The book is a sprawling business bio, but the main topic of our conversation was Black’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, which he gets to in the last third. Had Bill got close to understanding exactly why Black paid Epstein $170 million?

It’s a question that the House Oversight Committee wants to ask Black - but, as of now, he’s refusing to return to Congress after a previous voluntary hearing was stopped short when the committee asked Black about various NDA’s he has signed with women. He argues that these NDAs - apart from one which he has turned over - had nothing to do with Epstein and are confidential. Right now he’s suing Congress for embarking on a “fishing expedition” and has refused its subpoena to return to sit for more questions.

So…

What did Bill find out?

The bad new is he’s stuck taking Black’s word for what happened, given that Epstein is dead. And two key people - Black’s former tax lawyer Carlyn McCaffrey, and, Andy Levander, the author of an independent investigation into Black, did not talk to Bill, presumably because they’d be disbarred if they did.

Further, Bill did not wind up seeing the actual tax documents that Black talks about. Black balked at this, apparently, and cited privacy. Bill says he thinks this is understandable.

I don’t.

My own view of this is that if Black really wants to clear up this controversy, he needs to go the extra mile and reveal everything, “privacy” be damned. The reason we care about the specific “tax advice” for which he paid Epstein an astronomical amount, is not because we are prurient. It’s because Epstein could not have pulled off his ghastly criminal enterprise without the hundreds of millions of dollars he had behind him and Black is one of the two known chief sources of this money; Leslie Wexner is the other. (Bill mentions in our interview that the financier Glenn Dubin also contributed to Epstein’s piggy bank. True. But not at the same scale as Black and Wexner.) Black and Wexner trusted Epstein sufficiently that they each handed him well north of $100 million for whatever it is he was doing for them. Black admits to Bill he wasn’t even paying attention to exactly how much he was paying Epstein for his services and was shocked to discover the full amount.

I mean, wow.

So, here’s what’s in the book about the improbably gargantuan fee for “tax advice”: According to Black, his original high-priced trust-and-estate attorney at the blue-chip law firm of Weil Gotshal - a woman named “Carlyn McCaffrey” - who now works at another reputable law firm, McDermott, Will and Schulte LLP, - allegedly botched something in documents, exposing Black to a potential $2 billion tax liability.

Bill writes: When he [Black] confronted McCaffrey, he said, at first she denied that there was a potential problem and then conceded there was “a terrible mistake” made that could only be rectified by taking an action explicitly prevented by the documents that McCaffrey had drafted.

Right there, I have a major problem with this version of events. How many top lawyers say to their clients that, yes, they have made a “terrible mistake” and its going to cost the client $2 billion? In many years of reporting about finance, I have never heard of a conversation like this. It doesn’t just sound unlikely. It sounds preposterous. It’s a lawsuit to end all lawsuits the moment the words are uttered.

Because, if a law firm - especially one as well-known as Weil Gotshal - botches something and makes a $2 billion mistake for a client, they are, of course, on the hook to pay that money! That’s why they have insurance! (I phoned around my lawyer friends at top firms to get their take on this..and their off-the-cuff reaction is, yes, of course, they are on the hook, and, of course, that’s why law firms have insurance. And, yes, this story sounds like a fairytale. But without looking at the documents or speaking to McCaffrey, it’s impossible to give a definitive verdict.)

Next, according to Black (and Bill), not only could Weil Gotshal not fix the “terrible mistake,” nor could lawyers at Paul, Weiss and Sullivan and Cromwell.

Hmm. Again, my lawyer friends just do not buy this. One of my sources says “almost everything in tax law is reversible”. But, since Bill did not see the actual documents, he and we are left depending on Black’s word.

So — as the story goes — Black turned to Epstein, who wasn’t a lawyer or an accountant, and had not even graduated college - but who had nonetheless positioned himself to Black as an expert on family offices and tax structuring and was so trusted by Back that he’d even put him on the board of his family foundation. (This, despite the fact that, per Bill, Elliot “Skip” Stein - Black’s friend who had first introduced Epstein to Black suspected that Epstein’s personal wealth in the early 1990s was mostly stolen from European families who had illegally laundered their money into the US.)

Anyhoo…Epstein, according to Black, found a workaround - and Black then had Epstein’s ideas vetted by major law firms, which claimed they worked. Bill says he spoke with lawyers at these law firms - and Black’s story as far as he can tell checks out.

According to Bill, once Epstein had proved himself with the tax issue, he wheedled his way into giving tax advice on Black’s purchase of jets, art, yachts, etcetera. It was money Black says he didn’t even realize he’d spent, until investigators dug it out for an independent report after Epstein’s death. Until he read it in the report, he thought he’d paid Epstein a mere $75 million or so.

Bill says he pushed Black on this:

And I said, oh, come on, Leon. That’s crazy.

Yes, I know you think that’s crazy, Bill, but I own 93 million Apollo shares.

If the stock goes up $1, that’s $93 million. If it goes up $1.50, that’s $150 million.

So that’s, you know, I didn’t think about it.

When you think about this exchange, it’s no wonder that many people believe the pitchforks are coming.

It also partly explains why Leon Black garners zero sympathy for his protestations that he knew nothing of Epstein’s sex crimes and is therefore being unfairly hounded over this. The guy clearly neither knows nor cares how a statement like this comes across in the midst of an affordability crisis.

Bill Cohan is a former investment banker and one of the very best financial journalists operating today. He’s also a friend. Which is why I wanted to talk to him about his book, which is fabulously reported and engagingly written.

But I was struck reading it, at how the culture has changed dramatically. Twenty years ago there was a mass appetite for biographies like this one. In 2010 my first book, The Devil’s Casino, was about Lehman Brothers and the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, we all wanted to know what drove the Kings and Queens of Wall street, what were the characteristics behind their material success - and what caused their failures - and that of the financial system.

Today, I think readers’ appetites have altered. Mine certainly has. Other than trying to understand the Epstein piece of it, I don’t care about Leon Black or how he made his money. I think that in the main we are no longer intrigued by self-made billionaires unless their wealth is created at the cutting edge of AI or industries that directly impact or alter the world we live in; in fact I’d go so far as to say we now abhor the billionaire class unless we see them using their vast wealth to improve other people’s lives in the vein of Mike Bloomberg - or even Black’s one time boss, the rehabilitated Mike Milken.

My suggestion to Black (not that he’s likely to take it): If it’s as easy for him to make money as he tells Bill Cohan, why doesn’t he stop whining about being treated unfairly and repeating that he is shocked and horrified by Epstein’s crimes - and instead set up a charity to protect women and girls against sex trafficking? Not as part of an NDA settlement, or to get himself out of a congressional hearing - but just because he can afford to, and it’s the right thing to do?

That, at least, would be a story I’d be interested to read.

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The conundrum that is America’s Second Lady Usha Vance keeps cropping up at dinner parties? Who is she really? Is she in heaven or is she in hell? Is she complicit in her situation or appalled by it? First Lady chronicler, Kate Brower just published an excellent Vanity Fair profile on the Second Lady and agreed to go live with me.

A Yale liberal in a MAGA world

We started with the basic contradictions: Usha Vance voted for Hillary Clinton and was a registered Democrat until 2022. Yet she is now the second most high-profile woman in MAGA land; She’s Hindu, yet she’s married to a man who wrote a bestselling memoir about his conversion to Catholicism and has said, publicly, that he’d like her to convert too.

She’s whip-smart and accomplished; she graduated summa-cum-laude from Yale Law School, clerking for Justice John Roberts and worked in corporate law - and yet now she’s given birth to a fourth baby, plays a public supporting role, and talks about children’s books on a podcast.

Her mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri, a microbiologist, isn’t just liberal-adjacent — she’s a DEI trailblazer. Dr. Chilukuri created a course at UC San Diego, officially titled “Exploring Issues of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Relation to Human Biology”. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Chilukuri has not been photographed anywhere near the Trump White House.

So….is Usha Vance a long-suffering victim who has been forced into a trad-wife mold thanks to her ambitious husband? Or is it more complicated?

According to Kate’s reporting, yes, it’s a lot more complicated. Usha’s Yale Law school friends emphatically say she is not a victim. She’s a detail-oriented meticulous thinker who is as interested in power as her husband and is content, for now at least, with the role she is playing.

And yet there are quiet signs of rebellion, indications that she isn’t fully immersed in every aspect of Trump World.

Kate dropped one detail in our conversation that didn’t make it into the Vanity Fair piece: Usha’s hairdresser has been urging her for a while to dye the grey streaks in her hair.

She won’t.

Apparently she’s comfortable in her own skin in a world that rewards exactly the opposite.

Speaking of:….

We pivoted to the First Lady, who is facing a different problem — Invisibility. Where is she these days? She can’t hide behind the excuse of looking after Barron any more.

And why has Melania’s foster care program working to return Ukrainian children taken by Russia raised only $2 million?

And, conversely just how many millions is she raking in from licensing agreements? A LOT…. It’s unprecedented.

Enjoy our conversation!

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What would they suggest we do to course correct? AJ throws out some thoughts.

Enjoy our conversation (as well as AJ’s hat!)

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Hey Everyone,

A few weeks ago at Substack’s summer cocktail party in Manhattan, I ran into a friend, fellow substacker, AJ Jacobs who most recently spent a year dressing and attempting to live like a Founding father for his book: The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution's Original Meaning.

Among the list of things he did in order to “live constitutionally”:

I carried a musket on the streets of NYC and shot muskets at a rifle range

I gave up social media in favor of writing pamphlets with a quill pen

I quartered a soldier in my apartment, as is my Third Amendment right

I applied to Congress for a letter of marque, which is my constitutional right to be a pirate.

I started a petition on a scroll of paper and got hundreds of signatures and brought it in person to Congress.

I fined my sons thirty-seven and a half cents for every time they cursed, as was the constitutionally-approved law in New York State in 1789.

I tried unsuccessfully to follow coverture, the 18th century system that says married women can’t sign contracts.

The point of this exercise was to remind his readers of what our Founding fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution, and to explore the idea of “originalism,” the guiding principle by which our Supreme Court issues rulings on guns, religion, women’s rights and more. Supposedly the idea of originalism is to follow the original intentions of the framers.

As many of you know I tackled the thorny topic of originalism in my podcast series: Pipeline to Power, which you can order here.

What did AJ find? And what does it signify for us and this court?

Well, tune in tomorrow at 5pm ET for what promises to be a serious conversation dressed up in AJ’s light, humorous and engaging tone.

You can find his substack at Experimental Living with AJ Jacobs.

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As promised, my son Orlando Doull and I got together to see if we could conquer the generation gap and listen to each other’s points of view in a non-judgmental way.

We discussed my latest reporting on Bryan Kohberger - which you can download here and also read in the paperback version of The Idaho Four.

Idaho Four Part 7[93]

412KB ∙ PDF file

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As Orlando says in our chat, this new section in the book is a painful reminder that our justice system does not serve victims of crimes in all the ways that it should. In fact it can rob them of agency, even as it delivers “justice”. The Goncalves family predicted that Kohberger would try to wriggle out of his sentence a year ago when they pushed in vain to have the case go to trial and not let Kohberger cop a guilty plea. I spoke to Steve Goncalves yesterday. It gives him no comfort to have been proven right. Some of the other victims’ parents are devastated.

I hope that a judge moves fast to quash Kohberger’s petition. As you will see in the excerpt, he had plenty of opportunity to express reservations about his defense counsel in court - and he did not do so.

We moved on to talk about incel culture (in which Kohberger was embedded) and the latest reports around Gen Z refraining from having sex.

From there we get into Gen Z’s love affair with Zohran Momdani and the DSA and what he sees coming politically.

We also discuss the importance of American soft power abroad - the subject of Orlando’s latest newsletter.

I was particularly struck by Orlando’s comments about the schism dividing the Democrats and how his peers in Gen Z did not turn out to vote for candidates they viewed as “imperfect” in 2020 and 2024.

Give us your feedback and let us know if you found this interesting - and what you’d like us to tackle next time.

Orlando’s substack is Orlando Doull’s Lunch Break. Feel free to reach out to him with comments and suggestions.

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Hey Everyone,

In a piece of serendipitous timing, just as Bryan Kohberger has announced that he is filing to reverse his guilty plea, telling the New York Times “My actual innocence is my truth, and the plea, hinged on by false promises and blatant disinformation, MUST be withdrawn,’ the paperback version of The Idaho Four has dropped!

You can buy it here.

In the new edition of our book there is a whole new section at the end with brand new reporting in which we tell the story of exactly what went down when Kohberger copped to a guilty plea all of a sudden in June of last year, saying, yes, he had murdered Maddie Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle, thereby avoiding a trial which had already been delayed three years. We take a look at what went down through the eyes of Alivea Goncalves Stevenson, Kaylee’s elder sister, whose stunning speech directed at Kohberger in the courtroom was a tour de force.

The new section will remind you that Kohberger’s plea was not something that all four of the victims’ families wanted to accept at the time. The Goncalves family wanted a trial precisely because they had reservations that Kohberger would pull a stunt like the one he is pulling now. Yesterday, I spoke to James Fry, the former Moscow police chief at the time of the murder investigation (now the police chief in West Richland, WA) and he told me he “was not surprised,” to see that Kohberger had filed to a appeal. “Kohberger has decided he doesn’t like being in prison - perhaps he should have thought of it before he went out and killed four innocent people - and before he said in court that he was pleading guilty because yes, he committed the crimes,” said Fry. “Unless the justice system is totally screwed, a judge will take two seconds to reject this plea.”

If you want to read our new pages, you can download them here:

Idaho Four Part 7

412KB ∙ PDF file

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Later this afternoon at 5pm ET, my son Orlando Doull of Orlando Doull’s Lunch Break and I will chat about the latest developments in the Kohberger story as well as other topics in the new around which Gen Z and Gen X may or may not see eye to eye. Orlando’s latest substack post on US soft power stems from a thought-provoking book launch event with Joel Rubin that I moderated in Washington, DC last week.

Here’s the photo and link to the write-up of our talk!

See you at 5pm ET!

And Here’s the cover of the new Idaho Four paperback!

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So yesterday, while Argentina were scoring two goals in the final minutes of the World Cup semi-final against my native country — ugh! — fortunately I was distracted by a great conversation with Adam Klasfeld.

We discussed the three Congressional hearings happening (strangely) simultaneously: confirmation hearings for both Todd Blanche and Jay Clayton, and testimony to the House Oversight Committee by Kathryn Ruemmler, the former Goldman Sachs General Counsel who stepped down after her flirtatious “joking” emails with Jeffrey Epstein were published in the Epstein Files.

We started with Blanche.

Adam broke down what the senators should have asked him but did not. (He also asked: why didn’t they get more coordinated and organized for this? Blanche is an easy target in that you don’t need to take his word for what he’ll do in the future — there’s plenty to see in his recent past.)

Adam gave props to Sen. John Cornyn, the lame-duck senator whose swing vote is likely pivotal for Blanche’s confirmation, and who cornered Blanche on the thorny legal details suggesting that the $1.8 billion slush fund related to Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS (in which he demanded $10 billion after his tax records were published) is not truly dead in the water. He also focused on Blanche’s role in approving the unprecedented settlement that now gives the Trump family immunity from prosecution for tax crimes.

So that was good. But both of us felt Blanche was not properly pressed on the delayed botched roll-out of the Epstein Files or that infamous sit-down with Ghislaine Maxwell — after which she suddenly moved to a far nicer, more relaxed prison.

For my part, I felt that at least Blanche acknowledged the Epstein survivors’ presence in the room (unlike his predecessor Pam Bondi). And at least he gave an explanation for why he can’t commit to meeting them personally — by law, he isn’t allowed to if they have legal representation. He can, however, meet with their attorneys. So my question is: where are those attorneys? They have been strangely silent, in my view, when it comes to giving up the names of Epstein’s male co-conspirators.

We moved on to Jay Clayton’s ties to the Epstein story, which, as you may recall, Nina Burleigh and I discussed last week — and to Ruemmler’s testimony.

We closed on Regime Change, the new epic Trump tale from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. According to their reporting, all the topics that Adam and I typically talk about — lawfare, the weaponization of the Justice Department, the attempted rewriting of the Constitution — generate from the brain of Stephen Miller.

Enjoy!

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As promised, I went back to Nina Burleigh  (like me currently deep in book reporting and writing) to talk about three fabulous pieces of reporting on the Epstein Files she and Katie Chenoweth have done for their Substack American Freakshow.

The topics include:

1. Leon Black. (After storming out of his last session, Leon Black is expected back before the House Oversight Committee, supposedly on July 16.

2. Steve Bannon, somehow, has managed to stay almost entirely out of the conversation despite showing up in the Epstein files roughly two thousand times.

3. A small club of white-shoe lawyers — not the marquee names from Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, but a second tier of possibly far more important fixers, who have spent two decades quietly managing the money, NDAs, and much else that has contributed to keeping this story from fully surfacing.

The Bannon Mystery

We started with Bannon because Nina and Katie’s piece about him dropped yesterday afternoon and arguably should be getting attention on Capitol Hill.

Bannon and Epstein got to know each other well in Epstein’s last years.

The relationship timeline Nina and Katie have pieced together from the files is as follows: in the summer of 2017, Bannon was pushed out of the Trump White House. He and Trump were feuding, but Bannon was still the outside figurehead of the MAGA movement. Then, in January 2018, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury was published, in which Bannon is quoted describing Donald Trump Jr.’s Trump Tower meeting with the Russians as treasonous. Bannon became radioactive. His patron, Rebekah Mercer, was furious and stopped funding Bannon. He was, in Nina’s words, bottoming out.

And that is precisely the moment Jeffrey Epstein appeared

Wolff connected the two men. What followed was a few months of what Nina calls “footsie playing,” before an invitation to one of Epstein’s birthday parties, before an actual friendship. Within a short window, the man who built his political brand on smashing the administrative state and warning about a shadowy global elite was on Epstein’s plane, in Epstein’s orbit, cozying up to exactly the network he’d spent years telling his audience to fear.

The emails Nina and Katie highlight in the files show the two men engaged in a lot of shit-talk. They are proverbial “boys with toys”, full of empty braggadocio. My personal favorite is when Epstein offers his house to Bannon to make confidential calls because it’s like a “SKIF”. Right. They are discussing turning Mongolia into a crypto capital. They trash Trump, who Bannon says is “like an instrument”. In December 2018—roughly six months before Epstein’s arrest - their exchanges included mocking the #MeToo movement, with Epstein writing, “so many guys caught in the me too . reaching out to me [sic],” and the pair joking about staging a “million man march” on Washington in which participants would wear “pink dick hats.” In August 2018, Epstein and Bannon went back and forth, teasing each other about how Bannon looked on TV. Epstein wrote that he’d changed his plans just to watch Bannon on TV and told him he “looked so clean cut” that Epstein thought he’d “turned on the figure skating channel by accident.”

I told Nina that in the summer of 2017, not long after Bannon left the White House, I’d heard through people close to Michael Wolff that Epstein had reportedly offered to fly Bannon to the Middle East to meet Mohammed bin Zayed, the ruler of Abu Dhabi. I raised it directly with Bannon at the time and told him, in no uncertain terms, to stay away from Epstein. He didn’t confirm or deny anything. He just smiled and said nothing — a moment I’ve thought about often since.

So what did Bannon actually need from Epstein? Bannon already had a lot of contacts in the global populist movement. He didn’t need Epstein to meet MBZ - he already knew him. BUT what he didn’t have, after burning his bridge with Mercer, was financial backing — and leading the MAGA army from the outside requires funding. I have never understood why on earth Bannon, of all people, came up with the completely cockamamie scheme to “coach” Epstein for a supposed 60 Minutes sit-down that never had a chance of happening - except, of course, if he was being paid.

And apparently, he was supposed to be paid. According to Nina’s reporting, in the final month of Epstein’s life, the files show that Bannon was pressing Epstein for payment on a contract. That alone, Nina argues, is reason enough for Bannon to be called before the Oversight Committee.

What makes Bannon’s situation fascinating in my view is how successfully he has distanced himself from a scandal he is drowning in on paper. Unlike Trump. One doesn’t hear the base baying for Bannon to divulge what he knows.

Now, that, I’d argue, is a sign of power.

Leon Black, The Recruiters, And The NDAs

The Bannon story bleeds directly into the Leon Black story, which is where the Oversight Committee’s attention is now turning.

Black stormed out of his own committee hearing once already after he refused to discuss NDAs he may have with women in Epstein’s orbit.

Nina and Katie’s reporting focuses on two young Russian and Central Asian women who, according to the files, were actively recruiting for Epstein — steering women from their countries into his network. One of those women, according to Nina, was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars directly by Black. Both women appear in email exchanges asking Epstein when Black is going to pay them, discussing what they call, without apparent irony, a “business.” One is looking for a “goodbye” gift - that she later references and says it enabled her to be a stay-at-home mom for a few years.

Whether these women were exploiters or exploited by Epstein is unresolved. It’s the uncomfortable gray zone this entire case keeps landing in: who is a survivor, who is a recruiter, and how often those categories collapse into the same person.

The paper trail alone does not prove that Black had any knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking (and he has said he did not know about it). But it raises exactly the question the Oversight Committee should be putting to him: what did Leon Black understand about the operation that supplied him with women; why did he pay them - and why was Epstein apparently in the middle of some of these financial discussions?

Which gets us to the real bottleneck in this entire story: the NDAs.

Nina and I both keep landing on the same frustration. Survivors’ lawyers routinely stand in front of cameras demanding “justice for victims” while declining to name the men who paid for their clients’ silence. Why? Because, as Nina says bluntly, these were largely unsophisticated young women being guided by plaintiffs’ lawyers who negotiate settlements, take a substantial cut, and then present signed NDAs as the price of the payout. The lawyers get rich. The names stay sealed. And the NDA machine — which Epstein himself pioneered, using it even to try to silence the original Palm Beach victims before his 2008 non-prosecution deal — becomes the single biggest reason the FBI and DOJ went nowhere on this case for two decades. Without a named victim willing to testify, prosecutors don’t have a case. Without broken NDAs, there is no named victim.

The Other Epstein Lawyers

Nina and Katie’s other recent piece looks at a different kind of lawyer entirely — not the Epstein defense “dream team” from the 2008 plea deal, but four men Nina and Katie call the Epstein Lawyers Association: Reid Weingarten, Jay Clayton, Andrew Levander, and Brad Karp.

Karp is the most well-known and publicly damaged of the four. He had to step down as chairman of Paul Weiss, after the files showed personal emails between him and Epstein, discussing not only Black’s business and private life, but a woman Epstein wanted deported.

Weingarten, whom I know, was Epstein’s personal lawyer going back to the Palm Beach era. He is a Washington fixture who once served on the Senate committee that investigated the “October Surprise” allegations in the 1990s.

Levander is arguably the most unusual of the four: a white-shoe lawyer with a decades-old Epstein connection dating back to the 1980s, when — according to reporting by James Patterson — he hired Epstein to help recover money lost in the Drysdale Securities collapse, one of Wall Street’s forgotten mid-80s crises. That chapter includes an almost cinematic detail: Epstein allegedly taking a private plane out of the Cayman Islands with a briefcase of bearer bonds belonging to a wealthy Spanish family, which he then deposited into a Swiss account the family could never access — while Epstein himself apparently could. Decades later, after Black was forced out of Apollo, it was Levander who produced the internal “independent report” — interviewing twenty people, including Black himself — that concluded Black paid Epstein $170 million for tax advice and would never have paid it had he known about Epstein’s sex crimes. Black was not, in that report, held responsible for anything worse than poor judgment.

And then there’s Clayton — the Trump-appointed former SEC chairman who became Apollo’s “non-executive chairman” after Black’s ouster, sat out the Biden years drawing an Apollo paycheck, and was installed by Trump in 2025 as the top federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York — the very office that held the Epstein case files before they were moved to Washington. The man who knows, as Nina puts it, “where the bodies are buried at Apollo” is now the man in charge of the prosecutor’s office that would decide whether to dig them up.

All of these stories highlight the network and machinery that enabled Epstein to thrive and avoid justice. All of these men know pieces of the Epstein story - pieces that still need to be put together.

It would be helpful for us to know what they know.

We’re watching Leon Black’s return to Congress closely. We’ll be back on Bannon the moment there’s more.

Nina Burleigh and Katie Chenoweth’s Bannon and Epstein-lawyers reporting is available now on their Substack, The American Freak Show.

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Hey Everyone,

This week I am doing something different.

My son, Orlando, has started writing a substack called Orlando Doull’s Lunch Break. Orlando is 23. He works in corporate communications in Washington, DC. He’s a politics junkie.

His latest substack about Zohran Mamdani and the wave of Democratic Socialism sweeping New York, where he grew up, is thought-provoking. I know many people (my age and older) who are panicked in the way he describes, but I love how thoughtfully he argues they should not be. There is a precedent for the current moment that I think he lays out beautifully. (I think he’s omitted some important things from his argument but he tells me he has his reasons. He wanted to keep it tightly focused).

I may be his proud mom - and as you can see from the photo collage, we enjoy goofing around together - but I don’t think everything that comes out of his mouth or proverbial pen (or social media feed) is worth pondering or repeating. And he’s not shy from telling me whenever he thinks I have generated crud! But even when we disagree, we are usually able to have a constructive dialogue. Usually. There are also times where we feel frustrated with each other, like any parent and child.

As you know I am writing a book about Luigi Mangione and am therefore focused on trying to understand Gen Z, a generation that feels misunderstood and unfairly pigeon-holed by their elders.

So, when I phoned Orlando to talk about his piece on Zohran, we decided we’d try doing some mom/son live video chats around controversial topics to see if we can find a way to better understand each other’s points of view and, perhaps, bridge the generation gap between Gen X (me) and Gen Z (his).

We are noodling a title for our series, so feel free to write in with suggestions as well as ideas for subjects we should talk about

Meanwhile, his substack is below. Do subscribe to it, if you like his writing!

And, Happy July Fourth!

Democratic Socialism: The Boogeyman?

The instinct to check concentrated wealth is older than the panic about it — and it has always had a New York address.

On a Tuesday night last November, my city elected a democratic socialist mayor, and a good part of the country reacted as though we’d run a red flag up over City Hall.

Zohran Mamdani took the oath on January 1st after pulling more votes than any mayoral candidate since 1969, in the highest-turnout city election since 1993. He ran on a platform that didn’t bother to be coy: freeze the rent on stabilized units, make the buses free, fund universal childcare, open city-run grocery stores, tax the top to pay for it. His opponent’s concession warned darkly about “socialism.” The President, watching from Washington, floated arresting him and choking off the city’s money. Listening to all of it, you’d be forgiven for thinking something genuinely alien had just landed in America.

It hadn’t. And the reason why has everything to do with the city that just voted.

Last week, New York held its primaries, and the message only got louder. A slate of candidates endorsed by Mamdani didn’t just win — they came for the establishment and got it. Brad Lander beat two-term Rep. Dan Goldman by nearly thirty points; Darializa Avila Chevalier knocked off five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus; and Claire Valdez took an open Brooklyn-Queens seat over the retiring incumbent’s handpicked successor. Two of the three are card-carrying members of the Democratic Socialists of America. In districts this blue, the primary is the election. Come January, Mamdani will have three new allies in Congress.

This alarmed a lot of people, plenty of them Democrats. Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey went on Fox News the next morning, called himself a “Democratic capitalist,” and announced that the socialists who’d just won were, in his telling, not Democrats at all.

I take serious issue with that, because it openly ignores history. Franklin Delano Roosevelt — arguably the architect of the modern Democratic Party, Governor of New York, four-term President — expanded the role of government in the economy about as far as it has ever gone: he created Social Security, raised taxes on the wealthy, and funded public works on a scale the country had never seen.

Gottheimer says these people aren’t Democrats. But FDR didn’t merely happen to be a Democrat who did these things. He was the modern Democratic Party — the man who built the coalition Gottheimer now claims to speak for. To call the heirs of that tradition fake Democrats is to read the party’s own founder out of it. And it was never only the Democrats. Teddy Roosevelt (FDR’s cousin) — Republican, trustbuster, face on the mountain — went after the “malefactors of great wealth” a generation earlier and used the Sherman Act to break Standard Oil apart. The instinct to put a check on concentrated money has never belonged to one party. It’s belonged to whichever one was paying attention.

And here’s what Gottheimer, of all people, should know, sitting in a seat just across the river: this instinct has a New York address. The New Deal he’s living off of was, in no small part, a New York export. Frances Perkins watched workers leap from the windows of the burning Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911 and later called that day the beginning of the New Deal; she went on to become FDR’s Secretary of Labor and the architect of Social Security. Roosevelt governed here. Robert Wagner, who wrote the law that gave American workers the right to organize, was our senator. So when New York sends a slate of democratic socialists to Washington, it isn’t smuggling in something foreign. It’s doing what it has always done — exporting the argument that capitalism works best when somebody is watching it.

Notice, too, when these moments arrive. They show up when the gap between the top and everyone else has stretched near the breaking point. When the Depression hit, Herbert Hoover’s instinct was to stand back and let the market right itself. That instinct didn’t save him, and it didn’t save the country. What came after wasn’t the end of American capitalism. It was its renovation — and the renovation kept the house standing for the better part of a century.

Which brings me back to my city, and to why these candidates keep winning. This is not a fever that happened to New Yorkers. Look at what they actually said on their way out of the polls: cost of living was the top issue, ahead of crime, and three in four called the cost of housing a major problem. These are not people who read too much theory. They do the rent math every month and keep coming up short. When that’s the reality, “freeze my rent and tax the billionaires” isn’t a radical incantation. It’s an answer to a question the people in charge kept declining to answer.

Somewhere along the way we started treating “free market, hands off” as the one authentic American creed, and everything to its left as a betrayal of the founding. That’s just bad history. The tradition was never pure laissez-faire; it was a running argument over where to draw the line between a market that rewards effort and one that simply entrenches whoever already won. My own line sits about here: I am in favor of a market economy, but only when the proper restrictions on monopoly, malpractice, and misuse are in place. That is not a socialist position. Teddy Roosevelt would have recognized it. So would the New Dealers.

You could watch the modern version of that argument in Lina Khan, who ran the Federal Trade Commission until 2025 and spent her tenure dusting off the trustbusters’ tools for the age of Big Tech. The wealth gap she was reacting to isn’t subtle: the top one percent now holds about as much wealth as the entire bottom ninety percent combined — a concentration the country hadn’t seen since the Gilded Age that turned the first Roosevelt into a trustbuster. And the ground is shifting under the people who say “socialist” like it’s a spell: support for capitalism has slid to 54 percent, the lowest in Gallup’s tracking, while support for socialism has climbed to 39. A whole generation is doing the math and landing somewhere their parents didn’t, partly because the America where you could “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

Which raises the question the boogeyman talk is built to avoid: what would a fair market actually take? Not its abolition. A fair market doesn’t build itself — somebody has to set the table and then keep an eye on it, and that’s the part we’ve let slide. It means breaking up the monopolies that quietly set prices for the rest of us. It means building enough housing that rent stops swallowing half a paycheck, and funding the childcare and the buses that let people show up to the economy in the first place. It means writing rules that punish malpractice instead of subsidizing it. Call that socialism if it makes you feel better. I’d call it upkeep — the maintenance a market needs to keep the one promise it is supposed to make, that effort gets you somewhere. Do that work well and you don’t bury capitalism. You give people a reason to defend it again.

None of which makes the worries imaginary. The objections have teeth: rent freezes can choke off the new housing a city desperately needs, city-run groceries can curdle into city-run boondoggles, and capital and people can leave a place that overplays its hand. Mamdani and his new allies have mandates and to-do lists, not records, and those are very different things. Skepticism is fair. Panic is not. Taking a set of fairly ordinary demands about affordability and laundering them into a red scare isn’t an argument — it’s a way of dodging one. The American economy, right now, does not work for most Americans. Plain and simple. That’s the engine under economic populism, and the lawmakers who can’t say it out loud are the ones it’ll keep running over.

So, the boogeyman. Turn the lights on in the closet and the thing standing there looks an awful lot like our own history: a country that has repeatedly decided unchecked economic power is the government’s business, and a city that has done more than its share of the deciding. New York didn’t invent that last week. It just remembered it, loudly, and in an accent Josh Gottheimer should recognize from his own side of the Hudson. The real question was never whether democratic socialism is un-American. It’s whether the people shouting the word have read past the first chapter of the story — because the rest of the book is full of exactly this fight.

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Hey Everyone,

Yesterday, I pegged it back from the latest Luigi Mangione hearing at New York State Supreme Courthouse to sit down with the journalist and author Nina Burleigh, author of American Freak Show, here on substack to discuss the latest Epstein news and her excellent reporting around it. (Next week she has a “bombshell” to deliver around the financier Leon Black, who testifies to Congress on June 26. We will back, talking about it).

First, though: Luigi.

Tempers frayed on both sides of the New York State courtroom yesterday in a an emotional, fiery hearing.

Luigi’s lawyers said they would file to pursue a “psychiatric defense”, in other words they may argue at trial that Luigi suffered from “extreme emotional disturbance” at the time of Brian Thompson’s murder. That was yesterday. Suddenly they’ve withdrawing this application and so all the records that would pertain to this are staying sealed.

What is the significance of this back and forth? I don’t know. Karen Friedman Agnifilo mentioned in state court that the unsealing of these records could be prejudicial to Luigi down the road in his federal trial, currently scheduled for January. Extreme Emotional Disturbance “EED” pertains to a New York statute, not a federal one.

That it was brought up at all is a big deal. It was the first implicit admission by Luigi’s defense that he murdered Brian Thompson. If it was applied, at trial, the prosecution would still have to prove to a jury that Luigi committed the alleged crime. But if a jury also believed he was suffering from an “EED” and “a profound loss of control” as it’s termed, then the highest charge he could be convicted of is manslaughter.

Anyway it’s moot now.

But back to the fireworks in court yesterday: Assistant district attorney Joel Seidemann looked like he might choke he was so furious as he preemptively asked Judge Gregory Carro to prevent the defense from pushing back the trial beyond September 8th. Seidemann said that Brian Thompson’s mother is 78 and is entitled to know “the why and the who” it came to be that she buried her son before the end of her life. This caused Karen Friedman Agnifilo, Luigi’s counsel to bark that she hadn’t actually asked to delay anything. Yet. No matter, it was nowJudge Carro’s turn to shout angrily, as he instructed her firmly that the trial would start on September 8th as scheduled.

This was not the only Luigi drama playing in Manhattan, however.

Last night I went to see Luigi: The Musical, here in New York for four nights only. This is the show, which notes in its marketing, a one word review in the San Francisco Chronicle: “terrible.”

My takeaways:

1. If you go, leave plenty of time to find the venue, Green Room 42, a cabaret on the fourth floor of a hotel in Hell’s Kitchen. Once inside the building, it took me fifteen minutes to find it. But, by showtime it was packed.

2. One of the elderly guys at my table said at the start he thought New York should hold a Knicks-style parade for Luigi. By the time the show concluded, he was asleep.

3. The show: So, there’s a small band consisting of a drummer, two guitars and a pianist behind four actors, three dressed in orange prison garb, the other dressed in blue as a prison guard. The four stand in front of microphones and enact - (sort of: it’s more like they read from binders) - a pastiche, based on a reimagining of the days inside the MDC following Mangione’s arrest. Mike Cefalo who plays Mangione, looks unnervingly like him. Two women play Diddy and SBF, so you wouldn’t get them mixed up with their doppelgangers. A burly man plays a prison guard. The “plot” is that the three inmates plan their escape, and there’s a lot of “banter” along the way. Diddy and SBF come off as entitled dicks. Mangione is supposed to be the “good” guy of the trio. “I’m not a celebrity. I’m just a normal, exceedingly handsome guy,” he tells his cellmates. He kicks it off by singing a song, wishing he hadn’t lowered his mask to smile inside the New York hostel, and that he hadn’t eaten a hash brown inside of McDonalds. Ie He wishes he hadn’t been caught. It’s sort of funny. There are lots of riffs on Mangione’s fan mail; his looks…The audience laughs.

4. One big problem: none of them can really sing. Mangione is the best. Diddy especially is very pitchy. Several times one has to cover ones ears.

5. Another problem: the music is really bad. The drummer looks bored. Did the writer not think to create a Diddy style rap for Diddy to sing? Too obvious? Feels like a missed opportunity.

6. Another problem: the dialogue is bad. I found myself wishing I was a few blocks East and North watching Chess for a fourth time before it closes on Sunday.

7. Wow. Turns out that the prison guard wants to let Mangione escape because he’s suffering from cancer….My companion thinks it’s good the show is “leaning in” to healthcare issues.

8. A plus: it’s only 90 minutes long and I can go home and watch episode nine of The Other Bennett Sister.

   ---

   So, back to Nina and Epstein.

Nina is one of the reporters behind The Cover-Up, the Courier News project devoted to combing through the mountain of Epstein documents that have emerged over the last year. Alongside her reporting partner Katie Chenoweth, she has become one of the most dogged investigators of the files, following obscure threads that many larger news organizations have overlooked.

In our conversation we discuss:

1. The latest New York Times deep dive about Jeffrey Epstein’s last days inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.

   We agree this is one of the best pieces of original reporting you can get.

2. Nina’s great reporting about two sophisticated Russian women in Epstein’s orbit in her substack article, Jeff and the Red Sparrow.

   It raises an uncomfortable question that sits at the center of so many Epstein stories: what exactly is the line between victim, survivor, and participant? Last week Julie K. Brown and I discussed exactly this, when we analyzed Sarah Kellen’s congressional testimony. In that case we decided, it’s clear Kellen is a victim. But I doubt many people will feel the same about the two protagonists of Nina’s piece.

3. The latest on Marius Borg Hoiby, the son of Norway’s Crown Princess, who has been convicted raping two women and is only sentenced to four years in jail…

4. Leon Black! The billionaire financier who paid Epstein $170 million for “tax advice”. I’ve reported on him frequently, as you know. He’s due to testify to congress next week and Nina promises that she has got a “bombshell” to drop.

5. We discuss the controversial New York Times piece on Kathy Ruemmler. Nina wrote about it here.

6. And the NYT excerpt of Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book, Regime Change, which had Trump’s kitchen cabinet frantically meeting in the Situation Room to try to fix the Epstein Files PR headache…

   Enjoy! Nina and I will be back next week.

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Julie K. Brown joined me yesterday to discuss yesterday’s congressional testimony from Bill Gates, as well as that of longtime Epstein associates Sarah Kellen and Lesley Groff. (Groff testified on Tuesday and Kellen testified on May 21st).

We don’t yet have transcripts for Groff and Gates but we do know that Gates told congress that Epstein had knowledge of his extra-marital affairs and tried to leverage that to re-engage with him, after Gates had decided Epstein could not be useful in helping him scale his philanthropy and dropped him in 2014. Gates said Epstein’s efforts at re-engagement were unsuccessful. Still, it’s the first time someone has raised Epstein’s predilection for attempted blackmail to Congress; a reminder, as Julie points out, that if Epstein was a threat to someone like Gates, then of course his vulnerable female victims stood no chance.

What I hope the transcript will show is exactly how Epstein gained knowledge of Gates’ private life. Based on my own reporting - and that of the Wall Street Journal - a key conduit between Epstein and Gates was the mysterious figure of Melanie Walker, a neurology professor and an Epstein protege who met Epstein with Donald Trump over tea at the Plaza hotel in the 1990s. Walker was fresh out of college and was thinking about a modeling career at the time, but Epstein encouraged her to pursue medicine instead. While she attended medical school she listed an address in the New York building on East 66th street where Epstein housed many other women who “worked” for him. He told people that Walker was his “science advisor”.

Years later, the Wall Street Journal reported that Walker wound up having a sexual relationship with Gates in 2017, while taking all sorts of direction from Epstein, according to text messages now unearthed by the Gates Foundation, which is conducting an investigation into Gates relationship with Epstein.

The text messages illustrate Epstein’s longterm tight control over Walker who was first sent - at Epstein’s direction- into Gates’ orbit in 2001 - right around the time her relationship with Andrew Mountbatten Windsor was ending. (She had been introduced to the British prince by Ghislaine Maxwell).

Andrew was also at the dinner where Walker sat next to Steven Sinofsky, the number three at Microsoft. Walker moved in with Sinofsky soon afterwards. Sinofksy grew sufficiently close to Epstein that Epstein wound up advising him on his exit from Microsoft in 2012, according to Justice Department records.

While living with Sinofsky Walker began working at the Gates Foundation in 2006. In 2009 she encouraged Boris Nikolic, an immunologist who was close to Gates, to meet with Epstein (Nikolic has said he had never heard of Epstein at the time. ) This was right after Epstein had served a year in jail for soliciting sex with a minor and was looking to rehabilitate his image. Walker also talked up Epstein to Gates himself, according to text messages reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Gates and Epstein met in 2011 - but Gates dropped Epstein in 2014 once it became clear Epstein was not able to deliver on promises to help him scale his philanthropy. Epstein was livid that he had been dumped, according to my sources. But Walker was in a prime position to keep whispering in Gates’ ear: in 2017 she moved jobs to work at Bill Gates’ private office. She began a sexual relationship with Gates the same year.

“Correspondence between Epstein and Walker reveals that Epstein was actively encouraging Walker to pursue a sexual relationship with Gates,” a Gates spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.

David Fleissig, a lawyer for Walker told the Wall Street Journal that Walker was “a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein” who had a prior history of abuse and then endured “a coercive relationship that spanned decades and ended only with his death. Beyond that, she would prefer not to make any comment at this time.”

Walker has not alleged sexual abuse by Epstein and hasn’t filed claims against his estate.

But it appears that there was a wobble in her relationship with Epstein in August 2014. According to the Wall Street Journal she wrote to Gates that Epstein, had “pretty incredible human specimens” at his disposal, but warned of consequences that she had seen “happen to too many powerful people over the years.” She also noted that Epstein tries to appeal to the “weaknesses or proclivities” of his targets.

Yet by 2017 she was back seeing advice from Epstein on text message as to how to handle Gates. She continued writing effusively to Epstein until the 2019 - the year of his arrest and death.

A spokesperson for Gates told the Wall Street Journal he had no idea of Walker’s relationship with Epstein and their “shared motives”.

Rep. Robert Garcia said yesterday that the House Oversight Committee wants to interview people Gates mentioned in his testimony. I sincerely hope Melanie Walker is one of them. At the very least, it’s clear from the text messages she knows how Epstein attempted to blackmail rich and powerful men - and who those men were: a piece of the jigsaw puzzle that is missing from public view at the current moment.

Also, it’s worth asking: why do know so little about Walker? Why is she not in the Epstein Files, given how long and close her relationship to Epstein was? According to her lawyer, he asked her name be withheld on the basis that Epstein had introduced her to two professional contacts whom she rebuffed after they sexually propositioned her.

Hmm. Does this really make her a “victim”? Your thoughts?

Julie and I move on to discussing the testimony of someone we do think was a victim: Sarah Kellen - a former employee of Epstein’s who was listed in the infamous Non Prosecution Agreement of 2008.

Julie and I agreed that, after reading the transcript of her testimony it was very hard to dispute that Kellen was a victim. She had grown up a Jehovah’s Witness. She was effectively homeless by the time she began working for Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Her descriptions of working for Epstein were hard to read.

Even when she finally got out of Epstein’s household she was not a free agent. Epstein negotiated the one-sided prenuptial agreement she signed to marry the racing car driver Brian Vickers, from whom she is now divorced. She was essentially handed like a chattel from one rich man to another.

We believe that Lesley Groff, Epstein’s longtime assistant, is in a different category altogether.

“She knew. She absolutely knew,” Julie says in our conversation.

I agree. Groff maintained to Congress that she never saw any instances of improper behavior by Epstein. Well as Julie points out, you don’t need to see anything to be aware something is off. When a guy asks you to book him three massages a day - I’d argue it’s pretty clear that something is off.

I remember when Groff phoned me in the Fall of 2002 after I’d met with Epstein, and she said “Jeffrey wanted me to tell you: he thought you were so pretty.”

Eew. It was inappropriate then. It’s inappropriate now.

It told me that, even if she didn’t witness specifics, Lesley Groff knew, in general, exactly who her boss was.

We also discussed Julie’s recent interview with Michael Reiter, the former Palm Beach police chief who helped build the original case against Epstein.

Reiter was reluctant to be interviewed for almost twenty years partly because he believed - based on what happened to me and to my late colleague at Vanity Fair, John Connolly - that Epstein would get any interview killed.

One of Reiter’s greatest frustrations is the misconception that local law enforcement failed to act. As Julie points out, Reiter and his detectives “were standing alone” in trying to hold Epstein accountable in 2006 and 2007. They built the case. The decision not to fully prosecute Epstein came later and elsewhere.

You can read that interview here.

Finally, we get to yesterday’s sizzling New York Times read about the panic inside the White House Situation Room around the Epstein Files and the great effort - in vain - to stop their release.

This read to me like a Feydeau farce: a tale of bumbling incompetence among the Trump top lieutenants that would be hilarious if at the heart of it there wasn’t such a serious problem, an omission if you will: No one in the self-selected “spin room” asked the most fundamental question of all: What was it, they were meant to be spinning, or covering-up or distracting from? Why was President Trump so averse to releasing the Epstein Files? (I have always struggled with this question, given that, based on the incomplete record we have, there’s nothing in there that’s criminally problematic for Trump. So what was his objection to them? It doesn’t make much sense.)

I tried to explain this last night on MsNOw.

The Times story describes a mass panic to cover up…. what, exactly? None of the panickers seems to wonder.

No one thought to go into see their boss and ask: “What is it in the Epstein Files you don’t want out there?”

No one thought to have a conversation along the lines of: “Isn’t the Epstein story completely horrific? Don’t we want to understand what happened? Doesn’t America need to know? Might that not be a good political strategy, even?”

The kindest thing one can say is that, based on the scenes in the New York Times, this bunch of senior political operatives is not only chaotic, dumb and ineffective, they are cowards, as well as being the least curious people on the planet.

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There’s no one better than Joel Rubin, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for House Affairs under Obama, to break down where we are with the war in Iran.

The motif of today’s discussion is: “Trump appears to keep on squandering his leverage.”

Joel argues that he did it with Iran, by backing off from applying military pressure (albeit for understandable reasons).

Trouble is, Trump now finds himself boxed in, because he wants the Iranians to agree to a ceasefire and to opening the straits of Hormuz and to getting rid of their enriched uranium but without paying them anything. And there’s the rub.

Because if he offers sanctions relief or any financial assistance, he risks opening himself up to the same criticism that he heaped on Obama - who offered sanctions relief in exchange for an agreement to not build a bomb.

If he capitulates and does strike an Obama-type deal, will the Democrats try to fight him on a solution with Iran because of this, in an effort to press political advantage ahead of the midterms? It’s a possibility, says Joel. We both hope not, however.

We move on to the war in Ukraine. The Ukrainians have just bombed St Petersburg - right before Putin hosts his economic summit there - the Russian version of Davos. Reportedly, the far-right lunatics Candace Owens and Andrew Tate are there as guests of the Kremlin….to which, no words. But I promise you I will get Russian dissident Mikhail Zygar on here shortly to tell us what he makes of that - and what they are saying inside Russia about this.

For now it seems the Ukrainians have the advantage in the conflict. Yet again, says Joel, you could (cynically) argue that Trump squandered his leverage over Ukraine when he had it, if he was serious about pulling off a peace - albeit not a kind of peace most of us would have condoned.

We move to Venezuela. Again, says Joel, reports that the new Venezuelan leader Delcy Rodriguez is struggling to provide the transparency about oil money that Washington asked for is another instance of where Trump squandered his leverage. He could have negotiated to return María Corina Machado the Nobel prize winner and opposition leader to lead Venezuela, thereby bringing about democracy…but no.

China? What did we get out of the China State Visit?…Er nothing…

You get the drift.

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Thank you for joining me for today’s live video chat with Alex Murdaugh’s defense attorney, Jim Griffin. (And, here’s the link to the ten minute video that concludes our chat, after Jim’s screen froze at 50 minutes). As I wrote yesterday, Alex Murdaugh’s convictions for murdering his wife, Maggie and his son, Paul, have been overturned by South Carolina’s Supreme Court. It’s a sensational twist in already sensational story.

So, here’s what I learned in our riveting conversation that I did not know previously:

1. Jim received an email in the midst of the last trial from a viewer in the Netherlands (the trial was live streamed). The emailer told him that he was a lip-reader and could understand everything Jim was whispering to his client, so he might want to cover his mouth. (Jim did from that point on).

2. The night before Jim was scheduled to give his closing statement, he received another helpful tip from a different viewer. The State had argued that Alex Murdaugh’s lack of concern for the whereabouts of his younger son, Buster, showed that he knew who had murdered Paul and Maggie, because otherwise he’d be concerned the murderer was coming for Buster, too. But this emailer pointed Jim to a section of video tape in which Alex asked the sheriff to get an escort for Buster. Jim hadn’t seen it. “I didn’t even have it in my outline,” he explains. But, after that he queued it up and played it.

3. He talks about the hate mail he has received in the wake of defending Alex Murdaugh - and shows us an example.

4. Jim describes the dramatic scene on the Saturday of Labor day weekend 2021 when Alex comes on board Jim’s boat and explains the depths of his financial crimes. (He embezzled more than eight million dollars from clients of his law firm, allegedly to pay for an opioid addiction). Jim wound up saying to him: “You will be going to jail for this.”

5. Jim takes behind the scenes as to what happened after the guilty verdict came in. He and Dick Harpootlian, his co-counsel received a “tip” suggesting they needed to talk to the jurors about possible interference by the court clerk, Becky Hill. Eventually they found a woman who told them that Hill had said to her: “the defense is going to put up their case and don’t be fooled by what

   they do.” That was only the start of evidence they found about Hill’s efforts at “persuasion”.

6. He gets into what is likely to be different in the next trial.

7. He discusses pieces of evidence he felt were inconclusive, including the video on Paul’s phone of Paul looking at a dog, in which Alex’s voice can be heard. (He says it’s impossible to know the timing of that as it relates to Paul’s death because his phone ran out of battery). And he gets into the mishandling of Maggie’s cellphone by SLED (South Carolina Law Enforcement Division). Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post covered Jim’s successful evisceration of SLED in the courtroom. I’d forgotten how many things the agency botched in the investigation. It’s worth reading here.

8. In our last ten minutes he discusses what happened when jurors went back to the scene of the murders at Moselle, the plantation owned by the Murdaughs (it has since been sold).

9. Buster Murdaugh, the surviving son, has asked for privacy as he tries to get on with his life. But he wants it known he supports his father 100 per cent.

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Hey Everyone,

Tomorrow (Wednesday May 27th) at 5pm ET I will be joined by Jim Griffin, who is one of the lawyers representing South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who, in 2023, was convicted of murdering his wife, Maggie, and son, Paul on June 7th 2021. (I wrote about what happened here.) But on May 13th, remarkably the two convictions were overturned - because the Supreme Court deemed that Colleton County Clerk, Rebecca “Becky” Hill exerted “improper external influences on the jury.” So, now there will be a whole new trial. And this time Murdaugh won’t have to testify.

In December 2025, Hill, a former local beauty pageant winer, pleaded guilty to several charges, including perjury and misconduct in office. She received probation, community service, and restitution. Significantly, she was NOT convicted of jury tampering but the Supreme Court clearly believed that her influence was enough to have swayed the jury. She was said to have told jurors to study Murdaugh closely and “watch his body language” among other things.

In order to discover if jurors felt swayed by her words, Griffin and his co-counsel Dick Harpootlian tracked them down - often in the middle of nowhere.

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal contains the following scene about Harpootlian’s efforts:

He recalled meeting one juror, in particular, at the end of a dirt road. “She had a dog on a chain out front. It was a trailer. She’s inside cooking collards for her grandson there.… I mean, it was like something out of ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ combined with Tennessee Williams,” Harpootlian said. “I mean, that whole scenario down there is really bizarre.”

That woman—and then other jurors, he said—recounted how “Miss Becky” told them not to believe the defense, not to let him fool you, and to “watch his body language” when Murdaugh testified.

During the evidentiary hearing in January 2024, nine jurors testified that they hadn’t heard such admonishments from Hill. Three others had, one of whom said it had affected her decision: “It felt like she made it seem like he was already guilty.” Murdaugh’s lawyers contend that Hill connived to have a juror removed—the so-called Egg Lady—because Hill feared she wasn’t inclined to convict.

Back in 2022, I spent some time down in South Carolina looking into the Murdaughs, which is why I know Jim Griffin and Dick Harpootlian. I wrote about a particularly memorable time with them in Harpootlian’s office here.

I was both shocked - and not - by the latest turn of events, because, frankly, I have never encountered such a bunch of self-interested cowboys as those I met in South Carolina (including many of the lawyers). However, Jim, always stood out to me as a straight arrow.

Many of us were/are horrified - but fascinated - by the story of Alex Murdaugh, and what it told us about the dynasty that ruled the so-called “low country” in South Carolina for over a century.

So, tune in tomorrow (Wednesday) at 5pm ET to hear the details of why Murdaugh’s conviction was overturned, and what happens next.

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I spoke to the writer Danielle Crittenden Frum, whom I have known for many years, about her memoir: Dispatches of Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through The Unthinkable in which she describes the horrendous journey she has been on since unexpectedly losing her first-born 32-year-old daughter, Miranda, in February 2024.

She explains she didn’t intend to write a book initially, but she’s a trained reporter who comes from a family of journalists, and out of habit, she’d write down scenes and feelings in real time, feeling “like a foreign correspondent in a war zone”. Slowly she began to realize that what she had might be of value - to her and to other people.

She discovered that there’s not much useful literature out there when something this devastating occurs. She found C. S. Lewis’s memoir, A Grief Observed, on losing his wife, Joy, to cancer, helpful, but the famous Five Stages Of Grief by Elisabeth Kubler Ross was “a joke….there is no order to this grief.” And as for Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking? “It’s so name-droppy…I am not interested in what table you sat at.”

In our interview, as in her book, Danielle describes with raw honesty, suicidal ideation - “when the pain of living is so great, the peace of death beckons you” - the pain that became physical at times - she was rushed to hospital in the middle of the night, suffering a “medical grade panic attack” - and the character transformation she and her husband, David, have undergone in their effort to survive and find purpose in their lives once more. Before Miranda died Danielle’s nickname among her friends and family was “The Minister of Fun.” But, as she tells us here, she has retired from that position. Permanently.

Astonishingly - given, the unfairness of what happened, Danielle is never angry in her book - or in our interview. Miranda was felled by a mere virus, because she was juggling the cocktail of medications she was forced to take in the wake of a benign brain tumor removal five years previously. The surgeons had also had to remove her pituitary gland, leaving her reliant on cortisol and other drugs to regulate her hormones. The drugs had side-effects and she was trying to fine-tune the dosage. Danielle explains that the prescribing doctor never said to her: “One consequence of getting this wrong, is you could suddenly drop dead”. But that is what happened.

Danielle says there was no point being angry - because nothing can bring Miranda back. She learned that from a Hollywood agent friend who, it emerged, had also lost a child around Miranda’s age, and said to her and David: “If an angel were to come down to you and say: if you guys jump off a building now, Miranda can come back alive, would you do it? And we said: ”yes, of course we would.” And he said, “well, that’s not on the table.” So it just felt to me like raging at the sky was not going to bring her back.“

She talks about the agony of not being able to get into Miranda’s electronic devices fully - regardless of a court order: “Apple assumed we were either prurient people, or hackers”. And the agony of being reminded of Miranda several times a day on her own electronic devices. The trauma of seeing her child’s dead body. Of burying her in a grave without flowers (they moved her). Of saying goodbye to her apartment.

She says she could never have described this journey on paper and talked about it today were it not for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy (EMDR) colloquially known as rapid eye movement therapy. “It doesn’t make the grief go away, but it does help you manage your grief better and sort of learn to live with it.”

She explains that for many people, including her own grandmother who drank herself to death after the death of her son in World War II, grief can literally kill. Your life expectancy is dramatically reduced in the wake of something like this. And how she and David feel blessed because of their strong marriage, and their network of supportive friends. And how, ultimately, Danielle sees her book as a story about parental love. Despite this loss, she and David would not change a thing. They are blessed to have had Miranda for 32 years.

I encourage everyone to watch our conversation and buy Danielle’s book here - even if you haven’t suffered a loss this devastating. Because it’s a reminder that we are all human, that death is inevitable - but that also in the depths of despair and devastation, that we are not alone.

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Hey Everyone,

This Wednesday at 5pm ET I am doing something a little different. I will be doing a live video chat with a personal friend, the author and journalist - and substacker, Danielle Crittenden Frum about her extraordinary new memoir: Dispatches From Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through The Unthinkable.

On Valentine’s Weekend in 2024, Danielle and her husband David received the appalling news that their beloved 32-year-old daughter Miranda had been found dead in her apartment in Brooklyn. She had been felled by an ordinary virus that most people would have survived. But Miranda did not have a pituitary gland, the result of the surgical removal of a brain tumor five years previously. So her immune system was weakened.

Danielle’s beautifully written book takes us with her on the horrific journey she, David and their two surviving adult children continue to go on. How she found the distance to chronicle their pain in such a raw, tangible way I do not know. I read this book in one sitting on Sunday afternoon. This is an odd thing, perhaps, to say about a book about loss and grief - particularly that of people you know and care about - but reading it was almost uplifting - because everything in it is so relatable.

Part of its power is that Miranda was extraordinary: beautiful, defiant, funny, clever, a bundle of witty complexity who packed more into 32 years than many people do with three times that.

But what Danielle does so magnificently is expose the vulnerabilities that most of us spend our lives hiding, pretending we don’t have. Turns out those vulnerabilities have emotional power that surface polish does not. Gardeners everywhere will relate to the moment she digs up her daughter’s body to move her to a grave where there are flowers. Mothers everywhere will relate to the moment she crawls inside Miranda’s bed to sleep there the night before selling her apartment. Wives everywhere will relate to the way she describes how the devastation impacts spouses differently - but also the same. Even with the unspeakable loss, the Frum family, in Danielle’s telling, is a place we want to be. We understand them. We like them. We feel them.

Anyone who has experienced loss and sorrow will empathize with every word - and perhaps wish we could have phrased what we felt as eloquently as Danielle does here.

It isn’t just Miranda who was extraordinary. Her mother is too.

I hope you will join me on Wednesday at 5pm for what will be a sad but vital conversation about loss, life, survival and the power of writing.

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Thank you for tuning into to my live broadcast from the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room in TriBeCa in Manhattan.

Adam Klasfeld and I did NOT discuss Leon Black’s testimony to the House Oversight Committee - because it’s been postponed to June 26th.

But we did discuss:

a) the powerful impact of the pop-up museum that is the Epstein Files Reading Room. I tried to give you a virtual tour.

b) what we make of the alleged Epstein suicide note

c) the strange case of the “Jane Doe”, who accused Leon Black of rape (he says he never even met her) and whose lawyer has been sanctioned by a judge.

d) The stunning reversal of Alex Murdaugh’s conviction of murdering his wife and son.

e) Luigi Mangione’s imminent important state court hearing

e) the latest in the ongoing immigration case of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia

f) The debacle of the Louisiana v. Callais decision, weakening the Voting Rights Act and causing mayhem in Alabama

AND

last but not least: Stacey Williams joined me live in the reading room, her eyes filled with tears, as she talked.

For those who don’t know her story: Stacey was a very successful Sports Illustrated model who briefly dated Jeffrey Epstein (to whom she was introduced by the model agency owner, Faith Kates) in 1993. She quickly figured out Epstein and Trump were close friends. But she was wholly unprepared for the moment that winter when, while walking with Epstein, he suddenly decided to drop in on Trump in his office in Trump Tower where, she says Trump then groped her for a few minutes in front of Epstein and his assistant.

“The door wasn’t closed which is why it was so sort of confusing and discombobulating for me … he stepped outside of his office and we were in this sort of waiting area and his assistant was walking back and forth and Donald just started putting his hands all over me and Jeffrey was standing there but they kept talking as if I weren’t even there.

I didn’t even remember what they were talking about - I think it was about me and my career or something - and as he’s talking to me he’s putting his hands up and down my body and touching my butt my breasts my hip, everything. I just I froze I was in absolute shock…”

Stacey first went public about the alleged assault in 2024 shortly before the election and of course Trump vehemently denied it. Karoline Leavitt, then the press secretary for the Trump campaign issued a statement, saying: “These accusations, made by a former activist for Barack Obama and announced on a Harris campaign call two weeks before the election, are unequivocally false. It’s obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign.”

As you will hear, the postcard Trump sent Stacey (below) after the alleged assault has been authenticated and she has undergone a polygraph by a veteran FBI special agent. Plus Epstein is on tape telling Michael Wolff about the incident.

Stacey says that once she and Epstein were in the street, having left Trump’s office, Epstein was livid and let her have it. She began to realize what had happened; that it was a test that “was coordinated” by the two men.

I had vented a lot to Jeffrey about how dark and, you know, violent the modeling industry, and how just completely pervasive rape culture was or is in the modeling industry - and how I was always in trouble with agents and photographers for fighting back, for refusing to play along,f or refusing to kowtow to these guys in power, to Patrick Demarchelier’s photographers. And then I told him stories of actually physically defending myself a few times.

She thinks Epstein wanted to test if she’d defend herself with Trump.

As we learned from the Access Hollywood tape, Donald Trump has bragged about what he can get away with. He made it very clear that’s what he does. He says: “they don’t do anything”… and I thought: “oh no …..I didn’t do anything .. I froze.”

In our conversation, as you will hear, Stacey tells us that she met Ghislaine Maxwell and wondered about her relationship with Epstein: she seemed possessive. And that there was a lot of speculation about Epstein’s “dark money.” What the heck is “dark money” she wondered at the time. But the money was far from the only “dark” thing about Epstein’s behavior.

She describes the moment when Epstein slid into the conversation the fact he’d secretly filmed her undressing.

“I’d stayed over his place one night and…. he looked at me many days later and said something like, …. that video I have of you undressing… is my most prized possession ….Jeffrey had this way if you speak to some of the other journalists or women who have interacted with him he has this way of just sort of sliding in a really dark way….”

Well, of course, I was one of those journalists who experienced first hand how Epstein could slide in threats in a really dark way…

I know exactly what Stacey is talking about.

Where, she asks, is that tape of her undressing? The DOJ has not reached out to her, even though she tells her story to the international media almost daily.

Her plea, as you will here, is that investigators around the world must not stop simply because Epstein and Jean-Luc Brunel (who was her manager) are dead; the rot spread far wider and there is work to be done.

I hope you will be as inspired by our talk - as we were.

Thank you for watching.

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