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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It.md\"> A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs inside the dark heart of modern chess.md\"> Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs inside the dark heart of modern chess </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Secret in the walls Hidden letters reveal love, lust, scandal in 1920s Baltimore society.md\"> Secret in the walls Hidden letters reveal love, lust, scandal in 1920s Baltimore society </a>",
@ -12561,39 +12831,36 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Riding the baddest bulls made him a legend. Then one broke his neck..md\"> Riding the baddest bulls made him a legend. Then one broke his neck. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.07 Animals/2024-04-26 First S&B.md\"> 2024-04-26 First S&B </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Family Photographs That Helped Us Investigate How a University Displaced a Black Community.md\"> The Family Photographs That Helped Us Investigate How a University Displaced a Black Community </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-04-21 ⚽️ PSG - OL (4-1).md\"> 2024-04-21 ⚽️ PSG - OL (4-1) </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Frank Carone on Eric Adams’s Smash-and-Grab New York.md\"> Frank Carone on Eric Adams’s Smash-and-Grab New York </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Can a Film Star Be Too Good-Looking.md\"> Can a Film Star Be Too Good-Looking </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How climate change is turning camels into the new cows.md\"> How climate change is turning camels into the new cows </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-04-21 ⚽️ PSG - OL (4-1).md\"> 2024-04-21 ⚽️ PSG - OL (4-1) </a>"
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Insulin Empire Edward Ongweso Jr. & Athena Sofides.md\"> The Insulin Empire Edward Ongweso Jr. & Athena Sofides </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Scenes From a MAGA Meltdown Inside the “America First” Movement’s War Over Democracy.md\"> Scenes From a MAGA Meltdown Inside the “America First” Movement’s War Over Democracy </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/For the Women Who Accused the Trump Campaign of Harassment, It’s Been More Harassment.md\"> For the Women Who Accused the Trump Campaign of Harassment, It’s Been More Harassment </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Segregation Academies Still Operate Across the South. One Town Grapples With Its Divided Schools..md\"> Segregation Academies Still Operate Across the South. One Town Grapples With Its Divided Schools. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It.md\"> A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Toxic Gaslighting How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe.md\"> Toxic Gaslighting How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The elections next door Mexico’s cartels pick candidates, kill rivals.md\"> The elections next door Mexico’s cartels pick candidates, kill rivals </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The true story behind the kid who went 1940s viral for his week at the cinemas in San Francisco - Gazetteer SF.md\"> The true story behind the kid who went 1940s viral for his week at the cinemas in San Francisco - Gazetteer SF </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The elections next door Mexico’s cartels pick candidates, kill rivals.md\"> The elections next door Mexico’s cartels pick candidates, kill rivals </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/52,529 guns once owned by police departments have been later used in crimes, new data finds.md\"> 52,529 guns once owned by police departments have been later used in crimes, new data finds </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs inside the dark heart of modern chess.md\"> Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs inside the dark heart of modern chess </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs inside the dark heart of modern chess.md\"> Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs inside the dark heart of modern chess </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs inside the dark heart of modern chess.md\"> Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs inside the dark heart of modern chess </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.05 Vinyls/Actual Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022) (by Fred again - 2022).md\"> Actual Life 3 (January 1 - September 9 2022) (by Fred again - 2022) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/IRS Audit of Trump Could Cost Former President More Than $100 Million.md\"> IRS Audit of Trump Could Cost Former President More Than $100 Million </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Former Far-Right Hard-Liner Says Billionaires Are Using School Board Races to Sow Distrust in Public Education.md\"> Former Far-Right Hard-Liner Says Billionaires Are Using School Board Races to Sow Distrust in Public Education </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A 19-year-old Stanford phenom is blazing a new trail from Japan to the majors.md\"> A 19-year-old Stanford phenom is blazing a new trail from Japan to the majors </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Secret in the walls Hidden letters reveal love, lust, scandal in 1920s Baltimore society.md\"> Secret in the walls Hidden letters reveal love, lust, scandal in 1920s Baltimore society </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The professor, the caregiver and the missing $30 million.md\"> The professor, the caregiver and the missing $30 million </a>",
@ -12617,36 +12884,13 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Family Photographs That Helped Us Investigate How a University Displaced a Black Community.md\"> The Family Photographs That Helped Us Investigate How a University Displaced a Black Community </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Frank Carone on Eric Adams’s Smash-and-Grab New York.md\"> Frank Carone on Eric Adams’s Smash-and-Grab New York </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The soft life why millennials are quitting the rat race.md\"> The soft life why millennials are quitting the rat race </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The last days of Boston Market.md\"> The last days of Boston Market </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Welcome to Northwestern University at Stateville.md\"> Welcome to Northwestern University at Stateville </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Frank Carone on Eric Adams’s Smash-and-Grab New York.md\"> Frank Carone on Eric Adams’s Smash-and-Grab New York </a>"
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@ -12749,63 +12990,63 @@
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],
"Removed Tags from":[
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"title":"🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out exhibitions at the [Kunsthaus](https://www.kunsthaus.ch/en/) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-05-15",
"rowNumber":93
},
{
"title":":hibiscus: :canned_food: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out [FOOD ZURICH - MEHR ALS EIN FESTIVAL](https://www.foodzurich.com/de/) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-06-01",
"rowNumber":106
},
{
"title":"🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out exhibitions at the [Rietberg](https://rietberg.ch/en/) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-06-15",
"rowNumber":95
"rowNumber":96
},
{
"title":":hibiscus: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Zürich Pride Festival %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-06-15",
"rowNumber":121
"rowNumber":123
},
{
"title":":sunny: :movie_camera: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out programmation of the [Zurich's finest open-air cinema | Allianz Cinema -](https://zuerich.allianzcinema.ch/en) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-07-01",
"rowNumber":107
"rowNumber":109
},
{
"title":":sunny: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Seenachtfest Rapperswil-Jona %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-08-01",
"rowNumber":124
"rowNumber":126
},
{
"title":":sunny: :runner: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out tickets to Weltklasse Zürich %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-08-01",
"rowNumber":132
"rowNumber":134
},
{
"title":":sunny: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Street Parade %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-08-10",
"rowNumber":122
"rowNumber":124
},
{
"title":"🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out exhibitions at the [Kunsthaus](https://www.kunsthaus.ch/en/) %%done_del%%",
"title":":maple_leaf: :movie_camera: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Zürich Film Festival %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-09-15",
"rowNumber":108
"rowNumber":110
},
{
"title":":maple_leaf: :wine_glass: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Zürich’s Wine festival ([ZWF - Zurich Wine Festival](https://zurichwinefestival.ch/)) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-09-25",
"rowNumber":109
"rowNumber":111
},
{
"title":":snowflake:🎭 [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out floating theatre ([Herzlich willkommen!](http://herzbaracke.ch/)) %%done_del%%",
@ -869,42 +849,47 @@
{
"title":":maple_leaf: :wine_glass: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out [Discover the Excitement of EXPOVINA Wine Events | Join Us at Weinschiffe, Primavera, and Wine Trophy | EXPOVINA](https://expovina.ch/en-ch/) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-10-15",
"rowNumber":110
"rowNumber":112
},
{
"title":":snowflake: :person_in_steamy_room: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out [Sauna Cubes at Strandbad Küsnacht — Strandbadsauna](https://www.strandbadsauna.ch/home-eng) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-11-15",
"rowNumber":102
"rowNumber":103
},
{
"title":":christmas_tree: :cocktail: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out pop-up bars ([Pop-ups at Christmas | zuerich.com](https://www.zuerich.com/en/visit/christmas-in-zurich/pop-ups)) %%done_del%%",
"title":":hibiscus: :fork_and_knife: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Book a restaurant with terrace for the season: [[Albishaus]], [[Restaurant Boldern]], [[Zur Buech]], [[Jardin Zürichberg]], [[Bistro Rigiblick]], [[Portofino am See]], [[La Réserve|La Muña]] %%done_del%%",
"time":"2025-05-01",
"rowNumber":104
"rowNumber":105
},
{
"title":":hibiscus: :canned_food: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out [FOOD ZURICH - MEHR ALS EIN FESTIVAL](https://www.foodzurich.com/de/) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2025-06-01",
"rowNumber":107
}
],
"03.02 Travels/Geneva.md":[
@ -922,15 +907,15 @@
}
],
"03.02 Travels/@Italy.md":[
{
"title":":sunny: :racehorse: [[@Italy|🇮🇹]]: Check out the [Palio di Siena](https://www.comune.siena.it/node/135) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-05-15",
"rowNumber":87
},
{
"title":":maple_leaf: :canned_food: [[@Italy|🇮🇹]]: Check out the [International White Truffle Fair - Find out all the events](https://www.fieradeltartufo.org/en/) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-09-18",
"rowNumber":81
},
{
"title":":sunny: :racehorse: [[@Italy|🇮🇹]]: Check out the [Palio di Siena](https://www.comune.siena.it/node/135) %%done_del%%",
"time":"2025-05-15",
"rowNumber":87
}
],
"03.02 Travels/@@Travels.md":[
@ -948,7 +933,7 @@
"01.08 Garden/@Plants.md":[
{
"title":":potted_plant: [[@Plants|Plants]]: Buy fertilizer for the season %%done_del%%",
"time":"2024-05-31",
"time":"2024-06-30",
"rowNumber":111
}
],
@ -1018,11 +1003,6 @@
}
],
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-04-29.md":[
{
"title":"09:10 :fork_and_knife: [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]: Book [[Bistro Rigiblick]]",
"time":"2024-05-30",
"rowNumber":103
},
{
"title":"09:11 :fork_and_knife: [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]: Book [[Jardin Zürichberg]]",
# 52,529 guns once owned by police departments have been later used in crimes, new data finds
Candace Leslie was leaving church when she got the call she will never forget.
"All I heard was his girlfriend yelling in the phone, and she was like, 'Cameron! Cameron! ... He won't get up. He won't get up!'"
Someone shot Leslie's son four times that Sunday evening in September 2021 outside his new apartment on Indianapolis's northeast side.
[](https://www.cbsnews.com/police-selling-guns/#component-1eb905c4-dbea-4fb8-94d0-c10add98d81a)
Cameron Brown was 19. He was working at FedEx. He loved fishing with his grandfather and was trying to follow his footsteps into the U.S. Army.
Brown died at the scene.
"I just felt numb. I felt kind of disoriented," Leslie said, remembering the chaos, the yellow police tape, and officers scouring the scene.
Police recovered at least one gun. It was a Glock pistol. Unbeknownst to investigators at the time, the gun once served as a law enforcement duty weapon, carried by a sheriff's deputy more than 2,000 miles away in California.
According to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Glock was one of at least 52,529 police guns that have turned up at crime scenes since 2006, the earliest year provided. While that tally includes guns [lost by or stolen from police](https://www.thetrace.org/2018/11/lost-and-stolen-police-guns/), many of the firearms were released back into the market by the very law enforcement agencies sworn to protect the public.
CBS News, in partnership with [The Trace](https://www.thetrace.org/2024/05/police-guns-sale-trade-used-crime-data/) and [Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting](https://revealnews.org/article/shot-by-a-civilian-wielding-a-police-gun/), reviewed records from hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the United States and found that many had routinely resold or traded in their used duty weapons -- a practice that has sent thousands of guns into the hands of criminals.
Law enforcement resold guns to firearms dealers for discounts on new equipment and, in some cases, directly to their own officers, records show. Some of the guns were later involved in shootings, domestic violence incidents, and other violent crimes.
Candace Leslie holds a photo of her late son, Cameron Brown in Indianapolis. Leslie lost her son Cameron in 2021 after he was shot and killed near his apartment complex in Indianapolis. Lee Klafczynski for The Trace
A Kentucky State Police pistol sold to a retiring detective ended up in Buffalo, New York, where federal agents executing a search warrant on a murder suspect in 2019 found the gun in a backpack alongside heroin and a bulletproof vest. In another case in Indianapolis in 2021, police seized a former Iowa State Patrol pistol from a man while arresting him for allegedly choking a woman. The gun was fully loaded with a round in the chamber.
Reporters surveyed state and local law enforcement agencies and found that at least 145 of them had resold guns on at least one occasion between 2006 and 2024. That's about 90 percent of the more than 160 agencies that responded.
### Law enforcement agencies that have sold or traded guns
Records from 67 agencies showed they had collectively resold more than 87,000 firearms over the past two decades. That figure is likely a significant undercount, however, because many agencies' records were incomplete or heavily redacted.
Scot Thomasson, a former ATF division chief who is now a consultant for SafeGunLock, a District of Columbia-based company, believes police departments that resell weapons are violating their obligation to protect the public. "Taxpayers are buying firearms that are then resold for pennies on the dollar and ultimately ending up in criminals' hands," Thomasson said. "It is absolutely ridiculous."
Many police departments resold their weapons while [holding buyback events](https://www.thetrace.org/2023/04/do-gun-buybacks-work-research-data/), which they say are important to pull guns off the street.
The Philadelphia City Council boasts on its website of having collected 825 guns in buybacks since 2021. But records show that the Philadelphia Police resold at least 886 guns over the past two decades, including 85 firearms between 2021 and 2022.
In some cases, departments added more guns to the marketplace than they removed.
The Newark Police Department in New Jersey staged a buyback in 2021, offering the public up to $250 for each firearm turned over. The event netted 146 guns. "Without question, 146 fewer firearms on our streets means less gun violence, fewer gun violence victims, and less risk of suicide or death," the city's public safety director said in a [YouTube post](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7KNmfMf4bA) celebrating the haul.
But five years earlier, the Newark Police resold more than five times that number of guns -- nearly 1,000. One of those weapons surfaced in Pittsburgh, where police seized it from a convicted felon after he allegedly squeezed off more than a dozen shots in a neighborhood and then led officers on a foot chase.
A Newark Police spokesperson said the guns had been traded in as a cost-saving measure under a previous administration and that the department currently "has no plans to upgrade its service weapons."
The Glock pistol involved in the killing of Cameron Brown in Indianapolis was one of more than 600 guns resold by the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Office in Modesto, California, between March 2019 and August 2023, records show. Another weapon from the same agency found its way to Texas, where San Antonio police recovered it in connection with the shooting of a 15-year-old in 2020.
In an interview with CBS News, Stanislaus County Sheriff Jeff Dirkse defended the practice of reselling weapons as necessary to reduce the cost of new equipment. "You're talking several hundred thousand dollars every few years and that's all taxpayer money," he said. "It's just a cost-benefit to the department."
Candace Leslie and her parents at her son Cameron's grave at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis. Leslie lost her son Cameron in 2021 after he was shot and killed near his apartment complex in Indianapolis. Lee Klafczynski for The Trace
Dirkse expressed sympathy to Brown's family but said his agency was not responsible for the teenager's killing. "Whoever did this, if he didn't acquire that gun, he's probably going to go acquire another one," Dirkse said. "My organization had nothing to do with it."
When a reporter told Brown's family that the gun involved in his death once belonged to a sheriff's office, they were at first in disbelief and then angry.
"One more gun on the street actually changed our lives forever," said Brown's grandmother, Maria Leslie, a pastor. "We're missing a piece of our puzzle."
Now, the family wants police to stop selling their weapons.
"I'm losing trust in the people who're supposed to protect and serve us," said Leslie, Brown's mother. "There's no reason for police firearms to be in the hands of young teenagers."
Indianapolis Police Chief Christopher Bailey told CBS News that his agency has historically traded in its weapons, but he would consider changing that policy in light of Brown's death. "I don't want any weapon that we owned to end up being used violently against another person," he said.
Brown's killing remains unsolved.
## A rift in law enforcement
For decades, the ATF has worked on behalf of state and local law enforcement to [trace recovered crime guns](https://www.thetrace.org/2016/07/how-a-gun-trace-works-atf-ffl/) to their original owners, providing fresh leads to investigators and insights into firearms trafficking.
ATF data obtained by Reveal shows that between 2006 and 2021, the number of crime guns traced to law enforcement agencies each year more than doubled, from about 2,200 to more than 4,500. On average, more than 3,200 duty weapons were recovered at crime scenes annually over that 16-year period.
Records detailing some of the traces conducted between 2013 and 2017 indicate that the guns previously belonged to more than 800 different agencies, ranging from rural sheriff's offices to police departments in the country's largest cities.
### 52,529 crime guns traced to law enforcement
Even more granular trace information used to be publicly available, making it easier for reporters to hold police accountable for their resale practices. The Washington Post in 1999 analyzed ATF data and [identified 107 crimes](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/11/12/recycled-dc-police-guns-tied-to-crimes/f75ad9b4-263a-43d1-aed9-d2e1e4a30fc1/) linked to former District of Columbia Police guns. That same year, a similar investigation by [CBS News revealed](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/caught-in-the-gun-maze/) more than 3,000 police guns had been connected to crimes -- including nearly 300 homicides -- since 1990.
The Tiahrt Amendment, passed by Congress in 2003 and named after the lawmaker who introduced it, now bars the ATF from disclosing most trace information to the public. In 2017, Reveal sued the ATF for refusing to respond to a public records request for statistical data on recovered police guns. The agency pushed back, citing Tiahrt. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals [decided in favor](https://www.thetrace.org/2020/12/atf-trace-data-gun-reveal-lawsuit-foia-federal-government/) of Reveal in 2020, ruling that the request fit within an exception to Tiahrt that allows the ATF to release statistical information.
### Law enforcement agencies' whose guns traced to crime scenes
Federal law enforcement agencies are legally required to destroy their used guns, but there's no similar mandate for state and local agencies. As a result, decisions about what to do with old guns are left up to state and local leaders and police chiefs, who've taken a variety of stances.
Public safety concerns prompted Seattle Police to stop trading in handguns around 2016. "If we're selling them out, we just don't know where those guns could end up," Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz said. "We don't want to contribute to the problem."
When CBS News Minnesota showed our findings to Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara, he said that his agency would stop reselling its guns. "I don't want us to be in a position where a weapon that was once in service for the police department here is then winding up used in a crime, or in an act of violence against a person, or even to shoot a police officer," O'Hara said. "So going forward, we're not going to be selling any weapons at all."
The Seattle Police Department uses machines like this to melt their used guns down. They are used to make construction materials like rebar. Ryan Beard / CBS News
Law enforcement agencies often trade their used weapons to a gun dealer for credit toward their next purchase, similar to how cell phone companies offer discounts on new phones in exchange for previous models.
William Brooks, a board member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said resales are essential for many departments to afford weapons upgrades. "Decisions about trading in old police service weapons should be left to individual communities and their police chiefs," he said. "We believe that, should a community decide to destroy old weapons when new ones are purchased, they should commit just as fervently to fully funding new firearm purchases when their police chiefs call for them."
Once sold by a department, weapons enter a secondary market where they can be resold to members of the public or other dealers. By the time they turn up at crime scenes, the guns may have been stolen, traded, or resold multiple times with little documentation. They sometimes still have the department's name stamped on the side.
Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin and author of "The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing," said trade-ins allow police to avoid public scrutiny, as they can purchase new guns without having to obtain budgetary approval from city leaders.
"There are certainly other mechanisms to acquire weapons. You can get a line item in the budget with the city, but that could come with all kinds of political hurdles to jump through," Sierra-Arévalo said. "So I'm not surprised that when someone shows up and says they can help the police skip all of that, the police go with that."
The Baltimore Police Department weathered public criticism in 2008 after one of its traded-in service weapons was used to murder two children as they walked home from a slumber party in Oklahoma.
At a news conference in April, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said officers are given the opportunity to purchase their duty weapons for personal use before the guns are traded in for credit. If an officer buys a gun and wants to resell it later on, they must first offer it back to the department.
"We know that there are some issues around the country," Scott said. "For BPD, we're extremely diligent about what happens when we have weapons retire."
The police department for Baltimore County -- which is separate from the Baltimore city police department -- takes a different approach. In 2013, it traded in its old guns to a firearms dealer, but under the terms of the agreement, key parts of the guns were destroyed, a spokesperson said.
"I felt throughout my entire career that police departments should not be in the business of putting more guns back out into our society," said James Johnson, who served as Baltimore County police chief from 2007 to 2017.
In 2023, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a requirement that the Sheriff's Department destroy firearms it no longer needed. Board Supervisor Janice Hahn said she hopes the decision can serve as a model for the rest of the country. "Those of us at the local level should do what we can to keep guns out of the hands of criminals," she said. "We all can wait all day long for Congress to pass common sense gun violence prevention laws."
Some police departments argued that because they were reselling to gun stores and other federally licensed gun dealers, they were not technically purveying firearms directly to members of the public.
In an email, a spokesperson for the Fort Worth Police Department, Buddy Calzada, said it would be "inaccurate" to report that the agency resells guns to the public.
He then went on to explain how the department resells guns: "In rare cases, the department has traded small quantities of firearms back to the dealer the department purchased them from and received credit for newer weapons," Calazada wrote. "It is important to note, any guns sold by a dealer are sold only to qualified buyers who have passed the Federal background checks."
Internal records show that the department resold more than 1,000 guns to two dealers in the past 10 years. The department declined an interview request.
## Appealing to gun buyers
Using sales records obtained by CBS News from dozens of police departments, reporters identified nearly 50 gun dealers whose business includes buying and reselling retired police weapons. Many are self-styled police-supply companies that also sell flashlights, handcuffs, and other tools of the law enforcement trade.
Police-supply companies that buy and sell firearms have to hold a federal gun dealer's license, which allows them to sell guns to members of the public. The license opens them up to inspections by the ATF, but [internal records show](https://www.thetrace.org/2021/05/atf-inspection-report-gun-store-ffl-violation/) that the agency has long been toothless and conciliatory, mostly issuing warnings instead of serious punishment when its inspectors find dealers breaking the law.
To encourage better practices among suppliers competing for lucrative public contracts, some California cities have passed measures to [prevent local law enforcement](https://www.thetrace.org/2023/11/california-law-enforcement-gun-stores/) from doing business with gun dealers that have been cited for serious violations during inspections. But in most of the country, there is no requirement for law enforcement to consider a dealer's compliance history when awarding contracts.
Lindsay Nichols, policy director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said police had a moral and ethical responsibility to do business only with gun dealers that follow best practices. "There are plenty of conditions that an agency could put on a gun store as a condition of receiving their weapons," she said. "There are lots of gun stores out there. You don't have to sell to any one particular business."
One of the most prolific buyers of used police guns has a long history of violating federal regulations, according to ATF inspection records [obtained by the gun control group Brady.](https://gunstoretransparency.org/)
LC Action Police Supply, based in San Jose, California, bought more than 3,000 guns from 11 different law enforcement agencies between 2005 and 2023, including the gun involved in Cameron Brown's homicide, according to records obtained by CBS News.
Over that same period, the ATF cited LC Action for 30 violations of federal firearms laws, including failing to conduct background checks and report suspicious gun sales, records show. One ATF inspector pushed for revoking LC Action's license to sell guns after the company was cited for six violations in 2005, but the recommendation was overruled by agency higher-ups.
The ATF inspected LC Action four more times between 2009 and 2019, uncovering many of the same violations. The agency allowed the company to keep its license to sell firearms.
LC Action did not respond to multiple requests for comment via phone and email. When a reporter and a photographer from CBS News Los Angeles visited the company's retail store and asked to speak with a representative, they were told to leave.
An ATF spokesperson said the agency does not comment on specific cases, but that, as a general matter, the outcome of any licensing action involving a gun dealer is dependent on the underlying facts and circumstances. The spokesperson added that the ATF's policies and procedures were designed to maximize public safety by ensuring federal law is fairly and consistently administered.
In 2021, the Biden administration ordered the ATF to [implement a zero tolerance policy](https://www.thetrace.org/2021/06/joe-biden-gun-dealer-atf-inspection-community-violence/) on lawbreaking gun dealers, a step that has led to an [increase in license revocations](https://www.thetrace.org/2022/10/atf-gun-dealer-inspection-revocation/).
Used police guns are popular among gun buyers because they're relatively inexpensive and often in good condition. They also typically have high ammunition capacities and are designed to hold large-to medium-caliber rounds.
Firearms instructor Larry Brown Jr. uses his gun during target practice at South River Gun Club Inc. in Covington, Georgia, Sunday, May 5, 2024. Alyssa Pointer for The Trace
Larry Brown Jr., a firearms instructor and the president of the [Bass Reeves Gun Club](https://www.bassreevesgc.com/) in Atlanta, said he bought a used police gun because it was already equipped with glow-in-the-dark sights and a special trigger that made it easier to shoot, saving him money on upgrades.
"The price is on point," Brown said. "Police trade-ins are typically better equipped, and better souped-up, than what I would buy new. That's what made me buy the one I have."
The demand for decommissioned police weapons has created a thriving market, with gun dealers snapping them up en masse.
"Every now and then, I'll get a call from my reps saying, 'Hey, we got a bunch of police Glock 22 trade-ins for a great price. They're all in good shape if you're interested,'" said Mark Major, the owner of [2-Swords Tactical & Defense](https://www.2-swords.com/), a gun dealer in Lithonia, Georgia. "Usually police trade-ins are kept up by the armorer in the department. They do have some scratches and rubs on them from being in a holster, but they work."
Online forums and blogs promoting the benefits of used police guns are common, and there are dozens of YouTube videos featuring gun dealers and enthusiasts showing off large shipments of the weapons to entice potential buyers.
In a video posted in April 2024 by AimSurplus, a gun dealer in Monroe, Ohio, one of the store's employees shows off a rolling cart piled high with assault weapons, as well as several boxes of pistols and shotguns -- all former police guns to be resold on its website.
"You guys love our police trade-ins," the employee says. "And why shouldn't you? They're awesome. We just got a whole truckload in."
## See what we found in cities across the U.S.
Journalists from CBS News, The Trace and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting investigated investigated what happens to local police agencies’ guns in dozens of communities we cover coast to coast. You can see all of those investigations here.
### Credits
Reporting and research: Chris Hacker, Champe Barton, Stephen Stock, Alain Stephens, Amy Corral, Nicole Vap, Will Van Sant, Olga Pierce, Pamela Kirkland, Jose Sanchez, John Kelly, Brian Maass, Chelsea Jones, Julie Watts, Kelsi Thorud, Brian New, Megan Hickey, Erika Stanish, Mike Hellgren, Tim McNicholas, Walter Smith Randolph, Christina Hager, Joe Holden, Ross Polambo, Jennifer Mayerle, Samah Assad, Scott Pham, Dilcia Mercedes, Nick Devlin, and Rachel Gold | Data Analysis: Chris Hacker | Photography and video editing: Jose Sanchez, Josh Pena and Aaron Munoz of CBS News and Lee Klafczynski and Alyssa Pointer of The Trace | Visual Design and Web Development: Grace Manthey, Aaron Munoz, Josh Pena, Thomas Craver and Doug Holly of CBS News and Selin Thomas, Gracie McKenzie and Chip Brownlee of The Trace | Editing and project leadership: Chad Cross, John Kelly and Nicole Vap of CBS News; Brian Freskos, Craig Hunter, Miles Kohrman, Samantha Storey and David Geary of The Trace; and Taki Telonidis and Kate Howard of Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting
# A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?
Last August, Lucy Letby, a thirty-three-year-old British nurse, was convicted of killing seven newborn babies and attempting to kill six others. Her murder trial, one of the longest in English history, lasted more than ten months and captivated the United Kingdom. The *Guardian*, which published more than a [hundred](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/lucy-letby) stories about the case, called her “one of the most notorious female murderers of the last century.” The collective acceptance of her guilt was absolute. “She has thrown open the door to Hell,” the *Daily Mail* wrote, “and the stench of evil overwhelms us all.”
The case galvanized the British government. The Health Secretary immediately announced an inquiry to examine how Letby’s hospital had failed to protect babies. After Letby refused to attend her sentencing hearing, the Justice Secretary said that he’d work to change the law so that defendants would be required to go to court to be sentenced. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said, “It’s cowardly that people who commit such horrendous crimes do not face their victims.”
The public conversation rushed forward without much curiosity about an incongruous aspect of the story: Letby appeared to have been a psychologically healthy and happy person. She had many close friends. Her nursing colleagues spoke highly of her care and dedication. A detective with the Cheshire police, which led the investigation, said, “This is completely unprecedented in that there doesn’t seem to be anything to say” about why Letby would kill babies. “There isn’t really anything we have found in her background that’s anything other than normal.”
The judge in her case, James Goss, acknowledged that Letby appeared to have been a “very conscientious, hard working, knowledgeable, confident and professional nurse.” But he also said that she had embarked on a “calculated and cynical campaign of child murder,” and he sentenced her to life, making her only the fourth woman in U.K. history condemned to die in prison. Although her punishment can’t be increased, she will face a second trial, this June, on an attempted-murder charge for which the jury could not reach a verdict.
Letby had worked on a struggling neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, run by the National Health Service, in the West of England, near Wales. The case centered on a cluster of seven deaths, between June, 2015, and June, 2016. All but one of the babies were premature; three of them weighed less than three pounds. No one ever saw Letby harming a child, and the coroner did not find foul play in any of the deaths. (Since her arrest, Letby has not made any public comments, and a court order has prohibited most reporting on her case. To describe her experiences, I drew from more than seven thousand pages of court transcripts, which included police interviews and text messages, and from internal hospital records that were leaked to me.)
The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four “suspicious events,” which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time, with X’s next to each suspicious event that occurred when they were on shift. Letby was the only nurse with an uninterrupted line of X’s below her name. She was the “one common denominator,” the “constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse,” one of the prosecutors, Nick Johnson, told the jury in his opening statement. “If you look at the table overall the picture is, we suggest, self-evidently obvious. It’s a process of elimination.”
But the chart didn’t account for any other factors influencing the mortality rate on the unit. Letby had become the country’s most reviled woman—“the unexpected face of evil,” as the British magazine *Prospect* put it—largely because of that unbroken line. It gave an impression of mathematical clarity and coherence, distracting from another possibility: that there had never been any crimes at all.
Since Letby was a teen-ager, she had wanted to be a nurse. “She’d had a difficult birth herself, and she was very grateful for being alive to the nurses that would have helped save her life,” her friend Dawn Howe told the BBC. An only child, Letby grew up in Hereford, a city north of Bristol. In high school, she had a group of close friends who called themselves the “miss-match family”: they were dorky and liked to play games such as Cranium and Twister. Howe described Letby as the “most kind, gentle, soft friend.” Another friend said that she was “joyful and peaceful.”
Letby was the first person in her family to go to college. She got a nursing degree from the University of Chester, in 2011, and began working on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, where she had trained as a student nurse. Chester was a hundred miles from Hereford, and her parents didn’t like her being so far away. “I feel very guilty for staying here sometimes but it’s what I want,” she told a colleague in a text message. She described the nursing team at the Countess as “like a little family.” She spent her free time with other nurses from the unit, often appearing in pictures on Facebook in flowery outfits and lip gloss, with sparkling wine in her hand and a guileless smile. She had straight blond hair, the color washing out as she aged, and she was unassumingly pretty.
The unit for newborns was built in 1974, and it was outdated and cramped. In 2012, the Countess launched a campaign to raise money to build a new one, a process that ended up taking nine years. “Neonatal intensive care has improved in recent years but requires more equipment which we have very little space for,” Stephen Brearey, the head of the unit, told the Chester *Standard*. “The risks of infection for the babies is greater, the closer they are to each other.” There were also problems with the drainage system: the pipes in both the neonatal ward and the maternity ward often leaked or were blocked, and sewage occasionally backed up into the toilets and sinks.
The staff were also overtaxed. Seven senior pediatricians, called consultants, did rounds on the unit, but only one was a neonatologist—a specialist in the care of newborns. An inquest for a newborn who died in 2014, a year before the deaths for which Letby was charged, found that doctors had inserted a breathing tube into the baby’s esophagus rather than his trachea, ignoring several indications that the tube was misplaced. “I find it surprising these signs were not realised,” the coroner said, according to the *Daily Express*. The boy’s mother told the paper that “staff shortages meant blood tests and X-rays were not assessed for seven hours and there was one doctor on duty who was splitting his time between the neonatal ward and the children’s ward.”
The N.H.S. has a totemic status in the British psyche—it’s the “closest thing the English have to a religion,” as one politician has put it. One of the last remnants of the postwar social contract, it inspires loyalty and awe even as it has increasingly broken down, partly as a result of years of underfunding. In 2015, the infant-mortality rate in England and Wales rose for the first time in a century. A survey found that two-thirds of the country’s neonatal units did not have enough medical and nursing staff. That year, the Countess treated more babies than it had in previous years, and they had, on average, lower birth weights and more complex medical needs. Letby, who lived in staff housing on the hospital grounds, was twenty-five years old and had just finished a six-month course to become qualified in neonatal intensive care. She was one of only two junior nurses on the unit with that training. “We had massive staffing issues, where people were coming in and doing extra shifts,” a senior nurse on the unit said. “It was mainly Lucy that did a lot.” She was young, single, and saving to buy a house. That year, when a friend suggested that she take some time off, Letby texted her, “Work is always my priority.”
In June, 2015, three babies died at the Countess. First, a woman with antiphospholipid syndrome, a rare disorder that can cause blood clotting, was admitted to the hospital. She was thirty-one weeks pregnant with twins, and had planned to give birth in London, so that a specialist could monitor her and the babies, but her blood pressure had quickly risen, and she had to have an emergency C-section at the Countess. The next day, Letby was asked to cover a colleague’s night shift. She was assigned one of the twins, a boy, who has been called Child A. (The court order forbade identifying the children, their parents, and some nurses and doctors.) A nursing note from the day shift said that the baby had had “no fluids running for a couple of hours,” because his umbilical catheter, a tube that delivers fluids through the abdomen, had twice been placed in the wrong position, and “doctors busy.” A junior doctor eventually put in a longline, a thin tube threaded through a vein, and Letby and another nurse gave the child fluid. Twenty minutes later, Letby and a third nurse, a few feet away, noticed that his oxygen levels were dropping and that his skin was mottled. The doctor who had inserted the longline worried that he had placed it too close to the child’s heart, and he immediately took it out. But, less than ninety minutes after Letby started her shift, the baby was dead. “It was awful,” she wrote to a colleague afterward. “He died very suddenly and unexpectedly just after handover.”
A pathologist observed that the baby had “crossed pulmonary arteries,” a structural anomaly, and there was also a “strong temporal relationship” between the insertion of the longline and the collapse. The pathologist described the cause of death as “unascertained.”
Letby was on duty again the night after Child A’s death. At around midnight, she helped the nurse who had been assigned to the surviving twin, a girl, set up her I.V. bag. About twenty-five minutes later, the baby’s skin became purple and blotchy, and her heart rate dropped. She was resuscitated and recovered. Brearey, the unit’s leader, told me that at the time he wondered if the twins had been more vulnerable because of the mother’s disorder; antibodies for it can pass through the placenta.
The next day, a mother who had been diagnosed as having a dangerous placenta condition gave birth to a baby boy who weighed one pound, twelve ounces, which was on the edge of the weight threshold that the unit was certified to treat. Within four days, the baby developed acute pneumonia. Letby was not working in the intensive-care nursery, where the baby was treated, but after the child’s oxygen alarm went off she came into the room to help. Yet the staff on the unit couldn’t save the baby. A pathologist determined that he had died of natural causes.
Several days later, a woman came to the hospital after her water broke. She was sent home and told to wait. More than twenty-four hours later, she noticed that the baby was making fewer movements inside her. “I was concerned for infection because I hadn’t been given any antibiotics,” she said later. She returned to the hospital, but she still wasn’t given antibiotics. She felt “forgotten by the staff, really,” she said. Sixty hours after her water broke, she had a C-section. The baby, a girl who was dusky and limp when she was born, should have been treated with antibiotics immediately, doctors later acknowledged, but nearly four hours passed before she was given the medication. The next night, the baby’s oxygen alarm went off. “Called Staff Nurse Letby to help,” a nurse wrote. The baby continued to deteriorate throughout the night and could not be revived. A pathologist found pneumonia in the baby’s lungs and wrote that the infection was likely present at birth.
“We lost \[her\],” Letby texted a close friend I’ll call Margaret, a shift leader on the unit. Margaret had mentored Letby when she was a student training on the ward.
“What!!!!! But she was improving,” Margaret replied. “What happened? Wanna chat? I can’t believe you were on again. You’re having such a tough time.”
Letby told Margaret that the circumstances of the death might be investigated.
“What, the delay in treatment?”
“Just overall,” she said. “And reviewing what antibiotics she was on, etc., if it is sepsis.” Letby wrote that she was still in shock. “Feel a bit numb.”
“Oh hun, you need a break,” Margaret said. Reflecting on the first of the three deaths, Margaret told her that the baby’s parents would always grieve the loss of their child but that, because of the way Letby had cared for him, they’d hopefully have no regrets about the time they spent with their son. “Just trying to help you take the positives you deserve from tough times,” Margaret wrote. “Always here. Speak later. Sleep well xxx.”
A few days later, Letby couldn’t stop crying. “It’s all hit me,” she texted another friend from the unit. She wrote that two of the deaths seemed comprehensible (one was “tiny, obviously compromised in utero,” and the other seemed septic, she wrote), but “it’s \[Child A\] I can’t get my head around.”
The senior pediatricians met to review the deaths, to see if there were any patterns or mistakes. “One of the problems with neonatal deaths is that preterm babies can die suddenly and you don’t always get the answer immediately,” Brearey told me. A study of about a thousand infant deaths in southeast London, published in *The Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine*, found that the cause of mortality was unexplained for about half the newborns who had died unexpectedly, even after an autopsy. Brearey observed that Letby was involved in each of the deaths at the Countess, but “it didn’t sound to me like the odds were that extreme of having a nurse present for three of those cases,” he said. “Nobody had any concerns about her practice.”
The head of the pediatrics department, Ravi Jayaram, told me, “There was an element of ‘Thank God Lucy was on,’ because she’s really good in a crisis.” He described Letby as “very popular” among the nurses. To make sense of the events, Jayaram said, “you sort of think, Well, maybe the baby wasn’t as stable as we thought, and maybe that longline was in just a bit far, and it got into the heart and caused a heart-rhythm problem. You try and make things fit, because we like to have an explanation—for us and for the parents—and it’s much harder to say, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what went on.’ ”
Four months later, another baby died. She had been born at twenty-seven weeks, just past the age that the unit treated. At one point, she was transferred to another hospital, called Arrowe Park, for more specialized care—she had an infection and a small bleed in her brain—but after two nights she returned to the Countess, where her condition deteriorated. Brearey told me, “Senior nursing staff were blaming the neonatal unit that sent back the baby, saying that they hadn’t been entirely honest, that they were just trying to clear a space.” The baby’s mother worried that the staff at the Countess were too busy to pay proper attention to her daughter. She recalled that a nurse named Nicky was “sneezing and coughing whilst putting her hands in \[the baby’s\] incubator.” She added, “To top it off, whilst Nicky was in the room, the doctor, who was seeing another baby, asked Nicky if she was full of a cold, to which she said, ‘Yeah, I’ve been full of it for days.’ So even the doctors were aware and didn’t do anything.” In a survey the next year of more than a thousand staff members at the Countess, about two-thirds said that they had felt pressure to come to work even when they were ill. (None of the hospitals mentioned in this piece would comment, citing the court order.)
The staff tried to send the girl to a specialized unit at a different hospital, but, while they were waiting to confirm the transfer, she began struggling to breathe. Her designated nurse was not yet trained in intensive care, and she shouted for help. Letby, who had been assigned to a different baby, came into the room, followed by two doctors, but the baby continued to decline and could not be revived.
A doctor later saw Letby crying with another nurse. “It was very much on the gist of ‘It’s always me when it happens, my babies,’ ” the doctor said, adding that this seemed like a normal reaction. Letby texted Margaret that she had spoken with the neonatal-unit manager, Eirian Powell, who had encouraged her to “be confident in my role without feeling the need to prove myself, which I have felt recently.”
Three of the nurses on the ward attended the baby’s funeral, and Letby gave them a card addressed to the child’s parents. “It was a real privilege to care for \[her\] and to get to know you as a family, a family who always put \[her\] first and did everything possible for her,” she wrote. “She will always be a part of your lives and we will never forget her. Thinking of you today and always.”
Jayaram, who was on duty during the girl’s death, discussed the events with Brearey and another pediatrician. “‘You know what’s funny?’ ” he said that he told them. “‘It was Lucy Letby who was on.’ And we all looked at each other and said, ‘You know, it’s always Lucy, isn’t it?’ ”
They shared their concerns about the correlation with senior management, and Powell conducted an informal review. “I have devised a document to reflect the information clearly and it is unfortunate she was on,” she wrote to Brearey. “However each cause of death was different.”
The next month, Letby, who was in a salsa group, got out of class and saw three missed calls: the nurses on the unit had called her because they didn’t know how to give a baby intravenous immunoglobulin treatment. “Just can’t believe that some people were in a position when they don’t know how to give something, what equipment to use and not being supported by manager,” Letby texted her best friend, a nurse I’ll call Cheryl. “Staffing really needs looking at.” She described the unit as “chaos” and a “madhouse.”
One of the senior pediatricians, Alison Timmis, was similarly distressed. She e-mailed the hospital’s chief executive, Tony Chambers, to complain that staff on the unit were “chronically overworked” and “no one is listening.” She wrote, “Over the past few weeks I have seen several medical and nursing colleagues in tears.” Doctors were working shifts that ran more than twenty hours, she explained, and the unit was so busy that “at several points we ran out of vital equipment such as incubators.” At another point, a midwife had to assist with a resuscitation, because there weren’t enough trained nurses. “This is now our normal working pattern and it is not safe,” Timmis wrote. “Things are stretched thinner and thinner and are at breaking point. When things snap, the casualties will either be children’s lives or the mental and physical health of our staff.”
At the end of January, 2016, the senior pediatricians met with a neonatologist at a nearby hospital, to review the ward’s mortality data. In 2013 and 2014, the unit had had two and three deaths, respectively. In 2015, there had been eight. At the meeting, “there were a few learning points, nothing particularly exciting,” Brearey recalled. Near the end, he asked the neonatologist what he thought about the fact that Letby was present for each death. “I can’t remember him suggesting anything, really,” Brearey said.
But Jayaram and Brearey were increasingly troubled by the link. “It was like staring at a Magic Eye picture,” Jayaram told me. “At first, it’s just a load of dots,” and the dots are incoherent. “But you stare at them, and all of a sudden the picture appears. And then, once you can see that picture, you see it every time you look, and you think, How the hell did I miss that?” By the spring of 2016, he said, he could not “unsee it.”
Many of the deaths had occurred at night, so Powell, the unit manager, shifted Letby primarily to day shifts, because there would be “more people about to be able to support her,” she said.
In June, 2016, three months after the change, Cheryl texted Letby before a shift, “I wouldn’t come in!”
“Oh, why?” Letby responded.
“Five admissions, 1 vent.”
“OMG,” Letby responded.
Cheryl added that a premature boy with hemophilia looked “like shit.” His oxygen levels had dropped during the night. Letby took over his care that morning, and doctors tried to intubate him, but they were unable to insert the tube, so they called two anesthesiologists, who couldn’t do it, either. The hospital didn’t have any factor VIII, an essential medicine for hemophiliacs. Finally, they asked a team from Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, which was thirty miles away, to come to the hospital with factor VIII. A doctor from Alder Hey intubated the child on the first try. “Sat having a quiet moment and want to cry,” Letby wrote to a junior doctor, whom I’ll call Taylor, who had become a close friend. “Just feel like I’ve been running around all day and not really achieved anything positive for him.”
A week later, a mother gave birth to identical triplet boys, born at thirty-three weeks. When she was pregnant, the mother said, she had been told that each baby would have his own nurse, but Letby, who had just returned from a short trip to Spain with friends, was assigned two of the triplets, as well as a third baby from a different family. She was also training a student nurse who was “glued to me,” she complained to Taylor. Seven hours into Letby’s shift, one of the triplet’s oxygen levels dropped precipitously, and he developed a rash on his chest. Letby called for help. After two rounds of CPR, the baby died.
The next day, Letby was the designated nurse for the two surviving triplets. The abdomen of one of them appeared distended, a possible sign of infection. When she told Taylor, he messaged her, “I wonder if they’ve all been exposed to a bug that benzylpenicillin and gentamicin didn’t account for? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay, just don’t want to be here really,” Letby replied. The student nurse was still with her, and Letby told Taylor, “I don’t feel I’m in the frame of mind to support her properly.”
A doctor came to check on the triplet with the distended abdomen, and, while he was in the room, the child’s oxygen levels dropped. The baby was put on a ventilator, and the hospital asked for a transport team to take him to Liverpool Women’s Hospital. As they were waiting, it was discovered that the baby had a collapsed lung, possibly a result of pressure from the ventilation, which was set unusually high. “There was an increasing sense of anxiety on the unit,” Letby said later. “Nobody seemed to know what was happening and very much just wanted the transport team to come and offer their expertise.” The triplets’ mother said that she was alarmed when she saw a doctor sitting at a computer “Googling how to do what looked like a relatively simple medical procedure: inserting a line into the chest.” She was also upset that one of the doctors who was resuscitating her son was “coughing and spluttering into her hands” without washing them. Shortly after the transport team arrived, the second triplet died. His mother recalled that Letby was “in pieces and almost as upset as we were.”
While dressing the baby for his parents—a standard part of helping grieving families—Letby accidentally pricked her finger with a needle. She hadn’t eaten or taken a break all day, and as she was waiting to get her finger checked she fainted. “The overall enormity of the last two days had sort of taken its toll,” she said. “To imagine what those parents had gone through to lose two of their babies, it was harrowing.”
The surviving triplet was taken to Liverpool Women’s Hospital, and his mother felt that the clinical staff there were more competent and organized. “The two hospitals were as different as night and day,” she said.
That night, Brearey called Karen Rees, the head of nursing for urgent care, and said that he did not want Letby returning until there was an investigation. The babies’ deaths seemed to be following Letby from night to day. Rees discussed the issue with Powell, and she said that Powell told her, “Lucy Letby does everything by the book. She follows policy and procedure to the letter.” Rees allowed Letby to keep working. “Just because a senior healthcare professional requests the removal of a nurse—there has to be sound reason,” Rees said later.
The next day, Letby was assigned a baby boy, known as Child Q, who had a bowel infection. At one point, he was sent to Alder Hey, but he was transferred back within two days. Taylor texted Letby that Alder Hey was “so short of beds that they can only accommodate emergency patients. It’s not good holistic care, and it’s rubbish for his parents.”
Letby was also taking care of another newborn in a different room, and, while she was checking on that baby, Child Q vomited and his oxygen levels dropped. After he stabilized, John Gibbs, a senior pediatrician, asked another nurse which staff members had been present during the episode.
“Do I need to be worried about what Dr Gibbs was asking?” Letby texted Taylor after her shift.
“No,” he reassured her. “You can’t be with two babies in different nurseries at the same time, let alone predict when they’re going to crash.”
“I know, and I didn’t leave him on his own. They both knew I was leaving the room,” she said, referring to a nurse inside the room and one just outside.
“Nobody has accused you of neglecting a baby or causing a deterioration,” he said.
“I know. Just worry I haven’t done enough.”
“How?” he asked.
“We’ve lost two babies I was caring for and now this happened today. Makes you think am I missing something/good enough,” she said.
“Lucy, if anyone knows how hard you’ve worked over the last 3 days it’s me,” he wrote. “If anybody says anything to you about not being good enough or performing adequately I want you to promise me that you’ll give my details to provide a statement.”
“Well I sincerely hope I won’t ever be needing a statement,” she said. “But thank you. I promise.”
Letby was supposed to work the next night, but at the last minute Powell called and told her not to come in. “I’m worried I’m in trouble or something,” Letby wrote to Cheryl.
“How can you be in trouble?” Cheryl replied. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”
“I know but worrying in case they think I missed something or whatever,” Letby said. “Why leave it until now to ring?”
“It’s very late, I agree,” Cheryl said. “Maybe she’s getting pressure from elsewhere.”
“She was nice enough, I just worry,” Letby responded. “This job messes with your head.”
Letby worked three more day shifts and then had a two-week vacation. Brearey, Jayaram, and a few other pediatric consultants met to discuss the unexpected deaths. “We were trying to rack our brains,” Brearey said. A postmortem X-ray of one of the babies had shown gas near the skull, a finding that the pathologist did not consider particularly meaningful, since gas is often present after death. Jayaram remembered learning in medical school about air embolisms—a rare, potentially catastrophic complication that can occur when air bubbles enter a person’s veins or arteries, blocking blood supply. That night, he searched for literature about the phenomenon. He did not see any cases of murder by air embolism, but he forwarded his colleagues a four-page paper, from 1989, in the *Archives of Disease in Childhood*, about accidental air embolism. The authors of the paper could find only fifty-three cases in the world. All but four of the infants had died immediately. In five cases, their skin became discolored. “I remember the physical chill that went down my spine,” Jayaram said. “It fitted with what we were seeing.”
Jayaram and another pediatrician met with the hospital’s executive board, as well as with the medical and nursing directors, and said that they were not comfortable working with Letby. They suggested calling the police. Jayaram said that the board members asked them, “‘What’s the evidence?’ And we said, ‘We haven’t got evidence, but we’ve got concerns.’ ” To relieve the general burden on the unit, the directors and the board decided to downgrade the ward from Level II to Level I: it would no longer provide intensive care, and women delivering before thirty-two weeks would now go to a different hospital. The board also agreed to commission a review by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, to explore what factors might explain the rise in mortality.
After Letby returned from vacation, she was called in for a meeting. The deputy director of nursing told her that she was the common element in the cluster of deaths, and that her clinical competence would need to be reassessed. “She was distraught,” Powell, the unit manager, who was also at the meeting, said. “We were both quite upset.” They walked straight from the meeting to human resources. “We were trying to get Lucy back on the unit, so we had to try and prove that the competency issue wasn’t the problem,” Powell said.
But Letby never returned to clinical duties. She was eventually moved to an administrative role in the hospital’s risk-and-safety office. Jayaram described the office as “almost an island of lost souls. If there was a nurse who wasn’t very good clinically, or a manager who they wanted to get out of the way, they’d move them to the risk-and-safety office.”
After she’d been away from clinical duties for more than a month, Letby texted Cheryl that she’d spoken with her union representative, who had advised her not to communicate with other staff, since they might be involved in reviewing her competence. “Feel a bit like I’m being shoved in a corner and forgotten about,” she wrote. “It’s my life and career.”
“I know it’s all so ridiculous,” Cheryl said.
“I can’t see where it will all end.”
“I’m sure this time after Christmas it’ll all be a distant memory,” Cheryl reassured her.
In September, 2016, Letby filed a grievance, saying that she’d been removed from her job without a clear explanation. “My whole world was stopped,” she said later. She was diagnosed with depression and anxiety and began taking medication. “From a self-confidence point of view it completely—well, it made me question everything about myself,” she said. “I just felt like I’d let everybody down, that I’d let myself down, that people were changing their opinion of me.”
That month, a team from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health spent two days interviewing people at the Countess. They found that nursing- and medical-staffing levels were inadequate. They also noted that the increased mortality rate in 2015 was not restricted to the neonatal unit. Stillbirths on the maternity ward were elevated, too.
A redacted portion of the report, which was shared with me, described how staff on the unit were “very upset” that Letby had been removed from clinical duties. The Royal College team interviewed Letby and described her as “an enthusiastic, capable and committed nurse” who was “passionate about her career and keen to progress.” The redacted section concluded that the senior pediatricians had made allegations based on “simple correlation” and “gut feeling,” and that they had a “subjective view with no other evidence.” The Royal College could find no obvious factors linking the deaths; the report noted that the circumstances on the unit were “not materially different from those which might be found in many other neonatal units within the UK.” In a public statement, the hospital acknowledged that the review had revealed problems with “staffing, competencies, leadership, team working and culture.”
In November, Jayaram was interviewed by an administrator investigating Letby’s grievance. There had been reports of pediatricians referring to an “angel of death” on the ward, and the interview focussed on whether Jayaram had made his suspicions publicly known.
“Did you hear any suggestion that Lucy had been deliberately harming babies?” the administrator asked Jayaram, according to minutes of the interview.
“No objective evidence to suggest this at all,” Jayaram responded. “The only association was Lucy’s presence on the unit at the time.”
“So to clarify, was there any suggestion from any of the consultant team that Lucy had been deliberately harming babies?”
“We discussed a lot of possibilities in private,” he responded.
“So that’s not a yes or no?”
“We discussed a lot of possibilities in private,” Jayaram repeated.
The hospital upheld Letby’s grievance. At a board meeting in January, 2017, Chambers, the chief executive, who was formerly a nurse, told the members, “We are seeking an apology from the consultants for their behavior.” He wanted Letby back on the unit as soon as possible. In a letter to the consultants, Chambers expressed concern about their susceptibility to “confirmation bias,” which he defined as a “tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.” (Chambers said that he could not comment, because of the court order.)
Jayaram agreed to meet with Letby for a mediation session in March, 2017. A lithe, handsome man with tight black curls, Jayaram appeared frequently on TV as a medical expert, on subjects ranging from hospital staffing to heart problems. When the cluster of deaths began, he was on the reality series “Born Naughty?,” in which he met eight children who had been captured on hidden cameras behaving unusually and then came up with diagnoses for them. Letby had prepared a statement for the meeting, and she read it aloud. “She said, ‘I’ve got evidence from my grievance process that you and Steve Brearey orchestrated a campaign to have me removed,’ ” Jayaram recalled. “‘I’ve got evidence that you were heard in the queue to the café accusing me of murdering babies.’ ” (Jayaram told me, “Now, I’ve got a big mouth, but I wouldn’t stand in a public place doing that.”) Letby asked if he would be willing to work with her. He felt obligated to say yes. “I came away from that meeting really angry, but I was not angry at her,” he said. “I was angry at the system.”
Jayaram and Brearey felt that they were being silenced by a hospital trying to protect its reputation. When I spoke with Brearey, he had recently watched a documentary about the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, and he described the plight of an engineer who had tried to warn his superiors that the shuttle had potentially dangerous flaws. Brearey saw his own experiences in a similar light. He and Jayaram had spent months writing e-mails to the hospital’s management trying to justify why they wanted Letby out of the unit. They wrote with the confidence of people who feel that they are on the right side of history.
Serial-killer health professionals are extraordinarily rare, but they are also a kind of media phenomenon—a small universe of movies and shows has dramatized the scenario. In northwest England, this genre of crime has not been strictly limited to entertainment. Harold Shipman, one of the most prolific serial killers in the world, worked forty miles from Chester, as a physician for the N.H.S. He is thought to have murdered about two hundred and fifty patients in the span of three decades, injecting many of them with lethal doses of a painkiller, before he was convicted, in 2000. The chair of a government inquiry into Shipman’s crimes said that investigators should now be trained to “think dirty” about causes of death.
In April, 2017, with the permission of the Countess’s leadership, Jayaram and another pediatrician met with a detective from the Cheshire police and shared their concerns. “Within ten minutes of us telling the story, the superintendent said, ‘Well, we have to investigate this,’ ” Jayaram said. “‘It’s a no-brainer.’ ”
In May, the police launched what they called Operation Hummingbird. A detective later said that Brearey and Jayaram provided the “golden thread of our investigation.”
That month, Dewi Evans, a retired pediatrician from Wales, who had been the clinical director of the neonatal and children’s department at his hospital, saw a newspaper article describing, in vague terms, a criminal investigation into the spike in deaths at the Countess. “If the Chester police had no-one in mind I’d be interested to help,” he wrote in an e-mail to the National Crime Agency, which helps connect law enforcement with scientific experts. “Sounds like my kind of case.”
That summer, Evans, who was sixty-seven and had worked as a paid court expert for more than twenty-five years, drove three and a half hours to Cheshire, to meet with the police. After reviewing records that the police gave him, he wrote a report proposing that Child A’s death was “consistent with his receiving either a noxious substance such as potassium chloride or more probably that he suffered his collapse as a result of an air embolus.” Later, when it became clear that there was no basis for suspecting a noxious chemical, Evans concluded that the cause of death was air embolism. “These are cases where your diagnosis is made by ruling out other factors,” he said.
Evans had never seen a case of air embolism himself, but there had been one at his hospital about twenty years before. An anesthetist intended to inject air into a baby’s stomach, but he accidentally injected it into the bloodstream. The baby immediately collapsed and died. “It was extremely traumatic and left a big scar on all of us,” Evans said. He searched for medical literature about air embolisms and came upon the same paper from 1989 that Jayaram had found. “There hasn’t been a similar publication since then because this is such a rare event,” Evans told me.
Evans relied heavily on the paper in other reports that he wrote about the Countess deaths, many of which he attributed to air embolism. Other babies, he said, had been harmed through another method: the intentional injection of too much air or fluid, or both, into their nasogastric tubes. “This naturally ‘blows up’ the stomach,” he wrote to me. The stomach becomes so large, he said, that the lungs can’t inflate normally, and the baby can’t get enough oxygen. When I asked him if he could point me to any medical literature about this process, he responded, “There are no published papers regarding a phenomenon of this nature that I know of.” (Several doctors I interviewed were baffled by this proposed method of murder and struggled to understand how it could be physiologically or logistically possible.)
Nearly a year after Operation Hummingbird began, a new method of harm was added to the list. In the last paragraph of a baby’s discharge letter, Brearey, who had been helping the police by reviewing clinical records, noticed a mention of an abnormally high level of insulin. When insulin is produced naturally by the body, the level of C-peptide, a substance secreted by the pancreas, should also be high, but in this baby the C-peptide was undetectable, which suggested that insulin may have been administered to the child. The insulin test had been done at a Royal Liverpool University Hospital lab, and a biochemist there had called the Countess to recommend that the sample be verified by a more specialized lab. Guidelines on the Web site for the Royal Liverpool lab explicitly warn that its insulin test is “not suitable for the investigation” of whether synthetic insulin has been administered. Alan Wayne Jones, a forensic toxicologist at Linköping University, in Sweden, who has written about the use of insulin as a means of murder, told me that the test used at the Royal Liverpool lab is “not sufficient for use as evidence in a criminal prosecution.” He said, “Insulin is not an easy substance to analyze, and you would need to analyze this at a forensic laboratory, where the routines are much more stringent regarding chain of custody, using modern forensic technology.” But the Countess never ordered a second test, because the child had already recovered.
Brearey also discovered that, eight months later, a biochemist at the lab had flagged a high level of insulin in the blood sample of another infant. The child had been discharged, and this blood sample was never retested, either. According to Joseph Wolfsdorf, a professor at Harvard Medical School who specializes in pediatric hypoglycemia, the baby’s C-peptide level suggested the possibility of a testing irregularity, because, if insulin had been administered, the child’s C-peptide level should have been extremely low or undetectable, but it wasn’t.
The police consulted with an endocrinologist, who said that the babies theoretically could have received insulin through their I.V. bags. Evans said that, with the insulin cases, “at last one could find some kind of smoking gun.” But there was a problem: the blood sample for the first baby had been taken ten hours after Letby had left the hospital; any insulin delivered by her would no longer be detectable, especially since the tube for the first I.V. bag had fallen out of place, which meant that the baby had to be given a new one. To connect Letby to the insulin, one would have to believe that she had managed to inject insulin into a bag that a different nurse had randomly chosen from the unit’s refrigerator. If Letby had been successful at causing immediate death by air embolism, it seems odd that she would try this much less effective method.
In July, 2018, five months after the insulin discovery, a Cheshire police detective knocked on Letby’s door. Two years earlier, she had bought a home a mile from the hospital. A small birdhouse hung beside the entrance. It was 6 *a*.*m*., but she opened the door with a friendly expression. “Can I step in for two seconds?” the officer asked her, after showing his badge.
“Uh, yes,” she said, looking terrified.
Inside, she was told that she was under arrest for multiple counts of murder and attempted murder. She emerged from the house handcuffed, her face appearing almost gray.
The police spent the day searching her house. Inside, they found a note with the heading “NOT GOOD ENOUGH.” There were several phrases scrawled across the page at random angles and without punctuation: “There are no words”; “I can’t breathe”; “Slander Discrimination”; “I’ll never have children or marry I’ll never know what it’s like to have a family”; “WHY ME?”; “I haven’t done anything wrong”; “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough to care for them”; “I AM EVIL I DID THIS.”
On another scrap of paper, she had written, three times, “Everything is manageable,” a phrase that a colleague had said to her. At the bottom of the page, she had written, “I just want life to be as it was. I want to be happy in the job that I loved with a team who I felt a part of. Really, I don’t belong anywhere. I’m a problem to those who do know me.” On another piece of paper, found in her handbag, she had written, “I can’t do this any more. I want someone to help me but they can’t.” She also wrote, “We tried our best and it wasn’t enough.”
After spending all day in jail, Letby was asked why she had written the “not good enough” note. A police video shows her in the interrogation room with her hands in her lap, her shoulders hunched forward. She spoke quietly and deferentially, like a student facing an unexpectedly harsh exam. “It was just a way of me getting my feelings out onto paper,” she said. “It just helps me process.”
“In your own mind, had you done anything wrong at all?” an officer asked.
“No, not intentionally, but I was worried that they would find that my practice hadn’t been good,” she said, adding, “I thought maybe I had missed something, maybe I hadn’t acted quickly enough.”
“Give us an example.”
She proposed that perhaps she “hadn’t played my role in the team. I’d been on a lot of night shifts when doctors aren’t around. We have to call them. There are less people, and it just worried me that I hadn’t called them—quick enough.” She also worried that she might have given the wrong dose of a medication or used equipment improperly.
“And you felt evil?”
“Other people would perceive me as being evil, yes, if I had missed something.” She went on, “It’s how this situation made me feel.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a23911)
“I hate it when they put kittens in the impulse-buying section.”
Cartoon by P. C. Vey
The detective said, “You put down there, Lucy, that you ‘killed them on purpose.’ ”
“I didn’t kill them on purpose.”
The detective asked, “So where’s this pressure that’s led to having these feelings come from?”
“I think it was just the panic of being redeployed and everything that happened,” she said. She had written the notes after she was removed from clinical duties, but later her clinical skills were reassessed and no concerns were raised, so she felt more secure about her abilities. She was “very career-focussed,” she said, and “it just all overwhelmed me at the time. It was hard to see how anything was ever going to be O.K. again.”
In an interview two days later, an officer asked why one of her notes had the word “hate” in bold letters, circled. “What’s the significance of that?”
“That I hate myself for having let everybody down and for not being good enough,” she said. “I’d just been removed from the job I loved, I was told that there might be issues with my practice, I wasn’t allowed to speak to people.”
The officer asked again why she had written, “I killed them on purpose.”
“That’s how I was being made to feel,” she said. As her mental health deteriorated, her thoughts had spiralled. “If my practice hadn’t been good enough and I was linked with these deaths, then it was my fault,” she said.
“You’re being very hard on yourself there if you haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Well, I am very hard on myself,” she said.
After more than nine hours of interviews, Letby was released on bail, without being charged. She moved back to Hereford, to live with her parents. News of her arrest was published in papers throughout the U.K. “All I can say is my experience is that she was a great nurse,” a mother whose baby was treated at the Countess told the *Times* of London. Another mother told the *Guardian* that Letby had advocated for her and had told her “every step of the way what was happening.” She said, “I can’t say anything negative about her.” The *Guardian* also interviewed a mother who described the experience of giving birth at the Countess. “They had no staff and the care was just terrible,” she said. She’d developed “an infection which was due to negligence by a member of staff,” she explained. “We made a complaint at the time but it was brushed under the carpet.”
One of Letby’s childhood friends, who did not want me to use her name because her loyalty to Letby has already caused her social and professional problems, told me that she asked the Cheshire police if she could serve as a character reference for Letby. “They weren’t interested at all,” she said. Letby seemed to be in a state of “terror and complete confusion,” the friend said. “I could tell from how she was acting that she just didn’t know what to say about it, because it was such an alien concept to be accused of these things.”
Shortly after Letby’s arrest, the pediatric consultants arranged a meeting for the hospital’s medical staff, to broach the possibility of a vote of no confidence in Chambers, the hospital’s chief executive, because of the way he’d handled their concerns. Chambers resigned before the meeting. A doctor named Susan Gilby, who took the side of the consultants, assumed his role. Gilby told me that the first time she met with Jayaram it was clear that he was suffering from the experience of not being believed by the hospital’s management. “He was in tears, and bear in mind this is a mature, experienced clinician,” she said. “He described having issues with sleeping, and he felt he couldn’t trust anyone. It was really distressing.” She was surprised that Ian Harvey, the hospital’s medical director, still doubted the consultants’ theory of how the babies had died. Harvey seemed more troubled by their behavior, she said, than by anything Letby had done. “In his mind, the issue seemed to be that they weren’t as good as they thought they were,” Gilby told me. “It was ‘They think they’re marvellous, but they need to look at themselves.’ ” (Harvey would not comment, citing the court order.)
The week of Letby’s arrest, the police dug up her back garden and examined drains and vents, presumably to see if she had hidden anything incriminating. Four months later, while she remained out on bail without charges, the Chester *Standard* wrote, “The situation has caused many people to question both the ethics and legality of keeping someone linked to such serious allegations when seemingly there is not enough evidence to bring charges.” Letby was arrested a second time, in 2019, but, after being interviewed for another nine hours, she was released.
In November, 2020, more than two years after Letby’s first arrest, an officer called Gilby to inform her that Letby was being charged with eight counts of murder and ten counts of attempted murder. (Later, one of the murder counts was dropped, and five attempted-murder charges were added.) She was arrested again, and this time she was denied bail. She would await trial in prison. As a courtesy, Gilby called Chambers to let him know. She was taken aback when Chambers expressed concern for Letby. She said that he told her, “I’m just worried about a wrongful conviction.”
In September, 2022, a month before Letby’s trial began, the Royal Statistical Society published a report titled “Healthcare Serial Killer or Coincidence?” The report had been prompted in part by concerns about two recent cases, one in Italy and one in the Netherlands, in which nurses had been wrongly convicted of murder largely because of a striking association between their shift patterns and the deaths on their wards. The society sent the report to both the Letby prosecution and the defense team. It detailed the dangers of drawing causal conclusions from improbable clusters of events. In the trial of the Dutch nurse, Lucia de Berk, a criminologist had calculated that there was a one-in-three-hundred-and-forty-two-million chance that the deaths were coincidental. But his methodology was faulty; when statisticians looked at the data, they found that the chances were closer to one in fifty. According to Ton Derksen, a Dutch philosopher of science who wrote a book about the case, the belief that “such a coincidence cannot be a coincidence” became the driving force in the process of collecting evidence against de Berk. She was exonerated in 2010, and her case is now considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Dutch history. The Italian nurse, Daniela Poggiali, was exonerated in 2021, after statisticians reanalyzed her hospital’s mortality data and discovered several confounding factors that had been overlooked.
William C. Thompson, one of the authors of the Royal Statistical Society report and an emeritus professor of criminology, law, and psychology at the University of California, Irvine, told me that medical-murder cases are particularly prone to errors in statistical reasoning, because they “involve a choice between alternative theories, both of which are rather extraordinary.” He said, “One theory is that there was an unlikely coincidence. And the other theory is that someone like Lucy Letby, who was previously a fine and upstanding member of the community, suddenly decides she’s going to start killing people.”
Flawed statistical reasoning was at the heart of one of the most notorious wrongful convictions in the U.K.: a lawyer named Sally Clark was found guilty of murder, in 1999, after her two sons, both babies, died suddenly and without clear explanation. One of the prosecution’s main experts, a pediatrician, argued that the chances of two sudden infant deaths in one family were one in seventy-three million. But his calculations were misleading: he’d treated the two deaths as independent events, ignoring the possibility that the same genetic or environmental factors had affected both boys.
In his book “[Thinking, Fast and Slow](https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.KP7SbRzcre9DpN2LWPIgYeuUQQSnHrRQrcy8gnDT93A-vvp2ViI6AUe8ujnH_YsocO3Mj0I-g799KxVF2_xkaxGG2UKbHDoO9Va_cN8B04FPFFw24WWutQzLuwdB-j2SbER4KJr93qnQqFB3G9ZYxkUAi7EIWjwgopBcrT3CEfH7E5daC1Y2DWKhocIKcIeysa4M4fYUvrBNZe2AAn72VGz2NCZ25lxox6mDz4kjkNA.-3Q_47k2ytWqaoqK698edFzkOJlixpoXEBxXu8z1rEI&dib_tag=se&hvadid=598729179038&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9073499&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=7319156310836186384&hvtargid=kwd-316358223323&hydadcr=22595_13531227&keywords=thinking-fast-slow-daniel-kahneman&qid=1716309023&sr=8-1)” (2011), Daniel Kahneman, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, argues that people do not have good intuitions when it comes to basic principles of statistics: “We easily think associatively, we think metaphorically, we think causally, but statistics requires thinking about many things at once,” a task that is not spontaneous or innate. We tend to assume that irregular things happen because someone intentionally caused them. “Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events,” he writes.
Burkhard Schafer, a law professor at the University of Edinburgh who studies the intersection of law and science, said that it appeared as if the Letby prosecution had “learned the wrong lessons from previous miscarriages of justice.” Instead of making sure that its statistical figures were accurate, the prosecution seems to have ignored statistics. “Looking for a responsible human—this is what the police are good at,” Schafer told me. “What is not in the police’s remit is finding a systemic problem in an organization like the National Health Service, after decades of underfunding, where you have overworked people cutting little corners with very vulnerable babies who are already in a risk category. It is much more satisfying to say there was a bad person, there was a criminal, than to deal with the outcome of government policy.”
Schafer said that he became concerned about the case when he saw the diagram of suspicious events with the line of X’s under Letby’s name. He thought that it should have spanned a longer period of time and included all the deaths on the unit, not just the ones in the indictment. The diagram appeared to be a product of the “Texas sharpshooter fallacy,” a common mistake in statistical reasoning which occurs when researchers have access to a large amount of data but focus on a smaller subset that fits a hypothesis. The term comes from the fable of a marksman who fires a gun multiple times at the side of a barn. Then he draws a bull’s-eye around the cluster where the most bullets landed.
For one baby, the diagram showed Letby working a night shift, but this was an error: she was working day shifts at the time, so there should not have been an X by her name. At trial, the prosecution argued that, though the baby had deteriorated overnight, the suspicious episode actually began three minutes after Letby arrived for her day shift. Nonetheless, the inaccurate diagram continued to be published, even by the Cheshire police.
Dewi Evans, the retired pediatrician, told me that he had picked which medical episodes rose to the level of “suspicious events.” When I asked what his criteria were, he said, “Unexpected, precipitous, anything that is out of the usual—something with which you are not familiar.” For one baby, the distinction between suspicious and not suspicious largely came down to how to define projectile vomiting.
Letby’s defense team said that it had found at least two other incidents that seemed to meet the same criteria of suspiciousness as the twenty-four on the diagram. But they happened when Letby wasn’t on duty. Evans identified events that may have been left out, too. He told me that, after Letby’s first arrest, he was given another batch of medical records to review, and that he had notified the police of twenty-five more cases that he thought the police should investigate. He didn’t know if Letby was present for them, and they didn’t end up being on the diagram, either. If some of these twenty-seven cases had been represented, the row of X’s under Letby’s name might have been much less compelling. (The Cheshire police and the prosecution did not respond to a request for comment, citing the court order.)
Among the new suspicious episodes that Evans said he flagged was another insulin case. Evans said that it had similar features as the first two: high insulin, low C-peptide. He concluded that it was a clear case of poisoning. When I asked Michael Hall, a retired neonatologist at University Hospital Southampton who worked as an expert for Letby’s defense, about Evans’s third insulin case, he was surprised and disturbed to learn of it. He could imagine a few reasons that it might not have been part of the trial. One is that Letby wasn’t working at the time. Another is that there was an alternative explanation for the test results—but then, presumably, such an explanation could be relevant for the other two insulin cases, too. “Whichever way you look at this, that third case is of interest,” Hall told me.
Ton Derksen, in his book about Lucia de Berk, used the analogy of a train. The “locomotives” were two cases in which there had been allegations of poisoning. Another eight cases, involving children who suddenly became ill on de Berk’s shifts, were the “wagons,” trailing along because of a belief that all the deaths couldn’t have occurred by chance.
The locomotives in the Letby prosecution were the insulin cases, which were charged as attempted murders. “The fact that there were two deliberate poisonings with insulin,” Nick Johnson, the prosecutor, said, “will help you when you are assessing whether the collapses and deaths of other children on the neonatal unit were because somebody was sabotaging them or whether these were just tragic coincidences.”
But not only were the circumstances of the poisonings speculative, the results were, too. If the aim was to kill, neither child came close to the intended consequences. The first baby recovered after a day. The second showed no symptoms and was discharged in good health.
On the first day of the trial, Letby’s barrister, Benjamin Myers, told the judge that Letby was “incoherent, she can’t speak properly.” She had been diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder following her arrests. After two years in prison, she had recently been moved to a new facility, but she hadn’t brought her medication with her. Any psychological stability she’d achieved, Myers said, had been “blown away.”
Letby, who now startled easily, was assessed by psychiatrists, and it was decided that she did not have to walk from the dock to the witness box and instead could be seated there before people came into the room. The *Guardian* said that in court Letby “cut an almost pitiable figure,” her eyes darting “nervously towards any unexpected noise—a cough, a dropped pen, or when the female prison guard beside her shuffled in her seat.” Her parents attended the entire trial, sometimes accompanied by a close friend of Letby’s, a nurse from the unit who had recently retired.
Press coverage of the case repeatedly emphasized Letby’s note in which she’d written that she was “evil” and “killed them on purpose.” Media outlets magnified the images of those words without including her explanations to the police. Much was also made of a text that she’d sent about returning to work after her trip to Spain—“probably be back in with a bang lol”—and the fact that she’d searched on Facebook thirty-one times for parents whose children she was later accused of harming. During the year of the deaths, she had also searched for other people 2,287 times—colleagues, dancers in her salsa classes, people she had randomly encountered. “I was always on my phone,” she later testified, explaining that she did the searches rapidly, out of “general curiosity and they’ve been on my mind.” (Myers noted that her search history did not involve any references to “air embolism.”)
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a27837)
Cartoon by Roz Chast
The parents of the babies had been living in limbo for almost a decade. In court, they recalled how their grief had intensified when they were told that their children’s deaths may have been deliberately caused by someone they’d trusted. “That’s what confuses me the most,” one mother said. “Lucy presented herself as kind, caring, and soft-spoken.” They had stopped believing their own instincts. They described being consumed by guilt for not protecting their children.
Several months into the trial, Myers asked Judge Goss to strike evidence given by Evans and to stop him from returning to the witness box, but the request was denied. Myers had learned that a month before, in a different case, a judge on the Court of Appeal had described a medical report written by Evans as “worthless.” “No court would have accepted a report of this quality,” the judge had concluded. “The report has the hallmarks of an exercise in working out an explanation” and “ends with tendentious and partisan expressions of opinion that are outside Dr. Evans’ professional competence.” The judge also wrote that Evans “either knows what his professional colleagues have concluded and disregards it or he has not taken steps to inform himself of their views. Either approach amounts to a breach of proper professional conduct.” (Evans said that he disagreed with the judgment.)
Evans had laid the medical foundation for the prosecution’s case against Letby, submitting some eighty reports. There was a second pediatric expert, who provided what was called “peer review” for Evans, as well as experts in hematology, endocrinology, radiology, and pathology, and they had all been sent Evans’s statements when they were invited to participate in the case. The six main prosecution experts, along with at least two defense experts who were also consulted, had all worked for the N.H.S. Evans wasn’t aware if Letby’s lawyers had sought opinions from outside the U.K., but he told me that, if he were them, he would have looked to North America or Australia. When I asked why, he said, “Because I would want them to look at it from a totally nonpartisan point of view.”
In the five years leading up to the trial, some of the experts’ opinions seemed to have collectively evolved. For one of the babies, Evans had originally written that the child had been “at great risk of unexpected collapse,” owing to his fragility, and Evans couldn’t “exclude the role of infection.” The prosecution’s pathologist, Andreas Marnerides, who worked at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, wrote that the child had died of natural causes, most likely of pneumonia. “I have not identified any suspicious findings,” he concluded. But, three years later, Marnerides testified that, after reading more reports from the courts’ experts, he thought that the baby had died “with pneumonia,” not “from pneumonia.” The likely cause of death, he said, was administration of air into his stomach through a nasogastric tube. When Evans testified, he said the same thing.
“What’s the evidence?” Myers asked him.
“Baby collapsed, died,” Evans responded.
“A baby may collapse for any number of reasons,” Myers said. “What’s the evidence that supports your assertion made today that it’s because of air going down the NGT?”
“The baby collapsed and died.”
“Do you rely upon one image of that?” Myers asked, referring to X-rays.
“This baby collapsed and died.”
“What evidence is there that you can point to?”
Evans replied that he’d ruled out all natural causes, so the only other viable explanation would be another method of murder, like air injected into one of the baby’s veins. “A baby collapsing and where resuscitation was unsuccessful—you know, that’s consistent with my interpretation of what happened,” he said.
The trial covered questions at the edge of scientific knowledge, and the material was dense and technical. For months, in discussions of the supposed air embolisms, witnesses tried to pinpoint the precise shade of skin discoloration of some of the babies. In Myers’s cross-examinations, he noted that witnesses’ memories of the rashes had changed, becoming more specific and florid in the years since the deaths. But this debate seemed to distract from a more relevant objection: the concern with skin discoloration arose from the 1989 paper. An author of the paper, Shoo Lee, one of the most prominent neonatologists in Canada, has since reviewed summaries of each pattern of skin discoloration in the Letby case and said that none of the rashes were characteristic of air embolism. He also said that air embolism should never be a diagnosis that a doctor lands on just because other causes of sudden collapse have been ruled out: “That would be very wrong—that’s a fundamental mistake of medicine.”
Several months into the trial, Richard Gill, an emeritus professor of mathematics at Leiden University, in the Netherlands, began writing online about his concerns regarding the case. Gill was one of the authors of the Royal Statistical Society report, and in 2006 he had testified before a committee tasked with determining whether to reopen the case of Lucia de Berk. England has strict contempt-of-court laws that prevent the publication of any material that could prejudice legal proceedings. Gill posted a link to a Web site, created by Sarrita Adams, a scientific consultant in California, that detailed flaws in the prosecution’s medical evidence. In July, a detective with the Cheshire police sent letters to Gill and Adams ordering them to stop writing about the case. “The publication of this material puts you at risk of ‘serious consequences’ (which include a sentence of imprisonment),” the letters said. “If you come within the jurisdiction of the court, you may be liable to arrest.”
Letby is housed in a privately run prison west of London, the largest correctional facility for women in Europe. Letters to prisoners are screened, and I don’t know if several letters that I sent ever reached her. One of her lawyers, Richard Thomas, who has represented her since early in the case, said that he would tell Letby that I had been in touch with him, but he ignored my request to share a message with her, instead reminding me of the contempt-of-court order. He told me, “I cannot give any comment on why you cannot communicate” with Letby. Lawyers in England can be sanctioned for making remarks that would undermine confidence in the judicial system. I sent Myers, Letby’s barrister, several messages in the course of nine months, and he always responded with some version of an apology—“the brevity of this response is not intended to be rude in any way”—before saying that he could not talk to me.
Michael Hall, the defense expert, had expected to testify at the trial—he was prepared to point to flaws in the prosecution’s theory of air embolism and to undetected signs of illness in the babies—but he was never called. He was troubled that the trial largely excluded evidence about the treatment of the babies’ mothers; their medical care is inextricably linked to the health of their babies. In the past ten years, the U.K. has had four highly publicized maternity scandals, in which failures of care and supervision led to a large number of newborn deaths. A report about East Kent Hospitals, which found that forty-five babies might have lived if their treatment had been better, identified a “crucial truth about maternity and neonatal services”: “So much hangs on what happens in the minority of cases where things start to go wrong, because problems can very rapidly escalate to a devastatingly bad outcome.” The report warned, “It is too late to pretend that this is just another one-off, isolated failure, a freak event that ‘*will never happen again*.’ ”
Hall thought about asking Letby’s lawyers why he had not been called to testify, but anything they said would be confidential, so he decided that he’d rather not know. He wondered if his testimony was seen as too much of a risk: “One of the questions they would have asked me is ‘Why did this baby die?’ And I would have had to say, ‘I’m not sure. I don’t know.’ That’s not to say that therefore the baby died of air embolism. Just because we don’t have an explanation doesn’t mean we are going to make one up.” The fact that the jury never heard another side “keeps me awake at night,” Hall told me.
After the prosecution finished presenting its case, Letby’s defense team submitted a motion arguing that the medical evidence about air embolism was so unreliable that there was “no case to answer” and the charges should be dismissed. Though the motion was rejected, perhaps it had seemed that the prosecution’s case was so weak that defense experts weren’t necessary. The only witnesses Myers called were the hospital’s plumber, who spoke about unsanitary conditions, and Letby, who testified for fourteen days.
She said she felt that there were systemic failures at the hospital, but that some of the senior pediatricians had “apportioned blame on to me.” Johnson, the prosecutor, pushed her to come up with her own explanation for each baby’s deterioration. Yet she wasn’t qualified to provide them. “In general, I don’t think a lot of the babies were cared for on the unit properly,” she offered. “I’m not a medical professional to know exactly what should and shouldn’t have happened with those babies.”
“Do you agree that if certain combinations of these children were attacked then unless there was more than one person attacking them, you have to be the attacker?” Johnson asked at one point.
“No.”
“You don’t agree?”
“No. I’ve not attacked any children.”
Johnson continued, “But if the jury conclude that a certain combination of children were actually attacked by someone, then the shift pattern gives us the answer as to who the attacker was, doesn’t it?”
“No, I don’t agree.”
“You don’t agree. Why don’t you agree?”
“Because just because I was on shift doesn’t mean that I have done anything.”
“I’ll use numbers, all right? I won’t refer to specific cases. Let’s say if baby 5, 8, 10 and 12 were all attacked, if the jury look at the medical evidence and say they were all attacked by someone, and you’re the only common feature, it would have to be, wouldn’t it, that you’re the attacker?”
“That’s for them to decide.”
“Well, of course it is, of course it is. But as a principle, do you agree with that?”
“No, I don’t feel I can answer that.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a26640)
“Sorry my story ended up just being me describing a TV show I watched recently.”
Cartoon by Daniel Kanhai
After a few days of cross-examination, Letby seemed to shut down; she started frequently giving one-word answers, almost whispering. “I’m finding it quite hard to concentrate,” she said.
Johnson repeatedly accused her of lying. “You are a very calculating woman, aren’t you, Lucy Letby?” he said.
“No,” she replied.
He asked, “The reason you tell lies is to try to get sympathy from people, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“You try to get attention from people, don’t you?”
“No.”
“In killing these children, you got quite a lot of attention, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t kill the children.”
Toward the end of the trial, the court received an e-mail from someone who claimed to have overheard one of the jurors at a café saying that jurors had “already made up their minds about her case from the start.” Goss reviewed the complaint but ultimately allowed the juror to continue serving.
He instructed the twelve members of the jury that they could find Letby guilty even if they weren’t “sure of the precise harmful act” she’d committed. In one case, for instance, Evans had proposed that a baby had died of excessive air in her stomach from her nasogastric tube, and then, when it emerged that she might not have had a nasogastric tube, he proposed that she may have been smothered.
The jury deliberated for thirteen days but could not reach a unanimous decision. In early August, one juror dropped out. A few days later, Goss told the jury that he would accept a 10–1 majority verdict. Ten days later, it was announced that the jury had found Letby guilty of fourteen charges. The two insulin cases and one of the triplet charges were unanimous; the rest were majority verdicts. When the first set of verdicts was read, Letby sobbed. After the second set, her mother cried out, “You can’t be serious!” Letby was acquitted of two of the attempted-murder charges. There were also six attempted-murder charges in which the jury could not decide on a verdict.
Within a week, the Cheshire police announced that they had made an hour-long documentary film about the case with “exclusive access to the investigation team,” produced by its communications department. Fourteen members of Operation Hummingbird spoke about the investigation, accompanied by an emotional soundtrack. A few days later, the *Times* of London reported that a major British production company, competing against at least six studios, had won access to the police and the prosecutors to make a documentary, which potentially would be distributed by Netflix. Soon afterward, the Cheshire police revealed that they had launched an investigation into whether the Countess was guilty of “corporate manslaughter.” The police also said that they were reviewing the records of four thousand babies who had been treated on units where Letby had worked in her career, to see if she had harmed other children.
The public conversation about the case seemed to treat details about poor care on the unit as if they were irrelevant. In his closing statement, Johnson had accused the defense of “gaslighting” the jury by suggesting that the problem was the hospital, not Letby. Defending himself against the accusation, Myers told the jury, “It’s important I make it plain that in no way is this case about the N.H.S. in general.” He assured the jury, “We all feel strongly about the N.H.S. and we are protective of it.” It seemed easier to accept the idea of a sadistic “angel of death” than to look squarely at the fact that families who had trusted the N.H.S. had been betrayed, their faith misplaced.
Since the verdicts, there has been almost no room for critical reflection. At the end of September, a little more than a month after the trial ended, the prosecution announced that it would retry Letby on one of the attempted-murder charges, and a new round of reporting restrictions was promptly put in place. The contempt-of-court rules are intended to preserve the integrity of the legal proceedings, but they also have the effect of suppressing commentary that questions the state’s decisions. In October, *The BMJ*, the country’s leading medical journal, published a comment from a retired British doctor cautioning against a “fixed view of certainty that justice has been done.” In light of the new reporting restrictions, the journal removed the comment from its Web site, “for legal reasons.” At least six other editorials and comments, which did not question Letby’s guilt, remain on the site.
Letby has applied to appeal her conviction, and she is waiting for three judges on the Court of Appeal to decide whether to allow her to proceed. If her application is denied, it will mark the end of her appeals process.
Her retrial in June concerns a baby girl whose breathing tube came out of place. She had been born at the Countess at twenty-five weeks, which is younger than the infants the hospital was supposed to treat. In a TV interview that aired after the verdict but before the retrial was announced, Jayaram, the head of the pediatric ward, said that he had seen Letby next to the baby as the child’s oxygen levels were dropping. “The only possibility was that that tube had to have been dislodged deliberately,” he said. “She was just standing there.” He recalled, “That is a night that is etched on my memory and will be in my nightmares forever.”
Brearey, the head of the neonatal unit, told me that after Letby’s first arrest, in 2018, a “significant cohort of nurses felt that she had done nothing wrong.” But, in the past six years, many of them have retired or left. In an interview with a TV news program shortly after the verdict, Karen Rees, the former head of nursing for urgent care, seemed to be struggling to modify her beliefs. She routinely met with Letby in the two years after she was removed from the unit. “If I think back to all the times when I have seen her really, really upset—I wouldn’t say hysterical but really upset—then I would think that...” She paused. The camera was focussed on her shirt, her face intentionally obscured. “How can somebody continually present themselves in that way on a near-weekly basis for two years?” Her voice trembled. “I find that really difficult, and I think, Oh, my gosh, would she have been that good at acting?”
Brearey told me that only one or two nurses still “can’t fully come to terms” with Letby’s guilt. The ward remains a Level I unit, accepting only babies older than thirty-two weeks, and it has added more consultants to its staff. The mortality rate is no longer high. The hospital has, however, seen a spike in adverse events on the maternity unit. During an eight-month period in 2021, five mothers had unplanned hysterectomies after losing more than two litres of blood. Following a whistle-blower complaint, an inspection by the U.K.’s Care Quality Commission warned that the unit was not keeping “women safe from avoidable harm.” The commission discovered twenty-one incidents in which thirteen patients had been endangered, and it determined that in many cases the hospital had not sufficiently investigated the circumstances.
It was another cluster of unexpected, catastrophic events. But this time the story told about the events was much less colorful. The commission blamed a combination of factors that had been present in many of the previous maternity scandals, including staff and equipment shortages, a lack of training, a failure to follow national guidelines, poor recordkeeping, and a culture in which staff felt unsupported. It went unstated, but one can assume that there was another factor, too: a tragic string of bad luck.
Throughout the year of the deaths, Letby had occasionally reflected on the nature of chance, texting friends that she wanted to imagine there was a “reason for everything,” but it also felt like the “luck of \[the\] draw.” After the first three deaths, she wrote to Margaret, her mentor, “Sometimes I think how do such sick babies get through and others just die so suddenly and unexpectedly?”
“We just don’t have magic wands,” Margaret responded. “It’s important to remember that a death isn’t a fail.” She added, “You’re an excellent nurse, Lucy, don’t forget it.”
“I know and I don’t feel it’s a failure,” Letby responded, “more that it’s just very sad to know what families go through.” ♦
On a storied stretch of Mexico’s Baja peninsula, locals fight rich outsiders and rampant development that threaten to transform the coast and dry up aquifers.
The fish are so thick we can see them from the boat, a writhing mass darkening the ocean’s surface, their oily smell rising into the air. Our guide counts us down—“*uno*, *dos*, *tres*!”—and we slip overboard. Within moments, a thousand or more bigeye jack surround us, all slippery silver bodies and trailing fins, unblinking eyes and downturned mouths, below us and in front of us and on either side of us. They all face the same direction, the whole school turning and changing shape in concert like an underwater version of the murmurations of birds that paint the sky with their collective motion.
Individually, each jack is as unremarkable as a child’s drawing of a fish: bullet shaped, a half-meter long, relatively common in the tropics. Together, they’re breathtaking. They become waves of fish, swirls of fish, tornadoes of fish. At times, I can’t see the blue of ocean behind the wall of their bodies. To be among so many animals at once is to be reminded of the dazzling abundance that still exists in the world.
I lift my face from the water and get my bearings: a sea that seems made of light, the tawny mountains of the Mexican state of Baja California Sur rising in the distance. A few snorkels poke up around me.
“*Chicos*, over here!” our guide calls. “*Tortuga*!” I reach her just in time to see a hawksbill turtle drift by. Later, we’ll glimpse several more sea turtles, along with a spotted eagle ray, a green moray eel, parrotfish, pufferfish, angelfish, corals, sea fans, and small, colorful darting creatures too numerous to count. The reef below, as John Steinbeck wrote in *The**Log from the Sea of Cortez,* “skittered and pulsed with life.”
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Bigeye jack, or bigeye trevally, school in a shimmering tornado. Video by underwatercam/Pond5
The biodiversity packed into this sliver of ocean is partially a result of underwater geology and currents that allowed the only true coral reef in the Sea of Cortez (also called the Gulf of California) to form here some 20,000 years ago. Equally important, however, is a nearby village called Cabo Pulmo. In the 1980s, fishermen whose families had lived in Cabo Pulmo for a century began noticing that they were catching fewer fish, as well as spotting fewer sharks, turtles, and rays. Corals were increasingly damaged by anchors. Then the village’s story took a surprising turn: residents decided to stop fishing the reef and go all in on conservation and ecotourism.
Given that Cabo Pulmo had virtually no tourist facilities, had no store or gas station, and could only be reached by driving many kilometers of washboarded, sandy roads, it was a gamble. In 1995, however, the Mexican government designated 71 square kilometers of ocean as a national marine park. Locals helped implement and enforce a fishing ban within the park’s boundaries, and they educated visitors on responsible diving and snorkeling. By 2009, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego found that fish biomass had jumped 463 percent—the largest increase ever documented in a marine reserve. The biomass of top predators like sharks increased tenfold.
People benefited as well. In the 1970s, Cabo Pulmo had only six houses. Today, 300 people live in the village, which now has its own elementary and middle school and a variety of locally owned restaurants, dive outfitters, and guest houses for rent. There’s an economy, in other words, that allows residents to stay put instead of migrating to cities for work or school as they did in the past. And Cabo Pulmo remains charmingly rustic. There are no hotels. Chickens, goats, and dogs wander freely, children play soccer on the unpaved roads, and electricity comes largely from rooftop solar. The stars at night are brilliant. The village and its eponymous park are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, lauded by conservation luminaries in Mexico and abroad.
[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/kids-cabo-pulmo.jpg)
Kids play soccer on the main drag of Cabo Pulmo, in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur. The village has no pavement or traffic lights and is powered largely by rooftop solar.
“This is a perfect example of what a community that belongs to a place \[can\] do,” says Judith Castro Lucero, who grew up in Cabo Pulmo and whose family was instrumental in protecting it. “Because we belong to this ocean.”
For a long time, Cabo Pulmo’s location also aided its success. The Cabo del Este—or East Cape—region surrounding the park is a quiet stretch of desert and sea peppered with small towns and villages. Guidebooks gush that it offers a taste of “old Mexico,” conjuring images of scattered ranchos where leather-faced cowboys round up scrawny cattle and of empty beaches where intrepid campers can buy dinner directly from fishermen. Research shows that compared with other subtropical regions, the East Cape’s coastal habitats as a whole have remained relatively intact, rich with fish and comparatively free of pollution.
Judith Castro Lucero’s family was instrumental in creating Cabo Pulmo National Park.
Yet, the East Cape is beginning to change, and rapidly. Real estate speculation; megaresorts; and unplanned, poorly planned, and possibly illegally planned developments threaten to displace people and harm biodiversity—potentially even in the waters that Cabo Pulmo has fought so hard to protect. As local activists try to rein in the worst projects, they’re confronting competing visions for the region’s future. Will tourism and gentrification consume the East Cape as they have so many other coastal destinations? Or can people find ways to welcome some growth while still preserving the intricate connections between the desert, the sea, and the human communities that care for them both?
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The 1,200-kilometer-long peninsula of Baja California juts south from the US state of California like a crooked finger pointing toward the equator. Geographically, culturally, and even geologically, it is distinct from mainland Mexico. Arid mountain chains form its spine, crashing into the Pacific Ocean to the west and the more protected waters of the Sea of Cortez to the east. *Arroyos*—dry riverbeds that intermittently flood with rainfall—funnel fresh water from the mountains to the coast, carrying sediments and nutrients that replenish beaches with sand, feed marine life, and recharge the aquifers that people depend on for drinking water.
These ephemeral threads tying together desert and sea are even more valuable because of the scarcity of freshwater. Eighteenth-century Jesuit missionary Jakob Baegert described Baja as “a pathless, waterless thornful rock, sticking up between two oceans,” and his observation remains fairly accurate today. The state of Baja California Sur, which makes up the southern half of the peninsula, is especially dry and sparsely populated, claiming both the longest coastline and the least fresh water of any Mexican state. For centuries, its aridity and imposing topography isolated it from the rest of the world. Getting to Baja Sur from nearly anywhere else required a boat, a small plane, or a long journey in a four-wheel-drive vehicle.
[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/map-cabo-pulmo.png)
Map by Mark Garrison with data from ArcGIS
“Baja is a splendid example,” commented early 20th-century naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch, “of how much bad roads can do for a country.”
That isolation began to erode in the 1970s, when the Mexican government decided to boost the economies of the nation’s poorest states by turning a handful of communities into seaside tourism hubs. One of them was Los Cabos, roughly 100 kilometers south of Cabo Pulmo on the southern tip of Baja Sur. With help from the World Bank, the government improved roads, built an international airport, and offered incentives for real estate developers. Mass-market hotels, luxury hotels, second homes, marinas, and golf courses followed. In 2022, over three million visitors came to Los Cabos, and many never left their all-inclusive resorts.
Yet the rebranding of Los Cabos from a fishing and agricultural community into a glitzy resort destination came at a cost. Because some construction interfered with the flow of water from the mountains, aquifers and certain beaches shrank, and fewer nutrients reached the sea. Hotels effectively walled off much of Los Cabos’ 32-kilometer coastline, defying state and local zoning regulations (known as ordering plans) meant to ensure coastal access and protection. Mexican families who had lived or fished in the area for generations were forced inland.
Tourism workers, meanwhile—many of whom migrated from elsewhere in Mexico—settled in *cordones de miseria* (“belts of misery”) on the city’s outskirts, where they frequently live without running water in a place where temperatures can soar to over 37 °C. In 2006, 15 percent of local households lacked potable water, while hotels watered lawns and flushed toilets with abandon. Ecosystems suffered, too. As of 2022, Los Cabos had the lowest recorded fish biomass out of 76 sites across Baja Sur where scientists collected such data.
[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/los-cabos-cabo-pulmo.jpg)
Cabo San Lucas is one of two towns that make up a 32-kilometer stretch known as Los Cabos at the southern tip of Baja, Mexico. Photo by Frederick Millett/Alamy Stock Photo
Until recently, this sort of unchecked development was largely constrained to Los Cabos. Driving north toward Cabo Pulmo and beyond, the East Cape has maintained an almost mythological reputation. Bone-rattling roads keep crowds at bay, and the region’s 20,000 or so residents can still spend weekends picnicking, swimming, fishing, and camping freely on beaches that stretch unbroken for miles. Working-class people can still live in modest homes with an ocean view.
Or at least they could, until Los Cabos–style development began creeping north.
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Reina Macklis is waiting for me in her battered gold Subaru in a mostly dry arroyo just outside La Ribera, the town closest to Cabo Pulmo. I follow Macklis as far down the arroyo as I can in my rental car, then park next to some Mexican fishermen who say they’ve come here from Los Cabos, over an hour away, because their own waters are too polluted to fish. Macklis—an environmental activist who grew up in La Ribera—says this happens often, and she fears similar pollution may soon taint her hometown waters. A Los Angeles–based investment firm called Irongate is in the midst of building a megadevelopment known as Costa Palmas between La Ribera and the arroyo. (Irongate did not respond to requests for comment.)
When it’s complete, Costa Palmas will look more like a small, exclusive city than a resort. It will include two luxury hotels and nearly 400 private homes, priced from US $2.5-million to $26-million. According to the *New York Times*, it will also boast “polo fields, a horseback riding center, several organic farms, a kids club, and scenic walking paths,” as well as 20 restaurants, a golf course, a pool, a gym, a movie theater, and a 250-yacht marina with an exclusive club. It will span three kilometers of beach.
[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/construction-aerial-cabo-pulmo.jpg)
The Costa Palmas megadevelopment is under construction outside La Ribera, a town near the southern tip of Baja California Sur.
On this warm, overcast morning, Macklis has agreed to show me and photographer Kristina Blanchflower how Costa Palmas is already affecting local people and ecosystems. She starts by pointing out a 5.7-kilometer-long stone wall several meters high that construction workers are building alongside the arroyo. Typically, when the arroyo floods, the water disperses into an estuary of Mexican fan palms, mangroves, and wetlands. But because the flooding arroyo would put the golf courses and buildings of Costa Palmas at risk, the wall is being built to channel water away from them.
Unfortunately, a concentrated flood passes through more quickly than a dispersed one, which keeps it from percolating into the aquifer that supplies La Ribera’s drinking water. Costa Palmas draws from the same limited aquifer, and since parts of the resort opened, Macklis says she and other La Ribera residents have run out of water—sometimes for a few days, once for two weeks. A single golf course, meanwhile, uses enough water every day to supply 9,000 Baja residents.
[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/arroyo-cabo-pulmo.jpg)
The Santiago *arroyo*, just outside La Ribera, feeds one of Baja California Sur’s most ecologically important wetlands. A new wall, at the left, aims to control the flow of water in the arroyo.
And Costa Palmas is far from the only new golf course in the East Cape. As of 2022, state and municipal governments had approved permits for nine additional golf courses, with 18 more under consideration. They’d approved nearly 12,500 hotel rooms, with another 25,000 in the permitting process, and 10,000 new houses, with 20,300 more in permitting.
Thanks largely to such development, the population of the East Cape nearly doubled between 2010 and 2020—from 13,800 to 21,000 people—and is expected to surpass 138,000 by 2040. While many of the new residents are construction and tourism workers from other parts of Mexico, the population boom is also driven by second-home owners, investors, digital nomads, and retirees from the United States, Canada, and Europe who put additional pressure on the region’s scant fresh water. Mexico’s 1917 constitution forbids foreigners from owning property within 50 kilometers of the coast, but nonresidents routinely circumvent the law by buying property through a *fideicomiso*, a trust in which a Mexican bank holds the title to a property in a foreigner’s name.
Walking from the arroyo toward the beach, Macklis points out raccoon and bird tracks in the sand. Leatherback and ridley sea turtles, as well as the endangered gallito marino, or least tern, nest here. “There are a lot of species,” Macklis says in Spanish, pushing her curly salt-and-pepper hair out of her eyes. “A lot of mammals and a lot of birds.” She pauses next to a small wetland edged with mangroves. A great blue heron stands in the shallows, and a flock of migratory ducks rests nearby. The area is also home to the endangered Belding’s yellowthroat, a bright warbler that lives only in the wetlands of Baja California Sur.
And then, abruptly, the wetlands end in a massive construction zone crawling with cranes and bulldozers and men in hard hats. “All that over there was mangroves,” Macklis says. “And they took it all out.”
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Critics of Costa Palmas are concerned that its construction has destroyed important wetland habitat.
Satellite images confirm that the verdant wetlands around the mouth of the arroyo shrank drastically as construction of Costa Palmas began. The beach accessible to La Ribera residents also shrank as Costa Palmas’ marina cut off the flow of sediment from the arroyo.
Costa Palmas has changed the area’s social fabric as well. Macklis remembers when La Ribera was a peaceful town, just a bit bigger than neighboring Cabo Pulmo. Now, there are so many newcomers that the school has turned away students. The line for the medical clinic wraps around the building. It’s more dangerous to walk after dark. And Macklis no longer comes to the beach alone. When we get to the edge of the construction zone, where a uniformed man with a walkie-talkie stands guard, she stops.
“I used to come to the beach a lot,” she says. “But not as much now … To come by myself is dangerous. It’s dangerous for me because they know me.”
What she means is that they know she’s tried to document the destruction this project has caused. What she means is that she’s afraid to come to her hometown beach. What she means is that she’s being pushed out.
Blanchflower and I, however, are *gringas,* and no one is going to stop us from continuing on. So while Macklis returns to her salt-rusted Subaru, Blanchflower and I stroll past the security guard, past the expensive homes in various stages of construction, past the golf course where men in pastel-colored polos cluster on immaculate grass. We walk right into the Four Seasons hotel. Everything is white canvas and rattan and clean, modern lines: the infinity pool, the xeriscaping, the beachside restaurant with bouquets on each table. We see an open-air yoga class, where a flock of slender white women stretch and chatter like birds. We stop at an empty bar to chat with the bartender, who lives in Los Cabos but commutes here five days a week because the pay is better and he’s saving for a house. He tells us this as if it’s part of his job, and his deference makes me uncomfortable. Even though we’re sweaty and bedraggled, people seem to think we’ve spent between roughly $1,500 and $4,000 per night to stay here, simply because we’re white.
[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/four-seasons-cabo-pulmo.jpg)
The Four Seasons hotel overlooks a golf course and a construction zone.
Meanwhile Macklis is driving to her home that occasionally runs out of water, hoping to get some rest before she shows up for her shift at a shelter for street dogs. She works there because she loves animals, loves this place, and wants only to ensure that it stays habitable for everyone—dogs and humans and birds alike.
---
Driving back to the small guesthouse we’re renting in Cabo Pulmo, we pass roads that, according to my 2021 atlas, show beach access but which the Costa Palmas development now blocks. We pass belching construction trucks full of rocks and cement. The way quiets as we head south, until finally we’re back on the washboarded road to Cabo Pulmo. My shoulders relax, and I roll down the windows to let in the velvet air.
A hurricane passed over the East Cape two weeks ago, and the desert flushes green from rain. Paloverde and acacia trees intertwine with flowering shrubs and all kinds of cacti. The biggest are elephant cacti, or Mexican giant cardón, which soar more than 19 meters into the air. Vultures scan for food from their upper limbs. Roadrunners dart in front of our car.
[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/caracaras-cabo-pulmo.jpg)
Crested caracaras perch atop Mexican giant cardón in Baja California Sur.
Still, even on this quiet dirt road, there are signs of encroaching development. Literally. Every few kilometers, we see another large *Se Vende* sign. Or, if the landowner is targeting expats, For Sale. If these lots are sold, second homes and hotels could soon surround Cabo Pulmo just as they do La Ribera. During my November visit, developers just a few kilometers away are even clearing land for another proposed megadevelopment similar to Costa Palmas, this one directly abutting Cabo Pulmo National Park.
“Pulmo is an excellent example of how conservation can be very successful,” says Armando Trasviña Castro, an oceanographer at the Ensenada Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education. “But it’s so small, and it’s surrounded by areas that are experiencing very accelerated growth. And that has an impact on what happens inside the protected area.”
Studies indeed show that nutrients entering the ocean from La Ribera’s arroyo, 30 kilometers away, help feed the marine life in Cabo Pulmo’s reef. What happens on land affects what happens in the sea. “The whole environment is connected,” says Sarahí Gómez Villada, a marine biologist with the nonprofit Mexican Center for Environmental Law. If the coast around Cabo Pulmo is transformed into a parade of second homes or a big resort, marine and terrestrial life within the park will likely suffer.
Oceanographer Armando Trasviña Castro uses satellite images to track the impacts of coastal development from his office in La Paz, Mexico.
That evening, I meet Angeles Castro for fresh scallops at an open-air, oceanfront restaurant she owns with her family in Cabo Pulmo. Angeles is Judith Castro Lucero’s cousin; their grandfather helped settle the village. When the cousins were growing up in the 1980s, the kids weren’t allowed to swim unless the beach was clean, like children elsewhere aren’t allowed to watch TV until they tidy their rooms.
Now, I ask Angeles about the For Sale signs we saw earlier. “Our East Cape *has* been sold, sadly, most of it,” she says. “It used to be ranches here and there, and then just empty land.” She shakes her head. “Why more marinas? Why more hotels? There’s so many in \[Los Cabos\] already, and look what happens. \[Tourists there\] go diving and don’t see what they see here, because there is not much fish over there. The whole pull is to come see the natural beauty, but if they’re ruining the natural beauty, there’s nothing left to see. There’s just going to be their fancy hotel.”
Angeles Castro sits in the Cabo Pulmo restaurant she owns with her family.
Angeles worries that developments around Cabo Pulmo could also push her own family away. Beaches in Mexico cannot be privately owned, but there are ways to kick people out. Beach access can be closed or monetized. Real estate prices can rise so high that many Mexicans can no longer afford to rent on the coast, let alone buy their own homes. Or sometimes, newcomers simply make locals feel unwelcome. A social scientist who lives in Baja Sur’s capital, La Paz, told me about some homes built along a beach where she and her daughter had enjoyed camping for years. When they set up their tent, a woman came out of one of the houses, yelling at them in English to get out.
“You know, I thought it would be different,” Angeles says. “I thought somehow we were untouchable. But all these people with money have their eyes on us … They want to protect this place. They want to protect it from *us*.”
---
One afternoon, Blanchflower and I visit a *barrio* called El Caribe, on the outskirts of Los Cabos. The neighborhood started as a squatter camp for construction and hotel workers and grew into a sprawl of cobbled-together dwellings made of sheet metal, cinderblocks, tarps, and other low-cost materials. Women scrub laundry in plastic washtubs outside their homes, and dusty, broken-down cars line the roadsides. Trash blows in the wind and spills from black plastic bags. This is the part of Los Cabos that most tourists never see.
I expected residents to feel bitter that they lived without basic utilities while serving posh foreigners just a few kilometers away, but I hear the opposite. One woman tells me she’s from Mexico City and came here to work in a hotel. She likes it; she thinks tourism is good for the region. While we’re talking, a man named Alejandro approaches, eager to practice his English. He’s from Guadalajara and thinks Los Cabos is paradise. He can go to the beach on his day off, and he built a cinderblock home in El Caribe with two extra rooms—each with its own bathroom—which he rents to local workers for 3,000 pesos ($172) each per month. Two black water tanks squat outside. Every two weeks, he pays 500 pesos ($29) to have them filled. It’s expensive, but it means he never runs out of water like many of his neighbors do.
Alejandro, too, supports the proliferation of hotels, Airbnbs, and investment properties, even if it feels unfair. “All they see from their houses is the ocean,” he says. “I’m like, damn, you’re really rich. And we are poor here … They push us away.”
El Caribe is a neighborhood just outside the tourist district Los Cabos where many tourism workers live.
Inequality is a well-documented byproduct of the mass tourism that’s reshaped places like Los Cabos, Cancun, Puerto Vallarta, and elsewhere. “There are these histories of displacement and dispossession in tourism zones, where local Mexicans tend to get pushed out,” says Ryan Anderson, a cultural and environmental anthropologist at California’s Santa Clara University who has worked in Baja Sur. “That’s kind of the pattern.”
The pattern is so predictable it has a name: Butler’s Tourism Area Life Cycle. Richard Butler, formerly a professor at the University of Western Ontario, coined the phrase in 1980, and scholars have since applied it to tourist-dependent regions from Tunisia to the United Kingdom to Hawai‘i. According to Butler’s model, a place is first “discovered,” then developed. Locals begin to lose control over decision-making, and laborers from elsewhere come to fill new jobs. The number of visitors climbs. At this stage, tourism becomes the dominant economic driver, and the environmental, social, and economic fabric of the original community changes, often to the detriment of locals’ quality of life. In Mexico’s tourist hubs, the resulting inequality is so pronounced that one researcher called it “de facto social and economic apartheid.”
And as Angeles Castro presciently observed, mass tourism can alter a place so thoroughly that it becomes indistinguishable from a thousand other places. Some tourist locales adapt and remain popular, but in other cases, tourists grow disenchanted and move on to somewhere more “authentic.” Although tourist numbers are still climbing in Los Cabos, Anderson believes that visitors’ disillusionment is partially driving the development boom elsewhere in the East Cape. The biodiversity of Cabo Pulmo is part of the appeal; developers tout it as one of the East Cape’s assets. The Mexican government is even proposing to pave the rugged coastal road between Los Cabos and Cabo Pulmo, making it easier for tourists, investors, and expats to reach the region’s isolated beaches and close-knit villages.
After leaving El Caribe, Blanchflower and I try to drive to Los Cabos’ oceanfront, but traffic is atrocious and the hotels are like barricades, impassable unless you’re staying in one. When we finally get within sight of the ocean, there’s nowhere to park without paying $40. It is manicured and clean and safe, but it feels surreal, nightmarish. We flee.
Your browser does not support the video element.
Private hotels render many beaches in Los Cabos inaccessible to everyone except paying guests. Video by BlackBoxGuild/Pond5
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In 2023, state and municipal governments in Baja California Sur announced they would revise several of the ordering, or zoning, plans that determine what can be built where. Previous ordering plans were either nonexistent or were written behind closed doors; this time, governments have opened the process to public review and invited people to attend meetings and submit comments. For the first time in recent memory, locals have a platform for expressing concerns about freshwater scarcity, and for speaking out in favor of public beach access and protections for wetlands, waterways, dunes, and endangered species. For the first time, they have a voice.
Yet, in Mexico, having a voice can be dangerous. In 2022, a global watchdog group found that 54 environmental or land rights’ activists were killed in the country, making it the deadliest place in the world for environmentalists. Some people I talk with are reluctant to let me use their names out of fear for their safety or their careers, including several members of a group of friends I meet one night at a *mezcaleria* in La Paz.
I join the friends in a courtyard behind the bar, where night-blooming cacti unfurl their white blossoms and people chat animatedly in Spanish over shots of mezcal. A couple has just come from a planning meeting, and after ordering fried grasshoppers, guacamole, and chili-dusted orange slices, they discuss their vision for the future. It’s too late for many of Mexico’s tourist hubs, they say, but the East Cape is a place where people still have a chance to get it right. It’s a place where activists and visionaries might be able to disrupt the predictable patterns of mass tourism and disenfranchisement and ensure that the coast remains a public good, rather than a private resource monetized for the benefit of a few.
“This is possible, that it’s not all like Cabos, no?” another person interjects. “We can imagine and we can dream and we can build a different story, no?”
There are reasons for hope, they add. The mayor of La Paz has restored public access to several beaches that private development had cut off. A greater percentage of Baja Sur’s land area is under environmental protections than anywhere else in the country, and more people are now working to strengthen and enforce those protections. And scientists are documenting the region’s biodiversity to make a case against the most egregious developments.
During my visit, Gómez Villada, of the Mexican Center for Environmental Law, is doing exactly that: collecting data from the site of the proposed megadevelopment at the border of Cabo Pulmo National Park where workers have begun clearing land. “We need to document what is happening at the site, what kind of works are being carried out, what regulations are being violated, what ecosystems or species are being affected,” she tells me. Her work will ultimately make a difference. In January 2024, two months after I leave Baja, the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection (PROFEPA), an agency that ensures compliance with environmental regulations, will decide that the development is, in fact, illegal. The decision states that it would harm both the national park and sea turtle nesting habitat.
Such successes are heartening, but they also illustrate the challenges that activists face. The construction workers outside Cabo Pulmo initially ignore the ruling and don’t cease work until several weeks later, after a local nonprofit convinces someone from PROFEPA to visit the site.
The new ordering plans, similarly, will only be useful if they’re enforced. Protections on paper have proven meaningless when money is changing hands. Although existing regulations are supposed to protect waterways and wetlands, for instance, Costa Palmas is being built on one of the state’s most ecologically important wetlands. Several people told me that they believe Costa Palmas’ construction is illegal and should never have been permitted. I reached out to multiple government officials, including the state director of PROFEPA, to try to understand why Costa Palmas and other questionable developments were allowed. None agreed to an interview.
[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/construction-cabo-pulmo.jpg)
Costa Palmas is under construction despite allegations of possible illegality.
Locals, on the other hand, are blunt. While some officials try to enforce the ordering plans, they tell me that others collude with developers or pretend not to notice contraventions. Sometimes, construction begins without the proper permits in hand. Other times, a developer will receive a permit to build, but with stipulations: don’t disturb this particular habitat, for example. If they ignore the conditions, repercussions are rare. There simply aren’t enough resources for the few government officials in charge of enforcing environmental regulations to keep an eye on all the construction underway across the region.
And developers intent on profiting from the East Cape don’t seem to be going away. Many proposed projects pop up again and again with different names and investors, exhausting even the most ardent activists. While big projects like the one near Cabo Pulmo garner the most attention, the cumulative impact of individual homes can be just as great—and harder to defeat. One woman who was part of the “resistance,” as she called it, told me that she’d stopped fighting. “To be very honest,” she texts me, “\[my friends and I aren’t\] involved in this anymore … It’s just part of the reality out here.”
---
Back in Cabo Pulmo, cell phone service has been down for at least four days. No one seems bothered by this. It’s Día de los Muertos, Day of the Dead, and the village is hosting an *ofrenda* (altar) competition. A few dozen residents and a handful of expats stroll down the sandy road under the spill of the Milky Way, moving from one altar to the next.
[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/coastline-cabo-pulmo.jpg)
Evening falls on the undeveloped coastline just south of Cabo Pulmo.
One of the ofrendas is in a little shack at the end of the village’s main road, just before it dead-ends onto the beach. Dozens of votives flicker within, but when I duck through the door, I’m caught by surprise. Instead of photos of a dead relative, laminated placards with illustrations of extinct animals are propped on the tapestry-covered table. There’s the paloma de Socorro, or Socorro dove, last seen in the wild in 1972, and the zanate de lerma, or slender-billed grackle, a wetland bird of central Mexico driven to extinction in the early 20th century. There’s the Guadalupe caracara, a vulture-like falcon that was a close relative of the crested caracara, which still perches in elephant cacti throughout the East Cape.
Children crouch around the ofrenda, listening as a woman explains in rapid Spanish the demise of each species. Even though I don’t understand everything she’s saying, I absorb the gravity of her talk: the lessons that unchecked greed leads to loss; that this place is still flush with biodiversity because of peoples’ connection to their lands and waters; that there are places worth protecting, and doing so doesn’t have to come at the expense of community well-being.
When she’s done, we file out of the close, incense-filled room, and the mood lightens. There will be time for fighting and time for mourning, but tonight is a night to come together. Tonight, seabirds still fly against the darkening sky, and insects still buzz and chirp from the verdant desert. Old women still sit in plastic chairs with paper plates of tamales balanced on their laps. And the children, set free from their somber lesson, run laughing down the sandy roads that still, for now, belong to them.
# For the Women Who Accused the Trump Campaign of Harassment, It’s Been More Harassment
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Nearly eight years ago, convinced that she’d been treated unfairly, Jessica Denson sued Donald Trump’s campaign for workplace harassment.
Then she discovered the lengths Trump’s attorneys would go to hit back — and their unwillingness to stop.
Immediately, the campaign filed a counterclaim for $1.5 million. It won a $52,229 judgment, and the campaign froze her bank account and almost forced her into bankruptcy.
She found it humiliating when the campaign lawyers branded her a “judgment debtor” in a subpoena. They monitored her Twitter account, which had 32 followers, and submitted hundreds of pages of printouts to a judge. They even deposed her mother, grilling her about the family’s religious practices.
The judgment was ultimately thrown out by a judge, but her legal fight continues.
The process has been “unbearable,” Denson said, describing the unrelenting pressure she felt from Trump campaign attorneys. “This had become my life. I had no income and had this lien against me. It crippled my ability to work.”
The legal resources deployed to try to crush Denson’s case are not unusual. At least four women of color involved in the 2016 operation have been embroiled in legal fights with the campaign over workplace harassment, discrimination or violations of nondisclosure agreements. They have been subjected to scorched-earth tactics. For years, the Trump campaign has persisted, despite losing consistently, in at least some cases after it was clear that its efforts had damaged the women.
Trump was regularly updated on the women’s cases, according to two people familiar with the matters. In one, he wanted to escalate the dispute by filing a federal defamation lawsuit against the former employee, but his lawyers persuaded him it was best handled through confidential arbitration. Campaign lawyers urged him to settle the ongoing “legacy lawsuits” from 2016 before the 2020 election, but he declined.
Now as Trump engages in another presidential run, a judge’s order in one of those cases may force into public view the new details about staffers who lodged similar accusations. A federal magistrate judge has ordered the campaign to produce by May 31 a list of all discrimination and harassment complaints made during Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential runs, allegations that the campaign initially tried to keep confidential through rigorously enforced NDAs. Last year, a federal judge freed 422 employees of the 2016 campaign from confidentiality agreements in a class-action lawsuit brought by Denson, a major crack in the campaign’s strategy.
As the media has chronicled, Trump is a well-known bully. He has belittled and sought to dominate political rivals like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former allies like Bill Barr, who was his attorney general. Trump and his surrogates have appeared to relish hounding or humiliating women who have verbally crossed him, including media and Hollywood stars and a long list of accusers who have complained over the years about sexual harassment or inappropriate conduct. (He has denied all of the allegations.)
But ProPublica found that Trump’s campaign used similar bullying tactics against its own workers. These fights have been waged out of the public eye against women with few resources to stand up against the campaign’s battery of lawyers, paid from a seemingly bottomless trove of campaign money.
The campaign is “still litigating these ridiculous cases that should have been settled” long ago, said campaign finance authority Brett Kappel of Harmon Curran, who has been tracking Trump’s civil and criminal cases. Trump’s strategy is the same one he’s used in other lawsuits: “Drag it out and make it as painful and expensive as possible for the opponent, and maybe they’ll go away,” he said.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a detailed list of questions. Spokesperson Steven Cheung in an emailed statement said one of the cases filed by a former campaign worker was “an absurd and fake story.”
Supporters are giving him money earned with “blood, sweat and tears,” Denson said. “And it is being turned around to terrorize people.”
---
As is being revealed now in the Stormy Daniels case, Trump’s chaotic 2016 campaign was governed by one overriding public relations strategy: Lock down any whiff of scandal that could be unflattering or compromising to the candidate.
Trump’s campaign used a trio of tools, borrowed largely from the Trump Organization, to ensure that. Allegations were met with swift denials. Employees were bound to silence by onerous NDAs that imposed a lifetime ban on disparaging Trump, his extended family or any of his companies. And the campaign’s lawyers brought in a phalanx of Trump-savvy outside lawyers prepared to crush.
How much the campaign has poured into such efforts is unclear, but it is likely millions, according to spending reports. Trump’s bills for all his many legal challenges — workplace harassment claims aren’t broken out — have topped $100 million.
Trump’s use of donor money to fight lawsuits against the campaign is legal, but experts say he has pushed the limits of laws that forbid using campaign contributions for legal matters that have nothing to do with running for office.
The campaign faced its first-known discrimination complaint in January 2016 when [Iowa field organizer Elizabeth Davidson filed a case](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/us/politics/trump-field-organizer-accuses-campaign-of-sex-discrimination.html) with a local civil rights agency claiming she had been underpaid because she was a woman. The law student had been fired and accused of violating her NDA by making “disparaging comments” to the press, according to the complaint. Davidson dropped her case without explanation in 2018. She did not return phone calls.
The Trump campaign brought out heavy artillery to try to discredit another female employee who filed a federal lawsuit in February 2019. Alva Johnson, a field operations director from Alabama, [alleged pay disparities and a hostile workplace in 2016](https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/former-campaign-staffer-alleges-in-lawsuit-that-trump-kissed-her-without-her-consent-the-white-house-denies-the-charge/2019/02/25/fe1869a4-3498-11e9-946a-115a5932c45b_story.html), but her most explosive allegation was that Trump engaged in “sexually predatory conduct” by kissing her without permission during a Florida campaign event.
To handle her case, the campaign hired attorney Charles Harder, best known for winning a privacy case in 2016 that financially destroyed the gossip website Gawker. Harder’s firm was paid $4.3 million for legal work on a number of campaign cases between 2018 and 2021, according to spending reports. Trump was then in the White House, and spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Johnson’s accusation “absurd.”
Harder produced a video filmed by an unnamed supporter. It showed Trump kissing Johnson near her mouth as he approached her for the first time in a reception line. Harder argued the video showed the kiss was not forced; Johnson’s lawyers argued it proved the kiss was real and unwelcome.
A Trump-appointed judge threw out Johnson’s case in 2019, calling the kissing allegation a political attack, and gave her a chance to refile a complaint focused only on alleged pay disparities. She said recently in an interview she chose not to do so, largely because she was frightened for herself and her family as Trump supporters rallied to the president’s defense.
“I definitely heard about every possible way I could die,” she said. “We lived in a cul-de-sac, and they would just drive around with their Trump flags.”
Harder subpoenaed Johnson’s bank statements, extensive news media contacts and communications with potential employers. At one point, Johnson said, Harder offered to withdraw the complaint if she would apologize to Trump and leave the NDA in place. She refused. At another point, Trump wanted to countersue her for defamation, but his lawyers talked him out of it, according to two people.
In response to questions, Harder said his legal tactics were “100% permissible discovery in an employment case” and her attorneys did not object. “It’s called litigation, and it’s part of the legal process,” he said.
Johnson’s arbitration case dragged on long after Harder’s firm withdrew. The campaign brought in new outside lawyers, but by then, judges in Denson’s New York case had found the NDA invalid and other courts seemed likely to follow. If Johnson won, Trump’s NDA said the losing party must pay legal fees.
In August 2022, the arbitrator found Johnson’s NDA unenforceable and ordered the campaign to pay her lawyers $303,285. She said she personally received no money but “won the ability to speak.”
In a statement, Cheung, the spokesperson for Trump’s 2024 campaign, called Johnson’s account “an absurd and fake story that has previously been debunked and contradicted by multiple, highly credible eyewitness accounts.”
The campaign also relied on Harder in an NDA case it brought against former White House official Omarosa Manigault Newman, a Black former contestant on “The Apprentice” who wrote a 2018 tell-all book describing Trump as a racist. Trump smeared her on Twitter as a “low life.” Harder said he withdrew from the case before its conclusion.
Newman had signed an NDA in 2016 when she joined the campaign, and its lawyers demanded $1.5 million for violating the secrecy agreement. The case plodded along until 2021, when an arbitration judge ruled in Newman’s favor and found Trump’s NDA too vague to enforce. He ordered the campaign to pay $1.3 million to Newman’s lawyers. “The bully has met his match,” Newman declared at the time. She could not be reached for comment.
---
A discrimination case pending in a Manhattan court, however, might force the culture of Trump’s previous campaigns and their suppression efforts into the light.
Arlene “AJ” Delgado sued the 2016 campaign and three senior officials for discrimination after she became pregnant by her supervisor, Jason Miller, then the campaign’s chief spokesperson.
Trump had called Delgado a rising star when she went on the campaign trail as one of his Hispanic surrogates, and she expected an administration job. But she claimed that when she confronted Miller about her pregnancy, he told her Trump could not afford to have her “waddling around the White House pregnant.” Other senior officials shut her out of work discussions until her transition job ended with Trump’s inauguration, she claimed.
Ten days after Delgado delivered her baby, the Trump campaign filed a $1.5 million-claim against her for NDA violations. Delgado’s main offense, according to the campaign, was a series of angry tweets about Miller and Trump’s decision to promote him to White House communications director. The attorney on the case, Lawrence Rosen, who left LaRocca Hornik Rosen & Greenberg, as it was then known, late last year, and his former partners did not return calls or emails.
Miller did not respond to repeated attempts to seek comment.
The firm, now named LaRocca, Hornik, Greenberg, Kittredge, Carlin & McPartland, leases space in a Trump office building, and it has long been a favored legal vendor for the Trump campaign. It’s been paid at least $2.8 million since 2016 by the Trump campaign and its affiliated PAC, Make America Great Again, according to campaign reports. Rosen was described on the firm’s website as a “bulldog” litigator, and he recently surfaced in testimony from Trump fixer Michael Cohen as a lawyer involved in his effort to silence Daniels, a porn star.
Delgado, a Harvard Law School graduate, claims in the lawsuit filed in December 2019 that the campaign deprived her of a job and hurt her other employment prospects. Squaring off against campaign lawyers, she serves as her own attorney and has raised money for legal expenses, including taking depositions from top former White House officials, through GoFundMe.
Delgado recently accused the campaign of withholding information about its handling of harassment and discrimination cases. A LaRocca partner said in a court filing the campaign has disclosed all of the information it has on women’s complaints.
The judge ordered the campaign to produce a full list of cases by May 31. (It’s unclear whether there are any cases that have not emerged yet into public view.)
The LaRocca firm abruptly withdrew from the case, citing “irreparable differences” with the campaign, after five years pursuing Delgado in court.
As for former 2016 campaign staffer Denson, now an actress currently hosting a podcast, she continues to pursue her personal discrimination and retaliation suit, saying she wants her persistence to inspire others.
The federal judge’s decision in October 2023 to void NDAs for all 2016 employees, vendors and volunteers was a blow to the campaign. The campaign agreed to pay $450,000 to Denson’s lawyers and to no longer pursue employees for NDA violations.
Denson said her problems began when she went to work for the campaign’s data division as a national phone bank administrator, one of a dozen employees who reported to director Camilo Sandoval. She had no experience and believed she and another woman, a model, were hired simply because of their looks.
She claimed that Sandoval, who later worked in several high-ranking Trump administration jobs, made inappropriate comments and assigned end-of-day tasks to make her stay late. In one private meeting, she said, he reclined on a sofa. In a deposition, Sandoval denied many of Denson’s charges. He did not respond to calls or email.
Denson’s work on a Spanish-language project caught the attention of Steve Bannon, then the campaign’s CEO, who moved her to work on Hispanic outreach and raised her pay by $3,000 a month, her complaint said. Sandoval reacted angrily to the transfer and scolded her immediate boss for letting his “sheep wander.” He told her, “I hired you and I can also fire you,” she alleged.
Denson introduced emails Sandoval sent to senior officials describing her as a security risk who should be reported to the police and the Secret Service. He suggested she was stealing documents and may have had a role in mailing Trump’s [1995 personal tax return to a reporter at The New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html), court records show. She claimed he hacked into her personal laptop while she was traveling. In a deposition, he denied accessing her personal information.
Based on Bannon’s encouraging emails about her performance, Denson thought she would be hired for Trump’s transition. But documents showed the campaign’s human resources director telling others, “Jessica is NOT ever to be hired onto transition, inaugural or brought to DC!” An email from Sandoval to senior official Stephen Miller said, “This bitch is out of control.”
Camilo Sandoval’s email to senior official Stephen Miller Credit: New York County Clerk. Redactions by ProPublica.
She filed a lawsuit in New York state court in November 2017 claiming emotional distress as a result of “pervasive slander,” discrimination and harassment. A month later, Rosen pounced. On Christmas Eve, Denson got papers demanding that she face arbitration for violating her NDA by filing the suit. The campaign sought $1.5 million in damages.
Denson declined to go to arbitration, arguing that her right to a safe workplace was unrelated to the NDA, and the campaign won the judgment for legal fees by default. Rosen had her bank account frozen and went after $1,200 she had raised through GoFundMe.
“This is how cruel and scorched earth they were,” she said in a recent interview.
Denson said in her deposition that Trump campaign lawyers grilled her aggressively about her whereabouts. “Their obsession with my location was very frightening,” she said. “The fear has lived with me ever since.”
She felt further traumatized when the campaign demanded to see mental health and medical records. She was upset when they suggested to her during her deposition that her emotional damage was not extreme.
Denson’s cases followed a circuitous path, and at first she served as her own lawyer because she had no money to pay attorney fees. She remembered crying inconsolably late one night, fearing her situation was hopeless, then waking up to learn a judge had sided with her and had thrown out the judgment in the campaign’s favor as unfair.
In March 2021, a federal judge declared her individual NDA invalid under New York state contract law and said the campaign had used NDAs repeatedly to “suppress free speech.” Denson and her legal team moved forward to extend her victory to all 2016 staffers.
Legal experts say the class-action victory established a precedent that should deter future campaigns from trying to quash employees’ free-speech rights.
Denson and other women fighting the campaign have been struck by Trump’s repeated assertions in his own cases that his right to speak freely has been violated.
“I came to the campaign as someone who cared deeply about human rights, First Amendment, individual liberty; I thought I was working on a campaign that supported those values,” Denson said. “Then I saw the opposite of what this country stands for, going after perceived critics and trying to destroy them.”
Do you have information about discrimination or workplace issues involving the Trump campaign or its payments to lawyers? Email [\[emailprotected\]](https://www.propublica.org/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#8ae7ebf8e3e6f3e4a4fee2e5e7faf9e5e4cafaf8e5faffe8e6e3e9eba4e5f8ed) or call 347-325-3348.
[Alex Mierjeski](https://www.propublica.org/people/alex-mierjeski) and [Ken Schwencke](https://www.propublica.org/people/ken-schwencke) contributed research.
# Former Far-Right Hard-Liner Says Billionaires Are Using School Board Races to Sow Distrust in Public Education
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This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for [The Brief Weekly](https://www.texastribune.org/newsletters/briefweekly/) to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues
When Courtney Gore ran for a seat on her local school board in 2021, she warned about a movement to indoctrinate children with “leftist” ideology. After 2 1/2 years on the board, Gore said she believes a much different scheme is unfolding: an effort by wealthy conservative donors to undermine public education in Texas and install a voucher system in which public money flows to private and religious schools.
Gore points to West Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and brothers Farris and Dan Wilks, who have contributed to various political action committees that have poured millions into legislative candidates who have promoted vouchers. The men also fund or serve on the boards of a host of public policy and advocacy organizations that have led the fight for vouchers in Texas.
In recent years, the largesse from Dunn and the Wilks brothers has reached local communities across Texas, including Granbury, near Fort Worth, where fights over library books, curriculum and vouchers have dominated the community conversation.
Gore said that she believes school board candidates are being recruited, at times without their full knowledge, in an effort “to cause as much disruption and chaos as possible” and weaken community faith in local school districts.
In 2021, two local men — former state representative Mike Lang and political consultant Nate Criswell — asked Gore to run for school board. At the time, the three were co-hosts of a web-based talk show that targeted local officials they believed were insufficiently conservative and were straying from GOP platform positions. They took frequent aim at the Granbury school district, which they alleged was allowing explicit sexual content into school libraries and teaching divisive ideas about race.
Gore broke from the group shortly after taking office in January 2022, when she concluded that the materials she had warned about on the campaign trail were not present in Granbury schools. She claims the men and other leaders of the far-right faction in Hood County, home to Granbury, dismissed her findings. They continued to pummel the district over books and curriculum, supported school board candidates who sought to remove a growing number of titles from library shelves, and worked to derail three bond elections that would have funded new and renovated buildings for the overcrowded district.
That’s when Gore said she began to piece together connections that hadn’t been previously apparent to her.
Lang, a Republican who represented Hood County in the state Legislature for four years, received more than $600,000 in campaign contributions — more than half his total — from direct donations from or PACs funded by the Wilks brothers and Dunn. On the campaign trail, Lang [supported providing public money for private schools](https://www.weatherforddemocrat.com/mineral-wells/house-race-with-lang-largent-one-of-ideals/article_ae4328d0-9d63-5334-8bee-16154231a477.html) and, in 2017, [voted against a House measure](https://index.texastaxpayers.com/legislators/mike-lang/2017-index) that prohibited funding for school vouchers. He did not respond to requests for comment.
In addition, in January 2022, Criswell’s political consulting company [received $3,000 from Defend Texas Liberty](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24632617-criswell-strategies-dtl#document/p8/a2556032), one of the PACs funded by the Wilks family and Dunn. The PAC [donated another $3,000 to Criswell](https://co.hood.tx.us/DocumentCenter/View/15833/Criswell-Nathan---2262024-Campaign-Finance-Report?bidId=) this year when he unsuccessfully ran for Hood County commissioner.
Criswell declined to answer specific questions but said he has closed his consulting firm, Criswell Strategies, and has “stepped away from the local political scene, aside from occasionally sharing posts on social media.”
According to her campaign finance reports, Gore did not receive any money from the men. But another school board candidate, her then-ally Melanie Graft, received a [$100 in-kind contribution](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24608706-graftcfrdtl#document/p35/a2554540) from Defend Texas Liberty for advertising expenses. Graft did not respond to written questions or requests for comment.
“I was knee-deep in it,” Gore said about the local connections to the billionaires. “I guess I was just too naive. I should have known better.”
Neither Dunn nor a representative of the Wilks family responded to questions. Dunn recently penned an [opinion piece in the Midland Reporter-Telegram](https://www.mrt.com/opinion/article/tim-dunn-midlanders-lead-education-18487081.php) arguing that he was not the leader of the statewide push for vouchers and has never made public statements on the topic.
Nearly two decades ago, however, Dunn argued in favor of a voucher-like program, saying that the [Texas Public Policy Foundation](https://www.texaspolicy.com/a-consensus-on-choice/), a conservative think tank on whose board he has served for more than 20 years, supported such an idea “as long-time advocates of eliminating the government monopoly in public education.” In March, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who is among the state’s fiercest advocates for directing public education funds to private schools, credited the organization’s longtime advocacy with bringing the state to the “threshold” of a voucher-like program.
Dunn is also the [founder of Midland Classical Academy](https://yellowballoons.net/meet-our-team/), a private school that offers its approximately 600 K-12 students a “Classical Education from a Biblical Worldview,” [according to its website](https://www.mcaknights.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=386607&type=d&pREC_ID=879156). The school believes in interpreting the Bible in its literal sense, which it takes to mean that marriage can only be between a man and a woman and that there are only two genders.
Zachary Maxwell, Lang’s former chief of staff who later worked for Empower Texans, a pro-voucher public policy organization whose associated PAC was largely [funded by Dunn and the Wilks brothers](https://littlesis.org/reports/the-money-behind-empower-texans/), would not speak about his time there, citing a nondisclosure agreement he signed when he left the organization.
Maxwell, however, said he has become disenchanted by Dunn and the Wilks family’s efforts to exert control over the state’s politics. He said Hood County hard-liners, some of whom have close ties to PACs funded by Dunn and the Wilks brothers, were trying to use Gore and Graft to drive a wedge between rural residents and their school district in an effort to build support for vouchers. The women’s presence on the school board enhanced the legitimacy of the group’s claims about pornography in libraries and Marxist indoctrination, Maxwell said.
“It’s all about destroying the trust with the citizens to the point where they would tolerate something like doing away with public schools,” he said in an interview.
Over the past two years, Abbott has teamed up with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, embarking on a tour of Texas towns to promote vouchers. Following the narrow defeat of voucher legislation in November in the Texas House of Representatives, the Republican governor campaigned to unseat lawmakers in his party who opposed such legislation. He successfully ousted five of them.
One of the Republicans who lost in the primary was Glenn Rogers, whose rural district sits just north of Hood County and whom Abbott endorsed in 2020. This time around, Abbott gave $200,000 in campaign support to Rogers’ pro-voucher opponent. Dunn and the WiIlks brothers donated another $100,000.
Rogers, who represented Hood County until 2021, when lawmakers changed the boundaries of his district, said he believes privatizing public education is at the core of Dunn and the Wilks brothers’ political efforts in Hood County and across the state.
“Whether it’s at the school board level or it’s what’s happening in the Texas Legislature right now, that’s their end goal,” he said.
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@ -56,8 +56,6 @@ His senior year, he got a 40-hour-a-week job at Mirador, a financial-services co
Given his résumé, some of his friends expected him to go to an Ivy. Instead, he enrolled at UMiami, where he planned to double major in computer science and management. But in December 2019, halfway through Bergwall’s senior year, his father died of cancer. Devastated — “I do not know how I will move on from this. Right now I feel like I will never move on,” he wrote on Instagram — Bergwall decided to take a gap year and focus on making more money. He stayed on at Mirador and added a second job at a Boston-based crypto start-up called Flipside. In October 2020, he went on a podcast called *Dharma Unfiltered,* hosted by UMiami student Reed Kastner-Lang. Bergwall had yet to matriculate; he and Kastner-Lang found each other in a Snapchat group for incoming freshmen with an interest in entrepreneurship. “You’ve tasted a lot of different things within the computer-science industry,” Kastner-Lang said to Bergwall. “Down the road, what do you see yourself doing?” Bergwall explained that, actually, his thinking had shifted lately. He once dreamed of working as a software engineer at Google. Now, “I don’t want to be a slave for Google,” he said. “I want to build something. I want to run something.” When his gap year ended, he quit Mirador, reduced his hours at Flipside, and moved to Miami to begin in-person classes in the spring of 2021.
No one really knew how he had the money for the matte-gray Tesla, either. Photo: Matthew Bergwall/Instagram
By the time he arrived, Miami had already taken its place as a haven for a particular flavor of techno-optimist capitalist: libertarians, crypto bulls, and OnlyFans agencies. The city promised a launching pad for a gifted young software engineer to step off the traditional career track — the kind of thing expected in stuffy, old-money Darien — into a lifestyle on the bleeding edge of the new-money grind-set. Bergwall was not alone among his classmates in idealizing this. The campus is overrun with wannabe digital players, several students told me. Everyone is an influencer; everyone is launching a brand. Only months after she graduated in 2023, Earle established the Alix Earle Scholarship for any other “aspiring entrepreneur” with the “ambition to be a changemaker in the world of business.” (The application asks for a two-minute video answering the questions “What impact would this scholarship have on your educational and career goals?” and “Why is it important to you to be a student at the University of Miami?”)
“A lot of kids come to Miami and try to emulate the lifestyle,” said Jesse Fromer, a recent graduate who grew up in South Florida. He said he sees the school’s culture as downstream from the ostentatious flexing of the city’s most visible residents — club promoters, influencers, VC bros. The cars are more than likely rented, the jewelry fake. “But if you’re not from here, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s fugazi,” said Fromer. Adding to the pressure are the expenses of the social life and keeping up appearances: While young women typically don’t pay covers for nightclubs and boat parties, young men are often expected to buy tables and rent boats for thousands of dollars a weekend. The status anxiety on campus is acute, Fromer said, because of how ostentatiously rich the upper crust of the student body is. Like Bergwall, many students come from Northeast suburbs where they might have gone to private schools and thought of themselves as wealthy. But the richest students at UMiami are a different breed — trust-funders released from any sort of East Coast stealth-wealth sensibility.
@ -68,8 +66,6 @@ Bergwall was also quick to embrace the Miami party life. His friend posted a pic
He leaned way into a tech-guru persona, describing himself on LinkedIn as “Serial Entrepreneur|Venture Capital Catalyst|Igniting Innovation & Growth.” During a business-class lecture in which the professor asked students not to use their laptops, Bergwall “would be the only one with it out,” Fromer said. “Like, ‘Sorry, Professor, it’s for work.’” Work, ostensibly, was his new venture fund, EJB Investments. After class, he’d go to networking events for VCs and founders in the sleek high-rises of Brickell. At these, according to a friend, he’d talk up the fund, adopting a hyperconfident online business jargon and claiming that he managed more than $1 million in assets. “I’ve been an entrepreneur since my early days. I’ve always been passionate about building technology that didn’t exist yet and finding new ways to solve complex problems,” he wrote on LinkedIn. Over the course of his freshman year, he told friends that the firm had invested in several local companies, including a beverage-ordering app and a concert-promotion business; it also launched an NFT project called Skeletal Cats. By his sophomore year, Bergwall had become the kind of guy who could walk up to the hottest clubs near campus and skip the line because he knew the bouncer. “He was just crazy connected. Like, it seemed like he knew everyone and that if you worked with him or were friends with him, you would have a great time and you would be in his circle and, like, you would be successful,” said a student who was in a fraternity with one of Bergwall’s friends. On Instagram, he posted pictures of himself dripped out in a Gucci belt, a Stone Island pendant, and a $41,000 Rolex President Day Date. Toward the end of his sophomore year, he started taking his girlfriend on lavish trips: Dubai in the summer of 2023, then Tulum. High-school friends watching on Instagram couldn’t believe his glow-up: “For this wannabe Ken doll to pop out of nowhere, it was shocking,” one said. “People were like, ‘Where the hell is he getting all this money from?’” One student who worked at a finance firm was skeptical of what Bergwall told him: that the money came from his VC firm’s investments paying off. “In VC world, it takes about three-to-five years to exit,” he told me. “And he launched it, like, nine months before he met me. So I was like, ‘How are these making you money right now?’”
He seemed to like showing off his travel, especially when he was with his sorority girlfriend. After Dubai, they went to Tulum, where they also posed in pools overlooking the ocean and on mopeds. Photo: Matthew Bergwall/Instagram
A few months ago, I bought a $60 toaster on Amazon that just would not heat up enough to toast bread. I wanted my money back. But repackaging the toaster and dropping it off at a post office seemed like too much of a hassle. So I did something slightly nefarious: I logged on to Amazon, opened the customer-service chat window, and told the outsourced worker on the other end that my toaster had never arrived. The agent apologized, asked zero follow-up questions, and immediately refunded me $60. I had committed a common, low-grade version of a type of fraud that has proliferated in recent years as massive online retailers flood the world with packages and offer customers frictionless returns. Often referred to simply as refunding, it involves finding ways to get money back for products people have not actually returned. A lot of refunding is perpetrated by sophisticated cybercriminals who trick retailers and shipping companies at scale, obtaining high-value products in bulk and reselling them online to customers who want watches, computers, or other expensive items for cheap. According to a December 2023 report from the National Retail Federation, retailers lost $101 billion from return fraud last year.
Refunding first emerged alongside the early-2010s explosion in online retail and typically involved simple methods like buying items and claiming they never arrived (like my toaster). But as companies caught on, tactics evolved. In 2019, a fraudster who went by Bob published *Bob’s Refunding eBook,* which collected a number of methods that had been circulating on hacker forums and other underworld sites. (Nowadays, such tips circulate mostly on Telegram, the anonymous chat app on which much contemporary fraud is coordinated. The community is crass, like 4chan refitted for the zoomer mind: Refunding chat rooms with thousands of members host a flood of racist memes, slurs, cat GIFs, and extreme porn mixed in with advice on fraud methods.) Bob is credited in fraud circles with popularizing FTID — Fake Tracking ID, wherein the scammer returns an empty box to a retailer but edits the shipping label provided by the company to an address that is slightly different from the warehouse where returns are meant to go. The package gets scanned by, say, UPS when it’s picked up, allowing the customer to claim a refund, but it will never arrive at its destination.
@ -78,7 +74,6 @@ There are other FTID methods. One involves writing addresses in special dissolvi
In 2022, at one of his regular check-ins with FBI agents in Alabama, Johnson mentioned the surge in refunding fraud he’d begun seeing on Telegram. The agents were intrigued. The sheer volume of the crime, and the brazenness with which its practitioners were discussing it, opened up a potential enforcement gold mine. “They see that, *Well, shit, it’s pretty easy to identify these guys,*” Johnson told me. “Operational security is very low. They talk too much: They post screenshots of actual orders, they share drop addresses, real names — things like that.” The agents began trawling through the underbelly of the fraud internet, identifying major players. According to Johnson, their list eventually grew to more than 300 people, including Matt Bergwall.
Another picture from Dubai, captioned “desert king.” The posts from this trip made his high-school friends, in particular, take notice of his lifestyle. Photo: Matthew Bergwall/Instagram
Bergwall’s alleged refunding operation was fairly sophisticated. When his indictment was unsealed on November 9, it revealed he’d allegedly facilitated nearly 10,000 fraudulent returns between December 2021 and April 2022, which “resulted in more than $3.5 million in lost product and sales revenue to victim-retailers.” (More recent court filings list the total value at $5 million.) The indictment also alleged that Bergwall got high on his own supply, so to speak: He refunded a number of products for himself, including a “$41,000 Rolex President Day-Date watch, a $600 TeamGee H20 Electric Skateboard, a $350 Samsung 43-inch Smart UHD TV, and an $80 pair of Reebok shoes.” His alleged operation, called UPSNow, was run, like most refunding operations, on Telegram, where he went by the pseudonym MXB and worked alongside a number of unindicted co-conspirators. He specialized in FTID with a powerful edge: The government claims that Bergwall hacked into five employees’ back-end accounts at “a multinational shipping, receiving, and supply chain management company” confirmed by sources to be UPS.
# IRS Audit of Trump Could Cost Former President More Than $100 Million
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Former President Donald Trump used a dubious accounting maneuver to claim improper tax breaks from his troubled Chicago tower, according to an IRS inquiry uncovered by ProPublica and The New York Times. Losing a yearslong audit battle over the claim could mean a tax bill of more than $100 million.
The 92-story, glass-sheathed skyscraper along the Chicago River is the tallest and, at least for now, the last major construction project by Trump. Through a combination of cost overruns and the bad luck of opening in the teeth of the Great Recession, it was also a vast money loser.
But when Trump sought to reap tax benefits from his losses, the IRS has argued, he went too far and in effect wrote off the same losses twice.
The first write-off came on Trump’s tax return for 2008. With sales lagging far behind projections, he claimed that his investment in the condo-hotel tower met the tax code definition of “worthless,” because his debt on the project meant he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, ProPublica and the Times found.
There is no indication the IRS challenged that initial claim, though that lack of scrutiny surprised tax experts consulted for this article. But in 2010, Trump and his tax advisers sought to extract further benefits from the Chicago project, executing a maneuver that would draw years of inquiry from the IRS. First, he shifted the company that owned the tower into a new partnership. Because he controlled both companies, it was like moving coins from one pocket to another. Then he used the shift as justification to declare $168 million in additional losses over the next decade.
The issues around Trump’s case were novel enough that, during his presidency, the IRS undertook a high-level legal review before pursuing it. ProPublica and the Times, in consultation with tax experts, calculated that the revision sought by the IRS would create a new tax bill of more than $100 million, plus interest and potential penalties.
Trump’s tax records have been a matter of intense speculation since the 2016 presidential campaign, when he defied decades of precedent and refused to release his returns, citing a long-running audit. A first, partial revelation of the substance of the audit came in 2020, when the Times reported that the IRS was disputing a $72.9 million tax refund that Trump had claimed starting in 2010. That refund, which appeared to be based on Trump’s reporting of vast losses from his long-failing casinos, equaled every dollar of federal income tax he had paid during his first flush of television riches, from 2005 through 2008, plus interest.
The reporting by ProPublica and the Times about the Chicago tower reveals a second component of Trump’s quarrel with the IRS. This account was pieced together from a collection of public documents, including filings from the New York attorney general’s suit against Trump in 2022, a passing reference to the audit in a congressional report that same year and an obscure 2019 IRS memorandum that explored the legitimacy of the accounting maneuver. The memorandum did not identify Trump, but the documents, along with tax records previously obtained by the Times and additional reporting, indicated that the former president was the focus of the inquiry.
It is unclear how the audit battle has progressed since December 2022, when it was mentioned in the congressional report. Audits often drag on for years, and taxpayers have a right to appeal the IRS’ conclusions. The case would typically become public only if Trump chose to challenge a ruling in court.
In response to questions for this article, Trump’s son Eric, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, said: “This matter was settled years ago, only to be brought back to life once my father ran for office. We are confident in our position, which is supported by opinion letters from various tax experts, including the former general counsel of the IRS.”
An IRS spokesperson said federal law prohibited the agency from discussing private taxpayer information.
The outcome of Trump’s dispute could set a precedent for wealthy people seeking tax benefits from the laws governing partnerships. Those laws are notoriously complex, riddled with uncertainty and under constant assault by lawyers pushing boundaries for their clients. The IRS has inadvertently further invited aggressive positions by rarely auditing partnership tax returns.
The audit represents yet another potential financial threat — albeit a more distant one — for Trump, the Republicans’ presumptive 2024 presidential nominee. In recent months, he has been ordered to pay [$83.3 million in a defamation case](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/nyregion/trump-defamation-trial-carroll-verdict.html) and an additional [$454 million in a civil fraud case](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/nyregion/trump-bond-deal.html) brought by the New York attorney general, Letitia James. Trump has appealed both judgments. (He is also in the midst of a [criminal trial](https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/trump-ny-hush-money-case) in Manhattan, where he is accused of covering up a hush-money payment to a porn star in the weeks before the 2016 election.)
Beyond the two episodes under audit, reporting by the Times in recent years has found that, across his business career, Trump has often used what experts described as highly aggressive — and at times, legally suspect — accounting maneuvers to avoid paying taxes. To the six tax experts consulted for this article, Trump’s Chicago accounting maneuvers appeared to be questionable and unlikely to withstand scrutiny.
“I think he ripped off the tax system,” said [Walter Schwidetzky](https://law.ubalt.edu/faculty/profiles/schwidetzky.cfm), a law professor at the University of Baltimore and an expert on partnership taxation.
Trump’s Chicago tower Credit: Nurphoto/Getty Images
---
Trump struck a deal in 2001 to acquire land and a building that was then home to the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper. Two years later, after publicly toying with the idea of constructing the world’s tallest building there, he unveiled plans for a more modest tower, with 486 residences and 339 “hotel condominiums” that buyers could use for short stays and allow Trump’s company to rent out. He initially estimated that construction would last until 2007 and cost $650 million.
Trump placed the project at the center of the first season of “The Apprentice” in 2004, offering the winner a top job there under his tutelage. “It’ll be a mind-boggling job to manage,” Trump said during the season finale. “When it’s finished in 2007, the Trump International Hotel and Tower, Chicago, could have a value of $1.2 billion and will raise the standards of architectural excellence throughout the world.”
As his cost estimates increased, Trump arranged to borrow as much as $770 million for the project — $640 million from Deutsche Bank and $130 million from Fortress Investment Group, a hedge fund and private equity company. He personally guaranteed $40 million of the Deutsche loan. Both Deutsche and Fortress then sold off pieces of the loans to other institutions, spreading the risk and potential gain.
Trump planned to sell enough of the 825 units to pay off his loans when they came due in May 2008. But when that date came, he had sold only 133. At that point, he projected that construction would not be completed until mid-2009, at a revised cost of $859 million.
He asked his lenders for a six-month extension. A briefing document prepared for the lenders, obtained by the Times and ProPublica, said Trump would contribute $89 million of his own money, $25 million more than his initial plan. The lenders agreed.
But sales did not pick up that summer, with the nation plunged into the financial crisis that would become the Great Recession. When Trump asked for another extension in September, his lenders refused.
Two months later, Trump defaulted on his loans and sued his lenders, characterizing the financial crisis as the kind of catastrophe, like a flood or hurricane, covered by the “force majeure” clause of his loan agreement with Deutsche Bank. That, he said, entitled him to an indefinite delay in repaying his loans. Trump went so far as to blame the bank and its peers for “creating the current financial crisis.” He demanded $3 billion in damages.
At the time, Trump had paid down his loans with $99 million in sales but still needed more money to complete construction. At some point that year, he concluded that his investment in the tower was worthless, at least as the term is defined in partnership tax law.
Trump’s worthlessness claim meant only that his stake in 401 Mezz Venture, the LLC that held the tower, was without value because he expected that sales would never produce enough cash to pay off the mortgages, let alone turn a profit.
When he filed his 2008 tax return, he declared business losses of $697 million. Tax records do not fully show which businesses generated that figure. But working with tax experts, ProPublica and the Times calculated that the Chicago worthlessness deduction could have been as high as $651 million, the value of Trump’s stake in the partnership — about $94 million he had invested and the $557 million loan balance reported on his tax returns that year.
When business owners report losses greater than their income in any given year, they can retain the leftover negative amount as a credit to reduce their taxable income in future years. As it turned out, that tax-reducing power would be of increasing value to Trump. While many of his businesses continued to lose money, income from “The Apprentice” and licensing and endorsement agreements poured in: $33.3 million in 2009, $44.6 million in 2010 and $51.3 million in 2011.
Trump’s advisers girded for a potential audit of the worthlessness deduction from the moment they claimed it, according to the filings from the New York attorney general’s lawsuit. Starting in 2009 Trump’s team excluded the Chicago tower from the frothy annual “statements of financial condition” that Trump used to boast of his wealth, out of concern that assigning value to the building would conflict with its declared worthlessness, according to the attorney general’s filing. (Those omissions came even as Trump fraudulently inflated his net worth to qualify for low-interest loans, according to the ruling in the attorney general’s lawsuit.)
Trump had good reason to fear an audit of the deduction, according to the tax experts consulted for this article. They believe that Trump’s tax advisers pushed beyond what was defensible.
The worthlessness deduction serves as a way for a taxpayer to benefit from an expected total loss on an investment long before the final results are known. It occupies a fuzzy and counterintuitive slice of tax law. Three decades ago, a federal appeals court ruled that the judgment of a company’s worthlessness could be based in part on the opinion of its owner. After taking the deduction, the owner can keep the “worthless” company and its assets. Subsequent court decisions have only partly clarified the rules. Absent prescribed parameters, tax lawyers have been left to handicap the chances that a worthlessness deduction will withstand an IRS challenge.
There are several categories, with a declining likelihood of success, of money taxpayers can claim to have lost.
The tax experts consulted for this article universally assigned the highest level of certainty to cash spent to acquire an asset. The roughly $94 million that Trump’s tax returns show he invested in Chicago fell into this category.
Some gave a lower, though still probable, chance of a taxpayer prevailing in declaring a loss based on loans that a lender agreed to forgive. That’s because forgiven debt generally must be declared as income, which can offset that portion of the worthlessness deduction in the same year. A large portion of Trump’s worthlessness deduction fell in this category, though he did not begin reporting forgiven debt income until two years later, a delay that would have further reduced his chances of prevailing in an audit.
The tax experts gave the weakest chance of surviving a challenge for a worthlessness deduction based on borrowed money for which the outcome was not clear. It reflects a doubly irrational claim — that the taxpayer deserves a tax benefit for losing someone else’s money even before the money has been lost, and that those anticipated future losses can be used to offset real income from other sources. Most of the debt included in Trump’s worthlessness deduction was based on that risky position.
Including that debt in the deduction was “just not right,” said [Monte Jackel](https://jackeltaxlaw.com/), a veteran of the IRS and major accounting firms who often publishes analyses of partnership tax issues.
---
Trump continued to sell units at the Chicago tower, but still below his costs. Had he done nothing, his 2008 worthlessness deduction would have prevented him from claiming that shortfall as losses again. But in 2010, his lawyers attempted an end-run by merging the entity through which he owned the Chicago tower into another partnership, DJT Holdings LLC. In the following years, they piled other businesses, including several of his golf courses, into DJT Holdings.
Those changes had no apparent business purpose. But Trump’s tax advisers took the position that pooling the Chicago tower’s finances with other businesses entitled him to declare even more tax-reducing losses from his Chicago investment.
His financial problems there continued. More than 100 of the hotel condominiums never sold. Sales of all units totaled only $727 million, far below Trump’s budgeted costs of $859 million. And some 70,000 square feet of retail space remained vacant because it had been designed without access to foot or vehicle traffic. From 2011 through 2020, Trump reported $168 million in additional losses from the project.
Those additional write-offs helped Trump avoid tax liability for his continuing entertainment riches, as well as his unpaid debt from the tower. Starting in 2010, his lenders agreed to forgive about $270 million of those debts. But he was able to delay declaring that income until 2014 and spread it out over five years of tax returns, thanks to a provision in the Obama administration’s stimulus bill responding to the Great Recession. In 2018, Trump reported positive income for the first time in 11 years. But his income tax bill still amounted to only $1.9 million, even as he reported a $25 million gain from the sale of his late father’s assets.
It’s unclear when the IRS began to question the 2010 merger transaction, but the conflict escalated during Trump’s presidency.
The IRS explained its position in a [Technical Advice Memorandum](https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-wd/201929019.pdf), released in 2019, that identified Trump only as “A.” Such memos, reserved for cases where the law is unclear, are rare and involve extensive review by senior IRS lawyers. The agency produced only two other such memos that year.
The memos are required to be publicly released with the taxpayer’s information removed, and this one was more heavily redacted than usual. Some partnership specialists wrote papers exploring its meaning and importance to other taxpayers, but none identified taxpayer “A” as the then-sitting president of the United States. ProPublica and the Times matched the facts of the memo to information from Trump’s tax returns and elsewhere.
The 20-page document is dense with footnotes, calculations and references to various statutes, but the core of the IRS’ position is that Trump’s 2010 merger violated a law meant to prevent double dipping on tax-reducing losses. If done properly, the merger would have accounted for the fact that Trump had already written off the full cost of the tower’s construction with his worthlessness deduction.
In the IRS memo, Trump’s lawyers vigorously disagreed with the agency’s conclusions, saying he had followed the law.
If the IRS prevails, Trump’s tax returns would look very different, especially those from 2011 to 2017. During those years, he reported $184 million in income from “The Apprentice” and agreements to license his name, along with $219 million from canceled debts. But he paid only $643,431 in income taxes thanks to huge losses on his businesses, including the Chicago tower. The revisions sought by the IRS would require amending his tax returns to remove $146 million in losses and add as much as $218 million in income from condominium sales. That shift of up to $364 million could swing those years out of the red and well into positive territory, creating a tax bill that could easily exceed $100 million.
The only public sign of the Chicago audit came in December 2022, when a congressional Joint Committee on Taxation report on IRS efforts to audit Trump made an unexplained reference to the section of tax law at issue in the Chicago case. It confirmed that the audit was still underway and could affect Trump’s tax returns from several years.
That the IRS did not initiate an audit of the 2008 worthlessness deduction puzzled the experts in partnership taxation. Many assumed the understaffed IRS simply had not realized what Trump had done until the deadline to investigate it had passed.
“I think the government recognized that they screwed up,” and then audited the merger transaction to make up for it, Jackel said.
The agency’s difficulty in keeping up with Trump’s maneuvers, experts said, showed that this gray area of tax law was too easy to exploit.
“Congress needs to radically change the rules for the worthlessness deduction,” Schwidetzky said.
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# Inside the Savage, Surreal, Booming World of Professional Slap Fighting
The image that I can’t forget—the one that truly pulls me into the savage, surreal, and ridiculously compelling world of professional slap fighting—is the open hand of heavyweight champion Damien “the Bell” Dibbell smashing into the giant bearded face of Ryan “the King of Kings” Phillips in slow motion. In the moment, I can’t tell whether my horror or pleasure is greater. Phillips’s eyes are closed, all 255 pounds of him anticipating the blow, hoping to endure it so he can return fire. He can’t move to evade the slap. That’s not allowed in this relatively new, super-fast-growing combat sport. Flinching is a foul—spiritually, the greatest foul in slap fighting—and the penalty is that your opponent gets an extra chance to smash you in the face. So you just have to take the blow. Dibbell’s slap takes maybe a second to deliver in real time. Phillips drops—whatever was him, gone at least briefly—and his body crumples to the ground.
It’s the replay, caught with super-slo-mo cameras, that makes it exactly the kind of weird I like: We see the hand approaching the face and then the impact. *BAM!* Phillips’s face is briefly displaced off his skull, his neck skin stretching, his face in this moment deformed like a rubber mask—that’s how unlike a face it looks!—and then suddenly it snaps back on. And in that extended instant we see the light going out. His face is almost peaceful as he falls in the aftermath of such a sudden blast of pain. The clip ends and we don’t see what happens after.
This is the money shot that [Power Slap](https://www.powerslap.com/)—the newer of the two American slap-fighting leagues, the one with the vastly higher budget and bigger footprint—has perfected. It’s shocking. It’s dumb. It’s fun. It’s nuts. It’s barbaric. And it’s brief, so it’s extremely shareable online, which is part of the point. In an age of the unreal and the fake, the AI-doctored and the dubiously sourced, slap fighting—a sport in which two men stand over a pedestal or a barrel and take turns slapping each other and being slapped—is indisputably really freaking real. It’s so real, in fact, and seems so simple that it almost feels like it can’t be. *No way,* you think. *They’re not actually just doing this. Shouldn’t somebody stop them? This is awesome!*
Most articles incorrectly trace slap fighting back to a 2019 video from a Russian strongman competition that went viral. But they’re wrong, at least according to JT Tilley, CEO of SlapFIGHT Championship (SFC), the original slap-fighting league, which continues as an underground, more intimate alternative to Power Slap. Tilley tells me that he started slap fighting as a rules-based sport four years earlier, in 2015, after he saw a viral video from Lubbock, Texas.
SCHIAFFO LLC (POWER SLAP)
Ryan “the King of Kings” Phillips enters the octagon in Las Vegas before his Power Slap heavyweight title fight.
In [the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIqumhQHRuM&rco=1), taken at an Ink Masters Tattoo Convention, set in what looks like a high school gym, two unsvelte dudes square off over a picnic table covered with a taped-on red tablecloth. A slightly smaller guy in a hat slaps the face of a big dude with his back to the camera, but not hard enough to do much damage. As an announcer on the stage hypes up the crowd, the big dude returns the slap, knocking the smaller guy out. He goes limp immediately from the blow; the crowd goes absolutely apeshit. The comments below the Lubbock video outline the conflict that continues to rage around—and not coincidentally help spread—slap fighting: a contrast of thrilled, jacked-up smack talk versus “We’re close to landing men on Mars, yet this exists.”
It was after seeing that video and the response online, says Tilley, that he decided to “invent” slap fighting as a proper sport. That meant giving it shape and rules. And also trying to make it safe—by which he means safer relative to what it was at the time, which was a total free-for-all. The underground videos he was watching online were wild and compelling, sure. But he remembers thinking, *Somebody’s going to die out there*. So Tilley worked out a simple set of rules and the format. SFC started streaming its first events in 2017, and from there it grew.
The sport began to catch on overseas, including in Eastern Europe. A couple years after Tilley launched SFC, he was asked to consult with an unregulated Polish slapping show called PunchDown. Tilley says he told the organizers that they needed to incorporate his safety rules to protect the fighters. They didn’t. And shortly after that, someone did die. In 2021, Artur “Waluś” Walczak, a Polish bodybuilder, suffered a stroke in PunchDown 5 and died in the hospital. People freaked out. PunchDown disappeared, and, briefly, so did every other slap-fighting organization except for SFC.
SCHIAFFO LLC (POWER SLAP)
The moment Ryan “the King of Kings” Phillips was KO’d by the heavyweight champ, Damien “the Bell” Dibbell, at Power Slap 7.
But the visceral appeal of slap fighting was too potent not to attract new competition. And soon it caught the eye of the unofficial king of combat sports himself. In 2022, Dana White, the longtime president and impresario of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), founded Power Slap in Vegas, based on SFC’s rules and even using some of its fighters. Power Slap held its first bouts in January 2023, debuting on the TV network TBS. The initial ratings were disappointing, however, so Power Slap moved exclusively online, where it has been booming ever since.
The metrics tell the story of slap fighting’s social-media popularity. From April 2023 to early May 2024, Power Slap’s YouTube subscribers jumped from 121,000 to 2.4 million and its Facebook followers more than doubled, from 1.6 million to 3.3 million. The Power Slap [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@powerslap) has racked up more than a billion views in roughly two years. And White has leveraged that audience to help Power Slap acquire sponsors such as Anheuser-Busch, Crypto.com, and Fanatics. SlapFIGHT can’t match the speed and scale of Power Slap’s growth trajectory, but it still boasts a pretty robust global following. The [SFC YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@slapfightchampionship) has some 250,000 subscribers, with more than 57 million views since it launched. Tilley claims that SFC has garnered more than 2.5 billion views globally across all platforms and says the league has been televised in Hungary, Switzerland, Germany, the South Pacific, Nigeria, and the Middle East. Its most recent event, says Tilley, was seen online by 500,000 people live.
Slap fighting is unsafe, but all combat sports are. This is why we watch them. Frankly, most contact sports are dangerous, points out Power Slap president Frank Lamicella, who was tapped by White to run the league. The proven connection between football and CTE doesn’t seem to be hurting the NFL, after all. Both Lamicella and Tilley say that slap fighting is safer than boxing or MMA. Lamicella, who happens to be a lawyer, rattles off a whole list of medical precautions his league takes. Power Slap errs on the side of safety, he says. “So far we’ve had zero positive CT scans and really a very low hospital-transport rate compared to other combat sports.” Plus, he points out, no one is being forced to compete in his sport. “We live in a country where it’s capitalism and your freedom to do what two people want,” he says. “Look, people want to fight. We provide the platform to do it; we spend the money to make sure they’re safe and healthy. We make sure it’s as safe as possible.”
Wildman connects with FPS on his way to winning a decision at SlapFIGHT 420 in Oklahoma City.
Compared with MMA or boxing, slap fighting also seems more accessible, since the athletes don’t need to be as perfectly toned or highly trained as MMA fighters. Quite a few are former football players, wrestlers, or martial artists. But many slappers are just dudes who work in a Dollar General warehouse in your town and have a love for slapping and being slapped, or at least for what they learn about themselves after eating a powerful smack and delivering one of their own.
With the violence comes the physical damage. A slap leaves a mark. Consider the face of Austin “Turp Daddy Slim” Turpin from Power Slap 7 after his victory over Wolverine, one of the best-known competitors in the sport. The left half of Turpin’s face has ballooned to twice the size of the right half. His cheek is bleeding. His eye is pressed closed. The damage is obvious, though it’s temporary. He’s smiling as a bead of sweat rolls down the center of his forehead.
The face of Austin “Turp Daddy Slim” Turpin before and after his victory over Wolverine at Power Slap 7 in Las Vegas.
I should say before we get too deep into this: I’m not a fan of combat sports. I haven’t been in a fight since eighth grade. My contributions to my own pain threshold are distance running and lack of self-control when eating bags of chips. That is, I’m a bit of a glutton and definitely a wuss, which became super obvious watching these guys hit and take hits from one another. I have no interest in seeing how much pain I could take by being slapped. But I like watching men do crazy stuff. And *how* crazy it is, and in what ways, is what I wanted to find out, so I went to experience two slap-fighting events live: Power Slap 7 in Vegas and SlapFIGHT 420 in Oklahoma City.
---
Having a sensational name is a big part of the showmanship in slap fighting, and the competitors at Power Slap very much delivered on this promise: Kainoa, Pretty Boy, the Kryptonian, Bodacious, the Joker, the Truth, Static, the Waterboy, Da Hawaiian Hitman, El Perro.
Seated behind the stage in the media row, I could see the whole impressive production coming together. Lights and music (“Sandstorm,” by Darude, and the Moby song from one of the *Bourne* movies), fog machines, spotlights, booming voice-overs. The fight took place in the UFC Apex, which meant that the raised stage was an octagon. Everyone was dressed up. (Even the media was given a dress code: business casual.) Lots of sharp-looking, moneyed dudes with their girlfriends and entourages who’d paid $600 to $1,200 per seat.
JESSE CHEHAK
The slapping hands of competitors at SlapFIGHT 420.
The first fight resulted in a knockout after two slaps. The crowd roared but clearly wanted more. The Power Slap undercard bouts consist of only three rounds (a coin toss determines who goes first, then you slap, and then you get slapped, and then repeat), which should tell you how hard these guys whack each other. The second match got to round 3 and ended in a knockout. The third was a fiesta of fouls resulting in disqualification.
The fourth match was one I was looking forward to. It featured a relatively unknown underdog, Anthony “Babyface” Blackburn, challenging the terrifyingly named Christapher “KO Chris” Thomas, one of the most public faces of Power Slap. KO Chris looked kinda mean, with neck tattoos, and had the name and record to prove it. But after taking one of KO Chris’s slaps, counted as a foul, Babyface knocked him out in round 2 with a righteous blow, much to everyone’s surprise.
A few days later, I talked with Babyface. A former wrestler and football player, he really does have a sweet face and demeanor by comparison with some of these guys. He said he had never been hit in the face before Power Slap and that he was outwardly a kind and helpful person. “I’m not confrontational at all,” he said, “but I’ve always been an angrier person and been able to turn that switch on.” For slap fighting, it helps to know “that burst of aggressive energy is just sitting inside of you.”
Just before his bout at Power Slap 7, Babyface had been let go from his job at a pizzeria outside Detroit, where he lives. To go from that disappointment to the thrill of knocking out a fellow slap fighter he idolized, like KO Chris, was almost too much for Babyface to process. “To be paid to do it, and be on a show, and do something really, really monumental like this, for this dream to happen and for it to come true, is like mind-boggling for me. Fucking awesome.” He described the slappers as a brotherhood and said he had Facebook Messenger groups with a lot of them. “We’re in each other’s lives every single day. That’s my brother up there. I have to fight my brother each time.”
Time for the main card, each fight featuring five rounds. An entertainingly obnoxious Ayjay “Static” Hintz beat Azael “El Perro” Rodriguez by technicality, with Rodriguez getting disqualified for an illegal strike that knocked out Hintz. Then, during the break, a commercial informed us that Power Slap 7 was brought to us by AminoHeal, “the official brain-protection supplement of Power Slap.” I tried to get AminoHeal to return my calls or send me a sample of its brain-protection product, which its website claims will “reduce and prevent the effects of mild concussions to severe traumatic brain injury,” but nobody got back to me.
Since we’re on the break, this is a good time to delve further into the rules, which both leagues told me are designed to protect the slappers. When Tilley created SFC in 2017, he embedded the league’s initials in its guidelines, which feature only three kinds of fouls: Stepping, in which the slapper’s feet lift off the ground in the windup or the follow-through to create more force in order to get an unfair advantage; Flinching, in which the slappee moves before impact to anticipate the blow and doesn’t allow their opponent to get a fair slap in; and Clubbing, which is any slap that initially connects with the neck or eye or ear, really anywhere other than the cheek and the chin, or doesn’t make full contact with the palm of the hand.
Power Slap’s rules are elaborations on SFC’s, laid out in considerably more detail. Tilley grouses that Power Slap’s adaptations, like a smaller barrier separating the combatants, make the slapping less safe, even though Power Slap events involve fewer rounds than SFC’s. When I asked if Power Slap had taken the SFC rules as a model, a spokesperson gave me this answer: “We wrote the rules from scratch without any reference materials. We of course watched what was going on in other leagues, adopted certain things we liked, and changed things we didn’t like. We also professionalized the rules for government regulation purposes.”
Smiley, in yellow, lost by TKO in his bout against Mallet at SlapFIGHT 420.
Power Slap is still working on its rule enforcement and consistency, as White told us after the show. There were a lot of fouls called in Power Slap 7, and four of the eleven matches ended in disqualification. In spite of that, it was obvious why the sport is catching on so quickly. We’re in an age of making our sports shorter and faster paced: NHL hockey with its three-on-three overtimes and shoot-outs; Major League Baseball with its new pitch clocks and abbreviated extra innings; even football, with new clock rules to move things along at the end of a game. If you want people to pay attention to a sport in 2024, it has to be short and highlight filled, with plenty of time for commercial breaks.
The very last fight of Power Slap 7—the aforementioned showdown between Dibbell, a soft-spoken, 249-pound twenty-two-year-old who’s saving up his prize money to go to law school, and Phillips—pushed harder on the question of safety for me. Dibbell’s slap that knocked out Phillips in the fourth round was thrilling and disturbing in equal measure. Watching Phillips in the overhead shot on his back, opening and closing his mouth, clearly not all there, while the announcers chuckled about it (“down like a box of rocks, out like a light”) was not easy. He went down so fast that the beefy dudes whose job it was to catch a knocked-out fighter couldn’t get to him in time, and his head hit the canvas. As Dibbell was named the winner, flexed his victory on the stage, and eventually walked off for his post-match interview and we all left to try to get back to the pressroom, Phillips was still on the ground, being attended to by medical staff. He wouldn’t be available for the post-fight press conference. White said afterward that the knockout was in his “top two.”
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After Vegas, the venue in Oklahoma City was underwhelming, as anything after Vegas should be. On the drive over, I passed three billboards advertising Oklahoma’s Largest Knife Show the following weekend before I rolled up to the site of the former Crossroads Mall, once “the premier shopping experience in Oklahoma,” according to KOKH Fox 25. It is now largely empty. Two local charter schools occupy the space that was originally a Montgomery Ward. The north side, where I arrived, also advertised an antique show SATURDAY ONLY. Confused, I circled around the south side of the complex until I saw the signs for Chronic Palooza VI, a two-day festival celebrating the legalization of medical marijuana in Oklahoma.
THE FACES OF SLAPFIGHT 420—left to right, top to bottom: Smiley was competing in just his second slapfighting event; Okuma 915 with his dog; Dangerous Danny Steele, a former pro wrestler, injured his biceps with a record slap; former UFC fighter Mark “the Hammer” Coleman, who does commentary on the live streams; Mallet relaxing pre-fight; police officers outside the venue; one of the women from Little Darlings; FPS and his girlfriend; Biscuit, the “slap-happy hippie.”
Yes, the following day would be April 20, the high holy day for cannabis connoisseurs. And Tilley’s league was holding SlapFIGHT 420, “the dankest event in SLAP history,” as part of this promotion of all things weed. SFC mostly puts on underground shows for streaming audiences with tiny crowds in undisclosed locations. Tomorrow’s event would have a larger live crowd, but true to SFC’s underground brand, it would be in an abandoned Dillard’s.
No one from SFC had yet arrived. Bass echoed through the cavernous space as dealers like Stristed Art (which made elaborate dragon sculptures out of bone), Paradise Vape, Permanent Jewelry (“ask us about our tooth gems”), HawaiiCannabisExpo.com, and Little Darlings (a strip club just up the road) straggled in to set up their booths. I was so early, in fact, with so much time to kill that I felt obliged to go get a beer from the closest joint I could find, which was Little Dick’s Halfway Inn, an extremely divey dive bar. It was busy at 4:30 on a Friday, and at this point I realized that you could still smoke (tobacco) in Oklahoma bars, which felt like going back in time twenty years—just in time to shop at the old Crossroads Dillard’s.
The news was on: That’s how I realized that today, April 19, was the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. Twenty-nine years ago, Timothy McVeigh killed at least 168 people in downtown OKC. It was a somber reminder: Where there are humans, there is violence. Was watching or engaging in slap fighting an outgrowth of that violence or a solution to it? I didn’t know, but Afroman was telling me to roll, roll, roll my joint. It was a jukebox song, I realized, maybe folks pregaming for Chronic Palooza or looking for some respite from history. There was little of that to be had. Choking on the smoke—not a good sign for my ability to report on a pot festival, I noted—I finished my canned beer quickly and drove back to the venue.
Inside, no one seemed concerned by my presence. So I went upstairs in search of slappers, which meant walking up the nonoperational former Dillard’s escalator to the second floor, empty except for a bunch of dudes waiting for SFC’s 6:00 P.M. weigh-in. Already the flavor of this weekend could not have been more different from Power Slap’s: relaxed and very casual. There was no mention of a dress code.
This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Esquire
Here I met Tilley, the SFC founder and CEO. A former wrestler, Motown singer, comedian, and Hall of Fame MMA promoter, he is a big, burly, likable guy who recently turned fifty. He has a promoter’s jovial personality, a genuine smile, and an infectious enthusiasm for slap fighting and especially for the people who slap and get slapped. He is the face of SFC and, with retired MMA star Mark “the Hammer” Coleman, does the play-by-play on all the SFC live streams. From our first communication, he was super welcoming and described what they do as a family operation. That would come to be echoed by nearly every person involved with SFC. Tilley is a self-described inventor of “bullshit sports,” as he told me with a laugh, like carjitsu, “jujitsu but inside of a car,” a new sport for which he signed a deal with ESPN; ultimate tire wrestling, “a big stack of tractor tires, and your objective is to stuff the other guy inside the hole,” also ESPN bound; beast ball, “one-on-one football in a shipping-container unit”; sumo boxing, which I couldn’t entirely figure out; and a new one he was developing where two guys get roped together as in the “Beat It” video and have to fight.
Tilley has complicated feelings about his Power Slap rivals. When Power Slap was starting, Tilley says that White & Co. called him and asked him to partner with them. He considered it but was unwilling to give up his league or have it subsumed by White’s glitzier operation. He acknowledges that the growth of Power Slap is probably good for SFC, too, but he wants everyone to understand that he is the true slap-fighting pioneer. “I don’t want to talk shit on anybody. But I’m also not going to pretend like I didn’t write this sport on a piece of notebook paper on my coffee table.”
Today at Dillard’s, there was drama of a different nature: Tilley pulled me aside and told me that an official from the Oklahoma State Athletic Commission had come in earlier that day and forbidden him from putting on the event. He said he was planning to do it anyway, but there was a good chance he could get arrested. And if he did, he wanted to at least make sure we were there to get some photos. That’s how much he was committed, he said, walking away to huddle up with a couple of the other production guys.
After a few minutes, he came back and told me he’d changed his mind and that he didn’t want to endanger Chronic Palooza. The new plan was not to put on the show downstairs in front of the live audience tomorrow at 6:00 P.M. as intended but to do it secretly—no crowd, no announcements—and record it, then stream it later that night from “an undisclosed location,” since at that point they couldn’t stop the fight. He told me absolutely not to tell anyone; he would break the news to the slappers individually after the weigh-in. It was probably a coincidence, I told myself, that I’d mentioned to Power Slap’s Frank Lamicella the day before that I was going down to Oklahoma City for an SFC event.
JESSE CHEHAK
The crowd at SlapFIGHT 420 reacts to the action.
On the docket were five bouts, assuming the event happened at all. The headline matchups were for titles. For the welterweight championship: Okuma 915, a tall, quiet guy from El Paso with a serious face, vs. the current champ, the Cannon. The Cannon’s brother, Runt, would be slapping for the middleweight belt against challenger Shamokin Thunder Clap. The Cannon and Runt were both shorter than me but seriously jacked. They didn’t say much.
The competitors who were not contending for a title were the big dudes, superheavyweights: an absolutely massive guy at six-foot-six and 342 pounds named Cowboy, who religiously wore, yes, a cowboy hat, against Dangerous Danny Steele, a former pro wrestler with the biggest arms I have ever seen. Steele had driven down with his crew from London, Ontario, to take part in this event.
The middleweight division would feature SlapKage, a talkative, anime-loving dude, vs. Biscuit, also known as the “slap-happy hippie,” an extremely chill guy with a beanie he never took off and false teeth that he took out for each fight. In the catchweight division: Smiley, a kid with curly blond hair who could have been one of my undergraduate writing students, would be taking on Mallet, who had his name tattooed above his right eyebrow and told me he was the lightest slap fighter on the planet but had been trying to put on some weight so that Tilley could find him someone to fight. In lightweight: FPS, a tall, gangly dude with a goofy affect who liked playing, you guessed it, first-person-shooter games, would slap against Wildman, a bearded, intense guy who looked a solid foot shorter than him.
These guys were characters, to say the least. Several had backgrounds in other combat sports or martial arts; some had military backgrounds. Some had just seen slap fighting and thought they might be good at it. Mallet told me he’d just lost his dad a year ago and had a lot of anger he was working through, and he was really glad he found slap fighting because otherwise, he said, he would probably be in jail. Having experienced a significant personal tragedy would be part of many guys’ answers to one of the obvious questions: Why did you sign up to get smacked this hard in the face? Shamokin Thunder Clap, the best dressed of the bunch in a bow tie and a leather cap, had lost an infant son to Covid, then lost a long-term relationship, and on top of that he had just got through prostate cancer, so the brutality of slapping and getting slapped didn’t seem so bad to him. In fact, he liked the pain, he told me. He’d spent a lot of time street fighting before he found his way here. He would be aiming for a belt tomorrow.
JESSE CHEHAK
The Cannon and his brother, Runt, pose in their title belts after SlapFIGHT 420.
Smiley told me the event was his second slap fight ever. He got into the sport because of Biscuit. He and Biscuit work together in a Dollar General warehouse in Fulton, Missouri. Smiley trains at the gym some nights and with Biscuit every Monday to work on slap-fighting technique. In his free time he hangs out with his girlfriend and plays Magic the Gathering, because he doesn’t drink. Slap fighting, he said, has changed him for the better and given him a good way to release bad energy. “It’s like a form of therapy.”
There were reasons to root for all of the fighters, and the more I got to know them, the more I liked them. I was starting to see the appeal of slapping and being slapped—how when you realized you could take it, as one of them told me, it gave you a sense that you could take more than you thought you could, and then you got to give it right back out. In SFC, most of these guys were friends—family, as Tilley would have said—and the love between them was obvious.
Tony Charles and the team from TNT Premier Sports were setting up a device called the PowerKube that was, he said, designed to measure the force of a blow. They’ve been measuring MMA fighters and boxers and martial artists for years, he explained, and one of the reasons they chose to come down here was that he has a lot of respect for SFC and wanted to give its slappers the first shot at setting the Guinness World Record for the strongest slap. He Velcroed the target, a cube sixteen inches on each side with a bull’s-eye on the front of it, to an iron beam so that each guy could take a shot at it. Naturally everyone was eager to see what kind of number they could post. A Guinness World Record would be set tonight, and the videos of each of the guys slapping the Kube would be rolled into their introduction reel tomorrow. I watched for a while as they took their best shots.
Slapping force, Tilley told me, isn’t really what makes you a great slap fighter. What you want is to hit the right spot, not necessarily to smash the face with your power. There’s a nerve behind the mandible, and if you hit the right spot and slide the mandible back in, it connects with that nerve and slides out and your opponent goes down. I noticed this, too, watching both Power Slap 7 and SlapFIGHT 420: Being big didn’t necessarily help. In fact, almost all the tall fighters I saw facing more compact opponents lost. Many of the fighters had clearly been practicing a slap technique that started low and went up into the face and chin, and it appeared to be very effective.
JT Tilley, SlapFIGHT Championship founder and CEO, says he was inspired to “invent” the sport of slap fighting after he saw a viral video in 2015.
The second reason they brought the PowerKube in, Tilley would tell me later, was that he wanted to quantify just how relatively safe slapping was in contrast to punching or kicking. That would be borne out by the numbers, in which the hardest slap of the night—unsurprisingly by Dangerous Danny Steele—and thus the world record, was 75,906 Franklins. I had to read a Reddit thread to understand just what this proprietary measure actually measures, which is some combination of power, speed, and energy. Whatever the exact formula is, Steele’s record slap was less than half as powerful as the hardest punch (191,796 Franklins) or the hardest kick (235,875 Franklins) they had recorded. That gave at least some credence to the arguments about relative safety that both SFC and Power Slap were making. Plus, as Babyface told me later, any kind of slap that generated world-record-level force, as Steele’s did, would be a foul, so the record-setting slaps aren’t anything like what you’d get in a match.
Charles asked me if I wanted to try, but I demurred, figuring my arm would fall off and I’d die of blood loss and shame. As I was nursing my insecurity, I overheard Cowboy saying that Steele had ripped his biceps while hitting the Kube and would not be able to compete tomorrow. Tilley was trying to find another opponent to fill in so that Cowboy would have someone to fight, but there are only so many giant guys who are willing to stand on a stage and take a slap on short notice, even in Oklahoma.
---
The following morning, Tilley texted to tell me they’d decided to call the Athletic Commission’s bluff and run the event as planned onstage with a live audience. When I arrived, Chronic Palooza was now in full force. The haze of pot smoke would get thicker and thicker throughout the day until by evening it resembled a stew. Rappers worked the stage. An extremely stoned and very wizardly dude from Dragon Group Entertainment’s Build-a-Bong Workshop beckoned folks with his wizard staff, which was also, obviously, a bong. The number of kids in attendance was vaguely disturbing, but the organizers had clearly planned for it, with opportunities to pet two small cows for two dollars and a dicey-looking inflatable ball pit.
I didn’t want to build a bong, but I did want the Donut Burger from Miss Tammy’s Lunch Wagon: a fresh burger served with a glazed doughnut for a bun. Miss Tammy had just started up this business six months ago, she told me as she cooked. All four ladies working the truck were lunch ladies at local schools, which I found extremely charming.
I have to say the Donut Burger kicked ass. It was tasty and messy in a novel way. Both doughnut and burger were fresh and delicious, and together they felt absolutely over-the-top. The yellow mustard really worked with the glaze, which is a sentence I never thought I would write. It was a lot, but I was here to watch men slapping each other in the face, so I felt like I needed to eat it for science. For health, I skipped the fries.
---
Both SFC and Power Slap told me they thought their event was safer than the other’s. Power Slap touted its relatively few rounds (three and five rounds for prelims and main events, compared with seven and ten rounds for SFC) and its top-notch commitment to medical protection and care. Meanwhile, SFC cited the close nature of the relationships among its slappers and argued that, unlike the Power Slap guys, SFC’s slappers don’t lead with the base of the hand, which makes a slap much more like a punch. Tilley and his team claimed their slappers were more scrupulous about the rules. And they, too, had a medical professional backstage who checked out everyone after the fights. To my eyes, both events featured dudes getting crushed in the face.
In Oklahoma City, though, I did get to witness the camaraderie among the SFC competitors that Tilley was touting. Whether it was Biscuit telling his opponent, “You got this” while preparing to eat said opponent’s thunderous slap, or whether it was Mallet and Smiley hanging out in their hotel room before their fight, again in the greenroom, and then afterward in the crowd watching the title match, I came to really believe in the friendships between them.
As we approached showtime, it looked like this event might really happen.
Now the Little Darlings were done up like actual showgirls, feathered headpieces and all, which I found delightfully upscale. The ladies shared the greenroom with the slap fighters, walled off between the up and down nonfunctional escalators to the second floor. More than once I’d see what I thought was blood on a table only to realize it was (probably) red makeup. I walked upstairs, and finding two people there having a private conversation, I continued up to the empty third floor, where I happened on a whole pile of figures in the dark, some standing, some sitting. When I clicked on my phone’s light, I was shocked to see a white-faced clown with a cleaver. Pan right to an evil jester. A freaky woman with long blond hair. And maybe worst of all, an unidentifiable figure with a bunch of what looked like hangers for a face. I wondered how much of that smoke I had inhaled before I realized it was a huge pile of Halloween decorations stuck up here between seasons. HE’S HERE was spray-painted on the wall. I went back downstairs as quickly as I could.
I was excited for the show, but I wasn’t excited for the show. Now that I’d met these guys—mostly sweet and chill, here for their own reasons—I honestly didn’t want to see them hit each other in the face, even if they did. But I wasn’t here for the burger or the clowns. And besides—the evil clown might have told me, if it didn’t kill me—the show must go on, unless it got shut down by the Athletic Commission.
It didn’t. A few minutes after 6:00, a big crowd of mostly but not entirely stoned folks gathered around the main stage, and the show went live.
This was also a production, if not quite at the level of the Power Slap experience. A small crowd rounded out the stage, standing behind the slappers. The crowd chanted *one, two, three* for every slap, which felt inclusive. Wildman beat FPS on judges’ decision. Mallet TKO’d Smiley. Biscuit outlasted SlapKage for the win. Runt TKO’d Shamokin Thunder Clap in the third round to retain his belt. Unfortunately they couldn’t find a big enough opponent on short notice for Cowboy. And the main event, Okuma 915 vs. the Cannon for the welterweight championship, lived up to its billing, going an incredible ten face-slapping rounds. Both these dudes ate every slap and gave each back, their faces reddening and swelling, and at the end, the judges’ decision went to the Cannon, who retained the belt.
And with that, the event was over.
My adrenaline was running high, and I was just watching. I couldn’t imagine how the slappers felt afterward. SlapKage told me that there’s just a feeling, that fight-or-flight instinct kicking in after you take a massive slap in the face, and when you’re able to master it—if you’re able to master it—and compose yourself to give it back to your opponent, that feeling is hard to give up. Mallet talked about what it’s like when you go back to your day job with your face all lit up with battle scars. And then you have to explain to your coworkers that you spent the weekend getting hit in the face and maybe getting “knocked the fuck out,” as Smiley said happily. People just look at you like you’re crazy—*Why would you do that?!*—but they’ll never know. And there’s a letdown, I suppose, after the adrenaline subsides. There always is. What you have left over, after that goes away, is the story and the memory of it that only you can know.
Ander Monson is the author of *Predator: a Memoir* and other books.
# Multiple Trump Witnesses Have Received Significant Financial Benefits From His Businesses, Campaign
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Nine witnesses in the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump have received significant financial benefits, including large raises from his campaign, severance packages, new jobs, and a grant of shares and cash from Trump’s media company.
The benefits have flowed from Trump’s businesses and campaign committees, according to a ProPublica analysis of public disclosures, court records and securities filings. One campaign aide had his average monthly pay double, from $26,000 to $53,500. Another employee got a $2 million severance package barring him from voluntarily cooperating with law enforcement. And one of the campaign’s top officials had her daughter hired onto the campaign staff, where she is now the fourth-highest-paid employee.
These pay increases and other benefits often came at delicate moments in the legal proceedings against Trump. One aide who was given a plum position on the board of Trump’s social media company, for example, got the seat after he was subpoenaed but before he testified.
Significant changes to a staffer’s work situation, such as bonuses, pay raises, firings or promotions, can be evidence of a crime if they come outside the normal course of business. To [prove witness tampering](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1512), prosecutors would need to show that perks or punishments were intended to influence testimony.
White-collar defense lawyers say the situation Trump finds himself in — in the dual role of defendant and boss of many of the people who are the primary witnesses to his alleged crimes — is not uncommon. Their standard advice is not to provide any unusual benefits or penalties to such employees. Ideally, decisions about employees slated to give evidence should be made by an independent body such as a board, not the boss who is under investigation.
Even if the perks were not intended to influence witnesses, they could prove troublesome for Trump in any future trials. Prosecutors could point to the benefits to undermine the credibility of those aides on the witness stand.
“It feels very shady, especially as you detect a pattern. … I would worry about it having a corrupt influence,” Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said after hearing from ProPublica about benefits provided to potential Trump witnesses.
But McQuade said these cases are difficult to prove, even if the intent were actually to influence testimony, because savvy defendants don’t explicitly attach strings to the benefits and would more likely be “all wink and a nod, ‘You’re a great, loyal employee, here’s a raise.’”
In response to questions from ProPublica, a Trump campaign official said that any raises or other benefits provided to witnesses were the result of their taking on more work due to the campaign or his legal cases heating up, or because they took on new duties.
The official added that Trump himself isn’t involved in determining how much campaign staffers are paid, and that compensation is entirely delegated to the campaign’s top leaders. “The president is not involved in the decision-making process,” the official said. “I would argue Trump doesn’t know what we’re paid.”
Campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement that “the 2024 Trump campaign is the most well-run and professional operation in political history. Any false assertion that we’re engaging in any type of behavior that may be regarded as tampering is absurd and completely fake.”
Trump’s attorney, David Warrington, sent ProPublica a cease-and-desist letter demanding this article not be published. The letter warned that if the outlet and its reporters “continue their reckless campaign of defamation, President Trump will evaluate all legal remedies.”
It’s possible the benefits are more widespread. Payments from Trump campaign committees are disclosed publicly, but the finances of his businesses are mostly private, so raises, bonuses and other payments from those entities are not typically disclosed.
ProPublica did not find evidence that Trump personally approved the pay increases or other benefits. But Trump famously keeps close watch over his operations and prides himself on penny-pinching. One former aide compared working for the Trump Organization, his large company, to “a small family business” where every employee “in some sense reports to Mr. Trump.” Former aides have said Trump demands unwavering loyalty from subordinates, even when their duties require independence. After his Attorney General Jeff Sessions decided to recuse himself against then-President Trump’s wishes, paving the way for a special counsel to investigate his campaign’s ties to Russia, Trump fumed about being crossed. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump asked, referring to the notorious former aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy who later served as Trump’s faithful fixer long before Trump became president.
## Some Noteworthy Witnesses Who Received Benefits
In addition to the New York case in which Trump was convicted last week, stemming from hidden payments to a porn star, [Trump is facing separate charges](https://www.lawfaremedia.org/current-projects/the-trump-trials) federally and in Georgia for election interference and in another federal case for mishandling classified documents.
Attempts to exert undue influence on witnesses have been a repeated theme of Trump-related investigations and criminal cases over the years.
Trump’s former [campaign manager](https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/07/politics/paul-manafort-sentencing-virginia-case-russia-investigation/index.html) and former [campaign adviser](https://apnews.com/roger-stone-guilty-of-witness-tampering-lying-to-congress-ad355d2c983e4a7c85bc17e86d8c563f) were convicted on federal witness tampering charges in 2018 and 2019. The campaign adviser had [told a witness](https://apnews.com/roger-stone-guilty-of-witness-tampering-lying-to-congress-ad355d2c983e4a7c85bc17e86d8c563f) to “do a ‘Frank Pentangeli,’” referencing a character in “The Godfather Part II” who [lies](https://godfather.fandom.com/wiki/Frank_Pentangeli) [to a Senate committee](https://godfather.fandom.com/wiki/Frank_Pentangeli) investigating organized crime. Trump later pardoned both men in the waning days of his presidency. (He did not pardon a co-defendant of the campaign manager who had cooperated with the government.)
During the congressional investigation into the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a former White House staffer testified that she [got a call from a colleague the night before an interview with investigators](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23506946-cassidy-hutchinson-jan-6-committee-transcript#document/p70). The colleague told her Trump’s chief of staff “wants me to let you know that he knows you’re loyal and he knows you’ll do the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and the boss.” (A spokesperson for the chief of staff denied that he tried to influence testimony.)
Last year, Trump himself publicly discouraged a witness from testifying in the Georgia case. Trump [posted on social media](https://www.axios.com/2023/08/14/trump-georgia-witness-duncan-fulton-county) that he had read about a Georgia politician who “will be testifying before the Fulton County Grand Jury. He shouldn’t.”
One witness has said publicly that, when he quit working for Trump in the midst of the classified documents criminal investigation, he was offered golf tournament tickets, a lawyer paid for by Trump and a new job that would have come with a raise. The witness, a valet and manager at Mar-a-Lago, had direct knowledge of the handling of the government documents at the club, the focus of one of the criminal cases against the former president. “I’m sure the boss would love to see you,” the employee, Brian Butler, recalled Trump’s property manager telling him. (The episode was [first reported by CNN](https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/12/politics/former-mar-a-lago-employee-special-counsel-trump/index.html).)
In an interview with ProPublica, Butler, who declined the offers, said he looked at them “innocently for a while.” But when he added up the benefits plus the timing, he thought “it could be them trying to get me back in the circle.”
---
One Trump aide who plays a key role in multiple cases is a lawyer named Boris Epshteyn, who became an important figure in Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
A college classmate of one of Trump’s sons who worked on the 2016 campaign and briefly in the White House, Epshteyn was involved in assembling sets of false electors around the country after Trump lost the 2020 election, and Epshteyn’s emails and texts have come up repeatedly in investigations.
In 2022, he testified before the Georgia grand jury that later indicted Trump on charges related to attempts to overturn the election. The FBI seized his phone, and in April 2023 he was interviewed by the federal special counsel.
In early August 2023, the special counsel charged Trump with conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding as part of an effort to overturn the 2020 election. A couple weeks later, the Georgia grand jury handed down an indictment accusing Trump of racketeering as part of a plot to overturn the election results in the state. From November 2022 to August 2023, the Trump campaign had paid Epshteyn’s company an average of $26,000 per month. The month after the indictments, his pay hit a new high, $50,000, and climbed in October to $53,500 per month, where it has remained ever since.
Epshteyn is a contractor with the campaign and the payments go to his company, Georgetown Advisory, which is based at a residential home in New Jersey. The company does not appear to have an office or other employees. Campaign filings say the payments are for “communications & legal consulting.”
Kenneth Notter, an attorney at MoloLamken who specializes in white-collar defense, said that a defendant should have a good explanation for a major increase in pay like Epshteyn’s. “Any change in treatment of a witness is something that gets my heart rate up as a lawyer.”
Boris Epshteyn, second from right, appeared at a Manhattan criminal court where former President Donald Trump, left, was facing charges. Credit: Todd Heisler/The New York Times/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Already in early 2023, months before the pay bump, a Trump campaign spokesperson [described Epshteyn](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/14/us/politics/boris-epshteyn-trump-lawyer.html) to The New York Times as “a deeply valued member of the team” who had “done a terrific job shepherding the legal efforts fighting” the investigations of Trump. The Times reported then that Epshteyn spoke to Trump multiple times per day.
Timothy Parlatore, an attorney who [left Trump’s defense team last year citing infighting](https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/20/parlatore-trump-legal-team-00098033), found Epshteyn’s large raise baffling. He questioned Epshteyn’s fitness to handle high-stakes criminal defense given his scant experience in the area. “He tries to coordinate all the legal efforts, which is a role he’s uniquely unqualified for,” Parlatore said.
The Trump campaign official told ProPublica that Epshteyn got a pay raise because Trump’s legal cases intensified and, as a result, Epshteyn had more legal work to coordinate. The official declined to say if he started working more hours: “All of us are working 24/7, ... every second of the day.” Epshteyn declined to comment on the record.
Even after the major pay increase, Epshteyn has not devoted all of his working time to the Trump campaign. He has continued to consult for other campaigns in recent months, disclosure filings show. And in November, he got a new role as [managing director](https://kenmarsecurities.com/team/boris-epshteyn/) of a financial services firm in New York called Kenmar Securities, [regulatory filings show](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24698337-individual_5712968#document/p7).
Payments to Boris Epshteyn’s Company Jump
Note: Payments are to Epshteyn’s company, Georgetown Advisory. Apparent travel reimbursements were removed from two 2023 payments.
Other employees in Trump’s political orbit have followed a similar pattern — including his top aide.
Trump campaign head Susie Wiles, a Florida political consultant, was present when Trump allegedly went beyond improperly holding onto classified documents and showed them to people lacking proper security clearances.
When Trump was indicted on June 8, 2023, over his handling of the documents, the indictment described Wiles as a “PAC representative.” It described Trump allegedly showing her a classified map related to a military operation, acknowledging “that he should not be showing it” and warning her to “not get too close.”
That June, Right Coast Strategies, the political consulting firm Wiles founded, received its highest-ever monthly payment from the Trump campaign: $75,000, an amount the firm has equaled only once since.
Wiles had been a grand jury witness before the indictment. News reports [indicated Wiles](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/08/05/trump-trial-witnesses-2020-election-charges/) had told others that she continued to be loyal to Trump and only testified because she was forced to. (And, according to Wiles, Trump was told she was a witness sometime before the indictment’s June release.)
The Trump campaign official told ProPublica that the spike in payments was largely because Wiles was billing for previous months.
She also got a 20% raise that May, from $25,000 to $30,000 per month. “She went back and redid her contract,” the official said, adding that her role as a witness was not a factor in that raise.
A few months later, the Wiles family got more good news. Wiles’ daughter Caroline, who had done some work for Trump’s first campaign and in the White House, where she [reportedly left one job](https://www.politico.com/blogs/donald-trump-administration/2017/02/white-house-failed-background-checks-dismissals-235112) because she didn’t pass a background check, was hired by his campaign. Her salary: $222,000, making her currently the fourth-highest-paid staffer. (The Trump campaign official said her salary included a monthly housing stipend.)
Susie Wiles said she and another campaign official were responsible for hiring her daughter, who she said has an expertise in logistics and was brought on to handle arrangements for surrogates taking Trump’s place at events he couldn’t attend. Wiles said Trump wasn’t involved in the hire.
Caroline Wiles told ProPublica her mother’s position in the campaign played no role in her getting a job, but she declined to describe the circumstances around the job offer. “How did I get the job? Because I have earned it,” she said. “I don’t think it has anything to do with Susie.”
The indictment suggests Susie Wiles herself has been aware of efforts to keep potential witnesses in the fold. Soon after the FBI found classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, a Trump employee was asked in a group text chat that included Wiles to confirm that the club’s property manager “was loyal.”
Wiles told ProPublica she couldn’t talk about the details of the case, but she called the text message exchange “a nothing.”
More generally, she said she was unaware of the need to ensure employees who are witnesses do not appear to be receiving special treatment. “It’s the first time I’ve heard that’s best practice,” she said. “I don’t mind telling you I conduct myself in such a way that I don’t worry about any of that.” Trump, she said, had never talked to her about her role as a witness.
Less powerful aides who are witnesses have also enjoyed career advances.
Margo Martin, a Trump aide who, like Wiles, allegedly witnessed Trump showing off what he described as a secret military document, got a significant raise not long after the classified documents case heated up with the search at Mar-a-Lago.
According to the indictment, Trump told Martin and others the military plan was “secret” and “highly confidential.” “As president I could have declassified it,” he allegedly told the group. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
A few months before her grand jury appearance, she moved from the payroll of a Trump political committee to a job with the campaign as it was launching. Martin was given a roughly 20% pay raise, from $155,000 to $185,000 per year, according to the Trump campaign. Campaign finance filings show a much larger pay increase for Martin, but the Trump campaign said the filings are misleading because of a difference in how payroll taxes and withholdings are reported by the two committees.
Because of that quirk, it’s impossible to know who else got raises and how big they were. The campaign official said that at least one other witness also got a pay raise but did not provide details about how much and when.
---
Dan Scavino is a longtime communications aide who Trump once called the “most powerful man in politics” because he could post for Trump on the president’s social media accounts. Scavino was among the small group of staff who had an up-close view of Trump during the final weeks of his presidency — a focus of the congressional inquiry into the Jan. 6 insurrection and the criminal probe into election interference.
In August 2021, a month after the congressional investigation began, securities filings show that the parent company behind Truth Social, Trump’s social media company, gave Scavino a consulting deal that ultimately paid out $240,000 a year.
The next month, lawmakers issued a subpoena to Scavino to ask him what the White House knew about the potential for violence before the attacks and what actions Trump took to try to overturn the election results. The panel gave Scavino a half-dozen extensions while negotiating with him, but he ultimately refused to testify or turn over documents and was held in contempt.
In September 2022, Scavino received a subpoena to testify before the criminal grand jury in the federal election interference probe. This time, he wasn’t able to get out of it and was seen leaving the Washington, D.C., courthouse in May 2023.
Bits of Scavino’s testimony were reported by ABC News, citing unnamed sources. Though his recollections of Trump from Jan. 6 painted the former president unfavorably, his reported testimony didn’t include significant new information. He testified Trump was “very angry” that day, and, despite pleas from aides to calm the Capitol rioters, Trump for hours “was just not interested” in taking action to stop it. When the testimony was reported, Trump’s spokesperson said Scavino is one of the former president’s “most loyal allies, and his actual testimony shows just how strong President Trump is positioned in this case.”
Between getting the subpoena and testifying, Scavino was given a seat on the board of the Trump social media company.
Scavino was also granted a $600,000 retention bonus and a $4 million “executive promissory note” paid in shares, according to SEC filings. The company’s public filings do not make clear when these deals were put in place.
As one of the few aides who Trump was with on Jan. 6, Scavino is likely to be called if Trump’s election interference cases go to trial.
Reached by ProPublica, Scavino declined to answer questions about how he got the board seat and other benefits from the Trump media company. “It has nothing to do,” he said, “with any investigation.”
A Trump Media spokesperson declined to answer questions about who made the decision to give Scavino the benefits and why, but said, “It appears this article will comprise utterly false insinuations.”
---
When Atlanta attorney Jennifer Little was hired to represent Trump in his Georgia election interference case, it marked the high point of her career.
A former local prosecutor who started her own practice, she had previously taken on far more modest cases. Highlights on her website include a biker who fell because of a pothole, a child investigated for insensitive social media comments and drunk drivers with “DUI’s as high as .19.” Little had made headlines for some higher profile cases, like a candidate for lieutenant governor accused of sexual harassment, but everything on her resume paled in comparison to representing a former president accused of plotting to reverse the outcome of an election.
Then in May 2022, her job got even more complicated when Trump pulled her into his brewing showdown with the Justice Department over classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Despite multiple requests, Trump had not returned all of the documents he had brought with him from the White House to his Florida club. The Justice Department had just elevated the matter by subpoenaing Trump for the records, and Trump wanted her advice.
Little told him, according to news reports, that unlike the government’s prior requests, a subpoena meant he could face criminal charges if he didn’t comply.
When Trump ultimately did not turn over the records and the criminal investigation intensified, Little’s involvement in that pivotal meeting got her called before a grand jury by federal prosecutors.
Some of her testimony before that grand jury, which determines whether someone will be indicted, may have been favorable for Trump. In one reported instance, Little’s recollections undermined contemporaneous documentary evidence that was damaging to Trump. Investigators had obtained notes from another lawyer at the May 2022 meeting indicating Trump suggested they not “play ball” with federal authorities: “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”
Little told the grand jury she remembered the question more benignly, [according to an ABC News](https://abcnews.go.com/US/attorney-warned-trump-crime-comply-subpoena-classified-docs/story?id=105228569) story that cited anonymous sources, and said she couldn’t recall Trump recommending they not “play ball.”
Trump has since been indicted over his handling of the classified documents. If the case goes to trial, Little’s testimony could prove crucial as the two sides try to make their case about Trump's consciousness of guilt and whether he purposely withheld documents. (Trump has pleaded not guilty in that case and has said he did nothing wrong.)
Just after Little was forced to testify before the grand jury in March 2023, a Trump political action committee paid her $218,000, by far the largest payment she’d received while working for Trump. In the year after she became a witness, she has made at least $1.3 million from the Trump political committee, more than twice as much as she had during the year prior.
Little told ProPublica the large payment she received soon after she was compelled to testify was due to a lengthy motion she filed around then to block the release of the Georgia grand jury’s findings and prevent Trump from being indicted. Her hourly rate did not change, she said, the workload increased. The elevated payments in the year after she became a witness did coincide with the Georgia case heating up and Trump getting indicted.
The Trump campaign official said the spike in payments to Little after she became a witness was the result of her billing for multiple time periods at once.
Payments to Jennifer Little’s Law Firm Increase After She Becomes a Witness
A similar pattern played out for the other Trump lawyer present at the Mar-a-Lago meeting about the subpoena.
Evan Corcoran, a former federal prosecutor who specializes in white-collar criminal defense, was new to the team at the time. And it was his notes, obtained by investigators, that memorialized Trump suggesting they not “play ball.” His notes also included a description of Trump seeming to instruct him to withhold some sensitive documents from authorities when the former president made a “plucking motion.”
“He made a funny motion as though — well okay why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out,” Corcoran’s notes read, according to the indictment.
Like Little, Corcoran tried to fight being forced to testify before a grand jury, asserting that as Trump’s lawyer, their communications were protected. But prosecutors were able to convince a judge that the protection didn’t apply because their legal advice was used to commit crimes.
Corcoran’s notes from his conversations with Trump formed the backbone of the eventual indictment, and his descriptions of those meetings are expected to be a critical component at trial. The lawyer made an initial appearance before the grand jury in January 2023 and appeared again in another session in March.
Around the time he was forced to be a witness, Corcoran recused himself from the classified documents case, but he continued to represent Trump on other matters. Nevertheless his firm’s compensation shot up for a few months.
Just days after his March grand jury testimony, the Trump campaign sent two payments to his firm totaling $786,000, the largest amount paid in a single day in his almost two years working for Trump. The firm brought in a total of $1.4 million in that four-week span, more than double its payments from any other comparable period during Corcoran’s time working for Trump.
Corcoran did not respond to questions from ProPublica. The Trump campaign official said the spike in payments came because the firm was billing for more hours of work as Trump’s cases ramped up. The official added that the number of lawyers from the firm working on the case may have increased but could not provide specifics.
---
The issue of witnesses who have received financial rewards from Trump has already come up at both of the former president’s New York trials.
In the civil fraud case last year, prosecutors questioned the Trump Organization’s former controller about the $500,000 in severance he had been promised after retiring earlier in the year. During his testimony, the former controller broke down in tears as he complained about allegations against an employer he loved and defended the valuations at the center of the case as “justified.” At the time of the testimony, he was still receiving his severance in installments.
Former chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg got a [$2 million severance agreement](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24682234-px-01751-allen-weisselberg-severance-agreement#document/p2) in January 2023, four months after the New York attorney general sued Trump for financial fraud in his real estate business. The agreement contains a nondisparagement clause and language barring Weisselberg from voluntarily cooperating with investigators.
It came up in Trump’s hush money trial last month when prosecutors told the judge that the severance agreement was one of the reasons they would not [call Weisselberg](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/27/nyregion/trump-trial-hush-money-weisselberg.html) . He was still due several payments.
“The agreement seems to preclude us from talking to him or him talking to us at the risk of losing $750,000 of outstanding severance pay,” [one prosecutor said](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24679725-2024-05-10-transcript-people-vs-donald-trump-7c5a7ca2-full#document/p162).
In last year’s fraud trial, the judge wrote of the severance agreement, “The Trump Organization keeps Weisselberg on a short leash, and it shows.”
A Trump Organization spokesperson said in a statement that after Weisselberg and the controller announced their retirement plans, “the company agreed to pay them severance based on the number of years they worked at the company. President Trump played no role in that decision.” Weisselberg’s severance agreement was signed by Trump’s son Eric.
Another witness from the civil trial last year, longtime Trump friend and real estate executive Steve Witkoff, was called as an expert witness by Trump’s defense team, and he defended the Trump Organization real estate valuations at the heart of the case.
Two months after Witkoff’s testimony, Trump’s campaign for the first time started paying his company, the Witkoff Group, for air travel. The payments continued over several weeks, ultimately totalling more than $370,000.
The Trump campaign official confirmed the campaign used Witkoff’s private jet for multiple trips, including Trump’s visit to a stretch of the Texas border in February, saying it “appropriately reimbursed” him for the flights. The official said it sometimes used commercial charter jet services but opted for Witkoff’s plane because of “availability, space, and convenience.”
Witkoff and The Witkoff Group did not respond to requests for comment.
*Do you have any information about Trump’s campaign or his businesses that we should know? Robert Faturechi can be reached by email at [\[emailprotected\]](https://www.propublica.org/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#592b363b3c2b2d773f382d2c2b3c3a313019292b36292c3b35303a3877362b3e) and by Signal or WhatsApp at 213-271-7217. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at [\[emailprotected\]](https://www.propublica.org/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#dcb6a9afa8b5b29cacaeb3aca9beb0b5bfbdf2b3aebb) or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.*
[Agnel Philip](https://www.propublica.org/people/agnel-philip) contributed data analysis.
Graphics by [Lena Groeger](https://www.propublica.org/people/lena-groeger).
# Scenes From a MAGA Meltdown: Inside the “America First” Movement’s War Over Democracy
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Standing in a cafe decorated with tiny American flags and antique cabinets as big as bodyguards, Peter Meijer paused as he considered what to say to the man in the “Stand for God” shirt who had just called for his bodily harm.
It was a snowy morning in February. Meijer was the keynote speaker at a coffee-and-donuts meeting hosted by the Republican Party chapter in Kent County, Michigan, the most populous county on the west side of the state. Dressed in a candidate-casual uniform of jeans, a flannel shirt and an outdoorsy blazer, Meijer was seeking the Republican nomination for an open U.S. Senate seat, a race that could determine control of Congress’s upper chamber, in a state that could decide the presidential election. If Republicans wanted to win in November, Meijer told the 40-odd people in attendance, they needed to move on from the past and focus on their shared enemy.
“Is there anyone who thought that Jan. 6th was good for the Republican Party?” he asked. “Did it help us win in 2022?”
“We weren’t gonna win,” someone yelled. “It was rigged.”
“The election was stolen,” another person said. “It doesn’t matter.”
I watched this exchange from a table near the back of the room. Until that moment, the crowd met Meijer’s stump speech with polite nods and gentle applause. But when he brought up elections and Jan. 6th, the mood turned from Midwest nice to hostile.
Not long ago, this setting was friendly terrain for Meijer. For decades, voters here rewarded sensible, pro-business, avowedly conservative politicians. Meijer fit the archetype of a West Michigan Republican when he first ran for Congress in 2020. He was also basically Michigan royalty as an heir to the Meijer grocery store fortune. In one of the state’s most competitive districts, he won his debut congressional race by a comfortable 6-point margin.
At the Kent County event, however, many attendees seemed to feel nothing but scorn for him. That anger flowed from a single decision Meijer had made in Congress: He voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump. In response, he faced a far-right primary challenger who had served in the Trump administration and said Biden’s 2020 victory was “simply mathematically impossible.” Meijer narrowly lost. Now, as a Senate candidate, he was trying to make amends, even pledging to vote for Trump — whom he had once called “unfit for office” — if the former president won the Republican nomination. But to some, he was still a traitor.
“How did you vote to impeach Trump when he said in his \[Jan. 6\] speech, ‘I want a peaceful demonstration,’” a man angrily asked. “You don’t have to go any further than that to know that he was right and that he shouldn’t have been impeached.”
“I was there,” another man called out. “We were peaceful.”
Then-Rep. Peter Meijer, a Republican, voted in 2021 to impeach President Donald Trump. Credit: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
One audience member accused Meijer of taking a bribe in exchange for his impeachment vote.
Another challenged him to name five “political prisoners from Jan. 6” who were “sitting in prison and falsely accused.” I watched Meijer struggle to complete a sentence before being cut off.
A third person pointed a finger at him as he questioned whether Meijer was actually in the Capitol complex on Jan. 6, 2021, as he’d claimed.
“I have a photo I took in the House,” Meijer said, trying to defend himself without sounding defensive. Mostly, he listened wide-eyed, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup.
An older woman asked, in a gentler tone, if Meijer would redo his impeachment vote if he could. Would he at least have abstained instead of voting “yes”?
Meijer responded by saying that when he was in Congress, someone had once joked that they’d throw him off a bridge if he ever voted “present.”
A deep voice rang out on the far side of the room. The man in the “Stand for God” shirt.
“Sorry?” Meijer said, not hearing him.
The man repeated himself: “You should’ve gotten thrown off the bridge.”
A crowd gathers outside the Capitol at a pro-Trump protest on Jan. 6, 2021. Credit: Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA/AP Images
### The System Falls Apart
What divides the Republican Party of 2024 is not any one policy or ideology. It is not whether to support Donald Trump. The most important fault line in the party now is democracy itself. Today’s Republican insurgents believe democracy has been stolen, and they don’t trust the ability of democratic processes to restore it.
This phenomenon is evident across the country, in Georgia and Nevada, in Arizona, Idaho and Florida. But it’s perhaps the starkest in Michigan, a place long associated with political pragmatism and a business-friendly GOP, embodied by governors George Romney, John Engler and, most recently, Rick Snyder. It was a son of Michigan, former President Gerald Ford, who once said, “I have never mistaken moderation for weakness, nor civility for surrender.”
I grew up in Michigan. My own political education and my early years as a journalist coincided with a stunning Republican resurgence in my home state. Over several decades, Michigan’s dynastic families — the DeVoses and Meijers and Van Andels on the west side, the Romneys and Fords on the east — poured money and manpower into the Michigan Republican Party, building it into one of the most vaunted political operations in the country. They transformed Michigan from a bastion of organized labor that leaned Democratic into a toss-up state that, until recently, had a [right-to-work law](https://www.ncsl.org/labor-and-employment/right-to-work-resources) and put Republicans in control of all three branches of government for eight of the last 14 years. Michigan Republicans were so successful that other states copied their tactics. As Dick DeVos, heir to the Amway fortune and a prolific Republican donor, once told a gathering of conservative activists, “If we can do it in Michigan, you can do it anywhere.”
Several years ago, however, my home state stopped making sense to me. I watched as thousands of political newcomers, whose sole qualification appeared to be fervor of belief, declared war on the Republican establishment that had been so dominant. Calling themselves the “America First” movement, these unknowns treated the DeVoses and other party leaders as the enemy. I had covered the DeVoses and the Michigan Republican Party long enough to know that they were not just pro-business but staunch conservatives who wanted to slash taxes, abolish regulations and remake the public education system in favor of vouchers and parochial schools. Yet the new “America First” activists disparaged prominent Michigan Republicans as “globalist” elites who belonged to a corrupt “uniparty” cabal. That cabal had denied Trump a rightful second term and needed to be purged from the party.
With a consequential election looming, I traveled back to Michigan earlier this year to understand how this all happened. I sought out the activists waging this struggle, a group of people who don’t trust institutions or individuals except Trump and one another — and sometimes not even that. Could they triumph over the elites? I found chaos, incompetence, strife, a glimpse of a future post-Trump Republican Party and, all around me, danger for our system of government and the state of the country.
“We can’t keep going through election after election like this where a large plurality of the country just does not accept the outcome of the majority and refuses to abide by it,” said Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party who now works with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “That’s when the system falls apart.”
Trump at a 2024 rally in Waterford Township, Michigan Credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images
### A Call From God
After Peter Meijer’s event in Kent County, I drove west toward Lake Michigan to meet a plumber named Ken Beyer for lunch. Barrel-chested and with a neatly trimmed goatee, Beyer is in his late 50s but looks younger. He’s disarmingly earnest, the kind of guy who’d offer to help you fix a flat tire in a snowstorm. In less than two years, Beyer had risen from a political nobody to a district chair in the state GOP and a leader of the “America First” movement in Michigan. He is known for his fiery videos, in which he might equate a rival to Adolf Hitler or warn that “the storm is upon us.” Like many of his “America First” allies, he questions whether democracy still exists in this country. “I don’t know if any election is fair anymore,” he said.
Over chicken tenders and iced tea, Beyer, a church-going Christian, told me about a series of what he saw as divine revelations that had delivered him to this point. The pandemic and 2020 election had shaken him. He no longer recognized his own country. He feared that the moment had come, he said, “where freedom and the American dream end.”
Ken Beyer, a Republican district chair, feels he is on a divine mission. Credit: Nick Hagen for ProPublica
His next revelation happened on Jan. 6, 2021. Because he was convinced that Democrats stole the White House from Trump, he had gone to Washington to make his voice heard and show support for the president. Standing on the steps of the Capitol, he encountered a reporter with the conservative outlet Newsmax who needed help carrying gear. Beyer grabbed a tripod and backpack and filled in as a makeshift field producer for one of the biggest events of the 21st century. “What God wanted me to do,” he later said, “was help capture the history of what’s happening and get the truth out of what really was going on there.”
Back in Michigan, Beyer enlisted the help of a young videographer who had produced content for Beyer’s plumbing business, and together they churned out videos about COVID-19 (overblown), election fraud (rampant) and the “truth” of Jan. 6 (“a big prayer meeting”). He read about disturbing allegations about voting-machine software changing votes. He listened to poll workers allege that mysterious suitcases of mail-in ballots had arrived overnight at the state’s largest ballot-processing site in downtown Detroit (a claim that was later debunked). The more he heard, the more he came to believe that his home state had been central to the Democrats’ plan to steal the 2020 election.
In his free time, Beyer urged Republican lawmakers to investigate the allegations of fraud made by Trump and his allies. Most Republicans brushed him off. A few, like Peter Meijer, had openly turned on Trump, voting for impeachment or dismissing Trump’s stolen-election theories. Beyer couldn’t understand it. “Why weren’t they fighting for him?” he said.
According to more experienced people in the party, there was a simple answer: Many of the claims brought forward weren’t true. A long-awaited investigation by a Republican-led state Senate committee found “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud” in Michigan.
If Republicans wouldn’t act, Beyer reasoned, then they were just as bad as the Democrats. Trump supporters in other states had also encountered Republican indifference in response to Trump’s fraud allegations. What were they supposed to do now?
Republican Party delegates listen to a speaker at a state GOP convention. Credit: Nick Hagen for ProPublica
### The Re-Founding Fathers
A solution arrived in the form of the “precinct strategy.” It was a plan [promoted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon](https://www.propublica.org/article/heeding-steve-bannons-call-election-deniers-organize-to-seize-control-of-the-gop-and-reshape-americas-elections) to ensure that the political establishment in both parties didn’t “steal” future elections. Precincts are the smallest geographical unit in American elections. In Michigan, there are roughly 4,700 precincts typically made up of a few thousand active registered voters. Each precinct elects at least one delegate as its representative to a county convention, and sometimes three or four. In all, there are upwards of 8,000 delegate positions in Michigan.
If a state political party is a pyramid with a chairperson at the top, precinct delegates occupy the lowest, broadest tier. Until recently, it was an obscure position. Thousands of the seats often sit empty. If enough Trump supporters filled them, Bannon said, they could form a majority within the party, elect allies to leadership positions and, eventually, take control.
Ken Beyer had never heard of a precinct delegate until he stumbled across the website for MI Precinct First, a group inspired by Bannon’s plan. He decided to run. He believed that this, too, must be part of God’s plan for him. “I believe that He’s using people like me throughout the United States to become the re-founding fathers,” he told me.
The precinct strategy proved successful. In Michigan, thousands of new activists, many recruited by “America First” groups, became precinct delegates in 2022. In Ottawa County, a deeply conservative enclave along Lake Michigan, the number of delegates leapt from 170 to 330. The same trend played out in other battleground states. “The Trump apparatus did very little correct except infiltrate the party right down to the precinct level,” said Timmer, the former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party. “Not just in Michigan but all over.”
The first test for the new “America First” delegates came in late August 2022. In Michigan, the voters select most nominees for elected office in a normal primary election. But for two key positions with oversight of elections — attorney general and secretary of state — the precinct delegates decide the party’s nominees at a statewide convention. These conventions were often sleepy affairs, the outcome predetermined. But this time, when the party’s chair, a wealthy donor and former U.S. ambassador named Ron Weiser, took the stage, the cavernous ballroom filled with boos and jeers.
“How many of you believe we can sweep in November?” Weiser asked.
“With the new people!” a woman wearing a “Keep America Great” hat yelled. “With ‘America First’!”
Over the opposition of Weiser and other longtime party operatives, the “America First” contingent nominated two election deniers for attorney general and secretary of state. Matthew DePerno, a combative lawyer who had promoted a viral yet baseless theory about voting fraud in tiny Antrim County, Michigan, vowed to use the power of the attorney general’s office to investigate election crimes. Kristina Karamo, a tall, commanding woman in her late 30s with a breathless speaking style, was the “America First” pick for secretary of state. A community college instructor and live-trivia host, Karamo had come to prominence after she testified before the Michigan Legislature about irregularities involving ballot counting and voting machines she said she’d witnessedas a poll challenger in Detroit in 2020.
The party convention nominated Kristina Karamo, who has argued that the 2020 election was illegitimate, to be the GOP secretary of state candidate in 2022. Credit: Nic Antaya/The Washington Post/Getty Images
As a show of political force, nominating DePerno and Karamo was impressive. As an electoral strategy, it was disastrous. Both candidates were trounced in November, and Michigan Democrats won control of all three branches of government for the first time in more than 30 years.
DePerno conceded defeat right away. Karamo did not. To outside observers, her stance was laughable: She had lost by 615,000 votes, roughly the population of Detroit. But Beyer and many other “America First” delegates saw Karamo’s actions as brave and principled, the opposite of DePerno’s cowardly and hypocritical concession. Several months later, she and DePerno ran against each other to be the next chair of the Michigan Republican Party. DePerno won endorsements from Trump and Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and a funder of the election-fraud movement. But the delegates rallied behind Karamo and delivered her the victory. In just two years, Bannon’s precinct strategy had gone from a quixotic scheme to a reality.
No sooner had Karamo won than paranoia set in. Standing on the convention floor just before her victory, a well-connected precinct delegate approached Beyer to deliver a message. “He says, ‘Leadership is going to let you guys have this one,’” Beyer recalled. Karamo would be chair, in other words, because party leaders let it happen. Why’d they do that, Beyer asked. “Because they believe that they can make her fail quicker than they can Matt DePerno.”
### File Number One
A state political party is like the HVAC unit of American politics. When it does its job, you don’t think about it. It hums away in the background, as unsexy as it is essential. State parties recruit candidates to run for office. They mobilize voters. They raise money that helps candidates spread their message and win elections.
Karamo had other priorities when she took over the Michigan Republican Party. Top of the list: “election integrity.” She created a new “election security operations” team to recruit hundreds of volunteers as poll challengers, dropbox monitors and recount specialists, and to serve on county canvassing boards, which certify the final vote count. To oversee this work, she enlisted grassroots activists best known for filing a lawsuit that accused Detroit’s election clerk of running an “illegal election” in 2022. (A judge dismissed the case, calling it “frivolous” and “rife with speculation.”) Training and embedding “America First” activists in every part of the election process was critical to the future of the party and the state. “Otherwise,” one of Karamo’s advisers told a group of activists, “the big money is going to come right back in and start doing all this for us and selecting all the candidates for us again.”
Karamo’s plan to “secure” elections had two objectives: Not only did she and her team hope to catch future cheating by the Democrats, but they sought revenge against the Republican establishment. To do that, Karamo turned to a lawyer and political outsider named James Copas. He was given a special project: write a new constitution for the state Republican Party that would give as much power as possible to precinct delegates. People like Ken Beyer.
There was no greater priority for Karamo’s team. “If you were to look in my records, I opened 82 different project files,” Copas told me. “The constitution was file number one.”
Karamo showed little interest in the day-to-day work of running the party. Bills went unpaid, emails unanswered. When members of the party’s state committee, in effect the board of directors, questioned her, she ignored them or removed them from leadership positions. Even her allies were critical. “I can tell you unequivocally that there was no chance that Kristina was qualified to be the chair,” Copas said. “So what? She was elected.” (Karamo did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Near the end of 2023, Copas circulated a draft of his proposed overhaul of the party constitution. The new constitution proposed a radical change: Eliminate open primary elections and replace them with closed caucuses. Under the current system, about a million people voted in an August GOP primary to choose nominees for local elected offices, state legislative seats, judgeships and federal House and Senate races. Instead of those million or so voters casting ballots, fewer than 10,000 precinct delegates — the same precinct delegates who had powered Karamo to victory — would meet behind closed doors and select the candidates.
The aim of this proposal, said Joel Studebaker, who was Karamo’s chief of staff, was to break up the “corruption club” that had ruled Michigan Republican politics for far too long. “We want something that’s pure,” he told me. “The best answer for that is putting power in the hands of the people.” The irony, critics pointed out, was that Karamo’s proposal would disenfranchise far more people than it empowered.
A portion of the preamble and introduction of a proposed new version of the Michigan Republican Party’s constitution Credit: Obtained by ProPublica
There was another reason the closed-caucus model appealed to the “America First” faithful: It meant there was no need for voting machines, mail-in ballots, high-speed scanners or any of the other technologies that election-fraud believers had spent the last two years railing against. “You’re eliminating cheating in the election system,” Beyer told me.
The backlash was fierce. “Nothing says ‘we respect democracy’ like cutting out millions of Michigan voters,” wrote one prominent Michigan conservative activist.
Karamo’s proposed voting reforms and the party’s dire finances plunged the organization into turmoil with the 2024 elections less than a year away. Even some of Karamo’s own supporters turned against her. Privately, a group of delegates discussed whether to urge her to step down for the good of the party. Karamo had no plans to resign. If her enemies wanted her gone, they would have to try to remove her.
And so they did: On Jan. 6, 2024, a group of anti-Karamo delegates on the Republican state committee invoked party bylaws and voted to remove Karamo as chair. Two weeks later, the same faction elected former U.S. representative Pete Hoekstra to replace her.
Former U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra addresses the press at the 2024 convention of Michigan precinct delegates. Credit: Nick Hagen for ProPublica
### Up From the Ashes
By the time Trump walked onstage in Waterford Township, Michigan, in mid-February with his red hat pulled low, the Michigan Republican Party was a national punchline. Karamo had refused to leave office, saying the vote to oust her was “illegitimate.” An unsigned statement issued by the state GOP called it a “political lynching.” Her critics filed a lawsuit in state court to enforce the removal vote, and Karamo said only a judge’s order could make her leave. In the meantime, she urged her followers to travel to Detroit on March 2 for a special convention. There, they would vote on her controversial plan to rewrite the Michigan GOP’s constitution.
At his mid-February rally, Trump waded into the chaotic mess that was the Michigan Republican Party despite his supporters urging him not to. He described Hoekstra as “your new Michigan Republican Party chairman,” a line that was greeted with a mix of cheers and boos. The boos continued as Trump said he’d recommended Hoekstra for the job. “I said, ‘Do you think you could ever get this guy Hoekstra? He’s unbelievable,’” Trump said.
The Trump campaign seemed to recognize that the longer Karamo remained in charge, the weaker the state party was and the less chance he had to win Michigan. For both Trump and Biden, Michigan is arguably a must-win state.
Still, some of Trump’s most ardent supporters saw his support for Hoekstra as a betrayal. “I’m not happy with Mr. Trump right now,” one voter said at a Republican town hall I attended. “I think he should keep his nose out of Michigan politics.” When I asked Beyer what he thought, he said he suspected Trump was playing a double game. “If you know anything about election integrity, you know it’s a rigged program here,” he said. For Trump to win, “he’s gotta join the riggers.” I heard a Karamo supporter say she had read on “Truth” — meaning Truth Social, the social media platform partly owned by Trump — that Trump hadn’t even written the endorsement of Hoekstra that appeared on his account.
Around the time of Trump’s visit to Michigan, I went to hear Karamo speak in Saginaw County, an hour and a half north of Detroit. The event was part of a barnstorming tour of the state meant to rally her supporters and assure them that she remained the party’s legitimate leader. To her supporters, the date of the vote to remove her, Jan. 6, 2024, had taken on a mythological quality — it was the new Jan. 6. Their Jan. 6. The audience sat rapt as Karamo told them that it wasn’t just 2020 and 2022 that were rigged. “Our election system has been corrupted for decades. There’s an entire network protecting the corrupt system.”
At the end of her remarks, she reminded her supporters to go to Detroit on March 2. The date had taken on an outsize significance. Not only would delegates choose which presidential candidate received Michigan’s 39 remaining delegates on the path to the Republican nomination, but they would vote on Karamo’s constitution plan. Hoekstra, who was calling himself the rightful chair, was planning a separate event on the same day in Grand Rapids. The schism in the party would be on full display.
A few days before the dueling conventions, a judge issued a preliminary ruling that Karamo had been properly removed. The Detroit convention was called off, and her constitutional overhaul was shelved for the time being. With Karamo’s event canceled, Beyer, now a regional GOP chairman as well as a delegate, said he would carry the torch for the “America First” movement. In an act of defiance aimed at “Adolf” Hoekstra, as Beyer called him, he and Studebaker announced their own miniconvention.
On the morning of March 2, Beyer picked me up at a Wendy’s on the drive to his breakaway convention. A deluge of text messages lit up his phone as we drove down the highway. Beyer told me that the theme for Hoekstra’s convention was “Up From the Ashes.”
“It’s fitting,” he said. “Because they lit the match. They don’t like the new group of people that have come in over the last two years.” He paused. “They’re burning down the Republican Party to get rid of people like me.”
After Beyer and Studebaker had run their protest convention, they jumped in Studebaker’s truck and drove to Hoekstra’s event in Grand Rapids. There, Studebaker ran into some operatives aligned with Trump’s team in Michigan. Studebaker was furious with them and with Trump for abandoning Karamo and for, as he saw it, thwarting the will of the delegates.
“He’s going to lose Michigan if he keeps doing this,” Studebaker said. The delegates will still vote for Trump, he added, but they’re not going to knock doors and they’re not going to give money. They might tune out of state and national elections and focus on local races.
The operatives were unmoved. “We gotta go,” one of them said. “Trump stuff.”
A constituent wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat at a state Republican convention in early March. Credit: Nick Hagen for ProPublica
### A Future Without Trump
Not long afterward, Trump disappointed his grassroots followers again. In Michigan’s high-stakes Republican Senate contest, Trump endorsed Mike Rogers, a former representative, all but assuring that Rogers would clinch the nomination in the August primary.
As for Peter Meijer, that throw-you-off-the-bridge exchange in the cafe in February had proved prophetic: His comeback bid was doomed. In late April, he dropped out.
Trump’s endorsement of Rogers left his supporters mystified. Like Meijer, he had been a vocal critic of Trump, once calling the former president “more gangster than presidential.” He had chaired the powerful House intelligence committee, which led Trump followers to label him a member of the “deep state.” A former aide to Trump had tweeted: “Can’t imagine a worse or more dangerous ‘Republican’ candidate for Senate than Mike Rogers.”
Jim Copas, who quit his role with the party shortly before Karamo was forced out, told me he was disgusted with Trump’s actions. “I’ve lost complete faith in the state GOP and I’ve lost complete faith in the national GOP,” he said. Speaking of Trump, he added: “To be honest, I think Don has learned a little bit about being a politician and he’s forgotten his soul.”
Beyer hadn’t given up on Trump. He still “loved” the man, he said, but he wasn’t taking direction from Trump. “I’m not gonna always listen to him,” Beyer told me. “I’m not part of a cult.”
He had his own plans. In one of our last conversations, he laid out a more religious, more uncompromising version of the “America First” movement. He had started his own PAC called Faith Family Freedom and he planned to target the precinct delegates around the state who had opposed Karamo and replace them with “America First” allies in the next round of delegate elections this August. He had already signed up 350 supporters in various counties, he said, to help with his efforts.
If the Republican establishment — the DeVoses and the Meijers, Pete Hoekstra and the people who had voted to remove Karamo — fought him and his compatriots, Beyer stood ready. “They’re not after Trump. They’re not after Kristina,” he told me. “They’re after me. They’re after everybody like me. That’s what this is all about.”
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# Segregation Academies Still Operate Across the South. One Town Grapples With Its Divided Schools.
This story contains a racial slur.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. [Sign up for Dispatches](https://www.propublica.org/newsletters/dispatches?source=www.propublica.org&placement=top-note®ion=local), a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
Join us for [a virtual discussion](https://www.propublica.org/events/the-legacy-of-segregation-academies?x-craft-preview=08Q3sYTZrR&token=uBmzbMk_TUom8OzsRI2WXADOtmylgDQB) of how private schools known as “segregation academies” in the Deep South continue to preserve divisions within communities even 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education.
A mile of Alabama country road, and a history of racism, separate the two schools. At the stop sign between them, even the road’s name changes. Threadgill Road, christened for a civil rights hero, becomes Whiskey Run. Black students take Threadgill to one campus; white students turn off Whiskey Run toward the other.
Both schools are shrinking. Wilcox County, a notch in the swath of old plantation country known as the Black Belt, struggles with declining population — a common scenario across this part of the South. In such places, the existence of two separate school systems can isolate entire communities by race.
The private school, Wilcox Academy, is what researchers call a “[segregation academy](https://etd.auburn.edu/bitstream/handle/10415/8176/AmberlySheffield%20Thesis.pdf?sequence=2)” due to the historic whiteness of its student body and the timing of its opening. It’s down to 200 students across 12 grades. Housed in a single-story building with beige siding and brown brick veneer, the school offers chapel and core academic classes but not music, theater or band programs.
Wilcox Academy in Camden, Alabama Credit: Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica
Down the road, the county’s public high school has more students and course options. Wilcox Central High’s building, with a medical-training lab and competition-sized swimming pool, could house 1,000 students. Instead, it barely draws 400, virtually all of them Black, from across the entire 888-square-mile county.
Divisions like this have long played out across the region. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in [Brown v. Board of Education](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/347/483/), declaring public school segregation unconstitutional. As the federal courts repeatedly ruled against the South’s massive resistance, many white people pivoted to a new tactic, one that is lesser known and yet profoundly influences the Black Belt region today: They created a web of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of private schools to educate white children.
Now, 70 years after the Brown decision, ProPublica has found about 300 schools that likely opened as segregation academies in the South are still operating. Some have flourished into pricey college-prep behemoths. Others, like Wilcox Academy, remain modest Christian schools. Many have accepted more nonwhite students over the years, and some now come close to reflecting the communities they serve.
But across Alabama’s 18 Black Belt counties, all of the remaining segregation academies ProPublica identified — about a dozen — are still vastly white, even though the region’s population is majority Black. And in the towns where these schools operate, they often persist as a dividing force.
Even when rural segregation academies offer fewer amenities than their public-school counterparts, white parents are often unwilling to voluntarily send their children to majority-Black public schools. That can be to the detriment of all students, especially in struggling communities where money is tight. It means doubling up on school overhead costs, and fewer students at each school means neither one can offer the robust programs that they could provide if their resources were combined.
“You’re dividing money you don’t have in half,” said Bryan Mann, a University of Kansas professor who studies school segregation and school choice.
And soon, far more tax dollars will be flowing into private schools. Republican lawmakers are adopting plans for massive infusions of state money to help thousands more students who want to attend them. It’s part of a movement barreling across the country, particularly the Southeast — where, in Black Belt counties like Wilcox, a segregation academy may be the only nearby private school option.
In March, Alabama’s Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, who is from Wilcox County, signed the [CHOOSE Act](https://fastdemocracy.com/bill-search/al/2024rs/bills/ALB00016452/). It creates a program of voucher-like education savings accounts and directs the state legislature to devote no less than $100 million a year to fund them. Students can apply for up to $7,000 a year to pay for private school tuition, among other costs.
Since the start of 2023, [North Carolina](https://www.ncseaa.edu/2023/10/the-2023-appropriations-act-expands-eligibility-for-the-opportunity-scholarship-program/), [Arkansas](https://www.edchoice.org/school-choice/programs/arkansas-childrens-educational-freedom-account-program/) and [Florida](https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/1/?Tab=BillHistory) have joined [Alabama](https://www.revenue.alabama.gov/tax-policy/the-choose-act/) in opening voucher-style programs to all students over the coming years, as opposed to limiting them to lower-income students or those in low-performing schools. [South Carolina](https://ed.sc.gov/newsroom/strategic-engagement/education-scholarship-trust-fund-program/) created one that extends to middle-income and some upper-income families. [Georgia](https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/1583415) adopted its own for children in low-performing public schools. Governors in [Texas](https://www.fox4news.com/news/texas-school-vouchers-greg-abbott-interview) and [Tennessee](https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2024/04/22/tennessee-school-choice-voucher-program-gov-bill-lee-says-no-pathway-to-passage-this-year/73331645007/) pledged to continue similar fights next year.
To Alabama native Steve Suitts, history is repeating.
After the Brown decision, Southern legislatures provided state money to help white students flee to the new academies. Alabama was among the first states to do so, said Suitts, a historian and author of “Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement.” Even the language used — framing the movement as parents’ right to “freedom” and “private school choice” — was the same then as it is now.
“I cannot see how there will be any difference,” Suitts said of recent laws. He dubbed Alabama’s new voucher-style program the Segregation Academy Rescue Act.
Republican lawmakers strongly disagree. They argue that today Black and white students alike can use the money to attend private schools. The new law [bars participating schools from discriminating based on race](https://casetext.com/statute/code-of-alabama/title-16-education/section-16-new-participation-requirements-for-education-service-providers), though it does allow them to choose which applicants they want to admit.
During House debate earlier this year, Republican state Rep. Danny Garrett, the education budget chair, heard many Black legislators argue that the law is about race, its aim to bolster segregation. “Of course, neither of these statements are true,” he told them.
In Camden, the pastoral county seat of Wilcox, Black and white residents said they would like to see their children schooled together. But after so long apart, they aren’t sure how to best do that.
High school juniors Jazmyne Posey and Samantha Cook hadn’t met until they started working at Black Belt Treasures, a nonprofit in downtown Camden that sells the wares of hundreds of Black Belt artists.
On the surface, the teenagers appear to have little in common. Jazmyne is Black; Samantha is white. Jazmyne likes rap and hip-hop; Samantha likes indie pop. Jazmyne goes to the public school; Samantha goes to Wilcox Academy.
But they soon bonded over similar life experiences and problems, both teenagers navigating high school relationships. They wonder what it would be like to be in class together. Would their friends get along?
High schoolers Samantha Cook, left, and Jazmyne Posey talk about their favorite music while working at Black Belt Treasures, a cultural arts center in downtown Camden. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica
Once, when they hadn’t worked together for a while, Jazmyne missed talking to Samantha. “I caught word that she said she missed me too,” she said.
Samantha has watched her class at Wilcox Academy shrink from 22 to 13 students. She likes her writing classes but wishes the school offered more, especially a theater program. “I definitely would have been a theater kid,” she said. One day, she hopes to join her sister in Atlanta: “There’s so many different cultures, so many people to meet.”
Jazmyne’s grandmother, who died this spring, attended the public high school a few years after desegregation. By then, most white students had left for the new academies. Although racism caused segregation, Jazmyne doesn’t think it’s the cause of the ongoing divisions.
“Nobody around here is really racist,” she said. “We just haven’t come together. We’ve been doing our own thing all the time.”
### Roots of Division
Sheryl Threadgill-Matthews grew up immersed in the urgency and hope of the Civil Rights Movement. Her father was a prominent activist and chaplain of Camden Academy, a private Presbyterian school for Black children. Her mother taught at the school. The entire family lived, learned and worshiped on the campus, perched atop a grassy knoll called Hangman’s Hill.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., one of her father’s college classmates, [spoke at commencement](https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=228693) in 1954. The grounds soon became a hub for staging civil rights marches and boycotts — landing it in the crosshairs of white school officials.
In 1965, the Wilcox County school board exercised eminent domain to take over the property. They kept the school open for several more years but evicted the Threadgills from their home and forced her father and his parishioners to tear down the school’s church.
She witnessed the dismantling. Someone burned a cross in their yard.
The family pressed forward. A year later, when she was a freshman, Threadgill-Matthews arrived at Wilcox County High, then a public school for white children. It was Sept. 23, 1966, and she would become one of the first nine Black students to cross the county’s racial line that day.
Sheryl Threadgill (pictured on the far right with her mother behind her) was among several Black students who integrated Wilcox County schools. Credit: Bob Fitch Photography Archive, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Library
Sheryl Threadgill-Matthews looks through her old yearbook from Camden Academy. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica
Grand white columns flanked the front door to the red brick building. She was grateful that her father walked her inside. Even after he left, the morning passed quietly. But it was a fleeting relief. Over the coming months, students rammed her desk with their chairs. They ripped her books apart. They brushed chalk dust into her hair. They smacked her head with crutches.
One day in science class, a boy sneered: “Nigger, if you make more than me on the test, I’m gonna kill you.” When she did so, he hurled something at her head so hard that she fell unconscious in the hallway.
She endured for the school year, then pleaded to return to Camden Academy. So did most of the students who’d come with her.
By then, white families across the South had launched the segregation academy movement.
In Alabama, it ramped up after a federal court ordered Tuskegee High School to desegregate. White parents scrambled to [open a segregation academy](https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/sep/10), which Gov. George Wallace soon toured. He urged more like it to open — and called on state lawmakers to help.
In 1965, the state’s legislature [approved $3.75 million](https://archive.org/details/ERIC_ED018874/page/n17/mode/2up?q=private) — worth about $36 million today — to fund tuition grants that paid for students “to attend private schools rather than go to public school classes with Negroes,” the Alabama Journal reported.
Six other Southern states adopted similar programs, which “enabled the [largest growth](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/in-southern-towns-segregation-academies-are-still-going-strong/266207/) of private schools in the South’s history,” [Suitts wrote](https://southernspaces.org/2019/segregationists-libertarians-and-modern-school-choice-movement/) in the journal Southern Spaces.
Across the old Confederacy, newspaper headlines announced private schools opening with names like Robert E. Lee Academy, Wade Hampton Academy, Jefferson Davis Academy. The Rebels were a favored mascot.
In March 1970, Camden’s local newspaper reported, “Promoters of additional private school facilities in Wilcox County got a shot in the arm this week.” The federal government had filed a plan for desegregating the local schools.
“The action is expected by many to spur interest in the construction of new private school facilities at Camden and Pine Hill,” the article said.
Two weeks later, another headline reported: “Private School Plan Shaping Up.” The story said 119 families in Wilcox had formed a new foundation, voted to start a private school, and secured 16 acres of land in Camden. It was the birth of Wilcox Academy.
Despite the obvious implications of the timing, many white people across the South argued their [motives for embracing the new academies weren’t racist](https://www.commondreams.org/views/2005/03/21/deja-vu-parents-charge-tuition-grants-and-choice-education). Publicly, they cited “choice,” “freedom” and higher-quality (often Christian) education.
But those sentiments were hard to square with the fact that many academies opened hastily, often in people’s homes, churches or vacant buildings. [Researchers who visited](https://archive.org/details/schoolsthatfearb0000nevi/page/52/mode/2up?q=dilapidated) some of the new schools in the 1970s wrote that most were “dilapidated, worn, a little dirty, short on supplies and materials, cramped, offering few opportunities for enrichment.”
Wilcox Academy, however, enjoyed substantial financial support from the start. When it opened in September 1970, it was “generally regarded to be one of the most beautiful and well-equipped new schools in the area,” the Wilcox Progressive Era newspaper reported.
The nearby public school started the year with half the students it had the year before. Just two years later, Wilcox County public schools enrolled 3,733 Black students and only 109 white ones.
Now five decades later, only a handful of white students are enrolled.
Under drizzly clouds one day this spring, Threadgill-Matthews accelerated up the grassy knoll where Camden Academy once stood. With her 5-year-old great-nephew in the back seat, she approached J.E. Hobbs Elementary, a public school that now operates on the academy’s former campus in a hodgepodge of structures. Her nephew’s classroom was to one side in a low-slung building, painted blue with sunshine-yellow doors.
On her other side, a timeworn sidewalk leads to nothing but a stand of pine trees. Before the school district evicted her family and condemned it, their home stood in that spot.
Her nephew slipped from the car with his Spiderman backpack, gave her a hug, and headed into a classroom filled with Black children — just as she once did on this campus.
Now 71, she tries not to dwell on the disappointment. So little has changed since Brown v. Board, or the day when she and other Black children made history and suffered terribly for it.
Patrick Wheeler Jr., 5, is dropped off by Sheryl Threadgill-Matthews, his great-aunt, at the same campus where she attended an all-Black school in the 1960s. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica
Threadgill-Matthews stands beside a sidewalk where her childhood home once stood outside of Camden Academy, a Presbyterian school for Black students. J.E. Hobbs Elementary now stands on the former site of the academy. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica
### Tools of Resistance
Several years ago, an Auburn University history student reached out to Threadgill-Matthews, hoping to interview her for a master’s thesis. Amberly Sheffield had taught at Wilcox Academy, an experience that left her so intrigued by the school and its origins that she was devoting her thesis to the topic of segregation academies.
Sheffield grew up in the early 2000s in a neighboring county. Her hometown was down to 1,800 people. Despite the small population, she said, two segregation academies operated within a 20-minute drive of her house.
Sheffield didn’t go to either of them. Although she is white, her parents chose the public high school. About 70% of her classmates were Black.
She liked it there. An honors student and cheerleader, she had Black and white teachers. She hung out with a mix of friends and got to learn about their different backgrounds. So she often wondered: Why did so many other white parents pay to send their kids to the academies?
She decided to find out.
In 2019, fresh off earning her bachelor’s degree, she landed a job teaching high school history at Wilcox Academy. She moved to Camden, 40 miles south of Selma, and rented an old plantation house.
Heading into downtown, she saw attorneys, restaurants and clothing boutiques operating from rows of storefronts adorned with flower boxes. At one of the three stop lights, she passed the antebellum red brick county courthouse. Down the road, the white paint peeled on [Antioch Baptist Church](https://ahc.alabama.gov/Alabama%20Register%20Properties/Wilcox%20County/AL.WilcoxCounty.AntiochBaptistChurch.pdf), where the KKK had once harassed congregants and a white man shot a Black man dead as people gathered for a funeral.
Antioch Baptist Church sits along a quiet road in Camden. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica
On her first day at work, Sheffield headed into the academy’s building, which was flanked by athletic fields and stands of trees. Although the county is more than two-thirds Black, the classrooms inside bustled with white children and teachers. The only Black staff she saw were two custodians.
It felt like 1970, the year the school opened.
As she got to know her students, she probed: Why didn’t they go to the public schools? She expected them to cite the academy’s Christian education or the alumni in their family. And some did.
Others figured Wilcox Academy’s academics were better. But it was hard to know. Unlike the public schools, private schools don’t have to release test scores that would allow for comparisons.
To her surprise, many of her students spoke of fear. The public schools were dangerous, they said. They might get shot. They didn’t say it was because the students there are Black, “but that was the sense I got,” Sheffield said.
Now 70 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Wilcox Central High School’s student population remains nearly all Black. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica
She realized her students moved in bubbles of whiteness. Virtually all of their friends were white. Their parents’ friends were white. And they were never mentored or disciplined by Black teachers.
By then, Alabama was several years into a tuition scholarship program for lower-income families that was used mostly by Black students and could have helped more African American families apply to mostly white private schools. But Wilcox Academy has chosen not to participate.
Nor have many of the segregation academies in neighboring counties, [state records](https://www.revenue.alabama.gov/ultraviewer/viewer/basic_viewer/index.html?form=2022/06/Participating_Non-Public_Schools.pdf) indicate. Private schools in Alabama whose student bodies are more than 94% white have been least likely to opt in, one [researcher found](https://ir-api.ua.edu/api/core/bitstreams/0c365574-2cd9-41e8-9995-f4f6ada22542/content).
Wilcox Academy’s principal did not respond to ProPublica’s multiple emails and calls seeking to discuss the academy’s impact on local school segregation, why it doesn’t participate in the existing tuition-grant program and whether it will participate in the new program.
Sheffield concluded that many families still chose the academy due to race — the comfort of their own, discomfort with another — even if they didn’t recognize it as such.
She stayed for one school year, then got to work on her master’s degree. (She’s now a doctoral student at the University of Mississippi studying segregation academies.)
In [her master’s thesis](https://etd.auburn.edu/bitstream/handle/10415/8176/AmberlySheffield%20Thesis.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y), she tracked the formation of these schools across Alabama, particularly “a tidal wave” of openings in 1970. That fall alone, 23 sprang up across the state, including Wilcox Academy. By 1978, public school enrollment in seven Black Belt counties — including Wilcox — was more than 90% Black.
“These segregation academies proved to be white resisters’*most* successful tool of resistance,” Sheffield wrote.
### The Persistence of Division
In small towns like Camden, where everyone could know one another well, people often don’t. It’s been that way since white settlers arrived to bankroll new cotton plantations. They brought so [many enslaved laborers](https://sites.rootsweb.com/~ajac/alwilcox.htm) that the county became, and remains, predominantly Black.
Descendants of both enslavers and the enslaved still share the community. But in so many ways, they remain separated. Because they go to school apart and always have, only a few white children ride the buses to school with Black peers. Black and white parents rarely build friendships at high school football games or PTA meetings. They don’t often carpool or invite each other over for a meal.
Wilcox County Superintendent André Saulsberry has lived this. He graduated from the public schools he now leads. “Will we ever know each other as people here?” he asked. “I’m not sure.”
He noted that it’s difficult to imagine how to create an integrated school system where one has never existed. Black and white residents in Willcox still eye each other across a chasm formed by centuries of history.
“We don’t trust one another because we are so separate,” he said.
Two years ago, some of the county’s mostly white large landowners got Alabama legislators to derail the county and [school board’s request](https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/1457333) to bring a property tax increase to a local vote. Half of the money would have gone to the nearly all-Black schools, including a new building for the elementary school Threadgill-Matthews’ nephew attends. Its aging structures have suffered two fires.
People who don’t send their children to public schools can lack a reason to invest in them, Black residents here lamented. Many wonder how Wilcox County would have fared if, instead of investing in the academies, white families had devoted their time and resources to the public schools.
“If people are together, they will understand each other in more ways — and trust more,” Saulsberry said. “And we won’t continue to die as a county.”
But some places in Camden have begun to draw Black and white people together in ways that foster deep relationships. One is [Black Belt Treasures](https://www.blackbelttreasures.com/), where employees coordinate arts programs for public and private school students. They make a point of welcoming all comers. A Black artist, Betty Anderson, who runs a small civil rights museum across the street, has become close friends with the white women who work there.
Kristin Law, left, and Vera Spinks look at new artwork at Black Belt Treasures. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica
One recent day, two of those women stood in the gallery judging a public school’s art poster contest. Both were active with a local racial reconciliation group that halted during the early days of COVID-19. Both want the community to come together more.
Both also sent their children to Wilcox Academy. The decision, they said, wasn’t easy or simple.
One of them, Vera Spinks, knows that people wonder: Why not just send your kids to the public schools?
“It’s not as cut-and-dried,” she said.
The women vehemently deny the decision had to do with race. The schools had long been divided by the time they faced the decision of where to enroll their children. Both are Christians and said the academy’s religious education was a key factor, along with its small class sizes and personal attention from teachers.
Strong family ties also bond people to the academy. Kristin Law, the other woman working with Spinks at the gallery that day, is an alumna herself. “You now have three and four generations of students that have gone to the school,” she said. “It’s become more about school pride or tradition.”
Then there is the tremendous sweat equity parents put into the school. There’s almost always fundraising underway. The academy’s annual turkey hunt that raises money for the school dates back to 1971. Parents and students create, haul, assemble and gather donations for an annual prom extravaganza. The tradition has been passed down for 40 years.
Both women also said they are glad to see more Black and other nonwhite students at the school. “We’re ready for coming together,” Law said. “How do we do that?”
### Crossing the Broken Bridge
Integration may yet come to places like Wilcox County — though not in the public schools.
Alabama’s new school-choice program will be open to most of its students in January 2025 and to all students in 2027. Under Alabama’s existing tuition-scholarship program, about 60% of students who have received the money in recent years have been Black. The [new program](https://www.revenue.alabama.gov/tax-policy/the-choose-act/), which will open the door to wealthier families, could fund more than four times as many students.
In places like Wilcox and many other Black Belt counties, the largest pool of potential new private school enrollees is Black children.
In 2019, the year Sheffield arrived there, Wilcox Academy hired Michael Woods, its first Black coach, to revitalize the basketball program. Four years into the job, he now wrestles with the thorny implications of the new voucher opportunities.
Black children still account for barely 5% of students in more than half the schools in the South that likely opened as segregation academies. That leaves white parents and students still firmly in control, even in majority-Black communities. Now these academies will confront an important question: If more Black students apply, how many will white leaders accept?
Woods grew up in Camden’s public schools and describes the “broken bridge” between the two communities. He never imagined that he’d one day work at the academy and was surprised when its leaders reached out to him. He arrived to see two Black students and no Black teachers.
But he felt welcome enough that he brought his niece and nephew to the academy, along with another Black student. Some have told him about hearing racially insensitive comments but nothing he considers outright racism.
“We are still set in those old-time ways,” he said. “But God has made it better, and it’s time to let it go.”
He wants Black children to have the same opportunities that white kids have long enjoyed. But for them to have a real choice, they need to feel valued at the academy. Woods said he’s told the staff, “We still have to give something to show these kids that we appreciate them to get them there to the school.”
Saulsberry, the superintendent, doesn’t expect many to apply regardless. “I’m not sure how comfortable, in some cases, it will be if the Black child went there.”
Given that few public school students score at the proficient level on math or reading assessments, leaders there know the district’s [standardized test results](https://reportcard.alsde.edu/OverallScorePage.aspx?ReportYear=2023&SystemCode=066&SchoolCode=0000) could be used against it. But Saulsberry contends his schools provide far more than test scores can capture.
His teachers must be certified, unlike at some private schools. Students at the public high school also can become certified nursing assistants, patient care technicians, medication assistants, welders, brick masons and heavy equipment operators. They can get certified to work in forestry. Plumbing is coming in the fall.
Alexis Lewis, a junior, works on a project during welding class at Wilcox Central High School, which offers a number of job training programs. Credit: Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica
His students also can get mental health care, special education services, bus services and free meals — which few area academies offer.
“We try to look at the total child, not just the academic side,” Saulsberry said.
Public school leaders know they will have to do more to sell strengths like these. Wilcox Central High Assistant Principal Donald Carter expects private schools to follow the college football playbook: “They’ll be out to recruit now.”
When Woods coaches the academy’s teams, the stands in the gymnasium fill with mostly white parents. The other teams are mostly or entirely white as well. He wonders how it would feel if more Black families filled those seats.
Woods said that he fields almost daily phone calls from Black parents. “A lot of parents I have talked to want their kids in a private school,” he said. “But they just couldn’t afford it.” Now, in cautiously curious tones, they ask a question that echoes back 70 years: How would “the white school” treat their children?
---
#### How We Counted Segregation Academies
To identify schools that likely opened as segregation academies, ProPublica adapted [existing](https://ir.ua.edu/handle/123456789/8569) [research](https://doi.org/10.1525/sp.2014.11155) using data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ [Private School Universe Survey](https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pss/) to identify K-12 schools that were founded in the South between 1954 and 1976 and were more than 90% white as recently as 1993-1995, the earliest years for which student demographic data is available. We also filtered out schools with certain unique focuses, such as special education, or that were opened around the same time for reasons that may not have primarily been due to desegregation — many Catholic schools, for example, met this criteria. To determine which schools were still operating, we compared those schools to the most recent Private School Universe Survey data, from 2021 to 2022. Our estimates may be an undercount, since data about private school demographics was not collected until 1993, almost two decades after desegregation ended, and because not all private schools respond to the survey. To determine which schools were both still operating and still disproportionately white, we compared their demographics data to U.S. Census Bureau estimates for the counties in which each school was located.
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# Sexism, cheating, and nightclubs: inside the dark heart of modern chess
There is a singular misery to trying your very best, after months of training, only to be crushed by a 6-year-old.
Last December, I spent a cloudy day holed up at the Mechanics' Institute, a venerable chess club in San Francisco, to play in the 22nd annual McClain Memorial Tournament. It was my first in-person chess competition, and I was full of optimism.
I faced a severe-looking child who wore a food-stained sweatshirt emblazoned with a cartoon penguin. He did not speak. He alternated between fidgeting uncontrollably and fixing me with a disconcerting death stare. He spent much of his time between moves crawling around beneath the table (an interesting psych-out technique, but not one I think I could pull off).
Early in the game, I made an amateur mistake that left me down a knight. From there it was all over, even if I didn't immediately realize it. A checkmate soon followed.
My first game had been against a middle-aged asset manager, and we'd discussed the strangeness of us adults competing against children. (He also beat me.) After an undignified lunch of Doritos and a chocolate protein shake, I managed to eke out a win against my third opponent. A tech worker in her mid-20s, she noted she was nursing a severe hangover, and she had a helpful habit of involuntarily gasping whenever she realized she'd made a mistake. At that point, I'd take whatever modicum of dignity I could salvage.
For the first three decades of my life, I'd had fleeting phases of mild interest in chess, playing the occasional game online while procrastinating or over the board with a drink. But the game's foreboding density and association with supreme intellect dissuaded me from going any deeper. Over the past few years, however, a drumbeat of fanfare and tabloid headlines about the seemingly staid game became inescapable. Like so many other people, I got chess-pilled.
Chess.com, the world's leading chess site, now regularly reports record numbers of players —it said that in February 2023 it hosted more than 1 billion games a month —sporadically crashing under the weight of demand. The pandemic's enforced isolation and [Netflix's](https://www.businessinsider.com/how-netflix-is-changing-the-entertainment-industry-2021-8) smash hit "The Queen's Gambit" collectively introduced an entire generation to the game. Socialites are playing chess on "The Real Housewives of New York City." Twitch streamers and [YouTubers](https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-get-started-with-youtube-podcasts-build-an-audience-2024-5) have racked up millions of followers and ushered in a radical new culture —meme-drenched, rapid-fire, and drama-prone.
Chess has never been more popular, but its ugly side has also never been more exposed. The same characteristics that have driven its popularity online —an easy-to-understand eight-by-eight grid, a strategy without chance or luck — have also made it a cheater's paradise. Meanwhile, rampant sexism festers at chess' heart.
What the hell was happening to the game of kings? To find out, I decided I needed to get better at the game and face off against everyone I talked to.
---
In 1990, when Judit Polgár, the greatest female chess player, was emerging as a child prodigy, the world champion Garry Kasparov dismissed her as "after all, a woman."
"It all comes down to the imperfections of the feminine psyche," he said. "No woman can sustain a prolonged battle."
Sexism persists in every level of the game. In 1990, according to the US Chess Federation, only 4% of chess players were women. Today it's 14%. There are innumerable tales of how women were belittled, mistreated, harassed, and abused — from snide remarks about "losing to a girl" at a chess club to sexist comments during online play. Juliana Gallin, a graphic designer in San Francisco, told me before a game on Chess.com (she wiped the floor with me) that she had deliberately omitted any references to her gender in her online profile. Even at professional tournaments, many women say commentators and audiences sometimes fixate on their appearances and clothes rather than the quality of their chess. FIDE, the [international chess body](https://ethics.fide.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/New-EDC-Procedural-Rules-as-approved-by-FIDE-Council.pdf), requires anyone wishing to make a misconduct complaint to first pay a fee of 75 euros.
> In 1990, only 4% of chess players were women. Today it's 14%.
In 2023, the chess world had its own `#MeToo` moment. It started when the grandmaster Jennifer Shahade accused Alejandro Ramírez, a grandmaster and well-connected coach, of sexual assault. A slew of further allegations against Ramírez —and claims that the US Chess Federation had failed to act — [soon followed](https://www.wsj.com/articles/alejandro-ramirez-jennifer-shahade-chess-allegations-622263b8). (Ramírez has denied the allegations.)
Shahade and I played a quick game — she smothered me, picking off my pawns until my structure crumbled — and talked. Shahade told me that, in addition to the gender imbalance, part of the issue is that chess is "complex to attack because there's so many different cultures," adding that "every country might have its own policy for safe play." Beyond that, she said, "all ages play together — which mostly is a really awesome thing about the game that we love — but unfortunately for bad actors that could be an opportunity for grooming."
And there's no easier place for bad actors to take root than in chess' most popular venue: online.
---
More than anything else, the internet has transformed how chess is played and talked about. It has infused the 1,500-year-old game with modern video-game sensibilities and smack talk. Online chess can feel a world away from the carefully considered hourslong games of old; many modern players prefer "bullet chess," whose warp speed games take less than three minutes. Beyond Reddit hubs like the more pedantic r/Chess (1.1 million members) and the oddball, shitposting r/AnarchyChess (500,000), ground zero for chess' reimagining is video platforms like YouTube and Twitch. Dedicated chess influencers like Levy "GothamChess" Rozman (nearly 5 million YouTube subscribers) and the Botez sisters (1.5 million subscribers) offer guidance to amateurs like me, dissecting tournament games and diving into the nearly constant beef between chess celebs. Even grandmasters — historically cast as cerebral recluses — are getting in on the action. The five-time US champion Hikaru Nakamura (2.3 million subscribers) has become one of the most prolific streamers out there.
"You definitely can make in general a lot more from making content than what you can from playing competitive chess," said Anna Cramling, a fast-talking 21-year-old Swedish player with nearly 900,000 YouTube subscribers. After we chatted, we played a quick game; I timed out with no good moves open to me. All the time in the world wouldn't have made a difference.
The seedier side of internet culture has also wormed its way into chess. "The biggest downside to what I do is I don't always feel safe," Cramling said. Some of her followers, she says, are often "trying to get to know things about me." Poor sportsmanship abounds: Some players rage quit when they make mistakes, try to "stall" their opponents, or abort games if they don't get to play as white. Chat rooms are full of normalized abuse, often sexual or racist. Sometimes dark behavior bleeds out beyond the screen: In late 2023, Nakamura said the police had [turned up at his home](https://kick.com/gmhikaru?clip=clip_01HGP490KWBC8473KX5F71RV06) after someone tried to "swat" him.
But is playing online as fulfilling as playing over the board? As I explored, I kept up a steady stream of middling games on [Chess.com](http://chess.com/) — my Elo rating slowly rising — but wanted a more immersive experience. I decided to devote an entire day to playing bullet chess.
> By hour two, the games were blurring into one another — aching hands, no time for strategy, just vibes.
In the version I played, a 1:1 time control, each player was allotted one minute total for the entire game plus one additional second per move. My first game went beautifully: excellent piece development, no big mistakes, and a neat checkmate. During game two, I started to feel a little frantic. By hour two, the games were blurring into one another — aching hands, no time for strategy, just vibes. When I took a break for a virtual doctor's appointment, I was seized with a compulsion to fill out the intake forms at blitzkrieg speed.
I had a breakthrough when I switched up the time control. Now I was playing just a flat minute per player, no additional time. Suddenly I was winning clearly lost games because I was just a bit faster on the draw. All I had to do was hide my king in the corner and make my structure just convoluted enough, and I'd win by default as my opponents timed out. It was a lightning-fast game of pattern recognition and counterstrike reflexes, and totally unconducive to improving my actual chess skills.
Eight hours later, I was 150 games down and completely exhausted. It was time to log off.
---
Out in the world, chess' resurgence has been accompanied by a wave of new clubs and events.
In April 2023, [The Washington Post reported](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/04/15/school-chess-class-clubs/) that chess was causing an "epidemic of student distraction." In Berkeley, California, a controversial unlicensed street club has become a flash point for debates about [gentrification](https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/10/06/students-community-defend-telegraph-chess-tables-berkeley-city-council) and [police brutality](https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2023-10-04/article/50429?headline=The-City-of-Berkeley-Makes-a-Pawn-of-the-Chess-Club---Steve-Martinot). When I visited, I was bested by a guy who I suspected was extremely high and who got up to dance to Bill Withers between moves.
A couple months into my chess journey, I was in New York City for the week. I made a pilgrimage to the Marshall Chess Club, a 109-year-old institution in Greenwich Village.
> Beneath impressionist murals of naked women, and among candles and pumping EDM, an eclectic crowd of hipsters, skaters, and the occasional dyed-in-the-wool chess nerd mingled.
Inside, rows of players sat in perfect silence as the bust of the club's founder, Frank Marshall, the American chess champion of 1909, frowned down at them. But my itch to play could not be scratched: The club was hosting a tournament that day, a nice man told me apologetically, for high-ranking players only. Even the youngest attendees would demolish me. "These aren't your normal kids," he said.
The following evening, I went to an East Village bar and found a very different scene at Club Chess. Beneath impressionist murals of naked women, and among candles and pumping EDM, an eclectic crowd of hipsters, skaters, and the occasional dyed-in-the-wool chess nerd mingled. There were no chess clocks in sight, and downstairs there was a full-on dance floor. It was standing room only. Founded in 2023 by Alexander Luke Bahta — who spent the evening swanning around, tailed by a photographer and reporter for a lifestyle blog — Club Chess has been described by [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/sep/13/new-york-gen-z-chess-clubs) and [New York magazine](https://www.curbed.com/article/club-chess-maneros-of-mulberry.html) as the epicenter of chess' ascendance in nightlife.
I played a young Canadian mycologist in an evenly matched game that she ultimately resigned. Then came a wiry Romanian in athleisure —Elo rating 2200, extremely good — who inexorably ground me down, trapping one of my bishops and stomping through my pawn structure. Afterward I watched him play the burly security guard and checkmate him barely a dozen moves in. The bouncer "plays unconventionally," the Romanian said diplomatically.
"That guy's a monster," the bouncer told me later.
With work looming the next day, I left the party, still going strong, at about 11 p.m., feeling rejuvenated. It had been chess at its purest and most freeing —no scores or internet trash talk to be found.
---
If you've heard anything about chess in the past couple of years, it's probably been about anal beads.
In 2022, the world champion Magnus Carlsen accused the grandmaster Hans Niemann, chess' enfant terrible, of cheating in a tournament. What followed was a breathless debate (not by Carlsen) over whether Niemann had managed this with a device hidden in a particularly intimate part of his body.
The consensus among serious chess players is that the specific allegation is absurd,but paranoia about cheating pervades the game, from grandmasters playing in tournaments to amateurs whacking away at each other online. [Chess.com](http://chess.com/) bans 90,000-odd [players every month for cheating](https://www.chess.com/fair-play#fair-play-numbers).
I understand why. I've cheated at chess.
Years ago I periodically played online against a college buddy. He beat me, a lot. So in one or two games, purely out of curiosity, I booted up a chess engine, plugged in the moves he made, responded with the computer-determined optimal moves, and won handily. I told him promptly what I'd done. But there was also a prurient little thrill to winning, no matter how undeserved. And I'm hardly the only one who feels this way.
> If you've heard anything about chess in the past couple of years, it's probably been about anal beads.
Chess is an extraordinarily easy game to cheat at. Computer programs have handily beaten human players ever since Deep Blue versus Kasparov in 1997. And there's no easy remedy. At the most basic level, there's the risk of people copying computer moves by rote, but that's relatively straightforward to detect. For more sophisticated players, cheating on a single move at the right moment is sometimes enough to give them the edge. Even just a signal —a cough, a gesture, a vibration —that their seemingly innocuous next move will actually be critical, even if they're not told what the right move is, can be enough to make a player slow down and find the pathway to the (ill-gotten) win.
Hence a constant fear of cheaters and a string of minor scandals. The former world champion Vladimir Kramnik has in recent years repeatedly cast aspersions on other high-profile players, including Nakamura. ([Chess.com](http://chess.com/) subsequently said it investigated "dozens of players" whose play Kramnik had questioned and found no evidence "in the vast majority of cases.") The grandmaster Fabiano Caruana [said in a recent interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADK1o1sZ0s0) that he'd "bet a lot" that someone in the top 10 players had cheated at some point.
The concern can taint players' enjoyment of the game.
"It just sucks because you're trying your hardest —but it kind of doesn't matter because you're just playing god, essentially," said Dan Timbrell, a 33-year-old working in machine learning in the Netherlands. "You are pulling your heart and soul into really trying to win a game, and then you just realize it is just punching a brick wall."
---
Over four months, I played a shit ton of chess, and I learned a lot by being summarily beaten by nearly every person I talked to. But I also felt more and more burned out by the game. I found myself constantly fretting about my Elo rating. It distracted from what actually mattered:the chess.
Chess is a notoriously brutal game for the ego. If you lose, it's simply because you weren't good enough. Chess is a skill that can be learned, like any other, but that doesn't stop people online from discussing ad nauseam whether there's a correlation between chess prowess and IQ. Add internet-tracked Elo ratings, and you've got a potent recipe for an inferiority complex.
As a 27-year-old musician in New York City who got into chess after watching "The Queen's Gambit," told me: "You either make good moves or bad moves. So it's very easy to say, 'Oh my, I've made a terrible move —I'm so stupid.'"
I could relate. When I was playing online, I began gravitating toward anonymous, logged-out games — a far more relaxed affair.
Chess' problems aren't unique. But it is uniquely positioned to act as an accelerant for the internet's worst impulses: sexism, abuse, cheating, elitism, and toxic nerdery. It's a far cry from what Juliana Gallin described to me as "the stunning, breathtaking beauty and magic of chess." My most memorable chess experiences, the places where I encountered that magic, weren't online. They were playing in the crowded thrill of Club Chess in New York, or trading pieces with a buddy over a gin and tonic in a Lake Tahoe cabin, or battling it out in the cafeteria of a Russian bathhouse in San Francisco.
As I was wrapping up this story, [YouTube recommended me a video by ChessPage1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26174PF9Gmw), a janky instructional channel. At the high levels, the robotic-sounding voice said, players need an encyclopedic knowledge of openings and theory and a grand strategy to execute. But among us mortals, people screw up in minor ways several times a game.
"If you can be the guy who just doesn't blunder and also spots the opponent's blunders," the voice said, "you can easily become a very good chess player without having to pull off some complex mastery game plan … You don't have a game plan, your opponent doesn't have a game plan, everybody is confused. But confusion means high probability of blunders, and if you don't blunder, you will crush 99% of your opponents. Congratulations, you are now enlightened and smart." They added, "Remember,whenever you feel like you need a complex strategy, *just don't blunder*."
It's good advice for chess, and for life. If in doubt, remember that basically no one else has it figured out either. Just try not to screw up too badly.
---
[*Rob Price*](https://www.businessinsider.com/author/rob-price) *is a senior correspondent for Business Insider and writes features and investigations about the technology industry. His Signal number is +1 650-636-6268, and his email is* [*rprice@businessinsider.com*](mailto:rprice@businessinsider.com)*.*
@ -64,10 +64,6 @@ But IRS records obtained by ProPublica show the Clippers have reported $700 mill
How a Billionaire Team Owner Pays a Lower Tax Rate Than LeBron James — and Stadium Workers, Too
A massive tax break allows owners to report huge losses to the IRS, even if their teams are profitable, and save themselves hundreds of millions.
Credit: Mauricio Rodríguez Pons, Nadia Sussman, Joe Singer and Almudena Toral/ProPublica and Kristyn Hume for ProPublica
Ballmer isn’t alone. ProPublica reviewed tax information for dozens of team owners across the four largest American pro sports leagues. Owners frequently report incomes for their teams that are millions below their real-world earnings, according to the tax records, previously leaked team financial records and interviews with experts.
They include Shahid Khan, an automotive tycoon who made use of at least $79 million in losses from a stake in the Jacksonville Jaguars even as his football team has consistently been projected to bring in millions a year.And Leonard Wilf, a New Jersey real estate developer who owns the Minnesota Vikings with family members, has taken $66 million in losses from his minority stake in the team.
@ -86,7 +82,7 @@ Ultrawealthy Sports Owners Often Pay a Substantially Lower Income Tax Rate Than
A review of federal tax records from 2017 and 2018 shows that the tax code favors team owners over wage-earning athletes. Here are some prominent examples:
“Mr. DeVos complies with all federal, state and local tax laws and pays his obligations in full,” a spokesperson for Daniel DeVos said in a statement, adding, “I don’t intend to comment on the accuracy or inaccuracy of any data obtained illegally.” Representatives for Philip Anschutz, Anthony Davis, Josh Harris and LeBron James declined to comment. Representatives for Stan Kroenke, Justin Verlander and Tiger Woods did not respond to inquiries by ProPublica. A representative for John Henry declined to receive questions about his taxes. Floyd Mayweather’s tax lawyer, Jeffrey Morse, declined to comment about the boxer’s tax numbers, but in response to questions about the fairness of athletes paying higher rates than owners, he said, “It is a discussion worth having.”
@ -140,8 +136,6 @@ Then, you only pay taxes on the rest. You save about $45 million in taxes each y
In some cases, owners can write off even more than 90% of the purchase price.
Credit: Agnes Chang/ProPublica
---
When Steve Ballmer offered to buy the Clippers in 2014 for a record sum, the team’s longtime owner, Donald Sterling, was taken aback.
@ -178,7 +172,7 @@ Team Values Across Professional Sports Leagues Have Increased for the Past 20 Ye
On average, major sports franchises have consistently increased in value over the past two decades, according to estimates by Forbes.
National Sports Law Institute of Marquette University Law School and Forbes (Note: Forbes did not provide data for the NHL for 2005.) Credit: Lucas Waldron/ProPublica
@ -258,16 +252,6 @@ In an interview, Dominic told ProPublica that he allowed his family’s lawyers
“It’s just the darndest thing,” he said in a phone call from a vacation in Mexico. “I’m a lucky son of a bitch, there’s no way around it.”
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In *Insulin: A Hundred-Year History*, the medical historian Stuart Bradwel compares insulin to a key that “\[prompts\] our bodies to consume what they need to function.” Insulin shifts glucose, a sugar that serves as your body’s main source of energy, from the bloodstream into cells that will use or store it. It is a hormone—one of those chemical messengers of the endocrine system that collectively orchestrate metabolism, growth, development, reproduction, and other essential bodily processes. It is vital to each and every human being, whether it’s produced within the beta cells of the pancreas or, for the millions of people with insulin-dependent diabetes around the world, in a lab.
A body’s failure to produce enough insulin, known as type 1 diabetes, or to respond to it properly, known as type 2 diabetes, leads to elevated blood sugar levels that can bring about heart attacks, strokes, organ failure, coma, and diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), where the body cannibalizes its fat and muscle for energy. Living with un- or inadequately treated diabetes is excruciating, but for many with the disease, it first takes going into DKA to be diagnosed and receive adequate care. Unless you have experienced it yourself, it’s hard to understand just how distressing chronic hyperglycemia, or high blood glucose, can feel. Along with rapid weight loss, weakness, fatigue, mood swings, and brain fog, the body experiences an insatiable hunger, breaking into muscle and fat stores in a desperate attempt to remain functional. Similarly, in an effort to flush the excess sugar out of the bloodstream, the body also cues an unquenchable thirst which can cause anxiety, incontinence, and discomfort.
As recently as the early twentieth century, all types of diabetes were often a death sentence; type 1 diabetes was always fatal. In his 1916 article, “The Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus,” early prominent diabetes specialist Elliott P. Joslin noted that most children with diabetes would enter a fatal DKA coma shortly after diagnosis and die within a few years. At the time, treatment wasn’t particularly promising either, with one widespread prescription being “starvation diets”—permanent and severe calorie restriction to avoid high blood sugar levels—that left patients with stunted growth, reduced resistance to infection, and emaciation. In another article decades later, Joslin reflected: “We literally starved the child and adult with the faint hope that something new in treatment would appear. . . . It was no fun to starve a child to let him live.”
The discovery and extraction of insulin between 1921 and 1922 by Canadian surgeon Frederick Banting and his team at the University of Toronto—then-medical student Charles Best, and biochemists James Collip and John Mcleod—changed everything. One of the earliest success stories of insulin treatment was Elizabeth Hughes, daughter of U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes. In 1919, after a diabetes diagnosis at the age of eleven, a specialist put Elizabeth on a starvation diet that brought her weight down from sixty-five to fifty-two pounds. When her urine was determined to no longer contain glucose, her diet was relaxed and her weight rose slightly. But when her condition suddenly deteriorated in 1922—and her weight dropped to forty-five pounds—she was brought to Banting and his team to be included in an insulin treatment trial. Hughes not only regained her weight, she went on to live a long life, dying of pneumonia in 1981 at the age of seventy-three.
For many diabetics today, insulin replacement therapy—the measured intake of lab-extracted insulin, now produced by microbes—provides immediate relief to their painful suite of symptoms, and a relatively easy fix to a gruesome and debilitating physiological and psychological experience. But if a patient is so lucky as to be diagnosed with diabetes in time to prevent or ameliorate DKA, they are immediately faced with another disconcerting problem: accessing the treatment, which happens to be one of the most lucrative pharmaceutical products in human history. Just past the centennial of insulin’s discovery, the lack of insulin access and affordability continues to run rampant globally. Of the 537 million people living with diabetes worldwide, around 70 million require insulin. At the same time, more than three in four adults with diabetes reside in low- and middle-income countries where a combination of poverty and predatory pharmaceutical regimes make acquiring sufficient insulin difficult or impossible. Even in higher-income countries, pharmaceutical consortiums control who gets access to insulin, and for how much.
Take the United States: about 38.4 million Americans—including children—have diabetes, and among them, 8.4 million rely on insulin. A 2019 Yale study found that one in four insulin-dependent diabetics have resorted to rationing their insulin supplies: using less insulin than prescribed, stopping insulin therapy, delaying the start of insulin therapy, not filling prescriptions, and engaging in other underuse behaviors related to cost. Many who need insulin not only require adequate dosages but different types of insulins, alongside a suite of devices to monitor and stabilize blood sugar levels as health complications can emerge if they drift too far in either direction. Forgoing adequate insulin dosing can have devastating consequences for type 1 and many type 2 diabetics, and the practice is a substantial driver of the hundreds of thousands of deaths attributable to diabetes complications in the United States each year. With global diabetes rates expected to double by 2050, insulin accessibility and affordability will continue to be a matter of life and death for people with the disease.
### From Good Intentions
The potential for insulin’s market exploitation was almost presciently understood by Banting and his team at the University of Toronto, so in 1923, when Banting and Best were awarded the U.S. patents for insulin and the method for making it, they swiftly sold them to the university for $1 each. “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world,” Banting explained, believing that profiting off such an essential treatment was not only immoral but detrimental to ensuring universal affordability and access. He and Macleod were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine later that year.
> Just past the centennial of insulin’s discovery, the lack of insulin access and affordability continues to run rampant globally.
Despite their efforts, things have not gone as the scientists envisioned. The major reason for this can be traced back to the capture of insulin manufacture worldwide by an oligopoly of multinational pharmaceutical firms known as the Big Three—Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi—which control more than 90 percent of global insulin markets and the entirety of the U.S. insulin market. At times involved in lockstep collusion schemes, and at others, in transparent attempts to copy one another’s products, the Big Three have thrived in no small part because of obsequious regulations, loopholes in intellectual property law, and an odious health care system, pushing a miracle drug out of reach for millions of people who need it.
A century ago, Banting and his team worked with Connaught Laboratories—then the University of Toronto’s wholly owned, noncommercial, public health entity—to scale up insulin manufacture. In the earliest days, this meant extracting the hormone from the pancreatic tissue of hordes of animals, starting with dogs in their initial experiments, and later cows and pigs. Production not only required a constant supply of animal pancreases but precise methods to extract and purify the insulin, such that variability between lots was minimized and their potency maximized.
Throughout 1922, Connaught was failing to meet demand amid constant supply shortages as they rushed to scale up production, and their process was unable to ensure that insulin was reliably similar across batches to distribute to patients who needed it. Lurking in the wings, ready to capitalize on this moment, was George H.A. Clowes, Eli Lilly’s research director. Over the course of a year, Clowes tried numerous times to court individual members of Banting’s team to pursue a partnership with Eli Lilly and was rebuked each time—the researchers feared working with Eli Lilly would compromise their ethics. Still, Clowes pressed on. In one 1922 letter, he warned that “demand for the product will be such as to lead to attempts on the part of unprincipled individuals to victimize the public unless some steps are taken to arrange for the manufacture of the product by the procedures recommended by Dr. Collip and the control of the products by means of such tests as you and your associates would consider necessary.”
Within a few months, he was successful—in part because the university was simultaneously concerned with crafting a patent regime “in the public interest” that would thwart efforts to monopolize insulin while managing quality and using royalties to further finance medical research. (Eli Lilly would later go out of its way to try and undermine then sabotage the establishment of this system.) The Toronto group crafted an agreement with Eli Lilly that from 1922 to 1923 would give it exclusive license to manufacture and distribute insulin to physicians and hospitals across the Americas; in exchange, they would pay royalties to the University of Toronto, as well as share methodologies for improvements made to their manufacturing process. After a year, Eli Lilly would be free to sell insulin commercially. While the University of Toronto earned $8 million in royalties from licensing insulin between 1923 and 1967, Eli Lilly made out like bandits with $1.1 million in 1923 alone, despite only starting sales in October of that year. Insulin managed to account for 14 percent of the firm’s annual total sales, marking it the highest selling product in the company’s history and responsible for half of the firm’s profit. At the end of the exclusive agreement, Eli Lilly was well-positioned to push a commercial advantage: for another year, they would be the only firm selling insulin in America as others raced to speed up production infrastructure.
The two other members of the Big Three would get their start during the same period, amid that mad scramble for the mass manufacture of animal insulin. August Krogh, a Danish physiologist who won the 1920 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and his wife Marie—a type 2 diabetic herself—visited the University of Toronto in 1922 and secured an agreement for Nordic rights. The pair returned to Denmark, where August, along with two cofounders, created Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium and started offering insulin in 1923. The following year, two brothers who worked at Nordisk left the company to create Novo Terapeutisk Laboratorium and offer their own insulin products. These two firms eventually merged into Novo Nordisk in 1989. (You may also know Novo Nordisk as the creator of Ozempic, which was originally used to spur insulin production in type 2 diabetics before its application for rapid weight loss was discovered.) Along with Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium, the German chemical firm Hoechst AG developed its own process for manufacturing insulin in 1923. Two years later, Hoechst AG become a part of Nazi military contractor IG Farben but was spun off after World War II. In a series of subsequent mergers and acquisitions, Hoechst and Connaught Laboratories would end up under French pharma multinational Sanofi-Aventis by 2004.
### Under Their Thumb
From the 1920s to the 1970s, insulin prices in the United States were relatively stable—a phenomenon that stemmed not only from a Department of Justice that pursued insulin price-fixing but, as Natalie Shure writes in *The American Prospect*, Eli Lilly’s first-mover advantage. “Rival firms had no real incentive to compete with an already entrenched, scaled-up manufacturer whose prices were already relatively low,” Shure explains. Things began to change in the 1970s, as the pharmaceutical industry embarked on its glorious struggle to become the most profitable sector of our economy. It was within this political-economic reconfiguration that a new parasitic industry in the pharmaceutical pricing regime emerged: the pharmacy benefit manager, or PBM.
PBMs are entities working with drugmakers and insurance companies to determine which drugs will receive insurance coverage or be included on formularies (lists of drugs covered by health insurance plans), and to negotiate price cuts in the process. Initially formed to provide a much-needed solution to insurers that were unable to efficiently respond to claims as drug coverage increased, the arrangement became a privatized scheme in which drugmakers and insurance companies could acquire and control PBMs of their own. Rarely are the discounts they negotiate passed along to the customers (i.e., the people who need said medicines to live); they’re more often pocketed by these managers instead. Today, just three PBMs—CVS Caremark, Optum Rx (by UnitedHealth Group), and Express Scripts (by Cigna)—control about 80 percent of the U.S. market. The creation of clear pathways for private entities to “patent and commercialize public research,” Shure writes, alongside breakthroughs in DNA sequencing, occurred “at the very moment that both speculative investment and maximizing shareholder value became Wall Street dogma.”
For companies manufacturing insulin, this promised to crack up a sector that had been marked by stability in products, prices, and profits. Until the advent of recombinant human insulin in 1978, changes to insulin since the first wave of animal insulins developed in Canada, Europe, and the United States largely centered around the addition of various molecules and elements to make insulins last longer. The first recombinant DNA human insulin was made by Genentech—the company founded by one of the scientists who first pioneered recombinant DNA technology—and it would soon strike a deal with Eli Lilly to commercialize recombinant human insulin. In 1982, Eli Lilly marketed the product as Humulin R (rapid) and N (NPH, intermediate-acting). This technology priced out smaller manufacturers, resulting in collapses, mergers, and acquisitions that consolidated the market around the Big Three. It also introduced a new market logic that would prove problematic. As researchers David Beran, Edwin A.M. Gale, and John S. Yudkin put it in the journal *Diabetologia*:
> Market control coincided with a commercial incentive to move on from the human molecule, which cannot be patented, to genetically engineered analogues, which can. Commercial logic was matched by clinical enthusiasm, for restructuring the insulin molecule appeared to promise unlimited possibility. However, evolution has optimised insulin’s binding site with its receptor to the point that it is closely identical in many species. This left genetic engineers with limited scope for improvement, and their options were therefore limited to modifications which affect insulin’s absorption and bioavailability.
In the 1990s, we began to see “insulin analogues,” or synthetically produced insulin that is recognizable to and acts on the body at different speeds, with some forms working more quickly in advance of meals or to correct high blood glucose levels and others providing a baseline throughout the day. While short- and long-acting insulins allow tighter control of blood sugar, which mitigates long-term complications that have become more common as diabetics experience longer lifespans, patients have suffered from rising costs as patent “evergreening” has become a normalized business practice within the pharmaceutical industry. Evergreening works by changing a molecule slightly to yield an improvement sufficient to warrant a new patent, which locks out generic competitors from producing the product if it incorporates that improvement. Combined with extensive marketing, pharmaceutical companies also appeal directly to patients in order to popularize their products over “older” versions of the same drugs. When the patent for Lantus, a long-acting insulin by Sanofi, expired in 2015, the company filed seventy-four different patents in an effort to protect the company from competition for the next *thirty-seven years*.
As Merrill Goozer [writes](https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/55/insulin-should-be-free-yes-free/) in *Democracy Journal*, the structure of the pharmaceutical industry has long been selling patented medication to large patient populations to generate large sales. Less than 3 percent of the people in the United States had diabetes through the 1980s (it is now around 11 percent), so additional changes to the structure of insulin markets were required if serious profits were to be generated. Insulin producers looked to the general drug industry, where academic and industry labs focused on “orphan diseases”—rare diseases affecting smaller patient populations—including those linked to specific genetic mutations that new drugs could target. “Scientists began dividing broad disease categories into various sub-types. . . . Treatment varied accordingly,” Goozner writes. It was elegant science, but it also meant the “patient population for any given drug shrank. That’s why most of the targeted medicines developed over the past two decades have come from small, venture capital-funded biotech firms started by scientists whose original research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), charitable foundations, patient groups, or some combination of those resources.” Big drug companies then buy these biotech firms from venture capitalists at inflated prices, often with drugs already deep in the FDA-approval process. To compensate for the inflated cost, these new owners hike prices for drugs targeting small populations.
It’s in this environment that our insulin oligopoly found its groove. The evergreening of Eli Lilly, Sanofi, and Novo Nordisk’s synthetic insulin has allowed prices for the hormone to soar despite there being no evidence that each new version is any better than the last. They’ve also been successful in rallying opposition to legislation that supports biosimilar generic competition. Biosimilar firms are subject to additional regulatory scrutiny; they must demonstrate that there are no meaningful differences between their products and the original biologic—usually through costly clinical trials. While Europe approved its first “biosimilar” in 2006, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry [stalled progress](https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1553&context=facpubs) on biosimilar regulation until it was sufficiently favorable to incumbent firms, after which a spurt of “[ferocious lobbying](https://www.jstor.org/stable/26716211)” shaped and passed the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act in 2009. It wasn’t until 2015 that the FDA approved the first biosimilar, and only by 2019 did it issue its final guidance on allowing biosimilar interchangeability at pharmacies, which is key to letting them replace brand-name drugs.
The crux, as Goozner points out, is that “biosimilar” is industry speak crafted by pharmaceutical firms to convince the public that biologic drugs like insulin—which are produced using a living organism—can’t be generics. In a [2017 research paper](https://www.southcentre.int/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/RP82_The-International-Debate-on-Generic-Medecines-of-Biological-Origin_EN.pdf) for the South Centre, Germán Velásquez observed, “In any debate on the impossibility of producing ‘identical’ drugs, it should be made clear that what is at stake is not identical products but therapeutic equivalents. What matters to the patient, as we have said, is whether or not a drug can prevent, cure or mitigate the effects of the illness.” We can understand the moves by the U.S. insulin cartel’s war on insulin, then, as a war to remake insulin into a more profitable form, its patients into a more profitable demographic, and its market into a noncompetitive oligopoly.
In the face of expiring patents, insulin manufacturers sought to restructure the market around synthetic insulins and delivery systems that could be perpetually patented. To protect themselves from competitors while replacing revenue, the normal state-backed monopoly system in place for drug patents was expanded: earlier forms of insulin were disappeared, biological generics were recast such that they had a higher regulatory hurdle to clear, and incumbents were free enough from competitors to push out their own “authorized” generics and biosimilars as part of a strategy to generate even more revenue and profit.
### Endless Pricks
This leads us to where we are today. Some of the commonly used forms of insulin have long been exponentially more expensive in the United States than in the rest of the OECD; for years, caravans have taken Americans across the border to Canada, where they can buy insulin for a tenth of its U.S. price. Stateside, insulin prices have consistently seen hikes that are eye-watering for patients and mouth-watering for executives and investors. A vial of Eli Lilly’s rapid-acting Humalog (insulin lispro) cost $21 in 1996 but increased to [$332 by 2018](https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(19)31008-0/fulltext). A 2016 *JAMA* study [found](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2510902) that the price of insulin tripled from 2002 to 2013; since 2013, per-person spending on insulin alone has grown larger than that on all other diabetes drugs combined. The result: a hundred years after insulin’s discovery saved insulin-dependent diabetics from almost certain death, some 1.3 million Americans have been forced to embrace permanent and severe insulin-restrictions—limiting their doses, skipping them entirely, or going so far as to take expired insulin.
> A 2019 Yale study found that one in four insulin-dependent diabetics have resorted to rationing their insulin supplies.
A beacon of hope seemed to emerge in March 2023, however, when each of the Big Three [announced](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/03/01/insulin-prices-eli-lilly/) they would voluntarily cut the prices of various insulin products. Eli Lilly declared the list prices of its most popular insulin products would be decreased by 70 percent, alongside the expansion of a program that caps out-of-pocket costs at $35 for those with private insurance. Novo Nordisk followed suit and said it would cut the wholesale price of multiple insulin products by up to 75 percent. Not to be outdone, Sanofi announced the list price of its most widely prescribed insulin would be cut by 78 percent. These are not insignificant changes. While caps on out-of-pocket expenses offload the cost of drugs onto insurers, who offload it back onto patients through higher premiums, list price cuts prevent that entirely. The motivating—and ultimately limiting—justification for the cuts, however, was not a desire to make insulin more affordable, as the companies insisted. It was a desire to save money.
One major force that pressured the companies to cut prices turned out to be the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program. Under this system, drug companies pay rebates to the federal government and states in exchange for coverage of their drugs under Medicaid. That rebate has two major components. First, there is a base component, which is calculated according to a certain percent of a drug’s “average manufacturer price” (AMP), or the difference between AMP and lowest available price—whichever of those calculations is larger. Then there is an inflationary component that requires drug companies that are raising prices faster than inflation to rebate the difference to Medicaid. That inflationary component means that drugs whose prices rapidly increase could end up paying huge rebates—in fact, more than half of the program’s drug rebate amounts in 2012 were from the inflationary component—but it has been capped at 100 percent of AMP since 2010.
President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed back in 2021, removed those caps at the beginning of 2024. One [estimate](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-14/slashing-insulin-prices-could-make-money-for-lilly-novo-nordisk) suggested that with the removal of the caps, Eli Lilly could’ve been on the hook for an estimated $430 million per year in rebates and Novo Nordisk for some $350 million per year. But with their “voluntary” price cuts, the companies will actually net profits of $85 million and $210 million, respectively. If Eli Lilly hadn’t cut its prices, they would have had to pay Medicaid about [$150 in rebates](https://www.statnews.com/2023/03/06/eli-lilly-insulin-medicaid-rebates) for every vial of Humalog used by a Medicaid beneficiary. In previous years, that number has run even higher: one [study](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2720753) found that the removal of these caps back in 2017 would’ve cost Eli Lilly $1.7 billion in rebates to Medicaid.
In addition to the ARP, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act also included a Medicare cap of $35 per month on insulin costs. Medicare, however, is limited to seniors sixty-five or over, which excludes the twenty-one million Americans (more than half of all diabetics in the country) who are younger. This is staggering when you consider that [a 2021 CDC survey](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10061307/) estimated that 71.1 percent of the adults excluded from the Medicare cap are currently rationing their insulin use because of high costs. Still, as a [2023 *JAMA* study](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2806020) points out, federal policy changes were sufficient to deflate the Big Three’s inflated prices for various insulin products and offer diabetics lifelines for the first time in decades. While impactful, these moves have still left Insulin 4 All activists wanting; of the many kinds of insulin that people with diabetes use, only some are covered by the $35 price cap. Additionally, for Medicare patients who use more than one kind of insulin, as many diabetics do, the $35 cap applies to each insulin, so true costs are likely closer to $70 per month. And this does not include necessary diabetes management technology, like needles, glucometers, test strips, or wearable medical devices—the [costs](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37909353) for which, on average, represent $12,022 of the $19,736 an American diabetic spends on total medical care per year.
### Turn Down for What?
Soon after the IRA Medicare provisions took effect, the Big Three insulin manufacturers began to announce price caps of $35 per month for prefilled insulin pens and vials for people with commercial insurance, savings card programs capping out-of-pocket monthly costs for uninsured people, and [reductions in list prices](https://www.npr.org/2023/03/01/1160339792/eli-lilly-insulin-price) by up to 75 percent for some widely-used insulins. But in practice, a monthly bill of $35 for insulin is still not a reality for many people living with diabetes as implementation of the price-capping system has not been seamless. Ensuring that a pharmacy accepts the savings card can take some self-advocacy on the patient’s end—adding to an already burdensome labyrinth of bureaucratic insurance diabetics must navigate for medical care—and any given pharmacy is not guaranteed to stock their insurance-covered, lower-priced insulins. Impediments remain for people who need particular kinds of insulin, like those that require prior authorization from their insurance company or aren’t covered by the manufacturer’s price caps. And, more importantly, without federal regulation on commercial insurance, Lilly, Novo, and Sanofi’s price caps remain voluntary and could be lifted at any time. Not to mention that with GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic usurping insulin in demand and lucrativeness, it seems likely pharma’s attention will continue to favor non-insulin diabetes medications. Indeed, Novo Nordisk has already announced that Levemir, an insulin analogue it promised would see steep price cuts last year, [will be discontinued instead](https://prospect.org/health/2024-03-14-novo-nordisk-discontinues-insulin-levemir/)—a move likely motivated by the growing number of biological generics to the drug.
> While impactful, these moves have still left Insulin 4 All activists wanting
In the absence of reliably affordable access to insulin, many diabetes advocates remain cautiously optimistic about more rigorous governmental interventions, like procurement, wherein the state purchases lower-priced pharmaceuticals en masse to distribute to people, or public production, wherein the state manufactures (solitarily or in partnership with other entities) its own prescription medications. Some public initiatives, in relying on market solutions as stopgap measures, may fall short of advocacy demands. But publicly produced and procured pharma projects have worked in the United States before, and there is reason to believe that they could work for insulin. The recent [biosimilar insulin project](https://www.npr.org/2023/03/19/1164572757/california-contract-cheap-insulin-calrx#:~:text=Hourly%20News-,California%20enters%20a%20contract%20to%20make%20its%20own%20affordable%20insulin,Gavin%20Newsom%20said.) led by the state of California, in collaboration with nonprofit drugmaker Civica Rx, represents a potential alternative to the monopolization and oligopolies of privately-made insulin. And in the world of procurement, a recent consortium of state health and human services agencies across Connecticut, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington launched ArrayRx, a public PBM which collectively negotiated a [discount pricing system](https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/free-prescription-drug-discount-card-launches-monday/3114509/) whereby agreed-upon savings are actually passed onto the people buying the medications, not pocketed by middlemen.
Diabetic life has long been constrained and managed by a menagerie of bad-faith actors, from the paternalism undergirding the staunch starvation diets of early diabetes treatment to the pharmaco-medical industry’s stronghold on diabetes medication and technology today. And controlling the access and affordability of insulin has proven to be an, if not the most, integral piece of this regime. But the story of insulin is also one of reclamation: of agency, health education, and autonomy. As Bradwel, the medical historian, puts it, “insulin drags healthcare out of the clinic.”
Despite their irrevocable reliance on the pharmaceutical industry when presented with a diagnosis of insulin-dependent diabetes, the diabetic patient maintains a unique agency in that they are responsible for the lion’s share of their treatment decisions. It has been estimated that type 1 diabetics make [about 180 health-related decisions](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6286423/) per day: self-monitoring blood glucose using continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) and/or glucometers; calculating and administering long-acting insulin to re-up their baselines and short-acting insulin before food and as needed to correct for high blood sugars throughout the day; treating hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar, caused by too much insulin in the blood; and engaging in the mental calculus of anticipating higher or lower insulin sensitivity due to temperature, weather, menstrual phases, sickness, stress, altitude, exercise, sleep, medications, and the other forty-plus known variables that impact blood glucose. Many of these decisions are necessarily made outside the supervision and recommendation of a health care provider.
From volunteering to resource- and supply-sharing, to organizing at the state and federal levels for [#insulin4all](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/insulin-prices-diabetes-activists-hashtags/), diabetes activists and our allies keep each other alive in real-time. They embody the kind of interdependence described by disability justice arts project [Sins Invalid](https://www.sinsinvalid.org/) as the ways in which “we attempt to meet each other’s needs as we build toward liberation, without always reaching for state solutions which can readily extend its control further over our lives.” Until there is a federal cap on insulin pricing protected by the government, grassroots pharma access projects such as the volunteer-run collective [Mutual Aid Diabetes](https://mutualaiddiabetes.com/), and patient advocacy groups like [T1International](https://www.t1international.com/)—which refuses to accept industry funding as they organize for “access to insulin, diabetes supplies, and medical care” for all—will continue to fill the abundant gaps in the health care and regulatory landscapes.
But just as insulin unmistakably, and almost miraculously, transforms a sick body, it has the potential to reconstitute our political economic realities. Medical anthropologist Samantha Gottlieb gestures towards the “paradigm-shifting” potential of the “fantastical empowered” insulin-dependent patient. Unlike the engaged, “compliant” patient of the regulatory-clinical-commercial public health imaginary, the insulin-dependent patient is an “[actor-creator and disrupter](https://blog.castac.org/2019/04/the-fda-patient-empowerment-and-the-type-1-diabetes-communities-in-the-era-of-digital-health/).” Diabetics’ hands remain full as they traipse through multibillion-dollar mazes just to make it through each day, but, as diabetes activists on X have expressed so cogently, #WeAreNotWaiting. When insulin pumps and CGMs were faulty and incompatible, hackers developed a do-it-yourself device looping system for more personalized and precise blood glucose management; when pharma announced insulin shortages, Mutual Aid Diabetes and other groups have worked to give excess supplies to diabetics in need; when people died from rationing their insulin, protestors have demanded justice and gotten life-saving, [emergency access provisions](https://apnews.com/article/9f1dddc363714f632901ead1792683fb) written into state legislation. While the machinations of the pharmaceutical empire and its profiteering bedfellows continue to privilege profits over people, we continue to keep ourselves cared for and alive; we continue to demand guaranteed, protected, and dignified access pathways for insulin and all other drugs and medical technologies people need—not just to survive but to live full and thriving lives.
# The Local Girls Who Inspired the Hollywood Classic “Mean Girls”
## For decades, Jessica Jackson had a secret: Her high-school social life was an inspiration for the hit film “Mean Girls.”
**Back in December,** at a wine-drenched Christmas party for a moms group in suburban Maryland, Jessica Jackson got vulnerable. It was deep in the night, and the women were discussing their difficulties—toddlers, divorces—when someone quoted a line from*Mean Girls.*It shook loose a secret. “Do you want to hear something that sounds like a lie but it’s really true?” Jackson told the room. “I’m the real Regina George.”As proof, she pulled up an article on her phone, a 2002*New York Times Magazine*cover story entitled [“Girls Just Want to Be Mean.”](https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/24/magazine/girls-just-want-to-be-mean.html) At that time, Jackson was a 16-year-old junior at Northwest High School in Germantown. She loved*Dawson’s Creek*and Britney Spears, and when she spoke to the reporter for the story, she thought it was about some volunteer work she’d been doing with an organization that sought to build better relationships between girls. But in the course of their interviews, Jackson said some bonkers things about her social world, which wound up quite prominently in the*Times.*
An article about teens and “relational aggression” led Tina Fey to buy the rights toRosalindWiseman’s book.
At the Christmas party, Jackson read some of these quotes aloud. The most eye-popping pertained to the rules of her high-school clique: “You cannot wear jeans any day but Friday, and you cannot wear a ponytail or sneakers more than once a week. Monday is fancy day—like black pants or maybe you bust out with a skirt.” For several paragraphs this goes on, teenage Jessica laying out her friend group’s dizzying standards for each other. “The rules apply to all of us,” she clarified. When one friend wore jeans on a Monday, “she wasn’t allowed to sit with us at lunch.”
Among the moms at the party, nobody needed an explanation. Jackson’s friends were the Plastics, the catty clique of teen demigoddesses who run the school in*Mean Girls,*ensconced at their cafeteria table, reciting the ludicrous rules of their group. What Jackson said at 16 was rewritten—almost verbatim—into one of the megahit film’s most quoted moments. This was “On Wednesdays, we wear pink.”
Today, Jackson is 38, an HR director at a software company in Rockville. She called me recently while she was leaving work, en route to pick up her kids from school. I asked if she recognized her quotes when she first saw*Mean Girls,*back when it came out in 2004. “Of course I did,” she replied. “Tons of them—‘We wear pink,’‘You can’t sit with us’—I was tickled. I wasn’t mad.”
Jessica Jackson enjoys the film—despite her teen words being voiced by the Plastics. Photograph by Magdalena Papaioannou.
“It would have been cool to tell everyone in the world that I was part of this amazing cult-classic movie,” Jackson explained. But until that Christmas party, she says she’d never brought it up with anyone—not in her adult life. To explain her connection to the movie, she would have had to dredge up the article, which “does not paint me in a very good light. I say the most awful things. I’m the example of the mean girl, I’m the Queen Bee. I’m not even the antihero—I’m the villain.”
Jackson is bubbly and warm, a bleached-blonde suburban mother of two who loves cats and Disney princesses. She’s the kind of person who hosts an International Women’s Day event at her company each year; at one of them, she gave a presentation about how “women can either be a sex symbol, a mother, or a bitch,” then explained how each archetype fits into the corporate world. Aside from her love of pink and fondness for outrageous pronouncements, Jackson is not a person who resembles the Plastics—but somehow she’s partly the model for them. To understand how, you have to rewind a bit, to about a decade before she decreed Mondays jeans-free.
---
**A good place** to start is the rumor. The way I heard it,*Mean Girls*was based on a cohort of exceptionally cruel private-school girls who emerged in [DC in the ’90s](https://www.washingtonian.com/2021/12/16/the-ultimate-guide-to-90s-washington/), girls who were so mean that administrators hired an expert to tame them. For the movie’s 20th anniversary, I figured I’d find some of them—the bullies and the victims—and ask what manner of unholy prep-school viciousness could have possibly inspired such a film.
But here’s the thing: When I started making calls, the rumor fell apart. Yes, at one point that particular school engaged the services of an expert to sort out its girls—but so did dozens of others all over the DC area. The expert was [Rosalind Wiseman](https://rosalindwiseman.com/), who wrote a book about the cruelty of adolescent girls, which Tina Fey went on to adapt. So even though the prep-school thing was false, I figured there must be women in this region whom Wiseman had written about, whose experiences had therefore made it into the film. Hoping to find them, I called her.
According to Wiseman, the*Mean Girls*origin story begins in the 1990s, when she graduated from college and moved back home to DC. Her hope was to work with refugees, but while job-hunting, she invented a side hustle: teaching prep-school girls martial arts. This began at Georgetown Day School, then expanded to Sidwell Friends and to Wiseman’s alma mater, Maret. Soon, her work ballooned to schools all over the area, plus a home for pregnant teens.
At the time, Wiseman was 22 or 23—not much older than her pupils. She listened as they talked about their lives, and it struck her how often they discussed other girls: how important and complicated their friendships were, and how painful and elaborate their cruelties. “I felt it was important to go to the foundations of why girls were doing the things they were doing in their relationships with each other,” she told me. “I wanted to give them the skills to self-reflect as they were operating in the world.”
So Wiseman pivoted, asking schools if she could try out a different kind of workshop—not self-defense but relationship-building, the kind of thing we would now call “social-emotional learning.” Administrators said yes. Within a few years, Wiseman was a fixture at a broad mix of the region’s public, private, parochial, and alternative schools, teaching girls—well, not to be nice, exactly, but to disagree respectfully, to not abuse one another’s trust, to have friendships based in dignity, and to navigate the barbarism of adolescent life.
If you remember the end of*Mean Girls,*then you know approximately what these workshops were like: The junior girls report to the school’s gymnasium, where Ms. Norbury, the put-upon math teacher played by Fey, stands before the bleachers and teaches them to be less cruel. The girls raise their hands if they’ve ever said something mean behind a friend’s back, then they handwrite apologies and read them aloud to their peers. For years, Wiseman led those exercises, almost exactly as they appear in the film.
At that time, Wiseman was working with what she called her “Girls Advisory Board.” It was akin to a focus group: about a dozen teens from all over the region, who would regularly give feedback on her curriculum. “That group of girls were the people who said, ‘Tuesdays we wear that, Wednesdays we do this,’ ” she explained. They had a huge influence on her work, and aspects of their lives appeared in the movie. I asked if she’d give me some names.
---
**Within 16 minutes** of calling me, Zeina Davis was crying. She was remembering the late ’90s, before she joined the Girls Advisory Board, when she attended a Catholic middle school in Rockville. Her peers would torment her for her weight and curly hair, for living in a condo, and for being of Arab descent. “There was a mean-girl virus that was rampant in that school,” she said. “They used to put Wite-Out on their desks, scrape it, and then sprinkle it in my hair to make it look like I had lice.”
Mean Girls made Zeina Davis feel “seen.” But she worries that viewers “still want to be Regina George.” Photograph by Magdalena Papaioannou.
In her lowest moment, Davis fell victim to a particularly cruel ruse: A friend called one of their classmates and asked her opinion of Davis, who was secretly lurking on the phone. The result was devastating. “ ‘Oh, I just want to punch her in the face and she’s so fat and she annoys me so badly,’ ” Davis recalled hearing. Recounting it, she paused briefly to sob. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m 38 years old and it still hurts.”
Middle school was the saddest and most afraid Davis has ever felt. Then, at the beginning of ninth grade, she joined the Girls Advisory Board. Its mission was, in part, to end bullying between girls. Joining GAB felt like a way to solve a problem that had otherwise made her feel helpless—a reclamation of power after a few dreadful years.
Every other Tuesday in the early 2000s, a flock of girls would ride the Metro into DC and disembark at Mount Vernon Square, heading for a rowhouse nearby. They’d pop up the tall cement steps into what was once a dining room, where they’d sit around a huge wooden table and discuss their lives. Members of GAB would help solve each other’s problems, plan events to uplift local girls, and advise Wiseman on her work. “All of us were sharing our innermost fears, our hardest stories, our most embarrassing moments,” Davis said. “We were open with our pain.”
> “I would say hi to people from my classes, then eat a Pop-Tart in the bathroom.”
During those years, Wiseman was writing a book about the social landscape of adolescent girls, which became her bestselling parenting guide,*[Queen Bees and Wannabes](https://rosalindwiseman.com/queen-bees-and-wannabes).*For research, she interviewed Davis extensively, and some of her stories made it in. The three-way-calling attack was one of them, and another was when Davis started at a new school in tenth grade and ate her lunch in a restroom stall. “I didn’t want to look like I didn’t have a friend group,” she explained, “so I would kind of walk in circles and say hi to people from my classes, then I would, like, eat a Pop-Tart in the bathroom.”
When*Queen Bees*came out in 2002, Wiseman was in her early thirties, already a luminary in the burgeoning field of quelling cruelty between girls. For that, she became the central figure of that*New York Times Magazine*story, “Girls Just Want to Be Mean.” The story hit newsstands with a sickly pink cover, the phrase “Mean Girls” splashed across in huge text. Among the story’s readers was Fey, then a head writer at*Saturday Night Live,*who bought the film rights to*Queen Bees.*
---
**In January, at a cafe** in upper Northwest, Margaret Talbot admitted that she’d never seen*Mean Girls.*“I don’t own the phrase ‘mean girls,’ I didn’t even invent it,” she said. “But through this article”—the*Times Magazine*story she wrote—“it did enter the culture, and I feel mixed about it.” It troubles her to hear women called “mean girls,” often to trivialize or diminish them. Still, she thinks the term caught on because it “gets at something real.”
In the early 2000s, Talbot learned of a cutting-edge psychological theory: that adolescent girls are not, in fact, nicer than boys. Instead of socking each other on the playground, they bully through “[relational aggression](https://rosalindwiseman.com/queen-bees-and-wannabes)”—exclusionary cliques, caustic gossip, and arcane social cruelties. “I’d had some personal experience with the ingenuity of girls when they wanted to be dominant in a social setting,” Talbot said, so the theory resonated. It was “a useful antidote to a tendency to idealize girls, to imagine within feminism that women always had each other’s backs.”
To learn about relational aggression, Talbot began following Wiseman around DC, shadowing her at the workshops she was running, then interviewing her while they drove between schools. “She was super-vivid in her descriptions,” Talbot recalled, “and almost anthropological in the way she would lay out these different types of characters and maneuvers.” From Wiseman, Talbot learned about “fruit-cup girls,” who feign helplessness for male attention, and “bankers,” who hoard secrets to deploy as social currency. Her article mentions the diabolical tactic of leaving a message on a girl’s family voicemail asking if she’s gotten her pregnancy test back, knowing that her parents might hear.
“But it’s one thing for an adult like Rosalind to be imposing these categories and seeing these phenomena from the outside,” Talbot said. For her story, she needed “informants from the inside,” some in-the-flesh catty teens to dissect the mechanics of their cliques. That’s how she found Jessica Jackson; Wiseman referred her to a girl she knew whose friend group “was governed by actual, enumerated rules.” In the story, Jackson—then going by her maiden name, Travis—is described as an “amalgam of old-style Queen Bee-ism and new-style girl’s empowerment” whose behavior is in need of reform.
Top left to right: Rosalind Wiseman and Jessica Jackson. Bottom left to right: Zeina Davis and Tanzi Crayton.
But here’s the thing: Despite her cliquish behavior, Jackson was a member of GAB, a teen who grounded her identity in supporting other girls. “I grew up with a single mom who was a bra-burning hippie feminist turned corporate tech powerhouse,” she explained. Back in the ’90s, she would often hear her mom on the phone with female coworkers, dispensing career advice and telling them what behavior not to accept. “I listened to her empower other women, and I was so in awe of her. I just wanted to do that, too.”
In GAB, Jackson felt like she was “changing the world singlehandedly,” and she was excited for the*Times*to highlight that work; she’d told friends and family to expect the article. But when she read it, she was stunned. On the page, she found an array of barbed remarks about other girls, ones that weren’t off the record but that she’d said without considering they might be relevant enough to print. The story, she felt, presented her as the opposite of everything she stood for. It was humiliating. “I’m the example of the mean girl,” she said. “The whole article listed me as the opposition to \[Wiseman’s\] movement.”
Jackson’s displeasure makes sense; there’s a sting to some of the story’s lines. But Talbot doesn’t remember her as villainous—actually, she said, she came to admire the girl’s “flair and insouciance,” the “ingenuity” of her cliquish behavior. Their conversations made Talbot reconsider the kinds of girls who intimidated her in high school, whose antics are “kind of delightful as long as they’re not actually cruel,” which she didn’t think Jackson’s were. I think the story communicates that. On the page, teenage Jessica strikes me as clever and rollicking, her cattiness a mark of irrepressible verve.
---
**When I finally met Jackson,** at her snug yellow house in the suburbs, she made me a “meantini.” This was a cocktail of her invention: an admixture of ginger ale and vodka, plus splashes of fruit punch and cranberry to achieve the desired level of pink. As she stirred, she seemed breathy and scattered, which she eventually addressed outright: “I am so nervous,” she said. “I’m going to have a drink and then I’ll feel better. Dude, if I cry, I hope the earth swallows me whole.”
The issue was talking to a reporter. The last time she’d done so—besides a previous phone call with me—was for the*Times*story, which is still a source of shame. But on the phone, she’d thought I seemed “normal,” so she invited me over to set the record straight. She’s never been a mean girl, she insisted—though she’s certainly an “undercover celebrity.” That’s due to her odd connection to Regina George,*Mean Girls’*glamorous and tyrannical Queen Bee.
For emotional support, Jackson had invited her friend Tanzi Crayton, whom she met as a teenager in GAB. On a small balcony, the three of us drank meantinis from etched-crystal flutes. We bantered for a while—about our kids, the baffling return of Y2K fashion—before the conversation drifted to*Mean Girls.*Crayton said, “When I’ve watched it over the years, I’m like, ‘That’s Jessica right there—like, that’s a direct quote. You need to send my girl a check.’ ”
At a 2004 viewing in Silver Spring, Jackson and others saw bits of their lives onscreen. Photograph by Paramount/courtesy of Everett Collection.
Once Jackson read the*Times*story, she never returned to GAB, so she wasn’t there in the spring of 2004 when Paramount rented the AFI theater in Silver Spring for an advance screening of*Mean Girls.*Wiseman, the guest of honor, brought friends, family, and an assortment of GAB alums, Crayton among them. “I just remember being so starstruck,” Crayton said. “When Ros’s name came up in the credits, we were all cheering. And I saw little traces of us that were incorporated in some of the lines and the scenes.”
I called a few GAB alums to ask about this—about how it felt when they first saw the movie and encountered various fragments of their lives, like when Lindsay Lohan’s character eats lunch alone in a bathroom stall and falls victim to a three-way-calling attack. “It felt a little like, wow, these are my stories. Oh my God, that’s my childhood,” Zeina Davis said. “I definitely feel like I have a hidden part in*Mean Girls.*”
But her connection to the movie is bittersweet, particularly due to the three-way call, which is essentially a humorous aside. “It certainly made me feel seen,” she said, “but to have it played out as kind of a laughable moment—I’m like, it was real pain. They didn’t show how horrible it made me feel afterward, crying and begging my parents not to make me go back to school.” She worried that the film had glamorized something ugly. “You do not walk away from that movie and think, ‘We’ve got to change society.’ I do feel like you walk away and you still want to be Regina George.”
Crayton initially loved the movie—she bought T-shirts and posters for her room—but over the years, she’s reassessed. “I don’t think that people really got the true nature of what*Queen Bees and Wannabes*was about,” she said. “They touched a little bit on that in the end—the girls mended those fences and were able to coexist without being so nasty to one another. But everybody always quotes the crazy stuff, the bad stuff, the catty stuff. Nobody ever quotes any of the good things.” She calls it a “complicated movie,” one that’s genuinely funny but also perpetuates the “myth that young women can’t get along.”
Notably, Jackson’s relationship to*Mean Girls*is less fraught. “It wasn’t a public statement about me, it didn’t say my name,” she said. Hearing her teenage remarks in the mouths of various Plastics felt “so surreal,” but it “wasn’t obvious to anyone else the way it was obvious to me.” This freed her to love the movie: She thinks it’s hilarious and likes the positive ending.
> “Everybody quotes the crazy stuff, the bad stuff, the catty stuff. Nobody ever quotes any of the good things.”
As for Wiseman, she consulted on*Mean Girls,*but she first watched it in full at the AFI screening. “My experience of that was this kind of like—horror is a strong word, but it was like seeing a picture of yourself that you’re not really sure you want everybody to see.” She found the characters “so real” and “scary” and their meanness true to life. But after the movie came out, she learned that girls were dressing up as the Plastics for Halloween. “And it’s like, damn, girls subvert everything I do, all the time. I try so hard, but the opponent is formidable.”
---
**After a few pitchers** of meantinis, dusk fell, a string of lights blinked on, and the chill pushed us inside. Crayton headed home, but there was still something I wanted to understand—namely, the provenance of the rules. In the film, they’re authoritarian and exclusionary, a way to assert dominance over friends and create distance from social inferiors. Wearing pink on Wednesdays is not nice.
Days before, on the phone, I’d asked Jackson directly if she was a Queen Bee. “So, let’s do some layers here,” was her bristling reply. “When you’re confident and bold, are you a bitch? Are you Miranda Priestly? Do I only get to be either Taylor Swift from ‘Teardrops on My Guitar’ or Regina George?” For what it’s worth, Jackson has a “wild affinity” for Regina, for her fashion and brazen self-regard. Still, she said, the character is “not a representation of myself in high school, even though her quotes and my quotes are the same.”
Skeptical, I asked to see Jackson’s yearbooks, so she popped down to the basement and emerged with a stack. Opening one, she pointed to a picture of a jaguar mascot. “You see that? That’s me in there.” Before I could follow up, she’d moved on. “These were easily the most popular girls,” she said, her finger atop some identical blonde twins who apparently later became Ravens cheerleaders. Then she noticed another girl. “Anybody’s Regina George would be her, because everyone hated her but wanted her to like them.”
Remembering high school, Jackson was ebullient. Beside her couch, she performed a cheer that she’d invented as a freshman for a senior she had a crush on, a football player whose various castoffs she’d kept as totems: a pencil he bit, the program he fanned himself with at graduation. It didn’t feel like I was watching a dictator.
But if Jackson wasn’t mean, then why the rules? When I asked, she seemed bewildered. “It wasn’t a big-enough part of our lives or friendships that I remember, like, how we came up with them. Let’s say they were, at best, a phase.” She added that she and her friends “wanted to wear skirts on the same day. We made up all kinds of random songs and fake little clubby things. We weren’t the mean girls by any means.”
But as I puzzled, two of Jackson’s comments rattled around my brain. “Teenage friendships are a lot like teenage love,” she’d said. “Her laundry ends up in your clothes, you’re in each other’s closets and cars and dinner tables and bedrooms.” That thought seemed related to this one, an offhand remark about the actor Sydney Sweeney: “I just want to be her best friend really hard. We would braid each other’s hair and I would tell her all my secrets. I want us to smell the same. I want our periods to sync up.”
To Jackson, friendship seemed to mean sameness and melding—mingled laundry, matched perfume. So I asked if she thought the rules were about formalizing intimacy. “Wow, what a poignant point,” she replied. “Like, you killed it.”
“I’m also going to throw this out there,” she added. “There is a Disney movie called*Wish Upon a Star*starring Katherine Heigl, from the ’90s. I loved that movie. I watched it over and over again.” The movie features a Plastics-like popular clique, “and I remember those gals having specific rules about, like, shaving your legs every day, and this or that. I never forgot that.” Then she brought up the Pink Ladies from*Grease.*(“What made them friends? They had the jackets, it was a thing.”) “So maybe it has something to do with that,” she mused.
Of course, I thought—it’s classic high school, emulating movies to make life feel cinematic. But Jackson had slightly misremembered the plots. She described those two cliques as essentially benevolent, when both are a little mean. In*Wish Upon a Star,*the happy ending involves Heigl’s friends abandoning their rules, and in*Grease,*the Pink Ladies mock Sandy at a party—Sandy, who never gets to wear the pink jacket and belong. The misreading, though, is telling; it’s why the women of GAB are vexed about*Mean Girls,*that even though the ending is harmonious, it’s possible no one remembers it right.
About a week after our meantinis, Jackson called me on the phone. While we talked, she texted me two things she’d just encountered online. One was a social-media post from NARAL Pro-Choice America that said, “On Wednesdays, we fight for abortion rights.” The second was a screenshot of a [pink crew-neck sweatshirt](https://thespark.company/en-us/products/on-wednesdays-we-smash-the-patriarchy-feminist-sweatshirt) with “On Wednesdays, we smash the patriarchy” across the chest. She suggested we both buy it so we’d match.
I laughed at this, baffled by the life cycle of culture—how Jackson’s rules, a form of ritualized closeness filtered through film tropes, were themselves made into a villainous and exclusionary teen-movie speech, which then became iconic enough to meme, and now has been appropriated by corporate girlbossery into political sloganeering and Instagram products, which Jackson—the original Plastic—scrolls past on her phone. But it meant something to her, this reframing: her high-school quotes reclaimed from meanness, now a call to action, asking women to support one another.
“This is what I love,” she told me. “ ‘On Wednesdays, we wear pink’ is not a fuck-you to those who don’t wear pink, but it’s power, almost—it’s like,*we’re*the shit. On Wednesdays,*we*wear pink,*we*smash the patriarchy. It’s everything.” I think she finally felt understood.
**Back in December,** at a wine-drenched Christmas party for a moms group in suburban Maryland, Jessica Jackson got vulnerable. It was deep in the night, and the women were discussing their difficulties—toddlers, divorces—when someone quoted a line from*Mean Girls.*It shook loose a secret. “Do you want to hear something that sounds like a lie but it’s really true?” Jackson told the room. “I’m the real Regina George.”
An article about teens and “relational aggression” led Tina Fey to buy the rights toRosalindWiseman’s book.
As proof, she pulled up an article on her phone, a 2002*New York Times Magazine*cover story entitled [“Girls Just Want to Be Mean.”](https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/24/magazine/girls-just-want-to-be-mean.html) At that time, Jackson was a 16-year-old junior at Northwest High School in Germantown. She loved*Dawson’s Creek*and Britney Spears, and when she spoke to the reporter for the story, she thought it was about some volunteer work she’d been doing with an organization that sought to build better relationships between girls. But in the course of their interviews, Jackson said some bonkers things about her social world, which wound up quite prominently in the*Times.*
At the Christmas party, Jackson read some of these quotes aloud. The most eye-popping pertained to the rules of her high-school clique: “You cannot wear jeans any day but Friday, and you cannot wear a ponytail or sneakers more than once a week. Monday is fancy day—like black pants or maybe you bust out with a skirt.” For several paragraphs this goes on, teenage Jessica laying out her friend group’s dizzying standards for each other. “The rules apply to all of us,” she clarified. When one friend wore jeans on a Monday, “she wasn’t allowed to sit with us at lunch.”
Among the moms at the party, nobody needed an explanation. Jackson’s friends were the Plastics, the catty clique of teen demigoddesses who run the school in*Mean Girls,*ensconced at their cafeteria table, reciting the ludicrous rules of their group. What Jackson said at 16 was rewritten—almost verbatim—into one of the megahit film’s most quoted moments. This was “On Wednesdays, we wear pink.”
Today, Jackson is 38, an HR director at a software company in Rockville. She called me recently while she was leaving work, en route to pick up her kids from school. I asked if she recognized her quotes when she first saw*Mean Girls,*back when it came out in 2004. “Of course I did,” she replied. “Tons of them—‘We wear pink,’‘You can’t sit with us’—I was tickled. I wasn’t mad.”
Jessica Jackson enjoys the film—despite her teen words being voiced by the Plastics. Photograph by Magdalena Papaioannou.
“It would have been cool to tell everyone in the world that I was part of this amazing cult-classic movie,” Jackson explained. But until that Christmas party, she says she’d never brought it up with anyone—not in her adult life. To explain her connection to the movie, she would have had to dredge up the article, which “does not paint me in a very good light. I say the most awful things. I’m the example of the mean girl, I’m the Queen Bee. I’m not even the antihero—I’m the villain.”
Jackson is bubbly and warm, a bleached-blonde suburban mother of two who loves cats and Disney princesses. She’s the kind of person who hosts an International Women’s Day event at her company each year; at one of them, she gave a presentation about how “women can either be a sex symbol, a mother, or a bitch,” then explained how each archetype fits into the corporate world. Aside from her love of pink and fondness for outrageous pronouncements, Jackson is not a person who resembles the Plastics—but somehow she’s partly the model for them. To understand how, you have to rewind a bit, to about a decade before she decreed Mondays jeans-free.
---
**A good place** to start is the rumor. The way I heard it,*Mean Girls*was based on a cohort of exceptionally cruel private-school girls who emerged in [DC in the ’90s](https://www.washingtonian.com/2021/12/16/the-ultimate-guide-to-90s-washington/), girls who were so mean that administrators hired an expert to tame them. For the movie’s 20th anniversary, I figured I’d find some of them—the bullies and the victims—and ask what manner of unholy prep-school viciousness could have possibly inspired such a film.
But here’s the thing: When I started making calls, the rumor fell apart. Yes, at one point that particular school engaged the services of an expert to sort out its girls—but so did dozens of others all over the DC area. The expert was [Rosalind Wiseman](https://rosalindwiseman.com/), who wrote a book about the cruelty of adolescent girls, which Tina Fey went on to adapt. So even though the prep-school thing was false, I figured there must be women in this region whom Wiseman had written about, whose experiences had therefore made it into the film. Hoping to find them, I called her.
According to Wiseman, the*Mean Girls*origin story begins in the 1990s, when she graduated from college and moved back home to DC. Her hope was to work with refugees, but while job-hunting, she invented a side hustle: teaching prep-school girls martial arts. This began at Georgetown Day School, then expanded to Sidwell Friends and to Wiseman’s alma mater, Maret. Soon, her work ballooned to schools all over the area, plus a home for pregnant teens.
At the time, Wiseman was 22 or 23—not much older than her pupils. She listened as they talked about their lives, and it struck her how often they discussed other girls: how important and complicated their friendships were, and how painful and elaborate their cruelties. “I felt it was important to go to the foundations of why girls were doing the things they were doing in their relationships with each other,” she told me. “I wanted to give them the skills to self-reflect as they were operating in the world.”
So Wiseman pivoted, asking schools if she could try out a different kind of workshop—not self-defense but relationship-building, the kind of thing we would now call “social-emotional learning.” Administrators said yes. Within a few years, Wiseman was a fixture at a broad mix of the region’s public, private, parochial, and alternative schools, teaching girls—well, not to be nice, exactly, but to disagree respectfully, to not abuse one another’s trust, to have friendships based in dignity, and to navigate the barbarism of adolescent life.
If you remember the end of*Mean Girls,*then you know approximately what these workshops were like: The junior girls report to the school’s gymnasium, where Ms. Norbury, the put-upon math teacher played by Fey, stands before the bleachers and teaches them to be less cruel. The girls raise their hands if they’ve ever said something mean behind a friend’s back, then they handwrite apologies and read them aloud to their peers. For years, Wiseman led those exercises, almost exactly as they appear in the film.
At that time, Wiseman was working with what she called her “Girls Advisory Board.” It was akin to a focus group: about a dozen teens from all over the region, who would regularly give feedback on her curriculum. “That group of girls were the people who said, ‘Tuesdays we wear that, Wednesdays we do this,’ ” she explained. They had a huge influence on her work, and aspects of their lives appeared in the movie. I asked if she’d give me some names.
---
**Within 16 minutes** of calling me, Zeina Davis was crying. She was remembering the late ’90s, before she joined the Girls Advisory Board, when she attended a Catholic middle school in Rockville. Her peers would torment her for her weight and curly hair, for living in a condo, and for being of Arab descent. “There was a mean-girl virus that was rampant in that school,” she said. “They used to put Wite-Out on their desks, scrape it, and then sprinkle it in my hair to make it look like I had lice.”
Mean Girls made Zeina Davis feel “seen.” But she worries that viewers “still want to be Regina George.” Photograph by Magdalena Papaioannou.
In her lowest moment, Davis fell victim to a particularly cruel ruse: A friend called one of their classmates and asked her opinion of Davis, who was secretly lurking on the phone. The result was devastating. “ ‘Oh, I just want to punch her in the face and she’s so fat and she annoys me so badly,’ ” Davis recalled hearing. Recounting it, she paused briefly to sob. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m 38 years old and it still hurts.”
Middle school was the saddest and most afraid Davis has ever felt. Then, at the beginning of ninth grade, she joined the Girls Advisory Board. Its mission was, in part, to end bullying between girls. Joining GAB felt like a way to solve a problem that had otherwise made her feel helpless—a reclamation of power after a few dreadful years.
Every other Tuesday in the early 2000s, a flock of girls would ride the Metro into DC and disembark at Mount Vernon Square, heading for a rowhouse nearby. They’d pop up the tall cement steps into what was once a dining room, where they’d sit around a huge wooden table and discuss their lives. Members of GAB would help solve each other’s problems, plan events to uplift local girls, and advise Wiseman on her work. “All of us were sharing our innermost fears, our hardest stories, our most embarrassing moments,” Davis said. “We were open with our pain.”
> “I would say hi to people from my classes, then eat a Pop-Tart in the bathroom.”
During those years, Wiseman was writing a book about the social landscape of adolescent girls, which became her bestselling parenting guide,*[Queen Bees and Wannabes](https://rosalindwiseman.com/queen-bees-and-wannabes).*For research, she interviewed Davis extensively, and some of her stories made it in. The three-way-calling attack was one of them, and another was when Davis started at a new school in tenth grade and ate her lunch in a restroom stall. “I didn’t want to look like I didn’t have a friend group,” she explained, “so I would kind of walk in circles and say hi to people from my classes, then I would, like, eat a Pop-Tart in the bathroom.”
When*Queen Bees*came out in 2002, Wiseman was in her early thirties, already a luminary in the burgeoning field of quelling cruelty between girls. For that, she became the central figure of that*New York Times Magazine*story, “Girls Just Want to Be Mean.” The story hit newsstands with a sickly pink cover, the phrase “Mean Girls” splashed across in huge text. Among the story’s readers was Fey, then a head writer at*Saturday Night Live,*who bought the film rights to*Queen Bees.*
---
**In January, at a cafe** in upper Northwest, Margaret Talbot admitted that she’d never seen*Mean Girls.*“I don’t own the phrase ‘mean girls,’ I didn’t even invent it,” she said. “But through this article”—the*Times Magazine*story she wrote—“it did enter the culture, and I feel mixed about it.” It troubles her to hear women called “mean girls,” often to trivialize or diminish them. Still, she thinks the term caught on because it “gets at something real.”
In the early 2000s, Talbot learned of a cutting-edge psychological theory: that adolescent girls are not, in fact, nicer than boys. Instead of socking each other on the playground, they bully through “[relational aggression](https://rosalindwiseman.com/queen-bees-and-wannabes)”—exclusionary cliques, caustic gossip, and arcane social cruelties. “I’d had some personal experience with the ingenuity of girls when they wanted to be dominant in a social setting,” Talbot said, so the theory resonated. It was “a useful antidote to a tendency to idealize girls, to imagine within feminism that women always had each other’s backs.”
To learn about relational aggression, Talbot began following Wiseman around DC, shadowing her at the workshops she was running, then interviewing her while they drove between schools. “She was super-vivid in her descriptions,” Talbot recalled, “and almost anthropological in the way she would lay out these different types of characters and maneuvers.” From Wiseman, Talbot learned about “fruit-cup girls,” who feign helplessness for male attention, and “bankers,” who hoard secrets to deploy as social currency. Her article mentions the diabolical tactic of leaving a message on a girl’s family voicemail asking if she’s gotten her pregnancy test back, knowing that her parents might hear.
“But it’s one thing for an adult like Rosalind to be imposing these categories and seeing these phenomena from the outside,” Talbot said. For her story, she needed “informants from the inside,” some in-the-flesh catty teens to dissect the mechanics of their cliques. That’s how she found Jessica Jackson; Wiseman referred her to a girl she knew whose friend group “was governed by actual, enumerated rules.” In the story, Jackson—then going by her maiden name, Travis—is described as an “amalgam of old-style Queen Bee-ism and new-style girl’s empowerment” whose behavior is in need of reform.
But here’s the thing: Despite her cliquish behavior, Jackson was a member of GAB, a teen who grounded her identity in supporting other girls. “I grew up with a single mom who was a bra-burning hippie feminist turned corporate tech powerhouse,” she explained. Back in the ’90s, she would often hear her mom on the phone with female coworkers, dispensing career advice and telling them what behavior not to accept. “I listened to her empower other women, and I was so in awe of her. I just wanted to do that, too.”
In GAB, Jackson felt like she was “changing the world singlehandedly,” and she was excited for the*Times*to highlight that work; she’d told friends and family to expect the article. But when she read it, she was stunned. On the page, she found an array of barbed remarks about other girls, ones that weren’t off the record but that she’d said without considering they might be relevant enough to print. The story, she felt, presented her as the opposite of everything she stood for. It was humiliating. “I’m the example of the mean girl,” she said. “The whole article listed me as the opposition to \[Wiseman’s\] movement.”
Jackson’s displeasure makes sense; there’s a sting to some of the story’s lines. But Talbot doesn’t remember her as villainous—actually, she said, she came to admire the girl’s “flair and insouciance,” the “ingenuity” of her cliquish behavior. Their conversations made Talbot reconsider the kinds of girls who intimidated her in high school, whose antics are “kind of delightful as long as they’re not actually cruel,” which she didn’t think Jackson’s were. I think the story communicates that. On the page, teenage Jessica strikes me as clever and rollicking, her cattiness a mark of irrepressible verve.
---
**When I finally met Jackson,** at her snug yellow house in the suburbs, she made me a “meantini.” This was a cocktail of her invention: an admixture of ginger ale and vodka, plus splashes of fruit punch and cranberry to achieve the desired level of pink. As she stirred, she seemed breathy and scattered, which she eventually addressed outright: “I am so nervous,” she said. “I’m going to have a drink and then I’ll feel better. Dude, if I cry, I hope the earth swallows me whole.”
The issue was talking to a reporter. The last time she’d done so—besides a previous phone call with me—was for the*Times*story, which is still a source of shame. But on the phone, she’d thought I seemed “normal,” so she invited me over to set the record straight. She’s never been a mean girl, she insisted—though she’s certainly an “undercover celebrity.” That’s due to her odd connection to Regina George,*Mean Girls’*glamorous and tyrannical Queen Bee.
For emotional support, Jackson had invited her friend Tanzi Crayton, whom she met as a teenager in GAB. On a small balcony, the three of us drank meantinis from etched-crystal flutes. We bantered for a while—about our kids, the baffling return of Y2K fashion—before the conversation drifted to*Mean Girls.*Crayton said, “When I’ve watched it over the years, I’m like, ‘That’s Jessica right there—like, that’s a direct quote. You need to send my girl a check.’ ”
At a 2004 viewing in Silver Spring, Jackson and others saw bits of their lives onscreen. Photograph by Paramount/courtesy of Everett Collection.
Once Jackson read the*Times*story, she never returned to GAB, so she wasn’t there in the spring of 2004 when Paramount rented the AFI theater in Silver Spring for an advance screening of*Mean Girls.*Wiseman, the guest of honor, brought friends, family, and an assortment of GAB alums, Crayton among them. “I just remember being so starstruck,” Crayton said. “When Ros’s name came up in the credits, we were all cheering. And I saw little traces of us that were incorporated in some of the lines and the scenes.”
I called a few GAB alums to ask about this—about how it felt when they first saw the movie and encountered various fragments of their lives, like when Lindsay Lohan’s character eats lunch alone in a bathroom stall and falls victim to a three-way-calling attack. “It felt a little like, wow, these are my stories. Oh my God, that’s my childhood,” Zeina Davis said. “I definitely feel like I have a hidden part in*Mean Girls.*”
But her connection to the movie is bittersweet, particularly due to the three-way call, which is essentially a humorous aside. “It certainly made me feel seen,” she said, “but to have it played out as kind of a laughable moment—I’m like, it was real pain. They didn’t show how horrible it made me feel afterward, crying and begging my parents not to make me go back to school.” She worried that the film had glamorized something ugly. “You do not walk away from that movie and think, ‘We’ve got to change society.’ I do feel like you walk away and you still want to be Regina George.”
Crayton initially loved the movie—she bought T-shirts and posters for her room—but over the years, she’s reassessed. “I don’t think that people really got the true nature of what*Queen Bees and Wannabes*was about,” she said. “They touched a little bit on that in the end—the girls mended those fences and were able to coexist without being so nasty to one another. But everybody always quotes the crazy stuff, the bad stuff, the catty stuff. Nobody ever quotes any of the good things.” She calls it a “complicated movie,” one that’s genuinely funny but also perpetuates the “myth that young women can’t get along.”
Notably, Jackson’s relationship to*Mean Girls*is less fraught. “It wasn’t a public statement about me, it didn’t say my name,” she said. Hearing her teenage remarks in the mouths of various Plastics felt “so surreal,” but it “wasn’t obvious to anyone else the way it was obvious to me.” This freed her to love the movie: She thinks it’s hilarious and likes the positive ending.
> “Everybody quotes the crazy stuff, the bad stuff, the catty stuff. Nobody ever quotes any of the good things.”
As for Wiseman, she consulted on*Mean Girls,*but she first watched it in full at the AFI screening. “My experience of that was this kind of like—horror is a strong word, but it was like seeing a picture of yourself that you’re not really sure you want everybody to see.” She found the characters “so real” and “scary” and their meanness true to life. But after the movie came out, she learned that girls were dressing up as the Plastics for Halloween. “And it’s like, damn, girls subvert everything I do, all the time. I try so hard, but the opponent is formidable.”
---
**After a few pitchers** of meantinis, dusk fell, a string of lights blinked on, and the chill pushed us inside. Crayton headed home, but there was still something I wanted to understand—namely, the provenance of the rules. In the film, they’re authoritarian and exclusionary, a way to assert dominance over friends and create distance from social inferiors. Wearing pink on Wednesdays is not nice.
Days before, on the phone, I’d asked Jackson directly if she was a Queen Bee. “So, let’s do some layers here,” was her bristling reply. “When you’re confident and bold, are you a bitch? Are you Miranda Priestly? Do I only get to be either Taylor Swift from ‘Teardrops on My Guitar’ or Regina George?” For what it’s worth, Jackson has a “wild affinity” for Regina, for her fashion and brazen self-regard. Still, she said, the character is “not a representation of myself in high school, even though her quotes and my quotes are the same.”
Skeptical, I asked to see Jackson’s yearbooks, so she popped down to the basement and emerged with a stack. Opening one, she pointed to a picture of a jaguar mascot. “You see that? That’s me in there.” Before I could follow up, she’d moved on. “These were easily the most popular girls,” she said, her finger atop some identical blonde twins who apparently later became Ravens cheerleaders. Then she noticed another girl. “Anybody’s Regina George would be her, because everyone hated her but wanted her to like them.”
Remembering high school, Jackson was ebullient. Beside her couch, she performed a cheer that she’d invented as a freshman for a senior she had a crush on, a football player whose various castoffs she’d kept as totems: a pencil he bit, the program he fanned himself with at graduation. It didn’t feel like I was watching a dictator.
But if Jackson wasn’t mean, then why the rules? When I asked, she seemed bewildered. “It wasn’t a big-enough part of our lives or friendships that I remember, like, how we came up with them. Let’s say they were, at best, a phase.” She added that she and her friends “wanted to wear skirts on the same day. We made up all kinds of random songs and fake little clubby things. We weren’t the mean girls by any means.”
But as I puzzled, two of Jackson’s comments rattled around my brain. “Teenage friendships are a lot like teenage love,” she’d said. “Her laundry ends up in your clothes, you’re in each other’s closets and cars and dinner tables and bedrooms.” That thought seemed related to this one, an offhand remark about the actor Sydney Sweeney: “I just want to be her best friend really hard. We would braid each other’s hair and I would tell her all my secrets. I want us to smell the same. I want our periods to sync up.”
To Jackson, friendship seemed to mean sameness and melding—mingled laundry, matched perfume. So I asked if she thought the rules were about formalizing intimacy. “Wow, what a poignant point,” she replied. “Like, you killed it.”
“I’m also going to throw this out there,” she added. “There is a Disney movie called*Wish Upon a Star*starring Katherine Heigl, from the ’90s. I loved that movie. I watched it over and over again.” The movie features a Plastics-like popular clique, “and I remember those gals having specific rules about, like, shaving your legs every day, and this or that. I never forgot that.” Then she brought up the Pink Ladies from*Grease.*(“What made them friends? They had the jackets, it was a thing.”) “So maybe it has something to do with that,” she mused.
Of course, I thought—it’s classic high school, emulating movies to make life feel cinematic. But Jackson had slightly misremembered the plots. She described those two cliques as essentially benevolent, when both are a little mean. In*Wish Upon a Star,*the happy ending involves Heigl’s friends abandoning their rules, and in*Grease,*the Pink Ladies mock Sandy at a party—Sandy, who never gets to wear the pink jacket and belong. The misreading, though, is telling; it’s why the women of GAB are vexed about*Mean Girls,*that even though the ending is harmonious, it’s possible no one remembers it right.
About a week after our meantinis, Jackson called me on the phone. While we talked, she texted me two things she’d just encountered online. One was a social-media post from NARAL Pro-Choice America that said, “On Wednesdays, we fight for abortion rights.” The second was a screenshot of a [pink crew-neck sweatshirt](https://thespark.company/en-us/products/on-wednesdays-we-smash-the-patriarchy-feminist-sweatshirt) with “On Wednesdays, we smash the patriarchy” across the chest. She suggested we both buy it so we’d match.
I laughed at this, baffled by the life cycle of culture—how Jackson’s rules, a form of ritualized closeness filtered through film tropes, were themselves made into a villainous and exclusionary teen-movie speech, which then became iconic enough to meme, and now has been appropriated by corporate girlbossery into political sloganeering and Instagram products, which Jackson—the original Plastic—scrolls past on her phone. But it meant something to her, this reframing: her high-school quotes reclaimed from meanness, now a call to action, asking women to support one another.
“This is what I love,” she told me. “ ‘On Wednesdays, we wear pink’ is not a fuck-you to those who don’t wear pink, but it’s power, almost—it’s like,*we’re*the shit. On Wednesdays,*we*wear pink,*we*smash the patriarchy. It’s everything.” I think she finally felt understood.
*This article appears in the [April 2024](https://www.washingtonian.com/2024/03/21/april-2024-great-places-to-live/) issue of Washingtonian.*
# The true story behind the kid who went 1940s viral for his week at the cinemas in San Francisco - Gazetteer SF
Richard Allen was an intensely private man.
He was an upstanding citizen, the sort of guy who was well-known and well-regarded in his community. He loved working in the metals industry, where he was known as a “go-to person” among his peers. He loved visiting Disneyland almost as much as he loved visiting Hawaii. He loved his wife and four children. He was once a local radio DJ. He helped spur a movement of Bay Area wrestling in the ’80s. He was given a Citizen of the Year award by the Union City Chamber of Commerce. [By all accounts, especially that of his daughter Denise, he lived a long, rich life.](https://www.tributearchive.com/obituaries/18421673/richard-allen)
But Denise had no idea that her father made national headlines in 1947 for watching a week’s worth of movies in one sitting. She also didn’t expect that this story, more than seven decades later, would become a beloved internet meme that has likely been seen by thousands — if not millions — of people online.
Richard Allen’s wild week started on February 2, 1947.
“Richard had set out last Sunday, intending merely to spend a day at the movies,” read an article published in the San Francisco Examiner on February 8, 1947. “But when he suddenly found it was 1:30 a.m. he was ‘scared to go home.’”
So with a whopping $20 in his pocket, and one unidentified theater with a lax policy on kids watching flicks unsupervised, the possibilities were limitless. The fifth-grader’s wild week was filled with candy bars (150), comic books (15), hot dogs (“a large number”), and movies (16), punctuated by naps at a tree-covered lot.
It didn’t last. He probably had enough money to keep him afloat for a few more weeks, but by the following Friday, Richard’s father Marvin, a San Leandro restaurateur, had retrieved his son. He sternly told the *Examiner* that his boy gets “adventurous ideas” from listening to the radio.
Richard Allen’s story was eventually picked up by national news media. One of these outlets, United Press, also interviewed the Allens, and got a shrug of a quote from Richard that would stand the test of time: “I guess I just like movies.”
In 2021, a year after Richard died, [a Tumblr account specializing in mid-century geekery circulated the United Press story](https://vintagegeekculture.tumblr.com/post/655003803379269632/1947), headlined “Love For Movies Causes Boy, 10, To Lose A Week.” Cinephiles and meme accounts on social media shared the story the world over. It caught traction on iFunny, the meme recirculator website. [Actors](https://twitter.com/DevonESawa/status/1408956055862849536), [film distributors](https://twitter.com/janusfilms/status/1682427710960705549), and [movie theaters](https://www.facebook.com/somervilletheatre/posts/we-just-like-movies-too/10159569367831663/) shared his story, often with a pithy line expressing admiration for the boy.
But there was so much more to the story than the headlines.
I caught Denise on the phone, nursing her second glass of wine at her home in the Central Valley suburb of Tracy. What unfolded was a freewheeling, candid exercise in excavating her father’s life together.
Toward the end of his life, Richard moved in with his daughter. He had reluctantly retired from his decades-long career in the metals biz. Then, in a stroke of terrible luck, he sustained a debilitating hip injury.
“It was May 31, 2019, and my dad was dead a year later,” she said. “He didn’t know what to do without working.”
In the year or so that they cohabitated, she started to piece together a fuller picture of her father’s life. But it’s clear that Denise didn’t get to hear every story that she could about her father.
Here’s what she knew: Dick, as his friends and family knew him, *really* did like movies. She rattled off the actors her dad adored. He loved the comedy stylings of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. He *loved* OG *Mickey Mouse Clubhouse* star Annette Funicello, who, as she recalled, was his ultimate crush. His favorite actor, however, was probably Bela Lugosi. (And as luck would have it, Lugosi had a film that was released to theaters on February 1, 1947: a critically panned thriller titled *Scared to Death*. He probably saw that during his week out, Denise said. Chances are good that he probably also saw the Western *Last Frontier Uprising;* Dick loved Westerns*.*)
There were other things that she didn’t know firsthand, but ultimately made sense. Like, for example, how a 10-year-old could have earned $20 — again, worth a couple hundred bucks in 1947 — on his own.
Denise figured that one out pretty quickly.
“When I’m reading this story, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I have flashbacks of him telling me he used to panhandle in San Francisco when he was young.’”
A young Richard Allen, dressed up in pigtails and a dress. *Courtesy of Denise Allen*
Dick probably was good at it, too. He had a boyish charm: A cherubic face, a sweet smile, and a demeanor that could convince anyone to spare him a nickel, his daughter recalled. “My grandmother did put him in a dress on purpose because the curls in his hair were long,” she said. “It looked exactly like Shirley Temple's hair. He just was a cute, cute kid and he knew he could use his charm. And he probably learned it from the movies.”
The kid with $20 in his pockets would grow up to be an adult with a cool grand in cash at hand at all times, she said. And, that, too, was explained by the article. “He said, ‘I promised myself when I was a little boy that I would always have cash on me.’ And he did ’til the day he died.”
Even little things, like his taste in food, lined up with what he liked as a boy. He didn’t eat much candy, but he continued to have a fondness for hot dogs — and always kept them around the house.
But there was one thing in the story that didn't quite add up for Denise. Neither the *Examiner* or *United Press* really examined how long it took Richard’s dad to find his wayward son, or if he’d run away before, or if the “adventurous ideas” Richard’s dad said he heard on the radio concealed something else. Why would he be so scared of going home that he preferred to be out alone in San Francisco? How *can* a kid go to the movies by himself? How often did he go to the movies alone?
“I'm reading this thinking to myself, ‘What were my grandparents doing? What the hell were my grandparents doing?’” she recalled.
Denise didn’t miss a beat. “Oh my God, no wonder my father was in foster care,” she said, matter-of-factly.
Her father didn’t talk much about his childhood, perhaps for this reason. Denise didn’t really know her grandfather, Marvin Allen, Sr., who died before she was born. His wife was a devout Mormon. They later split, and she remarried to another man — a grandfather that Denise knew.
All she remembered about Marvin was that he owned a restaurant in San Leandro, and later moved down to Los Angeles to open up a shop there. It was successful enough that the actress Connie Stevens (another one of Dick’s favorites) came down for a visit.
She confessed that her dad “never really had a father figure.” “That's probably why he ended up in foster care, because I know that my dad said that they couldn't control him,” she said.
Midway through our conversation, I bring up the overwhelmingly positive reception that Richard Allen’s story has received by strangers on the internet. I asked her how he’d respond if he were alive.
“He would sit there, he'd put his head down,” Denise said. “He would probably shake it back and forth and just laugh.”
But Richard’s penchant for modesty, even in people’s post-mortem recollections of him, belied just how much the story resonated with people. This silly story keeps being shared for a reason.
“People really loved the idea that your dad loved movies so much that he ran away from home and escaped to go to the theater,” I told her.
“That’s what it was,” she said, with a catch in her throat. “You just used the word escape. I’m getting emotional right now. And I think that's what he was doing, escaping from the home life.”
Richard Allen’s sense of adventure and spontaneity, a quality that persisted for as long as he lived, continues to live on after his death. The idea that someone could escape their life — even if just for a few days — to camp out in a movie theater and luxuriate in another world feels like a pipe dream. It’s why the story continues to resonate, why people are still in awe of this 10-year-old. For a week, Richard Allen was free.
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