The Billion-Dollar Fear Machine Protecting Trump on Epstein

Kimmel is off the air, lawsuits are flying, and even CNN is terrified to utter Trump's name next to Epstein's.

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

You could almost see the terror on CNN’s John Berman’s face — the fear of saying the wrong, non–standards-approved line but the one thing hanging in the air: that Trump’s name is all over the Epstein story. Everyone knows it, but saying it on live TV could cost your network billions in court.

That’s the reality of this week in media. Billion-dollar lawsuits, a late-night host yanked off the air, and reporters hedging every sentence with qualifiers so they don’t get dragged into the courtroom by the most powerful man in the world, President Trump.

On Wednesday, ABC fired Jimmy Kimmel after his monologue about Charlie Kirk’s death triggered outrage from Trump’s allies, who called it disrespectful. Then Federal Communication Commissioner Chairman Brendan Carr warned on a podcast that ABC affiliates could lose their licenses if they aired it. According to Oliver Darcy’s reporting, the Disney network held a “series of emergency meetings to discuss how to respond,” and quickly decided to kick their longstanding late-night host to the curb — not because of a fickle audience or low ratings, but out of pure fear. ABC affiliates are now running Kirk tributes instead. Even the most established voices aren’t immune from being silenced.

At the same time, Trump is deploying lawsuits like landmines: a $15 billion defamation suit against The New York Times and another $10 billion against The Wall Street Journal for publishing Epstein’s 50th birthday card, which Trump insists is a fake.

The effect is obvious: silencing. You can see it in real time when Berman interviewed Rep. Dave Min last week and declared: “There’s no reason to think Donald Trump is involved in any wrongdoing with Jeffrey Epstein.”

But there is a reason. Michael Cohen admitted to me that he sent a private investigator to hunt down an “infant” Jane Doe who accused Trump of rape connected to Epstein. At that time, a Jane Doe under the pseudonym Katie Johnson filed three lawsuits in 2016, then abruptly withdrew them just days before the election, citing intimidation.

At the time, Cohen was Trump’s fixer, handling other women like Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. When I pressed him in August, he admitted on the record:

“I ended up taking a private investigator and trying to find out who this person was, and we went to the address that allegedly this minor lived at in the Bronx.”

He said she didn’t exist because the address was a parking lot. Of course, Jane Does often use false addresses to protect themselves from exactly this kind of intimidation.

This was a huge admission. It’s one Cohen lashed out at me over. But it lines up with the timeline: Johnson’s lawsuits alleged she was raped in Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse at age 13. She dropped her case on November 4, 2016, just days before the election. Her lawyer Lisa Bloom said she was receiving death threats. Sending a PI to unmask her identity is textbook intimidation.

✦ The mainstream media won’t chase this story. They’re chilled by lawfare, with Trump commanding a legal army that shows the world’s most powerful men how to bury uncomfortable stories with threats of ruinous lawsuits. Subscribe to continue reading the full investigation and support this reporting.