Kid Berwyn
Kid Berwyn's JournalDown with the Fascist Tangerine!
Scotland sends lots more excellence:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-38809265
From Russia (To Jeffrey), with Love (Craig UNGER)
Holy cat. Craig Unger pegs the Russia-Epstein angle.
From Russia(to Jeffrey), with Love
The Epstein saga is even more interesting when you look at the Russian women who helped run his operation. Here's a look at Svetlana Pozhidaeva.
Craig Unger
Jul 21, 2025
EXCERPT...
Raised in a Moscow apartment complex built for staffers of the NKVD, the Stalinist precursor of the KGB, Pozhidaeva was educated at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), the prestigious academy run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that is a training ground for Russian diplomats and intelligence officials. Reputed to be the most elite university in the country, MGIMO has been dubbed the “Harvard of Russia” by Henry Kissinger because it has trained so many figures in Russia’s political, intellectual, and financial elite.
According to the Italian edition of Maxim, Lana gave up a promising tennis career at the age of sixteen to become the youngest freshman at MGIMO, where she graduated with the equivalent of summa cum laude, having mastered, along the way, French, English, Italian, and Spanish, as if she were on course to join the Foreign Ministry.
But then her career took a bizarre turn. Her stellar academic credentials notwithstanding, Pozhidaeva somehow ended up becoming a model who was represented by MC2, a modeling agency owned by Epstein-pimp-to-be Jean-Luc Brunel. Known as “le fantôme” (the ghost), Brunel was the subject of a 1988 piece that aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes in which several young models accused him of drugging their drinks, groping them sexually, and rape. The CBS reporter, Craig Pyes, told Michael Gross. the author of Model: The Ugly Truth of Beautiful Women, that Brunel “ranks among the sleaziest people in the fashion industry. We’re talking about a conveyor belt, not a casting couch. Hundreds of girls were not only harassed but molested.”
SNIP...
“What was most striking about Pozhidaeva was that she had a terrific academic career in Russia and then threw it away on something completely unrelated. She attended, as she says, a top college in Russia, like Stanford in the United States,” said Shvets. “And she was a straight‑ A student. This is important to understand. She sacrificed four years and then two more years for a master’s degree. It’s an achievement.”
But suddenly after this, Shvets noted, “She says, ‘Fuck it all. Fuck my previous six years. Fuck everything I was doing.’ I mean, it’s amazing— it just does not happen in real life.”
“Of course, we know what Epstein was doing with the ladies. But in this particular case,” Shvets told me, “Epstein takes her and introduces her to renowned American and international scientists.”
CONTINUES...
https://substack.com/inbox/post/168787871
Jeffrey Epstein: how US media - with one star exception - whitewashed the story
Not fake news. The Guardian brings up a major threat to democracy: corrupt news media.
Jeffrey Epstein: how US media – with one star exception – whitewashed the story
The Miami Herald exposed a vast criminal network and a government cover-up – but why the silence elsewhere?
Ed Pilkington
The Guardian, July 19, 2019
EXCERPT...
Reiter warned Brown what would happen were she to continue digging: “Somebody’s going to call your publisher and the next thing you know you are going to be assigned to the obituaries department.”
Brown did not heed his warning. She flung herself at the investigation and eventually persuaded Reiter to go on record. Her resulting, award-winning three-part series last November exposed a vast operation in which 80 potential victims were identified, some as young as 13 and 14 at the time of the alleged abuse. She persuaded eight to tell their stories.
Brown also exposed a government cover-up in which Epstein got away with an exceptionally light sentence that saw him serve only 13 months in jail. She discovered that a “non-prosecution agreement” had been negotiated secretly in 2008 by the then top federal prosecutor in Miami, Alexander Acosta, that gave Epstein and his co-conspirators immunity from federal prosecution.
In 2017, Acosta was appointed by Donald Trump as labor secretary, a post that ironically is responsible for combating sex trafficking.
CONTINUES...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/13/jeffrey-epstein-alex-acosta-miami-herald-media
We likely wouldn’t know squat about Epstein & Associates without the Miami Herald.
Original DU post from August 2019: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212367573
Happy they credited The Guardian
Teen models, powerful men and private dinners: when Trump hosted Look of the YearDonald Trump, then 45, with contestants in the 1991 Look of the Year competition, the year he was a judge
In the early 90s, Donald Trump judged the world’s biggest modelling competition - since hit by allegations of abuse. This is how the people who were there remember it
By Lucy Osborne, Harry Davies and Stephanie
The Guardian, 14 March 2020
Excerpt…
It’s not clear how Casablancas first met Trump but, according to several former models who encountered him during the 1980s, the businessman became a regular at his parties. With the opening of Trump Tower on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1983, and the acquisition of the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in 1985, Trump had gained the reputation of a high-flying playboy in his own right. In 1987 he published The Art Of The Deal, and a flurry of publicity followed. “He sits atop a $3 billion empire,” proclaimed the Washington Post, “and seems to have a Midas touch.”
It was perhaps unsurprising that Trump, a New York celebrity who liked to date beautiful women, should come to know the city’s best-known model agent. “Trump was good with PR and that was something John liked,” says Jeremie Roux, who now runs System, a modelling agency he cofounded with Casablancas in 2009. “Good or negative press was all good to Trump.”
Patty Owen, an Elle and Cosmopolitan cover star, recalls seeing Trump at Elite parties as far back as 1982. “He would always be at the bar. That’s where he would stay and that’s where all the new models would hang out,” she says. “Whenever I saw him, I was always like: why does John have to invite him?” Barbara Pilling, also then an Elite model, told us Trump asked her out for dinner in the summer of 1989 at an industry soiree. She recalls Trump asking how old she was. “I said 17 and he said, ‘That’s just great – you’re not too old, not too young.’”
Continues…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/14/teen-models-powerful-men-when-donald-trump-hosted-look-of-the-year
Jeffrey Epstein's Friends Sent Him Bawdy Letters for a 50th Birthday Album. One Was From Donald Trump.
Source: Wall Street Journal
The leather-bound book was compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell. The president says the letter ‘is a fake thing.’
It was Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, and Ghislaine Maxwell was preparing a special gift to mark the occasion. She turned to Epstein’s family and friends. One of them was Donald Trump.
Read more: https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-jeffrey-epstein-birthday-letter-we-have-certain-things-in-common-f918d796
Anyone got a link to non-paywall version?
FOX News Host Declares His NAZI Pride On-Air
Greg Gutfeld is the name.
The NAZI asshole recommends other NAZIs learn "from the Blacks" to use the "N-word" NAZI like hip-hop and rap artists did to take the stigma off the N-word.
I kid you not.
Trump Executive Order to Help Open Up 401(k)s to Private Markets
The post my retirement has been waiting for!
Trump Executive Order to Help Open Up 401(k)s to Private Markets
by Miriam Gottfried, Dylan Tokar, Matt Wirz
President Trump is expected to sign an executive order in the coming days designed to help make private-market investments more available to U.S. retirement plans, according to people familiar with the matter.
The order would instruct the Labor Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to provide guidance to employers and plan administrators on including investments like private assets in 401(k) plans, the people said.
The details of the order aren’t yet final and are still subject to review, the people said.
An order could help pave the way for big managers of private assets such as Apollo Global Management and Blackstone to access the vast sums of retirement savings held by workers who don’t have a traditional pension. Institutional investors such as pension funds have largely maxed out on private markets, leading firms to look to individual investors for new sources of growth.
In theory, retirement plan sponsors can already put some of their investments in private funds and some already do in small quantities. But many companies remain concerned they would be sued by their employees over the higher fees associated with private-market investment products.
Continues…
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-executive-order-to-help-open-up-401-k-s-to-private-markets/ar-AA1IFFDr
Did Epstein hire Melania?
Did Epstein provide Melania a genius grant or grease her way into the country?
Epstein knew everybody, in a manner of speaking.
Would explain her sudden reappearance at her traitor man's side.
"I wish her well."
Epstein's brother said Jeffrey introduced the first couple, who first copulated aboard one of Jeffrey's jets.
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU08/20250227/117951/HHRG-119-JU08-20250227-SD006-U6.pdf
"I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."
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