The issue of how some of the most privileged people in the world treat children is getting more traction. After the arrests of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, millions of ordinary people are critically examining the actions of Hollywood celebrities, titans of business, powerful politicians, media corporations, and other elite groups. Scenarios that previously seemed unthinkable are becoming more thinkable by the day.

Chrissy Teigen is a popular model and actress who’s married to singer John Legend. She enjoys a lucrative career appearing in commercials and TV shows and hawking a product line at Target. She’s also a prolific writer of tweets that feature her disturbing fantasies about children. Here are some Chrissy tweets:

“I just saw a baby that looked like a porn star. Like a trashy do-anything porn star. Is this wrong to think?” and “seeing little girls do splits half naked is just…. I want to put myself in jail. #toddlersandtiaras”

Chrissy Teigen in 2019

Photo credit: Adweek licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Recently, alert readers unearthed thousands of Teigen’s child-centered tweets and started swarming Twitter with questions. Some of those questions probed into whether Teigen ever had a relationship with the deceased child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Teigen responded by blocking one million people, deleting 60,000 tweets, and claiming she was the victim of heartless internet trolls. Conveniently for her, the media sided with Teigen. This article in USA Today, for instance, painted a sympathetic portrait of Teigen as an innocent woman under vicious attack, while scrupulously avoiding quoting any of Teigen’s actual tweets.

Who could have imagined this bizarre photo of accused child trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and disgraced Oscar winner Kevin Spacey relaxing on the thrones of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip? Yet, here it is. The Queen’s son, Prince Andrew, was a friend of Epstein for decades, and is currently wanted for questioning by U.S. prosecutors. His relationship with Epstein was well-known in royal circles but tolerated until Epstein’s arrest made it too uncomfortable.

In fact, Jeffrey Epstein remained a highly sought-after companion among the elite, even after his release from jail on sex offender charges. A dinner at his New York mansion was attended by such media luminaries as Katie Couric, Chelsea Handler, and George Stephanopolous, whose wife just publicly urged parents to watch porn with their children.

And it wasn’t just media stars who loved Epstein. Bill Gates, who has endowed the world’s largest charitable organization, visited Epstein many times and maintained close ties through his staff. Harvard University gave Epstein his own office, phone line, and unlimited access, after he donated $9 million for scientific research. And Harvard faculty visited Epstein in his various homes and in jail and flew on his private planes.

As the magnitude of the Epstein-Maxwell saga reaches the public, it’s becoming harder for elites to haughtily wave away attention to their behavior. In previous times, the story about Wayfair that raced across social media last week might never even have surfaced. But in today’s environment, this odd development inspired countless TikTok videos, outraged tweets and media denials.

Wayfair is a popular online purveyor of household goods, which attracted interest when some internet sleuths noticed strangely labeled items. Some ordinary looking cabinets, pillows, and baby goods were selling for absurdly inflated prices. Even more remarkably, each item had an unusual name which matched the name of a recently missing kid. For instance, the Duplessis Zodiac pillow, which was priced at $9,999.99, matched the name of 13-year-old Samara Duplessis, who had just gone missing in Southfield, Michigan. The Samiyah storage cabinet, retailing for $12,899.99, matched the name of 17-year-old Samiyah Mumin, recently missing from Columbus, Ohio.

Wayfair denied it.  But internet investigators speculated that Wayfair was fronting for human trafficking operators and continued to probe its personnel and history. But instantly, as soon as the story broke, the media jumped in, proclaiming it a “false conspiracy” which was “baseless,” “unfounded,” and “debunked.” On what basis was the Wayfair story debunked?

The media remains remarkably uncurious about NXIVM, the sordid sex cult whose founder, Keith Rainiere, faces life in prison for sex trafficking. This grotesque saga has everything you could want for tabloid excitement: underage sex slaves, Hollywood stars, one of the richest families in the world, connections to powerful politicians and the Dalai Lama. Yet the public remains largely unaware of NXIVM. Has any journalist asked Senator Kristin Gillibrand what her father was doing as an NXIVM member and its highly paid lawyer? Has anyone asked Hillary Clinton why sex cult members were illegally raising money for her campaign? Has anyone asked the Dalai Lama why he took a $1 million fee to endorse a sex cult that branded women like cattle?  Have any mainstream journalists investigated what was being done to children at NXIVM’s international day care centers?

Unfortunately, the elites’ unsettling relationship to crimes against children is too extensive to catalogue here. Oprah promoted Brazilian “holy man” John of God, now a convicted rapist who impregnated underage sex slaves to sell their babies on the black market. Meryl Streep led a standing ovation at the Oscars for Roman Polanski, who drugged and raped a 12-year-old girl. BBC boss Mark Thompson helped to cover up violent assaults by TV host Jimmy Savile, who attacked more than 500 children.  Thompson is now CEO of the New York Times.

In this unprecedented time when authorities are asking us to trust them as they strip away our freedom, an honest appraisal of their trustworthiness is long overdue. The American people deserve to know what some of the privileged elites are doing to our children.