Leni Riefenstahl (that will come later, surely), but they capture the granularity of the American 21st century fascist aesthetic, which is, of course, the Marvel comic.

Around the time Trump rode down the golden escalator to blame “Mexican rapists” for America’s problems, America slipped through a wormhole into a Freakshow of cartoonish evil. Trump, the saurian reality show impresario, overseeing a cast of characters with analogues in comic books or horror classics. The senior official behind the assault on American cities is a dead ringer for Nosferatu. Trump advisor Roger Stone, dandy in bespoke Penguin suits, bares his teeth like a Tasmanian devil. The Health and Human Services Secretary had a literal dead worm in his brain. “Stormy” and “Pecker” starred in the Presidential sex scandal, a “Trashelle” in another. Raven-haired plastic-fantastic villainess Laura Loomer is a millennial Cruella DeVil. And a shaky dry drunk weekend anchorman has nominal control over the most lethal military in human history.

As the administration ramps up its assault on American cities, the Marvel movie production values are undeniable. Over the weekend, right wing influencer Benny Johnson went to Chicago with ICE, donned a flak vest and got to cosplay warrior, selfie-sashaying past a line of sign-holding protesters he called “terrorists.” He later created an AI-generated video of himself as Batman, battling sombrero-wearing “terrorists.”

Benny makes a fitting mascot for this phase of the MAGA insurrection. Like all MAGA influencers, he’s a longtime fraud whose shamelessness helped him fail upward. Sacked for plagiarism not only by mainstream media but by a right wing outlet, he was rescued from oblivion by Russian covert disinformation money that literally made him rich and famous.

Now, like all the superstar MAGA influencer-bros, Benny leans on performative uxoriousness (they all profess to be happily married), fake-Christian sanctimony, and racist/misogynist political insult comedy. Tweeting out his slick embed video, he announced, “From tunnels under Trump Tower to the most targeted ICE facility, we faced violent Antifa, chaos, and criminals on the run.” Anyone who bothered to actually watch the video didn’t see any violence from the sign-holding protesters, and the only chaos appeared to be among the twitchy men in flak vests.

Before he “deployed” to the streets, he snagged an interview with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. In the video, they hug and then have a chat… about Bad Bunny and the Super Bowl. For those blissfully unaware of MAGA’s buffet of racialist obsessions, they’ve lately been losing it over the NFL’s choice of halftime entertainment. Bad Bunny, born and raised in Puerto Rico, a US territory, is an American citizen. But because he sings mostly in Spanish and is vocally anti-Trump, MAGA world views his selection as a personal affront, a pro football diss to the greater whiteness project.

Bad Bunny outright said that he excluded the US from his forthcoming world tour because of fears that ICE would deploy immigration raids targeting his fans, something Benny brought up in his video. He tees up Kristi Noem: “What is your message to Bad Bunny? Will there be ICE enforcement at the Super Bowl?”

“We’ll be all over that place,” replies the fake frontier woman and unrepentant puppy-killer. “We are going to enforce the law. You shouldn’t be coming to the Super Bowl unless you are a law-abiding American citizen.”

(As if any undocumented immigrant would have the thousands of dollars for a ticket or the audacity to come around one of the most heavily guarded sporting events in America.)

The fact that two adults – one of whom is overseeing an extralegal assault on a major American city they claim is “under siege” by the left– appear to be chiefly concerned with the ideology of Super Bowl halftime entertainment is laughable.

During the presidential debate, Kamala Harris stated of Trump: “He’s not a serious person.” His greatest living biographer, Michael Wolff, calls him “an idiot.” But the spectacle is not supposed to be serious. Trump is an idiot savant when it comes to entertainingly manipulating race and class grievances.

The cartoon world his voters bought into last November has now turned dark, real and serious. Hundreds of Texas National Guard troops are headed up to Chicago, dispatched in accordance with Trump’s wishes, in defiance of judges and the governor of Illinois. A West Coast federal judge has managed to stave off the deployment of the National Guard to Portland, Oregon (where the chief of police is on record that the so-called emergency is a tiny protest taking place within one square block of the city). How long before armed men with Dixieland accents are shoving northern cops aside in the northern cities?

After ICE’s Blackhawk helicopter assault on a Chicago apartment building, right wing social media justified it by sharing reports of “30 shootings” in the city over the weekend. Sadly, 30 shootings in a weekend is not a lot by American standards. It is less than average. This year, there have been 11,359 gun deaths and 20,574 gun injuries nationwide. And according to the CDC, last year, the states with the highest rate of gun deaths per 100,000 were Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The lowest were New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

Fox “News” has done its part for a decade at least, terrorizing white rural and suburban Americans with stories about urban crime infernos. That myth of blue city violence is a new Big Lie pretext for the Insurrectionist in Chief to realize a dream he’s cherished since at least January 6, 2021.

Would he really invoke the Insurrection Act? He footsied around with that question last night. Maaaybe …

Kinda depends: how much American carnage will it take to make us forget Trump-Epstein? This morning, Pam Bondi remained silent at a Congressional hearing when Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), asked her if there were pictures of “Trump with half-naked young women” in the DOJ’s Epstein files.

She didn’t say no.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Epstein Files: Jet Flights To Istanbul And Massive Money Transfers

Epstein Files: Jet Flights To Istanbul And Massive Money Transfers

Charlie Kirk’s assassination diverted attention from some of the most odious and embarrassing episodes of Trumpies engaged in the Epstein coverup. While Donald Trump orchestrated a national mourning spectacle for the TPUSA founder, his toadies were out in shifty-eyed overtime on Capitol Hill, parroting the brazen “nothing to see here” message.

We know that Trump judiciary officials deployed a thousand FBI agents – a veritable Roman legion – to flag the Trump name in the hundreds of thousands of pages of Epstein case files. And yet, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, FBI Director Kash Patel embarrassed himself, dodging repeated direct questions about how many times Trump’s name is in the files, and whether he told Attorney General Pam Bondi that Trump’s name was in the Justice Department's Epstein files.

K$H, as Patel brands his Trumpy merch, insultingly claimed he had seen no “credible evidence” that any man other than Epstein had sex with his trafficked victims – despite the many public statements and courtroom testimony from those women.

He then stonewalled a House Committee hearing at which Republican Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie grilled him about the men believed to have been recipients of Epstein’s trafficked girls.

“According to victims, these documents in your possession, detail at least 20 men, including [Jes] Staley, CEO Barclays Bank, who Jeffrey Epstein trafficked victims to,” Massie said. “That list includes 19 over individuals, one Hollywood producer worth a few hundred million dollars. One very prominent banker, one high profile government official, one high profile former politician, one owner of a car company in Italy, one rock star, one magician, at least six billionaires including a billionaire from Canada. We know these people exist in the FBI files.”

K$H had nothing to add.

Also over at the House, former Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, the Miami federal prosecutor who ignominiously signed off on the cushy Florida Epstein plea deal, claimed to a closed-door Oversight Committee hearing that je ne regrette pas any of it.

Perhaps he will someday revise that sentiment. It’s clear that Trump’s Manhattan running buddy and fellow “modelizer” was empowered to globalize his sick business after the Acosta slap on the wrist.

Here at the Freakshow, we’ve found a cache of previously unreported global Epstein travel records, with a curious pattern: In the years 2010 to 2014, right after his laughably brief jail stint, Epstein was jetting back and forth to Istanbul, then back to the US, frequently stopping at his tropical hideaway, which he’d made his official residence. Records from Customs and Border Protection show Epstein flying his private jet into and out of Istanbul 64 times during that four-year period, often landing at St. Thomas only to turn around and make another round trip to Istanbul the very next day.

The source for all this is in CBP records here.

Weirdly, these documents are in the public domain only because of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Epstein’s own lawyer in July 2013, after Epstein had already been making regular trips in and out of Istanbul for two years. Was Jeff checking his tracks? (Epstein lawyer Darren Indyke has not replied to email or phone messages about this FOIA. If he does, we will update.)

More often than not, the records indicate female passengers were also on these flights. But their names are redacted. So many questions. Why Istanbul? Why always the private jet to Istanbul, when he flew commercial to Paris and London? Had the supply of underprivileged American girls run dry or had soliciting them gotten too risky after the plea deal?

Regrets-free Alex Acosta, in concert with Epstein’s A-Team of the best American defense lawyers money could buy, released Epstein into the wild in 2009. Instead of facing potential decades in prison, he spent 13 months of his 19-month sentence in the private wing of a Palm Beach jail, and was allowed to go home to his “office” by day. Once freed, he went on to fraternize with some of the most powerful men on the planet (we will have more on his relations with Vladimir Putin and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the next installment of The Trump-Epstein Files). And he would globalize his business, using multiple Russian banks to process payments related to sex trafficking.

The Trump-Epstein story isn’t going anywhere – as much as the administration would like to divert our attention with authoritarian threats to dissenters. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), has attached a request for thousands of Epstein-related documents at the Treasury to the National Defense Authorization bill, which Congress rarely if ever fails to pass. (More on this in a riveting new report by my COURIER colleague Camaron Stevenson.)

In a recent statement about these records, Wyden stated: “Treasury’s Epstein file details 4,725 wire transfers… adding up to nearly $1.1 billion flowing in and out of just ONE of Mr. Epstein’s bank accounts. If you ask me, that is more than 4,000 potential lines of investigation right there. Hundreds of millions more flowed through other accounts – that is even a lot more to investigate.”

Epstein’s private jet jaunts into and out of Istanbul coincide with a period when Turkey – Türkiye as it’s now more commonly spelled – and Istanbul specifically, was becoming a key transit point for trafficking in and out of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

According to a State Department report published by the UNHCR in 2014:

Turkey is a source, destination, and transit country for women, men, and children subjected to sex trafficking and forced labor. Trafficking victims identified in Turkey are from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bulgaria, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, Syria, and Morocco… Foreign victims are offered cleaning and childcare jobs in Turkey and, upon arrival, traffickers confiscate their passports and force them into prostitution in hotels, discos, and homes. Turkish women are subjected to sex trafficking within the country and in Western Europe, including Germany and Belgium. Traffickers increasingly use psychological coercion, threats, and debt bondage to compel victims into sex trafficking… Displaced Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi nationals are increasingly vulnerable to trafficking in Turkey.

The dry language of that report just hints at a chain of pain and trauma, of course. Stateless people on the run, looking for a better life, tricked and trafficked, without passports or guides to lead them out of hell, and running into rich, sly predator Jeff. Their names will likely never be known to us. One hopes that someday their collective memory haunts Epstein’s surviving pals, including Trump, and all of the posthumous enablers working so hard to make everyone forget.

“A lot of the women and girls he targeted came from Russia, Belarus, Turkey and Turkmenistan,” Wyden stated. “You shudder to think about the kinds of people who must have been involved in trafficking these women and girls out of those countries and into Epstein’s web of abuse.”

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freak Show.

The Big Chill: How Trump's Censorship Crusade Dishonors Charlie Kirk

The Big Chill: How Trump's Censorship Crusade Dishonors Charlie Kirk

I disagreed with most of what the martyred rightwing thought-warrior said. But it would have been far better to have him alive today to argue with. In his famous tract arguing against censorship, the English poet John Milton laid down the foundation of our concept of freedom of speech. Milton’s argument was that Truth and Falsehood should “grapple” in the public square, because in the end, “who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

The tract was called Areopagitica, a reference to Areopagus, the hill in Athens named after Ares, the god of war. It was published in 1644, at a time of great political upheaval and violence (the British had just beheaded their king and religious conflict had been increasing across Europe since the invention of the printing press).

Milton wrote it in response to Parliament passing a law requiring a pre-publication license on pamphlets. Almost four centuries on, the nation founded on the principles he set forth is confronting a similar challenge.

The last time I paid attention to Charlie Kirk before he died was when he came on my Twitter feed opening a chat room called “Should Taylor Swift Submit?” Kirk was one of the right wing bros obsessed with TayTay (I wrote about that here) and this was how he marked the occasion of her engagement to Travis Kelce.

I tuned in for a minute, as he was exclaiming that he didn’t want a wife who told him where to invest his money. What a strange obsession, I thought again. And flagged it for examination in a future Freakshow. Alas, that won’t be written.

Kirk was a polemicist and an effective one. He said outrageous and deeply offensive things. Black women “do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously.” He praised the idea of public executions and called for the death penalty for Joe Biden.

To add pious odiousness to insult, he did all that while praising Jesus, of course.

Kirk’s accused assassin was raised to be a sharpshooter by his own gun-loving conservative family. If he was influenced to murder by the left, as the Trump administration wants us to believe, he is an outlier among our nation’s heavily armed cohort. But yesterday, the Vice President sat in Charlie Kirk’s podcasting chair and laid out the Trump administration's plan to use Kirk’s death to criminalize dissent.

Political animal Vance cannot hope to don Charlie’s mantle. He’s wobbly on the issues and will never possess the mesmeric reality star wizardry that the president has over the masses. But the MAGA movement needs a younger unifier if and when King Don steps off the mortal coil, and Vance is first in line.

From the White House, Vance announced that the government will use the Kirk assassination as a tool to go after NGOs and left leaning groups. It’s not yet clear which ones, but presumably they mean to reclassify many of MAGA’s political foes, pesky civil liberties organizations and independent or corporate journalists as hate speakers. Meanwhile, Trump – as ever utterly transparent about his true aims – announced he is suing the New York Times and four reporters for $15 billion supposedly for endorsing Harris “on the front cover” of the paper.

More likely – based on the timing – he’s upset that the Times team is not taking eyes off the shameless self dealing and personal enrichment he is overseeing from inside the White House.

Two things are going to break MAGA, two things that therefore must be shut down, speech-wise. One is Epstein – as Michael Wolff put it in his latest Instagram mini-lecture, Trump cannot get away from Epstein because “Epstein” is “everything we don’t know about Donald Trump.”

The second thing that must be silenced is Gaza, which the UN has finally officially recognized as genocide. Two years of increasingly shocking restrictions on Gaza speech here and abroad are the kernel out of which the current clampdown grows. Yet even Charlie Kirk, a staunch Israel supporter who spent most of his time around college kids, could not have missed what an issue this is for youth on both sides of the political divide.

It is probably too late to do this, but let’s envision where this crackdown on speech and thought is headed. What is an America where dissent is criminal, where every person must first test a thought or an idea against how the religious right or the regime might respond?

We already live in an America where it’s legal to spread lies about public health and vaccines, where American history is being erased by executive order at the Smithsonian and the National Park Service, and where Bari Weiss is about to be empowered by one of the biggest media concerns in the world to tell us to love Israel unconditionally.

As if that wasn’t enough, now those who disagree must be criminalized.

I will always remember something about the inauguration of Trump 2017. There wasn’t much of a crowd (nowhere near the wall of humanity at Obama’s 2009 inauguration). All along Pennsylvania Avenue, peaceful protesters were penned off behind riot guards. These groups provided spots of color and even gaiety, with clever signs and songs. Shuffling between them on the sidewalk were the free people, visitors from states that had supported Trump, wondering what they were supposed to be doing.

Four years later almost to the day, January 6, 2021, the world witnessed a very different kind of scene in Washington, with no singing and no peace. The effects of the right’s online radicalization pipeline are well-known, including mass murders of innocent Americans from Santa Barbara to Pittsburgh to El Paso to Minneapolis.

Areopagitica is considered one of the foundational arguments against censorship and for freedom of thought in modern western history. Thomas Jefferson paraphrased some of it in his inaugural address: "Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

The key word is tolerated. We might not all like each other in this great American experiment of blended peoples and ideas, but to survive as a democracy we agree to tolerate one another.

The pen, it is said, is mightier than the sword. We scribes and polemicists and provocateurs – maybe even Kirk too – like to think that’s true. In some sense, it is. Words inspire and create movements and disagreement, force people to think, and promote a vitality that is the very best of America.

As Milton wrote: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

Words are powerful. But as we see in the tens of thousands of gun killings across our nation, now including Kirk’s murder, words and weapons are not equal. Not at all. And we are about to restrict the less lethal of the two.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.

Hair Plugs And Diet Pills: Trump's Personal Decay Is Nation's Avatar

Hair Plugs And Diet Pills: Trump's Personal Decay Is Nation's Avatar

In one of his earliest insane acts in public office, two weeks after his first inauguration, President Trump dispatched his former NYPD bodyguard to “raid” the office of his Upper East Side doctor and seize his medical records. The doctor had made the fatal mistake of revealing he’d prescribed hair growth drugs to the newly installed Leader of the Free World. Poor Dr. Harold Bornstein told reporters he felt "raped, frightened and sad" when Trump goon Keith Schiller and another "large man" came to his office to rifle the files and collect the records.

Despite that mobsterish incident, much reliable public reporting exists that Trump has resorted to hair plugs, baldness surgery and diet pills over the years to maintain his signature look. One former producer on The Apprentice, Noel Casler, has even insisted that Trump regularly snorted Adderall to stay focused.

But the rest of his self-care regimen is more murky. Did a doctor ever step forward to explain what really happened to his earlobe after the shooting in Butler? Did the public even see those medical records? Why, no!

After weeks of speculation about the Presidential cankles, the White House announced that he had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a fairly common condition that can also lead to amputation and death.

All we know for sure is that a steady diet of red meat and a little golf have apparently been sufficient to fuel production of the liters of bile required for hourly acts of vengeance.

For the last three days, social media was a-sizzle with macabre speculation about President Trump’s death. Granted it was a slow end-of-summer news weekend and people had a lot of time for wistful musing. He hadn’t looked well recently, his signature word salad was getting way more pronounced and there’s that weird bruise on his paw. Plus, the last Cabinet meeting played out like a creepy living eulogy session. Then he disappeared, without a word of explanation or reassurance in mainstream media.

The information vacuum became a vortex of speculation. Melania was (unreliably, but who knows) reported to have shown up unannounced in the maternity ward at Walter Reed. An unverifiable video went viral of a shadowy figure flinging something brown (a diaper? a McDonald’s bag?) out a third floor window of the White House. A Democrat I know in Washington spent the weekend querying ChatGPT about the prospects for an obese 79 year old with increasingly paraphasic, disorganized speech and with a noticeable weaving gait. Chat kept coming up with the same diagnosis: Transient ischemic attacks (little strokes).

Trump might be doing just fine. But like Biden, he is obviously experiencing some form of decline and his people are scurrying to cover it up. The ridiculous proof of life emissions the White House released over the weekend – old golf pictures and extended maniacal Truth Social rants – did little to reassure.

The old golf pictures presented as new were actually the most alarming sign that something was amiss. The Truth Social rants, not so much. (Clearly, he doesn’t write his own social media pronouncements – in my opinion, an official Trump rant channeler has been at work since covfefe. The tell is consistently correct spelling and perfect grammar, including semicolons and commas. We eagerly await that person’s unmasking.)

Whatever is going on with his health, we might not know about it for a generation or ever. Trump has overturned decades of tradition around transparency when it comes to Presidential health. But given that we are living at a time when the right’s brain trust openly advocates for a return to dictatorship or monarchy, it is worthwhile to remember how the medieval Europeans viewed the king’s body. Essentially it was doubled. The King was his physical body and the body politic. The physical body would decline and die, but the body politic was the eternal part of the man, hence “The King is Dead; Long Live the King.”

Trump can’t live forever. But his physical decline tracks with America’s.

The profound unhealthiness of the Trump moment is all around us: the MAGA social media grifters making bank on quack supplements; its women injected with plastic and hobbled in stilettos like footbound Chinese aristocrats, the reverence for pollution and worship of fossil fuel extraction, for "beautiful coal,” and more cracker plants to produce more tons of nurdles just as the rest of the nations on earth are trying to reduce plastic.

And most unforgivable – the deliberate destruction of our national medical research and public health systems to own the libs, save a few tax dollars for billionaires, and commence the great eugenics project openly cherished by the right wing fringe.

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 fear body horror evokes is rooted in violations of bodily integrity and the loss of control over one's own physical form, due to mutations, parasitism, infections, and augmentations or modifications. Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg is considered a principal originator of body horror films like Shivers and Rabid, his remake of The Fly. Think also of extremely unwanted pregnancies involving alien or Satanic gestations such as in Rosemary’s Baby or Alien.

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.

How much longer can the health of the body politic withstand the weaving fat man at the podium, the most divisive leader in modern American history, crooning about internal enemies over and over in that saccharine hiss so mesmerizing to so many: “They hate our country. They hate our country. They hate our country”?

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Ghislaine Blames Victim (And More From Her Pardon-Pushing Prison Script)

Ghislaine Blames Victim (And More From Her Pardon-Pushing Prison Script)

When I was helping produce a three part series about Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021, our team put in many hours discussing how and why she became the woman dozens of witnesses accused of heinous acts including underage solicitation, grooming, and trafficking. What kind of woman would serve up teen “nubiles” to a man who supposedly needed new girls on the daily? Why would she participate in an industrial scale sex trafficking operation? Was she pathologically inclined to assault? Was she groomed herself from childhood into the perfect tool for powerful men?

We hunted down and pored over clues to her psyche. We spoke with dozens of people who knew her in New York and in the U.K. where she grew up the tenth child in a wealthy family. We studied her father, media baron Robert Maxwell, a cruel, damaged oaf and one of the most mysterious figures in Cold War intrigue, associated with Israeli, and probably American, and maybe even Russian intelligence. What we didn’t do – what no one then could do - was hear from the woman herself.

Now she has spoken. In the released transcripts and audio from two days in a closed room with a Trump lawyer at a Tallahassee courthouse, she participated in a brazen feint at “transparency” for the Epstein conspiracy diehards threatening the MAGA coalition. It’s a fascinating charade and some enterprising theater director could turn the transcript verbatim into an excellent off-Broadway play.

Todd Blanche (one of the Epsteingate plumbers we covered here) threw softballs, and often answered Maxwell’s questions for her, while she suffered memory lapses, trashed victims, and demonstrably lied about her role and relationship with Epstein. (To be fair, Blanche did seem a little shocked that she couldn’t remember the reason for an $18 million payment from the sex trafficker.)

Blanche arranged the meeting after the Wall Street Journal published Trump’s “shared secrets” birthday note. That item is one of many artifacts – mostly photographic – confirming that the two men were close friends for years. The White House reportedly believed the item came from Maxwell’s side.

What else might be stashed in Pandora’s box?

While working on the documentary, we thought Maxwell would eventually trade evidence against untold numbers of powerful men ensnared in Epstein’s surveilled pleasure palace. Alan Dershowitz calls her “the key” to the case.

Anyone who reads the transcript and is familiar with the Maxwell story knows that there are many questions Blanche didn’t ask. But the transcript is filled with Easter eggs nonetheless.

Maxwell said a friend introduced her to Epstein as a potential husband in April 1991. If that’s true, is it just coincidence that it’s the same month Les Wexner mysteriously gave Epstein power of attorney over his entire fortune – a sum that enabled Epstein to catapult into the realm of blackmailable influential rich men. That same month, Epstein got his first private jet. According to flight logs, Maxwell would make 50 flights during the first year he owned it, often to Columbus, Ohio, where Wexner lived.

When Blanche asked her whether she had ever had any contact with an individual from Mossad, Maxwell replied: “Well not deliberately.”

“Pardon me?” Blanche replied, then moved on.

He was similarly blasé when she said Epstein hosted Ehud Barak, the former prime minister and head of military intelligence. Blanche breezed on to a question about Epstein’s use of testosterone instead.

Blanche worked to deliver backup for the MAGA obsession du jour, baiting his hook with the names of various Democrats – Andrew and Chris Cuomo, Bill Gates, Bobby Kennedy – trawling for evidence to build the elusive “client list” of progressive libertines. But Maxwell stood firm. “I never, ever saw any man doing something inappropriate with a woman of any age. I never saw inappropriate habits.”

Kind of depends on your definition of “inappropriate” of course: in court testimony, numerous women described Maxwell participating in the “massages” – stripping, pulling out sex toys, etc. To Blanche, she added a caveat: “Now, somebody's inappropriate and mine may be different.”

Inquiring minds might ask a follow-up to that. Blanche replied only: “Yep.”

In Maxwell’s memory, the bathrobe is the great leitmotif. “I don’t believe I ever saw him in a bathrobe,” Maxwell replied to a question about whether Dershowitz ever received a massage.

Maxwell used the exposure to settle scores and portray herself as a victim, a rebrand that, if successful, should win a Clio. She blamed her first public accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, 16 when she was recruited to service Epstein, for turning Jeff from a regular guy who just liked a daily massage or two, into an insatiable sex monster who always “wanted new,” causing Maxwell to trawl the spas of Palm Beach or the Caribbean for “masseuses” (she never called the victims women or girls). Roberts, Maxwell said, was trained “to be what every man wants in all its manners, fellatio and everything else.”

The transcript ends exactly where it likely began as the stunt was conceived in Washington – the birthday book. Blanche’s final question is the one eating his boss alive: “Do you know -- do you remember being told or knowing where the book is now?” Maxwell said she assumed the Southern District of New York feds had leaked it.

Maxwell knew exactly why she was there: She produced the money quote for Trump right away: “In the time that I was with him he was a gentleman in all respects.” The line made Fox News headlines and allowed MAGA propagandists to crow that Trump was ever honorable.

A week later Ghislaine was moved to finer prison digs, a way station perhaps to a pardon. And so the myth of the orange archangel sent from above to rescue children from pedophile elites lives another day.

AUTHOR NOTE: Readers interested in more about Ghislaine Maxwell, watch my recent Substack Live Sex Lies and Money with director Barbara Shearer and a long talk with Sidney Blumenthal at his Court of History podcast.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow

Pete Hegseth

Gender Regression: Trump Weenies And Their Woman-Hating Women

Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared a CNN clip in which a pastor from his nominally Christian sect said that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, the 19th Amendment should be “repealed,” and women should “submit” to their husbands. Hegseth’s getting better at cosplaying a powerful man. The flopsweat of Pete’s early days – wandering with lawyers and aides through Senate offices spluttering away the roofie rape charges – is mostly gone. But his eyes are ever aglow with the terror of his imposter syndrome. In his profound insecurity and his utterly unearned global power, Hegseth is a mascot for all Trumpy and MAGA men.

With Hegseth to his right and Attorney General Pam Bondi to his left, Trump announced that National Guard troops are taking charge of “crime prevention” in the nation’s capital. This was an obvious attempt at distracting from the President’s weaponization of the U.S. government for an Epstein cover-up. And that case, as we all know, is about the status of American women.

The elections in 2016 and 2024 signaled the end of a period when women could assume that we were living in an era of steady progress welcomed by many –but not all –Americans. The Dobbs decision set women back medically, but we overlook the knock-on effects politically and culturally. Since Trump’s first election, surveys have found that decreasing numbers of teen boys believe that women and girls deserve equal pay.

On Election Night last year, Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi who had dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, tweeted: “Your Body My Choice. Forever.” To slam home the point, the administration arranged for the accused sex trafficker, rapist, “manosphere influencer” brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate to be flown out of Romania, where they were awaiting criminal charges, and into Florida on a private jet.

The achievements of Second Wave feminism, a movement that profoundly challenged eons of patriarchy with the help of the birth control pill, seem to have culminated in the empowerment of a claque of extreme right-wing women serving arguably the rapiest White House in modern history.

These often blonde, conspicuous cross-wearing women – Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, political strategist Susie Wiles, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Agriculture Secretary and longtime hard-right conservative think tank figure Brooke Rollins, lawyer and media star Jeanine Pirro, profane right wing influencer Laura Loomer, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, media personality and lawyer Megyn Kelly and of course, mendacity phenom Karoline Leavitt, who stands steely-eyed before the entire world lying to vastly more experienced men and women – are the current de facto standard bearers for empowered American women.

Trump’s appointed eight women to his cabinet -- not a record but significant compared to the two in his first term. All are adept at the psychological and political jiu jitsu of serving a regime led by a convicted sex abuser, with a vice president who has seriously suggested that maybe single women shouldn’t vote. The disenfranchisement of women is just the beginning. Men’s rights cultists, religious leaders, and pandering legislatures fantasize about putting the “lock” back in wedlock, ending no fault divorce.

“Pastor” Doug Wilson is only one of the crackpot Men of God affiliated with Vance and Hegseth who openly proclaim that marital rape is impossible. (The “I do” in the vows constituted full and eternal consent, ladies. “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party,” Wilson has written in one of his books. “ A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts…True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity.”)

The foundational premise of this regressive worldview is that men, not women, are capable of living lives of adventure, mission, and public purpose. It’s an archaic notion originating from the movement’s murkiest id of a brain trust including, on the secular side, the odious Bronze Age Pervert, on the supposedly Christian side, Wilson and his ilk. These men share the view that women’s “natural” qualities design them for domestic, indoor, mothering forms of labor, and are innately incapable of seeking worldly challenge, living with purpose, or practicing self-reliance.

Supporting this creed, the working women of Trumpworld must be simultaneously empowered and hobbled. They would have you believe that although they have babysitters and cooks, and leave the kids with their husbands while they work long hours and rack up frequent flier miles, they are in full agreement with the notion that mothering, bread baking, and serving male carnal needs constitute all of a woman’s primary purpose in life. (In a recent Wall Street Journal article about these women, some claim that “faith” distinguishes them from career women of the left, who they believe “are unhappy.”)

These women and their regime are quantifiably setting women back on too many fronts to list here, and the cognitive dissonance between their real lives and the ideology they serve is mind-boggling. One need only look at before and after photos of every woman over the age of 40 in Trump’s orbit to know that they remake themselves physically to conform to his “smaller bikinis, higher heels” archaic caricature of femininity. Like the nativists descended from immigrants (Stephen Miller, et al) who yank up the ladder behind them, the rock-ribbed ladies of Trumpworld rode feminism to the top of the power structure, only to latch themselves to a project to revert those gains.

The bargain these women make with the sexual assaulter in chief is this: pretend that he and his men are actually protectors of women in exchange for personal gain and access to power. During the last weeks of his 2024 campaign, Trump was explicit on this, in a menacing way. He declared he would be a protector of women “whether the women like it or not.” Of course, the real protection that Americans need is protection against the misogynist MAGAs and the manosphere influencers and loony church men like Pastors Doug Wilson and Joel Webber.

The sole upside of the current assault on our rights is that it must energize a new generation of young women whose upbringing and expectations are profoundly at odds with the regressive aims of this minority. Anyone born after 1970 was raised in a world molded by grandmothers who made epochal change. The societal reset that clicked in half a century ago cannot be so easily erased. In the months and (hopefully not too many) years to come, they will re-learn an old lesson: In the oldest conflict in human history—the war between the sexes—women can never leave the front lines unattended.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.