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. They complement this positioning by asserting that the wilder the accusation is the more probable it seems. Leading media outlets, both traditional and alternative, as well government officials, legal professionals, and law enforcement around the globe 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. To be specific, journalists and reporters in the traditional and alternative media and their frequent guests, folks like Kara Swisher, Ryan Grim, Andrew Callaghan, Chris Hedges, Heather Cox Richardson, as well as congresspersons Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Robert Garcia, Thomas Massie, and other others. It's like the Witch Trials, Red Scare, Satanic Panic, Me Too, and "The Uterus Collector" didn't happen and nothing was learned...

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, Lifetime, HBO, and BBC documentary films and series, to television and other media appearances, to book and podcast deals and tours, to celebrity treatments of all kinds, 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 or podcast circuit is about the absence of credibility and evidence.

RELEASE REVERSAL

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. That is so not to "protect the accused", as commonly presented by a growing cohort of lunatics, but to "protect" accusers and done at the request of the white-shoe lawyers and their firms busily collecting hundreds of millions of dollars, in some cases 30% of rewards, instantly won without the requirement of testing any of accusers' 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 what was then a new federal investigation into potential co-conspirators of Epstein’s. And what does it show? Well, 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.

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, for their own record internally in a memo 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. At the very least she lied about her employment history, she said she was being abused for four years when it could only have been two, and 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 they had no evidence for those cameras, and say they reported to Giuffre there were no credible threat against her ever found.

  
  

• They were “unable to corroborate” the central claim of Giuffre’s story (and the crux of the whole Epstein mythos): while under age, she and many others were trafficked and “lent out” for sexual services to scores of prominent men from around the globe including royals, government officials, and others.

  
  

• Giuffre “began using drugs so heavily that Epstein [who never consumed any] said he did not want her around anymore.” They tell us, relatedly, that Giuffre acknowledged using large quantities of memory-impairing drugs despite her whole role in this case (and her celebrity status, book deals, documentary participation, and payouts of tens of millions in damages), being based on her ability to offer accurate and 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”. 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, suggesting 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 also 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 being recruited, trafficked, and used as a sex slave, and the one proposing 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 in an ancient ziggurat hidden on the dark side of the Moon, etc…) and as such an essential witness, Giuffre was never brought into court. Though named hundreds of times during the Maxwell trial, for instance, her total 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. Similarly, had he not died and the trial actually gone ahead, Giuffre would not have been invited to testify against Epstein, either. That no one considers this fact interesting tells you almost everything you need to know.

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 none of this came out in court as the legal proceedings against Brunel ended without 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? Clearly the absence of evidence is the firmest possible evidence of, well, what ever you like...

HISTORY'S RHYME

Of course, real and substantial evidence could appear any time. I'm sure everyone would welcome that. I'm also certain we all agree that our harshest punishments should be reserved for those who harm children and that anyone engaged in illegal activity should be charged and tried. But what explains how this story has so overtaken the popular imagination, news sites, Substacks, and social media feeds seven years after the death of the accused, 25 years after the purported events, and long after "survivors" received compensation — such as Giuffre, who may very well have survived nothing, who took home somewhere between $25-$50 million ($34-$68M CAD) in direct payouts alone?

That often-misattributed quote does look to be true: history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. 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. That might seem like hyperbole but those are real claims made to authorities that appear in these revealed (though redacted) FBI records. The wildest allegations attested to by purported victims include things like a man (after having recovered lost memories just like Michelle Smith before him) who accused former Presidents Bush and Clinton of raping him on a yacht in 2000, and also asserting that Trump and his wife were both present and engaged in ritualistic sacrifices including the dismemberment of infants. These are the sorts of claims earning credibility by being discovered in FBI memos and then repeated by reporters, so-called "Epstein researchers", and even former CIA analysts on the nightly news. And I think all of it is breaking people's brains.

Even the less absurd accounts are still too commonly devoid of evidence and/or involve outright deception while not only being taken seriously but celebrated. In this way this whole drama looks a lot like the Jian Ghomeshi case here in Canada a decade ago. Giuffre and many other "victims" — like Ransome and Farmer, for example, who appear to have conspired with Giuffre while fabricating wild allegations and supporting claims — don't even appear eager to fake credibility. Well, I mean, you decide: Maria Farmer (today aged 57) alleges that at age 26 (after being gifted an artist-in-residency by Jeffery Epstein, who was managing her artwork for a film at that time) she was held captive on an estate in Ohio. Her claim is specifically that "the Jewish mafia", including teams of snipers, provided overwatch as Epstein and Maxwell abused her and, as she insists, gave her multiple forms of cancer, as well. She offers this while also describing how she, an savvy adult from Phoenix who had been living in New York, was free to communicate with the outside world while in captivity and that her family members also visited and were free to come and go. (While the Israeli assault team was napping, perhaps? Or maybe she was able to take the space lasers offline with her powers of meditation and remote viewing? Who can say...) She adds to this that Epstein stole from her during her residency. What does she claim he took from her? Well, she admits that while in Ohio she had in her possession naked photos she made of her under age siblings (because, after all, she was an artist); but, of course, she has no evidence of the theft and instead simply offers that she committed several crimes of her own (which, naturally, no one cares anything about). To this weird story Farmer adds what she describes as a "troubling encounter" with Donald Trump. His crime? It is said that, when she was in her mid-twenties and in Trump's presence at an Epstein property, he ...wait for it... looked at her legs while ...wait for it... she was wearing shorts. Yes, that's the allegation. She says, as an adult at the time and now seeking damages a quarter century after this event, she felt the behaviour was "predatory" and "threatening" and left her traumatized.

It is stories just like this that have so much of the world's popular press and cultural influencers (many of whom are, apparently, investigative reporters and trusted media personalities, scholars and professors, former intelligence and military officers) asserting that the world is run by an elite cabal of child predators — even when allegations do not even involve anyone underage and there is zero evidence of any kind on offer.

However, Farmer, Ransome, and Giuffre don't just offer weird, unsubstantiated allegations of this sort but also claim to actually have hard evidence of real crimes. They have claimed to be in possession of scores of their own photos and videos of numerous public figures, both named and (for unknown reasons) unnamed, committing serious crimes; only, none of those have ever been produced for law enforcement, lawyers, researchers, or the press, or even published in their own book or website. Unable to provide any evidence, they, just like Ghomeshi's accusers, also continued to have trouble keeping their stories straight even as they conspire to do so.

Like Epstein, around 20 complainants eventually came forward with claims against Jian. Only three of them 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," that they were "manipulative," "breached their oath to tell the truth," "deliberately chose not to be completely honest," "prepared to tell half the truth as long as she might get away with it," and, as a result, their credibility was "tainted by outright deception." Their behaviour resulted in Ghomeshi being 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. *barf* Who wants to live in such a world?

But what I really cannot understand with this whole thing is how effectively none of these same people seem to care in the least about the globe-spanning network of child predators we have an abundance of real evidence and now many criminal prosecutions for. 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 over just two decades. A recent investigation in France says there's reason to believe there are as many as 330,000 victims of sexual abuse carried out by the clergy in that country, mostly against young boys. And this behaviour looks to have been repeated everywhere else the church operates, with new cases still 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? Mere correspondence with Epstein, not even untested accusations of wrongdoing, is resulting in donations to hospitals, schools, and charities being returned; threatening to end or destroy the legacy of illustrious scientific and academic careers; and potentially bringing down royal families and governments in Canada and the US, the UK and France, Norway and Slovakia, China, Japan, and Australia. I don't get it. If Epstein hadn't funded charities, universities, and science projects but instead built places of worship across the world and gifted priests and popes flights on his jet, these individuals, institutions, and those attending them would be seen as untainted and effectively immune to any real consequences? I mean, what would the church have to do to see mass resignations, return of billions in donations, or the shuttering of its operations on three continents — only to the degree we're seeing with individuals who received an email or the gift of a tax-deductible donation from Epstein? Nothing, it would seem.