Bill Kristol: Trump Is a Moral Monster

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Hello, and welcome to the Bullwood Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

We have a little special bonus segment in segment two today.

Late on Friday, I talked to Stacey Williams, who I think has an interesting story as far as the victims of Trump and Epstein are concerned.

She was not part of the child trafficking ring with Epstein, but she dated him when she was in her early 20s briefly.

And

he took advantage of her in some really creepy ways that we discuss.

But during that time, Epstein brought her to Trump Tower where Trump sexually harassed her.

So we get to hear her story and what she wants for the victims in segment two.

So stick around for that.

Some of you might have already heard that.

We put it out on Bork Takes over the weekend.

If you're not subscribed to the Bork Takes feed, definitely go check that out for more breaking news type stuff.

But for the audio only folks, it was a really touching interview.

So stick around for Stacey Williams.

But up first, it's Monday, so we've got editor-at-large of the Bulwark, Bill Kristol.

What's going on, Bill?

That was an excellent Stacey Williams discussion, both

thought-provoking in terms of how close Epstein and Trump were, how Epstein behaved, sort of, as you say, she wasn't directly involved in the trafficking ring with Maxwell, but a sense of how that might have gotten going and also moving really to hear her.

I mean, she's someone who came forward at some cost to herself, right?

She was like Epstein's girlfriend.

I mean, she's, but she lays it out in a very straightforward way.

And it really, I mean, just part of a broader thing, the degree to which the whole thing is repulsive and the degree of closeness between Trump and Epstein, let's say, in the woman-chasing category and to some degree sliding down into at least Trump's knowledge of the girl exploiting child raping category.

It's more than I realized even a month ago, right?

And I sort of followed this stuff a little bit, you know?

I mean, there's so many multiple cases where women are now talking about Trump and Epstein being together, joking about it all, and it's in nothing with the birthday card and everything.

And I think the two most relevant elements of it are just one, kind of hearing from a victim about what they want, right?

And that sometimes gets lost in all this.

I think that that is important.

In her case, talking about the kind of videotapes and wanting to know the truth about that.

The other thing, to your point, is just

the corroboration of the Trump and Epstein story is, I think, super important, you know, because essentially the story that Stacey tells is the same as what Maria Farmer told, who reported this to the FBI in 1996.

I think, thanks for a comment, Terry.

I think I've misstated that there's so many Epstein victims here.

Around the same time, there was another underage Epstein victim, and I'd mixed her up with Maria Farmer.

Maria Farmer was actually over 18, but even still, she was a victim of Epstein.

that like literally similar story like brought by Tom Tower they were creepy together and it was a couple years later so it's not like this was a you know like a one-month friendship or whatever, like a very similar situation between these two victims a couple years apart.

So, anyway, stick around for that.

Bill, you kind of write this morning about the more the politics of this.

You start by commenting on this Washington Post story this morning.

It's getting a lot of attention with the headline, Trump fumes as Epstein scandal dominates the headlines.

You write, I like the postmodern touch of having a headline about Trump fuming about headlines.

Well, that made me chuckle.

I kind of hate these stories because, you know, I don't know.

Like, it's just, it feels feels like we're in, you know, one of these movies where things happen over and over again.

You know, you can't, you can't, like, we're in Groundhog Day.

Like, you can't get out of this.

It's like for 10 years.

So it's like Trump is mad behind the scenes.

And then Trump's people say it's fake news.

And it's like, I don't know.

These stories annoy me a little bit.

But that said,

I think you get into kind of why this is relevant from a political standpoint.

Yeah.

And I want to say, I was actually going to write more about what Tom Jocelyn and I discussed yesterday, what you discussed with Stacey Williams, the Maria Farmer story, just the substance of it and how grotesque it is, both the crimes and Trump's proximity to them and then the cover-up.

But I was struck by the post-story and I thought, you know, maybe it's worth laying out a little bit why I think politically Trump is more vulnerable than he has been in other similar situations

or than he would have been, I think, if they had just decided to stonewall and stuck to it, honestly.

They did have a lot of backlash when they started to stonewall on July 6th and that rattled them.

But they honestly, from their point of view, better off sticking to these things than starting to open the door a bit because now he's repeatedly.

It was a provocative point, just really quick, that I hadn't really thought of.

Actually continuing to stonewall and just listening to Trump, you know, again, Trump does, for all the horrible traits he has, he has better political instincts than most of the

consultant class and the people around him.

And had they all sung from the hymn book that he did of like, it's over, we got to move on, let's talk about Obama, they would be in better shape today, it's true, than their current situation.

I think so.

I mean, Bondi, the AG and the Department of Justice and the FBI have decided to do this.

I support that decision.

It's over and we need to move on.

Yeah, there would have been grumbling and people would have said, oh, he betrayed us.

And some people might have said that.

He was still getting made fun of on the South Park and the Bro podcast and stuff.

But like the

advancing of the story would have potentially stopped.

Yeah, and that's the key, I think, here, that when you get into the situation, they put out the video on the sixth, the prison video, just to have something to put out, I suppose.

That turned out to to have a three-minute gap.

Then they decided, ooh, if we're getting beat up, well, we'll request the grand jury transcripts, which is nonsense, really, from a substantive point of view of what you're going to learn.

And the judges aren't going to release them anyway.

But that's like a gimmicky thing.

But it sort of raises the question: well, if they want to release that stuff, maybe there should be some other stuff they could release.

Their own accounts that they're telling the media of how they did the search is that maybe only 10% of the thousand pages or 10,000 pages, whatever they are, should be released once you do all the redactions.

Still quite a lot of pages.

Why aren't those being released?

And And then, obviously, the trip to Maxwell and okay, we're now, he's now finding new information.

And then the tweet, I guess Blanche's tweet, Deputy Attorney General's post, social media post at the end about how, oh, stay tuned, more information to come, something like that.

I mean, that just, the key to a stone wall is to preserve the wall.

You know, it's the key to a cover-up is to drop the curtain on the end the play.

Not that we're giving advice on how to do a cover-up.

No, but I'm just as if we were.

Whereas where it's sort of teasing what's coming next, it just makes people interested out of kind of honestly, out of some people, I think, for desire for justice and for accountability and for transparency.

And also just kind of like, what's happening next?

What's the next state?

What's Act IV?

You know, that was interesting in Act 3.

So I think the Maxwell visit, the more I've thought about it, they'll get, maybe they'll get the fake Maxwell statement that Trump wasn't involved.

Maybe they'll get her pointing at other people.

Maybe they'll do the deal.

But the degree to which it sort of opened the door to kind of what's next and invites the media to look much more at what's coming next and what's coming and invites people who are unhappy within the government, career people, resolving FBI or DOJ, to sort of say, you know what, this thing is terrible.

And we're going to point out that there is stuff in the files, like the birthday card.

And maybe I'm being a little wishful thinking.

Maybe they'll now shut the door fine.

You know, maybe this is after Act IV.

They succeed and they all cover up and the curtain drops, but in the whole cover up and the curtain drops.

But I do think they're getting more than a little oxygen to the story.

And now we've got a recess.

And don't you think Republicans in Congress seem rattled?

Democrats seem a little energized.

I want to talk about the August recess.

Just one more thing, though, in the Maxwell meeting.

Because Andrew Weissman and I covered

the discussion, too.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And I think he was really good on kind of the legal side of this.

But it was after we taped that the Maxwell lawyer.

came out and said explicitly, which what we all assumed implicitly, was that they want a pardon out of those or a computation.

I don't know.

I mean,

they were teasing that there's maybe a hundred names she could provide.

How do you, what do you think about all of that?

Just, and then you have Mike Johnson over the weekend saying, Not only do I not think she needs a pardon, I think she'll be in jail for longer than 20 years, a rare agreement I have with Mike Johnson.

How do you think all that kind of stuff

nets out?

Do you have any thoughts on that?

I think it's bad for Trump.

I mean, I think A, calling much more attention to Maxwell, who'd been a little bit relegated to the sort of sidekick of Epstein and a lot lot of the early coverage.

If people haven't followed it very closely, and I, again, would say I was a little bit in that category.

Now you have women talking about what a monster she was.

She was really key to the whole enterprise.

Oh, my God.

She's awful.

Yeah.

And she's also in the room.

Some of the people that haven't paid attention, that goes to this.

A lot of people don't realize.

They even just think she was like the secretary or whatever.

There's like a sexism.

There's like someone that organized when the girls come over, which is bad enough.

I mean, she's in the room for some of the molestation.

Like some of the side, I mean, she is a really dark, depraved character.

Yes.

And there's Trump's deputy attorney general, also his personal defense lawyer, cordially yucking it up, apparently with Maxwell's lawyer, whom he also knows, and Maxwell.

And I think no one else in the room, I've not gotten entire clarity.

Do we have any reporting that there was any FBI agent or someone taking notes of this conversation?

Or was it just a- That's what Andrew was talking about.

And we at this point, we do not.

But it doesn't mean that that wasn't happening, but we don't right now.

So I think they've opened the door to everyone to come forward and tell truthfully what a monster she was,

how monstrous the whole enterprise with Epstein was.

Epstein, let's go back to that again.

She can say, well, Trump's just, she invited Trump, or Epstein invited Trump, she and Epstein invited Trump as one of 20 friends to contribute the birthday card.

It is what it is.

Of course, they've all both Epstein and Trump have said many times what close friends they are.

They can't really pretend Trump wasn't hanging around with Epstein for those 15 years.

And here's one point.

I think this comes out implicitly in your conversation, but Jocelyn made this point well, I thought, in our little thing yesterday.

Of course, Epstein had a million, knew a lot of people.

He had parties.

He had dinner parties.

He played golf with people.

He was a big shot.

And there are people who, therefore, didn't know, maybe didn't want to know, honestly, what he was really like, or maybe honestly, just didn't know anything.

They invited to a party at Epstein's.

There were other famous, distinguished people there, famous.

They went to a dinner party.

That is true.

I would just add one thing.

There were some people that were doing this in like 2018, 10 years after he had been arrested.

But anyway, totally agree.

And even 2011 and after the 2008

police bargain and slap on the wrist, the degree to which a lot of the stuff continues and revives, right?

Isn't the whole Virtue Island thing post-2008?

Not the whole thing, but some of it, yeah.

Yeah, some of it.

I mean, it's terrible.

Anyway, I don't want to give any excuse to any of these people.

Having said that, Trump is way not even.

plausibly in anything like that category of slightly unknowing golf buddy or business partner or you know wall street associate associate or some such thing.

He is cheek by jowl, so to speak, with Epstein chasing women.

I mean, that's just explicit in public.

Now, obviously, the underage question is open.

We don't know.

Maybe Trump was careful

on that side.

But again, the degree of proximity and the kinds of things they were doing together for 15 years.

I mean, I just think that's sunk in in a way that I'm not sure it had.

What do you think?

Did it before the whole thing broke out, did people know that?

I don't know how much there was.

This is one of those things where it's hard for me to separate because I thought everybody did.

I don't know.

I got an email from a reporter or a text from a reporter yesterday that he was sending me a pitch I had sent him back to my anti-Trump PR days from 2016 or maybe even 2015.

It was nine or 10 years ago about the Trump and Epstein relationship.

And he sends it to me and he's like, time is a flat circle.

He's like, I was going through my old inbox and like, here's a pitch from you 10 years ago.

So I knew.

And I think that like

people that paid a close attention to this knew but I think now it's we're at a different level.

I think it's safe to say now as far as people's awareness of it.

Can't you say it's to your credit that you pitched it?

It's also interesting that you had to pitch it because that in a way doesn't that suggest that that you felt you had to pitch it meant it wasn't front and center in the news, right?

Yeah, yeah.

It's a good point.

He's talking right now.

He's always talking, but as we're taping this, and so on Epstein, I had a couple of things I want to get to from earlier in this press conference, but just right now, a couple comments.

It's a hoax.

It's been built up way beyond proportion.

The files were run by the worst scum on earth, Comey, Garland, Biden, and all the people that actually led the government, including the Autopen.

The whole thing is a hoax.

And then he goes on, I never went to Epstein's island.

I never had the privilege of going to his island.

That appears to be a direct quote.

I haven't actually heard that, but I'm just getting this as it's coming across.

Our guide, producer Jared, we should shout him out, hit a viral tweet over the weekend that was like, Trump has more pictures with Epstein than most people do with their grandparents.

Kind of macabre, but did well.

You can kind of tell that he doesn't think this is a big deal.

I mean, like, beyond the cover-up part of it, right, like, isn't there, isn't there something that betrays, right, like if the strategy is, oh, we're going to, you know, get whoever, I'm not going to name random people's names, but like, we're going to get these other Democrats who are in these files and we're going to focus on them with a deal with Maxwell.

That runs counter to the idea that it's a hoax, right?

And it's hard to imagine that Trump's selling that.

You can tell where Trump's heart is.

Trump's heart is like, eh, this guy was kind of playing a little grab ass, and boys will be boys, and it's not that big of a deal.

And I never went to the island, so don't look at me on the kids' stuff, but it seemed like a great island.

You know, like that to me seems like where his heart is on this.

And so it's hard to execute the other part of the plan when you're doing that.

Yeah, I totally agree.

I mean, just two points on that.

So, Blanche, and the more I think about it, and prompted by what you just said, Blanche's comment, or Maxwell's lawyer's comment, I guess uncontradicted by Blanche, that they went over 100 names, Blanche spending eight hours, 10 hours with Maxwell.

That's bad for them.

That is to say, they shouldn't want other names.

I know they're tempted to go with Clinton and all this stuff and Democrats.

The right way to do this, if you were doing the cover-up, not that you and I would be giving advice, but luckily they've already not done this, so it doesn't matter.

Blanche should have gone, said, look, I spoke with Maxwell very briefly.

She's a liar and a convicted sex offender, but I felt due diligence.

There's been a bit of an uproar.

You know, I asked her what she knows, and she wasn't forthcoming.

There seems to be no more from her than there was already in the files.

Case closed.

They did the opposite.

100 names?

I think this thing can be kept alive until we see 100 names.

And incidentally, that's very problematic.

They can't all literally be Democrats.

That would be kind of crazy, right?

And isn't there one of their main talking points?

Not a talking point I like much, and I think you've been critical of it too.

Oh, all these innocent people just get mentioned.

It's just hearsay.

They should stick.

That's a better place for them to sit.

We're not going to deal in here and say, I don't trust Maxwell.

It's closed.

You could have maybe used the Maxwell meeting as a way to reclose the door, so to speak, having opened it.

Instead, he's now opened it wide.

He's at odds with Trump, in a sense, who's saying it's just a hoax.

There's nothing there.

That's a little untenable, I believe.

I mean, Maxwell and Epstein were convicted.

Epstein pled to serious crimes.

The other thing about Trump.

personally is such a kind of moral monster, honestly.

It doesn't even occur to him to preface these statements with a sentence or two about the victims.

Every normal human being, every normal politician would would say, first, I want to say terrible.

Even the sociopaths would know that they had to fake it.

You'd think.

Like Trump has so far gone past that.

Yeah, he really is, isn't he?

I mean, there's not even a pretense of having any concern for these people.

So what is the administration?

I haven't, obviously, this press conference is happening as we're speaking, so I haven't thought about that part, but what is their line now?

The files are a hoax or they're worth pursuing.

Maxwell didn't do anything or she's got 100 names of people that the justice department, the Trump's Justice Department has to track down.

They really, I think my, I'm going to just say my little morning shots thing is this would add to the list of, you know, continuing the drama, so to speak.

It's sort of like, let's, oh, go, there's another mystery.

It's like watching a mystery.

I was watching a British mystery last night on TV on Britbox and stuff.

You know, it's sort of like another development.

How does that fit in, right?

You don't want, if you're running a cover-up to be kind of continually intriguing people with new developments.

Just one more on just kind of this contrast between Trump, which again, I want to repeat what he he said.

It's a hoax that has been built up way beyond proportion.

So that's where his stance is.

Dan Bongino, the WFBI director, who has been, you know, like one of the leading people talking about the need to uncover who all the pedophiles are in the Epstein files back when he was a competitor in the podcast space, is now at the bureau.

And he put out this statement.

He doesn't mention Epstein per se in this statement, but I want to read it just because the contrast in tone between hoax built up up beyond proportion and where Bongino is is pretty stark.

The director, Cash, and I are committed to stamping out public corruption and the political weaponization of both law enforcement and intelligence operations.

It's a priority for us.

But what I've learned in the course of our properly predicated and necessary investigations into these aforementioned matters has shocked me down to my core.

We cannot run a republic like this.

I'll never be the same after learning what I've learned.

We're going to conduct investigations by the book.

We're going to get the answers.

We all deserve all caps.

As with any investigation, I cannot predict where it will land, but we'll get the truth.

I'll never be the same after learning what I've learned.

It shocked me to the core.

It could all be bluster, but again, this is the deputy FBI director.

It's not like some random spokesperson.

So maybe he's not talking about Epstein.

Maybe he's trying to obliquely allude to Obama or some other thing.

Who the hell knows?

But this puts him in the same boat.

Like you can't say, oh, let's move on from whatever this is.

It's like if you've seen things that that are so shocking you'll never be the same that you've got a there's got to be a payoff at some point right i mean i sort of assumed when i read that that he thinks he's referring to obama and and russia and you know the tulsey gabbard stuff and all this he's never seen such corruption by the deep state so why not just say that then yeah why not say it and he leaves it ambiguous say and this line about these f these files are totally corrupted and you know it's it's who knows what brennan and

comie and everyone put in them.

I mean, that's asking for trouble also, because there are a lot of people at the FBI who, whatever their personal views about politics and so forth, probably don't like the idea that they went through these files.

Or back in the day, they were involved in investigations that are totally fake and hoax and politically driven.

I mean, the FBI did actually investigate, you know, Epstein and then Maxwell and indicted both of them.

Justice Department indicted both of them.

So he's trashing, he's now picking a fight with, you know, sort of hundreds of agents.

And I don't know.

That Vangino is supposed to manage.

A lot of agents are being run out.

David Frum did a good podcast with Peter Strzok, I'd recommend from last week.

And

I spoke to Mike Feinberg about this.

I think that the under-the-surface amount of people bailing on the FBI over this, I don't know that it's really sunk in with people.

They're really losing folks at a...

Pretty serious rate.

I was talking to somebody else who does crime research about this yesterday.

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On the Democrats on Epstein, I didn't plan to do another 25 minutes on Epstein, but until Alex Acosta comes on this podcast, we're going to have no choice but to do that.

Lauren Egan writes about the plans for this long recess and whether this is a usable issue.

What do you think about this?

I think at some level, this is like more of a getting people disillusioned with Republicans issue than it is something that the Democrats can really effectively rally around.

But maybe that's wrong.

What do you think?

Yeah, no, I've been sort of, I can argue that one either way.

I was saying to another friend last week, Democrats have been a little lame on this, and he said, I don't know, maybe it's better if they just stay out of it, honestly.

I mean, if you have impartial reporters and women like Stacey Williams speaking up, isn't that better than making it just a normal and regular people going to town halls, you know, to pressure Republicans about this is better.

It's funny to watch the progression.

Like I had Chris Murphy on, what, last Tuesday, and he's pretty good on this, but you can kind of tell that like he hadn't thought that deeply about like all the various like layers and talking points.

And, you know, and Murphy's out there on a million issues.

Like he's really good on the crypto thing.

It's just natural.

Right.

And then I watched him talk about it again like Thursday or Friday.

And, you know, he'd ratchet it up the rhetoric.

And part of that is because of the news that had come out during the week, right?

But moving it into full cover-up mode.

And you do see that a little bit from Democrats.

But maybe you're right.

Maybe that's not even the most useful thing.

I don't know how important it is that Ro Kana and Tom Massey are on TV together, but it's not nothing.

And Kanna's are pretty shrewd about this stuff sometimes, I think.

I think the key is for the Democrats not to go around giving pompous speeches as Democratic members of Congress or as Democratic challengers, but letting citizens speak up.

You know what I mean?

They need to sort of behind the scenes, the associated super PACs and so forth, have to get people to go to these meetings if there are Republican town halls or if not, go to Democratic town halls.

But let's have people in the audience speak up, not the members of Congress.

So there's a Wall Street Journal poll over the weekend that had,

I think Morning Schotts described it as the Democrats in shambles.

33% approving of the party, 63% disapproving.

They're worst showing since 1990, back in your day.

it's like really your heyday right there i was on the republican side so i was happy about it yeah i know that's what i mean that's you were driving them down it was bill crystal's machinations behind the scenes it was so effective that bill clinton won the presidency that it's two years later which probably tells you something about these kinds of polls but anyway yeah that's a great point yeah cnn uh had an had a poll that that showed them

despite being very upset with their party having way more enthusiasm at this point to vote in the midterms, which makes sense.

I just think what we're learning basically from these polls is that Dem voters just don't think that the party is up for what they need to be up for when it comes to Trump.

Independent voters still feel like Democrats are a little bit out of touch, and yet they're also very excited to have a check on Donald Trump at some level.

So it might not actually matter, at least in the short term politically.

I don't know.

What do you make of that?

Totally.

Totally agree.

Some of those, that dissatisfaction with the party comes from Democrats who are dissatisfied that the party is not being more aggressive.

They're not going to vote for Trump Republicans, however.

So, and they're probably going to vote to check Trump.

What this shows is Democrats, I don't know that they have a big 2026 problem.

They may have other problems, but I don't think this shows a 2026 problem.

That'll be a referendum on Trump.

They have a 2028 challenge, let's say.

They're not a party that's really in great shape, that happened to lose one election and just ready to roar to the presidency.

They need good candidates and they need to generally have a bit of an have something of an overhaul by 27-28.

Kind of related to this, so there were two senate announcements over the weekend roy cooper the governor north carolina former governor democrat is going to run for that senate seat it looks like against the chairman of the rnc michael watley it sounds like lara trump took a pass on that race which is unfortunate for content's sake um if not for the country uh dan osborne was the independent that ran in nebraska against deb fisher did pretty well i i kind of had forgotten how close it was uh so i pulled it up this morning deb fisher was at 53 and Dan Osborne at 46

in a Trump election year and in a 2024 general election instead of in a midterm election.

So I think that that

augurs that that's at least possible as a seat for it.

Now he would be an independent to pick up.

So I don't know.

Both of those guys are kind of not in the traditional mold for Democrats.

I mean, Roy Cooper's kind of in an old school traditional mold of a Southern Democrat that doesn't really exist anymore.

What do you think about those announcements?

I like Cooper, and I just worry that there's quite a lot of history of these ex-governors turning around to run for the Senate.

They genuinely were popular governors.

They have to run for the Senate.

It's a federal race.

It's who are you going to vote for for majority leader?

Who do you agree with, the most radical member of the Democratic Conference in the Senate?

And suddenly these popular governors lose, right?

That happened in Tennessee, didn't it, a few years ago?

And other states, we've seen it happen, sort of.

So I worry about that.

But look, he should be a strong candidate.

And he knows Medicaid extremely well.

He expanded it in North Carolina.

And so if that's going to be a big issue in 2026, he could really discuss it intelligently.

It's hard to tell down how much loyalty there is to him out there, but I think some, yeah, I think Osborne's good.

They just need a lot of different candidates.

I think Cooper cuts against this because he's unusually popular and skilled, I think, as a politician.

Generally, I prefer to see

non-politicians or non-career politicians or people with different backgrounds.

I'm just going to put it that way.

Running.

But I think that you could have a wave.

I mean, Paul Bagala and I, the Democrat run, I was on something with him.

And he said he thought that intensity number mattered.

He thought that in other cycles, that's really shown something.

If Democratic voters want to vote 20 points more or care a lot about it by 20 point margin over Republican voters, that probably translates into something in an off-year election.

Yeah, just one quick thing on both guys.

The Cooper video, this is kind of a silly thing, but

when somebody is obviously being recruited into the race that maybe doesn't want this job, a center, that's another thing you've seen in these governors races.

People feel like they have to get in and, you know, they're not that excited.

Just figure skating, judging, his opening video,

he looked like a person that had energy and was excited for the race.

And whether that's true, I don't know.

I haven't talked to Roy Cooper, but you can sniff it.

sometimes like i've seen some introduction videos of i don't know my mind goes to fred thompson's presidential race where it's like this person doesn't seem like their heart is in it and that i didn't get that from cooper so that's good on osborne i just pulled this up

so trump won nebraska by 20

and fisher beat osborne by seven so he ran 13 points you know on net ahead of ahead of the party

that's not nothing you know that is very and you've seen on some of this stuff you know you've seen these things where

you know candidates and senate races in particular end up kind of falling back to the mean.

You saw this like Larry Hogan and somebody say, well, you think that they'll be better.

And then it it turns out that they kind of run just very slightly better than a generic Republican or Democrat.

That wasn't the case for him.

So I think that's notable.

I'm going to try to get him on the pod.

I think that's a very interesting race for everybody to monitor.

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Going back to some actual policy stuff from Trump over the weekend and this morning, we have an EU tariff deal, if you want to call it that.

There's a European economist I follow who described it this way.

What was unthinkable a year ago is now the new baseline.

I think that's important to say.

A lot of the mainstream coverage of this is like, oh, they got a deal.

It's 15%.

It's only 15% tariff with carve-outs, of course, for some things, Trump buddies and semiconductor equipment, a couple of things.

I do think that there's been a little bit of a frog boiling in water on all this sort of stuff.

Like, had you gone to people in October and been like, we're going to have a 15% across-the-board tariff on Europe?

I think everybody would have been like, that's crazy.

That's far more than anything that we've had in recent times.

And yet,

because of how

radical Trump's initial proposals were, and

because the market has been relatively resilient, more than relatively resilient, really, people are just becoming a little sanguine about it.

I don't know.

What do you think?

Yeah, and I think the markets think by cutting deals and these tariffs will be lower than they look like they're going to be because they'll be carve outs.

And maybe that's right.

And look, we're a huge economy, trades only 12, 13% or something like that of GDP.

We can swallow some of this and take it, so to speak.

Stan Voyger, our friend, the AEI economist, pointed out to me, we were talking about this Thursday, Friday.

I was sort of thinking, well, shouldn't the tariffs be having more effect?

He said, no, they are having a considerable effect.

I think we'll get Wednesday second quarter GDP numbers, preliminary numbers on Wednesday.

So that will be interesting.

First quarter was mildly, slightly negative.

Second quarter, they think maybe two point something.

So that would average out to one and a half, let's just say.

We were growing 3% when Biden left.

And that was the prognosis for 2025.

People didn't think it was going to slow.

So I think we are, you know, one percentage point isn't, you know, the Great Depression.

It's not dramatic.

It's a lot of, it's a big difference, though, you know, if you go 2% to 3%

in the real world.

I mean, I kind of assume we end up paying more of a price for this than the markets now think, but obviously

I could easily be wrong.

The other point is, I mean, prices are going up on some items, though, a little more than mainstream world, than somehow the world is, I don't know, given that Biden paid such a huge price for 7, 8, 9% inflation in 2022, I believe, Chris Truax has this little piece, I think we'll have him morning shots tomorrow.

I think beef prices are up like, I don't know, more than 9% and hamburger steak and all this, just in the last six months under Trump's presidency.

One reason for that, I believe, is that some like insanely high percentage of the ground meat in the U.S.

is imported from Brazil.

It turns out I was not aware of this.

And we have big tariffs on Brazil because he doesn't like the fact that Bolsonaro is being tried.

So I don't know.

We're paying more for hamburgers and steak because Trump has this, he loves his fellow autocrat there in Brazil who tried to steal an election and is being tried according to the laws of Brazil.

I feel like some of that stuff has more potential than people realize.

Yeah, and it's narrow.

And the across the board kind of shock of the 8% or whatever it was during 2022, I think was like real because people are just getting hit all over the place in their life versus this is like certain, just certain products.

I don't know.

One of my, I don't know how many people are ordering sweaters from Europe, but one of of my buddies did forward me an email about a shocking tariff price that he received.

You know, do people actually vote on that or change their vote just because they ordered one thing and they're like, oh, oh, fuck, I had to pay 40 bucks on this that I didn't realize I had to pay something that I was ordering online.

But maybe, I don't know.

We're not really seeing it at this point.

But that is annoying if it starts to happen a lot, I guess.

Maybe one of those things, you're like, whatever.

But

if it starts to happen frequently, I do think that it could have an impact.

It's funny.

I heard a similar story about that.

Someone who, I guess, if you order online, it's not like you buy something at a store and the store has already paid the tariff and marked up your items.

So you can notice that your sweater is more expensive at whatever store you're going to, but it's, you know, literally pay the tariff yourself.

Whereas I guess you do online, it's just, it says, you know, an extra, for this case, it was like an extra $75 for the tariff for something from Canada.

So, yeah, that could add up a little bit, don't you?

I think.

God willing.

What the hell do I know?

I'm just a podcast host.

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I want to talk a little bit more about kind of the issues in Gaza and the hunger and the pictures that we've been seeing from there that are pretty striking.

Tomorrow with our guest who wrote about this recently, this is another just massive issue for Trump.

And in a weird way, it kind of

in a way that's a little awkward to talk about, frankly, it kind of intersects somewhat with the Epstein story because there is this populist right and left kind of anti-Israel that sometimes bleeds into anti-Semitism feeling.

And like that is like part of the Epstein controversy for some people.

And then some of them are very upset about what's happening in Israel.

I mean, we talk about how the bro podcasters are mad at him about the Epstein thing.

Most of those guys have spoken out on Gaza as well, too, right?

So in a way that's a little bit uncomfortable, there is kind of an overlap between the stories.

And Trump is like not in a good place in this.

So here's Trump this morning on this.

Like

there's, there's so much to talk about with this this quote.

It begins with a J.D.

Vance comment about what is happening to the people in Gaza.

We gave Gaza 60 million.

Nobody even said thank you.

Somebody should have said thank you.

And then there's a follow-up question for a reporter.

Netanyahu said there's no starvation in Gaza.

Do you agree with that assessment?

Trump, I don't know.

I mean, based on television, I would say not particularly because those children look very hungry.

A lot to talk about there, but I don't know.

What do you make of all that?

I mean, it's a good example.

I don't know what to make of it.

Again, we'll see what he does, if he does do anything.

It's been unclear

what the administration thinks and what the administration's policy is.

Trump's watching TV, I guess he doesn't have access to any intelligence reports or what's really happening there.

He doesn't have access to

actual proposals of what we could and couldn't do, what we could do with other international agencies.

This is one reason you sort of want to be, I would say, just from a political point of view, leaving aside what's happening in Gaza, what really, really could and should be done, which I think is slightly complicated, but I think it's bad.

I'm just going to say that, you know, and Israel has not behaved well in this circumstance, and has some real responsibility and accountability.

I mean, Biden got beat up from all sides, right?

He pulled Israel back at times.

The pro-Israel people didn't like him.

He let Israel do things at times.

Obviously, the pro-Palestinian people were annoyed at him.

So you could say he got the best of both the worlds.

Maybe Trump's smart to just kind of keep it weirdly at a distance.

But the other thing, one reason you want to be part of international organizations is you are doing things in concert with other nations.

And you can say, look, we've all decided that we're going to get this stuff in in this way, this food in this way.

We're working very closely with all of our partners.

Whereas Trump is Mr., you know, it's all about America.

We just do whatever we want on our own.

We hate all these international organizations.

We pulled out of half of them.

I don't know.

We're still in some of the food organizations.

We're not in the health organization, I don't think.

So it's sort of, okay, are you doing anything or not?

Now, I suppose from an America-first first point of view, not our problem, right?

Starvation happens in the world.

It's a tough world out there.

It happens in Africa.

It happens in Gaza.

And we're not in the business of being humanitarian, you know, goody-goodies.

But that's hard to sustain, I think, for an American president, even an alleged American first president.

And so, yeah, I don't know quite where it goes for him.

But the watching TV is a pretty astonishing line, right?

I mean, he's also in the UK.

Well, he's in Scotland, but he's in the UK, part of the UK, I guess, last I looked.

We're going to get in trouble with some British, some Britain bursters.

Yeah, but Starmer is going to have to raise it at the meeting.

Maybe they haven't, I think they haven't quite met yet.

And, you know, it's more of an issue there, honestly.

They've had big demonstrations and stuff.

So the watching TV, that's really unbelievable in a way.

I hadn't focused on that until you mentioned it.

U.S.

president.

It's just like it's idiocracy.

Like I'm getting that he's getting his news from cable TV.

He's like an old man that's just

watching his stories on TV and reacting rather than like a president who has real accountability and responsibility here, especially given how like he's closely he's tied himself to Netanyahu.

I know it is one of those things like they had any option.

To your point about the, from the American first perspective, and I think a decent number of people that voted for Trump thought this was what was going to happen.

Maybe that was wrong-headed, but like Trump's kind of weird, you know, jello-like sort of policy pronouncements on the Middle East like made like the pro-Israel people feel like he was on their side and like the right populists that want us to leave the region thought he was on their side.

So I guess kudos to him for that political maneuver.

But there's a decent chunk of people voted for him that thought that Trump was just going to kind of be like Homer Simpson going back into the bushes on the Middle East and just kind of like, you all do whatever you want.

That's not really our game.

I'll do economic deals with the, you know, Sharia oil oligarchs and Saudi and Qatar, you know, getting planes out of the deal, that sort of thing.

That's not what he's done.

And he's worked very closely with Israel on various things.

And so now just to be like, well, I'm watching TV, it doesn't really work as a whole, policy-wise.

All right.

Well, the one positive maybe, Trump development, I want to close on something positive.

How's that?

Does that sound nice?

No, it's bad.

That's bad.

But go ahead.

Yes, that.

It's positive both in the sense that Trump is being humiliated in this press conference with regards to his past comments on Putin.

So that's positive.

And it's positive in that he seems to be slightly continuing to move his policy slowly but surely.

He said this.

Putin goes out and starts launching rockets into some city like Kyiv and kills a lot of people in nursing homes or whatever.

I'm disappointed in Putin.

I'm going to reduce that 50 days that I gave him to a lesser number.

I'm going to make a new deadline of 10 or 12 days from today, about two weeks.

We just don't see any progress being made.

Any green shoot there for you, Bill Crystal?

I mean, it's better for the world and for the country and for Ukraine that Trump is

ambivalent or uncertain about Putin than he's 100% with him.

I mean, just as a practical matter, it increases perhaps the chances of that more aid for Ukraine, maybe for the sanctions bill, which I still notice hasn't been passed, and Trump still doesn't seem to quite be for, even though they keep talking about it.

So on the other hand, I mean, look, the best,

he's going to be president for three and a half years.

It's going to be bad.

It's going to be bad for the country and bad for the world.

The best we can hope for, honestly, is

inconstancy,

you know, lack of really throwing in with the bad guys and sort of only being with the bad guys one-third or one-half of the time and sometimes fearing against the bad bad guys because he gets annoyed at them and being sort of for the good guys and mostly not

really doing as much damage as he might otherwise do.

I guess we just have to,

we do have to hope for that.

It's for the sake of people around the world, obviously.

It's a weird thing, I've got to say, psychologically.

I've never had this experience with an American president.

I mean, there have been presidents I disagreed with a lot, you know, Obama's foreign policy at different times and stuff.

But then you sort of, Okay, I hope he changes his policy, or I hope Congress pressures him to change his policy, or I hope reality shows him that this policy was terrible, or minimally we could all agree that, I don't know, not enforcing the red line was terrible and the next president won't do it.

You know, you sort of have a way of handling a president you disagree with.

Here, one ends up rooting for a kind of less bad outcomes over the next three and a half years.

And so I hope

we act so that fewer people starve in Gaza.

And I hope we act in ways that increase the chances of peace, but I don't know.

It's hard.

On the other hand, you would like him to utterly fail.

I can give you Catholic dispensation on this.

Doesn't matter what you're rooting for.

It doesn't matter what I'm saying.

But I mean, in this case, obviously, he's just waiting.

It matters what you're saying, but it doesn't matter what I'm saying.

No, it doesn't matter what you say.

You know what I mean?

You being unhappy that Donald Trump is

doing something good

does not matter, actually, to the grand scheme of things.

So you can embrace that.

I'm not entirely mostly unhappy even.

But I would say, but just in terms of thinking about it, in the first term, one also could, in the first term of Trump, one could think, okay, I hope Mattis prevails on this.

Sure.

I hope Pompeo, I don't love, but whatever.

I hope he prevails on that.

Now you don't even have that, right?

It is a weird, it's a weird thing to follow, but it does, the more he's got a bunch of ridiculous sycophants working from, the more it's all on him.

I do think that's true.

Like on this one, maybe you would take the position of, you know, you know what?

It's very complicated.

The administration is working on it.

Our guy who's got the lead on this is, I don't know, Rubio or some deputy secretary of state or some.

National Security Council number three guy.

It doesn't have to be the number one guy, but someone, right?

And that gives you a little deflection.

It's all on Trump because it's all in his head, right?

Well, the one thing that just comes to mind, I'm trying to get a, um,

I have an American, America first kind of foreign policy guest in mind I want to kind of hash out a few things with because they're a little disappointed with Trump in various ways.

It does portray

just how bankrupt and how hard to execute that is.

Like, it sounds nice, like we're only going to care about ourselves, but just like listening to Trump tie himself into knots on the Middle East and on Russia.

I don't know.

We can maybe take some solace in that being revealed to be a very, a very shallow ideology that's hard to execute.

All right, Bill Crystal, that was wonderful.

Everybody, if you missed it on Friday, do stick around for Stacey Williams.

But if you caught that already, if you're just kind of a bulwark sicko listening to everything as soon as we post it, you can come on back tomorrow.

We got a great guest coming up.

We'll see you all then.

Thanks, Bill.

Thanks, Dick.

Bye, everybody.

Peace.

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Hey, everybody, Tim Miller from the Bullwark here.

And I'm grateful to be here with Stacey Williams, who last October, I guess, spoke out about an incident with Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump at the Trump.

hotel many years ago that I bet you wish you weren't talking about still.

Something that happened back in the 1990s, but I appreciate your courage in speaking out and coming here to talk about it a little bit.

Thanks.

Yeah, it's not a lot of fun,

contrary to what some folks say, but like I said, it's really important.

And I think also when I saw that Virginia died by suicide a few weeks ago, I thought, oh, you know, I can't just sit back.

Yeah, for people who don't know, Virginia was one of the Epstein accusers.

It almost feels a victims, I guess, would be a much more accurate term.

And

I mean, maybe

the most horrific of all of them i guess maybe not that's hard to you don't want to compare but i and her story was just particularly tragic yeah it was horrendous yeah well for people who don't know and aren't familiar let's just kind of contextualize what was happening here and then i want to talk in particular mostly to you about kind of what what victims and what other uh women in your shoes want out of this discussion about what what the government should be doing with regards to abstaining.

But to contextualize it, you were your swimsuit model in the 90s?

Is that right?

I think people call me that because I did the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue for like eight years and it was like some kind of record at the time.

But I did, you know, El Vogue, Grunway, everything.

I lived in Paris and New York.

I, you know, that's an important record.

Yeah, I guess.

Yeah.

I pretended as a, as a closeted gay, I pretended to like the swimsuit edition.

You know, I'd get it and, you know, sit around for a little while and, you know, I'd have it out in case no, so nobody had any questions.

But, you know, I didn't really linger.

So I don't, I don't recall, you know, your eight-year run.

Well, you know, what's funny is that I've met men over the years.

I mean, I guess we're of the, if we're Gen, I'm Gen X.

So, you know, there are men who I think who are Xers who couldn't come out.

And so many of them told me that I was their beard.

And I'm so truly, like, deeply honored.

They had posters, everything.

So

that's great.

That was, it's always been a great alliance.

That was Natalie Portman for me.

Thank you, Natalie.

Anyway, Stacey, the

how dare you?

Sorry.

Different elder millennial version.

Yeah.

So during that period, I guess you had a brief period where you were dating Jeffrey.

How did that even come to pass?

Like, and how long was it?

And, you know, what was just sort of the circumstance?

So I was introduced to Jeffrey by my agent at the time, Faith Cates, who owns Next Models.

Thanks for nothing, Faith.

You know, all those agencies, they, you know, they hosted a lot of dinners with models and powerful men.

And so

she got, you know, it was a night, she said, let's, you know, we're getting a group together for dinner on the Upper East Side.

And I went and Jeffrey was there.

And the interesting thing about Jeffrey, which is so funny, be like, well, you know, he's such a creep, obviously.

He's like the most renowned, you know, scumbag on the planet.

But at the time, he was one of the few men who just looked me in the eye and had a political conversation with me and didn't condescend.

And that's, I think, that's why, you know, I got interested in him and why, you know, we engaged and it went from there.

And then

kind of forgot about it, though, didn't exchange numbers or anything.

And a couple of months later, Donald Trump had, you know, he owned the plaza at one point, the hotel, and he was throwing a Christmas party

at the plaza.

And again, Faith said, you know, I think we had like three parties that night and we were just being festive and having fun getting dressed up for reasons other than being photographed and enjoying the season.

And we went to the plaza and, you know, Donald was there and he walked me over.

He's like, you know, Jeffrey, right?

And yeah.

So that's then at that moment, we we talked longer.

And I gave him my number and we dated after that for a few months.

You know, I was traveling.

I was very busy.

And

so it wasn't like, you know, we were seeing each other seriously for months.

I mean, it was a period of four months and I was traveling and it took a while to, for all the little data points to line up about how utterly batshit crazy everything was.

And then I was like, and then I was out.

You know, then I was like, yeah, I, I'm done.

This is insane.

The incident in question that you kind of spoke about last time was, I guess, during that three to four month period, Jeffrey took you to Trump's office.

And it's particularly noteworthy because it's a similar story to what Maria Farmer told to the FBI in 1996.

Like, so that would be then two years later, three years later.

She's underage at the time.

So even creepier and worse in a lot of ways.

But yeah, absolutely.

But it's interesting.

Like, it's sort of a corroborating type thing because the story is similar.

Like, I guess that he, you went by his office at Trump Tower.

So I don't know.

Talk about that.

Yeah.

We were taking a walk.

We met at, he was living in a brownstone on the Upper East Side.

I don't think it's the same one that got raided.

I don't know, but it was a very large, very fancy brownstone with butlers and multiple floors and everything.

And that's where we would meet.

And then we would take walks.

And

we were walking down Fifth Avenue one day and he said, you know, I'd already met Donald a couple of times over the years.

And he's like, oh, yeah, Donald keeps talking about you.

And let's stop by and say hi.

And then that's when the incident happened.

We went up and he groped me and Jeffrey and Donald kept talking while he groped me and I froze.

I was in shock.

And then Jeffrey got angry and berated me for allowing him to do it afterwards.

And it's a laugh because it's so insane.

Sorry.

And yeah.

And then, and it was not long after that that I, you know, I said, I can't, I can't do this.

In fact, I very, I said to him, I said, you need, you need to see a psychiatrist.

Something's seriously wrong with you.

He got angry at you.

To me, and again, who the hell knows people how to get inside the brains of somebody as sick as him?

But like, it does feel like, again, we get the other data point of where he brought Farmer there a couple years later, and then she ends up bringing that up to the FBI.

And like, the fact that he wasn't mad at Trump and that they continued to have a relationship, right?

And that he's mad at you, I kind of indicates that some, that there's some kind of, I don't, I don't know whether it was a game or some kind of whatever.

I don't know.

It felt like it.

Yeah, it felt like it.

I mean, I had detailed to Jeffrey

that I had a bit of a reputation in the industry for being combative in the industry with the predators that were in the industry as well as the guys on the streets.

And I mean, I have friends who have reached out to me and said, remember that time you like beat the shit out of that guy in Paris?

you know, and maced him or whatever.

It's like, you know,

I was in full combat mode in those days.

And so, and I had told that to Jeffrey.

I remember telling him that.

It was on my mind a lot because, you know, I was living in a war zone.

It was such a wild west, you know, back then, like 13-year-olds modeling, you know, there's like, you know, now, now you get booked for a job, you're 13 years old, and there's like a tutor on set and there's, you know, all kinds of oversight.

It was truly the wild west.

So,

so we were really unprotected.

And so he knew that.

I would download, I downloaded that to him.

And so I think he, and I could be wrong, but I think he was so angry because I was walked in.

I think he told Donald that, you know, I was one person who wasn't going to let him get away with the handsy stuff.

And I did because of the way, you know, like I said, everything he does is hidden in its brazenness, right?

So if I'd been in a dark alley.

And I had been in the past or a subway or something where someone's grabbing me or being inappropriate.

I fight back.

I get off the mace or whatever.

And I had some self-defense classes.

But, you know, in broad daylight with an assistant going back and forth, you're like, this can't be happening.

I mean, it's somewhat kitty Genovese-esque, right?

Which is,

yeah, it's relevant to that, where like, as long as everyone looks around and the room's filling with smoke and it's like, well, no, there's nothing, you know, no one's moving.

So everything must be okay.

It's akin to that.

So I froze.

And, and, and so that's why it felt like it was very much an arranged kind of situation and why Jeffrey got mad.

Who knows what, you know, whether it was a bet and he lost money.

I have no idea.

I don't know.

Hidden in his brazenness is very well put.

And it's like, I know it's his political strategy about a lot of his law

law breaking, but like, yeah, but also just like the access Hollywood tape.

And he admitted admitted, he tells you what the strategy, he says, I just, you know, gravel.

Ugh.

The interesting thing on the Trump side of it is just that like, it just, who knows if it's a game or whatever, but it shows a comfort and like a, some, a, some kind of, you know, tighten friendship romance, right, where they, where this kind of stuff happens, right?

And like, and that for Jeffrey to be mad at you, right, shows that like that in their relationship.

That type of behavior is accepted and common.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They were not mere acquaintances.

Yeah.

So to the Jeffrey side of it, all this stuff gets wrapped up in the politics.

Right.

And particularly now, and it's like, you know, why do people want to see?

So it so sucks.

Like, why do people want to see this?

It's like, not because they care.

You know, that's because they want accountability for the criminals.

Because there are other criminals besides Jeffrey Epstein and Jillian Maxwell here.

Yeah.

They're other perpetrators and collaborators.

So at some level, some people wanted that, but then it sort of gets warped and molded into, well, we want to see it because it might hurt so-and-so.

And we want to see see it because so from your perspective, like,

what do you want to see?

Right.

Like, what is, what would be the value of this?

Like, what would be useful?

So

one of the things that's been sort of nagging is that there was a point, and this was kind of like the very end for me when I stopped dating Jeffrey, when he looked at me and said,

I have,

you know, video of you undressing in a bedroom in the Brownstone.

And it's, it was something along the lines of it's the most beautiful thing I own, or it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

And

that just,

you know, that was when there were, I mean, being groped, you know, being led into Donald's office to be groped by him was bad enough.

And I probably was young enough and confused enough, or maybe I was still questioning.

But when he said to me, I have video of you undressed in a bedroom in my house, and it's my, I was, I, I just, it was so so creepy and so dark.

And so,

you know, I've wondered ever since, where is that video?

Was he lying?

Does it exist?

I know everyone's very focused on lists, right?

You know, where are the lists?

But my question is, you know, what's in all those files that the government has, the DOJ has, and, you know, is there video of me?

I'd like to know if it exists.

I think I speak for all the other, you know, victims who have come forward and wonder if there's video of them.

I think we'd like to know absolutely there's no video or there is and this is where it is.

You know, we just want more answers to have that just floating out there.

And then when I saw Alan Dershowitz's piece about how, no, no, no, there were just, you know, videos for security reasons.

I thought, well, that completely flies in the face of what Jeffrey said to me.

That doesn't line up.

So I have a lot of questions and I'm sure, you know, the other the other victims too.

So I do believe that the government owes all of us some facts and confirmation that videos exist.

I mean, I certainly wouldn't want any victims exposed if there's video of them being abused.

But we need to get beyond the list, I think, and we need to hear about those videos.

I want to know.

I mean, for closure purposes, just like, you know, and yes.

Yes.

Well, I mean, like, you know, there were, there are these, you know, horrible acts perpetrated on women and girls.

The government's interviewing the trafficker.

I'm like,

the government is interviewing a trafficker.

Maybe cutting a deal.

Maybe cutting a deal.

Who knows?

But, you know, I think like there is nothing transparent about this.

And we'd like some more transparency as victims.

And the government owes us that.

What is the Department of Justice for?

The word justice means you don't interview the trafficker, you interview the victims, right?

Or be honest with the victims.

Justice for the people, not for Donald Trump, right?

Yeah, top watches and his personal lawyer.

And pedophiles are, you know, people who are doing terrible things to women and girls.

Yeah.

On the videos, just one more kind of point about this, because something I've been thinking about lately is that you mentioned that Dershowitz's explanation is it's security footage, right?

Well, Vance, it's a private conversation.

So some a MAGA podcaster said this, but he said they had dinner together.

There's no reason to believe he'd be making this up.

And he said that he asked Vance about the videos, and that Vance says that it's commercial porn, that they don't, they don't have actually private secret videos.

And it's like, okay, I don't, who the hell knows?

I don't, I don't know.

And that seems extremely unlikely that Jeffrey Epstein, who is committing hundreds of sex crimes and had lots of video cameras in his house, wanted commercial porn instead.

But I like,

who the hell knows with this guy?

But you know, it shows that they're telling all these different stories, and there's no like transparency about

what the truth is with either the public or the victims.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's awful.

I agree.

And there are a lot of victims, right?

I mean, I don't understand it.

And as for the Vance quote, I mean,

it wouldn't surprise me if there was, if he had everything, you know, he had a collection of everything.

We just want answers.

There's no transparency.

There's none.

And again, to go, to think that you're going to clear all this up by interviewing the trafficker, the convicted trafficker, that's the solution.

Are you kidding me?

You have to laugh at this.

Just before we sat down, she said that she has information, that she's given them information on 100 people.

And I don't know, you know, okay, there certainly are a lot more collaborators out there and co-conspirators, but like, I would think, yeah.

But what would be the deal?

Like,

but there can't be any deal for Jelene Maxwell.

I mean, this was the person that was the ringleader of all of it.

So that's not justice.

One would think, but, you know, we are so far past,

I mean, like truth.

We're so post-truth and everything is so, you know, we're in the upside down.

So, I mean, nothing would surprise me, but that would be truly horrific.

I can't imagine anyone could stomach her getting out.

But, you know, we'll see.

All of us still need transparency.

And if there are videos, you know, as per what Jeffrey said to me, I want to know.

There's two other random things that come to mind.

I'm just curious.

So like you,

you came out, you talked about this, I guess, the first last year before the election.

Was it, yeah, I mean, at that point, you could have just

wanted to move on with your life.

And what was there something in particular that prompted it or that made you feel like you needed to say something?

Yeah, the possibility of him winning.

I don't want the guy who sexually assaulted me in the White House.

And I know that, you know, his

campaign tried to spin it as, you know, oh, you know, a week or so before the election.

And, you know, just to be clear as to how that happened, I am in a documentary that is out on the, on the, on the festival circuit right now about, you know, the woman who founded the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and how she, it's, it's actually a feminist story, believe it or not.

It's a fantastic film.

It's called Beyond the Gaze about how she was treated as the first female editor at Sports Illustrated and that old boys club and how many glass ceilings she broke.

And then when she had like literally saved the magazine, she

went to her boss and asked for a raise because she couldn't afford child care.

And he said, you have a husband.

You don't need a raise.

And she, you know, at one point, that was when I was doing it.

I did it, I guess, eight years in a row.

That was the most, at the time, that was the most lucrative brand in publishing history.

I think it was the first time anyone could charge $2 million per advertising page.

It was at its peak, right?

Wow.

So that's the story of the documentary.

So I got to know this crew that, you know, I shot with them constantly and we had a conversation.

And it was the first time I felt comfortable enough to disclose what had happened.

And then it took two years to edit.

It was only supposed to take a year, but that's how, you know, the filmmaking goes.

And cut to the premiere is a week before the election.

And I had to let lawyers know and everything.

I said, look, you know, this is coming out.

They left this in where I say what did.

And we're a week before the election.

Oh, it's in the dock.

It's in the dock.

And that's the first time I ever publicly disclosed.

That's how I ended up, you know, doing all the media and everything right before the election because I thought, you know, to have it out there hanging without any context a week before the election, like I need to

get a handle on this and

talk to people and everything.

So that's how that happened.

But then, you know, the timing of it looked to the conspiracy, conspiracist-minded, looked like it was set up to happen right before the election or something.

So, yeah, that's how I decided, you know, people had urged me to do it for years.

They said at the very least, and I have other friends who are victims and who haven't come forward and some who have.

And we all talk about it.

Victims of Trump or other people.

Other

people in the industry.

A lot of them are out there, very public about it.

Some aren't.

And so, you know, so many have come forward since me, too.

And I have always been uncomfortable about doing it.

I chose to become anonymous and disappear and go into a different space once I was done with my modeling career.

I didn't, I turned down reality and television movies and all that stuff.

And my

underground, became a low, I became a low-level Gray Davis appointee when I was 26.

I'm like, I had a totally different, I had started volunteer, completely different path in life.

And so, and I love my private, quiet, you know, as my friends call it, your old spinster life.

Yeah.

So, so,

but I, I decided it was time I felt comfortable enough.

And then I let him, and then it just blew up.

And, and then I realized that it was really important for me to do.

So crazy.

I know.

I just, I feel bad for all of you.

And I talked to Gene about this and other victims, but going back to 2016, right?

There were a bunch of folks that came out after Access Hollywood.

And it's like, to come out like that, then have like it almost, it isn't, but I could see how it might feel like it's like the American people are like rendering a judgment on your story.

Like, we don't care, basically, you know?

Yeah.

And that's so tough.

Yeah.

I think.

I just can't imagine.

Oh, it's really tough.

I mean, I had actual family members who are QA honors because I'm from rural PA, remember.

So I had actual family members yell at me and call me bitter.

And it's, it's been brutal.

I mean, it's just, this country's been savaged.

It's just, it doesn't look like there's any end in sight.

And it's deeply personal for all of us who, you know, went through it.

So I appreciate you coming out.

I'd be remiss if I didn't just ask you because that's just curiosity killed the cat.

And I'm, I can't, how do you think he had all that money, Jeffrey?

And you were with him for three or four months, but do you have any, did he, did he talk to you about that?

Do you have any theories of the case?

Like where his money came from?

It was always so vague.

You know, it was like, I never asked him directly.

I mean, look, I was around

Saudi prince, you know, I mean, the access, the access that you have as a young like teenager because you're this biological accident is absurd when you think about it, right?

Like I'm in the back rooms with politicians and billionaires and Saudi princes and everything simply because my parents had sex one night.

It's so ridiculous.

And so it was the norm that I'd be around wealthy, powerful men.

His was always a lot more confusing because that, you know, that was a lot of wealth.

And I still don't understand it.

I don't, that's another thing that would be nice.

I think Senator, the senator from Oregon is looking into.

Yeah, yeah.

And I would also say that, you you know, Adam Davidson, who I got to know through his podcast years ago, was a fantastic journalist.

I think, you know, he actually has written about some of the, linked up some of the money stuff.

But yeah, I don't, I have no idea.

I wish I knew.

I think we all need a lot of answers.

We do indeed.

All right.

Well, thank you, Stacey, so much for talking about this.

I appreciate it.

We didn't know each other before this, but I've been mentioning you this week.

Thanks for getting texts.

Okay, good.

Well, thank you.

My friends.

Yeah, everyone everyone loves you.

Well, well, good.

I appreciate that.

And I appreciate that.

Um, that uh, when I got a text from your uh, for your PR person, they're like, See, and I was like, Oh, I hope everything I've been saying is right.

You know, I didn't want to get in trouble.

But I kept going,

yeah, I kept being in the media, and people would be like, Well, just because his name is on the list doesn't mean he did anything wrong.

They're like, What are you talking about?

Like, many women have said that he sexually harassed or assaulted them, and specifically within the context of Epstein, women have, and you know, including yourself.

So, I mean, it's it's just an important distinction.

Yeah.

No, I really appreciated that.

Yeah.

You feel like, you know, I feel like, you know, you feel like you're screaming into the void sometimes.

And the fact when this, this, you know, this happened, it blew up a little bit around the election and then it was quiet.

And then once this started heating up again the last few weeks, again, like you said, everyone's like, well, just because they were in a photo.

I'm like, what?

What?

Why did I get an ulcer in November?

What a crazy story.

So, yeah, thank you.

I appreciate it, really.

And it's true.

There are a bunch of us.

And, you know, like, I feel like, you know, people say this, but for everyone that comes forward, like, you know, it makes someone else feel comfortable to come, you know, enough to come forward.

So that's a good thing.

So thank you.

Thank you, Nell.

Real, honestly.

I'm doing nothing.

I'm just flapping my jaw.

Thank you very much.

Really appreciate you.

And everybody else, thank you for joining us on the feed.

Subscribe.

We'll be talking to you all soon.

Peace.

notice.

And I am catching up, and I am seeing red.

However, I prove I'm right and raise it overhead.

I never promised you anything I couldn't do.

We try to bury it and rise above,

bury it and rise above you, yeah.

You never promised me, you see differently.

Bury it and rise above,

bury it and rise above you, you.

We bury it, bury it, bury it, and rise above.

We bury it, bury it, bury it, and rise above.

Reaching, reaching for, reaching for my resistance.

Nobody, nobody, nobody sees it at a distance.

And I am catching up, up, and I am seeing red.

How about I throw my weight and raise it overhead?

I never promised you anything I couldn't do.

We try to bury it and rise above,

bury it and rise above.

You, you, you, you.

You never promised me,

you can see it differently.

Bury it and rise above,

bury it and rise above.

You, you.

We bury it, bury it, bury it, and rise above.

You bury it, bury it, bury it, and rise above.

You bury it, bury it, bury it, and rise above.

You bury it, bury it, bury it, and rise above.

The Board Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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