"Surviving The Smear"

After weeks of lies, isolation, and cruelty, truth arrived quietly, cutting through the noise, restoring my humanity, and reminding me that endurance is its own form of justice.

There is a moment, quiet and almost imperceptible, when the noise finally breaks. Not because the mob gets bored. Not because the lies apologize. But because truth, battered and bruised, finally forces its way to the surface.

For more than a month, I lived inside that noise. Baseless accusations. Reckless rhetoric. Social media turned into a digital coliseum where cruelty was currency and facts were optional. No evidence. No checking. Just raw, unfiltered rage aimed at a target people decided they were done understanding. Me.

I have been called a lot of things in my life, some fair, some earned, some weaponized. I am a felon. I do not run from that word. I did my time, including 51 days in solitary confinement. And unless you have lived alone with your own thoughts in a concrete box, let me tell you something most people never grasp: your mind can become a dangerous place.

In solitary, there is no clock. Time dissolves. Seconds stretch into something unrecognizable. Pain does not spike. It accumulates. Second by second. Minute by minute. Hour by hour. Day by endless day. You replay conversations that never happened. You argue with ghosts. You try to fix things you cannot touch. You are helpless to change the narrative unfolding outside those walls.

No one cares. You are not human. You are a number.

And that dehumanization is not confined to prison walls. I recognized it instantly online, the same faceless cruelty, the same anonymity emboldening people to say things they would never say while looking another human being in the eye. Handles instead of faces. Rage instead of responsibility.

But I am also the son of a Holocaust survivor. And hope, real, stubborn, defiant hope, is not something I learned. It is something etched into my DNA. We learn instinctively that despair is a luxury we cannot afford. That even when the world is cruel, tomorrow might bring change. That survival itself is an act of resistance.

Yesterday, that change came for me. It came quietly. Not with a press release or a viral post, but with a text message.

I was having lunch with my wife. Holding her hand. Waiting for our food. Just trying, for a moment, to exist without the weight of accusation pressing on my chest. My phone buzzed. It was him, the attorney who represented both Katie Johnson and Jane Doe.

For weeks, people like Joy-Ann Reid and I had been calling, asking, seeking clarity. Not spin. Not cover. Just truth.

Fifteen minutes of texts. That is all it took.

“I do not see how it is in my client’s interest to issue a statement,” he wrote. “As I stated, I never dealt with an attorney named Michael Cohen.”

Then again, unmistakably: You are conflating two entirely different Jane Doe cases. I never dealt with an attorney named Michael Cohen.

There it was. Clear. Unequivocal. Not from me. Not from my critics. From the source himself.

Truth hurts on the way in. Truth also hurts on the way out. It cuts through lies like shrapnel, and sometimes you bleed before you heal. But eventually, it arrives. And, getting to this Truth has made me bleed profusely.

I have said this many times, borrowing from the Buddha: three things always rise, the sun, the moon, and the truth. In solitary confinement, you learn something profound. They can take almost everything from you, but they cannot stop the sun from rising. They cannot hide the moon. Truth, though, takes time. And strength. And will.

Which brings me to a larger truth still clawing its way into daylight.

As America waits for the full release of the Epstein files, we are already seeing familiar shadows. Missing records. Narrowed disclosures. Heavily redacted pages. A watchdog group now asking why communications from Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel, officials at the very center of the response, are largely absent.

Congress tomorrow is being granted special, strange access to unredacted materials. No computers. No phones. No aides to help sift through the millions and millions of documents. Just pens and notepads. The public? Fed fragments. And told, essentially, trust us.

We have heard that before.

Truth does not fear sunlight. It does not need gatekeepers. And it certainly does not require selective transparency. Just as in my own case, answers remain hidden, but not forever.

Because truth has a way of surviving pressure. Of enduring delay. Of rising anyway.

Yesterday, it rose for me. Tomorrow, it will rise again; this time for the Epstein victims.

And when it does, no matter how painful the journey, it will remind us of something this country desperately needs to remember: lies can be loud, but truth is relentless.

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Yeah, I know; you’re tired. This shit is exhausting.

Guess what? Me too.

But I’ve spent the last 8 years throwing punches in the dark so truth could get a little daylight. And now I’m asking you to step into the ring with me.

Because if you’re still reading this, you already get it:
This isn’t just a newsletter. It’s a rally cry. A war drum. A line in the sand.

We are not passive observers of the downfall. We are the resistance. We call out the liars. We drag corruption by the collar into the sunlight. We say the quiet parts out loud; and we don’t flinch.

But here’s the truth: I can’t do this solo. Not anymore.

The storm is already here. We are standing in it. And it’s wearing stars and stripes like camouflage, preaching “freedom” while it sells fascism at retail.

So let me ask you:
Are. You. In?

Because this is not a scroll-and-forget read. This is a living, breathing, fire-breathing movement; and movements don’t move unless you do.

We need to be louder than spin, tougher than propaganda, and impossible to gaslight.
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But let’s be clear:

This isn’t about a book.
It’s about backbone.
It’s about calling out the gaslighters and refusing to be played.
It’s about locking arms and saying, “Not. On. Our. Watch.”

You want to make a difference?

Then make it; right now.

Because if we don’t fight for truth, no one will.
But if we fight together?

They can’t drown us out.

Let’s be so loud, they wish we were just angry tweets.
Let’s be unshakable.
Unignorable.
Un-fucking-breakable.

Let’s go!