My name is Nick Bryant. In addition to being the Director of Epstein Justice, I’m the journalist who put Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book on the Internet in 2015, four years before the case broke nationally. And I’m also in the Epstein files! My harrowing odyssey that resulted in my appearance in the Epstein files in January of 2026 began in 2002.
Prior to 2002, I’d written extensively about children's issues, and then I stumbled across a 1987 US Customs Service report on a "child abuse investigation" the Customs Service was conducting into a cult called the Finders. (Though the subject matter of the USCS report is horrific, I urge readers of this blog to read the report with the caveat of a trigger warning.) The Customs report was written by Ramon J. Martinez, Special Agent, who took part in executing a search warrant on the Finders warehouse in Washington, DC. An excerpt from the report states:
“On Thursday, February 5, 1987, Senior Special Agent Harrold and I assisted the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department with two search warrants involving the possible sexual exploitation of children. During the course of the search warrants, numerous documents were discovered which appeared to be concerned with international trafficking in children, high tech transfer to the United Kingdom, and international transfer of currency.”
By early April of 1987, Martinez hadn’t heard a peep about the investigation, so he visited the DC police station, and talked to an officer who was only willing to talk “off the record.” Martinez ended his report on a rather ominous note:
“The individual further advised me of circumstances which indicated that the investigation into the activity of the Finders had become a CIA internal matter. The MPD report has been classified SECRET and was not available for review. I was advised that the FBI had withdrawn from the investigation several weeks prior and that the FBI Foreign Counter Intelligence Division had directed MPD not to advise the FBI Washington Field Office of anything that had transpired. No further information will be available. No further action will be taken.”
Whoa! It’s against the law for the CIA to operate in the US, and I wondered why in hell it would quash an investigation into a strange cult that’s seemingly engaged in child abuse. Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” came to mind: “There’s something happenin’ here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” The USCS report certainly triggered a paradigm shift within me—I suddenly became willing to entertain ideas that I previously would have discarded.
(In 2019, the FBI released a tranche of documents about the investigation into the Finders, which essentially portrayed them as an innocuous group of counter-culture sorts. The FBI documents also relegated Ramon Martinez to fantasist. In 2021, Elizabeth Voss, of Mint Press News, wrote a 3-part series on the Finders, “The Finders: CIA Ties to Child Sex Cult Obscured as Coverage Goes from Sensationalism to Silence,” in which she showed that the FBI whitewash was lacking in veracity.)
At the time I read the USCS report on the Finders in 2002, I found it nearly impossible to glean information on the cult. No one was talking.
After reading the USCS report, I started to entertain ideas that I otherwise wouldn't have. I then found myself en route to Omaha, Nebraska, the internet being rife with reports of a child trafficking network there that had been covered up by local, state, and federal authorities. During my week or so on the plains, I encountered palpable fear in people who had been touched by the scandal, which included a rash of mysterious deaths.
I managed to garner on-record interviews with a purported victim of the network and “blackmail” photographer the network utilized. I also talked with figures close to the scandal, including a former state senator who had headed a Nebraska Senate subcommittee that attempted to expose the network, a social services employee who alerted federal and state law enforcement to the network, and the former wife of an investigator for the Senate subcommittee who had died in a plane crash as he investigated the network. These three refused to go on record. However, I managed to collect documentation that the Senate subcommittee’s investigator had compiled before his death. One of the documents had the names of 60 victims.
After a week in Nebraska, I started coming to the realization that the pedophile network had been much bigger and more malevolent than I ever could have imagined, and that it had been, indeed, covered up by local, state, and federal authorities, with state authorities going so far as to describe the child trafficking allegations as a “carefully crafted hoax.” During my visit to Omaha, I had been followed and a death threat was dispensed to me on my last night in Omaha. When I returned to New York City, I started to receive very strange phone calls.
By the time I left Omaha I was shattered. I was free falling in a wormhole to a parallel universe, one that coexists with the realm of Little League, Boy Scouts, Disneyland, and the other hallmarks of wholesome, youthful Americana—a universe where lies masquerade as truth, where shadows reflect light, and where innocence is condemned.
My first trip to Nebraska left me overwhelmed by dread. But I made twelve trips there over the next six years, attempting to find victims whose names were on the list the subcommittee investigator had compiled before his death. I found them in shelters, projects, and a prison. I even looked for a victim in a crack house whose managerial team was quite hostile towards me. (Apparently, my fashion statement wasn’t crack chic.) About half the victims I found were willing to go on record with me.
The majority of victims I located had been to prison. A built-in protection mechanism of trafficking networks is that the victims are often from disadvantaged and dysfunctional backgrounds, and the adult or adults luring a child frequently introduce their underage victim to drugs and alcohol. When the victims lose their youthful marketability and are expunged by the network, their abuse is typically too horrific for them to process mentally. They often turn to drugs to ameliorate their pain, which erodes their credibility. I experienced immense anguish myself as victims told me of the nightmares that were their childhoods.
Four years into the investigation, a victim named Alisha Owen went on record with me. Alisha had been abused by the network as an adolescent, and FBI agents had pressured her to recant her accounts of abuse. Although other victims had quickly folded when subjected to the intimidation of FBI agents, the then 21-year-old refused to recant. She was sentenced to between 9 and 15 years for perjury, and spent nearly two years in solitary confinement. I also managed to acquire the sealed exhibits and testimony of one of the grand juries that had disavowed the existence of the trafficking network, and that documentation enabled me to see how thoroughly corrupt that grand jury process had been.
As I was making sojourns to Nebraska, my agent and I attempted to sell an article and/or book on my investigation, but our efforts came to naught. The editors and publishers I pitched experienced acute cognitive dissonance. The story was truly horrific, featuring children trafficked throughout the country, including Washington, D.C., and their extreme abuse by figures in positions of authority. Editors and publishers could either agree I was on to something and help me expose the network, or they could write me off as a crazed “conspiracy theorist.” They invariably chose the latter course.
I was finally able to land a book deal with a small publisher on the West Coast. The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse, and Betrayal was published in 2009 (Omaha’s Franklin Federal Credit Union served as the front for the nationwide pedophile network I investigated). The book was meticulously sourced, but no one in mainstream media would touch it. I turned to giving interviews to various podcasts, whose interviewers ranged from well-meaning and sane to a tad unhinged. The latter wanted me to discuss the Illuminati and even shape shifting extraterrestrials. I would bring those interviews to a polite but abrupt end.
Although I had published investigative articles before The Franklin Scandal, I primarily made my living as a freelance science reporter covering science conferences. Throughout my years as a science reporter, I had socked away significant savings, which subsidized my Franklin investigation. By the time The Franklin Scandal was published I had enough money to last another year. During the period when I was traveling to Nebraska, the science publishers I had reported for were being driven into extinction by the internet.
But I felt a year was enough time to promote my book and produce a documentary based on it. I threw all my energies in that direction. I had friends in the media and friends who were very successful writers, but only one, Malachy McCourt, attempted to help me. He introduced me to a publisher and a famous director, but both snubbed me. I grew up in Minneapolis, and a friend of mine from there who I had known for nearly three decades had become a media darling. He witnessed my “Franklin” investigation from its inception, but save for one paltry Tweet he wouldn’t assist in publicizing my book.
With my resources diminishing I doubled down on my risk. I made a jaunt to Los Angeles to sell a documentary on The Franklin Scandal which I had embarked on making two years earlier. I had several videotaped interviews of victims that had been spliced into a rough trailer. Following an intense flurry of networking a dozen entertainment executives granted me meetings. One of the individuals who had been instrumental in setting these up was a friend of a friend. He had a showbiz background and lived in Southern California. He’d read The Franklin Scandal and earnestly sought to help me, setting me up with two executives in their early thirties.
After I met with one of those executives, my newfound friend sent me an email between the two executives on which he had been CC’d. Without even having read the book, the executives had concluded what was true and untrue about it! After a series of rebuffs, I left L.A. without a deal that would salvage my apartment.
After my trip to L.A., I found myself pondering my future from the living room of the one-bedroom West Village apartment that I was on the precipice of losing. I had bet all my chips on at least one media hotshot not being apathetic about the industrial destruction of children. I had lost my wager. I debated leaving New York City, and whether to even continue my writing career. I had been a professional writer for 20 years, and a freelancer for 15. When I’d driven around L.A. the preceding week, I had passed various fast-food mascots standing in front of their respective eateries, and I contemplated the transition from a writer to fast food mascot. My partner of four years had left me a year earlier, and my approaching destitution reopened that wound. Our relationship had its challenges, and I’m unsure if it was salvageable, but my fixation on writing The Franklin Scandal wasn’t exactly conducive to our romance.
