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Axis of No Damn Good: Maxwell, Epstein... [1]
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Date: 2025-07-28
Author/podcaster Sarah Kendzior’s 2022 tome THEY KNEW is praised to the skies by the now Trump-scourged Columbia Journalism Review and National Public Radio. In an endnote, it credits a 2019 segment of the latter as a source for the book’s observation that ABC, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and other outlets admitted, back in the day, “suppressing the Epstein story.”
Enter- here and now- a fast-closing window to admit some long overdue light. For starters, conventional wisdom remains loath to cast a cold eye on jailed Jeffrey’s bitter end. (Spoiler alert: he knew boatloads about widespread misbehavior among the elite.) “In an amazing coincidence,” observes Dr. Kendzior, “his prison guards fell asleep AND the prison cameras all malfunctioned at the precise moment he [hanged] himself in his cell” (emphasis added).
With no small negligence (before and after Epstein’s demise), Dems have declined to define the Orange Ogre in light of credibly reported behavior that cannot help but recall Epstein’s. Sadly but truly, on well-known, now widely normalized audiotape, Trump not ‘merely’ admits but gleefully proclaims a “grab”-happy personal history of habitual carnal assault.
Scads of women have corroborated such evil. And there’s more. Two years ago, in civil court, a nonpartisan jury weighed mountains of facts- before UNANIMOUSLY holding him liable for damages relating to a credibly alleged attack on writer E. Jean Carroll.
Several years earlier, into a nexus of obfuscation and servility (on the part of newsies and donkeys alike) strode ace reporter Julie K. Brown. Around the time of Trump’s first inauguration she began to delve into Epstein’s axes of predatory perfidy.
One would have hoped her bosses (at the Miami Herald) would have cheered her from Day One. Nope. Instead (according to Dr. Kendzior), they fought her tooth and claw. Flying solo, she unearthed the vital truth that informs her Polk Award-winning series of 2017-2018 reports (which, thank God, the Herald did not spike) and her 2021 masterwork Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story.
At the risk of discombobulating my chronology, I’ve saved the best (aka the worst) for last. Lest we ‘forget’: smack before the watershed 2016 elections, a woman who, at the time of the alleged crimes, was all of 13 years old credibly alleged that Trump (in concert with Epstein) slapped, threatened, and brutally raped her.
On 11/2/16, lawyer/legal commentator Lisa Bloom announced that the anonymous accuser perforce had clammed up. “Jane Doe,” Bloom said, “has received numerous threats…. she is in terrible fear.”
In a formal declaration (see the link immediately above), Jane Doe wrote that Trump had slapped her. And that soon after the alleged rape “Defendant Trump threatened me that, were I ever to reveal any of the details of Defendant Trump’s sexual and physical abuse of me, my family and I would be physically harmed if not killed.”
Be it resolved: news must comprise a worthy, unflinching first draft of history. As such, it must be informed by solid, forthright takes on what’s gone before.
Trouble is (quoting Dr. Kendzior): “With brave exceptions, the prerogative of the media tends to be the protection of the powerful, at the expense of victims.” ‘Needless to say,’ lack of truth has hurt (not to say maimed) the body politic. Plainly enough, if we’re to avoid a bad end (viz. flatlining), we need to start learning and healing PDQ.
Right here, right now, we stand (if at all) on such broad shoulders as Kendzior’s. Brown’s. Carroll’s. Bloom’s. And Jane Doe’s. But with all three branches of governance dropped like dark red dominoes, prospects cannot look bright. Recalling the Pulitzer laureate poet/WWII combat vet/atrocities foe Anthony Hecht, “More light! More light!” is what we can ill afford not to demand.
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