THE HOBBLEDEHOY

A look through the Epstein files.

By Sarah Kendzior | Oct 18 2024

“They’re jackhammering into the sewer and the whole house is shaking,” I texted my husband.

I was sitting on a window seat watching a construction crew drill into the sidewalk below. I didn’t want to stand on a floor that trembled. Everything valuable threatened to fall. A photo of my children flipped over like a memory I couldn’t trust.

Outside, a stream of liquid coated the road. The workers gathered in a circle and looked down at something terrible. One picked up the jackhammer again and drilled deep and hard. The rest stood back and watched while he did it. I closed the windows, but I could not block out the sound or the feeling of earth giving way.

When will this stop, how can I make it stop I started to write, then deleted it. I saw my original text. I wrote instead:

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to accidentally summarize the state of the nation.”

* * *

Two weeks later, the DOJ released the Epstein files. The first people I looked up were the ones who tried to prevent my two books on Jeffrey Epstein, Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew, from being published. The next were the people who threatened to kill me for writing them. The ones whose names I know, anyway.

Looking through the files, I felt an old familiar sensation: this was the first time in years I got search results without an AI summary. I try to configure search engines to avoid AI, but Big Tech learned to override tricks like writing “-AI” or “-fuck”. The new robot overlords stole my old hobby of researching the technofascists who birthed them. The public domain that made it possible for me to write my books is gone.

I remembered when I found documentation of Trump and Epstein’s rape cases over a decade ago, and wrote about them, and thought people would care. When a timeline was a chronology on a social media site and not an alternate reality about which you fantasize: an alternative reality in which predators face consequences.

Then I felt another familiar sensation: I was jackhammering into the sewer now too.

When you jackhammer into the sewer, you get covered in shit. That’s what the Epstein Files are: shit. Unredacted to antagonize the victims; redacted to protect the perpetrators; released in a slow drip to acclimatize people to horror; released in an enormous drop to overwhelm people with fear.

They transform pain into social media content. They turn pain into predator contentment. The pursuit of truth is always noble: but not the sluggish or careless release of a partial reveal. Not when it’s about a pedophile rape cabal of ethno-supremacist billionaires and their enablers.

Not when that cabal holds power and we are left navigating a world we would have avoided had more people told the truth — and believed the truth-tellers.

This story could have been told in real time: and if it had been, it wouldn’t be this story. If people had believed the Epstein victims when they first came forward, the next wave of horrors would not have happened. If careerists had not been so easy to bribe and blackmail, ordinary people would not have to suffer under this group of sadistic oligarchs and politicians. Our era is the culmination of complicity.

Everyone likes to look at the dots. But when I connect them, people scream. Often because when I’m done connecting the dots, they are looking at a portrait of someone they know.

In the Epstein files, I found primary source documents related to events I described in my books: email invites to pedophile parties, open and cavalier. The brazenness stemmed from a lifetime of elite criminal impunity. I lost track of the Biden and Trump administration members I found in the files, along with their family members and friends and lawyers, who often overlap.

They like their worlds small, like the children they rape.

* * *

In 2021, I read the personal archives of Danny Casolaro, a journalist who had covered many of the same criminal networks as me. I wrote about him in They Knew as an example of a journalist murdered for going down this road, but he was more than that. He was a lyrical writer, a tenacious researcher, and a poetic soul. I felt invasive looking through his unpublished work. This is not how it was meant to be seen: by a stranger nearly the same age as he was when he was killed. Casolaro was 44 when he was found dead in a West Virginia hotel on August 10, 1991.

I remember shaking when I found a paper with Robert Maxwell’s name and address on it. “The European,” Casolaro called him. I took photos of the documents. After I did that, my phone was hacked and died. I had to go back and do it again, this time with different precautions.

Robert Maxwell was an espionage operative who procured Israeli passports for mobsters in the USSR so they could expand their criminal network worldwide. After he died falling (or being pushed) off a yacht in 1991, he was given an elaborate hero’s funeral by the Israeli government. Ghislaine Maxwell, along with Epstein, continued her father’s criminal operations, which included human trafficking.

Everyone I’ve just mentioned died in a suicide called a murder or a murder called a suicide, except Ghislaine, who is benefiting from the largesse extended by Trump and his Kushner-affiliated backer, the Aleph Institute.

I don’t want to write this article. Can you tell? I did not want to write books about crimes this depraved either. But it felt like the right thing to do: maybe exposure would bring consequences. Casolaro expressed hesitation, too, due to the enormity and danger of the topic. But he knew he had something, and he put his heart into his work.

That’s the irony: this work can only be done well by people with a heart, and you have to resign yourself to letting it break again and again. Or you will lose yourself, and you’ve lost too much already to let them take that too.

* * *

Two years after They Knew, a documentary about Casolaro came out. I couldn’t watch it. When you spend a lot of time with someone’s unpublished writing, it feels both intimate and exploitative. I didn’t want to feel the latter.

I had also recently watched The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness, a documentary about journalist Maury Terry and his struggle to prove a satanic group was involved in the murders committed by David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam. Terry was traumatized by his search. Desperation for clarity on the case consumed his life.

The documentary was released in May 2021. This was when Google still worked and most news sites were not paywalled. After watching, I read Terry’s 1987 book, The Ultimate Evil, and began looking up the officials he described as blocking his inquiry.

Once again, I found pedophiles in positions of power. For example, Eugene Gold, the Son of Sam prosecutor, admitted to assaulting a 10-year-old girl in Tennessee, a crime that would normally get a man life in prison, but in 1983, the judge let it slide. Gold had announced in 1981 that he was resigning as an attorney and would devote his life to serving Jewish causes. He moved to Israel in 1982. As CBS reported, Israel allows American pedophiles to become Israeli citizens. (You should print this report, as ultra-Zionist Bari Weiss now runs CBS.) Gold never faced punishment for sexually assaulting a child. He returned to the US and lived to be 100 years old.

I’m telling this story now because it’s hardly unique. I’m telling this story because it may disappear with the rest of the public domain into AI controlled by oligarchs. I’m telling this story for that 10-year-old girl in Tennessee.

The Trump administration is releasing a selective cache of Epstein documents because they believe their network has consolidated power. But as they release them, they take over media — Twitter, Tik-Tok, CBS, the endless outlets they bully into compliance — and rewrite history.

They want a world where people know the worst truths but are prohibited from discussing them.

* * *

Across my street is a barricaded sidewalk where the construction workers were jackhammering into the sewer. A loose plank of wood lies on top. Hole, it says. Underneath, a sea of shit, barely covered. It’s Groundhog Day and the second Trump administration is one year old.

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