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Wednesday, March 25, 2026
Honoring Brandy Vaughan's Birthday
Monday, February 23, 2026
Can social media age verification really protect kids?
As countries start enforcing new age-limit laws, platforms like Roblox use facial technology — but critics warn of privacy leaks and surveillance.
- Governments worldwide are requiring social media platforms to check the age of young users.
- Age verification methods are often inaccurate, and can easily be bypassed with VPNs and fake IDs.
- Age checks can compromise user privacy, increase surveillance, and exclude marginalized users.
Can social media age verification really protect kids?
Fourteen-year-old Carolina has been on Roblox since she was 10, chatting and playing with other gamers on the platform. When the site rolled out mandatory age checks at the start of the year, Carolina was afraid she would lose access to some of her friends and group chats. She needn’t have worried — the software determined she was 16 or 17.
“Without any makeup, I did what the app asked: turned my head this way and that for the photo,” Carolina, who lives in São Paulo, told Rest of World. “The app said I was 16 to 17 years old. I was able to go back to my chats.”
Roblox is among the growing number of social media platforms installing age checks as governments around the world act to keep young users off social media sites and limit their access to content deemed inappropriate. The most commonly used methods include verification with a government-issued identity; estimation through biometrics such as facial recognition; and inferring the age of the user from their online behavior.
The methods are not foolproof. Facial recognition technology is known to be less accurate for women and people of color. On Roblox, the age check is meant to restrict who users can chat with. The 16 to 17 age group, which Carolina was assessed as belonging to, can chat with users in their group, as well as the ones immediately above and below theirs, or those in the 13–15 and 18–20 age groups. Being able to chat with older users exposes her to the risk of harassment and abuse — something California-based Roblox has come under scrutiny for. Of its more than 100 million daily users, nearly 40% are under the age of 13, some estimates show.
As a new child safety law comes into effect in Brazil from March, requiring platforms providing gambling, pornography, and other such content to verify ages, users are learning to circumvent the tech, Simone Lahorgue Nunes, founding partner at law firm Lahorgue Advogadas Associadas in Rio de Janeiro, told Rest of World.
“Age-verification technologies are not infallible,” she said. “Minors are using increasingly sophisticated techniques, including VPNs [virtual private networks] and AI-generated deepfakes or selfies. Conversely, overly stringent measures may drive underage users toward the dark web or services hosted in so-called digital havens, thereby exacerbating the very risks such regulation seeks to mitigate.”
Circumventing age verification doesn’t even need much sophistication. In a subreddit on bypassing the Roblox checks, users recommend fake IDs and AI-generated photos. “I used a fake ID of [Joseph] Stalin and it got accepted,” one user wrote. Another user posted a video on X that showed a crude face painted on a thumb going through the age check on Roblox and being assessed to be 13 to 15 years old.
The age check process “is designed for accuracy,” Roblox said in the statement announcing the rollout. The technology has been “tested and certified by third-party laboratories,” and the company constantly evaluates user behavior to determine if someone is “significantly older or younger than expected,” it said. TikTok’s new age checks use a combination of profile data, content analysis, and behavior to infer whether an account belongs to an underage user.
Since Australia last year barred those under 16 years from social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok, at least a dozen countries including Malaysia, Spain, France, and the U.K. have said they are planning similar rules. The chief economic adviser in India, one of the biggest markets for social media companies, has also made a recommendation for such a law.
With the focus on technology, there isn’t enough discussion around how these measures can disproportionately harm minorities and others who lack documentation or prefer anonymity online, Shivangi Narayan, who teaches sociology at the Thapar School of Liberal Arts and Sciences in Patiala, India, told Rest of World.
“Age verification would end anonymous accounts and anonymity on the internet as we know it,” Narayan said. “It is a potent tool to kill dissent and end the last vestige of protection that a lot of marginalized identities have online — people who cannot express themselves fully on social media because they could be harassed, trolled, become a victim of hate speech or in extreme circumstances, even killed.”
Privacy campaigners are also worried that the identification documents and biometric data used to determine a user’s age could be compromised, exploited, sold, or used for surveillance.
Last year, San Francisco-based Discord said the government photo IDs of about 70,000 users worldwide had been exposed through a third-party vendor. The compromised data included their names, email addresses, contact information, and payment history. Earlier this month, Discord — with over 200 million monthly active users — said it was rolling out “enhanced teen safety features” for users over the age of 13. These include deleting identity documents submitted for verification “quickly — in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.”
Some countries are opting for their own age verification systems rather than U.S.-based Jumio or Yoti from the U.K. Malaysia has its own technology, and Brazil plans to build one. India’s Signzy and Accura Scan have several global clients.
The focus on age checks diverts attention away from the more pressing concerns around social media platforms, Apar Gupta, founder-director of Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights organization in India, told Rest of World.
“Effective child safety online doesn’t require identifying every internet user,” he said. “Platform design choices around recommendation algorithms, data harvesting practices, and addictive features cause far more harm than anonymous access to information.”
In Malaysia, where the government has said it will soon introduce a law to restrict under-16s from accessing social media platforms, long-time Discord user Adam is concerned about the security of its facial recognition requirement, he told Rest of World.
“If your face is compromised, you can’t replace it,” the 17-year-old said. “Imagine having your biometric identity exposed forever.”
Does social media ban under 16 work?
Does social media ban under 16 work?
Australia recently became the first country to ban social media use for children under 16, a landmark policy aimed at protecting kids from mental health risks, cyberbullying, and harmful or addictive content.
Earlier this month, my WhatsApp groups and dinner table conversations in Bengaluru quickly turned to whether India should do the same after a horrific event. According to preliminary police reports, three young sisters — just 12, 14, and 16 years old — died by suicide following a parental dispute over access to a mobile phone.
As a parent, I’m deeply worried about the harm that social media can cause to children. As a journalist who has monitored the effects — and inefficiencies — of tech-related bans, I’m also skeptical of how far such measures can go in keeping children safe.
Increasingly, my larger question is: Why does the burden of “fixing” social media fall on children and parents instead of on the companies designing these systems?
Tech lawyer Apar Gupta captured this tension well: “Beneath the fury lies a dangerous impulse: to solve a complex problem with a blunt instrument that absolves platforms of accountability while stripping young people of their digital rights.”
That line stays with me because I cannot comprehend why policymaking isn’t more focused on holding Big Tech accountable. Companies that make billions from young users — and constantly promote how advanced their AI systems are — surely have the technical capacity to design safer feeds, stronger age protections, and less addictive algorithms.
If AI can recommend the next video with eerie precision, why can’t it flag grooming patterns, throttle harmful content spirals, or detect when a teenager is in distress?
Early signals from Australia surface the limits and frustrations. A recent survey found that only 6% of Australians believe online spaces are safer and more age-appropriate since the ban. And many expect young users to simply find ways around the restrictions.
I phoned an old school friend in Sydney to ask how the ban is unfolding in real life. Her children, aged 10 and 12, are still below the social media threshold, but her teenage nephew had to quit Snapchat after the rules took effect. He and his friends quickly improvised.
“They are using WhatsApp groups like Snapchat,” she told me. Unable to maintain streaks on the social media platform, they now exchange daily photos and videos in WhatsApp group chats to keep their record of consecutive days alive.
My friend found other virtual spaces to worry about, too. She said her own children play multiplayer online games like Fortnite and Roblox, where a large number of anonymous players interact simultaneously in shared virtual worlds. These games have become hunting grounds for pedophiles and other criminals in recent years, leading to lawsuits, investigations, and arrests.
Is a ban on children playing in our future?
Social media today is more than dance videos and memes. For many people, it’s the primary source of news, community, and information. For some, it’s also a source of livelihood. Restricting access comes with trade-offs.
The harder — and more necessary — conversation is this: Instead of repeatedly fretting over how to keep children away from platforms, we should be demanding safer platforms.
Until companies are required to redesign systems that reward outrage, addiction, and endless engagement, bans risk becoming a cycle of ineffective whack-a-mole.
Surely, the real test of policymaking isn’t how effectively it can block apps — it’s how it pushes the world’s most powerful tech firms to build better ones. -Itika Sharma Punit, Deputy Editor, https://restofworld.org
Saturday, February 21, 2026
US on the brink of a major new war !
Eight months after Trump insisted that Operation Midnight Hammer "totally obliterated" Iran's nuclear program, he has deployed the largest military presence in the Middle East since the Iraq War.
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President Trump has spent two months ordering a rapidly expanding and now-massive military buildup near Iran, with a focus on the Persian Gulf and nearby permanent U.S. military bases in close proximity to Iran (Iran, of course, has no military bases anywhere near the U.S.). The deployment includes aircraft carriers and other assets that would enable, at a minimum, an extremely destructive air campaign against the whole country.
The U.S. under both parties has been insisting for two decades that it must abandon its heavy military involvement in the Middle East and instead “pivot to Asia” in light of a rapidly rising China. Yet in the midst of those vows, Trump has now assembled the largest military presence in the Middle East since 2003, when the U.S. was preparing to invade Iraq with overwhelming military force.
One of the most striking and alarming aspects of all of this is that Trump — outside of a few off-the-cuff banalities — has barely attempted to offer a case to the American public as to why such a major new war is necessary. This unilateral march to war resembles what we saw in the lead-up to the bombing of Venezuelan boats, culminating in the U.S. invading force that abducted (“arrested”) the country’s President, Nicolas Maduro, and took him and his wife to a prison in New York.
In the weeks preceding the Venezuela operation, we heard a carousel of rationales. It was all necessary to stop the flow of dangerous drugs into the U.S. We needed to free the repressed Venezuelan peoples from their dictator. Trump’s embrace and expansion of the Monroe Doctrine — now dubbed the Donroe Doctrine — meant that we cannot tolerate communist regimes in “our region.”
But as soon as Maduro was removed, all of those claims disappeared. Contrary to the expectations of many, the U.S. left in place Maduro’s entire regime rather than replacing it with the pro-US opposition (a wise move of restraint in my view, but one that negates the “liberation” rhetoric). Discussions of the drug trade from Venezuela (a source of drugs for the U.S. that was always minor if not trivial, and did not include fentanyl) have completely disappeared. The only real outcome seems to be that the U.S. has more control over that nation’s oil supply, and barrels of it are now being shipped to Israel for the first time in many years.
In sum, we were given a low-effort smorgasbord to enable supporters of Trump’s actions toward Venezuela to mount arguments in favor of the operation, but there was no systematic attempt to convince the country at large. There was not even a live television address to the nation beforehand to explain it. And the role that Congress played was close to non-existent. All of that is similar to what we are seeing now concerning a far riskier, more dangerous, and complex war with Iran.
This massive build-up near Iran also signifies the U.S.’s complete inability — or lack of desire — to extricate itself from the Middle East and endless American wars there. In the first year of his second term — 2025 — Trump has already ordered sustained bombing of Yemen; extensive military deployments to support Israel’s attacks on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen; and Operation Midnight Hammer, which was sold to Trump’s base as a one-night-only bombing run that is now close to exploding into something far more protracted.
No matter how fast China’s power grows, the U.S. — despite emphasizing the vital importance of doing so over the last four administrations — simply cannot or will not reduce its massive military commitment to the Middle East. The real reasons why the U.S. does not sharply deprioritize the Middle East as a military focus deserve serious examination (oil is often cited as the reason, but the U.S. is a net exporter of oil, and multiple oil-rich countries in that region are perfectly eager to sell the U.S. as much oil as it wants to buy).
In this regard, it is hard not to notice that Trump’s very rapid movement toward war with Iran comes in the midst of yet another visit to the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is not hyperbole to say that Netanyahu’s great dream for decades has been inducing the U.S. into a regime-change war with Iran to rid Tel Aviv of its most formidable adversary, and his dream is closer than ever to being realized.
There is no way to minimize the gravity of the moment. Trump himself has made clear that this huge armada on its way to Iran — far larger than the one deployed to Venezuela — is not for show. He has spent many weeks ratcheting up his war rhetoric. Trump’s public posture is ostensibly one of deterrence: he proclaims that his overarching desire is to strike “a deal” with Tehran in order to avoid the need for war, but he then quickly adds that the US will impose massive damage and violence on the country in the event that negotiations fail to produce the agreement he wants. In sum, he depicts threats of war as motivation for Iran to accept his terms.
That may seem to be a cogent theory of deterrence (or extortion) if one looks at it in isolation. Many world leaders, in general, and Trump, especially, believe that threats of war and military attack are often necessary for extracting the best diplomatic solution possible. But thus far, it has not averted wars.
One reason this tactic is losing efficacy is that it has lost its credibility. As I documented in my report last Tuesday, Trump’s words and actions about the current situation with Iran track almost completely his actions and words which preceded Israel’s surprise attack on Iran in June and the accompanying U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Up until the hours before Israel started a war with Iran by bombing Tehran in June, Trump was repeatedly trumpeting how great negotiations with Tehran were going, and he predicted with great confidence that all issues would be resolved without the need for military action against Iran. Central to this scheme was the Israeli “reporter” for Axios, Barak Ravid, who — before his overnight ascension to key reporter in the US for all matters Israel — served in Israel’s notorious Unit 8200 military intelligence unit as well as the IDF Reserves until 2024. This former IDF soldier, from his key perch at Axios and CNN, continuously circulated reports based on anonymous sources in both governments announcing a growing and virulent “rift” between the two leaders, all due to Trump’s refusal to allow Netanyahu to bomb Iran.
That public theater, by design, created the impression that a U.S. or Israeli military attack on Iran was highly unlikely because of how opposed Trump was to it. And that, in turn, manipulated Iran out of adopting a posture of maximum war readiness, given their belief in the sincerity of Trump’s assurances that a deal would be made.
But in the midst of all that, Israel suddenly launched a major attack on Iran, only to have the U.S. join in, with Trump eventually taking credit for all of it. This — quite understandably — created a global perception that Trump’s diplomatic conduct and statements, amplified by Ravid, were an obvious ruse to lure Iran into a false sense of security, so that Israel and the U.S. could attack Iran without much resistance.
When the Israeli attack on Iran was touted in Western media as a success, Trump instantly proclaimed that he and Netanyahu planned it together. He heralded Netanyahu (and implicitly himself) as a “war hero” and, on that basis, demanded that the Israeli president pardon Netanyahu on pending corruption charges.
When journalists asked Trump why the U.S. would not simply be in the exact same situation months from now, when Iran began rebuilding its nuclear program, Trump insisted that it would and never could happen. The U.S. “totally and completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, he insisted, and Iran learned its lesson and knows not to try to rebuild.
Yet here we are just eight months later, seemingly closer to a full-on war with Iran than ever before. “Trump appears ready to attack Iran as U.S. strike force takes shape,” reads the headline in The Washington Post on Friday morning. The paper cites “current and former U.S. officials” as saying that “the Trump administration appears ready to launch an extended military assault on Iran.” While such a war is not yet inevitable, it is clear that the probability increases each day with more and more military assets arriving. That the U.K. is thus far refusing to allow the U.S. to use its military base in Diego Garcia as a launching ground for air attacks is proof that the U.S. is, at the very least, in serious, high-level preparation stages.
The obvious, most pressing question — the key question for any war, but especially for this one — is why? In order to have the U.S. once again militarily attack a country and risk a major war, one expects that the American President would provide clear, consistent, and compelling evidence as to why this war is necessary to protect the interests of the U.S. and the security of the American people. The Bush 43 administration spent a full year starting in 2002 toward laying the groundwork to convince Americans of the need to invade Iraq, and though it was filled with falsehoods and deceit, that is the sort of campaign that generally accompanies an attempt to bring the country into a major new war.
But none of that is happening: at all. The U.S. has inexorably moved toward a war with Iran with stunningly little public debate or discussion. If you ask 10 different Trump supporters, or even 10 different Trump White House officials, why the U.S. should be aggressively menacing Iran with full-scale war, you will hear 10 different answers. There is not even a pretense of involving Congress, and the Democratic Party is in its usual state of worthless passivity. And the more one looks for such answers about why this war is even arguably necessary, the more difficult it is to find them.
The pretext used for the last U.S. bombing attack on Iran — namely, we have to stop their nuclear program — was never remotely persuasive for reasons we and others extensively documented. But whatever is true about the past, that pretext is less valid now than ever. Trump’s vehement insistence that the U.S. “completely obliterated” the only nuclear facilities Iran possesses renders that excuse inoperable. How could Iran possibly be close to developing a nuclear weapon if Trump’s boastful claims are even remotely true?
Then there is the “war justification” based on Iran’s recent, violent treatment of its domestic dissidents and protesters. I am almost reluctant to critically evaluate this claim, because it genuinely shocks me each time I learn that there really still are sentient human beings living on this planet who earnestly believe that U.S. foreign policy is based on a desire to liberate the world’s oppressed peoples and give them freedom and democracy. All presidents since the end of World War II have proven that “human rights concerns” or “a desire to liberate people” can often serve as the propagandistic pretext for war or a coup, but are never the actual motive for U.S. military action.
That many people continue to believe this self-serving fairy tale about U.S. foreign policy no matter how much negating proof they see — the U.S. propping up the world’s most savage and repressive tyrannies (such as in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Uganda); the fact that the CIA has far more often overthrown democratically elected governments and replaced them with vicious dictatorships rather than the other way around; that “human rights concerns” find a mainstream platform in the U.S. only for countries that are adversaries but rarely for countries that are close U.S. allies — leads me to accept the futility of any efforts at dissuasion for people who somehow still believe in this mythology.
In fact, Trump’s own 2025 national security strategy released in December explicitly states that the U.S. is not going to attempt to stop repression in other countries or lecture them about the need for democratic and human rights reforms, but instead will deal with such countries as they are (that policy was designed to justify Trump’s close relationship with Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, Egyptian and Jordanian tyrants but the principle applies to Iran as well, which is at most as repressive and in fact mildly less so than those close U.S. allies).
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The willingness of the U.S. to embrace and even support the world’s most savage regimes has, in fact, been the staple of U.S. foreign policy since at least the end of World War II; Trump, I guess to his credit, is the first to candidly admit and describe that reality.
Then we arrive at the final stated justification for a U.S. war against Iran: namely, Iran’s refusal to give up conventional weapons such as the ballistic missiles it used to impose serious damage to Israel in retaliation for Israel’s surprise attack on Iran. These ballistic missiles do not have the range to reach the U.S. Even if they did, Iran has never shown any propensity for militarily attacking the U.S. homeland, given its knowledge of what would ensue.
Moreover, every country has a legal right to build up a conventional arsenal: most countries in the world, including U.S. adversaries, do exactly that. And few countries have more justification for wanting such weapons than Iran, which has not only been repeatedly threatened with war by the most powerful country on earth, and the most powerful country in the region, but both of those countries have attacked Iran in multiple ways over the last two decades. Any minimally responsible leader of any country would, of course, want normal conventional weapons such as mid-range ballistic missiles to provide a deterrent threat against adversaries such as Israel from attacking it on a whim.
If the U.S. goes to war against Iran because of its refusal to destroy or severely limit its ballistic missiles — weapons that can threaten Israel and U.S. forces deployed near Iran to protect Israel, but not reach the U.S. homeland — then that will be one of the clearest signs yet (for those who still harbor doubts) that the U.S. is fighting wars and putting American soldiers at risk in order to advance Israel’s interests in the Middle East.
There is a reason that Netanyahu has visited Trump in the White House seven times in the last year, more than any other world leader by far. It is not because Netanyahu (or Trump’s fanatical top billionaire funder, the Israeli-American Miriam Adelson, whom Trump has suggested cares more about Israel than the U.S.) has suddenly developed a keen interest in building Trump’s “Board of Peace” to spread harmony in the world.
Each time Netanyahu visits, the U.S. finds itself in conflict, if not outright war, with Israel’s enemies. One can dismiss that as a coincidence if one likes, but I defy anyone to find a more likely reason as to why Trump — who built his movement on a vow to end Endless War as the defining dogma of the bipartisan DC swamp, yet is now clearly captive to powerful Israeli power centers — is on the verge of yet another new war with Israel’s enemies.
Thursday, February 19, 2026
Secret US government surveillance sounds new alarm
Senator, who has repeatedly warned about secret US government surveillance, sounds new alarm over ‘CIA activities’
Zack Whittaker
Feb 6, 2026
A senior Democratic lawmaker with knowledge of some of the U.S. government’s most secretive operations has said he has “deep concerns” about certain activities by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The two-line letter written by Sen. Ron Wyden, the longest serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, does not disclose the nature of the CIA’s activities or the senator’s specific concerns. But the letter follows a pattern in recent years in which Wyden has publicly hinted at wrongdoing or illegality within the federal government, sometimes referred to as the “Wyden siren.”
In a statement (via the Wall Street Journal’s Dustin Volz), the CIA said it was “ironic but unsurprising that Senator Wyden is unhappy,” calling it a “badge of honor.”
When reached by TechCrunch, a spokesperson for Wyden’s staff was unable to comment, as the matter was classified.
Tasked with oversight of the intelligence community, Wyden is one of a few lawmakers who is allowed to read highly classified information about ongoing government surveillance, including cyber and other intelligence operations. But as the programs are highly secretive, Wyden is barred from sharing details of what he knows with anyone else, including most other lawmakers, except for a handful of Senate staff with security clearance.
As such, Wyden, a known privacy hawk, has become one of the few key members of Congress whose rare but outspoken words on intelligence and surveillance matters are closely watched by civil liberties groups.
Over the past few years, Wyden has subtly sounded the alarm on several occasions in which he has construed a secret ruling or intelligence gathering method as unlawful or unconstitutional.
In 2011, Wyden said that the U.S. government was relying on a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act, which he said — without disclosing the nature of his concerns — created a “gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says.”
Two years later, then-NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency was relying on its secret interpretation of the Patriot Act to force U.S. phone companies, including Verizon, to turn over the call records of hundreds of millions of Americans on an ongoing basis.
Since then, Wyden has sounded the alarm on how the U.S. government collects the contents of people’s communications; revealed that the Justice Department barred Apple and Google from disclosing that federal authorities had been secretly demanding the contents of their customers’ push notifications; and said that an unclassified report that CISA has refused to release contains “shocking details” about national security threats facing U.S. phone companies.
As noted by Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, we may not know yet why Wyden sounded the siren about the CIA’s activities, but every time Wyden has warned, he has also been vindicated.
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
The Blackmail of Billionaire Leon Black and Epstein's Role
Black's downfall — despite paying tens of millions in extortion demands — illustrates how potent and valuable intimate secrets are in Epstein's world of oligarchs and billionaires.
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One of the towering questions hovering over the Epstein saga was whether the illicit sexual activities of the world’s most powerful people were used as blackmail by Epstein or by intelligence agencies with whom (or for whom) he worked. The Trump administration now insists that no such blackmail occurred.
Top law enforcement officials in the Trump administration — such as Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino — spent years vehemently denouncing the Biden administration for hiding Epstein’s “client list,” as well as concealing details about Epstein’s global blackmail operations. Yet last June, these exact same officials suddenly announced, in the words of their joint DOJ-FBI statement, that their “exhaustive review” found no “client list” nor any “credible evidence … that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.” They also assured the public that they were certain, beyond any doubt, that Epstein killed himself.
There are still many files that remain heavily and inexplicably redacted. But, from the files that have been made public, we know one thing for certain. One of Epstein’s two key benefactors — the hedge fund billionaire Leon Black, who paid Epstein at least $158 million from 2012 through 2017 — was aggressively blackmailed over his sexual conduct. (Epstein’s second most-important benefactor was the billionaire Les Wexner, a major pro-Israel donor who cut off ties in 2008 after Epstein repaid Wexner $100 million for money Wexner alleged Epstein had stolen from him).
Despite that $100 million repayment in 2008 to Wexner, Epstein had accumulated so much wealth through his involvement with Wexner that it barely made a dent. He was able to successfully “pilfer” such a mind-boggling amount of money because he had been given virtually unconstrained access to, and power over, every aspect of Wexner’s life. Wexner even gave Epstein power of attorney and had him oversee his children’s trusts. And Epstein, several years later, created a similar role with Leon Black, one of the richest hedge fund billionaires of his generation.
Epstein’s 2008 conviction and imprisonment due to his guilty plea on a charge of “soliciting a minor for prostitution” began mildly hindering his access to the world’s billionaires. It was at this time that he lost Wexner as his font of wealth due to Wexner’s belief that Epstein stole from him.
But Epstein’s world was salvaged, and ultimately thrived more than ever, as a result of the seemingly full-scale dependence that Leon Black developed on Epstein. As he did with Wexner, Epstein insinuated himself into every aspect of the billionaire’s life — financial, political, and personal — and, in doing so, obtained innate, immense power over Black.
The recently released Epstein files depict the blackmail and extortion schemes to which Black was subjected. One of the most vicious and protracted arose out of a six-year affair he carried on with a young Russian model, who then threatened in 2015 to expose everything to Black’s wife and family, and “ruin his life,” unless he paid her $100 million. But Epstein himself also implicitly, if not overtly, threatened Black in order to extract millions more in payments after Black, in 2016, sought to terminate their relationship.
While the sordid matter of Black’s affair has been previously reported — essentially because the woman, Guzel Ganieva, went public and sued Black, accusing him of “rape and assault,” even after he paid her more than $9 million out of a $21 million deal he made with her to stay silent — the newly released emails provide very vivid and invasive details about how desperately Black worked to avoid public disclosure of his sex life. The broad outlines of these events were laid out in a Bloomberg report on Sunday, but the text of emails provide a crucial look into how these blackmail schemes in Epstein World operated.
Epstein was central to all of this. That is why the emails describing all of this in detail are now publicly available: because they were all sent by Black or his lawyers to Epstein, and are thus now part of the Epstein Files.
Once Ganieva began blackmailing and extorting Black with her demands for $100 million — which she repeatedly said was her final, non-negotiable offer — Black turned to Epstein to tell him how to navigate this. (Black’s other key advisor was Brad Karp, who was forced to resign last week as head of the powerful Paul, Weiss law firm due to his extensive involvement with Epstein).
From the start of Ganieva’s increasingly unhinged threats against Black, Epstein became a vital advisor. In 2015, Epstein drafted a script for what he thought Black should tell his mistress, and emailed that script to himself.
Epstein included an explicit threat that Black would have Russian intelligence — the Federal Security Service (FSB) — murder Ganieva, because, Epstein argued, failure to resolve this matter with an American businessman important to the Russian economy would make her an “enemy of the state” in the eyes of the Russian government. Part of Epstein’s suggested script for Black is as follows (spelling and grammatical errors maintained from the original correspondents):
you should also know that I felt it necessary to contact some friends in FSB, and I though did not give them your name. They explained to me in no uncertain terms that especially now , when Russia is trying to bring in outside investors , as you know the economy sucks, and desperately investment that a person that would attempt to blackmail a us businessman would immeditaly become in the 21 century, what they terms . vrag naroda meant in the 20th they translated it for me as the enemy of the people, and would e dealt with extremely harshly , as it threatened the economies of teh country. So i expect never ever to hear a threat from you again.
In a separate email to Karp, Black’s lawyer, Epstein instructs him to order surveillance on the woman’s whereabouts by using the services of Nardello & Co., a private spy and intelligence agency used by the world’s richest people.
Black’s utter desperation for Ganieva not to reveal their affair is viscerally apparent from the transcripts of multiple lunches he had with her throughout 2015, which he secretly tape-recorded. His law firm, Paul, Weiss, had those recordings transcribed, and those were sent to Epstein.
To describe these negotiations as torturous would be an understatement. But it is worth taking a glimpse to see how easily and casually blackmail and extortion were used in this world...