Issue 148 – September 2019

S.M.A.R.T.
(Stop Mind control And Ritual abuse Today)
P. O Box 1295, Easthampton, MA 01027-1295 USA E-mail: SMARTNEWS@aol.com
Home page: https://ritualabuse.us/

Issue 148 – September 2019

The purpose of this newsletter is to help stop secretive organizations and groups from abusing others and to help those who allege they have been abused by such organizations and groups. This newsletter is not a substitute for other ways of recovering from ritual abuse. Readers should use caution while reading this newsletter. If necessary, make sure other support systems are available during and after reading this newsletter.

Important:
The resources mentioned in this newsletter are for educational value only. Reading the books cited may or may not help your recovery process, so use caution when reading any book or contacting any resource mentioned in this newsletter. Some may have a religious or other agenda that may be separate from your own recovery process. Others may have valuable information on secretive organizations, but have triggers or be somewhat sympathetic to those organizations. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, the views expressed in this newsletter constitute expressions of opinion, and readers are cautioned to form their own opinions and draw their own conclusions by consulting a variety of sources, including this newsletter. Resources listed, quoted and individual articles, etc. and their writers do not necessarily support all or any of the views mentioned in this newsletter. Also, the views, facts and opinions mentioned in this newsletter are solely the opinions of the authors and are not necessarily the opinions of this newsletter or its editor.

Copyright 2019 – All rights reserved. No reproduction of any material without written permission from the editor and individual authors.

East Coast conference organized by S.M.A.R.T. (Stop Mind Control and Ritual Abuse) The 2019 Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference is August 17 – 18, 2019 at the DoubleTree near Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, CT

Internet conference information: https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/
Speakers included Dr. Alison Miller, Neil Brick and movie maker Daniel Roemer.

Excellent Child and Ritual Abuse Conference Last Weekend https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/excellent-child-and-ritual-abuse-conference-last-weekend-300903328.html

Possible Hate Groups – How Do They Effect Survivors and Their Resources by Neil Brick – This presentation will discuss groups that attack survivors and their helpers due to their diagnosis of dissociation and dissociative identity disorder and work recovering from trauma. https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2019-conference/possible-hate-groups-how-do-they-effect-survivors-and-their-resources/
Discusses the cases of David Calof and Anna Salter and has information on Lucien Greaves/Doug Mesner and The Satanic Temple’s Grey Faction.

A Survivor’s View of Recovery from Ritual Abuse by Neil Brick
https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2019-conference/a-survivors-view-of-recovery-from-ritual-abuse-by-neil-brick/

Deception by Organized Abuser Groups: Helping Your Front People and Your Insiders Recognize the Lies and Tricks Which Keep You Enslaved by Alison Miller https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2019-conference/deception-by-organized-abuser-groups-helping-your-front-people-and-your-insiders-recognize-the-lies-and-tricks-which-keep-you-enslaved-by-alison-miller/

Please note: None of the material on these pages or at the conference is meant as therapy, or to take the place of therapy. This presentation may remind survivors of their programming, so please use caution while reading.

If you are a survivor of abuse by a mind-controlling abuser group, you have parts who have been trained to obey abusers because they believe lies your abusers told you. The abusers deceived you in childhood, using drugs, acted-out scenarios, stage magic, stories and films to control your child parts and prevent you from speaking out about the abuse. Their power over you depends on your young parts believing the abusers’ lies. If you learn to recognize when your emotions and behavior are influenced by these deceptions, and to discover the ways in which you were deceived, you can increase your freedom from the abuser group. (Skype presention)

Alison Miller https://ritualabuse.us/smart/alison-miller/

Information in this issue includes: R. Kelly, Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Bill Richardson, George Mitchell, E. Jean Carroll, Prince Andrew, Kevin Spacey, Dr. Michael Holick, Elon Musk, brain microchip, Boy Scouts of America, Catholic Church, New York Child Victims Act, Eric Lin

R. Kelly Arrested on Federal Sex Trafficking Charges: Law Enforcement Officials
The 52-year-old was arrested by NYPD detectives and Homeland Security Investigators on sex trafficking charges By Jonathan Dienst July 11, 2019
Singer R. Kelly has been arrested in Chicago on federal sex crime charges, according to two law enforcement officials.
The 52-year-old was arrested Homeland Security Investigation agents and NYPD Public Safety Task Force Thursday night on sex trafficking charges, officials tell News 4, and it is expected he will be brought to New York….
The R&B star, whose real name is Robert Kelly, has been the subject of different sexual abuse allegations for nearly two decades, with some of the alleged acts dating back to 1998.

Back in February, Kelly was charged with aggravated sexual abuse involving four women, three of whom were minors when the alleged abuse occurred. He pleaded not guilty and was released from Chicago’s Cook County Jail after posting bail.
A jury in 2008 acquitted Kelly of child pornography charges stemming from a video showing him having sex with a girl as young as 13, prosecutors claimed at the time. Kelly faced 15 years in prison for that charge, but the young woman in that claim denied it was her and did not testify.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/R-Kelly-Arrested-on-Federal-Sex-Crime-Charges-512618121.html

Jeffrey Epstein Was a Sex Offender. The Powerful Welcomed Him Anyway.
Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to a sex crime involving a teenage girl. Some elites shunned him, but others embraced him. By Jodi Kantor, Mike McIntire and Vanessa Friedman July 13, 2019
A strange thing happened when Jeffrey Epstein came back to New York City after being branded a sex offender: His reputation appeared to rise.

In 2010, the year after he got out of a Florida jail, Katie Couric and George Stephanopoulos dined at his Manhattan mansion with a British royal. The next year, Mr. Epstein was photographed at a “billionaire’s dinner” attended by tech titans like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. A page popped up on Harvard University’s website lauding his accomplishments, and superlative-filled news releases described his lofty ambitions as he dedicated $10 million to charitable causes.
Powerful female friends served as social guarantors: Peggy Siegal, a gatekeeper for A-list events, included him in movie screenings, and Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin, a champion of women’s health, maintained a friendship that some felt gave him credibility. Mr. Epstein put up a website showing Stephen Hawking and other luminaries at a science gathering he had organized.

“If you looked up Jeffrey Epstein online in 2012, you would see what we all saw,” Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, said in an interview. He seemed “like an ex-con who had done well on Wall Street,” who was close to the Clintons and gave money to academic pursuits, Dr. Botstein said. That was why, he noted, Bard accepted an unsolicited $50,000 in 2011 for its high schools, followed later that year and in 2012 by another $75,000 in donations.
Over a decade ago, when Mr. Epstein was very publicly accused of sexually abusing girls as young as 14, he minimized the legal consequences with high-powered lawyers, monetary settlements that silenced complaints, and a plea deal that short-circuited an F.B.I. investigation and led to the resignation announcement on Friday of a Trump cabinet official who had overseen the case as a prosecutor. Socially, Mr. Epstein carried out a parallel effort, trying to preserve his reputation as a financier, philanthropist and thinker.
Some of the respect Mr. Epstein, 66, drew on was manufactured, the accomplishments recycled. The gathering with Dr. Hawking had taken place back in 2006. The positive online notices appeared to have been paid for by Mr. Epstein: A writer employed by his foundation churned out the news releases, and Drew Hendricks, the supposed author of a Forbes story calling Mr. Epstein “one of the largest backers of cutting edge science,” conceded in an interview that he was given $600 to post the pre-written article under his own name. (Forbes removed the piece after The New York Times published its article.)

Though some institutions and prominent people, including Donald J. Trump, said they shunned him, Mr. Epstein’s tactics largely worked. Over the past week, as the scope of his alleged offenses, involving dozens of victims in the early 2000s, became clearer after a new indictment in New York, the story of Mr. Epstein and his social circles shows how some people were willing to welcome back — or at least give a pass to — a handsome rich man who had been convicted of a crime involving a minor.

Mr. Epstein’s social strategy proceeded from his legal one. The lenient agreement he reached with prosecutors — his plea involved one girl and the crime was prostitution, which made it look like the teenager was in part to blame — gave others a reason to dismiss his wrongdoing, decide he had already paid his penalty or not question what had happened.
At the top of New York society, plenty of people have “weird chitchat attached to their name,” said Candace Bushnell, the “Sex and the City” writer. She said in an interview that she looked into rumors about Mr. Epstein for The New York Observer in 1994 but stopped reporting after she was thrown out of his townhouse and threatened.
For years to come, people brushed such stories aside. “You’d think, ‘It couldn’t possibly be true,’” she said.

A Renaissance Man
In March 2006, a year after allegations of sexual misconduct were first reported to the police in Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Epstein underwrote the kind of elite event he prized.
Though Mr. Epstein never attended Harvard, it became a recurring theme in his self-styled image. He made donations and mingled with its faculty, including the law professor Alan Dershowitz.
It was a five-day gathering in the Caribbean of some of the world’s top scientists, including Dr. Hawking, to share ideas about gravity and cosmology, with scuba and catamaran excursions on the side. One evening, the participants had dinner on the beach at Mr. Epstein’s private island.

Some of the scientists noticed that Mr. Epstein “was always followed by a group of something like three or four young women,” as Alan Guth, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put it in an email to The Times, but they did not probe further.
Over a decade later, after Mr. Epstein was released from the Palm Beach County jail, he employed a similar strategy. He surrounded himself with prestige and counted on others to look past what he had done.
“I’m not a sexual predator, I’m an ‘offender,’ Mr. Epstein told The New York Post in 2011. “It’s the difference between a murderer and a person who steals a bagel.”
Ms. Siegal recalled, “He said he’d served his time and assured me that he changed his ways.”

For someone purported to have vast resources at his disposal, Mr. Epstein’s early endeavors to improve his image were oddly unpolished. In 2010 he created the first of at least a half-dozen websites, with names like JeffreyEpsteinScience.com and JeffreyEpsteinEducation.com, dedicated to extolling his philanthropy and fashioning himself a patron of technology and medicine.
The websites looked amateurish, the photos of him meeting with top scientists dated to years before his time in jail, and the name of the Harvard professor who led a research center Mr. Epstein had funded, Martin A. Nowak, was often misspelled.

At the same time, Mr. Epstein launched a public-relations campaign composed of a blizzard of news releases, along with canned write-ups designed to resemble news stories. For the most part, the announcements, which circulated from 2012 to 2014, were recycled accounts of donations he had made in the early 2000s and did not reflect new charitable giving. The earliest releases listed Mr. Epstein’s personal contact information, though later ones had the name of a media consultant. Some of the ersatz news stories found their way onto sites like Forbes and The Huffington Post.
Of all the names Mr. Epstein dropped, perhaps the most frequent was Harvard’s.

Though Mr. Epstein never attended Harvard or even got a college degree, the university has been a recurring theme in his self-styled image as a Renaissance man of finance and science. He found Harvard’s doors open to him once he opened his wallet, with donations starting in the early 1990s that eventually totaled at least $7.5 million.
He took to wearing Harvard sweatshirts, gravitated to mingling with celebrity scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Pinker, and developed friendships with the former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers and the law professor Alan Dershowitz, who later helped defend him. (In civil suits, Mr. Dershowitz has been accused of having sex with two of Mr. Epstein’s accusers; he has denied the allegations and accused their lawyers of malfeasance.) Mr. Epstein, a former math teacher, even popped up for lunchtime discussions among scientists at a Harvard cafeteria, Dr. Pinker said in an interview, adding, “He weighted his own opinions as much as scholarly literature.”

By 2014, a page appeared on the website for Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, the initiative Mr. Epstein had financed 11 years earlier with a $6.5 million donation (and a pledge of $23.5 million more that never came), featuring a studio portrait, his résumé and links to his websites. “He is one of the largest supporters of individual scientists, including theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, Marvin Minsky, Seth Lloyd and Nobel Laureates Gerard ’t Hooft, David Gross and Frank Wilczek,” the Harvard bio said, in what appears to be an exaggerated claim.
A Harvard spokesman said he did not know who was responsible for the page, which has since been removed.

A registered sex offender known for his lavish lifestyle and high-profile connections to the rich and powerful, the financier Jeffrey Epstein is facing new charges that he exploited dozens of young girls for sex acts.
That same year, Mr. Epstein resurfaced at a prestigious science conference. Dr. Pinker, who sat at the same table as Mr. Epstein, said he was treated as an important donor to be wooed.
A Brand-New Start of It
Although he was often described as a billionaire, Mr. Epstein did not come close in his philanthropy to other superrich people. His charitable foundations rarely gave away more than $1 million a year during the 2000s, according to tax records, and much of it was money others had given him.
In 2015, a new foundation Mr. Epstein created, Gratitude America, received a $10 million infusion and started making donations. The source of the money is something of a mystery. Like his earlier giving, which was financed largely by $21 million in donations to his foundation from a close friend and business associate, the retail magnate Leslie H. Wexner, the 2015 money did not appear to have come from Mr. Epstein.

Tax records show the $10 million donation came from a limited liability company located at a 22-story building on Park Avenue in Manhattan that also houses the family foundation of Leon Black, a billionaire investor and chairman of the Museum of Modern Art. He has known Mr. Epstein for years. In 1999, Mr. Black gave $166,000 to another of Mr. Epstein’s charities, and Mr. Epstein once served on the board of Mr. Black’s own foundation. The two men also appear in photos at a 2007 meeting with scientists at Harvard.
It could not be determined whether Mr. Black was responsible for the $10 million donation. His representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin, founder of the Dubin Breast Center at Mount Sinai, gave Mr. Epstein another form of currency.
The physician, who served for many years as an in-house doctor of NBC, is a breast cancer survivor who used her experience as inspiration for a holistic treatment approach. A former model and Miss Sweden, she is the wife of Glenn Dubin, a founder of Highbridge Capital Management who is No. 1168 on the Forbes billionaires list. The two are known for their philanthropy, and in 2006 they bought Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s former apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, a symbol of their standing in the city.
Dr. Andersson-Dubin also has a long history with Mr. Epstein, and has remained loyal to him since the 1980s.

At that time, she was putting herself through medical school. She became his girlfriend and, with his encouragement, put modeling aside to focus on her studies. They remained close after she married in 1994. After Mr. Epstein’s release from jail, she continued to socialize with him; those in her circle were aware of their continued friendship.
Despite longstanding news reports about Mr. Epstein’s behavior, Dr. Andersson-Dubin said through a spokeswoman that she was shocked by the recent news. “She’s a very loyal friend and didn’t abandon him after 2008, but the frequency of their contact was less,” the spokeswoman said. The new allegations “are completely counter to the person she is familiar with.”
Their relationship went a long way toward dispersing the cloud around him, according to some observers. If Mr. Epstein had Dr. Andersson-Dubin’s friendship, it suggested to others that perhaps he should be given the benefit of the doubt.
Ms. Siegal, perhaps the city’s most prominent professional hostess, took a more active role, using her gate-keeping powers to usher Mr. Epstein, a friend, into screenings and events.

In an interview, she said that her relationship with Mr. Epstein was not a paid one: They had developed a rapport over the years, with him often quizzing her about films and other topics. “I was a kind of plugged-in girl around town who knew a lot of people,” she said. “And I think that’s what he wanted from me, a kind of social goings-on about New York.”
After he left jail, she had no trouble continuing the friendship. She knew other people who had served time and then resurrected their lives, she said. “The culture before #MeToo was — ‘You’ve done your time, now you’re forgiven.’”
At screenings, Mr. Epstein would shuffle in at the last minute, sit in the back, speak to no one and leave before the party, Ms. Siegal said. He had no ambitions for New York’s party circuit, she and others said, and preferred to entertain people in his own space.
But her invitations helped. In 2010, just after Mr. Epstein left jail, he attended a screening of “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” Soon a flattering blind item appeared in The New York Post about how he was “greeted warmly by guests.”

“It was the first time he has been out in two years, but nobody blinked he was there,” an anonymous source told the newspaper.
A few months later, Ms. Siegal threw the dinner party at Mr. Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion for Prince Andrew, giving Ms. Couric, Mr. Stephanopoulos, Chelsea Handler and others a chance to speak to a member of the royal family a few months before the much-anticipated wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.
“It was just one of those strange nights,” Ms. Handler said in an interview. Ms. Siegal had not emphasized who was hosting, several guests recalled. “The invitation was positioned as, ‘Do you want to have dinner with Prince Andrew?’” Ms. Siegal said. Mr. Epstein did not speak much. Dr. Andersson-Dubin was there, but others said they barely knew who Mr. Epstein was or what he had been convicted of.
Two of the other guests have also been accused of sexual misconduct, then or since: the television host Charlie Rose and Woody Allen, who attended along with his wife, Soon-Yi Previn. (“So how did the two of you meet?” Ms. Handler recalled asking the couple.) Soon after, outraged headlines appeared about Prince Andrew’s associating with Mr. Epstein, a sex offender.
In a recent email, Mr. Stephanopoulos said he regretted attending. “That dinner was the first and last time I’ve seen him,” he said, referring to Mr. Epstein. “I should have done more due diligence. It was a mistake to go.”
After the #MeToo era dawned in 2017, others were starting to feel less comfortable with Mr. Epstein. The Miami Herald published an investigation that spurred new interest in the case. Ms. Siegal began to distance herself. It was obvious that he was going to face renewed scrutiny, she said, but “he was in complete denial.”
Others echoed that description. Just three months ago, as federal prosecutors were closing in with new charges, Mr. Epstein had a conversation with R. Couri Hay, a publicist, about continuing to improve his reputation. Mr. Epstein asserted that what he was convicted of did not constitute pedophilia, said Mr. Hay, who declined to represent him.

The girls he had sex with were “tweens and teens,” Mr. Epstein told him. Reporting was contributed by Jacob Bernstein, Dennis Overbye, Sarah Maslin Nir and Megan Twohey
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/13/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-new-york-elite.html

More Details About Jeffrey Epstein’s Past Emerge By Chas Danner and Matt Stieb July 15, 2019 How Epstein regained his influence after prison
Wondering why elite circles in entertainment and finance welcomed Epstein back after his 13 months in prison beginning in 2008, New York Times reporters Jodi Kanor, Mike McIntre, and Vanessa Friedman found that the financier invested in a pretty simple PR-rehab strategy. Tactics reportedly included paying a writer $600 to write a glowing item in Forbes calling Epstein “one of the largest backers of cutting edge science.” He also bought URLs to at least half-a-dozen sites, like JeffreyEpsteinScience.com and JeffreyEpsteinEducation.com, full of old pictures of him with academic heavyweights and misspellings; the sites feigned as if his prior giving to academic and science institutions was more current. The lenient plea deal in Florida helped as well, as it “gave others a reason to dismiss his wrongdoing, decide he had already paid his penalty or not question what had happened.”

Two other moments from the report are worth quoting — the first involving comedian Chelsea Handler at a dinner at Epstein’s house with Charlie Rose, Woody Allen, and Soon-Yi Previn, where she jokingly asked the couple “So, how did the two of you meet?”
The second involves an alleged interaction between Epstein and publicist R. Couri Hay about how he might continue to improve his reputation:

Mr. Epstein asserted that what he was convicted of did not constitute pedophilia, said Mr. Hay, who declined to represent him.
The girls he had sex with were “tweens and teens,” Mr. Epstein told him.
Former Dalton students say Epstein behaved inappropriately toward female students
The Times also reported on Epstein’s time at Manhattan’s prestigious Dalton school in the mid-1970s, when Attorney General William Barr’s father Donald wrangled him a job teaching math and physics, although he dropped out of college:
Eight former students who attended the prestigious school during Mr. Epstein’s short tenure there said that his conduct with teenage girls had left an impression that had lingered for decades. One former student recalled him showing up at a party where students were drinking, while most remembered his persistent attention on the girls in hallways and classrooms.
“I can remember thinking at the time, ‘This is wrong,’” said Scott Spizer, who graduated from Dalton in 1976.
Though none of the female students interviewed recalled any “unwanted touching,” Dalton graduates remember the 21-year-old teacher flirting with students as young as 14. “There was a real clarity of the inappropriateness of the behavior — that this isn’t how adult male teachers conduct themselves,” former student Millicent Young told the Times.

New Mexico’s attorney general is investigating Epstein — and his ranch
The New Mexico state attorney general’s office has opened an investigation into Epstein and whether or not he sexually abused any of his victims at the $15.7 million ranch he owns in the state, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican. The spokesperson for Attorney General Hector Balderas announced on Thursday that his office “has been in contact with survivors and is investigating this horrific matter,” and that it will pass along any findings to the SDNY….
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/more-details-about-jeffrey-epsteins-past-emerge.html

The Day Jeffrey Epstein Told Me He Had Dirt on Powerful People By James B. Stewart Aug. 12, 2019 Almost exactly a year ago, on Aug. 16, 2018, I visited Jeffrey Epstein at his cavernous Manhattan mansion.
The overriding impression I took away from our roughly 90-minute conversation was that Mr. Epstein knew an astonishing number of rich, famous and powerful people, and had photos to prove it. He also claimed to know a great deal about these people, some of it potentially damaging or embarrassing, including details about their supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use.
So one of my first thoughts on hearing of Mr. Epstein’s suicide was that many prominent men and at least a few women must be breathing sighs of relief that whatever Mr. Epstein knew, he has taken it with him.

During our conversation, Mr. Epstein made no secret of his own scandalous past — he’d pleaded guilty to state charges of soliciting prostitution from underage girls and was a registered sex offender — and acknowledged to me that he was a pariah in polite society. At the same time, he seemed unapologetic. His very notoriety, he said, was what made so many people willing to confide in him. Everyone, he suggested, has secrets and, he added, compared with his own, they seemed innocuous. People confided in him without feeling awkward or embarrassed, he claimed….
When I contacted Mr. Epstein, he readily agreed to an interview. The caveat was that the conversation would be “on background,” which meant I could use the information as long as I didn’t attribute it directly to him. (I consider that condition to have lapsed with his death.)….

Before we left the room he took me to a wall covered with framed photographs. He pointed to a full-length shot of a man in traditional Arab dress. “That’s M.B.S.,” he said, referring to Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. The crown prince had visited him many times, and they spoke often, Mr. Epstein said….
Behind him was a table covered with more photographs. I noticed one of Mr. Epstein with former President Bill Clinton, and another of him with the director Woody Allen. Displaying photos of celebrities who had been caught up in sex scandals of their own also struck me as odd.
Mr. Epstein avoided specifics about his work for Tesla. He told me that he had good reason to be cryptic: Once it became public that he was advising the company, he’d have to stop doing so, because he was “radioactive.” He predicted that everyone at Tesla would deny talking to him or being his friend….

Mr. Epstein then meandered into a discussion of other prominent names in technology circles. He said people in Silicon Valley had a reputation for being geeky workaholics, but that was far from the truth: They were hedonistic and regular users of recreational drugs. He said he’d witnessed prominent tech figures taking drugs and arranging for sex (Mr. Epstein stressed that he never drank or used drugs of any kind)….
About a week after that interview, Mr. Epstein called and asked if I’d like to have dinner that Saturday with him and Woody Allen. I said I’d be out of town. A few weeks after that, he asked me to join him for dinner with the author Michael Wolff and Donald J. Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon. I declined. (I don’t know if these dinners actually happened. Mr. Bannon has said he didn’t attend. Mr. Wolff and a spokeswoman for Mr. Allen didn’t respond to requests for comment on Monday.)….

Then early this year Mr. Epstein called to ask if I’d be interested in writing his biography. He sounded almost plaintive. I sensed that what he really wanted was companionship. As his biographer, I’d have no choice but to spend hours listening to his saga. Already leery of any further ties to him, I was relieved I could say that I was already busy with another book.
That was the last I heard from him. After his arrest and suicide, I’m left to wonder: What might he have told me?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-interview.html

Questions mounting over Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI5PROYfegU
Attorney General William Barr said there were “serious irregularities” at the jail where Epstein was being held, and that they were “deeply concerning and demand a thorough investigation.”

Who’s who of Jeffrey Epstein’s powerful friends, associates and possible co-conspirators By Eric Levenson, CNN Mon August 12, 2019
(CNN)Jeffrey Epstein’s death ends the criminal case against him, but his powerful friends and associates may not have heard the last of it.
US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman said the investigation of Epstein’s alleged conduct, including a conspiracy charge, remains ongoing, and Attorney General Bill Barr similarly said the case will continue against anyone who was complicit with Epstein.
“Any co-conspirators should not rest easy. The victims deserve justice and they will get it,” Barr said.

In addition, Epstein’s accusers asked a federal judge on Monday to invalidate the non-prosecution agreement that Epstein reached with prosecutors in the US Attorney’s Office in Florida a decade ago, which would give authorities “greater power” to go after his alleged co-conspirators.
Given that ongoing investigation, CNN took a look at the notable figures connected to Epstein who have been named in sworn testimony, as well as the major political figures with ties to him….
Epstein’s longtime associate was Les Wexner, the CEO and founder of L Brands, the parent company of Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works. After Epstein’s arrest on federal charges last month, Wexner acknowledged that Epstein was his former personal money manager and that he served as a trustee of the Wexner Foundation, the CEO’s charitable group.

He said he severed ties with Epstein 12 years ago and denied knowledge of his criminal behavior….
One of Epstein’s accusers said Epstein sexually assaulted her in Wexner’s home, according to an affidavit filed in a New York court in April as part of a defamation lawsuit against attorney Alan Dershowitz….
Giuffre has accused Dershowitz, the high-profile attorney who was part of the legal team that negotiated Epstein’s 2007 plea deal, of sexually abusing her.
Dershowitz has denied her claims and accused her of fabricating the allegations against him. He said in a statement that Friday’s release of documents “categorically proves that Virginia Roberts (Giuffre) never had sex with me.”

In April, she filed a separate defamation lawsuit against him, saying that he made “false and malicious” statements about her when he accused her of lying in making her accusations against him.
That case is ongoing, and Dershowitz has filed a motion to dismiss….
Giuffre has said that Epstein forced her to perform sex acts with a number of prominent men, including Prince Andrew, Duke of York, in 2001. In addition, another woman who said Epstein and Maxwell abused her said she was forced into sexual acts with Prince Andrew at Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion, where Giuffre participated as well, according to the unsealed documents.
In response, a spokesperson for Buckingham Palace said: “This relates to proceedings in the United States, to which The Duke of York is not a party. Any suggestion of impropriety with underage minors is categorically untrue.”….
Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, seen here at a 1992 party.
Among Epstein’s powerful associates are presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.

“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
However, on July 12, Trump said that he threw Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club years ago….
A spokesman for Clinton said in a statement last month that the former president took four trips on Epstein’s airplane in 2002 and 2003. The statement said they also had one meeting in a Harlem office in 2002 and that Clinton made a brief visit to Epstein’s New York apartment with a Secret Service detail.
“President Clinton knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has been recently charged in New York,” ….

Bill Richardson and George Mitchell
Finally, the documents unsealed on Friday in Giuffre’s lawsuit against Maxwell include allegations that Giuffre was instructed by Maxwell to have sex with former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former US Sen. George Mitchell, among others.
In a statement Friday, Mitchell called the claim false, adding: “I have never met, spoken with or had any contact with Ms. Giuffre.”
A spokeswoman for Richardson called Giuffre’s allegation “completely false.”….
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/12/us/jeffrey-epstein-associates-possible-accomplices/index.html

The rise and fall of Jeffrey Epstein: A timeline of the financier’s troubles
By abc news investigative unit Aug 10, 2019
….July 8, 2019: In a stunning indictment, prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York allege that from about 2002 to 2005, Epstein, now 66, “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, among other locations,” using cash payments to recruit a “vast network of underage victims,” some of whom were as young as 14-years-old.

….July 12, 2019: An ABC News review of campaign finance records finds that Epstein donated to several Democrats throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. One of the biggest beneficiaries of Epstein’s contributions was then-Senate hopeful Hillary Clinton, who received $20,000 from him in 1999 through her joint fundraising committee with the Democratic Party, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign also received $1,000 from Epstein in 1992. The Clintons, along with Trump, were among Epstein’s vast network of high-profile rich and famous people who helped the former Wall Street insider turned private wealth manager rise to prominence in the early 2000s.
….July 25, 2019: Epstein is placed on suicide watch after being found unresponsive and with injuries to his neck at a federal lockup in New York City, a law enforcement official briefed on the incident tells ABC News.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/rise-fall-jeffrey-epstein-timeline-financiers-legal-troubles/story?id=64507847

There’s no video of Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent suicide: sources
By Larry Celona, Israel Salas-Rodriguez, Daniel Cassady and Bruce Golding August 11, 2019
There’s no surveillance video of the incident in which Jeffrey Epstein apparently hanged himself in a federal lockup in Lower Manhattan, law enforcement officials told The Post on Sunday.
Although there are cameras in the 9 South wing where the convicted pedophile was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, they are trained on the areas outside the cells and not inside, according to sources familiar with the setup there…..

“Something is really troubling about that and I think it needs to be investigated extremely and very thoroughly to make sure there wasn’t any foul play,” Adams said.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who said she’s toured the MCC, said she found it “very difficult to understand how something like this could have happened.”
see also
Jeffrey Epstein autopsy results expected to be released Sunday afternoon
“My understanding is that he should have been on suicide watch and the people on suicide watch are placed in a type of jumpsuit that wouldn’t allow them to hurt themselves or others,” she said.
Federal prison officials violated normal procedures by leaving Epstein, 66, alone without a cellmate and not checking on him every 30 minutes the night before he was found, according to a report Sunday.

In addition, both of the guards overseeing the unit were working overtime, with one on his fifth straight day of extra hours and the other forced to remain on duty, the New York Times said.
Bob Hood, a former chief of internal affairs for the Bureau of Prisons, told the Times that it was “beyond me” why Epstein was taken off a 24-hour suicide watch following the July 23 incident, especially given the steady stream of humiliating news reports about him.
“A man is dead. The Bureau of Prisons dropped the ball. Period,” Hood said.
https://nypost.com/2019/08/11/theres-no-video-of-jeffrey-epsteins-apparent-suicide-sources/

Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyers highly ‘skeptical’ of suicide ruling, say he wasn’t ‘despairing, despondent’ before death Tue, Aug 27 2019 Dan Mangan Kevin Breuninger
….Epstein, 66, was a former friend of Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and other celebrities, whom he entertained at his luxurious residences in Manhattan, Florida and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
….A defense lawyer for Jeffrey Epstein on Tuesday expressed deep skepticism that the wealthy financier died by hanging himself in a Manhattan federal jail while awaiting trial on child sex trafficking charges, as a medical examiner has ruled.

The injuries suffered by Epstein are “far more consistent with assault” than suicide, the lawyer, Reid Weingarten, told Judge Richard Berman in U.S. District Court in Manhattan during a hearing.
Weingarten cited the defense’s own medical sources. Broken bones were found in Epstein’s neck during an autopsy after he died Aug. 10.
Such fractures are somewhat more common in cases of strangulation than in hanging.
Weingarten told the judge that when he and other defense attorneys spoke to Epstein shortly before his death “we did not see a despairing, despondent, suicidal person.”

Weingarten’s comments came during a proceeding where prosecutors were seeking the dismissal of child sex trafficking charges against the Epstein as a result of his death.
More than 20 alleged victims of Epstein spoke or had statements read during the hearing.
Another Epstein lawyer, Martin Weinberg, told Berman that the defense team had prepared a “significant” motion to dismiss the case, and that the lawyers were not approaching the case with a “futile, defeatist attitude.”
Weingarten said Berman had a “pivotal role to find out what happened.”
“We want the court to help us find out what happened,” Weingarten said.
“We’re skeptical of the certitude” of the finding of suicide by hanging by the New York City medical examiner, the lawyer said.
There are “significant doubts” regarding “the conclusion of suicide,” Weingarten said.

But Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor, told Berman that Epstein’s death was already the subject of “an ongoing and active grand jury investigation.”….Epstein, 66, was a former friend of Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and other celebrities, whom he entertained at his luxurious residences on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Palm Beach, Florida, and on a private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
….Weeks before his death, Epstein was found semiconscious in his cell in the Manhattan Correctional Center with marks on his neck. That incident led to him being placed on suicide watch, but he was taken off of that status about a week later.
Epstein’s connections, vast wealth and the prior incident in the jail led to a rash of speculation about whether he was killed in his jail cell, and did not commit suicide.
….Weingarten also pointed out that “we’ve heard that” the surveillance video at the jail around Epstein’s cell “were either corrupted or not functioning.”….
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/27/jeffrey-epsteins-lawyers-skeptical-of-suicide-ruling.html

New Tape Shows Donald Trump And Jeffrey Epstein At Mar-A-Lago Party In 1992 | TODAY Published on Jul 17, 2019 Newly unearthed video from 1992 shows future President Donald Trump partying with financier and now accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. It comes to light as Epstein’s lawyers offer a strange explanation for an item found by police in his Manhattan home. NBC’s Stephanie Gosk reports for TODAY. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUDr_c2PalI

Prince Andrew’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein could become the most sordid royal scandal yet by Maureen Callahan July 17, 2019
….On the heels of Epstein’s arrest last week for the sex trafficking of underage girls, the US Appeals Court for the Second Circuit has ruled that 2,000 pages from a 4-year-old defamation suit filed by one of Epstein’s and Andrew’s alleged victims, Virginia Giuffre (née Roberts), are to be unsealed.
It’s likely that names will be heavily redacted. After all, extremely rich and powerful people are contained within, including, said the court, “prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known prime minister and other world leaders” — all now implicated in Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking operation.
But Prince Andrew will almost certainly be named and his behavior highly detailed. It was Giuffre, after all, who in 2011 told the Daily Mail that Epstein made her a “sex slave” when she was just 15. In 2015, The Guardian reported that, in court papers, she was forced, at age 17, to have sex with Andrew three times in three different locations. Andrew has denied these allegations.

The insolent prince would not be cowed, even as The Sunday Times UK reported that flight and public records put Roberts and Prince Andrew in three separate locations at the same time — including once on Epstein’s private Caribbean island — even as a photo surfaced of Andrew taken in 2001, his arm around then-17-year-old Virginia’s waist.
That photo was taken in Ghislaine Maxwell’s apartment. Maxwell has been named as Epstein’s longtime alleged pimp and has herself been accused of sexually abusing young girls in court rec-ords filed in New York this past April. Maxwell has denied any wrongdoing. In 2011, The Daily Telegraph reported that Epstein and Maxwell had, in 2000, been hosted at Queen Elizabeth’s Sand-ringham estate….
By the way, another witness who gave evidence in Giuffre’s case testified that Andrew spent “weeks” at Epstein’s mansion in Florida — where young women were often roaming around topless or in the pool, naked — and that the prince received “daily massages.”….
https://nypost.com/2019/07/17/prince-andrews-ties-to-jeffrey-epstein-could-become-the-most-sordid-royal-scandal-yet/

“It’s Going to Be Staggering, the Amount of Names”: As the Jeffrey Epstein Case Grows More Grotesque, Manhattan and DC Brace
By Gabriel Sherman July 17, 2019
The Jeffrey Epstein case is an asteroid poised to strike the elite world in which he moved. No one can yet say precisely how large it is. But as the number of women who’ve accused the financier (at least, that’s what he claimed to be) of sexual assault grows to grotesque levels—there are said to be more than 50 women who are potential victims—a wave of panic is rippling through Manhattan, DC, and Palm Beach, as Epstein’s former friends and associates rush to distance themselves, while gossiping about who might be ensnared. Donald Trump’s labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, architect of the original 2007 non-prosecution agreement that let Epstein off with a wrist slap, has already been forced to resign.
The questions about Epstein are metastasizing much faster than they can be answered: Who knew what about Epstein’s alleged abuse? How, and from whom, did Epstein get his supposed $500 million fortune? Why did Acosta grant Epstein an outrageously lenient non-prosecution agreement? (And what does it mean that Acosta was reportedly told Epstein “belonged to intelligence”?) But among the most pressing queries is which other famous people might be exposed for committing sex crimes. “There were other business associates of Mr. Epstein’s who engaged in improper sexual misconduct at one or more of his homes. We do know that,” said Brad Edwards, a lawyer for Courtney Wild, one of the Epstein accusers who gave emotional testimony at Epstein’s bail hearing. “In due time the names are going to start coming out.” (Attorneys for Epstein did not respond to a request for comment.)

Likely within days, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will release almost 2,000 pages of documents that could reveal sexual abuse by “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known prime minister, and other world leaders,” according to the three-judge panel’s ruling…..
Of course, the two Epstein friends that people are most curious about are Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, both of whom have denied anything untoward. During the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton’s campaign consulted Bill’s post–White House Secret Service logs because they were worried Trump would bring up Bill’s close association with Epstein and wanted to get ahead of the story, a source told me…..
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/jeffrey-epstein-case-grows-more-grotesque

E. Jean Carroll: “Trump attacked me in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman.”
By Sarah Jones June 21, 2019
The cover story New York published today details an encounter the writer E. Jean Carroll had over two decades ago with Donald J. Trump, in which the then–real-estate mogul allegedly assaulted her in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in midtown Manhattan.
The episode is one of six incidents Carroll details in the article of attacks on her by men over the course of her life. Another episode involves the disgraced former CEO of CBS, Les Moonves. The cover story is an excerpt from her newest book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, which will be published on July 2 by St. Martin’s Press.

When Carroll meets Donald Trump in Bergdorf Goodman, the encounter starts as a friendly one. Trump recognizes her as “that advice lady”; Carroll recognizes him as “that real-estate tycoon.” Trump tells Carroll that he’s there to buy a gift for “a girl,” and though we don’t learn the identity of this mystery woman, Carroll places the ensuing incident in late 1995 or early 1996, during which time Trump was married to Marla Maples. When Trump asks Carroll to advise him on what to buy, she agrees, and the two eventually make their way to the lingerie section. Trump suggests a lace bodysuit and encourages Carroll to try it on; she, deflecting, jokingly suggests that he try it on instead. After they reach the dressing rooms, events turn violent. In Carroll’s account, Trump shoves her against a wall inside a dressing room, pulls down her tights, and, “forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me.”
Carroll is now at least the 16th woman to accuse Donald Trump of sexual misconduct and the 14th to accuse Moonves of similar offenses. The incidents, which date from the 1990s, are highly specific and related with dark humor. Moonves is compared by Carroll to an octopus, and Trump, she writes, “yammers about himself like he’s Alexander the Great ready to loot Babylon.” But she is clear, sometimes clinical, about the violence she experienced. Moonves frantically kisses and gropes her in a hotel elevator moments after she finished interviewing him for an article. The Trump story is even darker….
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/president-donald-trump-faces-new-rape-accusation.html

Kevin Spacey’s Criminal Case Has Been Dismissed
Massachusetts prosecutors dropped the case, in which an accuser alleged that Spacey groped him when he was 18 years old, “due to the unavailability of the complaining witness.” By Laura Bradley July 17, 2019
Prosecutors for the state of Massachusetts have dropped their criminal case against Kevin Spacey.
According to CNBC, Spacey’s accuser, who alleged that the actor got him drunk and groped him in a bar when he was 18 years old, invoked his Fifth Amendment right to stay silent after being questioned about a missing cell phone that would have potentially been exculpatory for Spacey. As a result the case was dropped, “due to the unavailability of the complaining witness.”
The New York Times reports that after Spacey’s accuser pleaded the Fifth, the judge in the case speculated over whether the prosecution still had a viable case. The defense had been focusing on locating the accuser’s phone, which he had used to text his girlfriend throughout the night. Spacey’s attorney suggested that records of the conversation appeared to be incomplete, and argued that the missing messages could help make the case for Spacey’s innocence, the Times reports….
He was just one of several men who came forward to accuse Spacey of sexual misconduct in the early days of the #MeToo movement…..
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/07/kevin-spacey-criminal-case-dismissed

Boston Hospital Reports Disciplining of Renowned Child Abuse Skeptic
Last September, we examined Dr. Michael Holick’s work as an expert witness for alleged abusers. In the wake of the article, his hospital notified Massachusetts’ medical board that it restricted his privileges.
by David Armstrong July 24, 2019
A Boston hospital has notified the Massachusetts medical board that it has restricted the work of a world-renowned endocrinologist criticized for espousing controversial theories as an expert witness for people accused of child abuse.
The action against Dr. Michael Holick is cited on his profile page on the board’s website under “health care facility discipline.” The listing is intended to alert members of the public who visit the site that Boston Medical Center, where Holick practices, has restricted his rights or privileges.
Last September, ProPublica and The New Yorker reported that Holick had testified in hundreds of child abuse cases worldwide and almost always blamed broken bones and other injuries on a rare genetic disorder. At the time, Boston Medical Center said that it had barred Holick from treating or evaluating children under age 13 beginning in May 2017. But Holick continued evaluating children in suspected abuse cases as part of an approved research project, and it now turns out that the discipline was not reported to the board until this past February….

Earlier this decade, Holick began working as an expert witness in child abuse cases in the U.S. and abroad. He has consulted or testified in more than 300 cases, always on behalf of the accused. As of last September, he had never concluded that a child was abused, and he had almost always attributed the injuries to Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a condition that affects the connective tissues of the skin, bones and joints and has been linked to bone fragility in adults.
The ProPublica-New Yorker article focused on a social services investigation in South Carolina that found that 3-week-old twins had allegedly been abused. The parents consulted Holick, who concluded that both babies had Ehlers-Danlos, and that fractures attributed to abuse could have been caused by bone fragility associated with the genetic condition. Nearly eight months later, one of the twins suffered a severe brain injury and the child’s father was charged with abuse to inflict great bodily injury upon a child. That criminal case is pending….

His work has drawn rebukes from other physicians who specialize in treating patients with the genetic disorder. They cite a lack of research supporting Holick’s view that Ehlers-Danlos can cause broken bones in very young children. Holick has also been criticized for diagnosing the condition in children he didn’t examine in person….
Boston University has defended Holick’s right to testify about his Ehlers-Danlos theory in court. The dean of the medical school, Karen Antman, in a letter to another physician critical of Holick, wrote that she didn’t need to know the details of his expert defense work. “As a member of the Boston University School of Medicine faculty, academic freedom allows Dr. Holick to espouse his views without censorship from the University,” she wrote….
https://www.propublica.org/article/boston-hospital-reports-disciplining-of-renowned-child-abuse-skeptic

Elon Musk says he’s tested his brain microchip on monkeys, and it enabled one to control a computer with its mind Isobel Asher Hamilton Jul. 17, 2019
Elon Musk’s neurotechnology company, Neuralink, has pulled back the veil on its ambitions to implant chips in people’s brains.
During a Q&A session at a live presentation on Tuesday, Musk surprised his Neuralink colleagues by announcing that the firm had tested its technology on monkeys with some success.
Musk said “a monkey has been able to control a computer with its brain,” though he did not elaborate further on what this involved….
Musk cofounded Neuralink in 2016. Its goal is to create a chip that could enable a “brain-computer interface.” And according to Musk, the company has already had some success — with monkeys.
During the 90-minute event, Musk and various senior staffers at Neuralink presented the company’s ambition to design a chip capable of being implanted in the human brain that could receive and transmit signals to the organ….
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-microchip-tested-on-monkeys-2019-7

Boy Scouts of America Are Coving up a ‘Pedophilia Epidemic,’ 350 Alleged Abusers Have Been Named In Lawsuit By Christina Zhao 8/7/19
The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) are covering up rampant pedophilia within their ranks, with 350 previously unknown adult scoutmasters or members identified as alleged abusers, according to a new lawsuit against the youth organization.
A new lawsuit, filed on Monday in Philadelphia County Common Pleas Court, accuses the BSA of facilitating “a continuing and serious conspiracy to conceal and cover up” sexual assaults against children within their organization.
The lawsuit was filed by a group of attorneys called Abused in Scouting. The group formed in February to investigate abuse in the BSA. The attorneys’ investigation discovered and identified 350 alleged abusers after hundreds of former Scouts members reportedly revealed their previously unreported sexual abuse claims.
“It is apparent that the Boy Scout defendants continue to hide the true nature of their coverup and the extent of the pedophilia epidemic within their organizations because the vast majority of new victims coming forward involve claims of abuse at the hands of pedophiles who are not yet identified by the Boy Scouts of America,” the complaint said.

Nearly 800 clients say they were abused by adult leaders in the Boy Scouts, the Abused in Scouting lawyers said, adding that the alleged abusers are not known to law enforcement or in the BSA’s internal database, sometimes referred to as the “perversion files.”
The lawsuit also claims BSA covered up incidents of sexual assault and accuses the organization of engaging in reckless misconduct, as well as failing to adequately protect its young members….
https://www.newsweek.com/boy-scouts-america-are-coving-pedophilia-epidemic-350-alleged-abusers-have-been-named-lawsuit-1452933

R. Kelly charged with engaging in prostitution, soliciting a minor in Minnesota
The musician already faces multiple federal and state sex crime charges in New York and Illinois. Aug. 6, 2019 By Tim Stelloh
R. Kelly was charged with one count of engaging in prostitution with a minor and one count of soliciting a minor for sexual purposes, authorities in Minnesota said Monday. The singer is facing other federal and state sex crime charges in New York and Illinois.
The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office said in a statement that the alleged crimes occurred on July 11, 2001, with a 17-year-old girl who was trying to get an autograph from the singer. The woman, who was not identified, later went to Kelly’s hotel room and was given $200 to dance naked for the performer, according to the statement.
Kelly, who also allegedly stripped, then touched the teen “all over her body” and gave her VIP tickets to his concert, the statement said.

The woman contacted local authorities in January to report the incident, the statement said…..
Kelly, whose full name is Robert Kelly, was indicted in July on 18 federal sex assault charges that allegedly occurred in Chicago and New York not guilty plea
Federal prosecutors allege that Kelly, 52, took underage girls across state lines for sex. Kelly and two employees are also accused of recruiting women and girls to engage in illegal sexual activity with the performer, then paying victims and witnesses to cover up the crimes…..
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/r-kelly-charged-engaging-prostitution-soliciting-minor-minnesota-n1039416

He Says a Priest Abused Him. 50 Years Later, He Can Now Sue.
A new law has created a “look-back window,” during which claims that had passed the statute of limitations can be revived. By Rick Rojas Aug. 13, 2019
Major institutions across New York State, from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts of America to elite private schools, are bracing for a deluge of lawsuits now that adults who said they were sexually abused as children will be entitled to pursue formal legal action.
New York joined more than a dozen states this year in significantly extending statutes of limitations for filing lawsuits over sexual abuse. Previously, the state had required that such suits be filed before a victim’s 23rd birthday.
Under the new law in New York, the Child Victims Act, which was approved by the Legislature in January, accusers will be able to sue until they are 55.
The new law includes a one-year period, known as a look-back window, that revives cases that had expired, in many instances decades ago, under previous statutes of limitations.

The one-year period begins on Wednesday, and the impact could cause major financial stress for many institutions in New York, including the state’s eight Catholic dioceses, which have faced a series of scandals involving abuse by clergy….
In lobbying for the new law, advocates for abuse victims have highlighted the toll of sex abuse on children, and the decades it can often take before they are able to speak up about it, if they can at all.
It took Charlie d’Estries years to process the sexual encounters that he said he remembered having with a priest as a boy. They were naked together, as he recounted it, and their relationship became sexual. Still, for decades, Mr. d’Estries, 64, did not describe it as abuse, and refused to see himself as a victim.
But last year, when Mr. d’Estries returned to his Catholic school on Long Island for a reunion, a nun he had known as a student offhandedly called him “Billy’s buddy,” a reference to the priest.
In a moment, he said, everything shifted. He was deeply shaken. He realized he had been abused. He was a victim. And he wanted justice, he said.

But he discovered he could not sue until the law changed….
This year, far more than in past years, legislatures in nearly 40 states introduced proposals to expand statutes of limitations. New laws were enacted in 18 states and the District of Columbia. New Jersey was among them, passing a law that includes a two-year look-back window that opens later this year.
“The significance of it is a switch in the balance of power,” said Marci A. Hamilton, the chief executive of Child U.S.A., a think tank focused on child protection at the University of Pennsylvania. “There was a severe imbalance of power that led to their abuse in the first place. The culture shut them out of the legal system until now. For them, this is validation.”….
Lawmakers in New York had tried and failed for well over a decade to expand the state’s statutes of limitations, which were regarded as among the most restrictive in the country. “We used to call New York a ‘shut down state,’” Mr. Amala said.
Each time, the law’s supporters were thwarted in the Legislature by opposition from the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, Orthodox Jewish groups and the insurance industry.

In years of jostling over the legislation, the look-back window had been the single most disputed element.
The New York Catholic Conference said before the law passed that the look-back window would “force institutions to defend alleged conduct decades ago about which they have no knowledge and in which they had no role.” (Many of the clergy members named as credibly accused of abuse are dead, infirm or no longer affiliated with the church.)
The State Assembly had passed the legislation multiple times, but before this year, the Senate never took it up for a vote. The political calculus in New York changed, however, after Democrats won control of the Senate in November…..
In future cases, the Child Victims Act allows prosecutors several more years to bring criminal charges, and decades more to victims weighing lawsuits. But advocates and lawyers stressed that the new law does not apply retroactively, meaning that virtually every abuse survivor older than 23 must bring any claims through the look-back window.
In the Rockefeller University case, the endocrinologist, Dr. Reginald Archibald, who died in 2007, is accused of abusing scores of boys and teenagers….
The Rockefeller University Hospital, through a spokesman, declined to comment. In a statement last year, the hospital acknowledged reports of “certain inappropriate conduct during patient examinations,” and sent a letter alerting about 1,000 former patients to the allegations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/nyregion/child-victims-act-lawsuit.html

Man Who Claimed Trump Will Start a ‘Racial War and Crusade’ Is Arrested
The F.B.I. headquarters in Washington. The bureau has said that attacks by racially motivated violent extremists are on the rise. By Adam Goldman Aug. 20, 2019
A Nazi sympathizer who threatened to butcher a Hispanic woman and boasted that President Trump would wipe out nonwhites in a “racial war and crusade” was arrested on charges of making threats, the F.B.I. said on Tuesday.
Prosecutors said that the suspect, Eric Lin, 35, sent a barrage of chilling and gruesome Facebook messages to the unidentified woman, who lives in Miami. Mr. Lin was arrested on Friday in Seattle, where he had recently moved from Clarksburg, Md., but was charged in Miami.
“This is a RACE WAR and ALL of you will DIE!” Mr. Lin wrote to the woman on Facebook in early June, according to a criminal complaint. The next day, he wrote, “You want to see what a real Nazi can do?” adding later that he was operating under the authority of Hitler. In July, he wrote that “I thank God everyday President Donald John Trump is President and that he will launch a Racial War and Crusade.”
Mr. Lin’s arrest was the latest example in a series of what the authorities say are racially motivated threats and possible attacks by violent domestic extremists that have received renewed attention amid a spate of mass shootings and other violence….

One of the men arrested in Ohio was accused of stockpiling weapons and ammunition and trumpeting the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people, as he made threats against Planned Parenthood. The other hinted at an attack on a local Jewish community center, prosecutors said, and had anti-Semitic and white nationalist propaganda inside his house.

Federal agents this month also charged a Las Vegas man who they said had discussed attacking a synagogue and had bomb-making materials at home. Prosecutors said he was also communicating with people who identify with a white supremacist organization. And the F.B.I. also arrested a man in Chicago who the authorities said had promised to “slaughter and murder” staff and visitors at an abortion clinic, a typical target of domestic terrorists…..
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/us/politics/eric-lin-neo-nazi-arrested.html

August 27, 2019 · Filed Under Newsletter 2019 - Issues 144 - 149