2026-02-22 05:58:14
There have been nearly 1,000 confirmed measles cases in the US in 2026 so far, according to new data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s more than four times the amount of cases as this time last year.
It’s unclear how much larger the spread could be, as the CDC’s number refers to reported and confirmed cases.
Many of the current cases stem from an outbreak in South Carolina, with the state nearly reporting around 800 cases since January. Twenty-six states have reported cases this year, spanning the entire country—from California to Maine and from Texas to Wisconsin.
During 2025, there were 2,281 confirmed cases of measles. The country is now at risk of, if not on track to, losing its measles elimination status that it’s held since 2000. Two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella, or MMR, vaccine, usually administered in children, provides 97 percent protection, though distrust of vaccinations, fueled by mis- and disinformation, has risen in the past few years.
The surging 2026 numbers come after more than a year of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. serving as the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services. He, along with key allies, has led the agency toward an unprecedented reshaping of the nation’s vaccination system for children—a mission he began prior to becoming secretary.
There are no current death reports from 2026, though at least three people died from measles in 2025. As more Americans are at risk of becoming sick from the illness, Kennedy has continued to spread false information about alternative remedies like cod liver oil.
Despite the record numbers and quick spread in 2025, HHS told Mother Jones back in December that they weren’t especially worried about the brewing South Carolina outbreak. The CDC was “not currently concerned that this will develop into a large, long-running outbreak,” HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard wrote.
To date, that outbreak has led to at least 20 hospitalizations. Though, according to reporting from ProPublica, that number is likely much higher as hospitals in South Carolina aren’t required to report when they admit patients with measles-related illnesses.
Dr. Leigh Bragg, a pediatrician in South Carolina who is board certified in pediatric infectious disease, told ProPublica that she didn’t even know that anyone had been hospitalized due to the illness in her state until she saw it on social media.
“It’s a very big disservice to the public not reporting complications we are seeing in hospitals or even ERs,” Bragg said. “Measles isn’t just a cold.”
Even if reports of measles were required, the chaos the Trump administration has rained down on the federal workforce could make it hard to understand and address the scope of the issue.
In October, more than 1,000 CDC employees were laid off, only for some 700 to be rehired the next day. As Americans face another widespread public health crisis, the pinned post on Kennedy’s X account isn’t about how to protect yourself or your children from measles. Instead, it’s a video of himself working out in a sauna, shirtless, with Kid Rock.
2026-02-22 03:12:21
President Trump’s favorite Supreme Court justice right now is the appointee who refused to restrict the president’s tariff agenda.
After the high court ruled against him in his tariff case on Friday, Trump has repeatedly singled out Justice Brett Kavanaugh in praise—the only one of Trump’s three appointments to dissent against the majority opinion that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, does not give Trump authority to impose tariffs.
Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, who Trump appointed in 2017 and 2020 respectively, sided with Chief Justice John Roberts and the liberal justices in the majority opinion.
“I would like to thank Justice Kavanaugh for his, frankly, his genius and his great ability. Very proud of that appointment,” Trump said during the press conference following the Friday ruling. During that address, Trump claimed, without providing details, that the loss in the Supreme Court “made a president’s ability to both regulate trade and impose tariffs more powerful and more crystal clear rather than less.”
Trump initially announced that he would impose a global tariff of 10 percent, invoking a law never before utilized by a president which allows the executive to “impose an across-the-board tariff for 150 days unless Congress agrees to extend it,” according to the New York Times. On Saturday, per a Truth Social post, Trump raised the amount to 15 percent—the cap for this kind of tariff imposition.
It’s unclear how this global tariff will impact trade negotiations with world leaders. It’s also unclear, and not covered in the ruling, if the executive office will be refunding any retailers impacted by the previous tariffs. Estimates place the total amount that Trump has collected under IEEPA between $133 billion and $175 billion.
Amid Trump’s strong rebukes of the justices who opted to deny the overarching presidential authority, he continued to lavish praise on Kavanaugh, who, according to a recent Marquette Law School poll, has the lowest net favorability among all of his peers.
“I’m so proud of him,” Trump said of Kavanaugh on Friday, repeatedly citing his dissent.
“My new hero is United States Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday morning, before mentioning the other two men who sided with him: “and, of course, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.” Despite dissenting from his liberal colleagues in the recent tariff case, Kavanaugh is the conservative justice most likely to side with liberals in outcomes, according to an analysis by SCOTUSblog.
Trump has long championed Kavanaugh, providing strong support for the appointee during his controversial approval process in 2018. When Christine Blasey Ford had accused then-nominee Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were in high school, Trump called for his followers to pray for him and his family. After Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the alleged assault, which she reportedly detailed to her husband and therapist several years prior, Trump wrote that Kavanaugh “is a fine man and great intellect.”
Around a year later, in 2019, the Times published another sexual misconduct allegation against him, spurring calls for his impeachment. Kavanaugh denied both of the women’s accounts.
Trump again came to the rescue: “Can’t let Brett Kavanaugh give Radical Left Democrat (Liberal Plus) Opinions based on threats of Impeaching him over made up stories (sound familiar?), false allegations, and lies. This is the game they play. Fake and Corrupt News is working overtime!,” Trump wrote at the time, adding the hashtag “#ProtectKavanaugh.”
2026-02-21 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
When it comes to adapting to the consequences of climate change, the federal government has relied heavily on one flagship program: Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities. Administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), BRIC has doled out $4.5 billion in grants to help states and cities prepare for future disasters. Wildfire retrofits in Washington State, safe rooms in Oklahoma, and sewer systems in Detroit have all benefitted from the program.
Despite bipartisan support for the effort, the Trump Administration issued a memo announcing its intent to shut down BRIC in April. Then, in December, a federal judge ordered FEMA to restore the program’s funding and “promptly take all steps necessary to reverse” the termination. The agency had two months to appeal.
Though that deadline passed last week, the Trump administration is still holding out. Two FEMA officials told Grist that the agency has taken no apparent steps to revive BRIC in compliance with the December court order. As a result, state and local governments across the country are holding critical projects in limbo as they await a resolution.
“It boggles the mind that almost two dozen states had to go back to court to ask Judge Stearns to enforce the existing court order.”
The officials who spoke to Grist requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from agency leadership. Separately, a FEMA spokesperson said the agency complies with court orders, but did not respond to questions about the future of BRIC.
FEMA’s deadline to appeal the judge’s ruling was February 9. On Tuesday, a coalition of state attorneys general accused the Trump administration of dragging its feet on compliance. (Those attorneys represent the states behind the original lawsuit over BRIC, which resulted in the December ruling.)
“Over two months have passed and Defendants have offered no indication to Plaintiff States, the public, FEMA’s regional offices, or apparently even Defendants’ own attorney that they have complied with the Order,” attorneys for almost two dozen states wrote in a court filing on Tuesday. The states asked the judge to compel FEMA to follow the order and make BRIC funding available.
BRIC actually launched during the first Trump administration, but most of its funding came from the Biden-era Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. That money endowed more than 2,000 projects nationwide. At the time of the April memo shuttering the program, FEMA told Grist that BRIC “was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program.” (The acting FEMA director who issued that memo, Cameron Hamilton, lost his job a few weeks later after telling Congress that he didn’t think Trump should abolish his agency.)
The BRIC pause is one part of an overall freeze on FEMA’s disaster mitigation spending. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, has placed it under a de facto spending moratorium, requiring Secretary Kristi Noem’s sign-off for any expenses over $100,000. FEMA has not approved any new disaster mitigation projects, has refused to process paperwork for projects that were already in progress, and has been slow even to reimburse communities for the cost of disaster recovery, a core activity mandated by Congress.
When a group of around two dozen states sued to stop the cancellation of the program in a Massachusetts federal court, FEMA claimed that it was not canceling BRIC. Instead, it said in a court filing that it “ha[d] not ended” the program and “continue[d] to evaluate whether to end the…program or to revise it,” even as it acknowledged it had not made new funding available.
The judge rejected that argument and issued an injunction preventing the agency from stopping the program. Judge Richard Stearns, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, wrote in an order that the law “entitle[s] the States to a certain measure of funding for mitigation projects each fiscal year.”
The state attorneys general allege that FEMA has not provided states, grantees, or regional offices with any new information about the future of the program—nor has it made two years of suspended BRIC funding available to states. The plaintiff states said in Tuesday’s court filing that a senior agency official had told them FEMA is “still in the process of connecting with leadership about how BRIC will operate and on what timelines.”
“If they’re really concerned about the escalating cost of natural disasters and the burden on the federal government, they should be concentrating on resilience.”
Two agency employees who work on disaster adaptation confirmed the states’ allegation that FEMA has not yet restored the program. The decision on how to proceed appears to rest with senior Homeland Security officials, they added.
“I haven’t heard a word internally, at all,” one of the officials told Grist.
The December court order found that the states could suffer irreparable harm if BRIC projects that were already underway lost funding or collapsed due to an abrupt shutdown. The state attorneys general are now arguing that FEMA’s recent delays further threaten those projects. Attorneys for the states said that FEMA has refused to provide updates on the status of frozen projects, even when state officials have warned that projects are in jeopardy. The states submitted more than a dozen affidavits showing that FEMA has declined to provide updates for stalled projects, including a seismic retrofit for a rural California hospital and a pair of public school safe rooms in Wisconsin.
The Massachusetts cities of Chelsea and Everett, just outside of Boston, were relying on around $50 million in BRIC money to fund an ambitious flood protection project. The cities were going to build a flood barrier and storm surge control project that would prevent tidal flooding in a floodplain that contains a high school, a rail line, and a regional produce distribution center. The barrier would have doubled as an expansion of a park that will be submerged by high tides in the coming years.
But FEMA paused the project’s funding last spring, after the April memo. Since then, the effort has been in limbo. The pause has meant that the two cities lost out on $50 million in matching money from a state fund. After a year in stasis, local officials are weighing whether to split the project into separate stages, pursuing the storm surge system alone while punting on the other parts.
“We could just put it on a shelf and wait for federal funding, or we could attempt to break the project into phases,” said Emily Granoff, who leads the project and is the deputy director of housing and community development for the city of Chelsea. “This project needs to happen,” she added, “but we don’t have the information we need.”
Disaster experts said the delay amounts to dereliction of duty. “It boggles the mind that almost two dozen states had to go back to court to ask Judge Stearns to enforce the existing court order against FEMA,” said Shana Udvardy, a senior policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy organization. “What we’ve seen when it comes to this BRIC case [and others] is this Trump administration’s willingness to either outright ignore the law or suggest it has a plan in place to implement the law, an obvious delay tactic to get away with doing nothing.”
President Trump and Secretary Noem have said they want the federal government to play a smaller role in disaster recovery, but experts told Grist that destroying BRIC will jeopardize that goal. That’s because BRIC projects ultimately reduce disaster recovery costs by funding more resilient infrastructure before it’s needed.
“If they’re really concerned about the escalating cost of natural disasters and the burden on the federal government, they should be concentrating on resilience,” said Leo Martinez-Diaz, the director of the climate and sustainability program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “That’s the only thing that ultimately reduces the losses.”
2026-02-21 16:01:00
One of the unmistakable throughlines of the second Trump administration is how it’s overhauling policies that directly affect African Americans, most notably by targeting programs and initiatives that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.
For journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, it’s an attempt to take the country back to an era before the civil rights movement. “A lot of folks are saying, you know, that this administration is rolling back the ’60s, but I’m like, he—this administration’s actually going back further than that.”
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.The administration is also removing references to Black history from the nation’s museums, parks, and schools. When history itself is being erased at the highest levels, who’s left to tell us where we’ve been and where we’re headed?
This week on Reveal, as part of Black History Month, we’re bringing you conversations from our sister podcast, More To The Story, with three prominent Black writers who are fighting to tell a more inclusive American story.
2026-02-21 07:05:26
On Thursday just before noon, bundled up couples and small groups of people wandered through the President’s House on Independence Hall, some snapping photos and others inquiring what was happening as four National Park employees worked in tandem, behind a barricade, to reattach panel after panel of the President’s House slavery exhibits. They worked in the cold, lifting the massive glass squares up onto the brick wall and then screwing them into place. Philadelphia’s mayor Cherelle L. Parker approached, admiring the exhibit for a moment before shaking hands with the workers and thanking them.
“I want you to know I’m grateful,” Parker said. “It’s our honor,” one of the employees responded.
They continued to work until at least 16 panels of the memorial were reinstalled. The exhibits had been removed on a Thursday afternoon nearly a month before, in accordance with Trump’s 2025 “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order to rid “public monuments, memorials, statues, markers or similar properties” of content that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” But after the city sued, US District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe issued an injunction ordering the government to “restore the President’s House Site to its physical status as of January 21, 2026.” That order was overruled on Friday, just one hour before the deadline Rufe had set for the exhibit’s reinstallation. Now, the National Park Service must maintain the status quo—leaving 16 of 34 panels up—while the federal government appeals the initial injunction.
For a community that fought to restore history, the initial order to restore the President’s House exhibit had been cause for celebration. “We need to understand what we’ve done here. This is actually a moment in time; your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren, are going to be talking about this for years and decades to come,” said Michael Coard, attorney and founding member of Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC), a broad-based Black-led coalition of activists, on Thursday as the the National Park Service initially started to restore panels. “This here, right now, what we’ve done is people power.” As Coard spoke, he stood in front of a wall engraved with the names of the nine people enslaved by Washington. At the bottom of his podium rested the 1863 image “Scourged Back,” which was marked for removal from Harper’s Ferry National Historical Park last year.
ATAC had been an instrumental part of establishing the exhibit in 2010 and had filed an amicus brief in support of the city’s lawsuit on January 27.
The exhibit in Center City was one of a dozen other signs and materials from national parks removed after Trump’s executive order. The Washington Post reported that park staff interpreted the order as including “any references to historic racism, sexism, climate change, and LGBTQ+ rights.” As America approaches its 250th anniversary this year, these removals foreshadow a celebration that, on the national level, excludes underrepresented communities’ contributions to American history, refuses to reckon with its more difficult periods, and ultimately obfuscates the truth of our collective past.
When Philadelphia was the nation’s capital, the President’s House was the site where Presidents George Washington and John Adams lived and worked. The original building was demolished in 1832, but visitors today can still walk through its foundation, which sits near the Liberty Bell Center. The slavery exhibits at the President’s House include displays that memorialize the names and experiences of the nine people enslaved under Washington, along with relevant historical moments like Washington’s signing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1793.
After the exhibit’s removal in January, the ATAC kept the space alive with numerous rallies. A few days prior to the court’s order to reinstall the panels, despite the leftover snow that piled along the sidewalks and on the lawn, hundreds of concerned Philadelphia community members gathered at the President’s House demanding the restoration of the slavery exhibit.
“African American history is American history, and we stand and continue to fight to make sure that Donald Trump will not whitewash the history here in the city of Philadelphia,” said Kenyatta Johnson, Philadelphia’s 2nd Council District President, as the crowd applauded. “It’s shameful that as we celebrate the 250th celebration of the birthplace of America that we have to be out here today advocating and fighting to make sure our true history—our true history, not his story—is known.”
Other speakers included a direct descendant of Black founding father Bishop Richard Allen, city council members, a historian, and a George Washington reenactor. They all echoed a similar message: the history presented by these panels needed to be restored because they tell an intrinsic part of American history, despite the current administration’s view that they were “disparaging.”
The main brick walls, where two long horizontal silver slabs hung covered in glue residue—a reminder of what had been there—had been plastered with various handmade flyers protesting the erasure of history and even recreating parts of the exhibit for those who came to view the site.
The City of Philadelphia filed their federal lawsuit against the US Department of the Interior and the National Park Service the day the panels were initially removed, arguing the removal of the exhibit was “arbitrary and capricious,” violating a 2006 Cooperative Agreement between Philadelphia and the federal government.
“This is not about hatred of America or the United States; it is about telling the full American story again.”
“This action is a disservice to our city, our nation, and it denies future generations the chance to learn from our history, fostering an environment of ignorance rather than understanding,” said Catherine Hicks, the president of Philadelphia’s NAACP branch, to the crowd. “We must confront the complexities of our past, honoring the lives and legacies of those who suffered under the institution of slavery.”
Hannah Gann, a high school African American history teacher attending the rally, said every year she’d teach her students about the people Washington enslaved, particularly Ona Judge, a young woman who escaped to New Hampshire. This year, when her students heard the memorial was torn down, they were “upset that their real history was being erased and a huge part of our city’s history was being taken away and covered up.”
Gann said the exhibit’s removal reminded her of how vital educators are. “We can’t just feel satisfied that we’ve done enough,” she said. “Every year we have to renew our energy, our commitment to the truth, our commitment to Black uplift and celebrating stories of Black resilience and power and having our students see themselves in those stories.”
As the rally to restore history took place in Philadelphia, in Washington, the House Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held an oversight hearing titled “All in for America250: Public-Private Partnerships Supporting America’s Semiquincentennial on our Public Lands.”
During the hearing, Alan Spears, National Parks Conservation Association’s Senior Director for Cultural Resources, recalled that when he was young, his parents would take him to places like Gettysburg. He said it was there that his passion for American History manifested, but it didn’t “take hold” until he started seeing people who looked like him in those spaces.
“I think what we’re looking at right now is the danger of taking that in a completely opposite direction, where people don’t see themselves reflected or are seeing themselves actively removed and excised from our shared national narrative,” Spears said during the hearing. “We don’t need to go in that direction. This is not about hatred of America or the United States; it is about telling the full American story again, about the times when we failed to live up to the better angels of our nature. That’s us too.”
John Garrison Marks, a historian and the author of Thy Will Be Done: George Washington’s Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory, had hoped that America’s anniversary would be an opportunity to “establish a more complete, more inclusive and more widely shared understanding of the nation’s history,” including the history of slavery.
Marks said people have debated Washington’s involvement in slavery for almost 250 years. The founding father enslaved people right up until the day he died, while privately writing about becoming “uneasy” with slavery and hoping that the institution would be abolished in southern states. Washington even circumvented a Pennsylvania law by deliberately moving the people he enslaved in and out of the state every six months to ensure they wouldn’t be freed by the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780. Marks noted that the president understood the hypocrisy of leading a revolution to found a nation dedicated to the ideas of liberty and equality while enslaving people.
Marks said you can’t to talk about Washington without talking about his involvement in slavery. He argued that some people struggle to see Washington as “an actual human being” with “egregious flaws,” and instead see him as a symbol of the nation itself; for some, “criticizing Washington is criticizing America.”
“There are a lot of people whose sense of patriotism, whose sense of self, is tied to the idea that America is the land of the free, is tied up in the idea that this is a nation that should only be celebrated,” he said. “And when you try to introduce this idea that we need to reckon with the history of slavery to understand Washington, there are a lot of people who view that as kind of a personal attack.”
With Philadelphia having the potential to see so many visitors this year, not only for the 250th anniversary, but for the FIFA World Cup or the MLB All-Star Game, the removal of the slavery exhibit at the President’s House was “a huge missed opportunity” to give people an uncensored history, one that Marks believes most people want to learn.
“On the eve of the 250th there are going to be people who are now waving the flag talking about how they love this country, and my thing is this: you can’t love a thing or a person until you know the good, the bad and the ugly,” Coard said after the rally. “So, the 250th shines a spotlight about the absolute necessity of knowing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about your country.”
Following the initial legal victory, community members were cautiously hopeful.
“My heart is really exploding with joy, but it’s the type of joy that we often experience as Black people in this country,” said Michelle Flamer, a retired attorney, who helped get the exhibit installed over 15 years ago. “Where is the permanency? I want to make sure that this is permanent and not to ever be taken away. This history belongs here. There have been many people who have talked about moving it somewhere else or telling it, and I support efforts to continue to tell this history as broadly and as widely as possible, but it belongs here on this ground, because this is actually where the president’s house existed.”
Whatever the result of the administration’s fight to change the signage at the President’s House and other sites across the country, nothing can change what happened at these places, and who it happened to.
2026-02-21 02:28:41
Under normal circumstances, the sex workers arriving to their jobs at Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel in Pahrump, Nevada, have a predictable routine. Most people’s shifts at the ranch last for at least a week, and the process involves picking out a room that they’ll stay in and work out of for the duration, visiting with a doctor, and some paperwork. The week of Christmas, however, things went very differently. Sheri’s workers showing up say they were presented with a surprising and objectionable new contract that would give the brothel unprecedented control over them, their intellectual property, and their digital likenesses.
“They want everything,” says Jupiter Jetson, a sex worker, model, and adult film actress who’s worked at Sheri’s for eight years.
“Their motivation is to get ahold of our videos and the ability to create AI likenesses.”
Jetson says there had been hints that something might be afoot: in the fall, brothel management started offering what she wryly calls “teaser trailers,” saying things like “There’s a new contract coming, a lot of ladies aren’t going to like it” while at the same time insisting, she says, that “there weren’t any major changes” and framing it as a chance to “tie up some loose ends and fix some clerical errors.” Like many people in adult businesses, Sheri’s Ranch workers—referred to as “courtesans” in Nevada, the only state where prostitution is legal—are classified as independent contractors, but some say they’re treated more like employees, with the ranch controlling basic aspects of their jobs, including how much they charge and what they can wear.
According to three women with experience working at Sheri’s, the new contract made an unprecedented play for their intellectual property, one that they worry could be a bid to make money from their likenesses, including through AI, as well as potentially owning a piece of anything they might create while working at the ranch. The contract, which Mother Jones has viewed, also gives Sheri’s power of attorney over the workers’ intellectual property; as the contract puts it, to “further the prosecution and issuance of patents, copyrights, or other intellectual property protection.” The women say the contract was shown to many arriving workers in what seemed like a deliberately rushed fashion, with someone in management immediately flipping to a back page and asking them to sign without reading it closely.
In addition to the contract, the workers have other longstanding labor issues, including the “limo fees” that they’re required to pay to help transport customers from the Las Vegas strip, and the system of tip splitting—both of which organizers say appear to be legally questionable. But as sex work has become an increasingly digital field, their major concern is the contract’s threat to their ability to protect their image and likeness, especially from potential AI uses. The issue is no longer hypothetical: just this week, major Hollywood players expressed concern and outrage after the Chinese company ByteDance made an AI video featuring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
Instead of signing, some of the women began talking among themselves, reading the fine print, and largely deciding that the new language was intolerable. As a result, Sheri’s Ranch workers have launched a unionization drive, forming the United Brothel Workers, a branch of the Communications Workers of America. If successful, they’ll be the country’s first brothel workers’ union to gain employer recognition.
While the workers and the CWA declined to share a specific number, they say they have collected signed union cards from a “heavy supermajority” of the ranch’s sex workers. They’re calling on Sheri’s to recognize the union voluntarily, which seems unlikely: multiple women have been abruptly terminated for what organizers say is protected union activity, including Jetson, who said she was fired via email 24 hours after collecting signed cards in the ranch’s parking lot.
“We live in a spicy panopticon,” Jetson says, referring to the security cameras that cover public areas of the ranch. “There is no covertly organizing a union.” Instead, she says, “we did a lightning strike-style drive to sign the union cards,” where organizers stopped workers coming from their cars to talk about their labor rights. Jetson and another worker involved in the drive, who has also since been dismissed, continued even after learning from a colleague inside that management appeared to be gathering around security camera monitors to watch their efforts.
“We got a lot of union cards” that day, Jetson says. “The brothel got our voluntary notice of recognition on Wednesday,” about 24 hours later, she says. “On Thursday, I was fired at 3:12 PM via email.”
Another worker, Molly Wylder, said she was also fired over email after management appeared to learn that she was helping with the union effort, and before she’d even had a chance to decline to sign. “They just knew what I was doing,” Wylder says. A third worker, Adalind Gray, attempted to sign the contract with a notation she hoped would indicate she was doing so under duress. She says that management refused to accept that, telling her she could leave instead. When she began recording the interaction on her phone—Nevada is a one-party consent state, and the conversation took place in an office that is already monitored by security camera—she says she was told “my contract was no longer on the table.” The CWA has so far filed four unfair labor practice complaints with the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of terminated workers.
While the Sheri’s Ranch website says the brothel is owned by retired car dealership owner and former homicide detective Chuck Lee, he died in 2018. The business, which currently appears to be held by at least one LLC, didn’t respond to specific questions about the legal concerns raised by the unionizing workers, or about the termination of Jetson and other workers. Instead, Jeremy Lemur, the brothel’s marketing director, provided a statement saying the ranch “has been actively working with independent contractors to revise and improve the existing contract with the goal of making it more workable and agreeable for everyone.” It said the company has been in “ongoing dialogue” with its workers, and that it believes “the final version will be viewed by the independent contractors who choose to work here as fair, balanced, and supportive of their ability to operate their own businesses.”
The statement makes clear that Sheri’s primary concern is that the unionization drive could result in the sex workers being classified as employees instead of independent contractors. As Lemur’s statement adds, “Sheri’s Ranch has long believed that the independent contractor model has served Nevada’s licensed sex industry, and the women who work within it, well for decades. It has allowed independent businesswomen to maintain autonomy, set their own paths, and build success under an established and lawful framework. While we respect that individuals have the right to express differing views, the company remains committed to preserving a structure that has provided opportunity, stability, and economic independence for generations, while continuing to support a safe, professional environment for contractors, clients, and the surrounding community.”
Despite the already intense backlash from management, the organizers forming the United Brothel Workers say that what’s on the line is nothing less than existential—for them and for sex workers at other Nevada brothels.
Alice Little, a legal sex worker at the nearby Chicken Ranch who’s known for advocating for sex worker’s rights, says she, too, recognizes that a union contract at Sheri’s could be seismic for the industry—which is why she’s opposed to the effort. “In my personal opinion, it is the brothels who would benefit from making employees of the independent contractors, not the other way around,” says Little, who I was referred to by Lemur, but who told me that she was not speaking on behalf of brothel owners. Little says she’s concerned that an employee system would allow brothels to impose stricter rules and guidelines on sex workers, including how often they need to work (be “on tour,” in industry parlance). “It would be almost a win for these locations to set a standardized contract and require us to be on tour however often.”
In her view, “It’s in our best interest to negotiate and contract individually and exercise the freedom to change locations,” meaning to quit a brothel if contract terms aren’t acceptable. “That makes a bold statement to a location if you take your business somewhere else. The Chicken Ranch and Sheri’s are within walking distance… It’s incredibly easy to just go work at the brothel next door. There are so many freedoms and options within this industry.”
In fact, a Sheri’s Ranch schedule shows that Little will begin working there in March, something she did not disclose in our conversation. Little confirmed by text that she would start there “next quarter. My license currently is for Chicken Ranch and I’m taking bookings there through the end of the month.” Little also published an op-ed this morning in the Nevada Independent, reiterating her opposition to the unionization effort; the piece does not disclose she’ll soon start work at Sheri’s.
Similarly, Jetson thinks that the new intellectual rights provisions in the Sheri’s contract are also a bellwether—which is why she and her colleagues are fighting against it.
“If this contract had been successful and they’d been able to roll this out without a peep from us,” Jetson says, “they would’ve taken it to the brothel owners association and we would’ve seen contracts like this in every house in Nevada in the next two years.”
Sheri’s Ranch has previously declared itself AI-skeptical. In a 2025 blog post, Lemur wrote that while AI “is certainly revolutionary and rapidly evolving, the tech raises serious questions about consent, authenticity, and what we trade for convenience.” By contrast, he wrote, Sheri’s “serves as a cultural counterpoint. Here, we provide genuine connection between real people—licensed sex workers who choose their profession and meet clients face-to-face in a safe and regulated environment. From the initial email contact to the sexual encounter, Sheri’s employs no deepfake imagery, no ghostwritten communication, and no deception throughout the customer experience.”
“I could be starring in adult videos that I never agreed to and never consented to.”
But the sex workers who provide those encounters worry the company’s attitude has shifted. Jetson says that in a conversation with the ranch’s madame last year, she “expressed the owners’ desire to get in on what they see as their owed piece of the content we’re making,” apparently meaning the workers’ social media presences, including on platforms like OnlyFans. “Their motivation is to get ahold of our videos and the ability to create AI likenesses.”
“This is how you end up the face of a Japanese lubricant company without ever having signed a document,” Jetson previously told the Associated Press. “This is how you end up finding yourself on a website offering AI companionship without ever seeing a penny.”
“I’ve never filmed pornography,” Wylder says. “But they have plenty of pictures and videos of my body and me walking in and out of the office, myTikTok, photos of me on Twitter before my account was deleted. They could easily make a composite of me, and I could be starring in adult videos that I never agreed to and never consented to.”
The contract has no language suggesting the provision is limited to AI pornography or virtual sex uses, the workers add. “If you write a book, or a recipe for a food blog, or take pictures on vacation and they decide they could get paid selling them to a travel company,” Jetson says the new contract allows them to do that. Gray, a musician, adds, “If I write music for the band I have, I worry they could take a piece.”
While the firings are a real blow to their lives, Jetson says Sheri’s Ranch response to their workers’ complaints about the contract has also left them unsatisfied. “Their approach has been to gaslight us and tell us we’re mistaken about what these clauses mean,” she says, telling the women, for instance, that they “need our power of attorney to share our photos with journalists or make sure we can’t spread lies about the ranch. It’s all complete nonsense.”
Gray, Wylder, and Jetson say they hope to get their jobs returned and be able to work for a professional and fair employer. “We’re fighting for Sheri’s to be a good place to work,” Gray says. “I’m looking forward to going back.”
Jetson, meanwhile, has a message for other sex workers in Nevada watching what’s going on at the ranch from afar. “When informing yourself about what’s going to be the best for you and your rights and your future,” she says, “don’t ask the people who stand to profit from you making a bad choice. I’ve heard so much propaganda, for lack of a better word, that’s been spread far and wide throughout this industry about how ‘employee’ is a four letter word and the end of our rights. In actuality, employees with collective bargaining power have so much more freedom and so many more rights than what is currently known in the brothel system.”
“Don’t ask the owners,” she concludes. “Ask your coworkers.”
Update, February 20: This story has been updated with information on Sheri’s current ownership and Alice Little’s upcoming work for the brothel.
