It’s terrifying to be in a position where you think you can see what is coming but don’t have enough time, space, or words to warn everyone you love.

That’s what it feels like to be a journalist in this timeline.

A year ago, I started showing up for Epstein survivors and following their fight for transparency. I thought I was covering a story that few others wanted to touch. These women had spent decades trying to be heard. They wanted answers about who harmed them, who enabled it, and who looked away.

I thought I was stepping into one story.

Instead, I found myself spending thousands of hours inside records, court filings, books, government documents, and notes. Long enough to know the difference between seeing ghosts and seeing patterns.

And I keep seeing the same thing: extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power, the same family names, the same circles, and the same people moving effortlessly between worlds that most of us are taught to think of as separate.

Monstrous things happen in their world, and it scarcely seems to touch them.

The elite world you were never meant to see is invitation-only, and the price of admission is often your humanity. Not all at once. In small compromises. Over time. Empathy dulls. Moral lines blur. The suffering of other people becomes background noise.

I keep coming back to that because Virginia Giuffre titled one of her unpublished memoirs The Billionaire’s Playboy Club. She was trying to describe the machine from the inside.

I know enough about trauma to understand that once you see something clearly, pretending you didn’t see it becomes its own kind of injury. Sometimes the wound isn’t what happened. The wound is in the witnessing. How we handle someone’s truth, no matter how ugly it is.

I’ve been threatened, followed, and surveilled at different points along the way.

But looking away now would feel like a betrayal—to survivors, to you (the person who still cares enough about humanity to read these words) and to my ancestors, who taught me to stand my ground, hold the line even when something is wrong. More so then. To move toward uncomfortable truths if doing so might protect the lives and dignity of others.

I’m scared. But I’m going to keep reporting from this foxhole.

And I’m going to soon publish my first book about this investigation, The Illusion Machine, because some stories are too historically important, too interconnected, and too consequential to fit into posts online.

I needed to create something that couldn’t be erased by an algorithm, a news cycle, or the passage of time.

If you’re still reading, then perhaps you’ve felt it too.

We still need truth tellers.

We still need books.

We are still living inside the longest running and biggest scandal in history. I’m not looking away.

Come with me.