Royals

Members of royal families across the globe

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Virginia Giuffre and Ghislaine Maxwell in 2001 in London

In early February, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) introduced a bill dubbed “Virginia’s Law” that would remove the statute of limitations for adult sex abuse and trafficking survivors bringing federal civil claims, while helping ensure abusers cannot avoid civil liability through jurisdictional loopholes. The bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM), chair of the House Democratic Women’s Caucus, has been largely sidelined by the Congressional outrage over the Department of Justice’s handling of the Epstein files under Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Schumer spoke on Monday at the Staten Island Child Advocacy Center to promote the bill, which was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where it awaits action. “It will allow survivors to seek accountability whenever they’re ready, when they feel safe enough to do it, and when they want to pursue litigation,” said Schumer. “It makes clear that abusers and those who are enabling them cannot evade responsibility simply because too much time has passed.”

Named after Epstein survivor and trafficking rights advocate Virginia Giuffre, Virginia’s Law would add to a 2022 law that removed the statute of limitations for victims of child sex abuse. That limit was previously 28-years-old or 10 years after the incident. The removal did not apply to crimes that occurred before 2022, which the new law would address.

Schumer was joined by District Attorney Michael E. McMahon and Safe Horizon CEO Liz Roberts. The nonprofit Safe Horizon calls itself the largest U.S. victim service organization, helping 250,000 people each year. The organization supports victims of physical, sexual and community violence as well as exploitation and abuse.

“We’re in a difficult time because lot of people are in greater fear because we have a tone being set at the top in Washington of disregard for victims of violence,” said Roberts. “We’ve seen that in comments made about domestic violence as well as sexual abuse, and also key appointments of people who have a history of committing those acts.”

Virginia Giuffre allegedly died by suicide in April of 2025.

Amy Robach

In 2019, ABC News anchor Amy Robach was caught on a hot mic complaining that the network “quashed” her interview with key Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre, who was trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell for two years. “I’ve had the story for three years,” said Robach in the video. “We would not put it on the air. Um, first of all, I was told, ‘Who was Jeffrey Epstein? No one knows who that is. This is a stupid story.’ Then the palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways.”

“I tried for three years to get it out to no avail, and now these new revelations and — I freaking had all of it,” said Robach in the video. “I’m so pissed right now. Like, every day I get more and more pissed, ’cause I’m just like, Oh my God! It was — what we had, was unreal.”

Alan Dershowitz, Epstein’s longtime friend and attorney during his first arrest, supporter of Hillary Clinton and a member of Trump’s legal team during his 2020 impeachment trial, was mentioned in Giuffre’s interview. Dershowitz told NPR that he had called ABC News in 2015 just before the interview was supposed to have been broadcast to dissuade the network from airing Giuffre’s allegations. He said he had mainly called to warn ABC against giving Giuffre a platform. “I did not want to see her credibility enhanced by ABC,” Dershowitz told NPR.

Julie K. Brown

In 2017, Julie K. Brown, a reporter for the Miami Herald, began investigating Epstein. She uncovered 80 potential victims, some of whom were 13 and 14 years old when they were trafficked. She documented eight individuals through a series of reports published in November of 2018.

Brown also extensively covered the secret deal Epstein made with federal attorney Alex Acosta, who would later become U.S. Secretary of Labor during President Trump’s first term. Through a 2008 plea deal with Acosta, Epstein was allowed to plead guilty to only two state-level prostitution offenses. His federal charges disappeared and an FBI probe linking Epstein to dozens of victims was shut down. The deal also granted immunity to any possible co-conspirators.

Epstein’s plea deal came under fire after his 2019 arrest, and amid bipartisan criticism, Acosta resigned as Secretary of State.

Dershowitz wrote an open letter to the Pulitzer Prize committee in 2019, urging them to shut out Brown and the Miami Herald for the “fake news” reporting on the Epstein case. Brown didn’t receive the award.

She later said she had been warned by former Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter to expect pushback for her reporting, as other members of the media who had attempted to report on Epstein received. Reiter had said, “Somebody’s going to call your publisher and the next thing you know you are going to be assigned to the obituaries department.”

It wasn’t an idle warning. The Epstein Files reveal that in 2011, Epstein asked private detective William Riley of Riley Kiraly to get information about a Miami reporter and “her boyfriend.” Riley sent Epstein a full report on the target, all redacted in the U.S. Department of Justice’s published files.

Brown herself revealed late last year that the DOJ was monitoring her, as information about a 2019 flight booking is included in the Epstein files. Brown said she expected to see her name in the files because of her extensive reporting on Epstein. “What I didn’t expect to see was an American Airlines flight record from 2019 with my full name on them, including my maiden name, which I don’t use professionally. It’s an unusual name, so it’s clear it’s me.”

“Does somebody at the DOJ want to tell me why my American Airlines booking information and flights in July 2019 are part of the Epstein files (attached to a grand jury subpoena)?” she asked on X.

Lucia Osborne-Crowley 

Shortly after journalist Lucia Osborne-Crowley met with Epstein and Maxwell victim Carolyn Andriano in 2022, she was approached in a restaurant by a private detective who asked what she was writing about. She said the man offered her drugs, cash and a meeting with one of Epstein’s pilots, then put his hands under her skirt. The restaurant manager asked him to leave and he then waited outside for her, forcing Osborne-Crowley to sneak out through a staff exit.

Andriano, who was trafficked between the ages of 14 and 17, was a key witness in Maxwell’s 2021 trial. Osborne-Crowley had been interviewing survivors for her book on the trial, “The Lasting Harm,” published in 2024. She wondered who was paying the private detective and other people following her and victims who had come forward.

“It could be any of the people who are not yet facing charges,” Osborne-Crowley told The Guardian. “Firstly, they can afford it. The weekend I was in Miami, there was a person following me, a person following a survivor in South Africa who was in my book, and a person following a survivor in the UK. Just so that we all were aware.”

Two women withdrew from “The Lasting Harm” after receiving threats. In November of 2025, 28 victims released a statement alleging many of them had received death threats and asking for police protection. “Ghislaine used to tell them, ‘If you ever tell anyone what’s going on here, no matter how far into the future, we will find you and we will stop you,'” said Osborne-Crowley. “And in a lot of ways, that promise was kept.”

Conchita Sarnoff

Investigative journalist Conchita Sarnoff was in a unique position when she began investigating sex trafficking. Her former husband is the grandson of Brigadier General David Sarnoff, the founder of NBC who also oversaw the construction of Radio Free Europe during World War II. Those connections brought her into the same social orbit as Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, whom she met in the 1990s. 

When Epstein was arrested in 2008 in Palm Beach, Sarnoff phoned him and then interviewed him at home while he was under house arrest.

“Because I had a social relationship with Epstein and Maxwell, I knew who they were, who their friends were, and more or less how they thought,” said Sarnoff. “This allowed me to expand my investigation.” That reporting turned into a book, “TrafficKing: The Jeffrey Epstein Case,” which Sarnoff completed in 2008.

Twenty-seven publishers turned her down after reading it. She said multiple media outlets scheduled her to discuss the book and her investigation but then rescinded the invitations without explanation.

The book became widely available in 2021, and discusses how Sarnoff risked her life to expose the reality of human trafficking despite bribes to stay silent. It includes witness accounts of Epstein, Maxwell and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Sarnoff is now executive director of the Alliance to Rescue Victims of Trafficking.

Savannah Guthrie

In 2019, Today Show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie interviewed six Epstein/Maxwell victims, including Virginia Giuffre. It was the first television appearance for Giuffre and aired on the NBC’s Today Show and Dateline. The survivors shared their experiences of grooming and abuse, and the Dateline special focused on the failures of the U.S. justice system to protect victims.

The high-profile disappearance of Guthrie’s mother, Nancy Guthrie, has dominated headlines recently. Guthrie was last seen on January 31, one day after the U.S. DOJ released 3.5 million additional pages of the Epstein files. Nancy Guthrie remains missing and law enforcement has found no ties between her disappearance and her daughter’s reporting.

We’re not at war right now, according to House Speaker Mike Johnson. The U.S. and Israeli governments are not aware of a strike on a girl’s primary school in southern Iran that killed 165 people, most of them girls aged 7 to 12, and wounded close to 100 more. Reports on the deaths of six U.S. troops killed in an Iranian drone attack are just attempts by “fake news” outlets to make President Donald Trump look bad, according to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

Graves being dug for victims following a strike on a school in Minab, Iran. Source: Iranian Foreign Media Department/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS

Since there’s clearly not much of interest going on right now, perhaps we should turn our collective gaze to the one thing Trump can’t stop talking about: his $400 million, 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom. “I picked those drapes in my first term—I always liked gold,” said Trump at a Medal of Honor ceremony for three Army soldiers earlier this week. “I believe it’s going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world.”

The ballroom will be almost twice the size of the actual White House. It is being built on the site of the demolished White House East Wing and is being funded by Trump himself as well as his good friends at Amazon, Apple, Google, HP, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Meta and Palantir. The Lutnick Family is also a donor. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick will appear before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee as part of the panel’s investigation into his close relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The National Capital Planning Commission released more than 9,000 pages of comments denouncing the project this week. The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued the Trump administration in December over the project, claiming the White House had been carrying out the construction unlawfully because Trump hadn’t gotten approval from Congress or submitted his plans to the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts for review.

The Commission of Fine Arts signed off on the project last month and the National Capital Planning Commission is also expected to give their seal of approval.

The gilded ballroom is reminiscent of the Palace of Versailles, built by French “Sun King” Louis XIV. His reign lasted for more than 72 years, the longest of any monarch in history. The inside of the palace was a testament to gold-plated opulence, while the estate’s Royal Menagerie boasted expansive gardens and exotic animals including ostriches and an elephant.

The Sun King eventually made Versailles the de facto capital of France, first using it to promote himself to European nobility through a series of nighttime festivals. It was leveraged to court elites and leaders from around the world, with an Embassy from Iran visiting in 1715. The Palace was a center of diplomacy, lobbying, intrigue, spying and all manner of scandal.

Louis XVI would be the last King of France. It was during his reign that the lower and middle classes rose up, the French Revolution began and the monarchy was abolished. Louis XVI was seen by many as the embodiment of elite tyranny, an example of old money excess that had outrun its course and was standing in the way of the principles of Enlightenment that would usher in a new age of the democratic republic. Louis and his wife, Marie Antoinette, were both famously arrested and executed by guillotine, and Versailles became a public establishment.

Trump’s gold-plated ballroom and its corporate benefactors are a stark reminder of what happens when elite power goes unchecked for too long. That it’s being constructed in the midst of what could become World War III, while an unprecedented global money laundering and sex trafficking scandal is being actively suppressed by his administration, is a disgrace.

Trump views his ballroom as the crowning achievement of his Presidency, a testament to the wealth and influence of his family and close friends, members of an elite billionaires club that don’t need planning permissions to get things done and unequivocally don’t need to respect laws.

We can only hope The Golden Ballroom goes down in history as a symbolic turning point for the United States. A time when citizens realize the two-party system they’ve been yoked under for so long does not represent their interests or their wellbeing. When they realize their federal government is designed to polarize and oppress them while ensuring One Percent of the global population keeps getting richer and more influential while the bottom tier experiences calculated and systemic suffering.

Extreme imbalances of power tend to be great equalizers. Now is the moment to level the playing field.

From left: Bill Gates, Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen, Jeffrey Epstein, Gates Foundation advisor Boris Nikolic and Jagland

Thorbjørn Jagland, the former prime minister of Norway, was hospitalized yesterday after an alleged suicide attempt. Jagland was charged with gross corruption earlier this month, stemming from his long-standing business relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Jagland served as Norway’s prime minister from 1996 to 1997, was secretary-general of the Council of Europe and also served as chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. The Epstein files detail numerous solo and family trips to various Epstein residences, including his notorious island. They show that Epstein covered expenses for Jagland and his family between 2011 and 2018.

Norwegian investigators are trying to determine whether Jagland received loans, travel and gifts in connection with his official posts. According to a 2014 email invitation from Epstein to Peter Thiel, Jagland was planning to spend an entire week on his island. Epstein also invited Richard Branson to the party in this email, mentioning Jagland. Epstein promises to vouch for Thiel’s discretion in yet another invite with the promise of Jagland staying at his house.

Jagland isn’t the only Norwegian who had a longstanding relationship with Epstein. Crown Princess Mette-Marit was forced to issue an apology after the released files showed a close friendship with the convicted pedophile. In a 2012 email, Mette-Marit asks Epstein, “Is it inappropriate for a mother to suggest two naked women carrying a surfboard for my 15 yr old sons wallpaper?”

Mette-Marit’s son, Marius Borg Høiby, 29, is currently on trial for 38 crimes, including four rapes and assaults.

The Manhattan apartments where Epstein and Lutnick resided for more than 2 decades

When U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was questioned at a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing earlier this month, the focus was on his personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Lutnick walked back statements he had previously made and revealed he and his family had visited Epstein on his private island.

But the Epstein files contain much more damaging information about Lutnick, who was Epstein’s New York City next door neighbor for more than 20 years. Les Wexner, the billionaire behind Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch, originally owned both buildings. Wexner has recently come under scrutiny for his decades-long business dealings with Epstein.

Lutnick also had a long-time business relationship with Epstein, including an investment contract signed in 2012 for a digital ad company called AdFin Solutions. Lutnick signed on behalf of an LLC controlled by investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, where he served as CEO. The deal was made five days after Lutnick and his family visited Epstein on his private island.

Perhaps the most damning allegations against Lutnick are contained in an FBI whistleblower complaint dated 04/23/2021. Titled “Alleged Money Laundering by Howard Lutnick via BGC Financial and Cantor Fitzgerald,” the complaint alleges “fraud, money laundering, Ponzi schemes and regulatory breaches by [redacted] and CF.” Lutnick was chairman and CEO of financial services company BGC, a spinoff of Cantor Fitzgerald, until he was appointed Donald Trump’s Commerce Secretary.

The FBI complaint also links Lutnick to illegal activities with JP Morgan, Russian hedge funds and other senior finance executives. Jes Staley, former CEO of JP Morgan, resigned as CEO of Barclays in 2021 after a U.K. regulatory investigation about his relationship with Epstein. He was subsequently banned from the U.K. financial sector for misrepresenting his relationship with the convicted pedophile.

“[Redacted] has documented proof showing money laundering and Ponzi schemes by Lutnick via offshore shell companies, liquid funding, and real estate brokerage firms,” states the FBI complaint. “[Redacted] believes he has supporting documents which could link Lutnick to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell and Sarah Ferguson, a royal family member, host events called La Dolce Vita Parties, where high profile celebrities and executives contribute large donations to attend. The donations are linked to causes involving children. Lutnick made ‘huge donations’ to these events.”

An earlier FBI interview with presumably the same whistleblower offers more insight about the money laundering, speculating it was from the Russian Mafia. It also alleges “Lutnick gave Sarah Ferguson office space above Cantor Fitzgerald in New York for the Children in Crisis (CIC) charity. Ghislaine Maxwell and Ferguson would attend Dolce Vita Parties which raised money for CIC and Stowe School. CIC no longer existed.”

Children in Crisis merged with another organization in 2018. Stowe School is an elite British private boarding school whose alumni include Richard Branson (a prominent figure in the Epstein files), the actor Henry Cavill, Prince Rainier III of Monaco, along with dozens of well-known British royals, politicians, entertainers, journalists and athletes.

This heavily redacted email from somebody named Bryan Miller alleges: “Back in the 90s Ghislaine Maxwell recruited a girl from for a modeling career. Instead of modeling she was sold as a slave for sex and torture. Prince Andrew was an accessory to her death as he tortured her and me to force her murder.”

An FBI intake report alleging injury, assault and torture when the victim was between 6 and 8 years old

Source: US Department of Justice

British members of Parliament will meet next week to discuss whether Andrew broke laws while acting as a UK trade envoy

The Epstein Files contain an email from Andrew to Epstein forwarding classified UK trade reports

This email forwarded to Epstein includes a confidential brief on investment opportunities in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. The region is responsible for around 42% of the world’s opium production