Survivor Stories and Seeking Accountability

When the Pope released his AI encyclical, the co founder of Anthropic sat beside him and gave a speech. How will we ensure that the gains of AI are shared globally It is an unsolved problem But is it really? We have historically proven tools that are actually pretty good at redistributing wealth and power. They're called taxes. How Anthropic markets itself is a moral leader. from WNYC in New York. This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Ollinger. Also on this week's show, we visit an Epstein Files reading room displaying printouts of three point five million files. seventeen thousand pounds of evidence. The first printer that we sent this project to came back and said, we work with a lot of lawyers We're really worried that if they find out that we printed this, they're not going to work with us anymore It's all coming up after this. 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Experience for yourself why Mohonk Mountain House is voted the most iconic resort in the Hudson Valley. Reserve your next getaway at moohonunk. com and feel your stresses melt away. WNYC Studios is supported by Wise. Wise, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world With a wise account, you can send, spend and receive in up to forty currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get wise downownload the Wise app today. Terms and conditions apply From WNYC in New York, this is Ama Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Ollinger On Tuesday of this week, yet another executive order. Trump just signed an executive order this morning centered on government access to advanced artificial intelligence. It lays the foundation out for federal testing of the world's most powerful AI systems before they're publicly released. Now the testing would rely on voluntary collaboration from the nation's top AI companies. This after earlier in the week One company became the front runner in the race to become the AI startup that rules them all. Anthropic has filed what's likely to be one of the largest IPO's in history. By filing Anthropic has leapfrogged its rival open AI. We reported just last week that Anthropic closed a massive financing of sixty five billion dollars nine hundred sixty five billion dollars valuation almost a trillion dollars Anthropic has built what many in the industry and many users consider the best in class AI product. Brian Merchant is a technology journalist and author of the book and newsletter, Blood in the Machine. Their clawud chatbot is one of the favored chatbots anywhere Eespecially for commercial use for automating work functions, especially software coding. Whereas openAI has been dabbling in consumer chat bots, in video generation with its SRa app that's now recently shuttered. You name it, and openAI is in it. And probably key to sort of outmaneuvering open AI more recently, Anthropic has really leaned into their reputation as the safer and more ethical AI company. How did Anthropic get this brand as the ethical AI company Anthropic began when Dario Amode, the now CEO and former employee of OpenAI, left the company citing ethical concerns with Sam Alaltman's managerial behavior. So he leaves and resolves to found moreethical a more safety focused AI lab from the beginning They are hiring safety researchers, AI ethics people. And they got another bump of press coverage in late February when Anthropic had a big dispute with the US military. Anthropic had a major contract with the Pentagon, but the US government said they would stop using Anthropic's technology because of the company's red lines that they wouldn't spy on Americans or let their tech be used in autonomous weapons Walk us through how that moment was like metabolized by the media The press kind of presents Anthropic as taking the ethical route. Anthropic is imposing another level of morality or control on the use of its technology, which is part of its sort of MO you know, they are taking the moral high ground here and clearly have a set of red lines for how they feel their technology should or shouldn't be used. They stood up to Pete Higs said. Exactly. And then they' served this absolute gift of Sam Altman running to HegSeth and the Department of War saying, who will do it. We'll take this contract where we'll surveill Americans and lend our technology to autonomous killing machines. In truth, yeah, maybe there's this red line Anthropic is partnering with Palantir. It's lending technology to companies that are building mass surveillance apparatuses already. Anthropic is working with the government in the first place, with the Department of War. It was involved in providing technology that led to the capture and kidnapping of Maduro and in the bombing campaigns of Iran That's not hidden information, but the fact that they say, oh, well, we won't do these things. suddenly, they look like the good guys. In April, Anthropic announced a new artificial intelligence model that it said was too powerful to be released to the broader public. They started by just offering it to a handful of executives, though they're starting to expand. You say this garnered them reams of credulous press coverage. Yeah. Break it down To me, this is the most sort of nakedly staged event. This is the clearest example of Anthropics ethic slop. They make this big show of withholding a model that they say is too dangerous for public consumption. likeike, oh, we've built this model, Mythos And it's so powerful that if we gave it to the public, then it could collapse the entire cybersecurity infrastructure of the world's digital systems as we know it. So we have to hold on to it. We're doing the ethical thing. And to kind of my surprise at this point, the media did by and large by their line. And I'm just going to read a couple headlines that I pulled from the New York Times here. You can't use this AI. Claude Mythos's preview is dangerous, Ananthropic said, We explain the risks Here's another one also just from the New York Times. Anthropic claims its new AI model, Mythos, is a cybersecurity quote reckoning. This is actually kind of a classic move that AI companies have made even before the AI boom really heated up. It sounds so much like Sam Altman saying, please regulate us. This technology if it falls in the wrong hands will like end civilization as we know it Anthropic gets to have it both ways. It gets to look like it's built this transformative totally disruptive technology that could change everything and if we're not careful, destroy it too. But you can just kind of hear that CFOs around the world kind of salivating, you know, what could it automate? if it can do this? what kind of jobs could it replace? if it can collapse world infrastructure? And that's the point. They want to feed this continuing hunger for the most powerful AI systems Yeah, you say that narrative plays a really important role in attracting the interest of VC and raising money. Can you give some other examples of that The biggest example is the entire concept of AGI or artificial general intelligence, which was, at least in the early years of the AI boom, the goal of all of the companies to achieve AGI, which is a system that is as smart as a human nominally, but is defined when you look at their charters as a system that can do most meaningful work of a human worker. If you're hoping to raise enough capital to compete with one of these giants that are worth over a trillion dollars like Google and Apple and Microsoft You need a story that's going to generate tens of billions of dollars of investment. So you need the biggest story. And so there's all these factors contributing to the story not just being, o, we're going to build a product and we hope people like it and we think they're going to buy it too We're gonna build the be all end all automate every job machine and you want to get in on the ground floor Just to point out the irony here, O one hand, Anthropic is raising money on this we're the ethical AI company. And on the other, they're also benefiting from the hype of the major consequences that would come with realizing their sales pitch, replacing human workers and all of the negative consequences that would have on our society This contradiction came to a head at the Vatican last month. Anthropic co founder Chris Ola said this at the press event where the Pope released his much talked about encyyclical. There is a real possibility that AI will displace human labor at a very large scale If that happens, supporting those displaced will be a moral imperative of historic proportions How will we ensure that the gams of AI are shared globally? We do not have a mechanism for this It is an unsolved problem And it is the kind of problem the church has historically refused to let the world ignore I heard you snickering. Why does this make you laugh? This is a serious problem. Well, to me, this is such a great example of AI executive Brain because we have historically proven policy tools that are actually pretty good at redistributing some of the wealth and power that's concentrated among a certain group of people with everybody else, they're called taxes, and just because AI companies don't really like that idea, they don't like the concept of being taxed Do doesnn't mean they don't exist. There are some pretty low hanging fruit solutions here that you could talk about You read Hope Leo fourteh's forty two thousand words on this topic. What did you think of it It's actually a really fascinating and rich document. and I think the important things to know about it are that Pope Leo kind of views it as a continuation of or comment on the previous Pope Leo, Leo XteII, his famous encyclical rareum Novirum, which was written and released in eighteen ninety one It's viewed as this transformative document in Catholic history, as it really marks the beginning of the Catholic tradition of social teaching. And it's primarily concerned with the impact of the industrial Revolution and how the industrialists are treating workers in the wake of this time of great tumultuous change the rapid concentration of wealth. The rise of machinery and so many human workers sort of falling under the gears. And it makes this argument that in order to truly be a good Christian, to have the time and the space and the spiritual capacity to live with God, you also have to have your material conditions met, right? You can't be suffering. And therefore, the church decides that Every human is worthy of dignity. Every human worker should be protected, even if that means sort of state intervention to get there. So Pope Leo fourte takes a lot of this framework and then moves it into the modern era, the AI era. Let me even just quote him here. Leo writes that the fundamental dignity of each person is neither acquired nor earned, nor does it need to be justified. It's not oh, is he working hard enough? or is he better than AI? Is he worse than AI? What's his productivity output? No, like the dignity is inherent It's pretty powerful stuff Timney Gebrw, who's an AI ethics expert. She previously worked at Google, She wrote on LinkedIn, calling this sort of PR event Vatican washing, like greenwhing, allowing Anthropic to kind of robe itself in the holiness of the pope's righteous criticism of this industry and the harm it might cause. She wrote, The Vatican could have told Anthropic to stop stealing data, exploiting labor, killing the environment, deceiving us with anthropomorphic designs and lying about product capabilities Instead, they partnered with them, like partnering with the Sackler family to discuss the harms of Oxy Yeah, she did not hold back there. I think that's absolutely correct. They chose to have Anthropic there and speak out. an AI executive, a billionaire presenting the AI company's take on the whole affair. They could have had a worker who's lost his job to AI or a content moderator who has developed PTSD looking at some truly horrific stuff that AI is outputting but is working for dollars a day to make these systems work it was a huge public relations coup for anthropic, getting to be there, co signing this document of great moral authority. I think it should bother us that just days later Anthropic ran home and announced the biggest funding round yet and that they were their company is now worth almost a trillion dollars on the back of all of this sort of performative moral handwringing. Do you think there's political appetite in the United States for the type of political intervention that the enncyclical calls for? If it's not here right now, it's on the way I think there's a rapidly growing demand for political action against this yawning inequality that we're seeing get entrenched Yeah, I think of the image of an American executive at a commencement speech Reaching AI to classes of graduating college seniors. The rise of artificial intelligence is The next industrial revolution. And the booze they get. What happen? Okay. I struck a cord May I finish? It just feels like both a temperature check of this moment, but also kind of foreshadowing of the political battles to come How do you think we should be talking about our future that doesn't just do the kind of PR work that the companies are looking for. There are a lot of great critical journalists covering this stuff, folks, like four hundred and four Media and Wired. I have a series of work that I do called AI Killed My Job. And the whole goal is to assess the claims of the AI CEO's by talking to the workers, right? L that's how we know what's actually happening. And most of the time, if you talk to someone who's at a workplace that has been heavily saturated with AI, they'll have a much more nuanced story to tell than just Yep, it took my job. You hear stories about how, yeah, they talk about AI a lot and they force us all to use it, but we don't actually see a whole lot of gains. In fact, there's been a lot of talk in just the last couple of weeks about whether or not AI is actually providing the return on investment that was promised. And you have big firms like Uber saying, I think we're going to scale back. Amazon saying, I think we might have to scale back We also need, I think, more focus on the financial balance sheets about what's actually going on behind the scenes here They've gotten so much money by telling these wild stories without having a concrete business plan to put forward to the extent that Sam Altman has said early on. We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue We have made a soft promise to investors that once we've built this sort of generally intelligent system Basically, we will ask it to figure out a way to generate an investment return for you. That was the plan. People did kind of laugh at him in the room and he said, No, no, no. You can laugh. It's all right But it is what I actually believe is gonna happen. For all of the fascinating technology and all of the breakthroughs and all of the disruption that this has caused, it is built first and foremost on this story. And we need journalists who are going to continue to sort of dig in to what lies beyond the story Brian thanks for doing this work Wow, thanks so much for having me Brian Merchant is author of the book, Blood in the Machine Coming up. Did he I write that? This is on the media WNYC Studios is supported by Mohawk Mountain House. 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As the day wraps up, get the scoop on what's been happening with Here's the Scoop, a new podcast from NBC News, with me your host, Yazmine Nasugian We'll take a deep dive into the today's top stories with NBC News's trusted journalists. It's a fresh take that's sharp, thoughtful, and it's informative, bringing you closer to the headlines and conversations that are shaping our world. From the front page to the zeitgeist, hereere's the scoop from NBC News. Listen daily wherever you get your podcasts. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Ooinger. Not long after the release of the Pope's Ecyclical, a rumor started to spread on social media that his missive on AI may have been written using AI The fact checking site Snopes could not find conclusive evidence to support this claim, but it did reference scan results from Panram Labs, an AI detection tool, which found that the encyclical was ninety four percent human, four percent AI generated, and two percent AI assisted If those results are accurate, then maybe someone on the Pope's staff fed parts of his essay into, say, Claude for editing help In this moment, as it's becoming harder to tell what's real or fake, human or AI, more people are turning to tools like Panram In March, a researcher fed a New York Times mododern Love column by Kate Gilgan into the app and alleged that the piece was more than sixty percent AI generated One writer for the Atlantic decided to dig deeper I eventually spoke to the author of the column over a text message Wahini Vara is the author of the book seearches selfhood in the Digital Age. She's been tracking how AI has been creeping into reporting, writing, even literature. She told me that she hadn't actually copied and pasted anything from an AI model into her work. But then she went on to say that she did utilize AI as a tool for things like inspiration and guidance and correction. And then she gave me this whole list of five AI products that she'd used while writing the piece, and she called AI a collaborative editor. And you reached out to the New York Times the fact that they had published something that at the very least was written with a heavy assist from AI tools, how did they respond The New York Times said that if people used generative AI in a substantial way that needed to be disclosed to readers I asked the spokesperson who I was in touch with whether the level of AI use in that essay rose to that level that required disclosure And she didn't directly answer the question. Eventually, many weeks later, the Times actually did changes policies. It introduced this new AI policy for freelancers making clear that they were expected to largely refrain from using AI Here's another example of an AI reckoning, the horror novel called Shy Girl. It had garnered some buzz before it was released by Hashette Book Group until a New York Times article made the case that again, AI tools may have been involved So in that case, the author of that book did tell the Times that she had not used AI to write Shy Girl, but that she had hired an acquaintance to edit an earlier version of the book and that acquaintance had used AI And then Het canceled publication? Okay, let's talk about another case study where again, this AI detection tool pangrram was used L year's Commonwealth short story prize People, again, on social media started noticing that This one story that was published online on the website of the magazine, Granta, which is very prestigious seemed to just reek of AI use. And again, people ran the story through Panram. In that case, Pangram believed that the story was one hundred percent AI generated. But that was just the beginning of it because that story had actually been a regional winner of this prize called the Commonwealth Short Story Prize And there were four other regional winners And so people ran those stories through Pangrum. One other story was flagged as one hundred percent AI generated. and a third story was flagged as including significant amounts of AI generated material. But what made this instance different from the other two we talked about is that these writers said that they didn't use AI. I want to ask you more about these AI detection tools like Pan Gram Do Pan Gram work? How accurate is it? do we know It essentially shows lotots of different examples of human writing and AI generated text to an AI model. And that model learns to distinguish the difference between what human writing looks like and what AI generated writing looks like. So it isn't a matter of this technology like counting M dashes per paragraph, right? orr like tallying the number of really bad metaphors, which to a human eye might be a sign of AI writing. Exactly Pangrrim in particular, as well as another product called GPT Zero, have been found by independent research from the University of Chicago to actually be veryy accurate. There's almost a zero percent chance that something's gonna be flagged as AI if it's really human written. The product does have higher false negative rates which can be between two percent and four percent, according to the University of Chicago research Which means that it's somewhat more likely that it's going to take something that was actually AI generated and flag it as human written. Interesting In some of your own reporting, you have relied on Han Grams analysis and more specifically the work of a Maryland PhD student and researcher named Jenna Russell. she and other Researchers from Pangrram released a preprint, meaning you can read it online though it hasn't been peer reviewed yet which scanned one hundred eighty five thousand articles from fifteen hundred newspapers The team claims that nine percent of those newspaper articles were either AI generated or mixed Th beds specifically were six times more likely to have AI's fingerprints In an op ed published in the Wall Street Journal in April, an editor at the paper, James Toronto, dug into that pan Gram research paper, which he says erroneously flagged three op eds in the Wall Street Journal as AI generated. And that term matters because two of the accused writers said they used AI to revise some of their work, but he wrote, It's inaccurate and unfair to characterize work produced in the manner described by any of these authors as AI generated The pangrram tool has no ability to discern a writer's work process, it merely looks for linguistic patterns that tend to correlate with AI output I wouldn't come to the same conclusion as the writer of that piece. It is true that to flag something as AI generated does not reflect the nuance of how people actually use AI products, right? When you see that something is flagged as one hundred percent AI, for example I think what we picture is that somebody went to Chat GBT and said, write me an eight hundred word modern love column about a bad breakup, right? It may be the case actually that people are giving the AI models very rough drafts or outlines of the material and then relying very heavily on the AI chat bot to suggest language or refine their language But an author might feel that it was actually there were because it was their ideas or an original draft came from them So I think that's a fair conversation to have, but I think it raises this other problem which is that we don't really have clear standards about what we mean when we talk about AI reliance. In all of the examples that we've discussed, shaming seems to play a role I guess I'd love to hear what you would say to people who don't necessarily believe that All of these writers did something wrong. Listen, I think it's a matter of disclosure and transparency. We can imagine a world in which The New York Times or the Atlantic or New York Public Radio have very clear policies about AI that they post on their websites, for example. And then in every article or opinion piece There's a disclosure explaining exactly how AI was used in producing that piece. And that way people can know and they can make an informed decision about whether they want to read the piece at all, how much they trust it There was a really interesting piece in Pointer last month by a book critic named Rachel Meghan She had written about Shy Girl before its release and had given it a rave review Before reading that it was seventy eight percent AI generated She wrote that the experience was embarrassing. It made her question her judgment as a critic But it made me wonder if she, a fan of horror found such value in this book. whyy then does the realization that AI played a role undo all of that? For me, it has to do with what literature is for. So when we view it through that lens, if I as a reader appreciated it Isn't it maybe okay? It's a sort of like consumerist lens to use to think about literature, I think we are customers and all we need is to be given products that we appreciate, right? There's another lens through which to look at it, which is a political lens, which considers literature, but also journalism and also just communication in general to be this crucially important political act There's something politically powerful about using language to serve our individual and collective purposes as people in the world and something really dangerous, I think. about accepting language that's provided to us by big technology companies for which we have to pay in some way or other, right? We're sort of electing to give up our agency as thinkers and individuals when we let them talk for us. Exactly The thing that makes us human as a species is our ability to use this really specific form of language that only we have. in order to connect with one another. And so yeah, it's not really about like, should we do it or should a robot do it? It's about Should we do it or should we relinquish it to Products built by really rich, really powerful technology companies that are built to further enrich and further empower those companies. Well He, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you for having me Jahini Vara is a contributor for the Atlantic. She's the author of the recent piece. This literary AI scandal changes everything Coming up. And in real life tour through the Epstein files This is on the Media O the media is supported by Eagles Crest Advisors. Eagless Crest Advisors works to take a holistic approach to financial planning, helping you create a comprehensive strategy that aligns with your life goals. Whether you're saving for retirement, purchasing a home, or funding your children's education, they help to guide you in making informed decisions personersalized advice and ongoing support, ensuring that your plan evolves as your needs change Learn more at eaglescrestadvisors. com As the day wraps up, get the scoop on what's been happening with Here's the Scoop, a new podcast from NBC News, with me your host, Yazmine Nasugian We'll take a deep dive into the today's top stories with NBC News's trusted journalists. It's a fresh take that's sharp, thoughtful, and it's informative, bringing you closer to the headlines and conversations that are shaping our world. From the front page to the zeitgeist, hereere's the scoop from NBC News. Listen daily wherever you get your podcasts. This is on the media. I'm Michael Loinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone A few months ago, the Justice Department released on its website its last tronche of Epstein Files, a tangled thicket of PDFs Some thirty public figures, mostly foreign politicians, businessmen, academics, and lawyers, have faced some sort of reckoning for their involvement with Jeffrey Epstein as a result of the files. But America's most powerful seem to have been left relatively unscathed The president has lied. being on Epsty's plane And the unreredacted files prove that There's a lot in here Pennsylvania rep Meline Dean questioning acting A attttorney General Todd Blanche earlier this week as part of the House of Representatives investigation into the federal government's handling of the Epstein files. It's worth noting here that while some three and a half million documents in the government's files on Epstein have been made public, roughly two and a half million haveave not There's also this set of files. This is investigation into the potential co conspirators of Jeffrey Epstein all covered up. The American people are not stupid They know that when members of Congress have to go in and actually unreredact to try to find the truth For these victims, something is corrupt Something is corrosive. On a sticky day last month I stepped into the cool interior of what had been an art gallery to behold the files in real life. att least those we've been authorized to see. In late March, we downloaded all of the Epstein files from the Department of Justice website print to the mount bound them into volumes and brought them here. David Garrett is a luxury wine entrepreneur from Michigan and the co founder of the nonprofit Institute for Primary Facts He organized this exhibit to shine a spotlight on the decades long relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. itss synergies and synchronicities The exhibit was open to the public in New York City for several weeks in May Three point five million files ends up being about three thousand five hundred volumes of eight hundred pages each. They're all in this room. We couldn't fit them all in here so we have a few downstairs. But yeah, seventeen thousand pounds of evidence. At that moment, I was standing in front of a bookcase filled with volumes and stark white binders I pulled out volume two thousand seven hundred and forty two As released by the Department of Justice of the United States, the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room published by The Drumsonian I leftugh. So this all started when the Smithsonian took down the exhibits of Trump's impeachments You know, I kind of lost it a little bit. I mean, I'd been listening to too many podcasts and yelling at the TV for ten years. But when the Smithsonian decided to bow to the Trump administration and rewrite history, thought we need some place that's going to actually preserve the truth I think a lot of people might think that, wow, it really takes a long time to Xerox all those files. We know that it took a long time for Ellsberg to get the Pentagon papers Xeroxed. That was a walk in the park compared to this. There were really two problems getting everything printed. The first one was technical All of these files are heavily redacted And when you redact a digital file, they go over the redacted material three times with full black It's completely gone The problem is that's so much ink that if you put it through a printer, it'll tear the paper. So we had to go through all three point five million files and correct each pixel that was three hundred percent black to a format that could be printed But the bigger problem was really political The first printer that we sent this project to came back and said, We work with a lot of lawyers. We're really worried that if they find out that we printed this, they're not going to work with us anymore A second printer, one of their biggest investors was a Trump supporter. We finally found some printers that are super courageous and we got very lucky. And the locations We had a very bad day when we lost both the printer and our first location on the same day. We literally sat down and said, is this too hard? We probably looked at five different places. And they turned you down. A bunch of them turned us down, yeah. And this exhibit, the reason that Donald Trump's name is on it, is really for two reasons what he shares with Jeffrey Epstein is Dozens and dozens of allegations of sexual assault They're both convicted felons So putting their names together really makes sense Trump's name is cited More than thirty eight thousand times throughout the documents. People can draw their own conclusions from that. But my point is this, he shouldn't be influencing the investigation into these crimes That is a corrupt act. him slowing that investigation. That's the purpose of having his name on this Now I assume you've looked at a lot of these documents, right? Too many Will you show me one that struck you? Oh I well, as well tell you One time last week, I was giving an interview and I just pulled a random book off the shelf and started leaving through it to show them that it was real And it was page after page of little girls with no clothes on And I had to put the pook back and I had to sit down And so I don't do that anymore. I was here with one of the survivors A couple of days before we opened, we helped her to find The the books where she's mentioned. And we pulled them down and I sat down with her downstairs. And she showed me her name Her address, her birthday, her social security number. Things that were supposed to be redactic. A picture of her driver's license. She was seventeen when she did the FBI interview. And so she talked about some of her friends that she had told about it Those friends's names are unredacted It is criminal. what the Department of Justice has done in causing additional harm to the victims and survivors and exposing them I don't know who to see about it when the Department of Justice breaks the law. He walks us towards the back of the room and to display The famous picture of Trump and Epstein, and Trump's got his hand on his shoulder. They're both smiling. And then there's a pretty extensive timeline. Three, actually, one on top of the other, on top of the other The top one is Jeffrey Epstein His dozens of allegations of sexual assault, his felony conviction The bottom timeline is Donald Trump and his dozens of allegations of sexual assault and his felony convictions And in the middle, you see all these famous photos of them together. We built this timeline to create context. So you would know when these photos were taken and all of the allegations of sexual assault by both men The notes that you see that are tacked to the timeline are all from survivors that have been here over the course of the last few days They see themselves on the timeline and they asked if they could include themselves. This one here from Marina Las Serda Parentheses minor victim one My first time in Epstein's house. I was only fourteen years old He gained my confidence and groomed me till he was able to rape abuse and take my childhood away Today I am thirty seven and reclaiming my power, and I encourage every woman not to forget that power is always within. Love Marina This happened to her. in two thousand two, alongside a profile of Epstein in New York magazine, Trump said, I've known Jeff for fifteen years, terrific guy, a lot of fun to be with. It's even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side Same year as Marina's encounter. When she was fourteen This is in two thousand five, the same year the federal probe into Epenin started And Danny writes here that she was trafficked to Epstein in two thousand four at seventeen years old Jeffrey used dance, my ballet background, and my mom's brain tumor against me to get what he wanted Demand from the powerful still exists We have to make it safer. This is around the same time that Trump wrote that birthday card. Yeah. She put it on the timeline right above Trump's famous birthday card And two thousand the same year where there's the famous forsome photo of Trump, Melania, Epstein and Gelaine Maxwell photographed together at Mar a Lago. This is when Virginia Jeffrey was recruited at Mar a Lago. She was sixteen years old. She became one of the most prominent voices against Epstein. later, she killed herself Lisa Phillips, around the same time, brought by boat from Tortola. She writes in this note on yourour Wall She met Prince Andrew on the same day Epstein, she writes, abused me. Yeah. so everything that's happening now with transparency and accountability as flawed as it is is because of these amazingly brave women who stood up and refuse to go away The pictures that you see here are them speaking out in front of Congress to get the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed And then two of these photos are from the very famous public service announcement advertisement that ran during the Super Bowl with all of the survivors holding up pictures of themselves the year they met Jeffrey Epstein After years of being kept apart We're standing together. Standing. Sting together Because this girl deserves the truth, because she deserves the truth. because we all deserve the truth On the timeline, there's a girl, she looks maybe thirteen or fourteen smiling for her class photo. This was the year she met Epstein nineteen ninety one. And she leaves a note Jess Michaels, raped by Jeffrey Epstein, brought to him by a woman who would go on to work for Epstein for eighteen plus years So what we have in the middle Next, David Garrett brings us to a draped back Inside there are fourteen hundred electric candles. Each one of those candles represents one of the victims of Jeffrey Epstein Each one of them is life you found that peopleople looking at it had a tendency to start S I think they start counting first to just say how many are there? And some people will stand here for twenty minutes or half hour. What we're surrounded by are three point five million files It's the problem with big numbers. How do you know what three point five million files looks like? Well, now you can see it But the same thing is true with four thousandteen hundred victims. How do you know what fourteen hundred little girls looks like? ten is a volleyball team, twenty is a lacrosse team. fourteen hundred fs a theater Downstairs, the walls are blanketed with so many more handwritten notes, but these are written by the guests. This was our overflow room originally, where we have some more bookshelves and a few hundred last books. And we created a space down here where people that come through, if they want to call the Department of Justice, they can sit at that table and call and ask demand all of the files be released and that they'd be properly redacted And then here at this table, people leave notes. We had one corkboard. We thought we'd only need one for the whole time that we were here. There are now maybe twenty corkboards. Here's one that says We live in a prison with free monsters We are not thingsings All this happened in the quote, best country in the world. Are we great yet So a lot of people that come through are survivors of sexual abuse or sexual assault themselves A lot of women need a moment after seeing the exhibit upstairs and want to express themselves down here. We've seen dozens and dozens of survivors come through this space There's one that says, why do men in power keep trying to protect us from imaginary threats and ignoring the real ones Burn it all down You call this enterprise a pressure campaign. How so a year ago, when the authors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act were contemplating that piece of legislation Everybody thought it'll never pass, it'll never be law, but because these incredibly brave women went to Capitol Hill and demanded that this law be passed, because millions and millions of people called their Cgresspeople. It passed the House with only one no vote, It passed the Senate unanimously, and the president signed it What that means is that if we work together, democracy can still work That's what I hope we can do a small part of here get people excited. We've already done maybe fif five hundred calls to the Department of Justice. We hope to demand that all the files be released, that they properly redacted this time, and that there is real transparency that drives towards real accountability The Institute for Primary Facts is primarily an anti corruption organization Is that wrong? It's a pro democracy, right? But I think that's the same thing. Corruption is the tool of autocrats to kill democracies. But primary facts don't seem to have much purchase in the current political climate people seem to be immune I'm not sure if it's the people. I think it might be the medium. You make more money, the more attention you get on social media. The things that get the most attention sometimes aren't true You just have no idea when you're looking through your phone. So when I say the Instute for Primary Facts, what I'm hoping that we can do is use in real life, use tactile experiences, Get away from your phone and come in and see what we've done here. It's really hard to ignore. You can't scroll past it when you're walking through this room. So many people are able to tisk tisk at what happened with Jeffrey Epstein and move on You clearly can't. justust talking about it made you something that the listeners couldn't see but really upset Why can't you pass it by? I have two daughters. How old are yours? I have a daughter who's twenty six and one who's fifteen I imagine that I'll have granddaughters someday There've always been monsters It' always for mononsters. But for two hundred and fifty years, we have the rule of law. And the rule of law meant that we could feel confident that regardless of who the perpetrator was, we could hold them accountable. And if we could hold them accountable, then there would be a deterrent for people to do it in the future. Well, what is the deterrent now They've all gotten away with it. I don't think that's providing a safe environment for my daughters and granddaughters. Let's have some real accountability Look, I've been a reporter for a long time. I've often told young reporters that it's like water dropping on a stone to change things. You need a billion drops to even slightly redirect the flow. Are your hopes for this reasonable Maybe, even if they're unreasonable Real change is a small group of people trying to do impossible things That's the only way that change has ever happened I think that a lot of people are hungry for change So let's do it Thank you so much. Thank you While Garrett was guiding us through the tour, a woman in a long navy dress slipped into the exhibit. He introduced her as Andrea Sterling, an online content creator And also a survivor of one of Epstein's notorious assaults on miners She agreed to sit down with me downstairs amid the spillover volumes and all those encouraging cork booards. and tell me what happened to her I was seventeen and I recently moved from Colombia. and a friend of mine casually invited me. He was like, Hey, you know I have this gig. There's this rich guy. and I give him massage There are no details It was easy for me to accept two because she always invited me to very normal events. Barbecues, friends that were our age, veryy normal So when she invited me, it was a little strange, but to be honest with you, I trusted it He clearly had a technique