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Narativ with Zev Shalev (Audio)
Hosted by Zev Shalev · EN
Uncover the hidden forces shaping our world.
Zev applies his skills gained as a journalist and news executive for 30 years to give viewers and listeners an unparalleled view of events changing our world.
Narativ is Where Truth Lives.
www.narativ.org
www.narativ.org
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SPECIAL REPORT: MICHAEL COHEN REUNITES WITH TRUMP; PREPARING TO QUASH TRUMP'S CONVICTIONS
6d ago01:19:07Tap to summarizeMichael Cohen testified Donald Trump into thirty-four felony convictions — the only criminal record ever attached to an American president. This weekend, Trump megadonor John Catsimatidis handed Cohen a radio show on 77 WABC, after telling the New York Post he “checked with the White House and they had no objection.” On a special Narativ Live, Zev Shalev convened the two people who watched this deal assemble in real time — Lev Parnas and investigative writer Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer — to name what the hire actually buys.Parnas put the transaction in one breath. “Michael Cohen wants to get a pardon. Michael Cohen wants to get back into the good graces of Donald Trump. Michael Cohen wants to start making money, living the lifestyle, and wipe out the past,” he said. His sources told him months ago that Trump and Cohen were talking directly and that Cohen had been inside the White House — back when the media treated the reconciliation as unthinkable. Parnas keeps receipts. “He never deletes his text messages. I even have the last text message, last week, where he texted me: let’s be friends.”The mechanics matter. Trump cannot pardon a New York state conviction — his only road out runs through appeal, and an appeal needs the star witness recanting. Cohen supplied exactly that in January, claiming Alvin Bragg and Letitia James “pressured and coerced” his testimony. Shalev read the WABC arrangement against that timeline: a weekend slot now — Andrew Cuomo’s chair, while the disgraced ex-governor summers — with Catsimatidis dangling a five-day week “down the line.” Meaning, Shalev said, “if you come through with Donald Trump and you help him erase his criminal record, we will then let you have the five days a week.” Parnas didn’t treat it as a theory: “It’s not even a read. That’s exactly what’s going on.”Leonard traced the deal to its origin — a document. After Cohen told an interviewer he had never heard Jeffrey Epstein’s name, one of her Substack readers surfaced an email from Cohen’s own lawyers proposing a Rule 35 motion: Cohen, already in prison, offering to trade information for a sentence reduction. “The information he had was information about Epstein and Donald Trump,” Leonard said. The man claiming ignorance had brokered the Palm Beach mansion deal that ended the Trump-Epstein friendship and, by his own later account, dropped the Katie Johnson file on Trump’s desk — with Epstein’s name on it.Then the show played Cohen’s 2019 congressional testimony: asked how many times Trump directed him to threaten someone, Cohen answered, “probably 500 times over the ten years.” Shalev added his own entry to that ledger: “He threatened all of us. He threatened me with choking.” Parnas filled in the pedigree — a childhood around the El Caribe, the Brooklyn club run by Cohen’s uncle and frequented by five mafia families and Russian godfather Marat Balagula — and named the succession: Roy Cohn, then Michael Cohen, then Rudy Giuliani, and now Cohen again. Trump always replaces the fixer. The fixer always comes back.Where does it go? Parnas called WABC a test run. The endgame is bigger: Cohen berating Democrats on national television — Fox, if Trump gets his wish — building toward what Parnas described as the grand-reunion interview, a pay-per-view reconciliation. The station is already rehearsing the format. Giuliani held a WABC show until election denial got him fired. Anthony Weiner holds weekends. Roger Stone appears on the roster. Cohen inherits Cuomo’s chair. A rogues gallery, assembled by the one New York billionaire who phones the White House before making a hire.The panel closed on the cost of covering it. Leonard described a month of coordinated attacks — fabricated websites, invented recordings, an obsessive account working her name “day and night” — that drove her to file FBI and IC3 reports. Shalev, called a Nazi despite a grandmother who survived the Holocaust, named the pattern from experience: get over the target and the institutional pushback arrives, dressed as something else. Parnas reported the same disruption across Substack — accounts bleeding subscribers, billing failures, chaos — four months before an election. The people reading the Epstein files are under attack; the man who offered to sell what he knew about the files just got a microphone.Parnas promised the story doesn’t rest. He’s finishing an investigation into mega-donor money flowing through super PACs into democratic-socialist campaigns — foreign money included — and tracking special prosecutor Joe diGenova’s Southern District of Florida operation, which he warns will produce indictments aimed at Obama, Brennan, Comey and Clapper. And he opened a public campaign for a seat on Cohen’s new show. Equal time. On the record. With the texts.Cohen swore Trump directed the crimes. He now sells the story that prosecutors directed him. Shalev’s advice ran the other way from the hype: ratings rule New York radio, and a show nobody hears dies fast. Spend your attention on the people reading the files — not on the man who offered to sell them.Thank you Amy Gabrielle, LC - Silence is Complicity, Robin Payes, Soso's World, Noble Blend, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas and Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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The Scheduler Who Kept the Line Open: Groff Connected Trump and Epstein Multiple Times
3w ago00:35:40Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgLesley Groff spent her deposition insisting she never knew what she was scheduling. Then she scheduled the one thing that matters. On Tuesday’s Narativ Live special, Zev Shalev walked the Gates and Groff transcripts with attorney Ann P. Mitchell of Notes from the Front and investigative writer Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer — each bringing a different toolkit: Mitchell the legal read, Leonard the deep work inside the files.The line that never went deadFor a decade, Donald Trump has sold a story: he and Jeffrey Epstein fell out years ago, he threw him out of Mar-a-Lago, they never spoke again. Groff, Epstein’s executive assistant of roughly twenty years, contradicted it under oath. Asked how often she connected the two men by phone, she answered “once a quarter, maybe, or twice” — regular calls the panel read as stretching across roughly ten years and, they believe, to the 2016 election. Groff couldn’t recall when they stopped. For Shalev, this was the night’s headline. “I’ve been trying to prove that for ten years,” he said, “and there she goes just saying they’re still friends all the way to 2016.”Mitchell supplied the legal mechanics of how Trump keeps his hands clean: he doesn’t put things in writing, so the contact runs assistant-to-assistant, with intermediaries — Steve Bannon among the names she cited — carrying messages between the two men. That structure, she argued, gives Trump the plausible deniability to claim he and Epstein never spoke directly while a communication conduit ran the whole time.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL
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Epstein's Zorro Network: What the Towers Were For
3w ago00:15:27Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgFor years, the microwave dishes on the mesas above Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico ranch were a mystery that everyone filled with theory — a spy-grade rig, a military-grade encrypted relay, a CIA or Mossad line wired into the nuclear labs on either side of the property. The towers were real. The explanations were guesses. Nobody had the documents. On Tuesday’s Narativ Live, Zev Shalev laid out the ones Narativ found, and replaced the speculation with a paper trail — joined by New Mexico broadcaster Eddie Aragon, who knows the hardware and the high desert, for an expert read on what the findings mean.What Narativ foundThe anchor is a wire. On October 27, 2016, $41,131.61 left a Deutsche Bank account in St. Thomas and landed at a SunTrust account in Georgia belonging to Future Technologies Venture, LLC — a commercial network integrator, not a front. Its director of business development, Chris Cappiello, spent 2016 trading emails with Epstein’s money man, Richard Kahn, and the ranch manager, Brice Gordon, under a single subject line: “ZDC Microwave Link.”The job was connectivity, and the reason it was hard is geography. High-speed fiber could be landed at exactly one place near the ranch — the top of Sandia Crest, a 10,620-foot peak 26.8 miles from Epstein’s front door. Fiber to the ranch itself did not exist and was not coming. So Future Technologies strung a chain of commercial DragonWave radios down off the mountain — crest to ranch tower, ranch tower to main house, main house to lodge — and engineered the link to a full gigabit. Gordon confirmed it was finished on September 26, 2016. The Federal Communications Commission granted Zorro Development five licenses to run it.That detail collapses the spy-rig myth. The equipment was ordinary, off-the-shelf gear from a commercial vendor, carrying the ranch’s data because no carrier would run a line that far into the desert. The hardware was nothing exotic, but why go to these lengths to install high bandwidth internet to a sleepy horse farm occupied for 45 days a year.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL
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FiveStack: 5 Stories That Reveal The Foreign Interests In American Politics
3w ago00:34:37Tap to summarizeToday’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Zev Shalev and Dean Blundell ran an abbreviated FiveStack on Tuesday, and the countdown kept arriving at the same place. A housing bill held hostage. A loyalist purging the spies. Two Epstein enablers pleading ignorance. A primary night soaked in foreign money. An eleven-day trillionaire. By the close, Shalev named the thread out loud: there wasn’t a single story on the board that wasn’t guided by the interests of a foreign government.TODAY’s Blindspot from GroundNews.comToday’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.5️⃣ The Eleven-Day TrillionaireEleven days after SpaceX went public and made him the first trillionaire in history, Elon Musk fell back under the line — a market selloff of roughly $363 billion, with SpaceX down again to about $156 the day of the show. Blundell relayed what a hedge-fund friend told him over dinner: they turned away clients who wanted in. The reason was the valuation — near $1.77 trillion against a single real customer, the United States government, and almost no runway to grow into the number. “Valuation is b******t,” Shalev said. The richer point underneath: the man whose net worth swings a third of a trillion dollars in a week, with Tesla, X, Grok and $1.8 billion in crypto all lashed to the same mast, still owns the country’s only ride to orbit.4️⃣ Mamdani’s Night, and AIPAC’sZohran Mamdani went three-for-three on his House endorsements, with Brad Lander burying Rep. Dan Goldman by thirty points. Shalev and Blundell read the result as a repudiation of AIPAC’s grip on who gets elected — and then refused the easy version of the story. Blundell drew the hard line: be as anti-Netanyahu, anti-Ben-Gvir, anti-Smotrich, anti-AIPAC as the facts demand, but the anti-Israel and antisemitic register running through some of the victory speeches visits the pain elsewhere, on a community that accounts for a fraction of the population and the majority of religious hate crimes. Shalev, born in Israel, separated anti-Zionism used as a proxy from legitimate criticism, and warned that candidates who win the primary on that register get crushed in the general — handing Republicans the seats.3️⃣ The Target and the SchedulerThe House Oversight Committee released the Gates and Groff transcripts. Bill Gates described being worked for blackmail over affairs with two Russian women — set-ups, in Narativ’s reading, that Epstein engineered — and staying in the circle anyway, claiming he’d “heard” Epstein was a sex offender but never looked it up. Shalev and Blundell didn’t buy it from the man who built a search engine. Lesley Groff, Epstein’s scheduler of nearly two decades, testified she never knew what she was scheduling — while confirming she booked calls with Donald Trump up to the election. Shalev’s verdict on the “I didn’t know” defense was flat: she knew.2️⃣ Who Benefits From Firing the CounterterroristsBill Pulte — the man who ran the FHFA machine that produced criminal referrals against Trump’s enemies — was sworn in as acting Director of National Intelligence on Friday and immediately began gutting the place: six intelligence officials fired, 45 detailees sent home, the counterterrorism and counterintelligence centers on the block for transfer or dismantling. Zev asked who benefits from firing counterterrorists. “Terrorists,” Dean answered. The show’s read: Pulte isn’t there to sharpen American intelligence. He’s there to manufacture confusion and cover into November — the same destination as the SAVE Act and the voter rolls.1️⃣ The Hostage StandoffThe bill that started the show is the one that may decide it. A bipartisan housing measure — 85–5 in the Senate, 358–32 in the House — sat ready for signature Tuesday morning. Trump canceled the signing until Congress passes the SAVE Act, the proof-of-citizenship and voter-ID bill that Narativ has reported could strip 100 to 150 million Americans of the ballot. Trump turned up at Thune’s lunch with Senate Republicans to force it. As the show aired, the outcome of that confrontation was still landing. The framing was not: a president sacrificing the country’s homes to secure the vote against its people.THE PATTERNPull the thread through all five and the same hand keeps surfacing — foreign, hidden, and closer to the center than any of these stories admit. “Everything is tied to foreign intelligence,” Shalev said in his close. “There’s just not a single story we can look at today that isn’t guided by the forces of a foreign government.” Not left, not right. Power protecting itself, and barely bothering to hide it.Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.Thank you LC - Silence is Complicity, Noble Blend, Lori Modafferi, 🇨🇦 Natalie Woodn’t 🇨🇦, Gretchen Theodorakis, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dean Blundell! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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The First Lady Deportation Scandal: What did Melania Trump know about Amanda Ungaro's Capture and When Did She Know It?
3w ago00:53:33Tap to summarizeAmanda Ungaro spent three and a half months in ICE custody before she asked a judge to deport her to Brazil — not because she’d done anything, she says, but because she wanted out of the facilities. On Narativ Live, in her first long on-camera interview, she laid out who she believes put her there: Paolo Zampolli, the man she calls the father of her child, the model scout credited with introducing Melania to Donald Trump, and the president’s longest-running friend.That is where a custody fight becomes a national-security story.The setup. Zampolli, by Ungaro’s account, kept her for two decades without easy access to her own passport. When she finally left him, she says, a custody battle over their son turned vicious — and charges followed, including an allegation she’d faked a medical license. She denies it. Zev’s read, laid out on the show: the charges were a pretext to mark her as a criminal so ICE could remove her. Ten officers came in the morning. She lost the custody fight, lost the country, and now sits in Brazil while Zampolli — appointed by Trump to an “ambassador for global partnerships” role — stays close to the First Lady. Ungaro calls him “Melania’s shadow.”The question Melania won’t answer. Ungaro says she appealed directly to the First Lady, who acted shocked and then did nothing. Zev’s point landed flat and hard: one phone call to Homeland Security from Melania Trump could have ended the detention in minutes. It never came. So either the First Lady let her self-described best friend be deported, or she had a reason to want her gone. Ungaro and Melania traveled the same road — models pulled out of Brazil and Slovakia through the same agency pipeline that Ellie Leonard describes as modeling at the front and something darker behind it.The Russians in the frame. Zev’s investigation, as he described it, found Zampolli’s orbit thick with Kremlin-linked figures — three people he ties to Russia’s FSB, a woman named Svetlana Pozhidaevawho also worked for Jeffrey Epstein, and Sergei Belyakov , a former Russian deputy economics minister Zev calls Epstein’s “Russian handler,” who signed off on one of their U.S. visas. A sports envoy and a Dominican Republic posting, Zev argued, are thin cover for an intelligence cell parked inside the United Nations, moving people on diplomatic passports. Parnas, who lived inside Trump’s world as the operator sent to “do the dirty work,” said he never heard Zampolli’s name in those rooms — but he remembers the era, the Miami–New York corridor, and the women being moved through it.The pipeline. Leonard walked through the machinery: Jean-Luc Brunel’s MC2 agency as a front to bring girls into the country, fake receipts to convince Epstein the agency earned its keep when it never turned a real dollar, and the O-1 “Einstein” visa used to import them — Epstein himself signing off, insisting everyone arrive “legally.” She cited the unredacted Maritza Vasquez deposition naming girls of 13, 14 and 15 out of Brazil, and the people who ran the visa program and, she notes, still work in it. She pointed to a model brought in at 14 though listed as 18, escaped, retrieved, groomed. And she pointed at the money: the JP Morgan litigation in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where investigators found 134 accounts opened for Eastern European girls — funded by Epstein, drained by no one but him. Parnas filled in the period detail that makes it all possible: pre-9/11, he says, a real U.S. passport went for $10,000.The survivors’ revolt. The night’s second break came from Parnas. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book reportedly draws on audio from a secured room — transcripts of JD Vance and the FBI director weighing the Insurrection Act, Parnas says, around the question of how to bury the Epstein files and shield Trump, at the same stretch when Todd Blanche was set to meet Ghislaine Maxwell before her transfer. More than a dozen survivors, led by Lisa Phillips, signed a statement after learning the material had been held for a book rather than handed to investigators. Leonard’s timeline cuts to the bone: if the reporters had the tapes shortly after the meeting, that knowledge existed before Maxwell got her proffer and was moved. “Their trauma is not content,” the survivors wrote. “The truth must come out now.”Zev kept the frame steady all hour: this is what independent reporting catches that the legacy press sits on — and what it costs the people waiting for the truth. A part two is coming, on Ungaro, on Zampolli, and on the intimidation campaign the three of them say is now running against them on social media.Editor’s note: The claims about Zampolli, the Trumps, and the figures named above were made by Ungaro, Parnas, Leonard, and in Narativ’s reporting; Narativ has not independently corroborated every one. Melania Trump has publicly denied any relationship with Epstein. Those named have not responded.Subscribe to Narativ for the rest of this investigation — part two lands next week.Thank you Dana DuBois, Cat: Poli-Psych, Lyudmila and Daniel, Cheech Previti, Caro Henry, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas and Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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Exclusive: Melania's Friend Knew How She Really Met Trump. Then the White House Deported Her.
Jun 1200:22:00Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgAmanda Ungaro spent twenty years inside the world the Melania and Donald Trump. in her first live interview since the Trump administration deported her, she walked Zev through it — the plane, the agencies, the United Nations passport trade, and a First Lady she says watched it all happen - and did nothing to stop it. The AbandonmentFor nearly two decades, Ungaro and Zampolli were one of only two couples at Melania’s table — White House Easters, Christmases, New Years. Melania was the first to call Ungaro’s son Giovanni every birthday, 7 AM, Secret Service arriving with presents. When Ungaro was taken — ten police breaking into her Miami home in an arrest she says Zampolli orchestrated through an ICE contact who has since been promoted — she got word to the First Lady and asked for help. “She looked like she was in shock, but she didn’t do anything,” Ungaro said. Three and a half months in detention. A prosecutor who tried twice to convert it into prison time; an email found by her son in which Zampolli wrote she should serve six years. “She knows me since I’m 18 years old. She knows who Paolo is. For me, it’s done. She lost her values.”The AgreementThe interview’s most consequential thread ran through the East Wing. Zampolli’s claim to fame — that he introduced Melania to Donald Trump in 1998 — is, Ungaro said, a story he maintains by arrangement. “The investigators, they have proof it was Jeffrey Epstein” who made the introduction, she said. Zampolli’s reward for keeping the official version alive: access. He is close to Melania, not Trump — “they text each other all the time.” He asked the First Lady for an ambassadorship — Paris, London, or Rome — but, as Ungaro put it, a man like Zampolli could never pass a security clearance. The consolation prize was Special Envoy for Global Partnerships, a title with no apparent duties beyond travel and photographs with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. When Melania made her extraordinary unprompted statement in April denying any relationship with Epstein, Ungaro believes the First Lady was preempting her — responding to a post Ungaro had put online days earlier.The Epstein files provides several documents that bolster the claims that it was Melania Jeffrey Epstein, not Zampolli, who introduced Melania to Donald Trump The PlaneUngaro was 16, a working model recruited out of Brazil at 13, when her agent Jean-Luc Brunel told her they’d catch “a friend’s plane” to a New York job. She boarded Epstein’s 727 and counted close to thirty girls — 14, 15, 16 years old, sitting on laps, worked by Ghislaine Maxwell “like best friends.” “They don’t look like models,” she told Brunel. “They look like students.” When they landed in New Jersey, Brunel tossed her a small bag and told her to put it in her purse. She realized it was drugs and threw it back. He threw it again. She threw it back again. She never saw Epstein after that day — but her name was on the manifest the DOJ released in 2021, beside Brunel’s.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL
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EXCLUSIVE: The Secret Facility Buried Beneath Epstein's Zorro Ranch
Jun 1100:00:31Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgSomebody carved a hole the size of 47 swimming pools out of Jeffrey Epstein’s New Mexico ranch — and the timing is the tell. According to a New York Times account cited on the show by Albuquerque radio host the Rock of Talk, Eddie Aragon of KIVA, the excavation broke ground at the end of January, the start of February this year: the same window the Epstein files were being released. Before the searches. As the documents went public. That’s when the digging started.On tonight’s Narativ Live, Zev Shalev walked Aragon through Narativ’s scientific evidence that a structure was built under Zorro Ranch in 2014-2015 and then removed the week the Epstein files were released. Aragon had once worked for the firm that laid the ranch’s original foundation — through the evidence frame by frame. The conclusion they reached isn’t that they know what was under the ground. It’s that the ground itself proves something was there, and that someone went to extraordinary expense to take it out.What the ground showsThe cut measures roughly 1.7 acres — about 76,000 square feet — and runs 20 to 25 feet deep, gauged against the 25-foot buildings beside it and confirmed by shadow analysis. That’s 155,000 cubic yards of displaced earth, the dirt volume of 47 Olympic pools, hauled out and then back in to refill the hole. It sits directly next to the main mansion, not out in the hills. A box cut, squared and leveled, on undulating high-desert terrain that doesn’t square itself.Foundations don’t go this deep, this clean, this close to the house, with the spoil staged to bury it again. The geometry reads as removal, not construction. As Aragon put it: there is no ordinary reason to dig that up like that.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL
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Sarah Kellen Told the Truth. The Next Attorney General Can Punish Her For It.
Jun 500:00:30Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgSarah Kellen sat in front of a congressional committee this week and dismantled the only version of herself the public ever knew. “I have read articles online labeling me as Ghislaine’s lieutenant,” she told the members. “That is a gross misrepresentation. I was a literal indentured slave. In fact, she even referred to me as her slave and minion.”For years Kellen has been the villain in the margins of the Epstein story — the assistant, the scheduler, the woman named alongside Maxwell in the 2007 non-prosecution agreement. Her transcript, released this week and read aloud on tonight’s Narativ Live by Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer, tells a different story. Kellen started where most of Epstein’s girls started: with nothing, and nowhere to go.She was raised, she testified, in “a religious cult of Jehovah’s Witnesses” in North Carolina, “in a faith where women did not speak unless spoken to.” At thirteen, an eighteen-year-old man began pursuing her. She dropped out of school at fifteen to marry him, did marry him at seventeen, and was carried off to Hawaii thousands of miles from everyone she knew. Three years later he served her divorce papers at an airport — she signed without a lawyer because she did not know she was allowed one — and had her excommunicated. From one day to the next, her parents, her siblings, every friend she had were forbidden to speak to her. She was twenty-one, marooned on an island, no degree, no family, no money.That is the raw material Epstein hunted. He did not have to break Sarah Kellen. Someone had already done it for him.The introduction came through a celebrity hairdresser, Frederick Fekkai, who flew her to Maui for a hair show that did not exist and assaulted her in his hotel room. Then he offered to introduce her to his friend Jeffrey Epstein, “a scout for Victoria’s Secret.” Epstein flew her to a hotel casting, told her to undress, told her to come back at four. She had a plane to catch. She figured she would never see the man again. About a year later, a coworker mentioned a wealthy couple in New York who needed an assistant. The couple was Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. “Unfortunately,” Kellen testified, “I got the job.”Ellie called the coincidence what it was on air — not a coincidence. The same man, surfacing ten months later through a different mouth, in a different city, to close the door he had left open in a Hawaii hotel room.What followed she described as indentured servitude. Twenty-five thousand dollars a year, on call every hour of every day, months at a time with no day off. “I understood the math exactly,” she told the committee. “I was being paid in part to be raped.” The abuse, she said, ran weekly and turned violent — a night in the Palm Beach gym where Epstein lowered the hurricane shutters, blasted the music so no one could hear, choked her and raped her. It continued, she testified, while he was supposedly serving his Florida sentence, by Skype, from a computer inside the Palm Beach County Stockade.And all the while she sat in the most powerful rooms on earth. A room in Cuba with Fidel Castro. Asia and Africa with Bill Clinton, including lunch at the home of the Sultan of Brunei. Princess Beatrice’s eighteenth at Windsor Castle. Across a table from Ehud Barak in Israel. “I was a silent body in a chair beside men who started and ended wars,” she said. In 2007 two FBI agents approached her and another young woman at the St. Thomas airport. Epstein told them to wait, walked over, spoke to the agents himself, came back ten minutes later and said, “Let’s go.” The agents were gone.Then the government did to her what Epstein had been doing all along. Later that same year, federal prosecutors wrote her name into Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement as a co-conspirator. No one asked her. No one questioned her. She learned her own name was in the document only after it was signed and made public. The United States branded her a criminal in a secret deal with her own abuser, and never spoke a single word to her.PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL
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Special Report: First Subpoenas Go Out in the Zorro Ranch Investigation
Jun 400:00:55Tap to summarizeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgOn Monday, New Mexico’s Epstein Truth Commission met for the first time and aimed its subpoena power. More than a dozen subpoenas are going out — to banks, to federal agencies, to law enforcement. The first focus is not a flight log or a wire transfer. It is a single email.A former Zorro Ranch staffer sent it in November 2019, three months after Jeffrey Epstein died in his Manhattan cell. Two foreign girls, the email said, strangled during fetish sex and buried in the hills on the orders of Jeffrey and Ghislaine. One Bitcoin for the proof.Narativ found that email buried in the FBI’s own released files soon after the Epstein Files were first published in compliance with the Epstein Transparency Ac. Our exclusive — The Bodies Buried at Zorro — was the first report anywhere of a logged federal tip alleging murder at the ranch. No other outlet had touched it. Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury later carried the same document to the state attorney general. Every search and every subpoena that has followed traces back to a tip the FBI chose to ignore and a document we chose to publish.The man who carried itEddy Aragon has lived with that email for six years. Albuquerque knows him as the Rock of Talk. He received the tip, recognized that whoever wrote it knew the property from the inside — the shorthand “Madam G,” the staff-only details — and walked it straight into the FBI’s Albuquerque field office, handing it to the agent who logged the intake. The Bureau dropped it into case 50D-NY-3027571 and stamped it “Pending Inactive.” Filed. Forgotten. In six years, Eddy told me tonight, not one agent ever called him back.He is blunt about what that means: without his tip, there is no state investigation, no truth commission, no subpoenas this week. He is right. The federal government had the same document and sat on it. A radio host in New Mexico did the work the FBI would not.PREMIUM SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER ANALYSIS BEYOND THE PAYWALL: What one survivor alleged happened underground at Zorro — and discover why our upcoming special report could change the investigation forever.
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Breaking News: Pam Bondi Refuses to Answer Questions at Epstein Inquiry with Ellie Leonard
May 2900:48:59Tap to summarizeThank you Hal Gill, Patris, Nick G, A Dude On The Couch, Ms. H, Pamela, and many others for tuning into my live video with Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe
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