Some stories I'm proud of from this year
A reporter's notebook.
2023 was my first full year of being a journalist while also being a parent. Being a parent is amazing and, if you’re in a position to be one, I highly recommend it. It’s also very hard.
All of this is to say that, despite many challenges, including a lot of my colleagues getting unfairly laid off, I did some work this past year that I’m very proud of. Here is a little sample.
Doe this, Doe that. Everyone is talking about the 150ish "Does” linked to Jeffrey Epstein whose names will be unsealed from court documents this year. Well, way back in January, I published an investigation into Doe 183, a billionaire who had been fighting tooth and nail in secret court documents to keep their identity a secret. (It’s probably Leslie Wexner.)
I spent a lot of time this year covering Sam Bankman-Fried. Before his trial, there were several mysteries I was trying to crack. Who were his mysterious guarantors? Insider (and other media organizations) went to court to unseal their names. What was the deal with his big chonky ring? I figured that one out using other reporting methods.
George Santos had a similarly mysterious secret bail arrangement. We went to court to make the records public. The judge blamed Santos for blowing up his own defenses.
After Kanye West/Ye made all those antisemitic comments, he went underground and disappeared from the map. As you might imagine, this caused some problems for his lawyers, who were trying to dump him as he was also being sued all over the country, mostly for not paying people who worked for him. The court filings about their attempts to track him down were amusing.
I covered six different trials in the past year, which feels like a lot. I am including the Dominion v. Fox News case in that figure, because I went all the way to Wilmington for it and because it went through jury selection, which still technically counts. The wildest stuff from that case — aside from the historic $787.5 million settlement figure itself — is all the material that came out in the summary judgment motions. The Fox hosts and executives mocking election conspiracy theories in internal text messages and emails. Martia Bartiromo uncritically accepting Sidney Powell’s FWD FWD FWD emails from a self-described headless, time-traveling ghost. Rupert Murdoch’s frank assessment that Trump needed to go. Looking forward to the Smartmatic case!
And remember the Abby Grossberg case???? Yeesh. She was also a party to text messages showing how Tucker Carlson brokered the deal that made Kevin McCarthy the Speaker of the House. That didn’t work out too well.
Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself? For years, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General — which was looking into this very question — kept mum, creating space for a number of theories to percolate through the American consciousness. It bothered me that, more than three years later, the DOJ IG’s office still hadn’t released its long-promised report on the circumstances of Epstein’s death. Unlike journalists, the IG’s office can get subpoena power, refer potential criminal cases, and has, like, government resources and all that. I set out to investigate, trying to interview everyone who would know anything about the unreleased report. Shouldn’t his victims get some closure? Shouldn’t his brother? Months later, I bumped into a very high-profile former Justice Department official at an event, and he seemed puzzled that it hadn’t been released already (he was also trying very hard not to answer any of my questions).
A little while after that, the DOJ OIG’s office finally did release the report. In my view, it’s as comprehensive an examination as we’re ever going to get about Epstein’s death (although I still have a few lingering questions…) and points pretty definitively to a suicide and deep mismanagement from the Bureau of Prisons. For the record, Jeffrey’s brother Mark strongly disagrees with me.
Has anyone else been the subject of more litigation in death? Lawsuits between Epstein’s accusers and the US Virgin Islands and financial institutions shed more light on how he used his money to traffic girls and exerted power on the US Virgin Islands to bend local politics to his will.
Remember the theory that Ron DeSantis was gonna refuse to extradite Trump from Florida to New York, where he’d face criminal charges? It was never gonna happen, but untangling the legal issues was fun.
Being in the Manhattan courtroom when Trump was actually arraigned for the first time on criminal charges was a surreal experience. Covering his four different criminal cases this year has become almost routine, given the volume of filings, though I try not to forget that it all remains historic.
Not long after that, Trump was on trial for civil rape and defamation accusations from E. Jean Carroll. Trump never showed up himself, and was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Carroll testified, as did two friends who she contemporaneously or near-contemporaneously talked to about her experience with Trump in Bergdorf Goodman. Trump’s defense? They all had Trump derangement syndrome. The jury didn’t buy it. I caught up with Carroll a little while later, who told me "hundreds" of people have contacted her seeking advice on how to sue their own alleged abusers.
OK also remember how the Westchester district attorney’s office was investigating the Trump Organization’s finances? I had a lil scoop about that.
Possibly the ugliest lawsuit I covered this year was from Noelle Dunphy, who sued Rudy Giuliani, alleging he sexually abused her while she worked for him. Dunphy had a difficult past, and Giuliani allegedly perpetuated a cycle of abuse. The lawsuit was also filled with certain Giuliani gems, such as that he asked her to delete all communications and avoid speaking to the FBI — before later asking her "for help in Googling information about obstruction of justice.” Later, court filings revealed Giuliani’s, uh, choice words for certain minority groups and, er, flirting attempts.
I read a lot of legal filings throughout the course of my work, and it’s always interesting to notice a pattern or contradiction. Rudy is dealing with a lot of legal problems and doesn’t seem to have a lot of money — he filed for bankruptcy this month — but he tried very hard in court to not tell anyone just how much money he doesn’t have. The legal backflips he made prompted Smartmatic to bring a filing with this very relatable passage:
'The dog ate my homework.' 'I have to wash my hair.' 'I can't go out, I'm sick.' Since the dawn of time, people have made up excuses to avoid doing things they do not want to do. This is exactly what Giuliani has done here. For months, Giuliani has made up excuses to get out of his discovery obligations to Smartmatic and to violate orders from this Court.
In December, I covered Rudy Giuliani’s defamation trial in Washington, DC. He lost.
I’ll just let you read the headline on this one: A crumbling, long-forgotten statue with an unusual erect phallus might be a Michelangelo. Renaissance scholars want hard evidence.
Pillow mogul Mike Lindell’s many defamation lawsuits continue to wind their way through the courts. In a set of depositions for one of them, he went ballistic, leading to some videos becoming public. “How do you guys sleep at night?" he asked the lawyers deposing him. "You obviously don't have a MyPillow. That's a fact."
The 8 alleged bribes Sen. Bob Menendez and his wife took, ranked.
I played second fiddle to my brilliant colleague, Laura Italiano, covering the interminable Trump civil fraud trial this year. I wrote a few pieces taking a step back and trying to take some novel angles, such as how Trump turned the trial into a publicity platform for his 2024 presidential campaign, his lawyers’ filibustering, which happened many times, his odd spurts of attendance, the wacky tenor of the whole affair, and exactly what the deal is with judicial clerk Allison Greenfield.
Also, what’s the deal with all his international trademarks? I would love to know if he plans to launch overseas companies for video games, lash extensions, deodorant, and nautical instruments.
At the same time the Trump fraud trial was happening, I covered Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial around the corner. I wrote approximately a zillion stories so I’m not gonna even try to list them all here, but I’m proud I exclusively got the full recording of the final Alameda Research meeting, where Caroline Ellison said the company was shutting down. I also broke down how Bankman-Fried’s closest friends, in testifying against him, demolished his defense strategy. Indeed, after haltingly testifying in his own defense, he was found guilty of all counts as his parents clutched each other in the courtroom.
I attended the trial between Robert De Niro and his ex-assistant Graham Chase Robinson because it was downstairs from the Sam Bankman-Fried trial which, to be honest, got kind of boring during some stretches. I played hooky (don’t worry, my venerable colleague Katie Balevic was still watching the SBF trial) and went to see if I could catch a glimpse of the “Taxi Driver” and “Little Fockers” star. This was the second day of the trial after De Niro had already yelled, “Shame on you, Chase Robinson!” while on the witness stand. As I left the elevator, an elderly man in a polo shirt and gray sportcoat drifted past me and went into the bathroom. I did a triple-take. I spotted a Daily Mail reporter I recognized in the hallway, pounding away on his laptop. “Was that him?” I asked. He nodded. I registered in my brain that Robert De Niro was currently sitting in a bathroom stall with one of those horrible doors that has a one-inch gap. I asked the Daily Mail reporter how the trial was going. He looked at me, and his face resembled someone who had spent a month crawling in the desert and had come upon a clear well. “It’s all gold.”
I entered the courtroom and easily got a seat, something that would never happen with Bankman-Fried. After a while, De Niro returned and shambled back onto the witness stand. In just 40 delirious minutes, he answered questions from Robinson’s lawyer, who looked almost comically young but it wouldn’t surprise me if every once in a while he cracked open a cold one with the boys and watched “Heat.” De Niro recounted the tedious tasks his personal assistant had to fulfill for him. A representative exchange:
Q. One time you really wanted a particular martini from Nobu and you called up Ms. Robinson to bring it over to your house; right?
A. That could have been at one time, yeah.
Q. 11:00 p.m.?
A. 11:00 p.m.?
Q. It was in the evening, correct?
A. Yeah. It might have been, yeah.
Q. And you would agree an Uber was justified to transport your martini; right?
A. That's different.
Anyway I wrote two stories from that whole thing and it was fun.
Architectural photo dump:
