The meat that those two resume entries sandwich: Marvin Mutch got a documentary, a speaking tour, and a 2024 award from the same network that has been working to spring Anand Jon Alexander.

The word the network keeps using for Mutch is “exonerated.”

He was never exonerated; the government just proved it for us.

The tell

Mutch pleaded guilty in March 2026 to two federal counts. One was possession of child sexual abuse material. The other was being a felon in possession of ammunition.

You cannot be a felon in possession of anything if you are not a felon.

That charge only exists because the murder conviction still stands. If his conviction had been vacated, as Davis Vanguard’s own awards page claims, the feds could not have charged him as a felon, and he could not have pleaded guilty to it.

He did plead guilty to it.

The plea is the proof. The murder conviction was never overturned. He was paroled. Those are not the same thing, and the entire “wrongfully convicted” brand was built on pretending they are.

The 1974 murder

The victim was Cassie Riley, 13 years old. She was beaten and drowned in a creek bed near her home in September 1974. Mutch was 18.

At the time he killed her, according to reporting on the case, Mutch was already out on bail awaiting trial for allegedly kidnapping a different 13-year-old girl.

A jury took five days to convict him of Riley’s murder. He drew a sentence of seven years to life and went to San Quentin, where he stayed for around 40 years.

He was paroled in 2016, after being turned down repeatedly. He has always claimed he was innocent. Claiming it and proving it are different jobs, and he never did the second one.

During one parole hearing, he made up a wild story involving a group of 20 men, explaining when confronted about the lie that they wouldn’t grant him parole if he did not show remorse and admit guilt.

The rebrand

Out of prison, Mutch became Director of Advocacy for the Prisoner Reentry Network in California and went on the circuit as a wrongful-conviction story.

KQED built a whole documentary and podcast series around him, “The Trials of Marvin Mutch.” I watched the documentary; it was nothing worth recommending to friends in the next “what podcast should I listen to?” convo.

The network that adopted him

International Justice Alliance. On May 21, 2022, IJA co-hosted the “Justice ForOM Summit Series and Ecovvear Fashion Show” in Malibu. A justice summit bolted to a fashion show.

Mutch was a listed speaker, billed as “Director of Advocacy at the Prison Reentry Network, who was wrongfully convicted and released after 41 years in prison.” Same nonprofit that keeps surfacing around Anand Jon. Same fusion of red-carpet fashion and innocence marketing.

Davis Vanguard. Mutch was an honoree at the 2024 Vanguard Justice Awards. The listing on Davis Vanguard’s own page describes him as “42 years inside, conviction vacated.” That is false on its face, and the felon-in-possession plea two years later is the receipt. Davis Vanguard also ran multiple 2019 “Court Watch” podcast episodes on him. Its founder, David Greenwald, appears on the same 2022 Malibu program.

Restorative Justice International. Ran a Mutch podcast dated January 22, 2020.

The exact same organizations surrounding Anand Jon: International Justice Alliance, Davis Vanguard, and the restorative-justice nonprofits, were handing a microphone and an award to a man who drowned a child and who was actively building his library of CSAM and a ghost gun when he went home.

You can’t unleash GATE kids into the wild and not expect us to notice these patterns. Not one bad actor; a booking pipeline that surrounds itself with child predators and calls them sheep.

The 2025 arrest

May 23, 2025. The Solano County Sheriff’s Office served a search warrant at Mutch’s home in Vallejo. What they found turns my stomach every time I read it.

Tens of thousands of depictions of child sexual abuse, according to the DOJ, including images of children as young as three or four.

A privately manufactured “ghost gun,” loaded with eight rounds, in the center console of a vehicle in his garage.

Narcotics.

He was booked into Solano County Jail on $300,000 bail. California Highway Patrol’s Computer Crimes unit and the Sacramento Valley Internet Crimes Against Children task force worked the digital forensics.

The federal case

The case went federal, to the Eastern District of California. On March 27, 2026, Mutch pleaded guilty to one count of possession of child sexual abuse material and one count of felon in possession of ammunition.

Sentencing is set for August 28, 2026, before U.S. District Judge Dena Coggins in Sacramento. He faces up to 20 years on the CSAM count and up to 15 on the ammunition count.

One thing I’m still trying to wrap my head around: the nonprofit whose forensic technology helped flag the images, Child Rescue Coalition, put out a piece still referring to him an “exonerated murder convict.” The tech that caught him and the press release describing him seem to be working off two different sets of facts.

Bye, Felicia

We are planning a protest outside Mutch’s courtroom on August 28, 2026. We want our voices and his crimes heard.

UPDATE 8/4/26 9:00pm: Upon looking at the docket for the Eastern District of California for August 28, I discovered that Marvin Mutch’s hearing has been moved to October 9, 2026 at 9:30am. The protest will begin at 8:30am. More details soon.

This man is a predator, through and through, the second we’ve uncovered in the International Justice Alliance / Davis Vanguard network. I’m confident it won’t be the last.

Sources

• Paroled Murderer Pleads Guilty (DOJ, Eastern District of California)

• Paroled California convicted killer pleads guilty (CBS San Francisco)

• Murderer who spent 4 decades in prison for drowning girl, 13, arrested (AOL)

• Vallejo man convicted in decades-old teen murder found with child porn (KRON4)

• California Prisoner Rights Activist Pleads Guilty (American Greatness)

• Ex-Con Marvin Mutch Busted for Child Porn and Guns (Hoodline, May 2025)

• The Trials of Marvin Mutch (KQED)

• 2024 Vanguard Justice Awards (Davis Vanguard)

• Marvin Mutch Archives (Davis Vanguard)

• Marvin Mutch podcast (Restorative Justice International)

• Justice ForOM Summit Series and Ecovvear Fashion Show, May 21, 2022 (Coast to Coast Newspaper)

• CRC Technology Aids in Identifying Marvin Lee Mutch (Child Rescue Coalition)

As part of my investigation, I check FARA.gov regularly for any new registered agents of Israel. In June, Sniper Advertising Services popped up, not through an intermediary like Havas Media… the name on the filing: Gideon Sa'ar, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.

A new arm to the beast

In June 2026, a company called Sniper Advertising Services registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent of two Israeli ministries, Tourism and Foreign Affairs. According to the filing, Sniper has an oral agreement with the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs for volume-based digital advertising, including “curating audiences” and “cohort deployments.”

So who exactly is Sniper Advertising Services? It’s not as easy of a question to answer as you may think. It took some digging to find anything of substance, and what I found is that Sniper is essentially two men and a great deal of mail forwarding.

A Wyoming corporation whose registered agent chain stacked like Russian nesting dolls into Wyoming Corporate Services, who NPR once described as 2,000 companies living in one small house.

A business address that is a numbered suite in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Owners: Frederick T. Hickerson III of Key Largo, and Larry Kerschenbaum, a dual US-Israeli citizen living in Israel. The only public record naming them is the FARA filing itself.

But Sniper’s website kept gesturing at something bigger: a location-data platform, an opt-out email at a domain called refinition.com, and audience-methodology language that read like it came from somewhere else.

It did… until I reached out.

This blank landing page is all you’ll find if you go looking today. Perhaps they are busy writing their own privacy policy and finding new case studies to poach.

The search that found nothing

Refinition is an actual, reputable marketing company: hundreds of millions of mobile devices, most of the US adult population, years of location history. A company like that has paperwork somewhere.

So I looked. Texas seemed right; the trail pointed to Austin. I searched the Texas Secretary of State’s records for Refinition.

Nothing.

I searched the Texas Comptroller’s taxable entity database, which catches even dead companies.

Nothing.

An Austin company with no Texas footprint under its own name is not a dead end. It is a company wearing a name that is not its legal one, and there is a federal agency where brands cannot stay anonymous: the trademark office. A trademark application must name its owner.

Serial number 97442243, filed 2022, mark: REFINITION. And behind it, a Texas assumed name certificate, filing number 804083318, dated June 4, 2021, which reads like the answer key to the whole puzzle. The assumed name Refinition belongs to GeoDataScience Inc., a Delaware corporation, principal office at a virtual suite in Austin’s Littlefield Building. Signed by Roger Heaston.

The company potentially behind the geofencing platform behind Israel’s newest foreign agent is literally named Geo Data Science. Sometimes the universe hands you one for free.

One more document brought everything together. Sniper’s privacy policy, on their own website, was Refinition’s privacy policy, word for word, still identifying “Refinition (’we’ or ‘us’)” as the responsible party and still defining “this Website” as refinition.com.

Israel’s new agent is a company with a stolen privacy policy, potentially fabricated case studies, who farms out work from a company that has no idea that Sniper was a registered foreign agent, nor that they had stolen almost all the language for their website from said reseller.

The people, and what I did not find

Heaston’s resume is aggressively normal: NetSuite, a retail-media CTO job, a founder-mentor gig. His chief strategy officer spent two decades on the ad side of Conde Nast magazines. The likely investor behind the ventures is a Santa Fe money manager with a Goldman Sachs past. A ten person Austin boutique built to help retailers chase shoppers between stores.

And here is what I did not find, stated with the same weight as everything I did: no Israel-adjacent work, no political clients, no government contracts, no visible overlap of any kind between these people and Sniper’s two owners. Trust me, I looked.

So I wrote to Roger Heaston, laid out every documented fact above, and told him my working assumption straight up: nothing suggested his company sought or knew about any of this, a reseller relationship running below his radar seemed most plausible to me, and if that was accurate I would print it plainly.

The answer

Three days later, the first on-the-record company response of this entire investigation landed in my inbox. My stomach lurched.

After months of fruitlessly chasing responses regarding doubled ledgers, a $31.5 million contract to Trump’s former campaign manager, and a missing $700,000 that was likely paid to influencers but never documented, this small company answered in seventy-two hours.

Heaston confirmed the relationship: Sniper is a Refinition reseller.

On the website: his team checked, found Sniper had “copy/pasted much of the content of our website of a few years ago,” privacy policy included, and has asked Sniper to take corrective action.

On regulation: he says the company confirms compliance regularly with outside counsel, and that its current operations do not require data broker registration.

These are his statements, reported as his account. I have found nothing that contradicts them, and his responsiveness, against the silence of every other company in this story, is noted to his credit.

When Sniper’s site changes again in the coming days, and it has already started, you are reading the explanation in advance, and the before-and-after lives in my archives.

His answer also quietly corroborated something else.

Sniper’s fees are contingent on campaigns the ministries choose to run. Show Faith by Works’ sworn ledger showed zero advertising purchases. And now the platform’s own CEO says no campaigns are running.

Three independent sources, one picture: as of today, in this corner of the pipeline, there is still no documented American ad delivery. Money has moved and paper has moved. The geofence, so far as the record shows, has not fired.

The sentence that stays with me

One line in Roger’s email stood out to me as extremely hopeful, whether he intended it that way or not:

He offered it as reassurance, and as reassurance it is genuinely good: a checkpoint exists, and a company that checks.

If the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ever orders campaigns through its registered agent Sniper, the entity that would actually execute the ads, by the platform’s own description of how reselling works, is GeoDataScience of Austin, Texas. Not the mailbox in Wyoming. Not the suite in Deerfield Beach. The boutique with the Conde Nast alum and the NetSuite resume.

Which leaves one question standing at the center of all this, and as of today it is an open one: now that the company knows what its reseller registered to do, would it execute those campaigns if they come?

I have not asked it yet. I wanted to share the answers I’ve found before I go searching for more.

Where things stand

Detailed questions went to Sniper Advertising Services on July 30, to the addresses in its own federal filings, with a response deadline of August 4. I’m not holding my breath, but the fact that their website changed on August 3, the day before their response deadline gives me a little hope.

I’m not saying they were, but if Israel was planning on sneaking some advertising or geotargeting in through the back door, I have notified the bouncer.

Sniper registered promptly and compliantly, and no wrongdoing by Sniper, Refinition, GeoDataScience, or anyone named here is asserted, apart from some copyright issues on Sniper’s former website (I archived it just in case this happened).

It’s pretty amazing what one person can do just by looking into some FARA filings and connecting the dots.

It is a public database. Go read it.

And stay feral, America.

Receipts

1. Sniper Advertising Services, FARA Registration #7745, Registration Statement (owners, addresses, structure): https://efile.fara.gov/docs/7745-Registration-Statement-20260624-1.pdf

2. Sniper Advertising Services, Exhibit A/B (the oral agreement with the Ministries of Tourism and Foreign Affairs; volume-contingent fees; audience curation): https://efile.fara.gov/docs/7745-Exhibit-AB-20260624-1.pdf

3. NPR, “Shell Game: 2,000 Firms Based in One Simple House” (2011), on Wyoming Corporate Services, the family at the end of Sniper’s registered agent chain: https://www.npr.org/2011/07/02/137573513/shell-game-2-000-firms-based-in-one-simple-house

4. Texas Secretary of State, Assumed Name Certificate, filing #804083318 (June 4, 2021): assumed name Refinition; entity GeoDataScience Inc., a Delaware corporation; signed Roger Heaston. Retrievable via SOSDirect.

5. USPTO trademark serial 97442243, REFINITION (owner records via TSDR): https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/97442243

6. California Attorney General data broker registry, Refinition, registration #552962 (2022; contact and Austin address): https://oag.ca.gov/data-broker/registration/552962

7. Statement of Roger Heaston, President and CEO, GeoDataScience Inc. d/b/a Refinition, received by email August 1, 2026, quoted above; on file in full.

8. The Project 545 Tracker (all eight legs, documents, timeline, money): https://project545.org

Regular readers know I have spent the last month inside the Foreign Agents Registration Act (“FARA”) database, mapping Project 545, Israel’s roughly $145 million campaign to shape American opinion, eight registered companies deep, summarized at project545.org.

Turns out the database answers that one too. It answers everything, if you sift through it long enough. Three findings from one evening of digging, and I want to be upfront before we start: most of what follows is legal, disclosed, and in a couple of cases genuinely, refreshingly transparent. Almost too transparent.

The arms maker buys a door

Israel Aerospace Industries is a weapons manufacturer owned by the State of Israel. Its own FARA paperwork says so in one clean sentence: its US subsidiary, Stark Aerospace of Columbus, Mississippi (Marvel may have an issue with that, just saying…), is described in the filing as a wholly owned subsidiary of IAI, “a state owned enterprise of the Government of Israel.”

In November 2025, Stark signed a contract with a Virginia firm called GlobalPoint International. The contract is attached to the filing, in full, and its first paragraph does not make you guess. GlobalPoint’s job is to build and strengthen IAI and Stark’s relationship, quote, “with the Trump-Vance Administration, Congress and across the US government.”

The scope of work reads like a map of official Washington. The White House and National Security Council. The Departments of Defense, State, Commerce, Treasury, and Justice. The Armed Services, Appropriations, Intelligence, and Foreign Affairs committees. The Missile Defense Agency, by name.

The price: $45,000 a month for six months, plus up to $100,000 in expenses.

And one line in the scope of work that keen eyes will recognize immediately: GlobalPoint will place op-eds authored by IAI executives and by “influential third-party voices.”

Borrowed mouths.

The same technique the Esther Project bought for influencers, here in a blazer, aimed at the defense press. Every one of those op-eds is supposed to be filed with the Justice Department and labeled, and I will be checking the bylines against the filings.

To be fair, foreign state-owned defense companies hiring Washington firms is one of the most routine transactions in that city. Airbus does it. Half the world’s arms industry does it. And this filing is a model citizen, the whole contract attached, the targets named, the fees visible.

The debt office builds a megaphone

Israel borrows a lot of money in American markets. The office that manages that borrowing is the Accountant General’s office inside the Ministry of Finance, working through the Israel Economic Mission on Second Avenue in New York.

Around New Year’s, that office went shopping.

On December 31, 2025, it signed Weber Shandwick, one of the largest PR firms on the planet, through its Interpublic parent entity. The sworn task: “institutional investor relations services related to the issuance of international debt offerings.”

Translation: managing how the people who buy Israel’s bonds feel about buying Israel’s bonds. The contract includes full paid-media machinery, an authorization-to-buy framework for purchasing advertising space, for a finance ministry.

Three weeks later, on January 20, 2026, the same office signed PLUS Communications, a major Arlington public affairs firm.

That task list: audience mapping, narrative and messaging strategy, crisis and issues communications planning, media relations, media train

ing.

Same ministry. Same New York address. And the same named official on both engagement lines: Gil Cohen, Senior Deputy Accountant General.

In one month, the office that sells Israel’s debt to Americans stood up a complete communications apparatus.

One firm for the investors. One firm for everybody else.

Crisis plans on one contract, ad-buying capability on the other.

Also noteworthy from Appendix I above: PLUS disclosed its rates at $830 an hour for senior staff, $550 mid, $300 junior. Weber’s rates were delivered “under separate cover” and made contractually confidential, so half of this apparatus has a public price tag and half does not.

PLUS checked yes on FARA’s political activities question. Weber checked no. The same ministry’s two agents, hired three weeks apart by the same man, answered the law’s central question in opposite directions.

And both contracts contain the same very 2026 clause: neither firm may feed the ministry’s information into any AI tool without written permission.

Israel’s sovereign credit ratings took downgrades during the war, and the state has continued borrowing heavily in US markets.

Sovereign governments hiring IR firms is routine; many do it. What the paper documents is the scale, the speed, the pairing, and the asymmetries. The rest is waiting on a comment request, which I sent out August 1; answers due August 7.

The watchtower that watches nothing

While digging, I noticed that the Justice Department’s legally required semiannual FARA reports to Congress are only posted through 2024. Looking for the missing ones, I found an FCC report instead: the Commission’s Sixteenth Semi-Annual Report to Congress on United States-Based Foreign Media Outlets, covering October 12, 2025 through April 11, 2026.

October 12, 2025 happens to be the exact day one of Project 545’s legs, Davis Media, registered under FARA. And the FCC report says no foreign media outlets filed during the period. For about an hour I thought I had something.

I did not.

I checked: that October 12 window is a fixed statutory cycle that has repeated every six months since Congress created this reporting regime in 2018. Pure calendar coincidence. And the regime could never have captured Davis Media anyway, for two independent reasons. First, the law only covers television-style programming carried by cable and satellite distributors. Second, it only covers outlets claiming FARA’s news-media exemption, and Davis Media registered under FARA instead of claiming any exemption.

So the suspicion died. What survived the check is better.

Congress built its foreign-media transparency watchtower in 2018, aimed at the RT America model: a foreign state channel likely on your cable lineup.

The FCC dutifully staffs that tower. It sent a reminder notice this March directing any covered outlets to report. And then it filed its sixteenth report, which says, in total, that nobody filed. Again.

Meanwhile, the actual foreign government media operation of this decade, the one documented across eight sworn registrations at project545.org, runs on branded websites, YouTube and Rumble channels, purchased influencers, and geofenced phone ads. Not one of those channels is visible to the statute. The watchtower faces an empty landscape. The campaign runs on the internet underneath it.

And the Justice Department’s own semiannual FARA reports? Still nothing posted past 2024 as of August 1, 2026.

The FCC report even contains a small confession of its own: its previous edition went to Congress late because of the government shutdown. The transparency system’s paperwork is behind on its paperwork. I wonder what the excuse will be this time.

Where the claims stand

I am not saying GlobalPoint, Stark, IAI, Weber Shandwick, or PLUS Communications broke any law; every filing described here appears prompt, written, and complete, and that assessment is stated in their favor on purpose.

I am not saying defense lobbying or sovereign investor relations are scandals; they are a typical Tuesday in Washington, for dozens of countries.

I am not connecting any of this to Project 545’s opinion campaign beyond the fact that the same state funds both; different ministries, different money, different purposes, and my Project 545 tracker deliberately does not count these.

Here is what I am saying: watch how the transparency changes with the audience.

When the Israeli state wants access to officials, the contract is written, filed, itemized, and named. When it wants the confidence of bond investors, the paperwork is prompt and professional, even if one rate card stays sealed.

However, when the target audience is you, the general American public, the paper turns to oral agreements, Frankfurt intermediaries, Wyoming mailboxes, and registrations later called errors.

The cleanliness of the disclosure tracks the power of the audience. Officials and investors get the courtesy of clean paper.

You get the faceless company buried under four shells.

Same government. Same database. The variable is who is being persuaded.

Questions with a stated deadline of August 7, 2026 went to GlobalPoint, PLUS Communications, and Weber Shandwick on August 1, and this piece will be updated with their responses or documented non-responses.

It is a public database. The filings are there to read.

If you don’t have the time to do that, at a minimum, share this article with someone who might. Share it with someone who wonders why the United States sends more money to Israel than any other country. Share it with someone who is concerned about foreign interference in the 2026 midterm elections. Call your representatives and demand they look into Project 545, they can start at Project545.org.

Stay feral, America.

Receipts

1. GlobalPoint International, Exhibit A/B and full contract for Stark Aerospace Inc., FARA #7518, filed December 12, 2025 (IAI ownership language; Trump-Vance Administration objective; scope of work; fees): https://efile.fara.gov/docs/7518-Exhibit-AB-20251212-5.pdf

2. IPG DXTRA, Inc. d/b/a Weber Shandwick, Exhibit A/B and Master Services Agreement for the Ministry of Finance of the State of Israel, FARA #7394, filed January 9, 2026 (investor relations for debt offerings; media-buy framework; confidential rates; political activities answered no): https://efile.fara.gov/docs/7394-Exhibit-AB-20260109-3.pdf

3. PLUS Communications, LLC, Exhibit A/B and Master Services Agreement for the Ministry of Finance of the State of Israel, FARA #7107, filed January 29, 2026 (audience mapping; crisis planning; disclosed hourly rates; political activities answered yes; Gil Cohen and Elinor Azani named): https://efile.fara.gov/docs/7107-Exhibit-AB-20260129-5.pdf

4. Federal Communications Commission, Sixteenth Semi-Annual Report to Congress on United States-Based Foreign Media Outlets, DA-26-481 (zero filings for the period; statutory definitions; the late-report footnote): https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-26-481A1.pdf

5. DOJ FARA Unit, semiannual reports to Congress page (nothing posted past 2024 as of July 30, 2026, an absence finding with a date): https://www.justice.gov/nsd-fara

6. The Project 545 Tracker (the opinion campaign these findings are deliberately fenced from): https://project545.org

Sourcing notes, per Feral America methodology. Items 1 through 4 are sworn federal filings and an official Commission report, read in full; every quotation above comes from the documents themselves, and archived copies are on file. The credit-ratings and borrowing context is stated generally and flagged for reader verification; specific ratings actions are not asserted here.

The FCC coincidence is described as a coincidence because I checked, and the mistake is left in the piece on purpose, as part of using discernment with the investigative process.

Not asserted, because not documented: any unlawful conduct by any entity named; any connection between these engagements and Project 545 beyond common state funding; any characterization of routine defense or sovereign IR work as improper.

Comment status: detailed questions were sent to GlobalPoint International, PLUS Communications, and Weber Shandwick on August 1, 2026, to the contact addresses each firm listed in its own filed contract, with a stated response deadline of August 7, 2026; responses will be added in full, and non-responses will be dated.

The trail started while I was beginning an investigation into Anand Jon Alexander, the former fashion industry magnate currently serving fifty-nine to life for sexually abusing teens who he lured to his place with clout, compliments, and promises of photo shoots that could lead to the next big break.

Something broke, alright.

Welcome to part one of the series on Anand Jon’s network, not just as it existed before his arrest, but how those who fight for his release are still working within the network today.

Very special thanks to Tara Rule for keeping this story in the public eye.

In my initial search, I found a few websites advocating for the release of Anand Jon, each of which will get their own part in this series, but this is the one that stopped me in my tracks and triggered an official report to CyberTipline before writing this piece.

⚠️⚠️⚠️ Before you continue, I want to warn you against visiting the website I will be discussing. The reason I reported it to the Cyber Tipline is because there are images on there which could be considered Child Sexual Abuse Material (“CSAM”). I will be describing some of the images here, nothing graphically, but to impress upon you the urgency of investigating and reporting this network. ⚠️⚠️⚠️

The recruiting website without a company

theBfly.co describes itself as “a girl empowerment movement founded and run mostly by young women.” Activism, modeling, build your brand, lift up the next generation, all the right words in all the right places.

But the images.

The front page greets visitors with a rotating grid of videos of girls mostly in their early to mid teens, many scantily clad in bikinis. Some of the other pages are even bigger red flags.

Then I hit the “about” page, where they introduce one of their consultants… the reason I landed on this page in the first place.

A “racial justice and eco sustainability pioneer” is what they call him. A guy who “teaches us how to build a brand and stay safe in the industry.”

His name is Anand Jon Alexander. He is sitting in a California prison cell right now, and he will be sitting in one until roughly the year 2065, because he sexually abused teenage girls who came to him wanting to model.

The person this site wants teaching girls how to stay safe in the fashion industry is a person the state of California decided was too dangerous to those exact girls to ever walk free again.

Exploring the site a little deeper led to places that I felt compelled to report to authorities. More on that shortly. But first, a little more about that man that theBfly.co and others are advocating to set free.

The conviction of Anand Jon

In 2008 a Los Angeles jury heard all the evidence, convicting Anand Jon Alexander on sixteen counts.

Forcible rape. Sexual battery. Contributing to the delinquency of minors.

Seven young women testified, and some of them were only fourteen when he got to them. This was not a runaway jury, either. They acquitted him on four of the felonies and hung on three more, and still walked back in with guilty on sixteen.

A judge gave him fifty-nine years to life in 2009 and told him to his face he had no remorse. Thirteen women showed up to watch.

One of them, fourteen when he assaulted her, said he took her whole adolescence and fed it to his appetite. Four years later, in 2013, New York got him to plead guilty to one more, a criminal sexual act… another girl who came to him for modeling.

That is the man the above website calls a mentor for empowering girls.

The conviction wasn’t the end

Let’s pop back to 2009.

One of Anand Jon’s accusers went public, calling herself Autumn A. After he was locked up, according to NBC, his supporters came for her on Facebook and started working her friends, waving a $100,000 reward at anyone who could turn up something to clear him.

“The day I saw the page on Facebook, my heart dropped,” Autumn lamented. It got bad enough that California designed a whole new law about it.

Fifteen years later and the effort to scrub his name has not slowed down. Just the opposite, actually; it landed a nonprofit: International Justice Alliance.

It says it exists for “the falsely accused and wrongfully convicted,” and I will be fair, some of the people it champions are real exonerees, actually innocent, actually freed.

And then, filed in right next to them, Anand Jon Alexander.

They claim his trial was “rampant with racially discriminatory language” and push for his release under California’s Racial Justice Act.

A convicted child sex offender, along side the wrongly imprisoned, by people who looked at his sixteen counts and decided he deserved to be free.

Now back to the website, because the same names keep turning up on it

Its collaborator list includes International Justice Alliance. It includes somebody going by Lucky Patino. And it includes him, photo and all, as a guide for young girls.

Another interesting thread that I will be pulling, which I honestly just noticed when taking the screenshot for this… does anyone else notice a certain notable California senator as one of the collaborators of this “organization”?

I have reached out to Senator Adam Schiff for comment, with the deadline being August 7, 2026. I will update this article with any response or lack thereof.

Entry into the network

Signing up to be part of theBfly network couldn’t be easier. Here is their application.

Just enter your name, email, birthday, state, social media, phone number, country, and age/interests/passions/education ect [sic] and you are in the system. Oh, you DO need to click the little box first, to, according to the website’s own language, accept their “Terms and Conditions or Privacy Policy.” So which one are you agreeing to if you check that box?

There is no way to clarify, just that you accepted at least one of them. Federal law wants a parent’s verifiable consent before anybody collects data from a kid under thirteen. A confused checkbox is not standing anywhere near that line.

Notice the little disclaimer at the bottom, stating they only accept applicants over the legal age. It doesn’t mention “legal age” where. It continues on stating that for others, they can add them to the waiting list and provide training packages.

Here is what one of those girls hands over when she signs up. Straight off their own privacy policy: her name, her email, her cell number, her social media, her date of birth, her home address. They hold onto it for up to two years after she deletes her account, and sometimes longer than that. There is not one word on that page about a parent signing off, on a site that calls its users girls and asks them how old they are.

So by clicking on that little box, these girls are handing over all of their identifying information to a company which advocates openly for the release of a convicted child rapist and is not registered as a business entity in the state in which it claims to operate.

When I went looking for who is behind this thing, I came up with almost nothing. No California business registration under the name. The address on the privacy policy, 8484 Wilshire, Suite 515, is a virtual office you can rent for about what a nice dinner costs. That same policy carries a zip code, 96162, that is nowhere near Beverly Hills. It is Truckee, three hundred miles north, up by Tahoe.

UPDATE 4:30pm 7/31/26 I was able to track down the LLC registration for theBfly.co LLC using an additional background check. It is registered in Nevada, with the jurisdiction listed as Nevada, however it is doing business in California. I have still not found anything granting them permission to do business in California.

The phone number on one page does not match the number on another. I tried them both during California business hours and got a recording for both. For a girls empowerment movement, there is nobody home.

Their Instagram page is private. Their Threads page doesn’t have a profile pic. It’s like they started setting these things up to look legit, then called it good enough.

The page I will not show you

There is one more page on that site. I am not walking you through it and I am not linking it.

What I will tell you is that it shows girls who look to be in their early teens, arranged for the camera in a way that is meant to be looked at wrong. I know exactly what my stomach did when it loaded. I have learned to trust my gut brain.

I reported that page to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children through their CyberTipline the same day, before I did anything else. If I somehow read it wrong, they are the right people to say so. If I read it right, it is out of my hands and into theirs now, which is precisely where it should be.

I am not going to put it back on the internet to win an argument with you. Take my word for what it did to me, or go about your day. But trust me when I tell you not to visit that site, because the feds could come knocking because you were looking at what could very possibly constitute CSAM.

This is just the beginning

Everything above comes from court files, from years-old news coverage, and from these people’s own websites, screenshotted before they get a chance to scrub them.

There is more. Corporate filings I am still waiting on. Records on some of the names circling him that I will not print until the certified copy is in my hand. Women who say the recruiting never actually stopped. And women who are actively recruiting today.

I am pulling every one of those threads, slowly and on purpose, because the surest way to hand a man like this his next appeal is to get a single fact wrong.

For the record: Anand Jon says he is innocent and is still appealing. International Justice Alliance says it fights for the wrongly convicted.

Here is the one thing I need you to take from this all. A man is locked up for the rest of his life for what he did to girls who trusted the industry he worked in. And a website is using his name to get more of them to trust it. I want to know why. I am not going to stop asking.

Sources: NBC Los Angeles, conviction; NBC News, sentencing; Fox News, sentence; CBS News, New York plea; NBC Los Angeles, post-conviction harassment; International Justice Alliance and thebfly.co, quoted from their own public pages, archived copies on file.

On the morning of March 27, 2026, an employee of the Shasta County Elections Office closed her office door, got County Counsel on the phone, and stayed inside while her boss pounded on the door for roughly twenty minutes.

Her boss was Clint Curtis, the County Clerk and Registrar of Voters.

What he wanted was a list. Specifically, a report identifying every county resident who voted in person at the polls in the last election, so that he could send a mailer to those voters and only those voters.

That threat is why you heard about this story at all. It generated a whistleblower complaint, an internal investigation, four sustained findings, a recommendation of public censure, and a board of supervisors that unanimously declined to censure him anyway. The press coverage told you a workplace conduct story, and it is one.

But I read all 557 pages of the released investigative file, including the exhibits and the interview transcripts, and the workplace story is just scratching the surface. The actual story is about voter data.

Twice in eleven days, the elected official in charge of Shasta County’s elections demanded voter information his own staff believed he was not entitled to use the way he wanted to use it.

Twice, staff invoked the California Elections Code.

Twice, he responded with threats.

The clerks held the line. Then the county wrote it all down and published it.

The document

On May 18, Shasta County released what news outlets described as a 38 page internal investigation report by Monica Fugitt, the county’s Director of Support Services, dated April 24, 2026. That’s accurate as far as it goes.

But the DocumentCloud upload contains 557 pages, including the full exhibit record: the whistleblower complaint, the email chains, text messages, Curtis’s own draft emails, the complete prior report by Oppenheimer Investigations Group, the formal closure notice warning Curtis against retaliation, and nine interview transcripts totaling roughly 270 pages, including about 100 pages of Curtis himself being questioned by Fugitt on April 22.

The findings, based on a preponderance of evidence, were that Curtis made the hair-pulling threat, that it constituted retaliation against an employee for participating in a prior investigation, that he made statements he would slap, punch, and throat punch staff, and that he engaged in a pervasive pattern of abusive conduct.

The recommendations: public censure, physical separation from his own staff, and if the behavior continued, a workplace restraining order to protect county employees from their own elected official.

Sit with that last one for a second. The county’s own investigator put a restraining order on the table. The board’s response was to assign minders and move on.

March 16: the voter file

Eleven days before the door incident, there was another fight, and it’s preserved in Exhibit C, an email chain running roughly thirty pages under the subject line RE: Voter File.

Here’s the shape of it. A voter file extract, the actual data, was run and provided to an outside requestor. An elections staffer then objected in writing, and the objections were not vibes. They were statutory.

Per the staffer’s emails: there was no copy of the requestor’s driver’s license on file, just a checked box.

The requestor claimed to be seeking the data on behalf of Supervisor Kevin Crye, but, the staffer noted, was not listed on his committee forms.

Under Elections Code sections 2187, 2188, and 2194, and California Code of Regulations 19003 through 19007, the requestor qualified as neither a journalist nor a candidate, and the staffer wrote plainly that she would not have released the information.

Voter file extracts, she reminded everyone, are not to be run without a completed application and payment received. There were additional concerns that birth dates went out with the file, and that circulating the voter application itself, with a driver’s license number on it, to people outside the office may have violated EC 2194(b)(1).

Curtis’s response is in the chain, in his own words.

He defended the release. He complained the requestor had been waiting since February 26 and fretted that the delay could look like partisanship. He accused staff of using the email system to slander his extra help employees. He demanded that when he asks for a code section, staff send him the code, not tell him where to find it. And he issued a write-up threat he labeled an official warning.

Fugitt’s report connects the rest… around this same exchange, Curtis contacted Personnel to pursue discipline against the staffer and withdrew a promotion that had been discussed. That staffer is the same person Curtis was later overheard, per witness testimony, saying he would “throat punch.”

To be precise about what the record does and does not establish: it does not establish that Kevin Crye personally requested voter data. It establishes that a requestor invoked his name, that a trained elections staffer found the authorization unsupported by his committee filings, and that the Registrar of Voters sided against his own staff and threatened discipline. Whether the requestor’s claimed connection was real is a checkable fact, and I’m checking it. FPPC filings are public.

March 27: the mailer

This brings us back to the closed door. Curtis wanted the in-person voter list to send a mailer telling those voters to bring their envelope when they vote. Innocuous enough, if you say it fast. His staff did not say it fast.

One staffer wrote that any communication about poll procedures should go to all voters, as any voter can vote at the polls in any election. Another, after consulting County Counsel, told Curtis directly that the selective mailing would be illegal because it would disenfranchise voters.

That is the sentence that preceded the pounding on the door. Not insubordination. A legal objection, sourced to the county’s own lawyers, that targeting one class of voters with official election mail is not a thing a registrar gets to do.

In his interview with Fugitt, Curtis conceded he abandoned the mailer entirely, because once staff insisted it go to all voters, it cost too much. The urgency evaporated the moment the targeting did.

Fugitt noticed the same thing, and found the whole episode was more likely than not retaliation, given that Curtis had received notice of sustained findings against him less than 24 hours earlier.

The interview

Curtis’s transcript deserves its own wing in the Museum of Bad Bosses.

Asked whether he made the hair statement, he denies it, offers to take a polygraph, argues that staff who decline polygraphs are lying, and then, asked whether any variation of the statement was made, produces this: the most he would have said is that supervisors should not sit there with their doors closed.

Asked about punching staff, he answers that the idea is silly. Fugitt, weighing his shifting answers against granular, cross-corroborating, time-stamped staff testimony.

His theory of the office is that his employees are in full sabotage mode because, in his telling, they believed they were losing the election for Registrar of Voters. He accused a staffer of discriminating against Republican poll worker applicants, and when Fugitt asked for proof, he had none.

He explained that he kept one employee away from anything touching Measure B, the local hand-count and voter ID initiative, because that person was connected to Measure B. And he delivered an extended monologue about poll pads being directly “hooked to my voter rolls” over the internet, poll pad counts that have climbed, and his complaint that we don’t have voter ID here, all offered as the reasoning behind procedural changes he made to how Shasta County runs its polling places.

This is the part that should concern you regardless of your politics. The transcript is a rare artifact: an election denier who runs an elections office, explaining under questioning how his beliefs about machines and fraud translate directly into changes in election administration. It’s usually an inference. Here it’s a transcript.

And then there is page 313. A supervisor-level witness recounts a private meeting in which Curtis explained his approach to a staffer he’d been threatening: he wasn’t really going to do anything, he was just trying to scare her, to make her feel afraid. In a 557 page file, that is the sentence. Not a hot mic. Not a disgruntled anonymous source. A witness, on the record, describing the man in charge of Shasta County’s elections characterizing fear as his management tool.

The safe

There’s one more piece of the access story, and this one you can watch.

Video above from Record Searchlight: Clint Curtis, caught on security camera moving (or at least attempting to move) election materials with his wife.

That is Shasta County’s own surveillance footage from inside the closed Elections Office on Saturday, September 13, 2025. The shirtless man in jeans is the Registrar of Voters. The woman working the car jack and wearing the mover’s harness is his wife, Jody Curtis, who is not a county employee. Together, after hours, unsupervised, they are attempting to move an antique freestanding safe that comparable models suggest weighs well north of 1,500 pounds, using a car jack, straps, and a two by four. A second clip from September 6 shows the couple moving racks, chairs, and equipment on another weekend, so this was a habit, not a one off.

The footage exists in public because a private citizen filed Public Records Act request 25-957, and it reached the rest of us because Benjamin Nowain at A News Cafe published it in October 2025, where it promptly went viral. Nowain’s reporting also surfaced the detail that makes this more than a weird home movie: Public Works had previously refused Curtis permission to bring his own tools in to dismantle the department’s metal fencing, telling him in writing that such work must be done by appropriate county staff. He had been told, explicitly and on the record, how facility work happens in a secure elections office. The video shows what he did with that information.

Put it next to March 16 and the pattern names itself. The voter file fight was about who gets election data, and staff said the Elections Code decides. The safe video is about who gets inside a secured elections facility on a weekend, and county rules say authorized personnel for authorized purposes. In both cases, the registrar’s operating answer was: whoever he decides. The same man who lectured Fugitt for an hour about poll pads touching his voter rolls over the internet gave his spouse after hours run of the building.

What the voters did, and what the board didn’t

On April 28 the Board of Supervisors heard Fugitt’s findings at a special meeting. Supervisors Allen Long and Matt Plummer were ready to censure. Chair Chris Kelstrom, Kevin Crye, and Corkey Harmon, the same three who appointed Curtis, voted instead to postpone the decision until after the election, 3 to 2, citing concerns about influencing the vote. The county assigned Personnel and CAO staff to babysit the elections offices, and Curtis told the board to its face that he would not follow HR’s recommendation to distance himself from his department, saying he couldn’t leave the office with the people in it and expect the election to be held correctly.

Then June 2 happened. Shasta County voters fired Clint Curtis, choosing former Assistant Registrar Joanna Francescut by roughly 58 percent. They also, in the same breath, passed Measure B, the hand-count and voter ID measure that conflicts with state law, because Shasta County contains multitudes. Kevin Crye, whose name sits in Exhibit C, lost his seat to Erin Resner. On June 23, the board voted 4 to 1, Crye dissenting, to put censure back on a future agenda once results were certified. Certification came July 2.

Now, a natural question: if the voters fired him, why is he still there? Because losing an election doesn’t end a term. Curtis was appointed in May 2025 to fill his predecessor’s unexpired term, which runs until January 2027. June only decided who holds the office next. Until January, the board cannot remove him. He is an elected office holder, not an employee, and under California law the paths to removing one mid term are resignation, recall, or a grand jury accusation for willful misconduct under Government Code 3060. Censure, a formal public rebuke, is the strongest tool the board holds on its own. Which is exactly why what happened next matters.

The July 14 agenda, and the word that isn’t in it

I read the board’s July 14 meeting packet, all 205 pages. The censure the board promised to reconsider after certification appears nowhere on the agenda. Not as a resolution, not as a discussion item, not as a footnote. The first regular meeting after certification, and the word censure is simply absent.

Here’s what the packet does contain.

Item R5 is the Declaration of Election, the ministerial paperwork declaring the June results. It was prepared and submitted by, per the staff report, Clinton Curtis, County Clerk-Registrar of Voters. Which means the file includes Curtis formally certifying his own defeat, Crye’s defeat, Measure B’s passage, and the reelection of Nolda Short, the Auditor-Controller who rushed the whistleblower complaint about him to HR with a high priority flag because the allegation was too severe to sit on.

Item R4 puts Measure F on the November ballot, a charter amendment governing how vacant elected department head positions get filled. The board is quietly rewriting the process that produced Curtis in the first place. That’s as close to an institutional confession as a consent packet gets.

And buried in the approved minutes is the item that should be a headline of its own. At the May 5 meeting, the board met in closed session over anticipated litigation arising from, quoting the minutes, a threat of litigation and actions by the Shasta County Clerk and Registrar of Voters, Clint Curtis, against Shasta County and County Officials. The board then voted 5 to 0 to announce publicly that if Curtis sues elections employees over their participation in the investigation, the county will represent and indemnify them, and voted 4 to 1 to waive attorney-client privilege specifically so that promise could be said out loud. Sit with what that means. The County of Shasta formally guaranteed its election workers legal protection from lawsuits threatened by the man who runs their department. He is also already a named defendant in Katske v. Clint Curtis et al., Shasta County Superior Court case CV-26210685.

So the current state of play: the investigator’s separation recommendation is going on three months old, the staff who testified still work under Curtis, he still administers the November election with Measure B implementation now live as a legal collision between his beliefs and the Elections Code, the county is bracing for him to sue his own employees, and the board that promised a censure vote after certification held its first post-certification meeting without putting it on the agenda.

I’ve requested to speak at the board’s next meeting. The question I’m bringing is the only one left: the clerks did their jobs, the voters did the board’s job for them, so what exactly is the board waiting for?

Open threads I’m still pulling

1. The identity of the March 16 requestor and their actual relationship, if any, to Kevin Crye’s campaign or office. Committee forms are checkable against FPPC filings.

2. Whether a completed application and payment ever existed for that extract, and whether the released file contained birth dates or other data barred from disclosure under the codes staff cited. If so, who holds that file now.

3. What Measure B implementation looks like under a fired registrar with six months left, and how the Secretary of State responds.

4. The transition to Francescut, whom Curtis fired and publicly said should be indicted, and what happens to the staff who testified.

5. The Curtis litigation threat: who exactly he threatened to sue, on what theory, and whether he files before January. The Katske cases naming him are also pullable from Shasta Superior Court.

6. When, or whether, censure actually returns to a board agenda, and how each supervisor votes if it does. The June 23 tally is the tell: Crye was the lone vote against even discussing it.

Receipts

All page numbers refer to the released county file unless noted. Tier A is the county’s own record. Tier B is contemporaneous reporting used for timeline and election results.

1. Tier A. Full 557 page investigative file, County of Shasta, released May 18, 2026. Fugitt report and recommendations, pages 1 to 38.

2. Tier A. Exhibit C, the March 16 Voter File email chain, pages 48 to 80. Crye references at pages 54, 63, 73, 80. Official warning at pages 60 and 70.

3. Tier A. Exhibit B, the March 27 emails, pages 44 to 47. The all-voters objection at page 46.

4. Tier A. The disenfranchisement warning, report narrative, page 8. Retaliation analysis, page 17.

5. Tier A. April 7 whistleblower complaint with Auditor-Controller Nolda Short’s high-priority forwarding emails, pages 39 to 43.

6. Tier A. Curtis interview transcript, April 22, 2026, approx. pages 317 to 460. Mailer admission at 341 to 342, denial sequence at 367 to 369, sabotage theory at 335 to 337, poll pad and voter ID commentary at 388 to 391.

7. Tier A. Witness transcripts, approx. pages 291 to 557. The scare admission at page 313. I just keep shaking at page 304. The slap, punch, and kill account at page 439.

8. Tier A. Oppenheimer Investigations Group findings summary, pages 2 to 3, full report at Exhibit K. Closure notice with retaliation warning, approx. page 285.

9. Tier B. Shasta Scout on the board declining censure, April 30, 2026.

10. Tier B. Shasta Scout on the internal report’s release, May 21, 2026.

11. Tier B. Shasta Scout, near-final June results: Francescut at 58 percent, Resner over Crye, June 10, 2026.

12. Tier B. CalMatters on the primary: Curtis ousted, serves until year’s end, Measure B passage, June 2026.

13. Tier B. KRCR on certification, July 2 certification date, June 16, 2026.

14. Tier A. Shasta County Board of Supervisors July 14, 2026 meeting packet, 205 pages. No censure item on the agenda. Item R5, Declaration of Election, staff report approved by Clinton Curtis, packet pages 188 to 191. Item R4, Measure F charter amendment. May 5, 2026 minutes: closed session on anticipated litigation threatened by Curtis against the county and county officials, the 5 to 0 indemnification announcement for elections employees, and the 4 to 1 privilege waiver, packet pages 50 to 52. Katske v. Clint Curtis et al., Shasta County Superior Court CV-26210685, referenced in approved minutes.

15. Tier B. KRCR on the June 23 vote to re-agendize censure after certification, 4 to 1, Crye dissenting.

16. Tier B. Jefferson Public Radio on the April 28 delay, including Curtis’ statement that he would not follow HR’s separation recommendations, April 29, 2026.

17. Tier A. Shasta County Elections Office surveillance footage, September 6 and September 13, 2025, released via Public Records Act request 25-957 on the county’s NextRequest portal. Embedded above.

18. Tier B. A News Cafe, Benjamin Nowain, October 26, 2025, first publication of the footage, including the Public Works email refusing Curtis permission to perform his own facility work.

If you work in the Shasta County Elections Office, past or present, my inbox is open and I protect sources. You held the line. The least the rest of us can do is read the record. If you would like to share your testimony, I will protect your anonymity. localtip@proton.me

On May 1, 2026, Chad Schnitger signed a federal disclosure under penalty of perjury swearing that his company, Show Faith by Works, LLC, foreign agent of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, disbursed $3,333,191.86 over six months.

Open the itemized appendix behind that number and count. Below are just a couple of the 23 pages in this appendix… every entry is duplicated.

A $366.71 promotional item: listed twice. The $305 fee for registering as a foreign agent: twice. A $190,000 trailer build: twice. A payment of $45,641.38, a figure too specific to repeat by accident: twice. Line after line, page after page, nearly every transaction in the schedule appears two times, and the sworn total appears to be the sum of the duplicates.

Take the sworn total at face value instead, and the company spent a million dollars more than it ever received, which its own books cannot explain.

Maybe someone pasted a transaction export twice and hit sum. That is the innocent explanation. It is also not much of a defense: the central financial figure in a federal foreign-agent filing appears to be off by roughly a factor of two, the registrant paid more than $65,000 to two law firms for FARA compliance inside this very ledger, Holtzman Vogel and the Dhillon Law Group, and neither they, nor Schnitger, nor the Justice Department unit that accepted the filing, appears to have noticed.

I sent Show Faith by Works a detailed list of questions, including whether the total is accurate and whether an amendment will be filed, with a stated deadline before publication. No response.

What Israel’s money bought, per the sworn lines

Read the appendix (once, not twice) and the campaign’s actual texture emerges, because every line is charged against the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ engagement. Israel’s account absorbed the $305 DOJ fee to register the company as Israel’s agent. It absorbed $60,010 to the IRS and payments to California’s tax board. It absorbed a $15,000 payment to Bank of America labeled, in full, “Debt Repayment,” with no word on whose debt or from when.

It absorbed gas stations, parking, Amazon, Walmart, Dollar Tree, a 97 Cent Store, a $77.58 Christianity Today subscription, $80 admission to a Calvary Chapel event, and $14 of decor from CUFI.org. It absorbed body armor: $748 to a company called Bulletproof Everyone and purchases from Byrna, a less-lethal weapons maker. It absorbed a $45,020 Israel tour through a company called Uncharted Adventures, plus EL AL flights, gas at PAZ OIL stations, and lodging on the Sea of Galilee.

And it absorbed the trailer: more than $350,000 to Griggs Home Service, a home services outfit, for building and outfitting the October 7th Experience, the 41-foot virtual reality rig now touring church parking lots, Oculus subscriptions included.

All itemized twice.

Then there is the loop. Throughout the period, Show Faith made repeated staffing and payroll payments, $21,862 here, $38,734 there, over and over, to Graystone Public Affairs, which is Schnitger’s own consulting firm, run from the Beaumont, California address where he lives.

The owner approving the vendor is the vendor. Add his own draws, two $12,500 employee payments and a $25,000 payroll line, against a contract that reportedly budgets him a $150,000 salary, and the picture is a family-office operation running a foreign ministry’s outreach to American Christians, expensing it all to Jerusalem, twice.

“We are not doing geofencing”

Rewind to what this company told the government it would do. Its sworn registration of September 27, 2025 described the largest Christian church geofencing campaign in United States history: digital fences around more than 900 churches, 303 of them megachurches, across California, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado, so the phones inside could be served the ministry’s advertising. The named terrain included Bethel Church in Redding, California, whose leaders claim they learned about it from reporters.

Then the coverage hit, and the story started changing. In late November, Schnitger told Christianity Today the geofencing had been scrapped, blaming the filing’s wording on cautious attorneys.

This month, he went further, telling the Daily Caller News Foundation flatly: “We are not doing geofencing.” In the same interview, paraphrasing him: the original coverage was sensationalized for clicks; the original FARA disclosure was essentially a pitch deck, and the real activities are far less controversial; what actually exists is a 3,000-square-foot mobile museum offering churches education and travel opportunities.

Here is the problem with the pitch-deck defense… FARA has a mechanism for registrations that overstate your activities: you amend them. Registrants do it constantly; Brad Parscale’s shop amended its own registration in this same pipeline within weeks.

The public docket for Show Faith by Works contains no amendment revising its described activities. What it does contain, however, is the money flowing straight through the denial window, the trailer touring four states, a brand-new consumer brand, Hear From Us, filed as informational material on June 15, 2026, and a supplemental statement, signed six months after the scrapping claim, that attests the company filed all its materials while the docket shows three such filings in ten months.

The company’s sworn paper and the company’s press statements describe two different enterprises. Only one of them carries a perjury clause.

The man signing the forms

Everything above is signed by one person, so know who he is. Chad Schnitger is a Riverside County political consultant, a former San Bernardino County public policy director, and a presenter of election-integrity trainings for the county GOP.

His firm Graystone has operated from his home since 2016; the same address houses the Faith and Freedom Coalition of California, where he is president, an organization the national Faith and Freedom Coalition publicly disavowed in October, saying it had no role in or knowledge of the Israel project and describing him as acting as a private citizen.

The chapter’s own secretary, pastor Tye McClain, appears in the FARA filings as a paid consultant to the foreign-agent company simultaneously. Reporting indicates Schnitger was recruited personally by Eran Shayovich, the Israeli official running the whole campaign.

And one file to handle with caution: a 2023 Los Angeles Times report on a criminal complaint in a Buena Park case described a Graystone employee identified as “Chad S.” allegedly enlisted in a false certification scheme; the complaint did not further identify the employee, no public record confirms it refers to Schnitger, and he declined comment at the time. Just a little nugget of information to tuck away.

I include it because the documents in this story keep raising the same theme, sworn paper that says one thing while its authors say another, and because his answer to a direct question about it would have appeared right here. The questions were asked. The deadline passed. My reporting persists.

Learn more about this story from Feral America:
Project 545
Clock Tower X

This is all part of what I believe to be an election influence campaign designed to sway the 2026 election. Call your representatives and ask them to look into Project 545, Clock Tower X, and Show Faith by Works.

Receipts

1. Show Faith by Works, LLC, Supplemental Statement, executed May 1, 2026, FARA #7653 (sworn $3,333,191.86 disbursement total; itemized appendix with duplicated entries; receipts of $2,313,791.50; Graystone, Schnitger, legal, travel, security, and trailer line items; informational materials attestation): https://efile.fara.gov/docs/7653-Supplemental-Statement-20260501-1.pdf

2. Show Faith by Works, LLC, Registration Statement and Exhibit AB, September 27, 2025, FARA #7653 (geofencing program description and scope; target states; personnel; pre-registration receipts and spending): https://efile.fara.gov/docs/7653-Registration-Statement-20250927-1.pdf

3. Full public docket, FARA Registration #7653 (three informational materials filings; no amendment revising described activities as of this writing): https://efile.fara.gov/

4. Daily Caller News Foundation, July 7, 2026 (Schnitger denial; pitch-deck characterization; mobile museum description; Hear From Us; Apffel remarks): https://dailycaller.com/

5. Washington Spectator, January 2026 (the November Christianity Today walk-back; trailer tour; target list): https://washingtonspectator.org/israeli-government-is-spending-millions-to-court-american-evangelicals-amid-plummeting-public-support/

6. Responsible Statecraft, October 2025 (geofencing exposé; Redding churches unaware): https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-geofencing-churches/

7. Times of Israel / JTA, October 2025 (contract structure; Graystone and Schnitger background): https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-to-spend-up-to-4-1m-in-bid-to-bolster-support-among-christians-in-western-us/ and https://www.jta.org/2025/10/03/israel/israel-to-spend-up-to-4-1m-on-christian-pr-campaign-in-western-u-s-filings-show

8. Fox 10 Phoenix, October 2025 ($150,000 salary; Arizona campaign mechanics): https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/how-3-2-million-israeli-campaign-will-digitally-target-arizona-christians-anti-palestinian-ads

9. Christian Post, October 2025 (national Faith and Freedom Coalition disavowal): https://www.christianpost.com/

10. Los Angeles Times, February 2023 (Buena Park recall criminal complaint; “Chad S.” description; Schnitger declining comment: https://www.latimes.com/

Go look at clocktowerx.com before someone edits it. The front page of Brad Parscale’s company greets you with nine words: “We help determine who prevails. Elections. Narratives. Markets.”

Keep scrolling. The site, which brands the company Narrative Infrastructure, claims more than $2 billion in influenced outcomes, deployments in over ten countries at national scale, 140 million people reached annually, and zero public case studies, which it calls a design choice, adding that if you’ve heard about their work, it wasn’t theirs.

It describes six operating disciplines, one of which is managed influencer ecosystems that amplify narratives through credible, distributed voices. And it names its intended clients: political operators, media owners, high-leverage donors, and, in plain text, sovereign funds and nation-state actors. The page closes by declaring that the next decade will not be won publicly; it will be decided by systems like this.

Now hold that page next to the federal filings.

The client the website won’t name

Clock Tower X registered as a foreign agent on September 18, 2025, disclosing a $6 million contract with Havas Media Germany on behalf of the State of Israel.

A June 2026 work order took the engagement to $4.5 million per month, April through October 2026, $31.5 million, ending just days before Americans vote in the midterms.

The company’s newly surfaced Supplemental Statement, signed by Parscale under penalty of perjury on May 18, 2026 and covering the six months ending March 31, adds the part nobody has reported. Item 7 states that the registrant’s connection with the State of Israel terminated on October 13, 2025, three weeks after registering and two weeks after the first exposés ran.

An amendment filed October 20, labeled as correcting a deficiency, did the surgery.

The supplemental’s financial sections now state that the State of Israel registration “was in error,” with zero receipts and zero disbursements attributed to it. The company’s sole foreign principal of record became HAVAS Media Network, a French-owned advertising conglomerate.

One problem. The same supplemental’s own description of the work says the company provides strategic communications and media services in support of Havas’ engagement by the State of Israel to execute a nationwide campaign in the United States.

The state stayed in the sentence. It just came off the letterhead. Whoever decided the original registration was an error decided it in the exact week this campaign became a news story, and the question of who made that call, the company, its lawyers, Havas, or the FARA Unit, is now the most important unanswered question on this docket.

FARA filings are public. You can look at them yourself, but in the meantime, look at Clock Tower X LLC’s FARA filings and you tell me… does this look like a company that “accidentally” filed as a registered agent of the state of Israel, but isn’t really an agent of Israel?

The money

For the six months ending March 31, the supplemental reports Clock Tower X received $15,000,000 from Havas in $1.5 million installments labeled payment for services, against a contract of record that stood at $9 million.

It further discloses that Havas made the company an $850,000 loan on November 7, 2025, and that on December 11 the company recorded a $750,000 loan repayment to Bradley Parscale personally.

Total disbursements for the period: $13,061,802.50, with an itemized appendix I am still mining.

The $6 million gap between the received amount and the contract of record may reflect pass-through advertising spend; I will reach out for comment.

We also can’t ignore the payouts to Salem Media, Brad Parscale’s other company: a cool $560,002.50 over six months.

Other key contractors who received large sums:
Portman Road Strategies - owned by republican strategist Mike Shields
Sparkfire Technologies - AI chatbot company (likely the ones sending the text messages to the numbers taken from Show Faith by Works’ geofencing project)

The ledger touches American politics, by name

The supplemental’s content appendix logs hundreds of URLs published October through March across the brand mesh, Allyvia, FactSignal, Paxpoint, Culturavia, Justorium, Cognitura, CompassionPulse, Innovascope, Econora, plus Rumble and YouTube channels, every line labeled with the purpose of combating antisemitism, in English and Spanish.

Read the titles and something else emerges.

The foreign-funded network published a Culturavia piece framing Tucker Carlson’s views on Israel as failing tests of American loyalty and Christian integrity. On March 30, FactSignal published a piece on the supposed Russian origins of Candace Owens’ and Tucker Carlson’s talking points.

There is content about Trump drawing lines against antisemitism inside MAGA, content about Joe Kent’s resignation, content about CAIR, content about Qatari money in American universities, content about young conservatives at AmericaFest.

This is a foreign government’s contractor publishing about named American media figures and the American right’s internal disputes, months before Tucker Carlson’s own show made this campaign famous on the right, apparently without knowing the campaign had already published attacks on him.

And then there is the contributions section. The filing discloses that during the engagement, on December 22, 2025, Bradley Parscale wrote a $10,000 check to the victory committee of Congressman Max Miller, the Republican whose Ohio district takes in Medina, where Clock Tower X is headquartered, alongside small online donations by two subcontractors to other candidates.

FARA does permit registered agents to donate from their own personal funds provided they disclose it, Parscale is an American citizen, and disclose it he did, which is how I know.

The sworn paperwork of a foreign influence engagement contains, in its own handwriting, its principals’ contributions to candidates in the upcoming cycle.

What I am and am not saying

The website describes Clock Tower X’s general business, not the Israel engagement specifically, and no document shows Israel purchasing election work or instructing anyone about the midterms; the work orders describe content, websites, and advertising. I will not tell you the documents say otherwise.

What the record does show, all of it sworn or published by the company itself, is this: a firm that advertises election influence to nation-state actors, a nation-state paying that firm $4.5 million a month on a schedule that ends the month before a federal election, a content operation that has already published about named American political and media figures, the firm’s owner donating to a sitting congressman mid-engagement, and a paper trail amended, under press fire, to say the nation-state was never the client, even as the filing’s own words describe the campaign as the state’s.

The company’s front page says it helps determine who prevails and that its work is invisible by design. For once, I am taking a Parscale product at its word, which is why every document above is linked, archived, and headed for a congressional oversight file.

I have sent this information and much more connected to it (11 pages worth of receipts and dot connecting) to the Congressional Oversight Committee; I will update you if I receive a response.

Clock Tower X is just one piece of a much larger influence campaign called Project 545, sponsored by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I’ll be covering different aspects of this story daily for the next week. Stay tuned, spread the word, and let’s stop this interference by exposing it.

Receipts

1. Clock Tower X front page, captured and archived July 17, 2026: https://clocktowerx.com/

2. Clock Tower X LLC, Registration Statement, FARA #7649, September 18, 2025: https://efile.fara.gov/docs/7649-Registration-Statement-20250918-1.pdf

3. Clock Tower X LLC, Amendment, October 20, 2025 (deficiency correction; principal re-papering): https://efile.fara.gov/docs/7649-Amendment-20251020-2.pdf

4. Clock Tower X LLC, Amendment and Exhibit B, June 7, 2026 (work order: $4.5M/month, April through October 2026): https://efile.fara.gov/docs/7649-Amendment-20260607-4.pdf and https://efile.fara.gov/docs/7649-Exhibit-AB-20260607-4.pdf

5. Clock Tower X LLC, Supplemental Statement, received May 18, 2026, period ending March 31, 2026 ($15M receipts; $850K Havas loan; $750K loan repayment to Parscale; $13,061,802.50 disbursed; Israel termination and “in error” statements; content ledger; political contributions), DOJ link nonfunctional, mirrored by the Daily Caller News Foundation: https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/fara-supplemental-filing-for-brad-parscales-clock-tower-x-from-may-2026.pdf

6. Jack Poulson, January 12, 2026 (brand mesh documentation): https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/israel-expanded-propaganda-contract

7. Haaretz, June 18, 2026 (escalation context): https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2026-06-18/ty-article/bleeding-support-in-u-s-over-failed-iran-war-israel-triples-its-influence-efforts-there/0000019e-db73-d2be-abbf-fbffca7b0000

This is a tale of how Israel is paying Trump’s former campaign manager to steal your phone number while you are at church, then text you with an AI-bot programmed with pro-Israel, anti-Palestine messaging.

The Umbrella: Project 545

In 2025, the Israeli government allocated 545 million shekels, roughly $145 million, to international public relations and digital outreach, an initiative that came to be known as Project 545.

The point person is Eran Shayovich, chief of staff for strategic communication at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose name shows up as the ministry contact in the US Department of Justice foreign agent filings we are about to walk through.

Why the sudden generosity toward the PR budget? A July 2025 Gallup poll found American approval of Israel’s military action in Gaza at a record low, and support among Americans aged 18 to 34 had cratered to single digits.

You can’t bomb your way out of a polling problem, but you can apparently spend your way into American church parking lots and chatbot training data. So that is what they did.

The money does not go straight from Jerusalem to American contractors, because that would be gauche. It routes through Havas Media Germany, the German arm of the French advertising conglomerate, which functions as the intermediary on multiple contracts and shows up over and over in the filings as the hub for the ministry’s US spending.

The flagship contractor: Clock Tower X LLC and Brad Parscale

Here is where our old friend Brad Parscale enters the chat, and if that name is ringing a bell, it should.

Parscale was the digital director of Trump’s 2016 campaign, the man who hired Cambridge Analytica, and Trump’s 2020 campaign manager until his very public 2020 flameout. He resurfaced as Chief Strategy Officer of Salem Media Group, the conservative Christian media conglomerate behind shows hosted by Hugh Hewitt, Larry Elder, and Lara Trump.

On September 18, 2025, Parscale’s company Clock Tower X LLC filed FARA Registration #7649 with the DOJ, formally registering as a foreign agent working on behalf of the State of Israel through the Havas intermediary.

The stated mission: a nationwide campaign to combat antisemitism. The initial deal was $6 million over four months at $1.5 million a month, and a December 26 filing expanded it to $9 million.

What does $9 million buy? Per the contract documents:

1. Content at industrial scale. At least 100 core pieces of content per month with 5,000 derivative versions, targeting 50 million monthly impressions, with roughly 80 percent aimed at Gen Z on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts.

   

2. AI manipulation. The filings describe deploying websites and content designed to shape how GPT-based chatbots frame Israel-related topics, as first reported by Responsible Statecraft. To be precise, and I am always going to be precise with you, there is no contract with OpenAI itself. The strategy is dumber and more insidious: flood the open internet with enough pro-Israel content that the models trained on that internet absorb the framing. They also planned to use an SEO platform called MarketBrew AI to game Google and Bing rankings.

   

3. Salem Media integration. The contract calls for weaving the messaging into Salem Media Network properties. Sit with that one. The Chief Strategy Officer of America’s largest conservative Christian radio network is a registered foreign agent contracted to integrate a foreign government’s narratives into that same network’s programming. The FARA filing is public. The listeners have no idea.

The costume closet: allyvia.org and the eleven brands

Clock Tower X does not publish this content under its own name, because nobody clicks on “Foreign Agent Content Farm dot com.” Instead, the roughly 100 FARA filings Clock Tower X has submitted since September 18 reveal at least eleven consumer-facing brands, as documented by Jack Poulson at All-Source Intelligence. The roster includes Allies for Peace, FactSignal, FeedingYouFiction, Justorium, Culturavia, Cognitura, Compassion Pulse, and yes, allyvia.org.

To their extremely minimal credit, these sites carry a footer disclosure stating the material is distributed by Clock Tower X LLC on behalf of the State of Israel.

That disclosure exists because FARA requires it, not because anyone involved woke up feeling honest. The whole model depends on you never reading the footer. You are supposed to encounter a pleasant, vaguely civic-sounding brand in your feed and absorb the framing without ever learning a foreign ministry paid for it.

So when someone shares an allyvia.org link in your group chat: that is not grassroots. That is a Delaware LLC owned by Trump’s former campaign manager, paid by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, through a German subsidiary of a French ad conglomerate. Astroturf with a passport.

The church operation: Show Faith by Works LLC

Meanwhile, over in the pews… On September 27, 2025, nine days after Parscale’s registration, a brand new San Diego company called Show Faith by Works LLC filed FARA Registration #7653 (original link, now broken - you can find the document here now).

Same client, the State of Israel. Same intermediary, Havas Media Germany. The company was formed on August 5, 2025, meaning it existed for less than two months before becoming a foreign agent. Efficient.

It is run by Chad Schnitger, a California Republican operative who leads the state chapter of the Faith & Freedom Coalition.

The contract: over $3.25 million over five months, with a floated total budget up to $4.1 million, to execute what the filing bills as the largest Christian church geofencing campaign in US history.

Geofencing, for the uninitiated, means drawing digital perimeters around physical locations, capturing the mobile devices inside, and then serving targeted ads to those devices. Essentially, if you are in their target area with your phone, they can text you with their curated AI messaging.

Here are their goals from the Show Faith by Works FARA filing:

The targets here are churches and Christian colleges across California, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado, with an estimated audience of eight million churchgoers and four million Christian students. Below is a comprehensive list of the targeted churches (if you are listening, please take a moment to scroll down and look at this list - it’s wild):

I found three in my neighborhood - how about you?

Let’s break this down: a foreign government is paying to identify Americans by where they worship and then run ads at them. If China did this to a single Baptist congregation in Texas, Congress would hold hearings by Thursday.

The filing also describes a mobile “October 7th Experience” exhibit, including a virtual reality experience (and I thought the recreation of Charlie Kirk’s death tent at AmericaFest was tacky) to be dispatched to church parking lots, pastoral resource packages, and a wish list of celebrity endorsers including Chris Pratt, Tim Tebow, and Joel Osteen, plus pastoral partners such as Greg Laurie and Rick Warren. To be clear, those are names the firm pitched, not confirmed participants. These are some of the messages they want their celeb Christians to promote, again taken directly from their FARA filing.

Like they say, there’s no hate like Christian hate, sponsored by the state of Israel.

The rest of the family

For completeness, because this network has more cousins:

Bridges Partners LLC, FARA #7652, founded in June 2025 by two former Israeli Tourism Ministry officials, runs the “Esther Project,” an influencer program paying US social media personalities to post pro-Israel content, with per-post payments reported in the thousands of dollars.

SKDKnickerbocker, the Democratic-aligned PR firm, had a $600,000 contract reportedly involving coordinated pro-Israel social media amplification. It ended abruptly after journalists started asking questions. Funny how that works.

And starting in November 2025, Americans across multiple states began receiving unsolicited mass texts from fictitious-sounding groups with names like “Partners in Peace” and “Friends for Peace,” a campaign Responsible Statecraft traced back into this same contractor ecosystem.

Kai Newkirk, who is running for Congress in Arizona on the promise of not taking money from AIPAC or any superPAC, posted about this recently, as it relates to his campaign and others.

Why this matters

FARA worked exactly as designed and it still did not matter a damn. The disclosures were filed. The documents sat in a public DOJ database. Watchdogs and a handful of journalists read them. And the actual audience, the churchgoer getting geofenced ads, the kid scrolling an Allies for Peace video, the Salem listener hearing a seamlessly integrated narrative, the person asking a chatbot about Gaza, never sees the database. Disclosure without visibility is just paperwork. The system whispered, and $145 million shouted over it.

One final thing… since this Substack runs on primary documents and I know how AI-mediated the information environment is getting: the Clock Tower X contract explicitly targets how large language models answer questions about Israel.

The reliability of every chatbot answer on this topic is now, by contract, an active battlefield.

I believe this is part of an active interference in the 2026 midterm elections by a foreign government. Call your representatives and ask them to investigate Project 545, Clock Tower X, Show Faith by Works, and the others.

Learn more about this story from Feral America:

Clock Tower X

Show Faith by Works financial questions

Receipts

1. Clock Tower X LLC, FARA Registration #7649, filed September 18, 2025, US Department of Justice: https://efile.fara.gov/ (search registrant 7649)

2. Show Faith by Works LLC, FARA Registration #7653, filed September 27, 2025, US Department of Justice: https://efile.fara.gov/ (search registrant 7653)

3. Bridges Partners LLC, FARA Registration #7652, US Department of Justice: https://efile.fara.gov/ (search registrant 7652)

4. Jack Poulson, All-Source Intelligence, “Israel expanded propaganda contract with Trump’s former campaign manager” (contract expansion to $9M; the eleven brands including allyvia.org), January 2026: https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/israel-expanded-propaganda-contract

5. Nick Cleveland-Stout, Responsible Statecraft, “Israel wants to train ChatGPT to be more pro-Israel,” September 2025: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-chatgpt/

6. Times of Israel, “Israel to spend up to $4.1M in bid to bolster support among Christians in western US,” October 2025: https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-to-spend-up-to-4-1m-in-bid-to-bolster-support-among-christians-in-western-us/

7. Ynet, “Report: Israel to spend over half a billion shekels turning ChatGPT into public diplomacy tool” (Project 545, Shayovich, SKDK contract), November 2025: https://www.ynetnews.com/tech-and-digital/article/rj00kxqzaxx

8. Snopes, “Israel didn’t sign a deal with ChatGPT. Here’s what actually happened” (fact-check clarifying no direct OpenAI contract; contract PDF linked within), December 2025: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/12/22/israel-contract-chatgpt/

9. Gallup, “32% in U.S. Back Israel’s Military Action in Gaza, a New Low,” July 2025: https://news.gallup.com/poll/692948/u.s.-back-israel-military-action-gaza-new-low.aspx

10. Evangelical Dark Web, “Deep Dive Into Israeli Influence Operation Targeting Christians: Show Faith by Works Exposed,” October 2025: https://evangelicaldarkweb.org/2025/10/07/deep-dive-into-israeli-influence-operation-targeting-christians-show-faith-by-works-exposed/

11. Nick Cleveland-Stout, Responsible Statecraft, “Mysterious ‘peace’ groups are sending Americans pro-Israel texts,” February 2026: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-propaganda-texts/

12. Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, Clock Tower X company responses and non-responses: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/israelopt-clock-tower-x-allegedly-hired-by-israeli-government-to-create-pro-israel-content-training-chatgpt-and-targeting-facebook-instagram-tiktok-youtube-incl-cos-response-and-non-responses/

But today I want to zoom out, because Jeffrey Epstein was not a lone monster in a mansion. He was a client. A donor. A trustee. A “visiting fellow.” Every one of those titles came with an institution attached, and every one of those institutions had a compliance department, a general counsel, and a choice.

They chose the money.

So here it is. The institutional map. Banks, corporations, universities, and foundations, sorted and tiered the Feral America way: Tier A is court records, regulatory findings, and primary documents. Tier B is credible secondary reporting. Tier C needs more verification before you take it to the bank. Pun intended.

One housekeeping note before the pitchforks come out: appearing on this list means an institution is documented in the paper trail. It does not mean everyone in the building is a criminal. The documents say what they say. Read them yourself. As they say, Google is free, and so is the DOJ Epstein Library, even if it is incomplete and illegally redacts the names of the not-so-innocent.

The banks knew, and the banks got paid

JPMorgan Chase (Tier A). Epstein banked here from roughly 1998 to 2013. His accounts held more than $200 million and generated real revenue for the bank. When compliance staff raised flags, internal emails show executives literally debating whether he was an “honorable” person, and his relationship manager, one Jes Staley, acted as his chief internal defender. The bank kept him for five years AFTER his conviction. In 2023, JPMorgan paid $290 million to survivors and $75 million to the US Virgin Islands. You don’t write checks that size for a misunderstanding.

Deutsche Bank (Tier A). When JPMorgan finally cut Epstein loose in 2013, Deutsche Bank picked him up like a free couch on the curb. They banked him from 2013 to 2018, a registered sex offender the entire time. New York regulators fined them $150 million in 2020 for it, and they paid survivors $75 million in 2023. Bonus: roughly 40,000 Deutsche Bank documents landed in the DOJ release, cracking open the family office world of the ultra rich in the process.

Barclays (Tier A). Staley again. After JPMorgan, he became CEO of Barclays in 2015 and told regulators his Epstein contact was ancient history. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority found he was in contact with Epstein in the days before his appointment was announced. They fined him and banned him from senior finance roles. He fought it. He lost.

Bear Stearns (Tier A, historical). Where the whole grift started. A college dropout math teacher from the Dalton School gets a Wall Street job through a student’s father, then exits under a regulatory cloud. Foreshadowing is a literary device.

Towers Financial (Tier A on the fraud, Tier B on Epstein’s role). Steven Hoffenberg’s half-billion dollar Ponzi scheme. Hoffenberg went to prison and spent years saying Epstein was in it up to his neck. Epstein was never charged. Draw your own conclusions about who had better lawyers.

And the vein is still open: House Oversight subpoenaed JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank, and the committee has already received roughly 5,000 documents with public release promised. Stay tuned.

The billionaire ATM

Apollo Global Management / Leon Black (Tier A). Black paid Epstein $158 million between 2012 and 2017, per the Dechert review Apollo itself commissioned. For “tax and estate planning advice.” From a convicted sex offender with no credentials. That is not a typo. That is $158 million, post-conviction, and it cost Black his CEO seat.

L Brands / Victoria’s Secret / Bath & Body Works (Tier A). Les Wexner didn’t just befriend Epstein. He handed him sweeping power of attorney over his fortune, his properties, his life. Epstein got the Manhattan mansion out of the deal. The lingerie empire whose brand was built on young women was, for years, financially intertwined with the most notorious sex trafficker in American history. Wexner exited in 2020 and has never fully explained where all the money went.

The Wexner Foundation (Tier A). Epstein sat as a trustee and drew money from it. A charitable foundation. Paying Jeffrey Epstein. Let that marinate.

The ivory tower cashed the checks

Harvard (Tier A, from their own report). Harvard’s own general counsel confirmed $9.1 million in Epstein gifts between 1998 and 2008, including $6.5 million to Martin Nowak’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. They made him a Visiting Fellow in 2005 despite the report’s finding that he lacked the qualifications and proposed a course of study he was unqualified to pursue. After his conviction, he visited the program’s offices more than 40 times and held a key card with unrestricted access as late as 2018. The new DOJ files show geneticist George Church planning a business venture with Epstein, and former president Larry Summers took an indefinite leave from teaching after his emails surfaced. Harvard is now reviewing its major donors named in the files, including Wexner, whose name is on a Kennedy School building funded with more than $42 million. Crimson-colored receipts, all of it.

MIT Media Lab (Tier A). Took Epstein’s money after his conviction and worked to conceal the source. Director Joi Ito resigned in 2019 when it came out. The internal review is public. Read it and weep.

Bard College (Tier A on donations, Tier B on the rest). Longtime president Leon Botstein is retiring after his Epstein ties were detailed. Epstein gave money to Bard after his conviction, which Botstein spent years spinning as noble fundraising pragmatism.

UCLA (Tier A). You already know this one if you read my Mark Tramo piece. A brain surgeon with nearly 1,300 appearances in the DOJ library, a decade of post-conviction emails, and $50,000 payments nobody wants to explain. I stood outside the Herb Alpert School of Music and screamed about it. I’d do it again.

Arizona State University (Tier A on the relationship). Lawrence Krauss’s Origins Project ran on Epstein enthusiasm and Epstein-adjacent funding. I’ve covered Krauss in depth before. The scientist patronage network wasn’t a bug. It was the reputation-laundering machine working exactly as designed.

Barnard College / Columbia (Tier B, developing). Seventy faculty members signed a letter demanding an investigation into a trustee named in the files. Watch this space.

The Dalton School (Tier A, historical). Where a 21-year-old with no degree was handed a classroom of teenagers. The origin story nobody at Dalton wants on the alumni newsletter.

The “foundations” that were really plumbing

Epstein ran his money through a lattice of entities that existed mostly to move cash and buy respectability:

• Financial Trust Company and Southern Trust Company, his US Virgin Islands vehicles, built to harvest tax breaks and central to the USVI’s civil racketeering case (Tier A)

• J. Epstein VI Foundation, Gratitude America, and Enhanced Education, the charitable fronts that wrote checks to scientists, student clubs, and universities to keep the invitations coming (Tier A via tax filings)

• COUQ Foundation, which regular readers know I’m pulling threads on right now in connection with Strauss Zelnick and Second City Capital Partners. More on that soon (Tier A documents, Tier B connections, verification in progress)

• Edge Foundation, John Brockman’s salon for big brains, where Epstein bankrolled the famous “billionaires’ dinners” and bought himself a seat at the table of Serious Ideas (Tier A on funding, via reporting and Edge’s own archives)

The rest of the top-tier rolodex

MC2 Model Management (Tier A). Jean-Luc Brunel’s agency, funded by Epstein and directly implicated in trafficking allegations. The modeling industry pipeline is its own future article, and it’s an ugly one.

Carbyne (Tier A on the investment). The Israeli emergency-services tech firm Epstein invested in alongside Ehud Barak. Yes, the surveillance tech angle is exactly as unsettling as it sounds.

The social circuit (Tier A on association only). The files are stuffed with dinner guests, flight passengers, and pen pals, from Hollywood directors to prime ministers and presidents. Association is not conspiracy, and I tier accordingly. But when your name shows up dozens of times in a sex trafficker’s calendar AFTER 2008, you don’t get to act surprised that people have questions.

Why the list matters

Here’s the thing that should make you genuinely angry. Epstein’s conviction in 2008 was supposed to be the end. Registered sex offender, level 3, most likely to reoffend. Instead, the next decade was the most institutionally supported stretch of his life. The banks kept the wires humming. The billionaires kept the checks coming. The universities kept the key cards active.

None of that happens without institutions deciding, over and over, in meetings with minutes and lawyers present, that the money mattered more than the girls.

The files are public now. Six million pages and counting, sitting on a DOJ server, free to search. Every entry on this list has a paper trail you can pull yourself. So pull it. Search a name. Follow a wire transfer. Send me what you find.

The rolodex is open. Let’s keep it that way.

Receipts

1. DOJ Epstein Library (primary documents): https://www.justice.gov/epstein

2. Al Jazeera, “How banks, billionaires aided Epstein after his 2008 conviction” (Feb 25, 2026): https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/2/25/how-banks-billionaires-aided-epstein-after-his-2008-conviction

3. Harvard President’s statement and full General Counsel report (May 2020): https://www.harvard.edu/president/news-and-statements-by-president-bacow/2020/report-regarding-jeffrey-epstein-s-connections-to-harvard/

4. Harvard OGC report PDF: https://ogc.harvard.edu/file_url/208

5. Harvard Magazine, “Harvard’s Epstein Probe Widened” (Feb 2026): https://www.harvardmagazine.com/university-news/harvard-epstein-probe-donors

6. CNN, Harvard/Church/Epstein emails exclusive (Feb 19, 2026): https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/19/politics/harvard-epstein-donations-influence-exclusive

7. Bloomberg, Deutsche Bank family office files (Feb 27, 2026): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-27/deutsche-bank-s-epstein-files-throw-family-offices-into-the-open

8. CNBC, House Oversight bank subpoenas and island photos (Dec 3, 2025): https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/03/epstein-files-jpmorgan-deutsche-bank-virgin-islands.html

9. Wikipedia, Epstein files (overview of releases and institutional fallout): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epstein_files

10. Feral America, “Mark Tramo to Epstein” (Feb 3, 2026): https://sueselle.substack.com/p/mark-tramo-to-epstein-newborns-will

The U.S. Virgin Islands hired a forensic accountant to figure out where Jeffrey Epstein’s money went. His name is Jorge Amador. He is a CPA, certified in financial forensics, a licensed attorney, thirty-five years in the business, and he once ran forensic accounting at one of the biggest securities litigation firms in the country. This is not a guy who tweets theories. This is a guy who reads bank statements for a living and signs his name to what he finds under penalty of perjury.

In July 2023, he signed his name to a report in the Virgin Islands’ lawsuit against JPMorgan. And buried in that report, under a heading a lawyer chose very carefully, is a foundation called COUQ.

Follow that foundation’s money in both directions and you get somewhere genuinely deranged. Downstream, its bank account was cutting checks to a woman prosecutors named as one of Epstein’s co-conspirators. Upstream, it answered to a parent foundation run by a former Chief Judge of Palm Beach County. And parked in the middle of it, a multimillion-dollar stake in a private-equity fund run by the man who today is CEO of the company that makes Grand Theft Auto.

One charity. A judge on one end, a video game magnate on the other, and a trafficking co-conspirator getting wire transfers out the side door. Let’s follow the money.

What the forensic accountant actually found

Amador’s job was to trace Epstein’s banking. The topline is staggering on its own: he found that JPMorgan held at least 134 accounts for Epstein and his related people and entities, and that those accounts ran more than $78 million in what he called “highly unusual and unexpected transactions.” Millions in cash. Millions in direct and indirect payments to women. Over $54 million to law firms.

Then he zeroed in on the charities, and gave that part of the report a heading that does not mince words: “Payments Unrelated to Charitable Organization’s Purpose.”

The charity he’s talking about is the COUQ Foundation. On paper, a 501(c)(3) science philanthropy. Its 2012 tax return lists the officers: Jeffrey Epstein, President. Richard Kahn, Treasurer. Darren Indyke, Vice President. Epstein’s accountant and Epstein’s personal lawyer, running a “charity” with a convicted sex offender at the top of the masthead.

Here is what Amador found in that charity’s JPMorgan account.

The money going out the side door

COUQ’s account made direct payments to women totaling more than $30,000, and Amador specifically flagged that some of these women were also being paid out of Epstein’s other accounts. This is the pattern the whole report is built to expose: the same recipients, the same women, paid through whatever entity was convenient, charity or shell or personal account, it didn’t matter.

One set of those payments is the one that should stop you cold. Money from the COUQ Foundation’s account went to a bank account at Banca Transilvania in Iasi, Romania, (Romania is a known hotbed for human trafficking) belonging to a woman Amador identifies as one of Epstein’s four alleged co-conspirators from his 2008 criminal case. Read that again. Epstein’s charitable foundation, the science one, was wiring money overseas to an alleged co-conspirator in his sex-trafficking operation.

An email dated April 13, 2009 (while Epstein was still in prison) shows the communication between Richard Kahn, Corina Tarnita, and Jeffrey Epstein regarding two separate payments to this individual, one to the Banca Transilvania in Romania, and one to an account in the United States.

The same account also sent $20,107 to an outfit called Phoenix Realty Home Inc., which the forensic accountant flagged as having no discernible connection to any charitable purpose.

This is not a foundation that got unlucky proximity to a bad man. Its checking account was part of the system.

The money coming in: Wexner’s stock and Apollo’s cash

So where did COUQ get the money it was moving around? Two places worth naming, both documented in its own tax filings.

The first is Leslie Wexner. In the fiscal year ending February 2002, the Wexner Children’s Trust, with Leslie H. Wexner as grantor, handed COUQ 600,000 shares of Too, Inc. common stock, a Limited spinoff, worth about $11.2 million at the date of the gift. COUQ then sold the shares off in chunks and booked more than $13 million in gains. Wexner puts in stock, Epstein’s foundation turns it into cash. Wexner is the only publicly confirmed client Epstein ever “managed money” for, and here is the mechanism in black and white.

The second is Apollo. COUQ’s earliest return, for the year ending February 2000, lists its founding contributors. Epstein is one. The other three, all care of Apollo Management, LP, are John Hannan, William Mack, and Leon Black.

That’s the same Leon Black who would later pay the U.S. Virgin Islands $62.5 million to settle its Epstein probe. Apollo executives seeded Epstein’s foundation on the ground floor.

Money in from a lingerie billionaire and a private-equity dynasty. Money out to an alleged co-conspirator in Romania. And in the middle, an investment that leads straight to a video game empire.

The fund in the middle: Second City Capital

Here is where a Grand Theft Auto executive enters the story.

COUQ’s own 990-PF tax returns show that the foundation held a stake in a private-equity fund called Second City Capital Partners I, LP. Not a small one, and not briefly. The foundation’s own filings track it year over year:

• Year ending Feb 2005: book value $3,454,785, market value $3,876,910. K-1 income that year, $307,036.

• Year ending Feb 2006: book value $5,168,275, market value $5,181,566.

• Year ending Feb 2007: book value $6,136,808, market value $6,144,653.

And it wasn’t a passive parking spot. Every year, COUQ paid the fund six figures in “consulting” and professional fees through the same K-1 entity: $107,712, then $126,258, then $120,000. Then, in the year ending February 2007, COUQ booked a $582,151 “bad debt expense” tied to Second City, plus a capital loss. Money flowed into the fund, fees flowed back out, and eventually something went bad. That is an active, entangled, and ultimately sour financial relationship between Epstein’s foundation and this fund.

Now, who ran Second City Capital Partners I? According to the SEC disclosure and the reporting first done by Business Insider, the $100 million fund was founded in 2004 by the late Canadian financier Samuel Belzberg, and it was directed by his son-in-law, a media executive named Strauss Zelnick. That is the same Strauss Zelnick who today is Chairman and CEO of Take-Two Interactive, the company about to charge you $70 for Grand Theft Auto VI.

Business Insider reported that Epstein’s total stake in the fund was $30 million, wired in 2004 from two entities sharing his Virgin Islands address, COUQ and YHS LLC, and that this was nearly a third of the entire fund. Two sources told Business Insider the money was invested on behalf of Wexner, and that Epstein’s own attorney, Darren Indyke, personally invested in the fund too.

Be clear on what proves what. COUQ’s tax return names the fund, “Second City Capital Partners I, LP,” and documents the multimillion-dollar position and the fees and the bad debt. The link from that fund to Zelnick and Belzberg comes from the SEC filing and Business Insider, not from the tax return. But put the two together and the picture is unambiguous: the foundation that was wiring money to Epstein’s alleged co-conspirator was, at the very same time, a multimillion-dollar limited partner in a fund run by the future CEO of Take-Two. When one investor is a third of your fund, you know exactly whose money you are managing.

The judge on top: KONI

Now go up the org chart, and this is where it stops being a story about billionaires working the financial system to billionaires working the judicial system.

There is a document in the federal Epstein Files production: EFTA00192303. It is a business report on THE C.O.U.Q. FOUNDATION, INC., pulled in December 2008, listing its West Palm Beach address at 250 South Australian Avenue, Suite 1404. And under the heading “Parent Company,” it names exactly one entity: THE KONI FOUNDATION INC.

Epstein’s COUQ, the charity wiring money to his co-conspirator and holding millions in Zelnick’s fund, reported a parent company. And that parent, the KONI Foundation, has on its officer roster a name that does not belong anywhere near this: Judge Lewis Kapner.

Lewis Kapner is not a nobody. He was Chief Judge of Florida’s Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, which covers Palm Beach County. He took the bench in 1967, made circuit judge in 1973, and by 1981 he was running the entire circuit. He co-wrote the book on Florida family law. And his foundation sat directly above Jeffrey Epstein’s on the org chart.

The addresses tighten it further. KONI’s Florida filing lists Suite 1402 at 250 Australian Avenue. COUQ sits in Suite 1404 of the same building. Two doors down, or right next door, depending on how the suites are laid out. One floor of one office building in West Palm Beach, two foundations, one of them a node in Epstein’s laundering network and the other with a former chief judge’s name on the paperwork.

Here is the honest caveat. The “parent company” designation comes from a commercial records aggregator, and its own report warns that its data should be verified against official state filings. Fine. But it was in the federal disclosure, which means investigators were looking at the same link, and the raw Florida corporate filings are the belt-and-suspenders I’m pulling next. Take the KONI-COUQ parent relationship as documented in the government’s own file and awaiting only the state-record confirmation.

Lay it on the table

Strip away the science-foundation costume and here is what the documents, all of them federal filings, tax returns, and a sworn forensic report, actually show.

A court-retained forensic accountant found that Jeffrey Epstein’s COUQ Foundation made payments unrelated to any charitable purpose, including wiring money to one of his alleged co-conspirators overseas. That same foundation was funded by Leslie Wexner’s stock and seeded by Apollo executives including Leon Black. That same foundation held a multimillion-dollar stake, complete with fees and a six-figure bad-debt writeoff, in Second City Capital Partners, the fund directed by Strauss Zelnick, now CEO of the company that makes Grand Theft Auto. And that same foundation reported a parent company controlled by Lewis Kapner, a former Chief Judge of Palm Beach County.

None of that is alleged by me. It is on paper, signed and filed.

What I cannot tell you is what any of the men at the edges of this knew. Whether Zelnick knew whose money was a third of his fund. Whether Kapner was an active hand or a name lent to letterhead. Those are real distinctions and I am not going to pretend past them. But “respected people just happened to be standing next to the most notorious sexual predator of his generation” gets very hard to say out loud when the forensic accountant has already shown you the charity was wiring cash to a co-conspirator, and the same charity sat between a video game magnate’s fund and a chief judge’s foundation.

Follow the money. It does not care who is standing at the end of the trail.

What you can do

COUQ, Wexner, L Brands, and JPMorgan are all named in the Epstein Files disclosures. If your representative voted for transparency and then went quiet, ask them why the money that ran through Epstein’s foundations, the ones that touch universities, judges, and video game executives, still hasn’t been walked all the way to the end in public, in congress, or in the courts. The forensic accountant did the tracing years ago. The filings are sitting right there.

The women who were wired money out of a fake charity’s account don’t get a foundation with a parent company. They get a redacted name in a 302, if it isn’t “accidentally” unredacted by the DOJ. The least the rest of us can do is read what the rich people bet we never would, connect the dots that are there waiting for us, and name these people publicly.

Next, don’t give your money to Strauss Zelnick by purchasing GTA6. In addition to the above Epstein connections, he is currently embroiled in a sexual harassment and wrongful termination lawsuit. Enough with the separating the art from the artist bullshit. Do not give your money to Epstein-associated individuals like Zelnick and Wexner. Full stop.

Keep looking into the money. Every document opens up a new potential lead, more interesting connections, and rabbit holes galore. Stick with a thread and keep pulling it… we can help unravel this together.

Receipts:

1. Expert Report of Jorge Amador (Axia Advisors, LLC), filed July 25, 2023 in Government of the U.S. Virgin Islands v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., No. 1:22-cv-10904-JSR (S.D.N.Y.), Document 238-31 — findings that COUQ’s account made “Payments Unrelated to Charitable Organization’s Purpose,” including $30,362 to women (one an alleged Epstein co-conspirator, wired to Banca Transilvania in Iasi, Romania) and $20,107 to Phoenix Realty Home Inc.; 134 JPMorgan accounts; $78M+ in highly unusual transactions. Epstein Files production, Bates EFTA02810827

2. THE C.O.U.Q. FOUNDATION, INC. Form 990-PF filings, FY ending Feb 2000 through Feb 2007 (EIN 13-3996471) — documenting the Second City Capital Partners I position ($3.45M rising to $6.14M book value), annual K-1 income, six-figure annual fees, the $582,151 FY2007 bad-debt writeoff; the Wexner Children’s Trust gift of 600,000 Too, Inc. shares (~$11.2M) in FY2002; and founding contributions from Epstein and Apollo Management’s John Hannan, William Mack, and Leon Black. Epstein Files production, Bates EFTA00224262

3. Comprehensive Business Report on The C.O.U.Q. Foundation, Inc., Dec. 9, 2008, listing The KONI Foundation Inc. as parent company. Epstein Files production, Bates EFTA00192303

4. THE KONI FOUNDATION, INC. — Florida Not-For-Profit Corporation Reinstatement (document N96000002084), filed Nov 3, 2008, listing Lewis Kapner and Howard Wiener as officers/directors, Howard Siegel as registered agent. Epstein Files production, EFTA00192298

5. “Jeffrey Epstein is financially tied to the spouses of big-name politicians”, Business Insider, July 25, 2019 (Second City directed by Strauss Zelnick; $30M Epstein stake; Indyke’s personal investment)

6. Government of the U.S. Virgin Islands v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., No. 1:22-cv-10904 (S.D.N.Y.) — exhibit naming Epstein as COUQ president, Indyke and Kahn as trustees

7. “Judicial Profile: Judge Lewis Kapner”, Palm Beach County Bar Association

8. How Jeffrey Epstein made his money, CBS News (Wexner as Epstein’s only confirmed money-management client)

If you have a lead that you want help investigating, a name that jumps out oddly to you, or an Epstein organization that you aren’t seeing talked about, please reach out! I am happy to help or spearhead the investigation, and will help in any way I can to bring it to the public’s eye.

Turns out Zelnick isn’t just a video game executive with a Dialog invite. He’s currently a named defendant in a fraud and sexual harassment lawsuit. His family’s old investment fund took $30 million from Jeffrey Epstein two years before the world knew what Epstein was. And his own son recently told the world on a podcast that he met Epstein once, at 13, and his parents pointed him out as a pedophile in real time. His mom would know. She dated Epstein in the 80s when she was 26.

None of these threads cancel each other out. They braid.

Who is Strauss Zelnick, and why should you care?

Strauss Zelnick is the Chairman and CEO of Take-Two Interactive, the company behind Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and NBA 2K. He’s also the founder and managing partner of the private equity firm ZMC, a former interim Chairman of CBS Corporation, and, as of June 2026, a confirmed name on the leaked membership list of Dialog, Peter Thiel’s invite-only “off-the-record” society for the executive and political class.

Dialog doesn’t do public rosters. It took a researcher named Maia Arson Crimew finding the entire list hardcoded into the site’s own HTML for any of us to know who’s actually in the room. Zelnick’s name is right there, next to Elon Musk, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, a sitting governor, and the CEO of YouTube. Make of that company what you will.

The Lawsuit Nobody is Talking About

In August 2024, an investor identified in court filings as John Doe and his company, Marks Capital Inc., sued Zelnick and an entity called B&C Retail Ventures LLC in LA County Superior Court. The original complaint was about money: John Doe alleges Zelnick invested $10 million in his business and then took the business away from him. Garden variety private equity ruthlessness, the kind that barely makes the trades. (Note: I do have the name of the plaintiff, but am protecting his privacy.)

Then, a month later, the plaintiffs amended the complaint. They added sexual harassment. Intentional infliction of emotional distress. Unfair business practices. Wrongful termination.

The case has since been partially stayed pending arbitration, and a few outlets have tried to spin this into “well actually it’s just a fraud case, the sexual harassment headlines are misleading.”

I’d encourage you to sit with why a man’s PR machine would want you to think “merely accused of defrauding a business partner out of his company” is the better headline. Both claims are pled. Both are still live. None of it is proven in court, and Zelnick is entitled to that presumption same as anyone.

But “nothing to see here” is doing a lot of work for a case that’s been active for two years and just got pushed to a January 2026 status conference (note: I haven’t been able to find information from that January 2026 date yet - I am still searching).

The Lone Epstein File mention

Strauss Zelnick appears one time in the DOJ Epstein Library, in a very interesting yet unexplained murder-board style chart showing connections between various prominent individuals. Zelnick is at the bottom in the middle, with strong connections to Mark Cuban, Ron Perelman, and Leon Black. There is no indication of who build this file, only a bold red “CONFIDENTIAL” at the top, indicating it might be from a three-letter agency.

The Money that Predates It All

Here’s where it gets interesting, and where you need to follow the lineage closely, because precision matters and I’m not going to overstate this.

In 2004, Strauss Zelnick’s father-in-law, the late Canadian businessman Samuel Belzberg, founded a $100 million private equity fund called Second City Capital Partners I. Zelnick directed it.

Jeffrey Epstein put $30 million into that fund. Two sources told Business Insider that money was invested on behalf of Leslie Wexner, the L Brands billionaire who is the only publicly confirmed client of Epstein’s “money management” services. Epstein also separately co-invested another $20 million alongside the fund into a debt instrument tied to a company called ID Biomedical. Below is a sale of some ID Biomedical stock, EFTA00199041.

The investment happened in 2004. The public didn’t know what Epstein was until 2006. Richard Blum, Dianne Feinstein’s husband, was also a limited partner in that same fund, a detail that has nothing to do with Zelnick directly but tells you something about how small this world really is.

To be precise, because precision matters: there’s no public record showing Zelnick personally knew Epstein was a limited partner, and the reporting suggests the money may have moved through Epstein as Wexner’s proxy rather than as Epstein’s own initiative. I’m not going to tell you Strauss Zelnick shook Jeffrey Epstein’s hand and closed a deal, because I don’t have that receipt. What I have is a fund his family directed, taking seven figures from a man who would later be a registered sex offender, four years before anyone outside Palm Beach PD knew to ask questions.

And Then There’s Lucas

Strauss Zelnick’s son, Lucas, is a stand-up comedian with a podcast of his own and a few million views of crowd work clips. He’s also, repeatedly, on the record about his mother having dated Jeffrey Epstein in the 1980s, before she married Strauss.

On a recent podcast appearance, the host brought it up directly. “We’re going to have to talk about your mom dating Epstein,” he said. Lucas didn’t flinch.

“Yeah, of course. I’ve definitely talked about it before,” he said. “I mean, I’ve met him. Once. I was like 13. But I was told he was a pedophile. They were like, ‘stay away, that guy’s a pedophile.’”

His parents, he said, pointed Epstein out to him directly, in a group setting. “That guy’s a pedophile. Stay away from him.”

I want to be fair to Lucas here, because he’s a comedian telling a story about his own childhood, not a witness in a deposition, and the story he tells is one where the adults in his life identified Epstein as dangerous and warned him off. That’s not nothing. If anything, it complicates the tidy narrative, because it means somebody in that house knew exactly what Epstein was, years before most of the country did.

But later in the same conversation, Lucas pivots the story somewhere worth sitting with. He waves off “Epstein conspiracy theory shit” as a distraction from the actual conspiracy, which he describes as wealth inequality itself: rich people knowing each other isn’t the scandal, he says, the scandal is that they’re rich at all while other people starve.

It’s a tidy little piece of class analysis from a guy whose father runs a fund that took Epstein money, sits in a billionaire’s secret society, and is currently being sued for fraud and harassment. The rich people knowing each other IS the story, Lucas. You just told it to us yourself.

What Do We Do With All of This?

A confirmed Dialog membership. An active fraud and sexual harassment lawsuit. A family investment fund that pocketed $30 million in Epstein-routed money in 2004. A son who says his own parents called Epstein a pedophile to his face, in front of him, as a kid.

None of these are smoking guns on their own. Together, they’re a portrait of how the same fifty or so families just keep showing up, in every file, every flight log, every leaked HTML page, no matter which decade you check.

Strauss Zelnick gets to keep his presumption of innocence in the Marks Capital case. He doesn’t get to keep pretending the Dialog leak and the Second City money and his own kid’s podcast stories are unrelated trivia. They’re the same Rolodex.

Receipts:

1. Marks Capital, Inc. v. Harry Strauss Zelnick et al., LA County Superior Court, filed 8/9/2024

2. First Amended Complaint adding sexual harassment, IIED, unfair business practices, wrongful termination claims, filed 9/2024

3. Dialog member list leak, hardcoded HTML, discovered by Maia Arson Crimew, June 16, 2026

4. Business Insider, “Jeffrey Epstein and Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s husband were co-investors in an exclusive private-equity fund,” July 25, 2019

5. Lucas Zelnick podcast appearance, Coastal Idiots Podcast, June 9, 2026

The obvious question, once you have a list like this, is how much of it overlaps with the other list everyone is reading right now. So here it is. Every name, checked against the released Epstein files and reliable reporting on them.

Read the methodology note first. It matters.

## The part nobody is saying out loud

The cleanest finding is not about any one member. It is about the club itself.

Dialog grew out of a world Epstein was already inside. In a 2016 email to Joi Ito, Epstein wrote that ["peter thiel LOVED the secret socieity idea"](https://stanforddaily.com/2026/06/16/levin-stanford-alumni-appear-on-list-of-peter-thiel-dialog-society-affiliates/) and had done a lot of work on the concept. The reply that evening: let's do it.

And the 2014 Dialog retreat invitation is itself sitting in the files, because [the invite got forwarded to Epstein's personal email](https://epsteinexposed.com/documents/d-23831) and he was listed among the "global leaders" invited. So a handful of current members are in the Epstein files for the simple reason that they were on a Dialog guest list Epstein received.

Start there. The individual matches are the footnotes.

## The matches, ranked by what the files actually show

### Tier 1. Direct, documented relationships

**Peter Attia.** The standout. His name [appears more than 1,700 times](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_named_in_the_Epstein_files). One email has him telling Epstein the life he led was outrageous, "and yet I can't tell a soul." Since the release he lost a science-officer role, an advisory seat, and a CBS News contributor spot.

**Reid Hoffman.** Said for years that his contacts were MIT Media Lab fundraising at Joi Ito's request, last one in 2015. In February 2026 he [revised that](https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/linkedin-billionaire-reid-hoffman-reveals-180850572.html), conceding six more meetings through 2018, and [has confirmed](https://abcnews.com/US/linkedin-founder-reid-hoffmans-ties-jeffrey-epstein-face/story?id=127651719) a one-night stay on the island in 2014. No victim has alleged wrongdoing by him.

**Lawrence Summers.** A longtime acquaintance. The documents are [full of meetings and dinners](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-list-of-powerful-men-named-in-the-epstein-files-from-elon-musk-to-former-prince-andrew), including Summers still emailing Epstein in 2019, after everyone knew exactly who Epstein was.

**Peter Thiel.** Dialog's cofounder, and independently all over the files. He and Epstein [exchanged emails until early 2019](https://stanforddaily.com/2026/06/16/levin-stanford-alumni-appear-on-list-of-peter-thiel-dialog-society-affiliates/), and Epstein called him a "great friend."

### Tier 2. Named, but contested or peripheral

**Elon Musk.** A December 2014 [calendar entry](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/27/elon-musk-peter-thiel-steve-bannon-among-names-in-new-epstein-documents) reads as a reminder about Musk going to the island. Musk says he declined, and that Epstein kept trying.

**Steven Pinker.** Mentioned dozens of times, but [no evidence in the files that he ever messaged Epstein](https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/a-twisted-breed/). He turns up in a 2002 video on the plane, before the conviction, and [has said](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/19/metro/steven-pinker-epstein-ties/) he could never stand the guy, took no funding, and tried to keep his distance. One of the scientists Epstein collected, not one who collected back.

**Jonathan Haidt.** Surfaces through the [Edge Foundation dinner circuit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_named_in_the_Epstein_files). John Brockman urged Epstein to meet him in 2011, and he was on invite lists for Brockman events Epstein attended.

**Sam Harris.** Minor. The documented item is Epstein telling Harris to use more charm and less argument in debates.

### Tier 3. In the files because they were on a Dialog invite Epstein received

**Chamath Palihapitiya. Bret Stephens. Charlie Songhurst.** All on the [2014 Dialog participant list](https://the307.substack.com/p/epstein-files-attendees-of-peter) that lives in the files. Proximity to a guest list, not to the man. Worth naming, worth not overcooking.

### Handle with tongs

**Jared Kushner.** His name appears in the DOJ release, and [an FBI Confidential Human Source document](https://www.aol.com/entertainment/doj-claims-released-epstein-files-161000380.html) makes wide-ranging assertions about Epstein, Dershowitz, the Kushner brothers, and others. CHS reporting is raw, uncorroborated source material. It is not a finding. The DOJ itself stressed that being named implies no wrongdoing. If this runs, it runs with that caveat welded to it.

## The full 116, with status

| # | Name | Dialog descriptor | Epstein-file status |

|---|------|-------------------|---------------------|

| 1 | Immad Akhund | Mercury | No documented appearance |

| 2 | Turki Al Faisal Al Saud | King Faisal Foundation | No documented appearance |

| 3 | Reema Al-Saud | Saudi Ambassador to U.S. | No documented appearance |

| 4 | John Arnold | Arnold Ventures | No documented appearance |

| 5 | Susan Athey | Stanford GSB | No documented appearance |

| 6 | Peter Attia | Attia Medical | DIRECT. 1,700+ mentions |

| 7 | Scott Belsky | A24 Films | No documented appearance |

| 8 | Nicolas Berggruen | Berggruen Holdings | No documented appearance |

| 9 | Scott Bessent | U.S. Treasury Secretary | No documented appearance |

| 10 | Preet Bharara | Fmr. U.S. Attorney SDNY | No documented appearance |

| 11 | Elizabeth Blackburn | Nobel laureate, Salk | No documented appearance |

| 12 | Sarah Bond | Xbox, Microsoft | No documented appearance |

| 13 | Cory Booker | U.S. Senate (NJ) | No documented appearance |

| 14 | Rachel Brand | Walmart, fmr. DOJ | No documented appearance |

| 15 | Scooter Braun | Hybe America | No documented appearance |

| 16 | Pete Briger | Fortress Investment Group | No documented appearance |

| 17 | Greg Brockman | OpenAI | No documented appearance. NOT John Brockman |

| 18 | Manuel Bronstein | Roblox | No documented appearance |

| 19 | Peter Brown | Renaissance Technologies | No documented appearance. RenTech tie runs through Jim Simons |

| 20 | Thasunda Brown Duckett | TIAA | No documented appearance |

| 21 | Sophia Bush | Actress | No documented appearance |

| 22 | Mike Cannon-Brookes | Atlassian | No documented appearance |

| 23 | Cesar Carvalho | Wellhub | No documented appearance |

| 24 | Wences Casares | Xapo Bank | No documented appearance |

| 25 | Julian Castro | Fmr. HUD Secretary | No documented appearance |

| 26 | Bob Cialdini | Author, Influence | No documented appearance |

| 27 | Matt Clifford | UK PM AI adviser | No documented appearance |

| 28 | Caroline Cochran | Oklo | No documented appearance |

| 29 | Matt Cohler | Fmr. Benchmark | No documented appearance |

| 30 | Scott Cook | Intuit | No documented appearance |

| 31 | Tyler Cowen | Mercatus Center, GMU | No documented appearance |

| 32 | Ted Cruz | U.S. Senate (TX) | No documented appearance |

| 33 | Adam D'Angelo | Quora | No documented appearance |

| 34 | Mitch Daniels | Fmr. Gov. Indiana, Purdue | No documented appearance |

| 35 | Dan Driscoll | U.S. Army Secretary | No documented appearance |

| 36 | Charles Duhigg | Author | No documented appearance |

| 37 | Steve Ells | Fmr. Chipotle | No documented appearance |

| 38 | Tim Ferriss | Author, podcaster | No documented appearance |

| 39 | Marcos Galperin | MercadoLibre | No documented appearance |

| 40 | Atul Gawande | Author, fmr. USAID | No documented appearance |

| 41 | Tom Goldstein | SCOTUSblog | No documented appearance |

| 42 | Joseph Gordon-Levitt | Actor | No documented appearance. Online speculation only |

| 43 | Adam Grant | Wharton | No documented appearance |

| 44 | Severin Hacker | Duolingo | No documented appearance |

| 45 | Jonathan Haidt | NYU Stern | ORBIT. Edge/Brockman dinner invites |

| 46 | Peggy Hamburg | Fmr. FDA Commissioner | No documented appearance |

| 47 | Sam Harris | Podcaster, author | NAMED. Epstein gave him debate advice |

| 48 | Jim Himes | U.S. House (CT) | No documented appearance |

| 49 | Auren Hoffman | Dialog Chairman, SafeGraph | No documented appearance |

| 50 | Reid Hoffman | Greylock, fmr. LinkedIn | DIRECT. Island, dinners, meetings to 2018 |

| 51 | Rob Hur | Fmr. Special Counsel | No documented appearance |

| 52 | Bob Jain | Millennium Management | No documented appearance |

| 53 | Bryan Johnson | Kernel, Blueprint | No documented appearance |

| 54 | Kaja Kallas | EU Commission VP, fmr. Estonia PM | No documented appearance |

| 55 | Gaurva Kapadia | XN | No documented appearance |

| 56 | Karen Karniol-Tambour | Bridgewater | No documented appearance |

| 57 | Garry Kasparov | Fmr. World Chess champion | No documented appearance |

| 58 | Neal Katyal | Milbank, fmr. SG office | No documented appearance |

| 59 | Shahid Khaqan Abbasi | Fmr. Pakistan PM | No documented appearance |

| 60 | Ezra Klein | NYT | No documented appearance |

| 61 | Tarō Kōno | Japan Digital Minister | No documented appearance |

| 62 | Henry Kravis | KKR | No documented appearance |

| 63 | Jared Kushner | Affinity Partners | TONGS. DOJ name appearance plus uncorroborated FBI CHS doc |

| 64 | Jason Kwon | OpenAI | No documented appearance |

| 65 | Leonard Leo | Federalist Society | No documented appearance |

| 66 | Jon Levin | Stanford President | No documented appearance |

| 67 | Howie Liu | Airtable | No documented appearance |

| 68 | Joe Lonsdale | 8VC, Palantir cofounder | No documented appearance |

| 69 | Micky Malka | Ribbit Capital | No documented appearance |

| 70 | Stan McChrystal | Fmr. U.S. Army General | No documented appearance |

| 71 | Neal Mohan | YouTube CEO | No documented appearance |

| 72 | Lisa Monaco | Fmr. Deputy AG | No documented appearance |

| 73 | Wes Moore | Gov. Maryland | No documented appearance |

| 74 | Elon Musk | SpaceX, Tesla | CONTESTED. Calendar entry re island, denies going |

| 75 | Demet Mutlu | Trendyol | No documented appearance |

| 76 | Vas Narasimhan | Novartis | No documented appearance |

| 77 | Grover Norquist | Americans for Tax Reform | No documented appearance |

| 78 | Mike Novogratz | Galaxy Digital | No documented appearance |

| 79 | Jim O'Neill | HHS nominee, Thiel Fellowship cofounder | No documented appearance |

| 80 | Chamath Palihapitiya | Social Capital | TIER 3. On 2014 Dialog invite in files |

| 81 | Benj Pasek | Songwriter | No documented appearance |

| 82 | Daniel Pink | Author | No documented appearance |

| 83 | Steven Pinker | Harvard | PERIPHERAL. Named often, plane video 2002, no correspondence found |

| 84 | Jared Polis | Gov. Colorado | No documented appearance |

| 85 | Jonathan Ross | Groq | No documented appearance |

| 86 | Robert Rubin | Fmr. Treasury Secretary | No documented appearance |

| 87 | Gretchen Rubin | Author, podcaster | No documented appearance |

| 88 | Sheikh Nawaf Saud Nasir Al-Sabah | Kuwait Petroleum | No documented appearance |

| 89 | Will Scharf | White House Staff Secretary | No documented appearance |

| 90 | Mario Schlosser | Oscar Health | No documented appearance |

| 91 | Eric Schmidt | Fmr. Google/Alphabet CEO | No documented appearance |

| 92 | Dan Schulman | Fmr. PayPal CEO | No documented appearance |

| 93 | Drew Scott | Property Brothers | No documented appearance |

| 94 | Kim Scott | Author, Radical Candor | No documented appearance |

| 95 | Pete Shadbolt | PsiQuantum | No documented appearance |

| 96 | Ali Siddiqui | OnZero, fmr. Pakistan Amb. | No documented appearance |

| 97 | Barry Silbert | Digital Currency Group | No documented appearance |

| 98 | Anne-Marie Slaughter | New America, Princeton | No documented appearance |

| 99 | Charlie Songhurst | Meta board, fmr. Microsoft | TIER 3. On 2014 Dialog invite in files |

| 100 | Jens Spahn | German Bundestag | No documented appearance |

| 101 | Scott Stephenson | Verisk Analytics | No documented appearance |

| 102 | Barry Sternlicht | Starwood Capital | No documented appearance |

| 103 | Bret Stephens | NYT | TIER 3. On 2014 Dialog invite in files |

| 104 | Lawrence Summers | Fmr. Harvard, fmr. Treasury | DIRECT. Meetings, dinners, emails to 2019 |

| 105 | Astro Teller | X (Moonshots) | No documented appearance |

| 106 | Peter Thiel | Dialog cofounder | DIRECT. Emails to 2019, "great friend" |

| 107 | Nick Thompson | The Atlantic, fmr. Wired | No documented appearance |

| 108 | John Townsend | Author, Boundaries | No documented appearance |

| 109 | Tom Tugendhat | UK MP | No documented appearance |

| 110 | Tim Urban | Wait But Why | No documented appearance |

| 111 | Rick Warren | Author, pastor | No documented appearance |

| 112 | Strauss Zelnick | Take-Two Interactive | No documented appearance |

| 113 | Shivon Zilis | Neuralink | No documented appearance |

## Methodology, because this is the part that gets people sued

"The Epstein files" are not one thing. They are a contact book with two thousand entries, flight logs, court depositions, financial records, and the 2025 and 2026 DOJ and congressional releases. Being in the contact book means Epstein had your number. It does not mean anything else.

The status column above tracks four very different things, and the difference is the whole story:

- **Direct** means documented correspondence, meetings, or a relationship in the released material.

- **Orbit / Peripheral** means the Edge Foundation science-dinner circuit, where Epstein collected academics and many never wrote back.

- **Tier 3** means their name is in the files only because they appeared on a Dialog guest list Epstein was sent.

- **Tongs** means raw, uncorroborated source allegations that are not findings.

Appearing in the files establishes no wrongdoing on its own. The DOJ said so in writing. Every person here who corresponded with Epstein has denied knowledge of his crimes. Three of them, Hoffman, Summers, and Attia, have faced real professional consequences anyway, which tells you the relationships were close enough to be costly.

The names marked "no documented appearance" did the work for you: they are the ones you do not write about. Greg Brockman is not John Brockman. Peter Brown is not Jim Simons. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a search-engine rumor. Leaving them off is not a courtesy. It is the job.

## Receipts

- Dialog member directory, captured before the patch: [github.com/nzaki-dev/dialog](https://github.com/nzaki-dev/dialog)

- WIRED on the leak: [wired.com](https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/)

- Thiel emails and the "secret society" origin: [Stanford Daily](https://stanforddaily.com/2026/06/16/levin-stanford-alumni-appear-on-list-of-peter-thiel-dialog-society-affiliates/)

- The 2014 Dialog invitation inside the files: [epsteinexposed.com doc](https://epsteinexposed.com/documents/d-23831), [The 307](https://the307.substack.com/p/epstein-files-attendees-of-peter)

- Master index of people named: [Wikipedia, List of people named in the Epstein files](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_named_in_the_Epstein_files)

- Reid Hoffman, revised meeting count: [Business Insider via Yahoo](https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/linkedin-billionaire-reid-hoffman-reveals-180850572.html); investigation context: [ABC News](https://abcnews.com/US/linkedin-founder-reid-hoffmans-ties-jeffrey-epstein-face/story?id=127651719)

- Musk island calendar entry: [Al Jazeera](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/27/elon-musk-peter-thiel-steve-bannon-among-names-in-new-epstein-documents)

- Summers and the powerful-men roster: [PBS / AP](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-list-of-powerful-men-named-in-the-epstein-files-from-elon-musk-to-former-prince-andrew)

- Pinker, kept his distance: [Boston Globe](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/19/metro/steven-pinker-epstein-ties/); the scientist salon: [New Humanist](https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/a-twisted-breed/), [The Conversation](https://theconversation.com/what-the-jeffrey-epstein-files-reveal-about-how-elites-trade-toxic-gifts-and-favours-275727)

- Kushner, DOJ release and CHS document context: [DOJ release coverage](https://www.aol.com/entertainment/doj-claims-released-epstein-files-161000380.html)

Bill Pulte has never worked in intelligence. Never worked in national security. Never held elected office, never ran a federal investigation, never managed anything more demanding than a private equity shop trading on a name he didn’t build. His one qualification to lead the office that coordinates all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies is that he spent the last year doing something Donald Trump liked very, very much.

He went after Trump’s enemies. With government resources. And nobody stopped him.

On June 2, 2026, Trump named Pulte acting Director of National Intelligence, replacing Tulsi Gabbard, who steps down June 30. Republicans called him unqualified to his face. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said flatly, “We don’t need a weaponized DNI, we need professionals there.” Sen. John Cornyn said he saw no evidence of any qualifications. Democrats called him a henchman. The intelligence community said nothing, which is its own answer.

How does a Twitter philanthropist with a felony-sex-offender ally and an open DOJ investigation end up running American intelligence?

Follow the money. Follow the power. Follow the pardons.

The Origin Story They Leave Out of the Press Release

Pulte didn’t claw his way up. He was born onto the top floor. His grandfather built PulteGroup, one of the largest homebuilders in America. The grandson inherited the name, the network, and a talent for going to war with his own blood.

Before he hunted Trump’s enemies, he practiced on his family. He accused his grandfather’s widow of insider trading. He was allegedly behind a website branding an aunt a “fake Christian.” He called another relative “a fat slob,” a “weirdo,” a “grifter.” That’s not from his critics. It’s from court records in a feud he started that dragged in the company itself. Internal PulteGroup memos from the litigation show executives so alarmed they asked him to give up his Twitter handle, noting that “negativity toward the company has continued in synch with Bill’s activities.”

So a man pushed out of his own family’s company needed a new brand. In 2019 he found one: handing out cash to strangers online and calling himself the “inventor of Twitter philanthropy.” He dangled two cars for veterans if Trump retweeted him.

Trump did.

The followers poured in, north of three million. He promised to give away a million dollars at a million followers and, per archived records, gave away about $474,000 the year of the pledge, a number his people won’t detail.

The halo slipped fast.

A bitter split with a veterans’ charity. Critics calling him a charlatan. A $250,000 wire to a former Kanye West associate, sent partly on a false promise that Ye would back his philanthropy. He got the money back when the associate was indicted for wire fraud, though the case later collapsed.

What stuck was the following and the usefulness. He poured money into Trump, the RNC, and aligned super PACs before 2024. When Trump won, Pulte wanted in. He angled for HUD Secretary. He got FHFA Director instead. That turned out to be the better weapon.

The Weapon

The Federal Housing Finance Agency is supposed to be a regulator. It oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together guarantee over $7 trillion in American mortgages. It is not a police force. It is not an opposition research shop. Under the law, it has no general crime-fighting authority and no power to make criminal referrals beyond those granted to its Inspector General.

Pulte ran it as all three.

Within a week of taking office in March 2025, he fired Freddie Mac’s CEO and purged the nonpartisan boards of both companies, installing himself, his associates, and loyalists. He made himself chairman of both boards at once, which Senate Democrats flagged as an apparent violation of federal law. He fired Fannie Mae’s chief compliance and ethics officer. He fired the head of HR and the COO. He gutted oversight and pushed stunts like a 50-year mortgage with no pilot and no public comment.

Then he went fishing.

He referred four of Trump’s highest-profile enemies to the Justice Department for alleged mortgage fraud: New York AG Letitia James, who’d won a $450 million judgment against Trump; Senator Adam Schiff; Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, whom Trump was trying to force off the board; and former Rep. Eric Swalwell. All four denied it. A Yale law professor’s read was blunt: Pulte appears to have “handed Fannie and Freddie a list of political enemies and asked for their loan files for review.”

Then it gets darker. Rep. Jamie Raskin’s letter to Pulte alleges he used FHFA to run “deep-sea fishing expeditions of Americans’ personal financial information, apparently with help from Peter Thiel’s data company, Palantir, to deliver artificial intelligence-aided opposition research reports” on people who’d held Trump accountable.

Read it again. Palantir’s AI. Mining mortgage data. Building dossiers. On the president’s enemies.

And the sequence is the tell. Pulte referred Cook. Then Trump fired Cook, citing those exact allegations. Referral first. Firing second. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a pipeline.

The Ethics Office Disappears

When Fannie Mae employees raised complaints about a senior officer close to Pulte, they did the normal thing. They went to the ethics office.

He fired the ethics office.

Up to a dozen of roughly 60 people he terminated worked in Fannie Mae’s ethics, internal audit, and investigations units. Where do you report misconduct once the watchdogs are gone?

Nowhere, because Trump had also fired the FHFA Inspector General. Complaints came in about a Pulte ally; the people who handle complaints were shown the door.

That’s not a bug. That’s a primary feature.

The Man He Brought In

In November 2025, Reuters found the through-line. Pulte had quietly installed Mark Zarkin, a Detroit-area restaurateur and Trump booster, as a consultant to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. No public announcement. Weeks later he still had a Freddie Mac email and an internal “consultant” label.

Zarkin had zero housing experience. What he did have was a no-contest plea to a felony sex crime, a conviction later vacated by a judge for reasons never explained.

And an active Michigan lawsuit accusing him of a scheme to bribe Trump for a presidential pardon for someone in New York. Per Fox 2 Detroit, Zarkin and a Hamtramck police official allegedly went to Mar-a-Lago to pitch wealthy donors, with a proposed payment to the president of $1 million to $5 million routed through Zarkin. He was allegedly handed a fake police ID naming him “Chief Director” to grease his access. A summary of the investigation reviewed by Reuters confirmed the FBI seized phones tied to the case.

Asked about it, Zarkin told Reuters: “I have never been employed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. I also have no criminal record. Anything you say to the contrary is defamatory.” Pulte called the questions “filled with completely false and defamatory statements” and said nothing more.

Deny. Attack. Reverse Victim and Offender. You know DARVO by now.

The Investigation Into the Investigator

By late 2025 the probes were stacking up. The Government Accountability Office opened a formal investigation into whether Pulte misused federal authority and data in the referral campaign, down to how he accessed private mortgage records.

Then the bigger one. The DOJ and FBI opened an investigation into whether Pulte and U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin interfered with the criminal cases against Trump’s adversaries, allegedly bringing in people outside DOJ, sharing grand jury material, and elbowing aside the FBI agents on the James and Schiff matters. A witness told agents she’d been talking with men she believed were DOJ investigators who had no authorization to be near the case. Investigators assessed that the interference may have jeopardized multiple federal prosecutions.

The man accused of corrupting investigations into Trump’s enemies was himself under investigation.

And then Trump promoted him to run American intelligence.

What the Promotion Actually Buys

The DNI sits on top of 18 agencies. It controls the President’s Daily Brief. It decides what the executive branch sees and what it doesn’t. It is the most sensitive data access in the federal government.

Pulte’s entire FHFA record is one skill performed over and over: pull names from a database, build a file, weaponize it. He did it with mortgage data and a Thiel AI tool. Now he’s near signals intelligence, human intelligence, counterintelligence, and the surveillance machinery of the United States, with the midterm elections inside his 210-day window.

Sen. Mark Warner, vice chair of the Intelligence Committee, said it plainly: Trump chose “an official who has demonstrated not just willingness but eagerness to use government power against the president’s enemies.”

The reward isn’t a side effect; the reward is the message.

The Pattern

Step back and look at the whole shape.

A man with a history of scorched-earth feuds turns online charity into a brand. The brand catches Trump. He pays in, generously. He’s handed a regulator. He strips out its oversight, fires the ethics team, loses the inspector general, packs the boards with loyalists. He uses the agency’s private financial data, allegedly with a Thiel AI firm, to build cases against Trump’s enemies and hands them to a loyalist DOJ. The cases justify firings and prosecutions. When investigators close in, he’s lifted out of reach and handed a bigger weapon.

Meanwhile he slips a vacated felony sex offender tied to an alleged pardon-bribery scheme into the two largest mortgage companies in the country. No announcement. FBI seizes phones. No charges. The conviction vanishes.

That’s not chaos. That’s architecture.

The pardon is the hinge, the way it always is in these networks. Protection flows one direction; money and loyalty flow back. Zarkin allegedly tried to buy a pardon and landed a federal consulting gig. Pulte built a targeting machine for Trump and landed American intelligence. Same logic both times: get close to power, prove you’ll operate outside the rules, and keep the watchdogs blind.

A protection economy. And the man at the center of it, who once called a relative a “fat slob” in a court filing and shorted his own million-dollar charity pledge by half, is one nomination away from the most powerful surveillance apparatus ever built.

But here’s the thing they’re hoping you’ll miss.

He Isn’t Confirmed. That’s the Opening.

Pulte is the acting director. Under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, an acting official can serve about 210 days once Gabbard leaves on June 30, then the seat needs a Senate-confirmed nominee. To install him for real, the White House has to send his name to the Senate, and the Senate has to vote yes.

It doesn’t have the votes locked. Thune already warned that a permanent Pulte is “a lengthy road ahead of him.” Tillis is a no. Cornyn is openly skeptical. McConnell signaled he won’t back him long-term. The margin is thin and the discomfort is bipartisan. That is exactly the condition where public pressure changes outcomes.

So if you’ve read this far and are trying to figure out what to do with your anger and frustration, here’s where to put it.

Call your senators, both of them. The Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121. All you need is one sentence: oppose Bill Pulte for Director of National Intelligence, in any capacity, permanent or acting. Find direct numbers at senate.gov.

Aim at the Intelligence Committee. They vet the nominee first, and that’s where this can die before a floor vote. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence roster and contacts are here. If a member represents you, your call counts double.

Lean on the persuadable Republicans. Thune, Cornyn, Tillis, McConnell, and the GOP members of the Intelligence Committee have already voiced doubts on the record. Doubt is not a no. Hold them to the words they’ve already said.

Demand the investigations stay alive. Tell your reps the GAO probe and the DOJ/FBI inquiry into Pulte must conclude before any confirmation vote. No one gets confirmed to run intelligence while under investigation for corrupting investigations.

Make it loud and local. Submit to your local paper. Tag your senators publicly. Ask them one question and refuse to let it go: why should a man under federal investigation for weaponizing one agency be trusted with all of them?

The clock is running on 210 days.

The Senate is the lock on the permanent door. They are listening right now, while it’s news, while it’s uncomfortable, while they haven’t decided.

Use it.

Receipts

• How Bill Pulte Learned the Art of the Attack, From His Own Family to Letitia James (AP via U.S. News, Oct. 10, 2025)

• Trump official accusing president’s rivals of crimes tapped a former registered sex offender for federal housing role (Reuters, Nov. 7, 2025)

• Hamtramck lawsuit: Chief worked bribes with Trump associate, election fraud, massive cover-ups (Fox 2 Detroit, June 3, 2025)

• Trump official tapped a former registered sex offender for federal housing role (Reuters via Union Leader, on the vacated conviction and pardon-bribe lawsuit)

• FHFA head Bill Pulte fired ethics workers at Fannie Mae who were looking into his ally (Washington Post, Nov. 10, 2025)

• More on the Fannie Ethics Meltdown (Radical Compliance, on the fired Inspector General, Nov. 10, 2025)

• Raskin letter to FHFA Director Pulte (House Judiciary, Sept. 8, 2025, on the Palantir allegation)

• GAO opens investigation into Pulte’s mortgage-fraud referrals (Senate Banking Committee, Dec. 4, 2025)

• Bill Pulte: Who He Is, Where He Came From, and What He Did at FHFA (record summary citing the Yale Journal on Regulation analysis)

• Letter to Pulte re corporate governance at Fannie and Freddie (Sen. Jack Reed et al., March 31, 2025)

• Bill Pulte, Donald Trump, political enemies: Letitia James, Lisa Cook, Adam Schiff (Fortune/AP, Oct. 11, 2025, on the Twitter philanthropy figures)

• Trump appoints Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence (NPR, June 2, 2026)

• Pulte appointment would give a Trump attack dog access to a trove of intelligence (CNBC, on the 210-day limit and Thune’s reaction)

• Doesn’t seem qualified: Who is Bill Pulte, acting US intelligence chief? (Al Jazeera, June 3, 2026, on the midterm window and confirmation odds)

• Pulte pick raises concerns about DNI independence (Roll Call, on the Vacancies Act mechanics and Cornyn)

• This is Nuts: Critics Aghast as Trump Appoints Personal Henchman as Acting DNI (Common Dreams, June 2026, Warner statement)

• FBI briefing documents reviewed for this piece: EFTA01655503 (Reuters, 11/07: Pulte hired Zarkin), EFTA01655551 (ABC News, 11/20: DOJ/FBI probe of Pulte and Ed Martin), and EFTA0165797 (Reuters, 05/08: FBI criminal investigation into Letitia James from Pulte’s referral).

Take Action

• Find and call your senators — Capitol switchboard (202) 224-3121

• Senate Select Committee on Intelligence members and contacts

He’s a retired guy in his 70s in Lake County, California. Bruce isn’t a computer person. He doesn’t cross-reference websites. He hears something on the radio over and over again, decides to do a good thing, picks up the phone.

The thing he kept hearing was the Kars4Kids jingle. You know the one. Eight-year-olds singing and dancing. Donate your car today. Help a kid. 1-877-Kars-4-Kids.

He had a broken-down 2001 Volvo station wagon sitting at his house. He called the number. He donated the car.

Then he found out the truth. Not from Kars4Kids. Not from their website. From a casual conversation with his neighbor after the car had already been picked up.

His money did not go to underprivileged kids in California. It did not go to underprivileged kids anywhere in the United States. It went to an Orthodox Jewish outreach organization in New Jersey, which used it to fund Israeli homeland trips for 17 and 18-year-olds, adult matchmaking services, and a $16.5 million building purchase in Israel.

“I felt taken advantage of,” he testified in court.

He sued. And on May 8, 2026, he won.

Kars4Kids ads are now banned in California. But the story of how this happened, why it was allowed to run for 30 years, and where your car donation actually went is not getting nearly the coverage it deserves. Let’s fix that.

The Setup

Kars4Kids has been running car donation ads since 1994. The jingle has been on the airwaves for over 20 years. The pitch is simple and it is deliberately designed to hit every emotional button: children, charity, ease of giving, local impact.

The ads feature child actors aged 8 to 10. They do not mention religion. They do not mention New Jersey. They do not mention Israel. They do not mention Oorah.

Oorah is the organization that receives the money.

Oorah is an Orthodox Jewish outreach nonprofit headquartered in Lakewood, New Jersey. Its mission, per its own filings, is to impart Orthodox Jewish education, values, and traditions. It runs summer camps in the New York and New Jersey area. It funds gap-year trips to Israel for Jewish teenagers. It operates adult matchmaking services for Jewish young adults. It is not a general children’s charity. It has never pretended to be one, in any of its own materials.

But Kars4Kids, Oorah’s primary funding vehicle and its sister organization, has spent 30 years running ads that imply exactly that.

The court put it plainly: the advertising was “misleading by omission.”

The Money

Let’s talk about scale, because this is not a small operation.

Kars4Kids reported gross receipts of $185 million in 2024 and $188 million in 2023, making it one of the largest car donation charities in the country. It processes over 40,000 donated vehicles per year.

Here is how that money flows, per the organization’s own IRS Form 990 filings:

Over 60% goes directly to Oorah. That is approximately $45 million annually in cash transfers from the car donation machine to the Orthodox outreach operation. In 2024, Kars4Kids sent Oorah $35.4 million. In 2023, it was $34.1 million.

Roughly 30% goes back into advertising. The cost of running those ads came to $39.1 million in 2024 and $37.6 million in 2023. Per the organization’s own IRS Form 990 for 2024, filed under EIN 22-3746050 and available on their website, here is exactly where the ad money went:

• Google (P.O. Box 883654, Los Angeles, CA): $22,508,970

• Marketing Advantage Plus LLC: $4,334,113

• Bing Ads: $3,477,118

• Hybrid Media Services LLC: $438,879

• Sirius Satellite Radio: $424,429

That is $31.2 million to just five marketing vendors. Google alone collected $22.5 million. The filing lists 48 independent contractors total who received more than $100,000 in compensation from Kars4Kids in 2024. Forty-eight vendors. Getting paid to make sure you keep hearing the jingle.

You are donating your car so that Google gets $22.5 million and Jewish graduates get trips to Israel.

About 6% covers administrative costs.

So when you donated your car, here is roughly where it went: a third of it paid for more ads to get more people to donate more cars. Most of the rest went to Oorah. If you were not Jewish, and if you did not live in New York or New Jersey, none of it went anywhere near you or anyone like you.

Meanwhile, Oorah has been accumulating assets at a remarkable pace. Its 2024 filing shows total assets of $211.3 million, up from $199.4 million the year before, with net assets of $209.5 million. Oorah is flush. Kars4Kids, the entity that actually takes in the cars, held only $35.8 million in total assets at the end of 2024. The fundraising arm stays lean. The beneficiary organization grows.

What Oorah Actually Does

Kars4Kids’ own Chief Operating Officer, Esti Landau, testified in the California trial. Under oath. Here is what she confirmed:

The organization’s primary purpose is not to help economically disadvantaged children. It is to help “Jewish kids and families throughout their lives.”

The programs Oorah funds “often target young adults (17 to 18) and matchmaking as well as Jewish families.”

In 2022, Oorah transferred $16.5 million to purchase a building in Israel. That same year it allocated $437,000 to “Middle East outreach.” It ran gap-year trips to Israel for approximately 250 teenagers annually.

She also confirmed that a donor would “have to go to the website” to learn any of this.

The judge’s response to that logic: “consumers act reasonably by calling that number rather than cross-referencing a website.”

And the word “Jewish” appears nowhere in the advertisement. The court found this to be a calculated choice. Judge Gassia Apkarian called it an “actionable strategy of deception.”

California Got 30,000 Cars and Zero Programs

Here is the detail that should be making people angry.

California accounts for 25% of Kars4Kids’ national vehicle intake. That is approximately 30,000 cars per year. California donors are generating tens of millions of dollars for this operation annually.

Kars4Kids runs no functional programs in California. None.

Its entire local presence consists of a backpack giveaway of about 1,000 bags. Distributed regardless of financial need. The court described it as a “branding exercise” designed to generate more donations, not to help children.

One thousand backpacks. For a quarter of the national donation intake. To children who do not need to demonstrate financial need to receive a backpack.

That is the entirety of the California program.

The Leadership Structure

At the center of both organizations is the Mintz family.

Oorah was founded by Rabbi Chaim Mintz. His son, Eliyahu Mintz, is the CEO of Kars4Kids. Eliyahu Mintz also serves as a senior executive at Oorah. IRS filings show he receives compensation from both organizations.

Multiple trustees and executives appear across both sets of filings. Schedule L disclosures confirm related-party transactions between the two organizations. This is a family operation. The fundraising arm and the beneficiary are run by the same people. And none of that appears anywhere in the ads.

This Is Not New

Kars4Kids has been caught doing this before. Multiple times. By multiple states. And kept doing it.

In 2009, the attorneys general of Pennsylvania and Oregon reached settlements with Kars4Kids and Oorah over misleading solicitations. Kars4Kids paid $65,000 in fines in each state. The settlements required changes in disclosure. The advertising model did not materially change.

In 2017, the Minnesota Attorney General released findings from a compliance review. Approximately $3 million had been raised from Minnesota donors. Less than 1% was spent on charitable activities benefiting Minnesota children. The rest went to Oorah.

That same year, CharityWatch issued a detailed warning that Kars4Kids deceives potential donors by failing to inform them that donated cars will benefit a Jewish organization and kids of the Jewish faith.

CharityWatch also flagged that Kars4Kids has been misreporting its car donation proceeds on its IRS Form 990 filings, reporting vehicle donation receipts net of processing expenses rather than at fair market value as required by IRS instructions. The Minnesota AG found this practice made Kars4Kids appear more financially efficient than it actually is. If vehicle processing costs had been correctly counted as fundraising expenses, overall fundraising and overhead costs would have increased by more than 30%.

After the Pennsylvania fines, the Oregon fines, the Minnesota investigation, and the CharityWatch reports, the advertising model did not materially change.

They just kept running the jingle.

The Federal Class Action

The California ruling was not the only legal action in motion.

In November 2025, law firm Keller Grover filed a federal class action lawsuit in the Northern District of California. The complaint accuses Kars4Kids of operating a “scheme to deceive unwitting donors to donate their vehicles to Kars4Kids for undisclosed and misrepresented purposes.”

The complaint is direct: “While promoting strict tenets of Judaism in a particular geographic area may be a worthy endeavor for donors intending to do so, Defendants designed their ads to conceal this true purpose from potential donors.”

The class action also alleges that Kars4Kids spent more than $16.5 million constructing a building in Israel and that California charitable activities were largely limited to the backpack giveaway already described.

This is not over. The California ruling is a permanent injunction on the ads, not a settlement. A federal case is now in the pipeline. And a separate lawsuit filed in April 2024 in the Northern District of California accused both Kars4Kids and Oorah of running a coordinated donor deception scheme.

Canada Is Still Running the Ads

For the Canadians reading this: yes, the ads are still running in your country.

Kars4Kids Canada is also part of Oorah Charitable Organization, registered as a charity with the Canada Revenue Agency. Canadian tax filings show the organization transferred $12.6 million to the U.S. and Israel in the fiscal year ending May 31, 2025, for projects including the Texas Torah Institute and the Cincinnati Hebrew Day School.

The jingle keeps playing. The cars keep coming in.

What Kars4Kids Said

Kars4Kids’ response to the California ruling was to call it “deeply flawed.”

Their spokesperson said: “It’s well known that we are a Jewish organization and our website makes it abundantly clear.”

It is not well known. That is the entire problem. That is what 30 years of advertising designed to omit that fact will produce. Bruce Puterbaugh did not know. Thousands of donors did not know. The attorneys general of Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Minnesota did not think it was well known enough to avoid taking action. CharityWatch has been saying it is not well known since 2010.

The website being clear does not absolve an advertising campaign that was specifically constructed to point people to a phone number rather than a website, featuring children who have nothing to do with the programs being funded, for 30 consecutive years.

The court agreed. “Money cannot ‘un-donate’ a car or restore the donor’s belief that they were helping a local, needy child,” the ruling states.

The Bottom Line

This is a $185 million per year operation that built its entire revenue model on the assumption that donors would not look closely enough to find out where their money was going.

They were right for 30 years.

They fined it out in Oregon and Pennsylvania in 2009. They ignored the Minnesota AG in 2017. They kept running the jingle. They kept processing the cars. They bought a $16.5 million building in Israel. They funded 250 teenagers’ homeland trips per year. They paid $22,508,970 to Google alone in 2024 to make sure you kept hearing the jingle. That figure is on their own 990. Line item. Independent contractors. Description of services: marketing. They gave California 30,000 cars’ worth of donations and a thousand backpacks in return.

And then one retired guy in Lake County who is “not a computer person” decided he felt taken advantage of and did something about it.

He got $250 and a court ruling. Kars4Kids has 30 days, or until June 8, to pull noncompliant ads from California airwaves or add a disclosure that actually tells you what you are donating to.

The federal class action is pending.

If you donated a car to Kars4Kids and you were not aware that your money went to fund Orthodox Jewish outreach, Jewish private school tuition, Israeli homeland trips, adult matchmaking services, and a building in the Middle East, you were not told that. By design. For 30 years.

And chances are, they are still operating in your state.

Sources: May 8, 2026 ruling, Puterbaugh v. Oorah Inc., Orange County Superior Court | Kars 4 Kids Inc., IRS Form 990 (2024), EIN 22-3746050, Part VII Section B Independent Contractors, available on kars4kids.org | Kars4Kids Form 990 via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer | Oorah IRS Form 990, 2024, via Daniel Mael / Substack | CharityWatch, 2017 and 2025 | CharityWatch, 2017 cost misreporting analysis | Minnesota AG Compliance Review, 2017 | Federal class action complaint, Northern District of California, November 2025 | CBC News, Canadian operations | NPR coverage, May 2026 | Fox LA trial testimony

You know the guy.

What you probably don’t know is that in April 2025, Romanian prosecutors filed a criminal complaint alleging that Van Damme had sex with five women who were trafficked from Romania and handed to him at a television launch party in Cannes in 2015. Not by strangers. By people he knew. At a party connected to a network he had been orbiting for over two decades.

It wasn’t Van Damme’s first sexually-based accusation.

And the deeper you dig into who was at that party and who put it together, the less this looks like a one-off scandal involving a fading action star, and the more it looks like one thread in a trafficking infrastructure that runs through the global fashion industry, touches Jeffrey Epstein’s network, and connects to a current member of the Trump administration.

Let’s dig in.

The Complaint

On April 2, 2025, attorney Adrian Cuculis filed a criminal complaint with Romania’s Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism, known as DIICOT. That is the same agency currently prosecuting Andrew Tate. Cuculis represents a woman who was allegedly groomed and trafficked by a man named Morel Bolea when she was 15 years old.

The complaint names Van Damme.

His QUEST? Obtain trafficked women for his own pleasure and use.

According to legal documents reviewed by The Telegraph, the allegation is this: in 2015, at a TV series launch event in Cannes, five Romanian women were “given” to Van Damme at a party organized by FashionTV owner Michel Adam Lisowski.

The women had been brought to the south of France by Bolea, a Romanian businessman who ran a modeling agency that prosecutors allege was a front for a sexual exploitation network operating from 2000 to 2016. Bolea was arrested in 2022 as the main suspect in a case involving the trafficking of minors. According to investigators, he used psychological coercion to recruit young women through his agency.

The women thought they were going to the Cannes Film Festival. They were not.

One woman provided written testimony describing what actually happened. She said that when they arrived, they realized they were not at a film festival event at all. They were at a much smaller affair: the launch of a TV series starring Van Damme, held in a hotel event room. She said one of the event organizers then selected five women and directed them toward Van Damme.

Not introduced. Directed.

Cuculis told The Telegraph: “They were basically offered to Van Damme… this is the allegation that Jean-Claude Van Damme used the services of one or more exploited girls.”

He added that the women “were in a state of vulnerability, with the suspicion that they were exploited within the meaning of Article 182 of the Criminal Code.”

The complaint charges Van Damme with making “use of services of an exploited person, an offense stipulated and punishable under Art. 216 of the criminal code.”

DIICOT confirmed receipt of the complaint and merged the file into the existing investigation into Bolea’s trafficking network.

Van Damme’s agent, Patrick Goavec, told People magazine that the claims are “both grotesque and non-existent” and “as absurd as it is unfounded.”

That is the entirety of the public denial. No detailed rebuttal. No counter-narrative. Just: absurd.

Let’s see how absurd it gets.

The FashionTV of It All

Here is the part that nobody seems to be connecting, at least not loudly enough.

That 2015 Cannes party was not just any launch event. According to a major April 2026 investigation by The American Prospect, it was a FashionTV party. And a witness told Romanian state police that the women were supplied to Van Damme by Ion Mirea, the then-president and CEO of FashionTV Romania, and by Michel Adam Lisowski, the founder and sole owner of FashionTV.

Read that again. The founder of FashionTV is named in witness testimony as having supplied trafficked women to Van Damme at a FashionTV event.

If you have been following my coverage of Lisowski, this will not surprise you. If you haven’t, here is the short version. Michel Adam Lisowski was born in Warsaw, studied math at Princeton, ran a textile sweatshop in Bangkok called the Eden Group, moved to Paris, and founded FashionTV in 1997, building it into a network reaching 500 million households in 192 countries. Along the way, he was arrested in Tel Aviv in 2005 alongside the head of Elite Model Israel for the alleged sexual abuse of a 20-year-old model. He was placed under house arrest for six days. FashionTV was implicated in a 2010 Romanian police investigation into modeling agencies trafficking women and forcing them into prostitution at a nightclub and brothel in Vienna. Two agency managers were convicted. Le Monde exposed him in the Panama Papers for using offshore structures to dodge taxes on an estimated $250 million in annual FashionTV revenue. He has been convicted of sexual assault in both France and Israel.

And he has been friends with Jean-Claude Van Damme for roughly 30 years.

Van Damme himself confirmed the relationship in a 2009 interview with the Austrian newspaper Kurier, saying: “Adam and I met 25 years ago in Thailand. We give each other advice, he on my acting career, I on his business.”

There are Getty Images photos of the two of them together at the Cannes Film Festival VIP Room in 2013.

Van Damme attended Lisowski’s birthday party in Vienna that same year. FashionTV launched a fashion brand in collaboration with Van Damme. They were not acquaintances. This was a business relationship and a personal friendship spanning decades.

So when the complaint says that women were “given” to Van Damme at a party in Cannes, and the American Prospect reports that the party was a FashionTV event and that witnesses named Lisowski and Mirea as being involved in directing the women, the DOUBLE IMPACT of two FashionTV execs’ involvement should hit hard.

This is not a case of a famous man being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is a famous man at an event run by people he knew intimately, in a world he had been part of for years, allegedly accepting what was offered.

The Network

And the network extends further than Van Damme and Lisowski.

The American Prospect investigation, written by Adam Robb, drew a line from FashionTV to Jeffrey Epstein, who nearly purchased the network. It connected Lisowski to Paolo Zampolli, the former modeling agent who is currently serving as Trump’s Special Envoy for Global Partnerships. Zampolli, Lisowski, and Van Damme were photographed together in Turkey in 2018 at a FashionTV event. Lisowski reportedly lived in the same Paris apartment building as Epstein. Adriana Mucinska, who served as Epstein’s scheduler in the 2000s, was a Zampolli client who was discovered through FashionTV.

The modeling industry has always been the supply chain. FashionTV was the infrastructure. And the men at the top of that infrastructure were not just adjacent to trafficking networks. According to prosecutors and witness testimony, they were allegedly operating them.

Van Damme’s involvement, if proven, would make him not a mastermind but a consumer. A man who took what was offered by people he had every reason to understand were not running a legitimate operation. A man who built an 80-film career playing the guy who rescues the vulnerable, while allegedly being the guy the vulnerable were delivered to.

That is not a HARD TARGET.

That is a man with NOWHERE TO RUN from his own shady history.

The Pattern

The Cannes allegation is not Van Damme’s only brush with this kind of accusation.

In 2022, Belgian prosecutors opened an investigation after a 33-year-old woman accused Van Damme of sexually assaulting her at a champagne bar in Brussels.

According to her testimony, he flirted with her before allegedly becoming aggressive, groping her, and pushing her into a bathroom. She managed to escape. Van Damme denied the allegations. There have been no public updates on that case.

And then there is his social calendar. In 2011, Van Damme attended the birthday celebration of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, a man accused of abductions, torture, and political assassinations, and reportedly gave a speech expressing admiration for the authoritarian leader.

Not exactly a LIONHEART move.

More like a man who is comfortable in rooms full of powerful men who hurt people.

What Happens Next

The Romanian investigation now hinges on several legal steps. Because the alleged events occurred in France, the French Court de Cassation must authorise criminal proceedings before suspects can be summoned to Romania. The current whereabouts and identities of the five women named in the complaint are unknown. Without them, the case gets harder.

Cuculis told The Telegraph that the investigation was already underway as of April 2025, with the Van Damme file merged into the broader Bolea trafficking case. If Romanian and French authorities can coordinate, Van Damme could face formal questioning. He has every type of agent pursuing him except a TIMECOP. (Okay, that one was a stretch.)

The central legal question is whether Van Damme knew the women were trafficking victims. The complaint alleges he did. His agent says the whole thing is fiction. Cuculis has argued that the situation would be different if the women had approached Van Damme voluntarily. But the allegation is that they were selected and directed toward him. Chosen for him. Delivered.

Meanwhile, the trafficked girls were IN HELL.

The Machine

Here is what bothers me about this story, and it is the same thing that bothers me about every story in this space.

Morel Bolea ran a modeling agency. Michel Adam Lisowski founded a global fashion television network. Ion Mirea ran its Romanian operations. Shai Avital ran Elite Model Israel. The women who entered this world were promised magazine covers, film festivals, careers. What some of them allegedly received was exploitation, coercion, and the experience of being packaged as gifts for famous men at parties on the French Riviera.

The fashion and entertainment industries did not just fail to prevent this. The infrastructure of these industries, the modeling agencies, the international TV networks, the launch parties, the VIP rooms, was the mechanism. It was not a bug. It was the feature.

Van Damme made over 80 films. In most of them, he played the hero. The man who fights for the defenseless. The man who never backs down. UNIVERSAL SOLDIER. THE QUEST. NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER.

If the allegations are proven, the man behind those characters did not fight for the defenseless. He allegedly accepted what predators offered him, at a party run by a man whose network was trafficking minors, in a world where women were currency and everyone at the table knew it.

His career was built on playing men with honor. If DIICOT and the French courts follow through, we will find out if the man behind the characters had any at all.

The investigation is open. The women are still missing. And Jean-Claude Van Damme has NOWHERE TO RUN.

I have not reached out to Van Damme for comment because, ew… I don’t even want my fingers talking to him.

All allegations described in this article remain unproven. A criminal complaint has been filed and an investigation is underway, but no formal charges have been brought against Van Damme. He has denied the allegations through his representatives. Morel Bolea was arrested in 2022 on trafficking charges. All individuals named are entitled to the presumption of innocence by the courts, but open to judgment by you.

Receipts

1. Stephens, Max. “Jean-Claude Van Damme accused of sex with trafficked women.” The Telegraph, April 8, 2025. Reproduced via Yahoo News.

2. Robb, Adam. “The Diplomat, the Fashion Channel, and Jeffrey Epstein.” The American Prospect, April 23, 2026. Link.

3. Speakman, Kimberlee. “Jean-Claude Van Damme Accused of Having Sexual Relations with Trafficked Romanian Women.” People, April 2, 2025. Reproduced via AOL.

4. “Jean-Claude Van Damme Named in Romania Trafficking Case.” Newsweek, April 3, 2025. Link.

5. “Jean-Claude Van Damme accused of sexual relations with trafficked women.” SAN, April 4, 2025. Link.

6. “Actor Jean-Claude Van Damme has become a defendant in a criminal case about human trafficking in Romania.” Babel, April 2, 2025. Link.

7. “Jean-Claude Van Damme Accused of Sleeping with Trafficked Romanian Women at Cannes Party.” Dagens, April 10, 2025. Link.

8. “Jean-Claude Van Damme Accused of Sex With Trafficked Women.” PopCulture, April 9, 2025. Link.

9. “Jean-Claude Van Damme allegedly engaged in sexual activity with women who were trafficked.” The National Desk, April 3, 2025. Link.

10. “Jean-Claude Van Damme accused of sex with trafficked women from Romania.” Yahoo News / USA Today, April 8, 2025. Link.

11. “Judicial Authorities investigate allegations of sexual assault made against Jean-Claude Van Damme.” VRT NWS, April 25, 2022. Link.

12. “A woman accuses actor Jean-Claude Van Damme of sexual assault at an establishment in Brussels.” NewsFounded / Sud Presse, April 22, 2022. Link.

13. “Michel Adam Lisowski and Jean Claude Van Damme attend the VIP Room JW Marriott at The 66th Annual Cannes Film Festival, May 18, 2013.” Getty Images. Link.

14. “Quand Jean-Claude Van Damme pète un câble en pleine interview.” Orange Tendances, August 1, 2016. Photo caption: “Jean-Claude Van Damme assiste à l’anniversaire de Michel Adam Lisowski à Vienne, le 16 avril 2013.” Link.

15. “Michel Adam: Mr. Fashion TV.” Greek City Times, November 18, 2022. Link.

16. “Michel Adam Lisowski.” Wikipedia. Link.

17. “Michel Adam Lisowski.” Alchetron. Link.

18. “Michel Adam Lisowski: Money-Laundering and Tax Abuse.” World Fashion Truth, February 23, 2018. Re: Le Monde / Panama Papers. Link.

19. “From the Clubs of Ibiza to International Arms Dealmaker.” American Freak Show, May 2026. Re: Lisowski convictions in France and Israel. Link.

20. “Paolo Zampolli.” Wikipedia. Link.

21. Dayen, David. Post on X/Twitter re: Adriana Mucinska, Zampolli, Lisowski, Epstein. Link.

22. “Van Damme in Romanian legal case.” Euro Weekly News, April 4, 2025. Link.

23. “Kicking it with Van Damme.” Bangkok Post, June 14, 2013. Re: FashionTV collaboration, Luxury Meets Justice series. Link.

24. “Jean-Claude Van Damme accused of having sex with five trafficked women at a television launch party.” LBC, June 27, 2025. Link.

He has, however, gone by several other names over the past 50 years, depending on which jurisdiction he happened to be operating in, and which one was about to indict him.

In Princeton in 1970, where he was arrested for smuggling $120,000 of hashish from London to New York, he was Adam Lisowski.

In the 1977 Securities and Exchange Commission injunction against his fraudulent zeppelin company, he was Lisowski.

In Paris in 1998, when French police held him in jail for nine days for cocaine possession, and in 2000, when the correctional tribunal convicted him of sexually assaulting a 21-year-old Polish model inside his apartment at 22 Avenue Foch, he was Adam Lisowski again. If that address looks familiar for some reason, it should - we will get into exactly why that address might ring a bell and what exactly went down there. Let’s just say that France should probably look into the happenings in that building.

In Tel Aviv in 2005, when an Israeli court extended his remand by six days after a 20-year-old model accused him and the CEO of Elite Models Israel of putting their hands inside her underwear in a nightclub bathroom, he was Michel Adam, French citizen.

In the Panama Papers in 2016, he was Michel Adam Lisowski.

In the FashionTV pageant judging panel in Romania in 2017, seated next to Paolo Zampolli, Shai Avital, and a man Romanian courts have ruled can be legally called the leader of an organized crime group connected to pedophilia networks, in the criminal complaint filed by a Romanian woman in April 2025 alleging that he and a FashionTV Romania executive personally supplied trafficked women to Jean-Claude Van Damme at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, and in the photo of a Casa Cipriani Milan dinner posted in March 2025 by the current United States Special Envoy for Global Partnerships, Paolo Zampolli, who captioned the picture “Soecial time with old friends” and misspelled the word special (keep in mind, his job title is Special Envoy), he was Michel Adam.

In the marketing materials for a luxury residential tower under construction in Dubai right now, in 2026, his name is on the building. Orvessa Residences by Michel Adam.

It is the same man. Every single time. The same man.

If you are reading this and you are angry that you are only learning his name today, I understand. I am too. So let’s fix that.

How a Polish kid in Vienna became a State Department problem

He was born in Warsaw in April 1950, into a Jewish family. The family moved to Vienna in 1958, when his father, Witold Lisowski, took a Polish diplomatic post at the International Atomic Energy Agency. A 1960 CIA cable, declassified and now sitting in the CIA Reading Room, describes the elder Lisowski as “an untrustworthy double agent and pimp whose only ambition was ‘money, money, even more money and then again money.’”

I want you to file that quote away, because the son is about to repeat the father almost verbatim in 2007.

Young Adam earned a Princeton scholarship to study mathematics. Before his senior year, in 1970, he was arrested with two other men for hashish smuggling. After he wriggled out of that, he disappeared into what The American Prospect recently called “African and European hippie communes.”

He surfaced in 1975, walked into the United States State Department during the energy crisis, and pitched them on a zeppelin.

A zeppelin.

This is not a joke. The federal government gave him government contractor money to build a fleet of dirigibles he claimed would solve America’s oil-dependence problem. The patents were exaggerated. The contracts were exaggerated. The capital was exaggerated. The zeppelin never flew. According to reporting by Adam Robb in The American Prospect, a State Department diplomatic cable warned that his failed venture “will hurt US interests and prestige” abroad.

In 1977, the SEC won an uncontested injunction against Lisowski and his partners. Uncontested because by the time the case was filed, he had already left the United States. He fled with the money. The SEC won by default.

The man whose father was on file as an untrustworthy double agent and pimp had now defrauded the United States federal government on a federally funded airship contract before turning 30. He left the country. He vanished into Southeast Asia.

The State Department that warned about him in 1977 is now run, in part, by a man named Paolo Zampolli, who posted a photo of his dinner with Lisowski on Instagram a little over a year ago. We will come back to that.

Thailand: the part where the workers tried to put a price on his head

He landed in Pattaya, on the Thai coast, and tried to open a hot-air balloon amusement park. Because of course he did. Putting people in floating contraptions was apparently his passion project before it was his fraud vehicle.

The amusement park failed. He started selling T-shirts on the beach to survive. By 1991, the T-shirt operation, which he called Eden Group, employed four thousand workers and manufactured Disney and Warner Brothers licensed apparel.

Not suspicious at all.

Here is what happened to those four thousand workers, according to a 1996 article in Multinational Monitor, the Washington-based magazine founded by Ralph Nader, citing the South China Morning Post:

“The Eden Group, a major Disney contractor in Thailand, recently fired 1,145 of their own workers to take advantage of lower cost subcontractors, ten of which were found to employ child labor.”

1,145 workers, fired. Replaced by subcontractors who employed children. Disney was on Multinational Monitor‘s Ten Worst Corporations list that year in part because of him.

Workers burned him in effigy in the streets of Bangkok. A contemporaneous web archive of the event is still online. Sadly, I could not find any video, as I would have loved to have seen that. The fashion trade publication Textile Asia reported that a local security firm was openly advertising it would kill him for $300,000 U.S. dollars.

300,000 dollars. A publicly advertised hit price.

Now, you might be wondering how the man himself felt about all this. Did he have a moment of reflection? Did he reconsider? Did he, perhaps, examine the ethical implications of building a fortune on the backs of children whose subcontractor bosses he hired specifically to avoid paying adult wages?

He did not.

He gave an interview to the Polish magazine Duzy Format in 2007. Asked about his corporate ethics, asked specifically about the documented child labor in his factories, he said this:

“A good capitalist must use the working class. Did you read Karl Marx? Man cannot be moved by ideologies, only material incentives.”

He cited Karl Marx as the intellectual justification for using child labor.

In the same interview, when asked about how he made his money, he said: “I didn’t have money then, so it was easy for me to enter the hippie communes. We shared. They, money, and I, intelligence. But when I started making money myself, my ideals changed.”

Read those two sentences again. He is telling you that the hippies gave him money and he gave them, in his estimation, his “intelligence.” He is telling you the extraction was the relationship from the very beginning.

And how does one go from being a drug-trafficking college dropout to living in international hippy communes to working in the U.S. State Department?

If you needed proof that the apple did not fall far from the IAEA-pimp father, you have it. The son does not even bother to disguise it. He told a Polish journalist, on the record, that he was a parasite by design and that he viewed every relationship as a transaction in which he was the brains and the other party was the bank.

This is the man who is about to launch a global television channel aimed at teenage girls.

22 Avenue Foch: where he became a convicted sex offender

He fled Thailand around 1996, because of the labor reform movement, the effigy burnings, and the $300,000 contract on his life. He resurfaced in Paris with a new idea. He was going to start a 24-hour fashion-and-modeling television channel.

He applied to the French broadcast regulator for a license.

The French embassy in Bangkok, the country he had just fled, wrote to the regulator and tried to stop him. According to the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, the embassy formally alleged that Lisowski had involvement in money laundering and prostitution and owed substantial unpaid wages to Thai workers.

A foreign embassy does not write that kind of letter casually. That is a let-us-go-on-the-record-so-no-one-can-blame-us warning.

The French regulator paused his application. During the pause, French police arrested him in Paris for cocaine possession and held him in jail for nine days. He received a three-month suspended sentence in May 1998. Sources: Le Point and Le Parisien.

Four months after the cocaine conviction, the French regulator granted him the broadcast license anyway. FashionTV launched.

You read that correctly. A man flagged by a French embassy for prostitution and money laundering, who had just been convicted of cocaine possession, was granted a national broadcast license by the French government in 1997. They knew. They licensed him anyway.

Within months of the launch, the first major sexual assault complaint was filed.

The date was September 22, 1997. A 21-year-old Polish model named Eva Cyankiewicz had walked a runway show at the FashionTV launch party in Berlin. Lisowski, 47, married, the founder of the channel, had been pursuing her since the launch. He invited her to stay at his Paris apartment and promised he would help her career.

The apartment was at 22 Avenue Foch, in the sixteenth arrondissement. I want you to remember that address.

In her sworn testimony at the trial, recorded in Le Parisien‘s contemporaneous coverage, Cyankiewicz described what happened next. He “threw himself on me, pulled off my dress, hit me on the buttocks and turned me over. He lowered his trousers. He hit me in the face.”

She escaped. She went to the police. He was arrested the next day, September 23, 1997.

Three years later, on September 19, 2000, the Paris correctional tribunal convicted him of sexual assault. They sentenced him to two years, one to serve and one suspended. 20,000 francs in fines plus damages.

The court testimony also entered into the record statements suggesting that FashionTV was itself involved in money laundering and prostitution. Le Parisien preserved that language in print.

He fled France before he could serve his sentence. Interpol issued a Red Notice for him.

By the time the conviction came down, his channel was already in 30,000,000 households worldwide. He kept running it from outside France.

Now I am going to ruin 22 Avenue Foch for you

FashionTV later launched a reality show called Flat Model. The concept was ten young women living in an apartment under 24-hour camera surveillance, streamed live on FashionTV. Big Brother for aspiring runway models.

The apartment they filmed it in was 22 Avenue Foch.

The same apartment.

He turned the room where he was convicted of attempting to rape Eva Cyankiewicz into a streamable, monetizable surveillance facility full of young women trying to break into modeling.

I needed a minute when I learned that. You might need a minute too.

And there is one more thing about that address. Because the universe is not subtle.

In 2001, four years after the Cyankiewicz assault, Jeffrey Epstein purchased an 800-square-meter apartment in the same building. The address was 22 Avenue Foch. He paid the equivalent of $8.6 million dollars. He ran his European operation out of it until his arrest in 2019.

This is not speculation. The valuation document is in the DOJ Epstein file release as EFTA00076130. Franceinfo did a deep investigative piece in February 2026 on Epstein’s Paris network, with embedded DOJ document links for every meeting and visitor.

Whether Epstein and Lisowski ever rode the same elevator in that building, I cannot prove. But for almost two decades, two men with overlapping appetites and overlapping methods shared the same Paris address.

Tel Aviv, 2005: the second arrest, the future convicted abuser as co-defendant

On June 12, 2005, Tel Aviv police arrested Lisowski. He was at a FashionTV-branded venue called Fashion Bar. A 20-year-old model had filed a complaint saying that two men had followed her, separately, to the women’s bathroom, where both forcibly kissed her on the neck and put their hands inside her underwear.

One of the two men was Shai Avital, 28, the CEO of Elite Model Management Israel.

The other was Lisowski. Haaretz reported the next day, in Roni Singer-Heruti’s June 13, 2005 article:

“The court extended the remand of fashion television president and French citizen Michel Adam by six days, while the head of Elite, Shai Avital, 28, was arrested and released on bail. The two were arrested after a model filed a complaint with Tel Aviv police, saying the two had sexually abused her.”

The Hebrew language Ynet article from the same day, written by Avi Cohen, was headlined בעל ערוץ האופנה שוחרר למעצר בית, which translates to “Fashion channel owner released to house arrest.” The Guardian covered it as well.

The case was closed in 2009 for lack of evidence.

I want to be careful here. A closed case is not a conviction. It is also not an exoneration. Sometimes prosecutors close cases because the evidence does not meet a burden. Sometimes they close cases because the complainant cannot afford to keep fighting a man with a private jet and an international fashion channel.

What we can say with certainty is this: the man Lisowski was arrested with that night, Shai Avital, went on to become one of the most credibly accused sexual predators in the history of the modeling industry. He was arrested in Amsterdam in August 2022 in a joint operation between Dutch police, Israeli police, and Interpol. By that point, 26 women had accused him of sexual harassment and assault. He was extradited from the Netherlands to Israel in November 2022. In January 2023, he was convicted on two charges, supplying drugs to a minor and assault, and sentenced to six months in prison plus restitution.

That is the man Lisowski was arrested with in 2005. The man who, by 2023, would be a convicted predator with 26 accusers.

Now here is the part that should be a felony in spirit, if not in law. Between 2005 and 2022, Lisowski kept working with Avital. Avital served as the model casting agent on Lisowski’s first FashionTV film, Exodus to Shanghai. Avital sat on the judging panel at Lisowski’s Mamaia pageant in 2017. They appeared together in photos. They built modeling careers together.

You do not accidentally keep working with the man who got arrested with you in a women’s bathroom. You do not accidentally cast him as the recruiter for your movie. You do not accidentally put him on your judging panel.

You do that on purpose. Because the abuse is the project.

The 2010 Romanian indictment that named FashionTV’s parent company as a brothel advertiser

In October 2010, six months after FashionTV’s IPO on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, the Romanian organized crime prosecutor DIICOT filed an indictment in a case that the Romanian press immediately nicknamed “Prostituate de lux pentru politicieni.” Luxury Prostitutes for Politicians.

The full indictment was published in Romania Libera. Four defendants. 80 young women. 140 witnesses across 19 Romanian counties. Revenues over 100,000 euros. The defendants were charged with EU trafficking offenses, including document confiscation and debt bondage. They were convicted in November 2012, three of them sentenced to three years suspended and one to two years suspended.

You may at this point be thinking, okay Sue, that is a regional Romanian trafficking case. What does it have to do with your French fashion guy?

Here is what the actual indictment says. I am going to give you the original Romanian and then the English translation. The translation has been reviewed.

“Postul Fashion TV difuzează clipuri publicitare pentru clubul Babylon, în baza unui contract încheiat în Austria de societatea mamă.”

Translation: “The FashionTV channel broadcasts advertising clips for the Babylon Club, based on a contract concluded in Austria by the parent company.”

The Babylon Club is the brothel where the trafficked women were being forced into prostitution.

FashionTV’s Austrian parent company, the company Lisowski controls, held a paid commercial contract to broadcast advertisements for the actual brothel.

That is not an inference. That is not journalistic framing. That is the Romanian state prosecutor saying, in a sworn legal document, exactly what FashionTV was doing.

The same indictment named Ion Mirea, president of FashionTV Romania, as a witness. Not a defendant. The indictment states that the convicted traffickers met one another at events organized by FashionTV Romania, and that the traffickers were trading on the FashionTV brand to recruit and present the women. Among the politicians named in the indictment as having received the trafficked women: Robert Negoiță, a sitting Social Democrat deputy who later became mayor of Bucharest’s Sector 3, and Nicolae Bănicioiu, who later became Romania’s Minister of Health.

Coverage of the indictment by Ziua de Constanța, Mediafax, and HotNews makes Mirea’s central role explicit.

Mirea was never charged. He still controls FashionTV-branded companies in Romania today.

He will reappear in this story in 2025.

The U.S. State Department’s 2015 finding on FashionTV Moldova

In 2015, the United States State Department published its annual Trafficking in Persons report. The Moldova chapter contained this sentence, which is still archived on the official State Department site and mirrored at Refworld:

“In January 2015, police placed under house arrest the director of Fashion TV-Moldova while investigating his involvement in human trafficking and related crimes; the suspect previously headed the interior affairs ministry’s division to combat organized crime and worked in the anti-trafficking center.”

A FashionTV national director. Under arrest. For human trafficking. He had previously run Moldova’s anti-trafficking unit.

This is not a hostile witness. This is the U.S. State Department’s own annual finding, in its own report, naming FashionTV in connection with the trafficking of human beings in a foreign country, in print, ten years ago.

The Wang Yan thread, which I am about to ask you to sit down for

In 2015, Lisowski produced his first FashionTV-funded film, called Exodus to Shanghai. Tablet magazine reviewed it and called it, I am not making this up, “the world’s first kung-fu Holocaust exploitation flick.” It was partially filmed inside the Chinese embassy in Romania. The Chinese government promoted it as a celebration of the 70th anniversary of the victory over fascism.

Lisowski’s wife, the Russian former model Maria Mogsolova, played the lead. Opposite her, in the role of a Chinese consul, was a man named Wang Yan.

Wang Yan, a Chinese national, obtained Romanian citizenship in 1999 under the Romanian alias Ion Alexandru. He became the president of the Romanian-Chinese Bilateral Chamber of Commerce. He was photographed for years at the right hand of Prime Minister Emil Boc.

According to Romanian intelligence service wiretap transcripts, he was also the head of an organized crime network the Romanian prosecutor’s office code-named Dosarul Shanghai. The Shanghai Dossier.

What was Dosarul Shanghai? Per investigative reporting by HotNews and Antena 3 CNN, it was a trafficking ring operating out of a massage parlor at 38 Ion Minulescu Street, Sector 3, Bucharest, located in the basement of a Chinese restaurant called Shanghai.

The HotNews translation: “Girls from impoverished families were brought to Bucharest, locked in apartments with bars, and forced to have sexual relations with influential men.”

Locked in apartments. With bars on the windows.

In the wiretap transcripts, Wang Yan was code-named Senatorul. The Senator.

The clients identified by victims included Romanian intelligence officers, police, tax inspectors, and members of the judiciary. Only one of Wang’s lieutenants, a man whose Romanian alias was Mihai, was ever prosecuted. The case against Wang himself was dropped.

In 2013, the Romanian intelligence service revoked Wang’s Romanian citizenship and formally declared him a threat to national security.

In November 2014, he returned to Romania anyway with a five-year residency permit. By 2018, he held the exclusive contract for the entire output of Cupru Min, Romania’s national copper company, which controls roughly 60% of Romania’s copper reserves.

In 2021, Wang sued Romanian journalists for publicly identifying him as the leader of an organized crime group connected to pedophilia networks. The Romanian court ruled against him. A Romanian court found, in writing, that calling Wang Yan the leader of an organized crime group connected to pedophilia networks was not defamatory.

This is the man Lisowski cast in his first FashionTV film, opposite his own wife, two years after Wang was officially stripped of citizenship for being a threat to Romanian national security.

In August 2017, at the Phoenicia Royal Mamaia resort on the Romanian Black Sea coast, FashionTV hosted its annual Summer Festival. Lisowski hosted. The judges included Paolo Zampolli, Melania Trump’s former modeling agent and the current U.S. Special Envoy for Global Partnerships. They included Shai Avital, the man with 26 accusers. And they included Wang Yan, the man a Romanian court has confirmed can legally be described as the head of an organized crime group connected to pedophilia networks.

Four men. One judging panel. Four separate criminal records or credible criminal accusations between them. Photos exist. They are not subtle.

Cannes, 2015: where Lisowski personally gifted 8 women to Jean Claude Van Damme

In April 2025, the Romanian organized crime prosecutor DIICOT opened a formal criminal investigation into Belgian-American action star Jean-Claude Van Damme. The complainant was a Romanian woman represented by attorney Adrian Cuculis. The allegation was that at a FashionTV-hosted party at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, eight women, five of whom did not know each other, were trafficked from Romania to the French Riviera and given to Van Damme as a gift.

The primary source on this story is an April 3, 2025 article in Newsweek by Sean O’Driscoll. O’Driscoll obtained the criminal complaint. He directly quotes a sworn deposition given to the Iași General Prosecutor’s office on October 29, 2020 by a model identified only as L.D.

“L.D. alleged that the five women she didn’t know were given to Van Damme as a gift from the manager who had brought them to the festival.”

“She complained that they weren’t given enough food, only small amounts from McDonald’s, and that occasionally they would go to dinner with their boss’ clients but this wasn’t enough food either. As a result, they felt weakened.”

They starved them. They fed them McDonald’s. Just enough to keep them upright, not enough to keep them strong.

According to Adam Robb’s investigation in The American Prospect, a witness told Romanian state police that Ion Mirea, the FashionTV Romania president from the 2010 trafficking indictment who was never charged, and Michel Adam Lisowski himself personally supplied the five women.

Personally supplied.

Van Damme and Lisowski have been close since the 1980s. In a 2009 interview with the Austrian newspaper Kurier, Van Damme said: “Adam and I met 25 years ago in Thailand. We give each other advice, he on my acting career, I on his business.”

The Thailand of the sweatshop years. The Thailand of the $300,000 hit price.

Van Damme’s agent Patrick Goavec told People magazine the allegations were “grotesque and non-existent.”

I leave that characterization in your hands.

The Panama Papers structure, because of course there is one

In July 2016, Le Monde published the FashionTV chapter of the Panama Papers investigation. The reporting documented that Fashion TV Holding Ltd had been registered in the British Virgin Islands by the law firm Morgan and Morgan. Lisowski’s older brother Gabriel, who runs the German FashionTV company and owns the domain name, was at the head of two additional BVI shell vehicles named Widok 10 and Fredry 16, both created in 1996 and reactivated at the end of 2015 by transfers from a Fashion TV Ltd account.

According to Le Monde, this structure was used to avoid paying “almost any taxes” on FashionTV’s estimated $250,000,000 in annual revenue.

The ICIJ summary noted it.

No criminal charges were filed.

You can hide a quarter of a billion dollars a year in offshore shells, get caught by the largest financial leak in modern history, get named in the world’s most-read newspaper, and the European Union charges you with nothing.

I declared a freelance payment last year that came in $78 under the 1099 threshold and the IRS sent me a paper letter.

Epstein tried to buy FashionTV in 2010

This is the part that should make you put down your coffee.

According to DOJ-released Epstein files, reconstructed in detail in Adam Robb’s American Prospect piece, Jeffrey Epstein, six months out of prison after his 2008 plea deal in Florida, contacted the modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel in February 2010 with a job. The job was to reach out to Michel Adam Lisowski about buying FashionTV.

Brunel did it. Within minutes, he wrote back that he had found Lisowski a “serious buyer.”

The serious buyer was Epstein himself, operating through a London-based businessman named David Stern who served as an aide to the former Prince Andrew.

For several weeks in early 2010, Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew’s aide tried to buy FashionTV from Michel Adam Lisowski. The proposed valuation was 245,000,000 euros. Former Sony Music CEO Tommy Mottola was attached to the proposed structure. FashionTV’s then-CEO Yaron Jakubowicz wrote, in writing, in a document released by the DOJ, that the company “could be a money printer, given the sufficient amount of paper to print on.”

A money printer. The CEO of the channel describing his own company to Jeffrey Epstein. As a money printer.

The deal collapsed when Stern wrote that FashionTV “looks too expensive and a bit odd.” Two months later, FashionTV went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange instead.

Also interesting to note that Epstein called Lisowski “a bad guy.” Epstein called him a bad guy. That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.

The man who ran the most documented trafficking network in modern American history almost owned FashionTV.

That was sixteen years ago. The channel is still on the air, in 500,000,000 households, in 192 countries.

The Adriana Mucinska pipeline

I want to be brief on this thread because the woman in question has rebuilt her life, but it has to be on the record.

Adriana Mucinska, a Polish model, arrived in the United States in 2002 on an Elite Models visa. She was married at the time to a man named Duncan Ross, who was FashionTV’s United States director. According to her July 2019 FBI proffer, now released as part of the DOJ Epstein files, Ross put her in contact with Paolo Zampolli of ID Models in New York. Zampolli “organized” for her to come to New York. She lived in a Varick Street model apartment with ten other women, down the block from Zampolli’s office.

Epstein was, per Mucinska’s own statement to the FBI, casting for models at Zampolli’s office one day. He saw a topless photograph of Mucinska in her portfolio. He recruited her. She abandoned her modeling career. She worked as his scheduler and assistant from 2002 to 2006.

Mucinska was named in the 2007 federal Non-Prosecution Agreement as a protected coconspirator of Epstein, alongside Sarah Kellen, Nadia Marcinkova, and Lesley Groff. In her 2010 federal deposition in Edwards versus Epstein, she invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times.

Before she ever met Epstein, Mucinska was the featured model on a FashionTV reality show called ModelFlat, which followed young women living in a surveilled London apartment. The format was, of course, a direct echo of Flat Model, filmed at 22 Avenue Foch.

A pipeline existed. Polish model with FashionTV exposure, through FashionTV’s American director, into Paolo Zampolli’s New York modeling agency, into Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, into Jeffrey Epstein’s permanent staff. The DOJ proffer documents include a notation that paragraphs in the FBI report mentioning Zampolli are subject to protective order.

You should read those words again. Subject to protective order.

She lives in Florida now, working as an accountant under a pseudonym. I wish her peace.

The system that produced her trajectory has not, in any way, been dismantled.

Dubai, 2026: his name is on the buildings

The current chapter of Michel Adam Lisowski’s life is luxury Persian Gulf residential real estate.

There are currently four FashionTV-branded real estate projects in the United Arab Emirates. FTV Dubai, a restaurant and nightclub, opened at the Voco Hotel in January 2025. Fashionz by Danube, a residential tower in Dubai. The BNW FashionTV Acacia, a tower at Al Marjan Island in Ras Al Khaimah. And the fourth, currently in development, is called Orvessa Residences by Michel Adam. His name. On the building.

Former FashionTV vice president Romain Saint Gilles now serves as a senior advisor and fund manager for the Royal Office of His Highness Ahmed bin Faisal Al Qassimi, an Emirati royal.

The brand has moved up market. Thai sweatshops to Bucharest brothel ad contracts to Persian Gulf luxury residential towers branded with his Tel Aviv arrest pseudonym.

And in March 2025, the current United States Special Envoy for Global Partnerships, Paolo Zampolli, flew to Milan during Fashion Week. The night before FashionTV hosted a luxury gala at Philipp Plein’s eponymous nightclub, Zampolli dined with Lisowski and Maria Mogsolova at Casa Cipriani Milan.

He posted two photos to Instagram. He captioned them “Soecial time with old friends.” He misspelled the word special.

A United States Special Envoy. Misspelling the word special. In a photo of his old friend the convicted sex offender, on the public internet, on a U.S. government official’s account.

The State Department that warned about Lisowski in 1977 is now the State Department whose Special Envoy calls him an old friend on Instagram in 2025.

Why he kept getting away with it

The reason Michel Adam Lisowski is not a household name, despite a 50-year record that includes a federal SEC injunction, a French criminal conviction for sexual assault, multiple international arrests, documented child labor in his factories, named appearances in two transnational trafficking investigations, a U.S. State Department finding against his channel’s Moldova director, and a Newsweek-documented criminal complaint that names him personally as a supplier of trafficked women, is straightforward:

He used different names in different jurisdictions. Adam Lisowski in French court. Michel Adam on the Israeli arrest paperwork. Michel Adam Lisowski in the Panama Papers. Michael Adam at the U.N.-adjacent fashion events. Just Michel Adam on his Dubai luxury real estate signage.

His record has lived in seven languages, on three continents, across five decades. Until very recently, no English-language outlet had pulled the threads into a single story. Adam Robb’s American Prospect piece, published April 23, 2026, finally did it. I am deeply indebted to that reporting.

But I am writing this Substack post because Robb’s piece, as thorough as it is, frames Lisowski as a supporting character. He is presented largely as the foil that helps illuminate Paolo Zampolli’s State Department appointment. And he should not be a supporting character. He is the protagonist.

He is the man who decided, in his own words to a Polish magazine in 2007, that a good capitalist must use the working class. He is the man who turned the room where he was convicted of attempted rape into a reality television set. He is the man whose Austrian corporate parent held a paid commercial advertising contract for a Bucharest brothel that an EU prosecutor said was running a trafficking operation. He is the man named in a Romanian woman’s October 2020 sworn deposition as a personal supplier of trafficked women to a Hollywood action star. He is the man putting his French and Israeli arrest pseudonym on Dubai luxury towers in 2026.

If we did the work of saying his name out loud, every time, in every jurisdiction, the pseudonym game stops working. The regulating boards have to look. The State Department has to answer for the dinner photos. The next French or Romanian or Moldovan or Emirati journalist who is handed an obvious trafficking thread connected to FashionTV has the context to actually publish it.

The receipts are public. The receipts have always been public. They just need attention.

Receipts

For anyone who wants to read primary documents directly, here is the working bibliography:

The Robb investigation that synthesized the modern record: The American Prospect, April 23, 2026

1960 CIA cable on Witold Lisowski: CIA Reading Room

1996 Disney sweatshop labor finding, Multinational Monitor: Ten Worst Corporations

1996 Bangkok effigy burning, archived: JCA-NET asia-apec list

1997 French embassy warning, Der Standard: Sexuelle Übergriffe

1997 Paris assault and 2000 conviction, Le Parisien: Défilé en correctionnelle pour le patron de Fashion TV

2005 Tel Aviv arrest, Haaretz, Roni Singer-Heruti: FTV head and Elite agency CEO arrested in sexual assault case

2005 Tel Aviv arrest, The Guardian: June 13, 2005

Shai Avital extradition and conviction, Haaretz: Dutch court orders extradition

Shai Avital conviction reporting, Times of Israel: Plea deal

2010 Romanian Prostituate de lux indictment, full text, Romania Libera: Rechizitoriul integral

Romanian DIICOT coverage, Ziua de Constanța: FashionTV Romania president audiat

Romanian DIICOT coverage, Mediafax: Politicieni, interlopi și milionari

Romanian DIICOT coverage, HotNews: Prostituate de lux sub paravanul unei agenții de fotomodele

Wang Yan / Dosarul Shanghai investigation, HotNews: Cetățeanul chinez audiat la DNA în dosarul Coldea

Wang Yan, Antena 3 CNN: Florin Coldea, Wang Yan, chinez, trafic de minore

Wang Yan, Romania Europa Libera: Un cetățean chinez audiat de DNA

Tablet review of Exodus to Shanghai: Kung-fu Holocaust exploitation flick

2015 State Department Trafficking in Persons Report, Moldova chapter: State.gov archive

Van Damme / Cannes 2015 trafficking allegations, Newsweek, Sean O’Driscoll: April 3, 2025

Van Damme / Kurier 2009 Thailand interview: Adam und ich

Van Damme agent’s denial, People: Goavec response

2016 Panama Papers FashionTV investigation, Le Monde: Les coulisses offshore

ICIJ Panama Papers summary on EU tax rules: July 7, 2016

Adriana Mucinska FBI proffer, July 2019, DOJ Epstein files release: EFTA00105195 and EFTA00090773

Adriana Mucinska 2010 federal deposition, Edwards versus Epstein: Archive.org

Jeffrey Epstein 22 Avenue Foch valuation, DOJ Epstein files: EFTA00076130

Franceinfo investigation on Epstein’s Paris network, February 2026: Mathilde Texier

If you read this whole thing, thank you. Share it. Send it to a journalist who covers nonprofits, organized crime, fashion industry abuses, or State Department appointments. Send it to a survivor advocacy organization. Send it to a French regulator. Send it to a Romanian prosecutor. Send it to anyone who has ever wondered why the same names keep appearing in the same rooms.

The next time you see Michel Adam Lisowski’s name in a press release for a luxury Dubai tower, or in a fashion magazine interview, or in a State Department envoy’s Instagram post, you will know what you are looking at.

You are looking at 50 years of receipts.

The story about Jeffrey Epstein and Ben Goertzel has been hiding in plain sight since the release of the files and since the South China Morning Press quietly reported on it in February 2026.

I haven’t seen any real coverage on this story online or on mainstream media (shocker, I know). Maybe because it doesn’t involve sexual impropriety, so it wouldn’t generate interest. After all, how engaging is a story about a sex offender funding an AI researcher?

You’re about to find out.

This is a story about the conversion mechanism… how Epstein’s tainted money entered a United States transhumanist 501(c)(3), exited as commercial “industry sponsorship,” and unlocked over $1,000,000 USD in Hong Kong public funds for a company owned by the man who chaired that 501(c)(3).

Meet Ben Goertzel.

Hot on the heals of the South China Morning Post article, Ben responded with a February 20, 2026 article on Substack called “Goertzel vs Epstein,” presented as a clarifying response to his name appearing 807 times in the files, and his company, Humanity+, appearing nearly 1000 times.

The piece has been received warmly, with commenters thanking him for his “honesty.” The man who has spent decades trying to shape artificial intelligence certainly knows how to shape his own narrative: naive scientist, master social engineer, broken science-funding system. It seems to have worked so far.

Here’s why it shouldn’t.

When read through a discerning lens, Goertzel’s own post is the most direct documentary admission of the money laundering structure available on all of Substack. He confirms the mechanism four separate times, he just conveniently doesn’t call it what it really is.

Let’s dive into what the Epstein files actually show, then take a look, paragraph by paragraph, at Goertzel’s attempt at a defense.

Part One: The Structure

Humanity+, Novamente, and the Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Fund

Humanity+ is a registered 501(c)(3) in the United States, listed as an educational nonprofit; it’s the rebrand of World Transhumanist Association founded by Nick Bostrom and David Pierce in 1998. Goertzel was the chair of its board during the relevant period.

Novamente was a private for-profit AI company owned by Goertzel, responsible for the initial codebase for the open-source project OpenCog.

The Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF) is a public research grant program run by the government of Hong Kong. Under its rules, projects must secure at least 10% of their total cost from a private “industry sponsor” to qualify for the remaining 90% from public funds. The matching requirement exists so that taxpayers are not fully subsidizing research that the private sector isn’t willing to invest in.

Between 2010 and 2015, Epstein used his shell company, Enhanced Education, to wire Humanity+ at least $113,000, which Humanity+ then transferred to Novamente.

The following spreadsheets are from Government of the United States Virgin Islands v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., No. 122-cv-10904 (S.D.N.Y. 2022) regarding Enhanced Education (all I wanted to do was write an article about Enhanced Education, but the amount of rabbit holes this leads to…).

In turn, Novamente presented itself to the Hong Kong government as the qualifying industry sponsor for three projects at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Those three projects collected nearly $1.14 million in USD (HK$8.9 million) of Hong Kong public funds.

Why this is a pass-through, not a donation

Quite simply, a donation has a donor and a recipient. The recipient decides what to do with the funds in service of its charitable purpose. The donor relinquishes control.

This was not that.

First, the money entered Humanity+ as a charitable contribution and exited as commercial sponsorship capital for a for-profit company. This is where the IRS gets picky, as that is not an acceptable use of charitable funds, it is a conversion of charitable funds into private-sector capital. The IRS really doesn’t like that.

Next, the chair of Humanity+ also owned Novamente. In and of itself, this isn’t a problem; many for-profit company owners also have non-profits, but they are savvy enough to keep the two separate. Benny boy here was not so savvy. The same individual, Goertzel, sat on both ends of the transfer, foregoing the arms-length grant requirement.

Finally, Epstein had no commercial relationship with Hong Kong PolyU, no products or services in Hong Kong’s tech sector, and no plausible reason to qualify as the “industry” the ITF rule was written to attract. Routing Epstein’s money through Humanity+ —> Novamente allowed his cash to function as the industry match while keeping his name off the Hong Kong government paperwork.

The result is a three-step conversion: private money —> tax-exempt nonprofit —> for-profit corporate sponsor —> public grant trigger.

But hey, who knows all the ins and outs of all these tricky foreign grant requirements? Goertzel probably just didn’t know what he was doing was wrong, right?

Wrong.

Let’s look at some of Goertzel’s emails to Epstein, which brings in another player I will write a whole separate article on, Joscha Bach, with one of the most stunningly stupid email subject lines one could possibly write:

So yeah. They were not only clear on the understanding that it couldn’t be used for commercial ventures, they were also using language such as “funneling money” and “pass-through.”

But the emails don’t stop there. Ben asks Epstein to donate to Humanity+ so Ben can repay himself, also a big 501(c)(3) no-no.

I’m really starting to wonder if the IRS has any idea what Ben and Humanity+ are really up to. Probably not, since Trump fired half of the IRS. But this has been going on for a decade and a half, so we can’t blame it all on that.

But all of Ben’s begging and tax evasion aside, here comes the real kicker: the email that Ben was gently reminding Epstein about.

Why is this particular email so damning for Goertzel? Two things.

First, Goertzel is not asking Epstein to support transhumanist outreach, AGI public education, or any other Humanity+ activity; he is asking for a specific dollar amount tied to a specific regulatory requirement. The $10k matches a sponsorship gap, not a charitable need.

Second, Goertzel openly states he would otherwise pay it himself. The Humanity+ “donation” is being requested as a substitute for capital Goertzel needed personally for his company’s sponsorship obligation.

That is not philanthropy; that is a directed transaction in which a 501(c)(3) is being used as a financial intermediary, or pass-through.

Okay, so Ben isn’t very good at nonprofiting. That doesn’t mean he knew what kind of person Epstein was while he was soliciting him for money.

Oh, wait.

So yeah. Ben knew, and asked for Epstein to keep sending his covert money the same way he had every year since 2010… and apologized that Epstein and his lawyers had to “go through all that”. Poor guys.

I think this might be enough for Benny to deal with today. Part Two, my dissection of his Substack post, will follow in a subsequent post.

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Transcript:

On the heels of learning about an online rape academy, this week on Feral America, we’re gonna be highlighting the story of two Hispanic 18-year-old girls with very different stories that you may not have heard. Let’s dive into it. We’re gonna begin this week talking about Makayla Rene Settles. Makayla was 18 years old, living in North Carolina.

Her father lived in California and she decided that for college she would go to Moorpark College, which was right near where her father lived. He offered to let her live with him and pay for her college while she went there. She moved out and in less than two days after she moved out, her father, Stephen Vincent Chavez, brutally raped her for four hours.

When her uncle found her, he had to carry her to the emergency room because she couldn’t walk. There was blood on the front and the back of her gown.

And she told her family members that during the assault, she asked him to stop because she was bleeding vaginally. And he said, well, you know what that means and turned her over.

Makayla had a rape kit done and Stephen Vincent Chavez, her father’s DNA was found inside of her. The police were notified and Chavez was arrested. However, he was let out on bail and is currently out walking free. This was in July, 2025. And in December of 2025, unable to deal with her grief and what had happened to her, Makayla took her own life.

Because she’s not around to testify, the case is tenuous at this point, despite all of the evidence. The hearing for Stephen Vincent Chavez is at 8.30 a.m. on April 21st at the Ventura County Courthouse at the Ventura Government Center. We will be holding a protest, a march for Makayla, at 8 a.m. April 21st.

on the corner of Victoria and telephone at the Ventura County courthouse. Please join us to show your support for Makayla’s family. They are mostly in North Carolina they are obviously coming out for the trial, but we really want to see some support out here for Makayla since she’s not here to stand up for herself anymore.

It’s a really tragic story. A lot of people are wondering, well, why did, you know, the comments I’ve seen online, like, why did her mom send her out there? Blah, Because it was her father. She didn’t anticipate this was going to happen. We don’t know the circumstances of why Makayla’s mother and father were no longer together. And so speculating on that is not something that’s worthwhile doing here.

It’s placing the blame where it doesn’t belong. The blame in this case lies squarely with Stephen Vincent Chavez.

So let’s make sure that he never walks free again, that our voices are heard, and that we show up April 21st, 8 a.m. with our signs and our voices raised. We need to show support for this case that has gotten very little media coverage. Thank you so much to Gina Silva at KTLA for covering this. But otherwise, I haven’t seen a whole lot on this case.

A lot of people online are like, this isn’t, this is fake. I haven’t seen any coverage of it. Welcome to the life of Brown people. Brown people do not get media coverage when things happen to them.

So another case that you may not have heard of involving another 18 year old Hispanic girl. This is a girl that’s originally from Honduras. Her name is Alishon Torres. Alishon was told along with her other family members by her five year old sister about a 58 year old man who was living with a family member.

who had been molesting the five-year-old. None of the family members did anything about this except for Alishon. She was out walking late one night on the night of February 26th, the early morning of February 26th, and she came across this man.

And she confronted him.

She was out walking late on the night of February 25th, early morning of February 26th at around 1 a.m. and came across this man that was accused by her sister of molesting.

Alishon asked if she could borrow his phone to make a call, then confronted him.

She proceeded to empty one complete round, one complete cartridge into him, pulled out a second weapon and emptied that into him as well. He was found at 2 a.m. with 14 bullet holes in him, including one in his head. He did not survive. Alishon is currently being held in Shelby County, Tennessee on $1 million bail.

Now, if I’ve ever heard a case of justifiable homicide, this would be the one. The support online from the story that I posted about this has been overwhelming for Alishon. A lot of people are asking, can we start a GoFundMe for her? And the answer to that, unfortunately, is no, because GoFundMe does not allow funds to be raised for someone who is accused of murder.

But what you can do to support Alishon is follow these steps to contribute to her commissary. Right now, the last I checked it was full, but I’m going to keep checking daily. And if there is any space left on her commissary, I am adding to it. She might be stuck in jail right now, but we can at least make it as comfortable as possible for her because

This girl is out there doing what every single one of us, when we heard about the Rape Academy, wanted to go and do. This is not saying that I’m going to do anything like this. I am not. I do not own any weapons and I do not condone people killing other people.

However, when the legal system is not doing its job, and we’ve seen with the complete lack of accountability through the Epstein files that it’s not doing its job…

Maybe it’s time for the revolution.

Just another day in feral America.

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In the charges, filed last year, Ann Altman details over nine years of abuse at the hands of her brother, Sam, from the time Ann was three (3) until she was 12.

Sensitive readers, please use caution reading through Ann’s account in the complete lawsuit that follows.

Sam Altman denies the claims and says his sister is mentally ill, a common excuse given by the accused and their enablers.

Extortion.

Seeking repayment for medical bills, therapy, and emotional damage is extortion in Sam Altman’s eyes.

So how much does Sam Altman, worth over $2 billion, consider to be extortion?

$75,000. That is what is asked for on page six of the lawsuit.

0.00375% of Sam Altman’s current net worth.

Let’s say you had one million dollars. Lucky you! Now, let’s say someone wanted to “extort” 0.00375% from you. They would be asking for a whopping $37.50. EXTORTION!

For a billionaire to claim that as extortion is laughable.

For a brother to do these things to his sister is inhuman.

Ann Altman’s initial lawsuit was thrown out due to statue of limitations.

However, the judge left it open for her to file an amendment under Missouri’s child sexual abuse statue. She has recently done just that.

It is now in the court’s hands to decide if the case has enough merit to go to trial.

Sam Altman is countersuing for defamation. Because of course he is.

Less than two days after she moved in, Stephen Vincent Chavez, Makayla’s father, brutally raped her for four hours.

When she asked him to stop because she was bleeding, he laughed and said, “Well, you know what that means.”

When Makayla’s uncle came home and discovered the situation, he took her to the emergency room, where he had to carry her in because she couldn’t walk from the trauma. Her hospital gown was covered in blood in the front and the back. I am guessing that is what Chavez’ comment meant - that he would assault her elsewhere. His DNA was found inside her.

Makayla’s mom brought her back to North Carolina, but the trauma was too much for Makayla to bear; in December 2025, after five months of living through unimaginable trauma, Makayla took her own life.

Chavez was arrested and released on bail. He is walking freely around Moorpark as I write this. His defense, according to text messages with Makayla’s mom? He was blackout drunk and doesn’t remember anything. For FOUR HOURS. Yet in the same text thread, he claims to be the victim because “she didn’t scream or run away.”

Tell me how you can be so blackout drunk that you don’t remember, yet you recall that she didn’t scream or fight back?

Guess what, Chavez. Surviving shouldn’t require violence. And dads shouldn’t rape their daughters.

The Ventura County District Attorney, Erik Nasarenko, has said the case may be dropped because it’s a “he said - she said” case because Makayla is not around to testify.

HIS DNA WAS FOUND INSIDE HER.

She had medical records and police records.

Yet Erik Nasarenko doesn’t know if that’s enough for a case.

Well, Erik, maybe a review of Chavez’ criminal history may help. He seems to have a serious issue with substance abuse. Now that we know what he does when he’s drunk, isn’t it time to protect the women and drivers of Ventura County?

For a more detailed breakdown, Chavez' history of arrests and violations, I ran a background check. His criminal history spans over 2 decades.

If you would like to help get Stephen Vincent Chavez off the streets of Ventura County and into prison where he belongs, you can call District Attorney Erik Nasarenko at (805) 654-2500.

Chavez is scheduled for his next hearing on April 21, 2026 at 8:30am.

The protest begins outside the Ventura Government Center on April 21, 2026 at 8:00am on the corner of Victoria and Telephone.

https://www.mobilize.us/projectnameandshame/event/933815/