A GOOFY MEMO

Like many other people, I’ve tried to stay as far away from this story as possible and for all kinds of obvious reasons. Until now, the lack of publicly available information, the hyperabundance of existing investigation and reporting, the wild conspiracies and sensationalism surrounding every aspect, as well as the nature and sensitivity of the related material has made this story deeply uninteresting. And yet, it’s looking evermore clear that this story, or murky constellation of stories, has mutated into the twenty-first century version of the globe-spanning moral panic and mass hysteria engendered by Smith and Pazder some forty-five years ago now.

Then, as now, serious folks seem willing to go on record and report their finding certain claims more credible the less evidence there is and with that the wilder those claims the more probable folks report finding them. Leading media outlets, both traditional and alternative, as well government officials, legal professionals, and law enforcement on five continents are showing superhuman credulity while seeing things that aren't there, connecting their imaginary dots into elaborate, hallucinatory, choose-your-own-adventure-style conspiracies, and throwing around language, accusations, and labels not justified or even implied by any available facts. It's like the Witch Trials, Red Scare, Satanic Panic, and Me Too didn't even happen...

With scores of people still suffering severe consequences from baseless allegations during the Ritual Abuse/Satanic Panic of the '80s and '90s, and responsible parties and institutions assuring the public of their self-reflection and reform, countless authorities around the world are on the hunt for more witches — while also offering a significant cut of hundreds of millions of dollars from estates and compensation funds and millions more in other rewards (from Netflix, HBO, Lifetime, and BBC documentaries, television series and news appearances, to book and podcast deals and tours, celebrity treatment, and more) for anyone coming forward (without any evidence, without having their credibility or allegations tested in any way, and without even needing to disclose their identity.) What could go wrong? Unsurprisingly then, one story not making the news and podcast circuit is about the absence of evidence and credibility.

A new tranche of documents was uploaded and made public as part of the "Epstein Files" disclosures from the US Department of Justice in early 2026. A bunch of those files were quickly removed without explanation. Despite knowing nothing about these matters and having spoken to no one about any of it or even any related issues, I was messaged by someone about this situation. So I looked into it. As you can imagine, given the broad interest and frantic fanaticism, those uploaded files were not removed before some folks had downloaded them.

Those documents remain largely redacted — not to "protect the accused," as commonly presented by a growing cohort of lunatics, but to "protect" accusers — at the request of lawyers busily collecting hundreds of millions, in some cases 30% of rewards, instantly won without the requirement of testing any of their claims in court. What a gig! Turns out one of those removed documents is an internal memo from December of 2019 on the state of the federal investigation into potential co-conspirators of Epstein’s. It explains in great detail, over many pages, how the primary source for almost everything you've previously heard (and probably believe) about this and related cases was well-established as being beyond unreliable and could never have brought her claims to court.

Federal prosecutors found the key Epstein "victim," Virginia Giuffre, the woman in the now-famous photo with Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell, to be lacking in any credibility whatsoever. They found her eager to fabricate, commonly offering errors, omissions, and fantastical stories, all while doing so and conspiring with others for financial gain. The investigators report, internally for their own record in a record that was never supposed to be made public, that:

• Giuffre’s accounts were “internally inconsistent” even within a single, brief interview conducted on September 9, 2019. For example: Giuffre would tell investigators in one moment that she had “not actually spent much time” with someone and then in the next moment would offer that her interactions with that same person were "too many to count."

  
  

• Giuffre admitted to repeatedly lying about basic details, destroying pertinent evidence, and knowingly offering falsehoods in interviews with the press. She lied about her employment history, she said she was being abused for four years when it could only possible have been two, and she burned all her personal notes on Epstein and Maxwell…

  
  

• Giuffre “engaged in a continuous stream of public interviews about her allegations, many of which have included sensationalized if not demonstrably inaccurate characterizations of her experiences.” For example, Giuffre claimed the FBI told her: of “40 other Epstein victims”, that “Epstein had cameras watching her at all times”, and that there was a “credible” death threat against her. The FBI denies ever offering such information, tells us there is no evidence for those cameras, and say they reported to Giuffre the opposite of what she was telling the press: no credible threat against her was ever found.

  
  

• They were “unable to corroborate” the central claim of Giuffre’s story (and the crux of the whole Epstein mythos): that she and others were trafficked and “lent out” for sexual services while under age to prominent men, such as Prince Andrew and others.

  
  

• Giuffre “began using drugs so heavily that Epstein said he did not want her around anymore.” They tell us, relatedly, that Giuffre acknowledged consuming large quantities of memory-impairing drugs despite her whole role in this case (and her celebrity status, book deals, documentary participation, and payouts of many millions in damages), being based on her ability to offer accurate, detailed specifics about events taking place decades prior.

  
  

• Giuffre schemed with Churcher, a tabloid journalist from the UK's Daily Mail, to generate “big headlines” by accusing lots of prominent men with child sex crimes. The plan was to do so to entice publishers to buy their forthcoming “memoir” and inflate the bid price. Churcher coached Giuffre to come up with as many names as she could, not the names of men who did any wrong but anyone she could recall with any connection to Epstein, writing in emails things like, "Don't forget Alan Dershowitz. JE's buddy and lawyer. Good name for your pitch... We all suspect Alan is a pedo and tho no proof of that, you probably met him when he was hanging with JE."

  
  

• The resulting “memoir” manuscript was found to be a “partially fictionalized account of her experiences with Epstein and Maxwell” and “described a number of incidents that she has since admitted did not in fact take place.”

Despite her being the primary source for most of the claims swirling around Epstein and Maxwell (the first to claim to have been recruited, trafficked, and used as a sex slave, and the one claiming there was a child trafficking ring, a network of prominent men involved, all tied to a blackmail operation connected to spooky foreign agencies [or maybe a cabal of shape-shifting, interdimensional lizard-people who reside inside the Moon], etc…) and as such an essential witness, Giuffre was not brought into court at any time. Though named hundreds of times during the Maxwell trial, for instance, her lack of credibility and inability to keep her story straight in a single non-adversarial interview threatened to imperil the work of any lawyer seeking to establish their case "beyond a reasonable doubt" and, as such was not invited to testify. And, had he not died and the trial actually gone ahead, she would not have been invited to testify against Epstein.

Giuffre was, however, asked to provide evidence for a related case in Paris, in June of 2021. She was considered pivotal to an investigation into Jean-Luc Brunel, the French modelling agent who had "connections" to Epstein. Brunel’s lawyers strongly contested her character and integrity, noting she admitted to errors in her testimony when confronted about serious contradictions regarding: key locations, dates, and individuals. But the legal proceedings against Brunel ended without a trial after he, age 75, was found dead by suicide in his La Santé prison cell in February of 2022. And Giuffre herself also died by suicide, on her farm in Western Australia, in April of 2025. Or was the death an operation carried out by a team of human-amphibian hybrids working for MI6 or the Saudi royals?

If you ask me, all of these findings and unfoldings make the current climate look way too much like the Satanic Panic, with so much of the public, popular press, alternative media, and even the legal systems of many countries in a frenzy to capture and convict an underground network of baby-eating Satanists, with or without any evidence. This accuser (and many others, like Sarah Ransome, who it appears conspired with Giuffre, fabricated wild supporting claims, and couldn't keep her story straight for even two seconds) also, shockingly, resembles those in the Ghomeshi case here in Canada a decade ago. Though around 20 complainants eventually came forward, only three were deemed to have any evidence or credibility. While being celebrated as heroes publicly and in the press, all three complainants were eventually found: lying (offering different information to the police, their lawyers, the court, and the media — with the lead complainant, wildly, conducting 19 press interviews replete with differing details immediately prior to trial) and conspiring to ensure their stories and timelines cohered (with more than 5,000 text messages between just two of them.) Ultimately, the court determined the accounts of all three complainants had "serious deficiencies" and, more than that, their credibility was "tainted by outright deception." As a result of this Ghomeshi was set free, found not guilty on all accounts.

I don't know how we keep allowing this sort of thing to happen, fanning the flames rather than creating journalistic and legal firebreaks, particularly when there's an absence of evidence or where reliability is treacherously low and huge financial and social incentives abound. Who wants to live in such a world? *barf*

But what I really cannot understand with this whole thing and the accompanying tsunami of panic and furor — too often surrounding allegations for which there is zero evidence or even ample countervailing evidence — when effectively no one seems to care about the globe-spanning network of child predators we actually know about and have an abundance of real evidence for: aka the Catholic Church. There have been almost 4,400 priests and deacons credibly accused in the United States alone, with lawyers bringing allegations from 11,000 people who were children at the time of their victimization. Investigations in Ireland suspect there were 15,000 cases there just between 1970 and 1990. France says there is reason to believe there are 216,000 victims of sexual abuse carried out by the clergy in that country. And this looks to have been repeated everywhere else the church operates, with new cases emerging all the time. So why the wildly disproportionate concern and energy directed at this one scenario that looks to be all or mostly in peoples' over-active imaginations? I don't get it.