Sex Abuse Scandals News Articles

Excerpts of key news articles on

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on sex abuse scandals from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

Caught in the act, Dr. Earl Bradley needed to think fast. “What the hell are you doing, you bastard?” his patient’s mother had screamed when she found Bradley with his hand in her daughter’s diaper. Now the police were coming. Bradley would say the mother - poor, young, unwed - must have been trying to extort money from him. It worked. A detective wrote that, compared to the doctor, the mother was “not credible.” A medical board investigator found that Bradley “specialized in welfare ... patients,” so a shakedown was “a distinct possibility.” The case was closed. And the doctor who would become one of the nation’s most prolific sexual predators moved on. For 15 more years, Earl Bradley raped, molested and sodomized a generation of his pediatric patients along the Delaware seashore. He recorded 13 hours of the assaults on video. Before he finally went to jail in 2009, he victimized 1,200 children, maybe more. Reported cases of doctors sexually assaulting children are unusual; vulnerable victims are not. Most are adult women, especially those who are poor or dependent on narcotic painkillers or lacking the credibility or social standing to pursue legal action. Still ... Bradley’s case underscores how American medicine so often puts doctors’ interests ahead of patient protection. The AJC documented eight instances in which Bradley was the subject of accusations between 1994 and 2008. Each time, in ways that echo through hundreds of other cases the newspaper examined, Bradley avoided punishment.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sexual abuse by medical professionals.

A dossier compiled by an MP detailing allegations of a 1980s Westminster paedophile ring is one of more than 100 potentially relevant Home Office files destroyed, lost or missing, it has emerged. The government faced fresh calls for an overarching inquiry into historical cases of paedophilia as it was revealed that a total of 114 Home Office files relevant to allegations of a child abuse network have disappeared from government records. David Cameron has already ordered the Home Office permanent secretary to look into what happened to a lost dossier given earlier in the 1980s to Leon Brittan, then home secretary, by the campaigning Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens. Dickens, who died in 1995, had told his family that the information he handed to the home secretary in 1983 and 1984 would "blow the lid off" the lives of powerful and famous child abusers, including eight well-known figures. In a letter to Dickens at the time, Brittan suggested his information would be passed to the police, but Scotland Yard says it has no record of any investigation into the allegations. The Home Office's permanent secretary, Mark Sedwill, admitted, however, that a further 114 documents relevant to allegations of child abuse were missing from the department's records. That discovery was made last year by an independent review into information received about organized child sex abuse but was not published in its report. Sedwill [said] the missing documents were some of the 36,000 records which officials presumed were lost, destroyed or missing.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra on Friday sentenced butler Alfredo Rodriguez to 18 months in prison for trying to sell an incriminating piece of evidence against his boss. Mr. Rodriguez was the butler for Jeffrey Epstein, the New York/Palm Beach billionaire who pleaded guilty in 2007 to two sex-related charges after more than a dozen women - many underage - claimed Mr. Epstein sexually abused them. Mr. Rodriguez tried to sell a journal that documented his boss’s sexual exploits and refused to turn it over to investigators when they first asked for it. His aim was to sell it for $50,000 to lawyers representing the women who had filed civil lawsuits against Mr. Epstein. Here is the puzzling part: Mr. Rodriguez may end up spending more time in prison than Mr. Epstein. Judge Marra gave Mr. Rodriguez an 18-month sentence - the same sentence given to Mr. Epstein. Mr. Epstein served only 13 months in prison and was released. Even under house arrest, he is free to leave is Palm Beach, Fla., mansion. The judge conceded that the equal sentences didn’t make much sense. the identical sentences seem like a strange administration of justice given the different crimes. Lesson learned: even if the butler didn’t do it, he still can go to prison for the cover-up.

Note: Epstein's butler feared for his life and ended up dead before he could reveal his secrets. Read a collection of major media reports on billionaire Jeffrey Epstein's child sex ring which directly implicate Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and other world leaders. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, numerous men followed sex workers into the apartment at 225 Chestnut Street in San Francisco's Telegraph Hill neighborhood. The johns were the unwitting subjects in a CIA experiment focused on how drugs and sex might be used to obtain secrets from foreign adversaries. Part of MKUltra, the agency's broader and highly controversial mind control research program, Operation Midnight Climax began in 1953. The experiments involved luring men into a heavily surveilled bordello, dosing them with LSD, and filming their reactions to probing questions and subliminal messaging. The goal of Midnight Climax was to understand what roles, if any, sex and drugs could play in getting a target to reveal sensitive or classified information. To run the operation, Gottlieb hired George Hunter White, a federal narcotics agent, who got to work renovating the apartment. Microphones disguised as electrical wall outlets were hooked up to tape recorders, and a large two-way mirror allowed CIA agents to monitor, film, and photograph the encounters. Behind the mirror, a makeshift control room featured a portable toilet and a refrigerator full of adult beverages. Sex workers were given $100 for each man they lured to the bordello, and they would then dose their client with LSD-laced cocktails. Eventually these efforts revealed that a man became increasingly talkative if the sex worker asked him to stay awhile–even after the sexual transaction was complete.

Note: Midnight Climax was supervised by George Hunter White, who wrote this in a letter about the program: "Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?" Former CIA officer and Iran-Contra whistleblower Bruce Hemmings put it best: "They do not give a damn about the law or the Constitution or the Congress or the Oversight committees except as something to be subverted and manipulated and lied to. If they can, they will blackmail you. Sex, drugs, deals, whatever it takes." Read our comprehensive investigation connecting Jeffrey Epstein's child sex trafficking network to intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

The first trial to contend with the post-9/11 abuse of detainees in US custody begins on Monday, in a case brought by three men who were held in the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The jury trial, in a federal court in Virginia, comes nearly 20 years to the day that the photographs depicting torture and abuse in the prison were first revealed to the public, prompting an international scandal that came to symbolize the treatment of detainees in the US "war on terror". The long-delayed case was brought by Suhail Najim Abdullah Al Shimari, Salah Al-Ejaili and As'ad Al-Zuba'e, three Iraqi civilians who were detained at Abu Ghraib, before being released without charge in 2004. The men are suing CACI Premier Technology, a private company that was contracted by the US government to provide interrogators at the prison. Only a handful of lower-rank soldiers faced military trials; no military or political leaders, or private contractors, were held legally accountable for what happened at Abu Ghraib or at any other facility where US detainees were tortured. As governments' reliance on private actors in conflict zones and crisis situations has grown exponentially since the war in Iraq, the case is also a test of the courts' ability to hold those contractors responsible for human rights abuses. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ... earned private companies trillions in defense and other government contracts. To this day, CACI continues to make millions in US government contracts.

Note: Read more about the horrific abuses at Abu Ghraib. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.

Maya Jones* was only 13 when she first walked through the door of Courtney's House, a drop-in centre for victims of child sex trafficking. When she was 12, she had started receiving direct messages on Instagram from a man she didn't know. She decided to meet him in person. Then came his next request: "Can you help me make some money?" According to Frundt, Maya explained that the man asked her to pose naked for photos, and to give him her Instagram password so that he could upload the photos to her profile. Frundt says Maya told her that the man, who was now calling himself a pimp, was using her Instagram profile to advertise her for sex. The internet is used by human traffickers as "digital hunting fields", allowing them access to both customers and potential victims, with children being targeted by traffickers on social media platforms. The biggest of these, Facebook, is owned by Meta, the tech giant whose platforms, which also include Instagram, are used by more than 3 billion people. In 2020, according to a report by US-based not-for-profit the Human Trafficking Institute, Facebook was the platform most used to groom and recruit children by sex traffickers (65%), based on an analysis of 105 federal child sex trafficking cases that year. The HTI analysis ranked Instagram second most prevalent, with Snapchat third. While Meta says it is doing all it can, we have seen evidence that suggests it is failing to report or even detect the full extent of what is happening.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

Clergy members in the Roman Catholic Church in France sexually abused more than 200,000 minors over the past seven decades, according to an estimate published on Tuesday by an independent commission that concluded the problem was far more pervasive than previously known. The long-awaited 2,500-page report by the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church laid out in detail how the church hierarchy had repeatedly silenced the victims and failed to report or discipline the clergy members involved. "The church failed to see or hear, failed to pick up on the weak signals, failed to take the rigorous measures that were necessary," Jean-Marc Sauvé, the commission president, said. For years, the church showed a "deep, total and even cruel indifference toward victims," he added. There has been a growing reckoning with sexual abuse in the church in France after a series of high-profile scandals. The investigative commission was set up in 2018 at the request of the Catholic Church in France in response to criticism of its handling of abuse cases. The findings were the most extensive account to date of the scope of sexual abuse by clergy in the country. About 216,000 minors, mostly boys ages 10 to 13, have been abused by clergy members in France since 1950, according to an estimate by the commission. The figure reached 330,000 after including perpetrators who were laypeople and worked for the church or were affiliated with it, such as Boy Scout organizers or Catholic school staff.

Note: And this CNN article is titled "Up to 3,200 pedophiles worked in French Catholic Church since 1950, independent commission says." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on sexual abuse scandals from reliable major media sources.

Millions of dollars that were sent from the estate of disgraced billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein into a dormant bank he had opened in 2014 has raised questions from a judge overseeing a court case over his remaining assets. In court documents obtained yesterday regarding the billionaire's Virgin Islands assets, a judge found that in August last year, when Epstein was found hanged in his jail cell, the financier's bank in the territory ... had no more than $693,157. In December, Epstein's estate transferred $15.5 million to the bank. The bank sent back $2.6 million, leaving $12.9 million. There was then a withdrawal of almost all funds before the end of the year, leaving the balance at around $500,000. In January, a lawsuit filed by the US Virgin Islands posthumously accused Epstein of sexually abusing and trafficking hundreds of girls and young women on his private Caribbean island as recently as 2018 and had a database to keep track of their availability. The lawsuit, filed against the millionaire pedophile's estate last month claimed Epstein used his two private islands in the U.S. territory to engage in a nearly two-decade conspiracy to traffic and abuse girls as young as 11 or 12. Many of the victims were allegedly aspiring models from South America and he used fake modelling visas to fly them across international borders to his two islands - known as Little Saint James and Great Saint James - the lawsuit claims.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein from reliable major media sources.

Prince Andrew announced on Wednesday that he would step back from public life, seeking to contain a firestorm over his ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. “It has become clear to me over the past few days that my association with Jeffrey Epstein has become a major disruption to my family’s work and the valuable work going on in the many organizations and charities that I am proud to support,” Prince Andrew said in a statement. “Therefore, I have asked Her Majesty if I can step back from public duties for the foreseeable future, and she has given her permission,” said the prince, who is also known as the Duke of York. The duke, 59, had hoped that the interview, broadcast Saturday by the BBC, would put to rest lingering questions about his ties to Mr. Epstein, as well as accusations that he had sex with a teenage girl who had been supplied to him by his friend. Instead, after the duke submitted to 50 minutes of polite but relentless grilling by the BBC journalist Emily Maitlis, his unsavory association with Mr. Epstein ... mutated into a full-blown scandal. Viewers expressed shock and anger at Prince Andrew’s lack of sympathy for Mr. Epstein’s victims, as well as his unpersuasive denials of sexual misconduct, which included peculiar assertions, such as that he has been medically unable to perspire since his combat tour in the Falklands War. In August ... Virginia Roberts Giuffre, accused the prince of having sex with her three times when she was 17 years old and had been offered to him by Mr. Epstein.

Note: Prince Andrew is finding himself increasingly isolated because of comments he's made about Epstein. Explore an article in the UK's Telegraph titled "Prince Andrew named in secret new evidence against Jeffrey Epstein." For more, see summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein. Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads to the highest levels of government. A second suppressed documentary, "Conspiracy of Silence," goes even deeper into this topic in the US.

Maria Farmer, who has accused Jeffrey Epstein and his friend Ghislaine Maxwell of assaulting her in 1996, said Maxwell threatened her life after the assault. Farmer ... was a young artist when she met Epstein and Maxwell at an art show in New York City in 1995. Epstein had bought one of Farmer's paintings ... and eventually offered her a job. The 26-year old soon found herself working the front desk in his palatial New York City townhouse. "All day long. I saw Ghislaine going to get the women. She went to places like Central Park. I was with her a couple of times in the car ... She would say ,'Stop the car.' And she would dash out and get a child." Epstein ultimately led her to his bathroom. "And there was a marble, like, altar thing over here, and he said that's where he gets his massages," Farmer said. Epstein told her the whole house was wired with pinhole cameras and took her into the media room where they were monitored. In the summer of 1996, Farmer said Epstein sent her to ... the vast estate of Les Wexner, the CEO of L Brands, which owns "Victoria's Secret." Farmer alleges in her complaint that Maxwell and Epstein sexually assaulted her there. When she tried to flee the following day, she wasn't allowed to leave. She claims a member of Wexner's staff warned her. "His exact words were: 'You're not going anywhere. You are never leaving,'" she said. Farmer reported the assault to the FBI, but it wasn't for another decade, just before Epstein's first arrest in 2006, that an agent finally appeared at her door, she said.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein from reliable major media sources.

By the time Melinda French Gates decided to end her 27-year marriage, her husband was known globally as a software pioneer. But in some circles, Bill Gates had also developed a reputation for questionable conduct. On at least a few occasions, Mr. Gates pursued women who worked for him at Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And then there was Jeffrey Epstein, whom Mr. Gates got to know beginning in 2011, three years after Mr. Epstein, who faced accusations of sex trafficking of girls, pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor. Ms. French Gates had expressed discomfort with her husband spending time with the sex offender, but Mr. Gates continued doing so. So, in October 2019, when the relationship between Mr. Gates and Mr. Epstein burst into public view, Ms. French Gates was unhappy. She hired divorce lawyers, setting in motion a process that culminated this month with the announcement that their marriage was ending. Mr. Gates [and] Mr. Epstein ... spent time together on multiple occasions, flying on Mr. Epstein's private jet and attending a late-night gathering at his Manhattan townhouse. "His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me," Mr. Gates emailed colleagues in 2011, after he first met Mr. Epstein. For years, Mr. Gates continued to go to dinners and meetings at Mr. Epstein's home, where Mr. Epstein usually surrounded himself with young and attractive women.

Note: Learn more in this Bloomberg article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein's child sex ring from reliable major media sources.

On Monday, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York unsealed a 14-page indictment against Jeffrey Epstein, charging the wealthy financier with operating and conspiring to operate a sex trafficking ring of girls out of his luxe homes on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and in Palm Beach, Fla., “among other locations.” Even in the relatively sterile language of the legal system, the accusations against Mr. Epstein are nauseating. From “at least in or about” 2002 through 2005, the defendant “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls,” some as young as 14 and many “particularly vulnerable to exploitation.” The girls were “enticed and recruited” to visit Mr. Epstein’s various homes “to engage in sex acts with him.” To “maintain and increase his supply of victims,” he paid some of the girls “to recruit additional girls to be similarly abused,” thus creating “a vast network of underage victims.” But Mr. Epstein is not the only one for whom a reckoning is long overdue. The allegations in the New York indictment are a depressing echo of those that Mr. Epstein faced in Florida more than a decade ago. In 2008, federal prosecutors for the Southern District of Florida, at the time led by Alexander Acosta, who is now the nation’s secretary of labor, helped arrange a plea deal for Mr. Epstein that bent justice beyond its breaking point. In addition to short-circuiting federal charges, the plea agreement killed an F.B.I. investigation and granted immunity to any “co-conspirators.”

Note: Explore an in-depth article from New York Magazine giving a thorough and balanced view of the Epstein case. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein from reliable major media sources.

Jeffrey Edward Epstein appeared at his sentencing dressed comfortably. At the end of the 68-minute hearing, the 55-year-old silver-haired financier - accused of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls - was fingerprinted and handcuffed, just like any other criminal sentenced in Florida. But inmate No. W35755 would not be treated like other convicted sex offenders in the state of Florida, which has some of the strictest sex offender laws in the nation. Epstein - who had a long list of powerful, politically connected friends - didn’t go to state prison like most sex offenders in Florida. Instead, the multimillionaire was assigned to a private wing of the Palm Beach County stockade, where he was able to hire his own security detail. Even then, he didn’t spend much time in a cell. He was allowed to go to his downtown West Palm Beach office for work release, up to 12 hours a day, six days a week, records show. [Courtney] Wild, who was 14 when she met Epstein, is suing the federal government, alleging that prosecutors kept her and other victims in the dark as part of a conspiracy to give Epstein ... one of the most lenient deals for a serial child sex offender in history. That lawsuit - and an unrelated state court case scheduled for trial on Dec. 4 - could expose more about Epstein’s crimes, as well as who else was involved and whether there was any undue influence that tainted the federal case. Some of Epstein’s victims will finally have an opportunity to testify for the first time.

Note: Watch a 15-minute news video which asks hard questions around Epstein and more. The incredibly eye-opening documentary "Imperium" uses major media reporting to show a huge cover-up of child sex trafficking rings which lead to the highest level of government. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

Back in the Nineties, socialite Ghislaine Maxwell was known in New York as the “female Gatsby” for her lavish entertaining. Today ... she is behind bars. The daughter of the disgraced media tycoon Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine was his ninth and ... his favourite. When her father died, his publishing empire collapsed after it was found that he had been pillaging the pension fund to prop up his businesses. However, a trust fund provided an income of £80,000 a year for Ghislaine. She lived the high life. Ghislaine was never more at home than with the super-rich, bumming a ride on Donald Trump’s private jet and dating billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein. Ghislaine was in love with Jeffrey the way she was in love with her father. Marriage didn’t happen, but she was always by his side, choreographing his world. “My job included hiring many people,” she said in a court deposition. She admitted hiring masseuses as young as 17. A source close to Ghislaine said in [a] Vanity Fair article: “When I asked what she thought of the under age girls, she looked at me and said, ‘They’re nothing, these girls. They are trash.’” She was driven to only respect high status and wealth. Things started to unravel for Ghislaine ... when under-age girls accused Epstein of paying them to perform sexual acts. Ghislaine fought to keep the court papers from [a] 2017 defamation case closed – and failed. On August 9, the first batch was released. The following day, Epstein was found dead in jail, presumed suicide, and Ghislaine vanished. On Thursday, Maxwell was finally arrested and charged with six federal crimes.

Note: Key Epstein witness Maria Farmer claimed in a highly revealing interview with crack reporter Whitney Webb that she was in the car with Ghislaine and Trump's ex-wife Ivana when they enticed young girls to come give a massage for large amounts of money. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein from reliable major media sources. Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads directly to the highest levels of government.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s private emails have been hacked by cyber criminals in a new twist in the scandal surrounding Prince Andrew’s friendship with a convicted paedophile. The British heiress was targeted after she was publicly accused of procuring young girls for Jeffrey Epstein, legal papers seen by The Telegraph reveal. The security breach raises the prospect that emails between Ms Maxwell and prominent individuals including the Duke of York could be made public, or sold to the highest bidder. Ms Maxwell has barely been seen in public since August, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit unsealed allegations that she conspired with Epstein to recruit and groom underage girls. Her US lawyers are currently battling the release of around 8,600 further documents from the same civil case, said to contain damaging new sex claims about Epstein’s vast network of celebrity friends. In December it was revealed that Ms Maxwell exchanged emails with Prince Andrew in 2015 about Virginia Giuffre, who accuses the Duke of having sex with her three times when she was aged 17. He has always emphatically denied the allegations. A US judge will decide in the coming weeks whether to unseal the new evidence about Epstein’s alleged crimes. The documents include depositions from 29 people, including a number of new witnesses and reportedly Epstein himself. The Duke of York’s name appears in the evidence along with a number of prominent politicians and businessmen.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Jeffrey Epstein from reliable major media sources.

Child sexual abuse material has exploded since the dawn of the internet era, while child sex trafficking also has increased as a result of being made easier for traffickers. The number of child sexual abuse files exchanged online grew from 450,000 in 2004 to 25 million in 2015, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore cofounded Thorn to combat this problem. The non-profits mission is to build technology to defend children from sexual abuse online by eliminating all child sexual abuse material from the internet. Thorn partners across the tech industry, government and NGOs and leverages technology to combat predatory behavior, rescue victims, and protect vulnerable children. The non-profits products are used today in 35 countries and have helped identify more than 30,000 victims of abuse, 10,000 of whom were children. Recently, Thorn was one of eight recipients to share in an over $280 million grant from The Audacious Project by TED. As CEO of Thorn, Julie Cordua manages the Thorn Technology Task Force, the largest organization of its kind, uniting technology companies committed to fighting child exploitation. We saw how technology was being used to exploit our children through child sex trafficking, the spread of child sexual abuse material, and online grooming and coercion. Yet there was no concentrated effort to use technology to fight back and stop this abuse, Cordua says.

Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.

Fifteen-year-old "Debbie" is the middle child in a close-knit Air Force family from suburban Phoenix, and a straight-A student. [She] is one of thousands of young American girls who authorities say have been abducted or lured from their normal lives and made into sex slaves. While many Americans have heard of human trafficking in other parts of the world — Thailand, Cambodia, Latin America and eastern Europe, for example — few people know it happens here in the United States. The FBI estimates that well over 100,000 children and young women are trafficked in America today. They range in age from 9 to 19, with the average age being 11. And many victims are no longer just runaways, or kids who've been abandoned. Many of them are from what would be considered "good" families, who are lured or coerced by clever predators, say experts. "These predators are particularly adept at reading children, at reading kids, and knowing what their vulnerabilities are," said FBI Deputy Assistant Director, Chip Burrus, who started the Lost Innocence project, which specializes in child- and teen-sex trafficking. Debbie's story is particularly chilling. Police say Debbie was kidnapped from her own driveway with her mother, Kersti, right inside. She was ... taken to an apartment 25 miles from her home. Police say her captors had put an ad on Craig's List. Shortly after the ad ran, men began arriving at the apartment at all hours of the day and night demanding sex from her. She said she had to comply. "I had no other choice," she said.

Note: If the above link does not work, this article can also be found at the Internet Archive. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

Epstein's relationship with the Israeli government has long been the subject of speculation and conspiracy theorizing. But the extent of the connections has long been difficult to prove. That is, until October 2024, when the Palestinian group Handala released a tranche of more than 100,000 hacked emails from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who led the country from 1999 to 2001. Barak is known to have been one of Epstein's closest associates. He visited the financier's estates in Florida and New York more than 30 times between 2013 and 2017, years after Epstein had been convicted for soliciting a minor for prostitution. Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's most prominent victims, who died earlier this year, alleged in her posthumous memoir that a figure, described only as "the Prime Minister," but widely believed to be Barak, violently raped her on Epstein's private Caribbean island when she was 18. Epstein helped to facilitate an agreement for Mongolia to purchase Israeli military equipment and surveillance technology from companies with which the men had financial ties. An Israeli spy, Yoni Koren, stayed at Epstein's New York apartment for weeks at a time on three separate occasions between 2013 and 2015. Koren served as an intermediary between the American and Israeli governments, helping Barak organize meetings with top intelligence officials, including former CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Note: Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Epstein's criminal enterprise and intelligence agency corruption.

President Trump on Friday accused Rupert Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal of defaming him in an article about a lewd birthday greeting that the publication said Mr. Trump had sent to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein decades ago. In a suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Mr. Trump said the article "falsely claimed that he authored, drew and signed" the note to Mr. Epstein. It asked for awarded damages "not to be less than $10 billion." The Journal published the article about the note on Thursday under the headline: "Jeffrey Epstein's Friends Sent Him Bawdy Letters for a 50th Birthday Album. One Was From Donald Trump." The article described a letter that appeared to be from Mr. Trump in a 2003 birthday album compiled for Mr. Epstein. The letter, which The Journal said it had reviewed, had a drawing of a naked woman on it with Mr. Trump's signature below her waist, alluding to pubic hair, the article said. "Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret," The Journal said the note read. Mr. Trump has faced mounting criticism and pressure from his supporters over whether to release documents related to investigations into Mr. Epstein, who was charged with running a vast sex-trafficking scheme. Many of Mr. Trump's supporters were upset because they believed that Attorney General Pam Bondi was holding back some files related to the Epstein investigation.

Note: Internal US Bureau of Prison (BOP) documents suggest a possible cover-up, while a 60 Minutes 2020 investigation uncovered compelling evidence that challenges the official suicide ruling in Jeffrey Epstein's death–including suspicious neck fractures, missing surveillance footage, and a series of unexplained security failures. Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

I had to pay a student to go island hopping to find basic records in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The territory's opaque laws and corruption makes it a haven for misdeeds. Albert Bryan Jr., the current governor, used his position to curry favor for Jeffrey Epstein for years. He helped bestow tax exemptions on Epstein's shadowy businesses and pushed for waivers allowing the former financier to dodge USVI sex offender laws. Bryan, whose hand-selected Attorney General swiftly ended the J.P. Morgan lawsuit that revealed a gusher of damning documents about Epstein's network, is now tapping Epstein victim settlement funds ... to pay for various earmarks and unrelated government debts. Former Attorney General Denise George led a series of lawsuits against Epstein's estate and former associates. Bryan fired her. In 2024, Bryan named a new Attorney General–none other than Gordon Rhea, a private practice attorney who previously defended Richard Kahn during the Epstein estate lawsuit. Not long ago, Kahn and Indyke were described by the U.S. Virgin Islands as "indispensable captains" of Epstein's alleged criminal human trafficking enterprise. We still have many unanswered questions. Why did U.S. Virgin Islands police and customs agents never act to protect the young girls they saw taken to Epstein's islands? What is clear, however, is that an attorney who worked to protect Epstein's estate is now the chief law enforcement officer of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Note: Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on government corruption and Jeffrey Epstein's child sex trafficking ring.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.