Sleuthsletter
August 13, 2026
Covering activity since the August 10 issue across accessible platforms — also see Michael Wolff’s own account of what Epstein told him about why Trump ran for president and Zorro Ranch’s new owners having the property exorcised by a Catholic priest before converting it into a Christian retreat.
Top developments
A federal hearing today (Aug 13) puts DOJ’s compliance under a judge’s microscope. Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered Todd Blanche to appear and account for three specific failures in Katie Phang’s transparency lawsuit: no documentation justifying redacted names, no production of the handwritten FBI interview notes, and no proof that redacted names actually belong to victims. Ellie Leonard timed her biggest release of the window — four FBI interview reports (FD-302s) from “Jane Doe 4,” the Hilton Head accuser who says her 1983 abuse involved both Epstein and Trump — directly to this hearing, since the 37 pages of handwritten notes from those same interviews are what Sullivan is demanding.
Ellie Leonard built out her Trump Tower scoop from last issue into a full case. She ran three livestreams (with Wajahat Ali, Jim Acosta, and Zev Shalev) walking through documents placing Epstein at Trump Tower on Nov. 13, 2016, then published a detailed writeup adding a same-day Epstein self-email about a falling-out with Leon Black and a Saudi-delegation email to Tom Pritzker — both dated the same afternoon Epstein was reportedly in the building.
Patsy Evans’s EpsteinWiki published the week’s most document-heavy piece, “The People Who Tried to Make Jeffrey Epstein Respectable Again,” tracing a decade-long reputation-management operation involving publicists, paid SEO firms, and — per Epstein’s own emails and messages — both Michael Wolff and Steve Bannon.
Three sleuths converged, independently, on the same demand: subpoena the Wolff and Bannon tapes. Patsy Evans’s EpsteinWiki/Butterfly Bureau co-published a formal petition to Congress and New Mexico’s Truth Commission; Lisa Tait amplified it on X the same day; Ellie Leonard kept pressing the “100 hours of Wolff recordings” claim on Bluesky. See “Connecting the threads.”
Two sleuths who went quiet last issue are both back. Bekah Day returned with a joint investigation (with Katie Chenoweth) into a Brazilian recruitment network, and Lisa Tait returned with a set of Epstein emails documenting his post-conviction stalking by Ponzi-scheme partner Steven Hoffenberg.
Dr. Patsy Evans (Resistance Kitty)
EpsteinWiki / Butterfly Bureau (Substack) — Her heaviest research week yet, five posts. The standout, “The People Who Tried to Make Jeffrey Epstein Respectable Again” (Aug 11), traces Epstein’s post-2008 reputation-repair apparatus in ten sections: publicist Dan Klores’s “deny and redirect” strategy; Al Seckel’s push to scrub Epstein’s Google results (EFTA02417871); paid SEO firms proposing to flood search results for $7,500/month; Ian Osborne’s strategy memo, which copied Michael Wolff directly (EFTA00915695); publicist Peggy Siegal offering in 2011 to relay an Epstein message to Arianna Huffington about Virginia Giuffre if he “rewrote it in clearer language” (EFTA01999184); and Steve Bannon’s 2019 proposal for “media training” aimed at helping Epstein “push back on the lies, crush the pedo/trafficking narrative, and rebuild [his] image as philanthropist” (EFTA01615720). A companion piece, “They Left Epstein’s Ranch Untouched for Nearly Seven Years” (Aug 11), works through New Mexico’s 119-page Truth Commission interim report: abuse allegations from at least five women and girls at Zorro Ranch between 1996 and 2012, roughly 30 additional potential survivors and witnesses identified, and the striking detail that no search warrant was ever executed on the ranch itself — unlike the Manhattan townhouse and Little St. James — until New Mexico investigators finally searched it in March 2026, nearly seven years after Epstein’s death. On Aug 12 she co-published “Subpoena the Epstein Tapes: Preserve the Wolff and Bannon Recordings Now”, a formal petition to the House Oversight Committee and New Mexico’s investigatory committee, citing Michael Wolff’s roughly 100 hours of recorded Epstein interviews and Steve Bannon’s roughly 15 hours of 2019 footage. Two further roundups aggregated other outlets’ reporting on Zorro Ranch, banking compliance, and Maxwell’s grand-jury records.
Website (resistancekitty.com) — Three more “Day” roundups (566–568) covering Todd Blanche’s DOJ confirmation, a Trump vaccine executive order, and White House construction spending, each paired with a satirical comic; Epstein content in these was limited to noting Blanche now “inherits” responsibility for “several million pages” of unreleased records and a recurring call-to-action urging readers to press Rep. Ayanna Pressley on the files.
Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads — Mostly link-sharing for the above, plus a wave of new EpsteinWiki profile pages pushed out around the “Respectable Again” piece — Steve Bannon, Peggy Siegal, Isabel Maxwell, Katie Phang, and Rachel Wolfson.
Dr. Katie Chenoweth
No solo piece on American Freakshow this window. She co-bylined Bekah Day’s Brazil investigation on Substack (see Bekah Day, below).
bekah day
Back after her first quiet cycle. Her Aug 13 piece, “Another Epstein Rabbit Hole Leads to Brazil” — co-written with Katie Chenoweth and a contributor credited as Xanthé — centers on Ana Maria Gomes Macedo, a former Elite Models model Epstein saved contacts for under “patrão” (Portuguese for “boss”). It documents Epstein buying a São Paulo apartment in 2003 and selling it to Macedo two years later at roughly 30% below what he paid; a 2006 email in which Epstein asks a contact to have “Lapo” (which Day connects to Agnelli heir Lapo Elkann) see him; and a sourced allegation from survivor Amanda Ungaro that Macedo helped introduce women to a Brazilian billionaire, which Day is careful to label “simply an allegation.” One citation doesn’t hold up on inspection: the document Day cites for an alleged $803.75 Epstein payment to Macedo (EFTA01654600) is actually an unrelated Epstein/Maxwell JPMorgan bank-statement bundle with no mention of Macedo. Her two new YouTube videos, “A Strange Pattern Within The Epstein Class...” (Aug 12) and “Tim Pool Just Appeared in the Weirdest Epstein Rabbit Hole” (Aug 11), continue her recurring pattern-analysis format.
Lisa Tait
Back after her first quiet cycle, and it was X, not her usual Substack or YouTube, where she resurfaced. On Aug 10 she posted three screenshotted emails documenting how Epstein’s convicted Ponzi-scheme partner Steven Hoffenberg harassed him and his staff after his release from prison — jumping out of cars, ambushing him on the street — including an email where Epstein warns an assistant “there is a crazy guy called steven hoffenberg who is stalking me, please be careful” (EFTA01939510) and one referencing “the dead cat sent to graydon carter” (EFTA00844188). On Aug 13 she shared Patsy Evans’s petition to subpoena the Wolff and Bannon tapes.
Ellie Leonard
The most active tracked sleuth again, almost entirely focused on two threads. First, Trump Tower: building on last issue’s scoop, she ran three livestreams — with Wajahat Ali, Jim Acosta, and Zev Shalev — walking through the documents placing Epstein in the building on Nov. 13, 2016, then published “Evidence Epstein was at Trump Tower on November 13, 2016” (Aug 13), adding a same-day Epstein self-email about a falling-out with Leon Black (EFTA02669184) and a same-day email to Tom Pritzker about hosting a Saudi delegation “for the next few months” (EFTA01061903). She quotes an anonymous photographer who was at Trump Tower that day noting “there was another way up via the parking garage below” — relevant since no photos of Epstein there have surfaced. She again credited “researcher Rye Howard-Stone” and epstein-data.com by name for helping identify a previously-redacted recipient. Second, Jane Doe 4: her “Jane Doe 4’s FBI Interviews” (Aug 12) publishes all four of the FD-302 interview reports the Hilton Head accuser gave the FBI in 2019, timed to today’s hearing over the still-missing 37 pages of handwritten notes from those same interviews; a family member told the Guardian she is currently “staying off-grid” out of fear of retaliation. She followed with a livestream reading of testimony from an Interlochen Music Camp accuser. One thing to flag: a widely-shared Bluesky post this week claiming she’d “spent six months” transcribing 1,832 pages of Michael Wolff’s emails to Epstein links to an article from this past April — not new work, despite being framed as a fresh finding.
Lucius Tuck
Personal and political posts again this window — on trans athletes in the WNBA, teen pregnancy rates, and a general jab at “an organised crime syndicate” running the country — with no original Epstein commentary. His lone Epstein-adjacent act was reposting an EpsteinWiki daily roundup, notable mainly because that roundup itself cited this newsletter as a source. His X bio links directly to EpsteinWiki.com, suggesting his reposting habit reflects a closer relationship with that project than casual amplification.
Greg Conners
Two posts, in noticeably different registers. “Connecticut, Epstein & Tuesday’s Primary” (Aug 10) is fully Bates-sourced, tracing Epstein’s documented Connecticut ties — a Greenwich JPMorgan account (EFTA01583418), casual mentions of the state in his emails, a security-check on a Maxwell associate (EFTA01582902) — ahead of the state’s Aug 11 Democratic primary, though the piece’s central tease, that one unnamed incumbent has donors “connected to Epstein’s circles,” is never actually named. “The Bridges Epstein Built: People” (Aug 11) traces Epstein’s ties to Boris Nikolic and, through him, the Gates Foundation orbit — but contains a sourcing error: the piece twice states that a 2013 Nikolic email to Epstein recommended geneticist George Church, and cites that claim to EFTA00668377. The actual document contains no mention of Church at all; its real list of names is Anne Hathaway, Ban Ki-moon, Qatar’s prime minister, and five others. Both posts carry an explicit “chatgpt” credit in their footers alongside epstein-data.com.
Connecting the threads
Three sleuths, working independently, landed on the identical demand this week: subpoena the Wolff and Bannon tapes. Patsy Evans’s EpsteinWiki co-published a formal petition to Congress (Aug 12) citing roughly 100 hours of Michael Wolff’s recorded Epstein interviews and 15 hours of Steve Bannon’s 2019 footage; Lisa Tait, resurfacing after a quiet cycle, shared that exact petition on X the next day; and Ellie Leonard kept the “100 hours” figure circulating on Bluesky the same week. None of the three coordinated visibly, and the push landed the same week Michael Wolff himself published a new Substack column recounting what Epstein told him privately about why Trump ran for president in 2016 — evidence, if nothing else, that Wolff is still sitting on unpublished material from those sessions.
Todd Blanche is the connective tissue running through nearly every sleuth’s work this week. Ellie Leonard’s Jane Doe 4 release was timed directly to today’s hearing over his DOJ’s non-compliance; Patsy Evans’s “Day” roundups tracked him “inheriting” millions of unreleased pages; and her “Respectable Again” deep-dive on Epstein’s PR machine landed the same week Katie Phang’s attorneys filed a court brief accusing Blanche’s DOJ of tactics with “no basis in reality.” Three separate angles on the same office, one federal hearing pulling them together.
Patsy Evans’s most document-heavy piece and Ellie Leonard’s biggest scoop both leaned on epstein-data.com in the same week — and both held up under scrutiny. Five separately spot-checked Epstein-data documents cited in “The People Who Tried to Make Jeffrey Epstein Respectable Again” matched their sourced claims exactly, as did every Bates number in Leonard’s Trump Tower and Jane Doe 4 pieces. Greg Conners credited the same site (plus ChatGPT) for his Connecticut piece, which also checked out — but his second post of the week misattributed a claim about geneticist George Church to a document that never mentions him, a reminder that AI-assisted research is only as reliable as the citation it’s paired with.
Zorro Ranch was pulled from three directions at once. Patsy Evans’s Truth Commission deep-dive detailed decades of abuse allegations and the fact that no search warrant was ever executed on the property itself; real-world reporting broke the same week that the ranch’s new owner, Texas Republican Don Huffines, had it exorcised by a Catholic priest before converting it into a Christian retreat; and New Mexico’s attorney general and Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández introduced federal legislation — with Republican co-sponsor Thomas Massie — specifically written to force DOJ’s hand on the property’s remaining records.
Bekah Day’s Brazil investigation extends a recruitment-geography thread she’s tracked before. Her Ana Maria Macedo reporting connects to the same international-recruitment network she and Katie Chenoweth traced in their Aug 2 Daniel Siad piece and to Jean-Luc Brunel’s MC2 Model Management — and lands the same week Brazil’s federal prosecutors confirmed they opened their own probe into Epstein’s network there in February.
Broader Epstein & transparency coverage
A federal judge rejected all three of Ghislaine Maxwell’s constitutional challenges to the Epstein Files Transparency Act and ordered the unsealing of grand jury materials from her civil case, with victim identities still redacted. Judge Loretta Preska ruled Congress has the authority to modify grand jury secrecy rules and that Maxwell never held “a vested right to total and perpetual secrecy” over the records (Reason/Volokh Conspiracy; Courthouse News, both Aug 12).
New Mexico officials introduced federal legislation to force DOJ’s hand on unreleased Epstein records. Attorney General Raúl Torrez and Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández unveiled the bipartisan “Epstein Files Transparency Act II” — co-sponsored with Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna — which would let state attorneys general, district attorneys, and survivors sue DOJ directly over withheld or redacted files, bar the department from invoking privilege to justify withholding records, and create criminal penalties for officials who conceal or falsify covered records (Source New Mexico, Aug 12).
Katie Phang’s attorneys accused Todd Blanche of deliberately stalling her transparency lawsuit ahead of today’s hearing, writing in a court filing that his request to retroactively extend a missed deadline “has no basis in reality” (MeidasTouch, Aug 12).
Michael Wolff published a new account of what Epstein privately told him about Trump’s 2016 campaign, writing that Epstein believed Trump’s run was driven by fading fame rather than any real interest in governing: “Money, sex, fame, it’s in that order,” Wolff quotes Epstein saying — an allegation attributed to Epstein via Wolff, not independently verified (The Daily Beast, Aug 12).
Zorro Ranch’s new owners had the property exorcised. Texas Republican comptroller candidate Don Huffines and his family, who bought the ranch, flew in a priest from Ohio for a three-day exorcism before beginning to convert the property into a Christian retreat named San Rafael Ranch, saying proceeds from the sale would go to Epstein’s victims (Santa Fe New Mexican, Aug 13).
Excluded after verification: a recirculating claim that “an Israeli spy stayed for weeks at a time with Epstein in Manhattan” traces to the same February 2026 reporting flagged and excluded from the last issue, not new; an “Aaron Swartz/MIT” connection theory and an “Epstein/Maxwell art theft” claim, both circulating on Reddit this week, have no corroborating reporting behind them.
Source note: this section draws on epstein-data.com/news’s clustered feed (via its API) plus independent web searches and verification, filtered to August 10 onward; every claim was checked against its underlying source and independently dated before inclusion.