Episode Details

Today’s FiveStack is brought to you by GroundNews — FiveStack viewers get 40% off their Vantage plan.

The Fivestack was supposed to count five stories but we could not turn our eyes away from today. Lev Parnas walked out of a Florida Senate hearing on Jeffrey Epstein, called in, and the show became one story. The story is what Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has done to the women who survived Epstein —Today’s show is dedicated to them.

5️⃣ THE HEARING REPUBLICANS WOULDN’T HOLD

House Oversight Democrats drove to West Palm Beach. The committee in the majority — the Republicans — refused to convene the hearing in Washington. So the minority held it themselves, in the county where federal prosecutors handed Jeffrey Epstein his 2008 sweetheart deal, across the bridge from Mar-a-Lago.

Security was tight. Local press showed up. Jim Acosta walked in. Tara Palmieri walked in. Katie Phang walked in. The major networks did not. Lev Parnas got the call from the Oversight team the night before, drove down, sat in the room, and live-streamed the hearing publicly because the committee told him he could. Schumer was not there. Jeffries was not there. Massie was not there. Marjorie Taylor Greene was not there. Survivors who waited thirty years for a hearing got the hearing they could organize themselves, and only one of the two parties came.

4️⃣ MARIA FARMER, THIRTY YEARS LATER

Maria Farmer was the first witness. She was not in the room — she had just been discharged from the hospital after twenty-three nights in the last month, several of them in the ICU. She recorded her statement and the committee played it. The voice was not strong. The statement was steel.

“My name is Maria Farmer. I am the whistleblower who reported Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Les Wexner and others to the FBI 30 years ago in 1996.”

She walked through the file. The 1996 report to the New York City 6th Precinct. The commanding officer who told her local police could only handle the local arson and to take the rest to the FBI. The FBI agents who said they recognized some of the names. The thirty years of nothing that followed. The 2006 federal trial they pulled her into and then the sweetheart deal that closed it. The death threats. The arson threats to her apartment. The Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The brain tumor. The Addison’s disease that landed her in the ICU last month.

She wants her FBI file. She has FOIA’d it. She has sued for it. The government’s most recent response told her they will get back to her in November 2027.

She named the women whose lives the FBI’s inaction cost — Virginia Giuffre, Anushka DiGiorgio, Chante Davies, Marika Chartone, Danny Benski, Jenna Lisa Jones, Ashley Rubright, Jennifer Rose. She called Virginia “the backbone of this case” and “the shining star and guiding light” the survivors are still walking behind.

3️⃣ ROSA — DOXED 540 TIMES

The next testimony broke the room. Rosa came to New York at eighteen from Uzbekistan, signed by the MC2 modeling agency, paid one hundred dollars a week. The agency took her passport. The agency paid her enough that she could not leave. She was trafficked.

She had spent the last decade rebuilding. She had been a Jane Doe — her name redacted from every court filing in every case. The redaction was the only thing standing between her past and her present life.

In January, Donald Trump’s DOJ released the Epstein files in compliance with the Transparency Act. They unredacted her name. Five hundred and forty times.

“I kept my identity protected as Jane Doe. I woke up one day with my name mentioned over 500 times. While the rich and powerful remain protected by redaction, my name was exposed to the world. Now reporters from across the globe contact me. I cannot live without looking over my shoulder.”

A congresswoman in the room asked her what j