Sarah Kendzior

Sarah Kendzior: Jackhammering into the sewer

by
Sarah Kendzior

A look through the Epstein files.

By Sarah Kendzior | Oct 18 2024

“They’re jackhammering into the sewer and the whole house is shaking,” I texted my husband.

I was sitting on a window seat watching a construction crew drill into the sidewalk below. I didn’t want to stand on a floor that trembled. Everything valuable threatened to fall. A photo of my children flipped over like a memory I couldn’t trust.

Outside, a stream of liquid coated the road. The workers gathered in a circle and looked down at something terrible. One picked up the jackhammer again and drilled deep and hard. The rest stood back and watched while he did it. I closed the windows, but I could not block out the sound or the feeling of earth giving way.

When will this stop, how can I make it stop I started to write, then deleted it. I saw my original text. I wrote instead:

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to accidentally summarize the state of the nation.”

* * *

Two weeks later, the DOJ released the Epstein files. The first people I looked up were the ones who tried to prevent my two books on Jeffrey Epstein, Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew, from being published. The next were the people who threatened to kill me for writing them. The ones whose names I know, anyway.

Looking through the files, I felt an old familiar sensation: this was the first time in years I got search results without an AI summary. I try to configure search engines to avoid AI, but Big Tech learned to override tricks like writing “-AI” or “-fuck”. The new robot overlords stole my old hobby of researching the technofascists who birthed them. The public domain that made it possible for me to write my books is gone.

I remembered when I found documentation of Trump and Epstein’s rape cases over a decade ago, and wrote about them, and thought people would care. When a timeline was a chronology on a social media site and not an alternate reality about which you fantasize: an alternative reality in which predators face consequences.

Then I felt another familiar sensation: I was jackhammering into the sewer now too.

When you jackhammer into the sewer, you get covered in shit. That’s what the Epstein Files are: shit. Unredacted to antagonize the victims; redacted to protect the perpetrators; released in a slow drip to acclimatize people to horror; released in an enormous drop to overwhelm people with fear.

They transform pain into social media content. They turn pain into predator contentment. The pursuit of truth is always noble: but not the sluggish or careless release of a partial reveal. Not when it’s about a pedophile rape cabal of ethno-supremacist billionaires and their enablers.

Not when that cabal holds power and we are left navigating a world we would have avoided had more people told the truth — and believed the truth-tellers.

This story could have been told in real time: and if it had been, it wouldn’t be this story. If people had believed the Epstein victims when they first came forward, the next wave of horrors would not have happened. If careerists had not been so easy to bribe and blackmail, ordinary people would not have to suffer under this group of sadistic oligarchs and politicians. Our era is the culmination of complicity.

Everyone likes to look at the dots. But when I connect them, people scream. Often because when I’m done connecting the dots, they are looking at a portrait of someone they know.

In the Epstein files, I found primary source documents related to events I described in my books: email invites to pedophile parties, open and cavalier. The brazenness stemmed from a lifetime of elite criminal impunity. I lost track of the Biden and Trump administration members I found in the files, along with their family members and friends and lawyers, who often overlap.

They like their worlds small, like the children they rape.

* * *

In 2021, I read the personal archives of Danny Casolaro, a journalist who had covered many of the same criminal networks as me. I wrote about him in They Knew as an example of a journalist murdered for going down this road, but he was more than that. He was a lyrical writer, a tenacious researcher, and a poetic soul. I felt invasive looking through his unpublished work. This is not how it was meant to be seen: by a stranger nearly the same age as he was when he was killed. Casolaro was 44 when he was found dead in a West Virginia hotel on August 10, 1991.

I remember shaking when I found a paper with Robert Maxwell’s name and address on it. “The European,” Casolaro called him. I took photos of the documents. After I did that, my phone was hacked and died. I had to go back and do it again, this time with different precautions.

Robert Maxwell was an espionage operative who procured Israeli passports for mobsters in the USSR so they could expand their criminal network worldwide. After he died falling (or being pushed) off a yacht in 1991, he was given an elaborate hero’s funeral by the Israeli government. Ghislaine Maxwell, along with Epstein, continued her father’s criminal operations, which included human trafficking.

Everyone I’ve just mentioned died in a suicide called a murder or a murder called a suicide, except Ghislaine, who is benefiting from the largesse extended by Trump and his Kushner-affiliated backer, the Aleph Institute.

I don’t want to write this article. Can you tell? I did not want to write books about crimes this depraved either. But it felt like the right thing to do: maybe exposure would bring consequences. Casolaro expressed hesitation, too, due to the enormity and danger of the topic. But he knew he had something, and he put his heart into his work.

That’s the irony: this work can only be done well by people with a heart, and you have to resign yourself to letting it break again and again. Or you will lose yourself, and you’ve lost too much already to let them take that too.

* * *

Two years after They Knew, a documentary about Casolaro came out. I couldn’t watch it. When you spend a lot of time with someone’s unpublished writing, it feels both intimate and exploitative. I didn’t want to feel the latter.

I had also recently watched The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness, a documentary about journalist Maury Terry and his struggle to prove a satanic group was involved in the murders committed by David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam. Terry was traumatized by his search. Desperation for clarity on the case consumed his life.

The documentary was released in May 2021. This was when Google still worked and most news sites were not paywalled. After watching, I read Terry’s 1987 book, The Ultimate Evil, and began looking up the officials he described as blocking his inquiry.

Once again, I found pedophiles in positions of power. For example, Eugene Gold, the Son of Sam prosecutor, admitted to assaulting a 10-year-old girl in Tennessee, a crime that would normally get a man life in prison, but in 1983, the judge let it slide. Gold had announced in 1981 that he was resigning as an attorney and would devote his life to serving Jewish causes. He moved to Israel in 1982. As CBS reported, Israel allows American pedophiles to become Israeli citizens. (You should print this report, as ultra-Zionist Bari Weiss now runs CBS.) Gold never faced punishment for sexually assaulting a child. He returned to the US and lived to be 100 years old.

I’m telling this story now because it’s hardly unique. I’m telling this story because it may disappear with the rest of the public domain into AI controlled by oligarchs. I’m telling this story for that 10-year-old girl in Tennessee.

The Trump administration is releasing a selective cache of Epstein documents because they believe their network has consolidated power. But as they release them, they take over media — Twitter, Tik-Tok, CBS, the endless outlets they bully into compliance — and rewrite history.

They want a world where people know the worst truths but are prohibited from discussing them.

* * *

Across my street is a barricaded sidewalk where the construction workers were jackhammering into the sewer. A loose plank of wood lies on top. Hole, it says. Underneath, a sea of shit, barely covered. It’s Groundhog Day and the second Trump administration is one year old.

Thank you for reading! I don’t paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family, so I appreciate and need your support!

Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 
     

Sarah Kendzior Q & A “A Nation on Thin Ice”

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By Sarah Kendzior | January 23, 2026
 

There are a lot of questions, so you’ve got a nice long Q & A to curl up with in the snowpacalypse! I’m going to publish this before the electricity and my mind give out. As Lonnie Johnson sang in 1938, “My brains is cloudy, my soul is upside-down.” On that note, let’s kick it off with thoughts on sin and Sinners:

Frank G: It seems there has been very little cultural reaction to the US becoming an authoritarian, oligarchic, severely economically stratified nation in the past 10-15 years. Other repressive eras in our nation’s history produced huge cultural responses in music, art, literature and film, but it seems to me we are not really seeing this now. Am I reading the situation correctly and, if so, what do you think is the reason for this? 

SK: Like politicians, entertainment companies have stopped trying to win us over: they instead focus on inserting things we don’t want (like AI) without our permission. The merger of Big Tech with Hollywood is one of the worst things to happen to American pop culture. The rot brought on by AI, algorithms, and “anti-DEI” racism is notable given the creative richness and diversity of the last two decades. The industry that boosted a show like Reservation Dogs just a few years ago is gone.

But cultural responses are still there. People still make art to reflect our time: it’s just a matter of whether their efforts are heard and recognized. I got your question on a rare day: the day Sinners got a record number of Oscar nominations. Sinners — a tale of vampiric white supremacists and Black cultural resistance during Jim Crow — is a commentary on our current era and its historical precedent. In the 1930s, Black music was an act of rebellion. Making Sinners is an act of rebellion now. Singing the blues is bearing witness; juke joints spit at the idea of white corporate control; and Sinners takes on race, crime, law, and other heavy issues in a wildly entertaining way.

In repressive eras, horror is where the unsaid can be said (see The Twilight Zone in the censorship-heavy early 1960s). The two movies that best respond to the political culture of the past ten years are Sinners and Get Out: another Black horror film. These films combine sharp political critique and visceral thrill and do so with vivid, original style. Their impact is one reason the Trump admin and its Hollywood backers deploy their racist “anti-DEI” policies: they’re afraid, and not of the supernatural.

You’re right that the last few years have felt flat and dull. Peak TV ended after decades of shows reflecting on the moral crisis of the US (Sopranos, Breaking Bad, etc.) We’ve been flooded with boring shows about the ultra-rich; this shift started around 2022. The downfall of TV was preceded by the downfall of the music industry: the murder of radio, MTV, and the musical pop monoculture — and with it, the counterculture that had formed in reaction. Like streaming TV, digital music is siloed and repressed by algorithms. Politically conscious songs exist but are hard to find. Americans still long for them: that’s why the “Fast Car” duet in 2024 entranced the nation.

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A Shiny Mausoleum on a Hill

by
Sarah Kendzior
 
 

Life, death, and the rampage of ICE.

By Sarah Kendzior | Jan 15, 2026

America is buried near a shining mausoleum on a hill.

Her grave is simple and white. She is surrounded by veterans of every war from the American Revolution to the Black Hawk Revolt to Vietnam. America lived in Illinois, which became a state when she was two. She died aged 53 in 1873, eight years after the Civil War ended. I wonder what she thought was coming.

The headstones surrounding America Myers are battered and worn. Some bear the scars of repair: patchwork tombs of broken remembrances. Others were long rendered indecipherable.

America is buried in Waterloo on a cliff overlooking the American Bottom.

It sounds like I’m making things up, but it’s real. I wasn’t in Waterloo, Illinois, seeking metaphors: I was looking for bald eagles. I didn’t see our national bird make his annual migration. Instead, I found a cemetery and wandered into an empty tomb.

I didn’t feel like writing this week, but God decided to lay it on thick, so here we are.

The American Bottom is an Illinois floodplain where one of the largest indigenous societies, the Mississippian People, lived in the 12th century. They built cities of such grandeur they outdid London in population. No one knows why they fled two centuries later. Today the region is known as Cahokia Mounds, and American Bottoms is a wastewater treatment plant.

Near the grave of America is a crescent of stone. “In Memory,” a sign says. “The stones making the patio in front of this bench, are made from the Tombstones of the many people buried here. LOST FOREVER IN TIME.” The patio was built by Columbia Boy Scout Troop 320. They did a good job.

Past America, past the heartbreaking graves of dead children, past the fallen tombs of forgotten soldiers and their wives, past the prairie grasses that grow defiantly above the poisoned soil, is the mausoleum. It was built by businessman Stephen W. Miles in 1859 for his family but now looms empty on a hill. An open doorway topped with a gargoyle invites you to enter.

I walked in and stood between rows of hollow crypts. Through the door, I watched clouds cast shadows and light burst through. I took photos, capturing crosses formed from slabs where bodies once lay. I felt safe and sad. The first feeling was novel; the second, a chronic condition of the 21st century. It was an honest place, this mausoleum on a hill. It was a hopeful place, restored with purpose, open to the sun.

When I posted a photo of the mausoleum, a man showed me a painting by a 14-year-old girl from Ukraine. She had painted a darkened doorway uncannily like the one in which I stood, down to the cracks in the floor. Her door looked out at the classic Ukraine scene: a golden field and a bright blue sky. This is what I saw in Illinois, too.

The images were so similar that I took them for an omen. I didn’t consider that the omen may have been for the US, also under invasion by a corrupt government, more than an omen of freedom for Ukraine.

I had forgotten that America was buried six feet under, surrounded by veterans who were assured that their sacrifice would prevent the tyranny under which we now live.

“People were free to select their own plot,” said a sign about the cemetery. I want to be free to select my own plot instead of living under unpunished treachery. I want my plot to be something more than a hole in the ground or a hole in the head.

* * *

In 2025, I saw the Mississippi River in Minnesota for the first time. That meant I had seen it in every state through which it flows, a feat I celebrated with unease. The goal of the Trump administration is to strip the US for parts. The Mississippi River is one part, and the Great Lakes are another.

I have seen the Mississippi River in every major city from its New Orleans basin to my St. Louis home to Minneapolis, which means I’ve seen it roll by police brutality and white mob violence in multiple places, as people have for as long as this country has existed, and well before.

Waterloo is near East St. Louis, Illinois, where a white mob slaughtered Black residents in 1917. Across the river in Missouri is Ferguson, where I ran from tear gas and police batons in 2014. Ferguson, which rid me of any illusion of how far the police would go, and how little most people would care after the initial outcry.

The Mississippi River is a migratory flyway, and not only for birds. Pundits and politicians fly in and out too. Minneapolis, where the George Floyd protests invigorated a mass movement for racial justice only to later be demonized, is familiar with fair-weather friends.

In December 1811, a record earthquake in Missouri made the Mississippi River flow backward. I thought of it in 2020 as Minneapolis rose up under police siege. I think of it now, as residents try to oust ICE and Minnesota mom Renee Nicole Good was shot dead by an ICE agent who called her a “fucking bitch.” Ferguson had rolled upstream.

People try to distinguish between ICE and police, but they operate as a tandem force. ICE is a new and unnecessary creation, formed in 2003, that wages a war of terror on civilians. ICE obeys the wishes of elites who seek to break the law. For everyone else, ICE promises only fear. Good’s crime was that she was not fearful enough.

Minnesota residents, determined to protect each other from ICE, are afraid — and brave. The two are not mutually exclusive. To fight on behalf of others in the midst of abandonment from officials, derision from the press, and the threat of fatal force: that’s not Minnesota Nice, that’s Minnesota Noble.

Minnesota police should be protecting residents from an invading federal force. But that is not what police do. Police have been trained to attack those whom they are tasked to serve and protect. They are told to back ICE — armed agents abusing and kidnapping their neighbors — and to fear punishment if they refuse.

This is not a civil war. This is a federal invasion by a mafia state.

The mafia state wants to strip the US and sell it for parts. The Great Lakes region, in the climate change era, is a valuable part. Minnesota, a Midwest Democratic stronghold, is an inconvenient part. Minneapolis, with its diverse immigrant population and history of police violence, is a strategic part.

ICE has been battering Americans and aspiring American citizens for two decades. It was rewarded for its brutality with an enormous boost in funding by Joe Biden. ICE funding was further increased by Trump, who also granted them explicit impunity.

It does not matter, in practical terms, whether ICE’s actions are legal. In mafia states, legal is a malleable notion. What matters is that they are wrong. What matters is how they can be stopped.

The gulf between law and justice is wide, but public understanding bends like the Mississippi River, the river where Dred Scott’s daughter was born stateless, the river that divided the enslaved from the free. Americans have been misled by pundits who proclaim the US a “nation of laws”. It makes no difference if the US is a nation of laws when courts are selective in their application. Autocracies are nations of laws, too.

The US is a nation of targets. A felon is the president and random civilians can be kidnapped without recourse. State-sanctioned violence was the inevitable result of the Biden administration countenancing sedition and refusing to prosecute Trump and other elites for crimes, no matter how brazenly they confessed them.

* * *

They say you are defined by the company you keep. These days I am defined by ghosts. Since 2025, I’ve been roaming cemeteries to the point that their residents feel like friends. My worst fears can’t be realized here: you can’t kill what’s already dead.

But the mausoleum on a hill is alive. When I looked it up after returning home, I was horrified to see old photos of its white marble covered in graffiti, its cemetery a mess of overturned stones. The recent repair is more than aesthetic. Volunteers put the puzzle pieces of American history back together. Every cemetery is a road map of American life, a bulwark against the annihilation of memory.

I spent my childhood listening to Ronald Reagan call America “a shining city on a hill, teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace” while his friends planned our country’s demise in a scheme later christened Project 2025. The “city on a hill” ideal of freedom for all has been recited from the Puritan era to the present by politicians who refuse to honor its principles in practice.

I’ve abandoned the shining city on the hill. But the shining mausoleum on a hill: that I can embrace. The shining mausoleum on a hill is real. I’ve seen its decay and its revival. I’ve born witness to its recreation and redemption. I’ve studied its dead: the names, the dates. My fellow Americans fallen in Waterloo.

We go to cemeteries to grieve. I grieve for strangers because I don’t want the part of me that mourns tragedy and spurns injustice to die. In a country where officials act like death no longer matters, here lies a grand rebuttal.

* * *

Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 
     

The Invaders

by
Sarah Kendzior

Thieves of American empire are gunning for your future.

By Sarah Kendzior | Jan 7, 2026

The theater where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested is playing Eyes Wide Shut. The movie is a revival. Everything is a revival when nothing gets resolved.

I am driving around Dallas the day after Christmas. The Texas Theatre is near Oswald’s residence, an unassuming home with a sign offering tours. I decline: I came to see the graves of Bonnie and Clyde and the Ewing Building where they shot JR. I can only handle so much crime at once. But Dallas never cared about that.

My phone offers “news”: pseudo-revelations about Jeffrey Epstein that his victims told in the 1990s, back when Stanley Kubrick was making Eyes Wide Shut. The media ignored the victims because the media are friends with the predators. They dismissed them until 2025, when media itself crumbled and US institutions abandoned even the pretense of law. Now the predators are purchasing social media outlets, the last bastions of unfiltered inquiry, like they’re plugging leaks on their yachts.

There is a theory that Kubrick’s tale of satanic elites was inspired by Epstein — or at least, by people like him. I don’t doubt the latter. There are more people like Epstein than anyone wanted to know.

I drive over a white X painted on the road. I realize I’ve passed the book depository where Oswald allegedly shot JFK and am now in the place where he died.

X marks the spot where the modern American downfall began. It happens fast when you’re a Dallas stranger: the grassy knoll is there and gone before you feel the gravity. I wonder about locals who drive here every day and if a presidential corpse marker is something a person can get used to.

I replay the events of 2025 and how, despite my best efforts, my mind adjusted to the horror, even if my heart never could and never will. I’d rather carry this shattered reliquary in my chest than let it beat blithely to unremitting cruelty.

It’s not what I asked for, but it’s what I am, and they’re not taking that away too [ . . . ]

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