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2026-02-07 11:25:38

On a frigid Thursday afternoon in late January, in a now-viral video, employees at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park were captured removing interpretive signs about slavery posted at the President’s House Site—where George Washington and John Adams both lived, and where Washington enslaved nine people.

The outdoor exhibit, installed in 2010 after years of advocacy by Black activists and historians, was intended to acknowledge the glaring contradiction between the nation’s founding ideals of freedom, equality and democracy and the brutal system of slavery it maintained. When a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter asked one of the park employees why the signs were being removed, he replied, “I’m just following orders.” 

Months after his second inauguration, President Donald Trump directed national parks and museums to root out “divisive, race-centered ideology,” specifically targeting Independence Hall—where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were adopted—in preparation for the nation’s 250th anniversary.  

“We’re living in a time…where people are really trying to constrain what we learn,” said Brian Jones, an author, longtime educator in New York City public schools and senior director of reading and engagement at the New York Public Library. “Sometimes we forget that these are powerful spaces, and then the sensors come along and remind us how powerful they are.”

After nearly a decade as an elementary school teacher, Jones earned a doctorate in urban education at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His research there on “a really explosive chapter in Black education history,” the 1968 student uprising at the historically Black Tuskegee Institute—which Jones’ father attended—would become the subject of his first book and propel him to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, first as a scholar-in-residence and later as staff. The more Jones studied Black history, the more he came to believe that Black history was for everyone—the title of his latest book, published with Haymarket Books.

As America nears its semiquincentennial, February also marks 100 years of Black history commemorations, a tradition started by the historian Carter G. Woodson in 1926 and officially recognized by president Gerald Ford during the 1976 bicentennial.  

Some sixty years ago, in yet another period of social and political upheaval, the writer James Baldwin delivered an address to teachers in his native New York in which he concluded that the source of the country’s troubles was its own slippery sense of self, built on “a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors.” 

The role of education in such a time, Baldwin argued, was to produce free-thinkers capable of questioning these myths and willing to challenge society in order to save it. By teaching an inclusive and unvarnished view of history, and creating an opportunity for Black students to see themselves in the classroom, educators could liberate all students, he suggested. 

To better understand Black history, the liberatory power of education, and how ideas of race and nation shape American identity, I spoke with Jones in early January about Black History Is for Everyone—a book born out of the belief that Black history is an “invitation to rethink everything,” and that studying it “offers an opportunity to begin to see ourselves, whether you identify as Black or not, in a new way.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

“If history is any guide,” you write, “reconstruction is even more difficult than abolition.” Today, amid the rolling back of so many hard-won freedoms, the dilution of Black political power, and the erasure of Black history, what can we learn from past liberatory struggles about the path to building a more durable and equitable democracy?

I mean, that’s the million-dollar question. The idea that reconstruction is even harder than abolition, as you may recall, is an idea I get straight from [the abolitionist Frederick Douglass] and W.E.B. Du Bois, the Black scholar who wrote a masterful book called Black Reconstruction, against the idea that Reconstruction was a disaster filled with just Black corruption, and Black people shouldn’t have been able to do all the things that they were doing, voting and carrying on: [that] it was just too much, too fast. 

What Du Bois teaches us is that after the abolition of slavery, the process of reconstructing the South came to this moment in its most radical phase, when the social order got turned totally upside down, and we had this quite radical experiment in biracial democracy. You had people, Black people, elected to offices at all levels, not just state government, but to the Senate, to the federal legislature. You had, through voting, the creation of amazing new state constitutions, some of which banned racism, created, in at least two cases, interracial schooling—[and] in every case, prohibited racism in saying who could go to what school.

There’s a historian, Manisha Sinha, who writes about it as the beginning of social democracy, in a sense, in the United States. Black people at the lead of this process of building a new society with their allies, the radicals in the Republican Party, begin building, for the first time, free, tax-supported, public institutions that didn’t exist before—schools, hospitals. So you have white children, in many cases, going to school for the first time thanks to the advocacy of their Black neighbors.

What came afterwards, I think it’s helpful to think of it as a counterrevolution. That’s what explains the violence of the Klan—burning down schools, burning down churches, burning crosses on people’s lawns, lynching people, terrorizing elected officials, in some cases violently overthrowing elected governments. So it took a lot of violence to turn it all the other way around, and then what we get coming out the other end is a new system of Jim Crow. 

Is reconstruction even more difficult than abolition? Is building a durable democratic order more difficult than tearing down something that’s unequal? I think [Douglass] has proved correct that it is more difficult, and that often we are chastised in moments of democratic advance for wanting too much, for trying to do too many things too fast. It’s usually more the case that we didn’t go far enough to secure these democratic changes, and because the changes weren’t thoroughgoing enough, that’s why they become undone. 

In the case of Reconstruction, we can see it clearly, because after Lincoln’s assassination, our new president takes a shine to the Confederates and is doing everything in his power to reinstate them. And then that attitude unfortunately becomes the dominant attitude, even among the Republican Party. So instead of squashing white supremacy, instead of making it impossible for the former Confederates to ever raise their heads again, to ever take office again, to ever terrorize anyone again, instead of doing that, they encourage them.

They take their foot off the gas of social change. They back off, allow them to flourish, allow the violence to continue, and the nation is reconciled. There is a new unity between North and South. But it’s sacrificing the project of Black rights and progress and really the project of democracy in the interest of reconciliation. So yeah, we didn’t go far enough.

On the topic of revolution—what about how studying the Haitian Revolution sort of shatters these western notions of freedom and democracy?

This was a real learning curve for me, because I am not Haitian. I don’t speak Creole or read it, so I have tremendous social distance from this history and this event, and so I had to do and continue to do a lot of work to try to learn and understand and especially trying to get closer to Haitian sources, to Haitian authors and Haitian scholars. The more you get closer to the event, the more you realize how earth-shattering it was.

More and more people are on to the idea that this is a really seminal event, that this was a game changer, and putting it up next to the American Revolution is revealing, and the French Revolution, actually. Both of them were revolutions declaring, égalité, fraternité. All men are created equal, all of these very universalistic declarations that are bold. And in both the French and the American cases, they are still keeping people in chains at the same exact time. 

The Haitian Revolution, by contrast, is a revolution made by people in chains. It’s the people in chains rising up. And so what’s embarrassing is that the people saying all this universal stuff, not only do they have their own slaves, but then when these people in Haiti rise up and are gaining freedom, the very same kind of liberté that [the French and Americans] are talking about, as soon as it’s happening, they are against it.

First [the enslaved African people are] in a French colony, Saint-Domingue. They rise up to form a new nation. They give it the name [“Ayiti”] that the indigenous people gave to the island, an amazing callback, and they declare in their first constitution the abolition of slavery. That’s the first time anybody does that anywhere in the world in a constitution. That’s amazing. 

So the ideas coming out of the Haitian Revolution, the spirit of it, that this individual liberty, that this idea of liberty, that this idea of everyone being free, that we’re not going to have slavery anymore, that all of these ideas apply to the African diaspora, which is the test of universalism. Does it apply to these human beings over here? Haiti passes that test, and American and French Revolutions fail it.

You also write about “the silence of the archives,” and how difficult it can be to access the views of Black revolutionaries in historical documents that are mostly authored and maintained by their oppressors. How can researchers learn to listen to, and for, the voices of Black folks in these texts?

It’s a great question.  Sometimes that’s tricky, because the traces that people leave depend a lot on their status—especially, the further back you go in time, the less documentation you have for people of lower status, and those lower-status people often show up in really unpleasant ways in the documents of high-status people. So for rich people, and especially wealthy white people, we have their diaries, and we have their journals, and we have their letters to all their siblings, and we have all this rich material about their internal life. And then we might have a ledger where they’ve kept account of how many Black people they own, and that sort of thing, and who got sick and when. 

And we have to then read between the lines of the ledgers: This person disappeared, or this person got sick and then got sick again and then got sick again. Is this somebody who’s repeatedly sick, or is this a form of resistance, of work stoppage? What’s going on here? So there are new tools and new interest among researchers in asking these questions.  

On the other hand, there are also other cases where the archives and the ancestors get quite loud. It’s impressive. Like we do have poems and letters, and abolitionist speeches and newspapers. Sometimes we will have a Black newspaper, a Black journal, or the proceedings of a protest organization, but it’s all men, because that’s who got hold of the resources and was writing things down.

So we have to do some extra work to try to get access to the perspectives of Black women in those times, [or] the perspectives of Black folks who didn’t speak English or write in English, or were disabled or were queer, or just all of the ways that we know that archives tend to reflect the hierarchies that we live with. So too are they often unequal in the ways that they reflect people in the past. And that is a serious challenge for researchers.

In your experience, how do you go about deconstructing or challenging the American mythos around race and nation that’s ingrained in so many people from such a young age?

Patriotism is often taught as a kind of unquestioned substrate of the educational journey. It’s like you’re pledging allegiance to the flag in third grade before anybody’s told you what those words mean. And so the very act of posing the question seems radical, but from a kind of educational perspective, it’s not really. It’s just good teaching. 

The classroom is a space where all of these things should be objects of study, and in the grand sweep of human history, nations are new. They’re pretty brand-spanking new. So yes, we should hold them up as objects of study and ask the question, where did they come from? When did they form? How did they get made? And that might lead people to the idea that this is not an eternal thing to which one must just bow down, but is a construct of our world. 

I think that a lot of people have come around to this idea when it comes to race, but they might feel less comfortable with that kind of talk around nation, and so I’m trying to gently, in some ways, help people see that actually these two are cousins in a sense—that we construct ways of grouping ourselves as human beings, and we don’t have to believe in those constructs, to think through them and about them carefully. 

Can you also speak to the liberatory power of education, and what role public schools and libraries play?

These spaces, at their best, are spaces that are just chock-full of democratic possibilities, because they’re places where we might where we have the possibility of learning with and from each other, changing each other’s minds, learning about a different perspective that you’ve never thought about before.

We’re living in a time, as I think you well know, where people are really trying to constrain what we learn, and their fear of our reading lists is part of the answer to your question about the liberatory power of education. That they’re so scared of what’s going to happen if people learn the real history of the United States. If people aren’t allowed to pose these questions, that should tell us how high the stakes are for keeping our schools and libraries open as spaces of learning and possibility. So sometimes we forget that these are powerful spaces, and then the censors come along and remind us how powerful they are.

2026-02-07 10:20:59

This story has been removed. Following publication, we learned that the video that we were told was of a warrantless raid in Memphis was from another incident in a different city. As a result, we are no longer confident of some of the details and media included in the story. We have reached out again to the federal and local agencies that did not respond to previous inquires.

2026-02-07 06:14:54

This story was produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

This week, hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants faced an uncertain future as the Trump administration fought in federal court to revoke their legal status and deport them. But despite these threats, the largely immigrant union workers at a JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado, many of them recent arrivals from Haiti, still voted on Wednesday by an overwhelming margin to strike over poor working conditions in what could become the first sanctioned walkout at a major meatpacking plant in decades.

Outside the plant on the day before the strike vote, semis idled on either side of Highway 85—the cattle trailers full and waiting to unload, the cows’ warm breath rising in clouds through the slatted sides. Across the highway, Tchelly Moise and other representatives of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 union walked through the employee parking lot, passing out handbills to workers coming and going from their shifts. The fliers (in Moise’s native Haitian Creole but also in Somali, Spanish, Burmese, and other languages spoken inside the plant) informed union members of a vote to be held the following day in the ballroom of the DoubleTree Hotel, a little over a mile away.

The daylong secret balloting was no surprise to members who had been demanding a strike vote for weeks, as tense and often contentious contract negotiations over pay and work conditions at JBS, the Brazilian multinational and world’s largest producer of beef, have dragged on for eight months. Haitian workers, who comprise a plurality of the plant’s night shift, have been especially upset. In 2023 and 2024, they were recruited to work at the Greeley plant under what the union characterizes as false pretenses amounting to human trafficking. (A JBS spokesperson told me that the company takes the safety and welfare of its employees seriously and that it follows all laws and regulations. The spokesperson also said that no substantiated evidence was provided that tied the recruiter or company leadership to the claims outlined by the union.) 

In December, a group of those workers filed a class action lawsuit alleging that they were promised free housing but, upon arrival, were charged “to live in overcrowded, uninhabitable housing” nearby at the Rainbow Motel. Worse still, the suit alleges, after being recruited to the B Shift, that they were made to work some of the hardest jobs on the line and at “dangerously fast speeds.” The suit claims that the line on the daytime A shift usually averages 300 head of cattle processed per hour, while the B shift runs at 370—and has reached as high as 440 head per hour.

Despite the lawsuit, the conditions, employees say, have remained largely unchanged—or even gotten worse. Some workers have told the union they struggle to keep up with the speed of the line at times. (JBS did not respond to a request for comment.) In recent weeks, some began coordinating short work stoppages, letting beef slide by on the conveyor belt uncut and untrimmed while banging their meat hooks on the sides of the metal work stations to alert supervisors that the chain conveyor system needed to be stopped.

Union officials told me it became clear that these kinds of spontaneous stoppages—known in the industry as “wildcat” actions, which can legally result in disciplinary action or termination—were only going to continue or increase as contract talks stalled. After months of fruitless negotiations with JBS, there was no choice but to hold a vote. This was no longer about whether or not to accept the company’s latest contract offer, Moise explained. The vote would be a simple ballot: strike or no strike.

In the union offices on the night before the vote, he told me he had no doubt about how workers would cast their ballots. “People at the plant,” he said, “they’re pissed off.”

For the previous few days, union leadership had quietly worried about turnout for the vote. A large number of Haitian workers—part of a group of roughly 353,000 migrants nationwide—were scheduled to lose their temporary protected status (TPS) and accompanying work authorization on February 3, the day before the vote was scheduled to take place. But then, late on the night of February 2, US District Judge Ana C. Reyes, of the District of Columbia, paused termination of TPS for Haitians. Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem had not decided to end their legal status because order had been restored in Haiti, Reyes wrote in her ruling, but rather because of a “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” Reyes cited a social media post by Noem in December, calling immigrants “foreign invaders,” who are “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

When Reyes’ ruling was reported, Moise said, his WhatsApp group chat lit up. “It was a very big relief,” he said. “People were literally celebrating.”

But Moise, who once worked as a forklift driver at the JBS plant but left in 2024 to become a union representative, cautioned everyone not to make too much of the ruling. “It is not a final decision,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that we’re going to have [TPS] forever.” He noted that Venezuelans with TPS had received a similar reprieve from the courts, only to have the Supreme Court rule in October that the termination of their 2023 TPS designation could take immediate effect. (Indeed, within hours of Judge Reyes’s ruling to halt the deportation of Haitians, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of Homeland Security, posted on social media: “Supreme Court, here we come.”) Still, the ruling would buy the union enough time to hold the strike vote. “Now we have at least a few days,” Moise said. “We cannot get deported for the next few days.”

Still, at the DoubleTree on the day of the vote, as workers from the overnight C shift began to check in shortly after 6 a.m. to cast some of the first votes, a sense of apprehension was palpable. Rumors circulated that unmarked vans had been seen circling outside the hotel, raising fears of detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Many workers reminded each other that, in recent weeks, proof of legal status had been little help to immigrants in Minneapolis. Nevertheless, workers lined up in the hallway, waiting to give their names and receive a blue slip of paper to record their vote and deposit it in an old-school wooden vote box.

Later, as workers from the B shift started to arrive, a group of Latino men in their twenties expressed deep concern about having been checked in by the union and registered as voting. Would JBS be able to access that information? The company was the largest donor to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Shortly after that donation, Trump changed the composition of the National Labor Relations Board, which then dismissed the union’s formal complaint alleging human trafficking by JBS. Months later, company CEO Joesley Batista met in person with Trump in a successful bid to lift US tariffs on Brazilian beef. JBS has the ear of a president already eager to deport immigrants, in the name of saving American jobs. 

A union rep assured the young men that the vote will be 100 percent anonymous—“cien por ciento,” he emphasized—but they sat for hours, unsure whether to cast votes. “The fear of retaliation is very real,” Moise told me.

And yet, soon after, Carlos Saint Aubin arrived to cast his vote. Saint Aubin was identified as “Auguste” in my story published last year in Mother Jones about the plight of Haitian workers at the plant. At that time, he said of working conditions at JBS: “I feel like I was being treated as a slave.” He couldn’t fully close his left hand after months of working with a meat hook on the line. But he was afraid then to have his name appear in print. Now, he is one of the named lead plaintiffs in the class action suit against JBS. As he dropped his ballot into the vote box, he broke into a wide smile.

The vote stretched into the evening.

I asked Kim Cordova, the president of Local 7 who had driven in from Denver, what the union would do if the Supreme Court reinstated the Trump administration’s right to immediately terminate TPS for the Haitians on B shift, as they had done for Venezuelan TPS recipients. Was she concerned that workers might vote to strike and then be on picket lines just as the court ruled that they could be rounded up by ICE? She conceded that it was a worry, but she noted that there are 3,800 workers at the plant. JBS wouldn’t be able to replace so many workers on short notice, she said. “Locals aren’t exactly lined up to take these jobs.”

Precisely at 7 p.m., Mathew Shechter, the general counsel for Local 7, called out, asking if there were any remaining uncast ballots. When no reply came, he called for counting to begin. The vote box was unlocked and the blue ballots—with x’s marked beside STRIKE / HUELGA or NO STRIKE / NO HUELGA—were dumped out on a round table where members began sorting yes votes into stacks and wrapping them with rubber bands and putting the no votes into a tiny pile. A respectful distance away, Moise stood with Dahir Omar, a fellow union representative who works with the plant’s Somali members.

Omar shook his head and smiled at Moise. “Democracy,” he said.

Moise smiled back and nodded.

“This isn’t how we do it in Africa,” Omar laughed. “In Africa, they’re like, ‘Hey, you guys go home, and we’ll count for you,’ you know?”

In less than an hour, the ballots were tallied. Nearly 99 percent were marked for STRIKE.

The mood among the union representatives was jubilant. I texted Cordova, who had driven home by then, to give her the results. “The workers have spoken,” she replied. Now, the union would give JBS a week to come back to the bargaining table and address worker complaints. Cordova said she hoped that JBS would resume negotiations, but a press release issued by the union soon after was clear: “Workers are prepared to take immediate and serious action if JBS continues to violate federal labor law and prevent workers from securing a fair contract.” If workers do walk out, it would be the first time in the history of the Greeley plant—and the first major strike by meatpacking workers since the Hormel strike of the 1980s.

In a statement issued on Thursday morning, JBS said: “We respect the collective bargaining process and remain hopeful that the local union will choose to move forward with this agreement.” But in an email sent directly to workers on Thursday afternoon, which focused on a 60-cent wage increase and a pension plan, the company’s tone was less rosy. “[T]he union has not allowed you to vote on the Company’s Last, Best, and Final offer,” the email obtained by Mother Jones reads. “Demand the union lets you vote on this offer!” (JBS did not respond to a request for comment about whether this email indicated that the company would not be resuming negotiations.)

At the end of the day, Moise sat alone in the union office. “It looks like they’re willing to see us go on strike for real,” he said. “They’re ready for the consequences.”

He laughed quietly. The union, he said, has already ordered 4,000 picket signs.

2026-02-07 04:33:02

You have “nothing to fear if you’re an American citizen. If you’re not an American citizen, then look out.”

That’s what Border Patrol “Commander at Large” Gregory Bovino said in December, as he and his entourage of masked agents patrolled a residential neighborhood in Kenner, Louisiana, a diverse suburb of New Orleans. Asked by a reporter whether that threat applied to “legal residents,” too, Bovino attempted to clarify. “We’re friends with all legal residents,” he insisted.

The exchange was captured by journalist Amanda Moore, who has spent months documenting the activities of the Border Patrol, ICE, and an alphabet soup of federal law enforcement outfits. Amanda’s videos are intense and often violent; they show disturbing levels of aggression from the heavily armed government agents that President Donald Trump has unleashed on American cities. She’s followed Bovino particular closely, tracking him across the heartland from Chicago to Louisiana to Minneapolis.

Amanda’s footage makes clear that everyone in these communities—undocumented immigrants, residents with legal status, American citizens—have quite a bit to fear from Trump’s immigration crackdown. Following the horrific killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minnesota, Bovino was reassigned away from his leadership role in the operation. But as Amanda notes, the violent culture and widespread fear he helped create won’t be so easily removed.

Please take a few minutes to watch Amanda’s report on Bovino’s legacy.

2026-02-07 02:35:59

This week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that body cameras would be deployed for all federal agents operating in Minneapolis, effective immediately—with plans to expand the policy nationwide “as funding becomes available.” 

Although Noem wrote that she is part of the “most transparent administration in American history,” getting footage from the Department of Homeland Security has proven difficult. In October, Mother Jones reporter Samantha Michaels and I set out to get records from the infamous South Shore raid in Chicago, when nearly 300 federal agents swept into an apartment complex in a massive show of force. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking paper records (like warrants) and video files. Witnesses described a chaotic scene of agents breaking down doors as terrified residents, including mothers with partially clothed children, hid or fled in panic. Several of those detained were US citizens.

In stark contrast, DHS released a highly produced social media video of the operation on its official channels, showing agents leading men out of the complex. Set to swelling orchestral music and edited in slow motion, it presented a calm, controlled version of events.

As a videographer myself, I know that a one-minute video from an unscripted, chaotic event means there is likely hours of footage on the cutting room floor. And in that unedited material, there might be images or audio that corroborate  eyewitness accounts. This footage should be public record. We shouldn’t have to settle for heavily curated and tightly trimmed clips, which is largely what DHS provided, for instance, when Stanford and Immigrant Legal Defense sued for raid footage from 2020. 

Witness accounts are valuable, but video evidence is often what forces accountability. Federal immigration officers have shot 13 people since President Donald Trump took office last year. But the incidents that galvanized the widest public response were the ones captured on video. Allegations that agents used unnecessary force and violated the rights of members of the public demand scrutiny. That’s why the Center for Investigative Reporting has filed a complaint in federal court calling for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and US Customs and Border Protection to produce videos and other records from the South Shore raid and Los Angeles operations that were filmed by videographers likely contracted by DHS, the parent agency to ICE and CBP. CIR’s in-house legal team Victoria Baranetsky and Brooke Henderson, alongside outside counsel Matthew Cate, make a case that for at least 15 years, DHS has operated a film and TV program that “feature[s the] gripping, action-packed work that ICE does to protect the public and national security,” quoting from its own website. 

DHS and the White House are using social media in extraordinarily new and aggressive ways. As this Washington Post investigation showed, the DHS public affairs team was under intense pressure from the White House to post “the worst of the worst” and “flood the airwaves,” with videographers hired to capture enforcement operations. 

There’s widespread concern that these videos function as propaganda that normalize state violence and influence public perception. But if there’s a silver lining, it’s that they’re the product of government-created material, paid for with tax dollars, that should be available to the public. 

So let’s test Noem’s claim that this is the most transparent administration in American history. 

2026-02-07 02:29:40

“Women are on the upswing to power,” Jeffrey Epstein wrote in October 2017 to a friend. “Their methods I might not agree with but I recognize the weapons are limited.”

The friend was Kathryn Ruemmler, a prominent attorney and former White House Counsel to Barack Obama whose close relationship with Epstein is now one of many under renewed scrutiny. The email exchange happened during the dawn of what would become the MeToo movement, when numerous powerful and some less-powerful men were accused of sexual abuse and harassment. In hindsight, the cultural reckoning created by MeToo was short-lived; many of the men accused went back to their original prominence, and some were even elected president of the United States. But at the time, it seemed that the movement might shake a lot of important men loose from their pedestals. And a lot of people—the accused themselves, lawyers, journalists, various curious gawkers—wanted to talk to the man who knew more about sexual abuse cases, and getting out from under them, than anyone else in their orbit: Epstein. 

In 2008, Epstein had been given an infamously lax plea deal by then-top Florida federal prosecutor Alexander Acosta, which kept him out of prison and paved the way for him to continue to sexually assault women and girls for the next 11 years, until his eventual re-arrest and 2019 death in a Manhattan jail. Newly released emails show him acting as an armchair media critic when it came to coverage of other powerful sex pests and related discussions of sexual abuse in the news.

The extent of Epstein’s involvement and interest in other men’s alleged sexual abuse cases—and the advice and lavish sympathy he was given about his own legal issues by his many famous friends—is further revealed in the newest dump of some three million pages of Epstein emails, released on January 30 by Donald Trump’s version of the Justice Department. In keeping with past releases, the new documents are heavily redacted, highly repetitive, and chaotically organized, meaning the full scope of what’s within it is just becoming clear. 

But they show that Epstein seems to have immediately been captivated by 2017’s emerging MeToo movement, perhaps, as a malevolent sex criminal himself, understanding it better than the general public. In late October of that year, he sent around a recent New York Times story about his friend, film producer Harvey Weinstein, who the paper reported had paid numerous sexual assault accusers to stay quiet. (This was, of course, exactly what Epstein himself had done for many years.)  

“It’s so interesting from a revolutionary point of view,” he wrote to Ruemmler. “The masses uprising, vigilanti [sic] gossip. but a long time coming.” (As in previous Epstein document disclosures, his writing is littered with astounding typos and misspellings; his iPhone signature even contained the words “Sorry for all the typos.” The newly released files also bear encoding errors. We’ve minimally cleaned quotes for legibility.) 

In another email from that October to Brad S. Karp, a top corporate lawyer, Epstein wrote, “How bad does the Harvey Weinstein story get?”

“I think it gets pretty bad—and a little bit worse every day,” responded Karp.

The two also emailed in March 2018, lamenting the resignation of William Voge, the chairman of rival firm Latham & Watkins, following a sexting scandal. “Really awful,” Karp wrote. “I really liked Bill Voge.” (Karp himself stepped down Wednesday night from his position leading Paul Weiss; the announcement conceded that recent “reporting” had become “a distraction” but did not mention the emails or Epstein’s name.)

Epstein also emailed an October 2017 New Yorker story about Weinstein to Soon-Yi Previn, the wife of director Woody Allen—one of a series of exchanges that make clear he and the couple were longtime friends. Allen has, of course, been accused of sexual abuse by his adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow. (Allen has denied her allegations.) Previn and Epstein discussed other people’s sexual abuse allegations at least twice: besides Weinstein, in 2016, they corresponded at length about Anthony Weiner’s sexting of a 15-year-old girl, belittling his accuser and rationalizing the former congressman’s conduct. (Weiner ultimately served time in prison.) In that exchange, Previn called the girl “disgusting” and “despicable,” adding, “I hate women who take advantage of guys and she’s definitely one of them.”  

“[H]e hasnt had sex in a year,” Epstein responded. “what is he supposed to do. he cant have a girlfriend, cant have a hooker. so hey thought he was safe.”  

In another email Previn sent to Epstein, she put a finer point on it, writing that MeToo had “gone too far.”

As time went on, Epstein and his friends expressed frustration with MeToo. Epstein exchanged numerous emails with Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist who began facing public accusations of sexual harassment by employees and other women in science in early 2018. In September, Krauss sent Epstein an article about New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma stepping down. Buruma had published an essay by Canadian radio personality Jian Ghomeshi, who was accused in 2014 of serial sexual harassment and abuse. Ghomeshi was found not guilty of five of six criminal charges during a 2016 trial; the sixth was dropped after he apologized to his accuser.

Buruma’s publication of Ghomeshi’s essay in 2018 had created an immediate backlash against the editor and prompted his resignation; in his email to Epstein, Krauss fumed: “Impossible to publish anything about metoo, even if the author was acquitted! Now that publisher of NYRB has had to leave, who will want to publish authors!”

Epstein was also involved in an email exchange about the Shitty Media Men list, a short-lived Google spreadsheet created by journalist Moira Donegan and circulated to collect women’s knowledge of sexual harassment and abuse allegations against men in the magazine and publishing worlds. One man put on the list by an anonymous accuser, writer Stephen Elliott, sued Donegan for defamation in October 2018. Elliott sent an appeal in August seeking help mounting his lawsuit. The appeal was sent to Lorin Stein, the former Paris Review editor who resigned in 2017 amid an internal investigation into his conduct towards female employees and other writers. (Stein denied harassing anyone, but admitted that expressing sexual interest in writers and interns who he had power over was, as he put it in an apology letter, “an abuse of my position.”) 

Stein, in turn, forwarded the email to prominent journalist Michael Wolff, another longtime friend of Epstein’s who has defended their warm relationship—one that the new emails provide fresh evidence oversteps the boundaries and ethical guidelines that usually govern reporters’ dealings with sources. 

Wolff asked Epstein to consider helping Elliott, as a battle in some broader anti-#MeToo war. “I don’t know Stephen Elliot but I have always thought that the way back from this climate is through specific instances of individuals successfully challenging their persecution,” Wolff wrote. “If his story is solid he might be worth supporting. Thoughts?” In another email, Wolff added, “I think there is an opening here. What you need is an excuse—or opportunity—to make the public argument.” 

“ill help anyway i can,” Epstein wrote back, “if you like.”

It’s not clear if Epstein ultimately got involved in any way with Elliott’s lawsuit, or if Elliott even knew that Wolff had reached out to Epstein on his behalf; Elliot didn’t respond to another journalist writing about the emails, and two emails to him seeking comment were not delivered successfully. Elliott and Donegan settled out of court for what has been described as a “six-figure” sum; Donegan told me this week that it was about the total raised by a GoFundMe set up on her behalf.

Donegan, the subject of Elliot’s lawsuit, was unaware that Epstein had discussed it. “I did not know that Epstein had been aware of the case; I came to know of his exchange about it yesterday morning, when it was forwarded to me by my boss,” Donegan, now a columnist for the Guardian, told me via email. “But having now read the exchange between Epstein, Wolff, Stein, and Elliott, I can say that it is no mystery to me why someone like Mr. Epstein would take an interest in the lawsuit against me, or why he would wish to help with it.” 

Epstein was also notably interested in finding out how to shape public reaction to his own sexual abuse scandals. In December 2018 exchange, Epstein seemed to ask Wolff about how to steer press coverage of his own lawsuits. 

“Do you think the press would react to the fact that all the settlement money is going to the attorney and none to the girls?” he wrote. The email’s context isn’t entirely clear, but earlier that month, Epstein settled a defamation suit brought by some of his underage victims.

“I think it’s a useful point, potentially a powerful one,” Wolff replied. “But I don’t think anything is going to get attention now. I would look for some reporter to do a more nuanced post-mortem on the case—with its Trump overtones, legal joustings, #metoo-isms, and profit-motives.” 

In a 2015 email exchange with Ruemmler, Epstein suggested he thought he could undermine accusations against him by mining the fallout of another journalistic scandal: the recently retracted 2014 Rolling Stone story “A Rape on Campus,” whose main character was found to have fabricated what she told reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely. 

As Ruemmler and Epstein workshopped a statement responding to new accusations against him by Virginia Giuffre, who said that she was trafficked by Epstein and his longtime partner and procuress Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein wrote that “i thought we might suggest , something like we would hope that after the UVA debacle that journalists should be more on notice regarding their obligations to verify the veracity of tabloid allegations.” 

Epstein referenced the retracted UVA story again in another 2015 email to Wolff writing, “think about if there is a way to captialize [sic] on the new ruling against girls, and the uva case where false accusations are apparant [sic].”

“The media is loathe to use the L word. Liar,” he added. “Millions of dollars involved in the uva issue and not media outlet said the girl lied… these stories are made out of whole cloth.”

Besides acting as a window into how the world’s most pernicious sex pest thought about MeToo and journalism, the emails also show some of the sympathy and advice that Epstein received over the years from friends and admirers, including actor Val Kilmer and famed public intellectual Noam Chomsky. Whenever Epstein came up in the news, friends noticed and reached out.

“I see they never miss an opportunity to try to drag you in—saw an article the other day asking how you missed the #metoo press and tying you to trump,” wrote David Schoen, an attorney who represented Epstein as well as Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial. “Didn’t mention much of all you have been put through already. I hope the cases are all behind you now.”

At the same time that Epstein was having these warm exchanges with famous and powerful friends, he was, of course, also continuing his predation on women and girls. The newly-released documents contain numerous examples of him soliciting nude photos from very young women; one declines because she still lives with her parents. Another declines his repeated requests to meet up, explaining that her virginity is important to her and clearly understanding what he had in mind. A third woman complains that she developed a painful vaginal infection following one of their meetings; Epstein responds only by asking if she’s gone on birth control yet.

These seedy predations are even more disturbing in light of his warm relationships with the rich and powerful, who, it is clear, didn’t much care much about what their infamous friend was doing with his time. In the exchanges, friends would occasionally tell him they stood by him, and that as far as they were concerned, the allegations against him were overblown, and that anyway, he’d served his time.

“I said that i thought you had acted with integrity,” evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers told Epstein in 2018, relating a conversation he’d had with a friend about him. “In both in the protection the young women received from you and your woman friend whom i knew well, having met her through you several times, that most were not in fact under age of consent (17), almost always massages, you had served your time for the crime and then, if i have this correct, paid several additional young women circa a million a piece—not to silence them but rather to minimise any harm caused by the publicity.”

When the accusations against Epstein do come up in these email exchanges, he can wave them away, often in the crudest and most cavalier of terms.

Epstein wrote in 2011 to British journalist Dominic Lawson, seeming to refer to an accuser of Prince Andrew, a longtime associate and party pal of Epstein’s who has repeatedly denied allegations that he engaged in sex trafficking involving Giuffre and other Epstein victims. Epstein and Lawson were also discussing allegations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a powerful French politician and former IMF chief who stood accused of sexually assaulting a maid in a New York hotel. (The charges were soon dismissed.)

“In a world of google. unpunished accusers. fear of appearing insensitive,” Epstein wrote, in his trademark mix of incoherent and insensitive. “My favorite take away line from the Strauss Kahn feminazis ‘These revelations mean little. don’t forget that even liars can be raped.’”