No, you didn’t.
So I don’t always know when to quit.
Last week I did a dumb thing and wrote an article about a story that I saw sweeping social media and that several of my friends were personally interested in. This was the account of Sascha Riley’s story identifying himself as an Epstein survivor in the early 1980s.1 I predicted that people would be mad at me for expressing skepticism of this story. I was basically right.
Now it’s been a week and this story is not even close to the most important thing going on in the country right now. In light of that, I feel a little silly getting stuck on this. But I actually did want to take another look at this story and see if there was anything I missed, and having done that, I thought I’d share the findings with you.
Here’s how I would encourage you to approach this in the last week of January, 2026.
The first thing I want to say is, reading is asynchronous communication. I didn’t write this today with the expectation you will read it today. I write things like this so people have something to pull out when they’re wondering about a story. You don’t have to read this right now. It’s not going anywhere. If you’re not in a place where this story is pressing for you, or you just don’t want to read violent content, I get it. Take care of yourself.
There’s obviously more stuff going on in the country that’s significantly more pressing. Unfortunately, a lot of that falls outside my range of expertise. I am working on some basic misinformation debunking I’ve seen related to immigration and ICE, so stay tuned for that. Please comment with links to good resources for ICE abuses in the US and what American citizens can do to reclaim their rights and freedoms.
That said, I actually feel that moments like these, when government spokespeople blatantly lie, is when setting a standard of what it means to believe things with evidence becomes even more important. We cannot allow ourselves to get caught up in the nihilism, conspiracy, and relativistic morality that is sweeping the nation. We have to hold the line on truth and rationality.
The second thing is that I try to be really conscientious of what conclusions I can actually draw. Sometimes, all we can do is raise possibilities based on the evidence we have. I have no opinion on any number of matters related to this story, such as whether Riley was abused by someone or whether anyone involved in discussing this story stands to make any profit. Those teeter into accusations, and I will not make those. All I can do is react to the information in front of me. This is an accusation-free zone. All we’re trying to say is if this story is likely true or not.
The third thing I want to affirm is this: the release of the Epstein files needs to be completed yesterday.22 This has been promised and withheld repeatedly from the American people. The fact that this has not happened is in violation of the Epstein Transparency Act, which was signed into law last November. There’s no excuse. The materials need to be released.
But if they are, I will be shocked if anything in them corroborates this story. The timeline of Epstein’s known crimes, and the ones recounted in this story, are just too different. There are people on the Oversight Committee who have contacts in the press. If one of them had laid eyes on a document showing decisively that Trump had murdered a child, I’d expect this to go the same way the story about Trump’s card to Epstein went. Someone who’d laid eyes on this told the WSJ months before this card was released as part of the files. If Ro Khanna has seen verified medical records showing that Trump has bowel problems because in 1980 he had a tent peg stuffed in his rectum, I think he would have told someone by now. (Remember: the House Oversight Committee has the files. They’re not on Kash Patel’s laptop.)
So that would leave journalists to dig into this, or more realistically, civilians. My big takeaway is that investigation into this is going to be, if attempted, unbelievably difficult. Finding corroboration for a series of crimes involving children with first names only is going to be incredibly difficult, and richly rewarding for people who can find loose associations between places and locations forty years out. Debunking this would be nearly impossible, since the most likely thing that would turn up in the event that none of it is true is “nothing.” For those who believe, no evidence will be as good as evidence. A lot of people will also find this story plausible because they’re using other stories of large, international networks of traffickers as a benchmark for how plausible these stories are, when these stories are also false. (Trafficking, like most crimes, tends to be ad-hoc and local. Epstein is actually a huge outlier in the history of US trafficking busts.)
But for the rest of us, we can look at the data we actually have and get a sense of what questions would need to be answered in order to find this story credible, or at least ready for print in a major publication. I’ve already broken down some of what I’m finding difficult about this story. I’ve added some new ones here.
Here, I want to get into some counter-claims I’ve seen of people who think they’ve verified this story. I personally do not think the evidence as we have it is getting any stronger, and I’ll explain why here. I also want to get a little more into Riley’s earlier allegations and see if they fit with my theory – that these look more like memories created after 2020, not before.
Let’s start by answering two possible rebuttals: “this sounds real” and “if it’s false why didn’t so-and-so sue.” Then we’ll get into more of the issues with the story.
You Cannot Tell if Someone is Telling the Truth Based on How Sincere They Sound
The number one response I have gotten from people who believe Sascha Riley is that he sounds like he is telling the truth. Others have told me that they have run his testimony through AI and it confirms he is telling the truth. Either way, the number one defense of this I have heard is 1) the events are literally possible (which is true of most events, really – almost everything is literally possible. The question isn’t if they’re possible, it’s if they’re likely) and 2) Riley sounds sincere.
I can’t disagree with either claim. But neither of those make this story true. First off, a lying person can sound extremely sincere. There is no technology or method that can give you perfect insight into whether or not a person is telling the truth based on the tone of their voice. Also, even if there was such a method (and there is not) to determine if someone is being deceptive, a person does not have to be deceiving you in order to state something wrong. A person can be completely convinced of a falsehood.
The thing we all need to remember is that being convinced something happened does not mean it happened. Michelle Smith’s testimony apparently sounded sincere enough that she was able to travel the country convincing people of events that did not happen. She was convinced, and she was convincing. She was wrong. Alleged McMartin preschool victims confidently led prosecutors into filing charges, even as they named figures like Chuck Norris and a local mayor-elect among their victims, in response to skeptical officials selecting random photos for the children to identify. These children apparently sounded very convincing, even though they were able to recount graphic stories of almost any photographed person they were presented with. The book We Believe the Children includes interviews of people who are still convinced they were abused in McMartin Preschool’s non-existent basement. And Paul Ingram became himself convinced that he had sacrificed babies on his lawn, until an excavation revealed no skeletons.
My point is, people can be convinced of anything, and they can sound convincing to anyone. There’s really only one way to know the difference between a true story and a false story, and that’s evidence. Riley may believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was abused by Andy Biggs. A lie detector test (flawed as they are) might show that he is not trying to deceive anyone when he tells this story. And it can still be false.
So it doesn’t actually matter how sincere Riley sounds. The whole story stands and falls on corroborating evidence. So what do we have?
If It’s False Then Why Haven’t These People All Sued Riley?
Here’s another thing I keep getting hit with.
“If it’s false, why haven’t people sued Riley?”
There’s a lot of reasons why.
It’s pretty difficult to win a defamation suit in the United States if you’re a public figure. In all defamation cases, the plaintiff has to prove that the statement is false. As we’ve said many times, proving that you didn’t do something forty years ago is not exactly easy. If you’re a public figure, you have an additional layer to prove, and that’s “actual malice.” That means you have to prove that the person deliberately made a false statement or acted with “gross negligence.” If Riley is personally convinced of what he says, you’re not going to win a lawsuit against him. You also need to prove that you sustained damages from this, such as a loss of a professional opportunity, loss of income, etc.
The only people I think we can reasonably assume know about these allegations are Riley’s family members who are named in this story, one of whom is dead. Other than that, we’re left with public figures who would need to know that this story was released, would need to prove it is false, and would need to demonstrate that since November they’ve lost income because of it. If those things aren’t all true, then no, it’s not surprising they haven’t sued.
It’s more predictable in these situations that, even if people are aware of these allegations, they don’t give them oxygen. While Brigitte Macron has clearly lost patience with Candace Owens saying that she’s actually her dead brother, you can find any number of deranged claims about public figures like Hilary Clinton, Tom Hanks, and Huma Abadin on the internet and exactly zero lawsuits. If we’re going to say that the absence of a lawsuit means that the claim is true, we must also say that Hilary Clinton drinks blood, Human Abadin was filmed wearing a child’s face as a mask, and Tom Hanks has mind control powers. If the absence of a lawsuit is evidence of truth in one case, it’s evidence in all cases.
Even if any of the named figures are watching Substack and know this story, there are a lot of reasons not to sue. As for Trump, he doesn’t know what Greenland is, so I’d be surprised if he knows who Sascha Riley is.
Bill Riley
The single corroborating thing (outside of available information that Riley is a real person, that he really was adopted, etc) that tied any of Riley’s claims to the Epstein files was the name of his father, Bill Riley. There is a Bill Riley in the Epstein files. It is almost certainly not Sascha Riley’s adopted dad.
There was a William Riley who worked for Jeffrey Epstein and who served as his PI. He worked for a firm called Riley Kiraly. His name is William H. Riley. Sascha’s dad is William Kyle Riley.
It sounds like Voldeng has been conflating Bill Rileys from the jump. The William Riley in the released Epstein files does not seem to be the William Riley who was the adopted father of Sascha Riley. One is William Henry Riley, the other is William Kyle Riley (and Leonard, in the above linked article, seems to have found even a third William John Riley who also worked as a PI).
When we look at the correct Bill Riley, Sascha Riley’s story looks even harder to corroborate. William K. Riley, according to this article, served in the army until 1994. He began working as a private pilot flying helicopters in Atlanta, where he leased helicopters. (If Riley had a helicopter the whole time, why did he need to lease one?) Before this, we’d need to believe that for Riley to be Trump’s personal pilot, he had an aircraft made available to him and was at leisure to travel with Trump while he was also serving in the US Army.
Maybe it was Trump’s helicopter? That’s even harder to pin down. The predecessor to the Trump Force One (1997) was Trump’s Boeing 727. He also owns two helicopters, built in 1989 and 1992, and a Cessna Citation X, first available in the US in 1996. Trump first bought aircraft in 1989, when he tried and failed to establish an airline. It was then he hired his first pilot, John Dunkin. The October 1989 helicopter crash that killed the Trump organization’s three leading executives was on a chartered helicopter, which is excellent corroboration for the Trump Organization not having reliable access to aircraft until fairly late in the 1980s. So the leads for Trump owning aircraft in 1980 are pretty poor.
Even if we could find a plausible person in this network who owned aircraft (Epstein’s history doesn’t seem to get us any closer), we still need to allow for the fact that William Kyle Riley was both a private pilot and also enlisted in the US Army. During his enlistment, he was able to be away for weeks at a time pursuing private endeavors on behalf of the Soviet Union, a real estate developer in NYC, and a series of students and young professionals around the United States. Is this literally possible? I guess. Maybe an examination of William Riley’s military records would show that he was regularly AWOL. But is it likely? I don’t think so.
I can’t even find decisive evidence that Bill Riley was even a PI. You can find a PI license for a William Kyle Riley in Georgia but the license isn’t for years that Riley lived in Georgia, according to this article. This license was procured in August of 2006, so well after the events described here.3 We’re also, once again, hitting the problem of the “incredibly common name.” There was a different William Kyle Riley who lived in Georgia at this time (an amateur MMA fighter who had turned eighteen before this license was issued), so it’s just as likely this isn’t even his license. So we’re stuck with another dead end here.
All we have is this: one of the country’s Bill Kyle Rileys can fly helicopters, and he has an adopted son named Sascha. Maybe he was a PI. Maybe Epstein had a PI named Bill Riley based out of Miami, and a completely different PI for five years in Atlanta, who was also named Bill Riley, even though Epstein didn’t live in Atlanta in the 2000s. Or maybe Sascha’s dad was a PI for five years and none of his clients were related to Trump or Epstein. Or maybe he wasn’t a PI at all. These are all equally possible with the evidence we have now.
One thing I also noticed in this section is that, despite the fact that this whole operation hung on Bill Riley being a helicopter pilot, Riley never mentions being on a helicopter. He mentions being in a plane now and then, but he mostly talks about being in cars. So remember that when we get to the next section and travel distances become really relevant — when Riley talks about travel, he’s almost always talking about cars.
How Does Oklahoma Get Involved Here?
Locations are a constant issue in trying to corroborate Riley’s story. Where he lived and the locations he listed (most of which are pretty unclear) are difficult to link with any of the figures he’s named in his story, including Andy Biggs, Vladimir Putin, and Lindsay Graham.
However, the locations get much clearer in his later stories where he recounts trying to get law enforcement to respond to his complaints. Riley has repeatedly discussed trying to get Oklahoma law enforcement to act.
But most of Riley’s childhood was spent in Texas, Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida. I have never seen any claim from him that he was in Oklahoma as a child, except when crimes were occurring.
But the brothel where Riley was kept was in Duncan, Oklahoma.4
Ellie Leonard, who’s also written about this, spoke personally to Voldeng, who affirmed that most of the crimes took place in Oklahoma. And in 2021, Riley started trying to get the police in Lawton, Oklahoma to look into this.
I got that from his Threads account.
So it looks like the earliest disclosures, and earliest police reports that I can find and confirm were all in Oklahoma, when Riley was 50. Late disclosures for abuse are not uncommon and are not themselves a sign of confabulation. But, what’s really weird about all this is that Riley’s childhood doesn’t seem to have been based in Oklahoma. His adulthood was.
On the website USPhonebook, I was able to find a PO box for Riley in Lawton, OK (2021-24), and Elgin, OK from 2011-2025. I’m not posting these addresses because whoever lives there now is not related and one of you nutcases will probably go to their house. But you can check yourself. Elgin is also where Riley got divorced in 2021. Elgin is about 20 minutes from Lawton, and 40 minutes from Duncan.
Isn’t it super weird that Riley lived in four states as a child, then joined the military, then was discharged in Oklahoma, and then moved about forty minutes from the brothel where he was sold as a child?
2021 is the critical year here for when Riley first starts going to police, making public allegations, and filing for divorce. And like other parts of this story, the locations involved look more like memories made in 2021 than in 1980. When Riley is trying to remember where things happened, he remembers locations in Oklahoma, where he lived at the time that he made the allegations, not where he lived when he was a child. Just like Riley’s abusers (Maxwell, Putin, Biggs, and Jordan) are people who were wealthy and powerful in 2021, not 1980, Riley’s abuse happened at locations that are familiar to him in 2021, not 1980.
But what’s more likely? That Riley, at age fifty, happened to move right back to the same small town where he was trafficked as a child, right at the same time that all his previous abusers were becoming nationally prominent as members of the same political party? Is the most likely thing that Riley moved back to the region where his abuse occurred nearly forty years later, and also all the people he knew – including a Mormon college student in Utah, a wrestling student in Wisconsin, a Soviet Union agent, a Reagan administration employee in Missouri, and a Democrat property owner in NYC – all emerged together as political associates? Or that something happened that caused him to create memories around figures he saw on the news and locations that were at hand? Or to associate old memories with new locations and figures?
Now, Riley has confirmed that he has met with aides from the House Oversight Committee, and there’s been external corroboration for this part of the story. The meeting does seem like it happened. Whether anything came of that meeting, I have no idea. Voldeng has also promised further corroboration some time this month. If so, that will give people more of an actual paper trail to work with. As it stands, most of the corroborating data anyone seems to be able to find is limited to biographical material – Riley is really adopted, and he really lived in these states. Beyond that, linking Riley to the figures he names hits a repeated dead end. They also depend on some remarkable coincidences for them to be true.
Samantha
This part needs all the warnings in the world, because this is going to get really upsetting. The screenshots below are particularly graphic. I want to be completely clear in this section that I am not accusing anyone of anything, including lying. I still do not have any evidence that any of this comes from conscious deception. But as I want to show here, this story looks really bizarre and I think there’s a better explanation for it than “it happened.”
Let’s start here. Michelle Smith kicked off the satanic panic in 1980 when she became convinced, at the hands of her psychiatrist, that her mother was part of a satanic cult that ritually abused her. This story was then published in the now-widely-discredited memoir Michelle Remembers. Smith did not lie. Smith was convinced. She came to believe these things happened to her.
Part of the reason why Smith came to believe these things, I think, is that they served an emotional need for her at the time. Smith was apparently unhappy in her marriage and struggling after a miscarriage. She had complicated memories of her strict mother. And, she received sympathy, attention, and nurturing from her doctor. The false memories she produced gave her care from her doctor, justification for her anger at her deceased mother, and ultimately, a reason to leave her husband and marry her psychiatrist. The content of the memory might have been horrifying, but the memories themselves were comforting. They met Smith’s emotional needs, explained her pain, and provided a justification to seek the kind of care she wanted.
Just because a false memory is disturbing doesn’t mean it can’t provide some comfort to the person who has it.
Let’s talk about Samantha.
So who is Samantha? Samantha first emerges as Sammy on Facebook in 2021. In all versions Samantha is a black child. In 2021, Riley says he calls her Sammy because he doesn’t know her name.
By 2025, though, we have a full name for Sammy, which is Samantha Jackson. According to the audio files, Riley met Samantha when he was sent to live in a brothel for two months.
According to File A, Samantha Jackson was tortured nearly to death because Samantha tried to run away, in a duplex in Enterprise, Alabama. Riley ended up killing her out of mercy.
Who exactly killed Sammy varies from one account to another. Sometimes Lynn, Riley’s mother, is the primary abuser. Here it’s William. In the audio tapes it’s clarified that they tortured her and Riley killed her.
Samantha herself, according to both the audio files and Facebook, had also mercy killed other victims. Samantha carried a gun with her and agreed to kill Sarah to put her out of her misery. Samantha actually had a standing agreement with the girls and did this fairly regularly. This is also recounted in Audio File 2.
As you can see in the above example, Samantha shot abuse victims fairly regularly. She also killed another abuse survivor out of anger, in Audio File C.
She also threatened clients with guns.
This was because the day-to-day management of the brothel was left up to Samantha, who was permitted access to a gun to lethally enforce rules and also execute victims.
Samantha was about ten, by the way. Remember that.
It sounds like this period of time was before the incident described with Trump, which Riley says was between 1980-1982. According to this 2021 post, Riley started training to star in CSAM by having sex with sex workers at age 9, which would put this event in 1982. He also reckons his age in the brothel around 10 in some of the upcoming stories, so this would put this event in 1983.
In the 2021 Facebook posts, Riley says that Trump became interested in him because of his video with Sammy/Samantha, which he believes was called “Bette Davis Eyes.” The song “Bette Davis Eyes” didn’t come out until 1982, though, so this either is not the order of events or pushes the whole timeline forward.
In Audio File C, the sequence of events is clarified that Riley was sent to the brothel where he met Samantha, Sarah, and Patricia. Sarah was killed in, Samantha was killed in Alabama, and then Patricia was killed in the incident with Donald Trump, who had been drawn to the Rileys because of the videos that already existed with Samanta. Riley puts the Trump incident at 1982 at the latest, so that would push Samantha’s death before that.
I don’t want to be pedantic about years that are off by one or two but it does make the possibility of a corroborating investigation more difficult. Riley on Facebook is describing events that seem to have happened later than he does in the audio interviews – the audio files have this all between 1980-2, but the Facebook posts put these at probably 1983-4. The later timeline is more believable just for the ages of people involved, though they don’t help the timeline with the named figures very much. The problem is that if we’re trying to corroborate a story and we have a range of years and first names to go off of, it gets even harder to find possible records or witnesses. Essentially, we’re looking for records of a black child born somewhere in the US, somewhere between 1971 and 1975, whose name might have been Samantha.
At any rate, this all ended with Samantha trying to run away, then being transported to Enterprise, Alabama, where she was tortured and killed.
There’s no easy way to talk about this and even describing the allegations here makes my skin crawl, but I do think we need to be honest about what is being recounted here. I also want to emphasize as much as I possibly can that this is just what is on the page. I did not make this up. These aren’t my words I’m reacting to. These are Riley’s. All I can do is react to the information that is in front of me. I can’t make any pronouncements about why Riley says what he says and what kind of a person he is. But in a box, looking at these words only, this is what it looks like.
The thing that holds the entire Samantha story together, starting with the name that Riley gives her in 2021, is that Riley seems like he is thinking about a much older woman when he thinks about her.
So with that, we need to look at something pretty uncomfortable. When Riley is talking about himself being made to make CSAM, he doesn’t mean that an adult victimized him on camera. He means that his dad taught him to perform and have stamina in the bedroom, at age nine, so he could be “proficient in the bedroom” with other children. Because of this, he was also able to experience a (I don’t have any other word for this) consensual relationship with another child, and then they made a video capturing the sex they were having off camera. That was the appeal of the video, as Riley says.
Samantha was a competent, brave ten-year-old who was entrusted with the daily operations of a brothel. She and Riley were together able to beat and incapacitate mobsters and hillbillies. Samantha was also the love of Riley’s life, and they sound like they had a fulfilling sexual relationship.
So, here’s the thing.
There’s four years between the Sammy of 2021 and the Samantha of 2025. The Samantha of 2025 is essentially interchangeable with the other girls in the story. If anything, Patricia (killed on “the farm” with Trump, who is only the “freckle faced” girl from 2021) is the central female lead in the 2025 stories. Not so in 2021. In 2021, Sammy is the headliner. Likewise, in 2025 Riley mostly sticks to the claims that friendships were largely impossible or strained in such a toxic environment, though empathy did occur. That’s not what we have when we’re first introduced to Sammy in 2021. Sammy in 2021 isn’t just Riley’s friend, she’s his lover. She protects him, and he protects her. She’s the girl he has loved the most in his life. And we’re given a lot of stories about her passion, her dance, her motherly empathy for other girls, her fearlessness in the face of clients, and yes, their romantic connection.
I don’t know why Samantha retreats so far into the background in the 2025 files. I only know that she does. I don’t know why so many of the things Riley says about her seem to be absent from the recordings he made with Voldeng. But I can say this.
The thing all this has in common is that in 2025, Samantha sounds like a child. But in 2021, she sounds like an adult woman, and also a total badass. This element is easy to miss if you’re only familiar with the 2025 tapes, but when Riley first made these claims in 2021, this was who Sammy was.
Let’s unpack this.
The first thing is that one of the most common objections I’ve seen to being skeptical of this story is “why would you say this if it isn’t true? What would you get out of it?” This isn’t a question you can answer without talking to the specific person in question who has outstanding insight into their own motives. But possibilities still present themselves.
The first is that we don’t actually need to find a self-serving motive to explain why someone has a false memory. Not all false memories result in personal gain. Paul Ingram got a few decades in prison for saying something that wasn’t true. Not everyone is a rational, self-motivated actor at all times. People become convinced of things for all kinds of reasons.
But second, there actually is a plausible motive for confabulation here, and that’s self-soothing. I don’t know Riley personally and I can’t say this is definitely what is happening. Still, think about this. At the time Riley started to tell these stories, we were in the midst of a global pandemic, the January 6 rioters and their political ringleaders were skating with limited consequences, inflation was out of control, Epstein was dead and Maxwell was facing trial alone, and Riley seems to have been going through some significant health issues and personal upheavals. But in his memory, he and his perfect companion were in peak physical fitness. They fought the worst of the worst together and Riley even tore a permanent hole in Donald Trump’s anus. Riley and Sammy actually have a storied place in history. Who wouldn’t want to believe this about themselves in 2021? It’s actually pretty rational from that perspective.
It makes more sense, at least, than Sammy (and remember, “Sammy” is the name that in 2021 Riley says he gave this girl in his memory, because he didn’t know what she was called) was a real child who did the things that are described here. The alternative is that this is a memory of a real girl, between ages ten and twelve, who was entrusted with the daily operations of a brothel. She was there through no choice of her own and acted as a surrogate mother and protector of other victims. She was armed when she did this, she had broad license to shoot fellow sex workers and did this regularly. She was protective, street-smart, a quick thinker, physically capable against grown men, and a great lover.
Does that sound like a ten-year-old? Or does it sound like an adult woman? The kind of woman a person would really want to believe he had been with, and been like, when things were hard? Maybe one who crops up in the head of a person who is really struggling, and who only during the one part of his memories when there’s no one at hand to say “I don’t remember Sammy?” (Remember: Riley was married twice and joined the military at age eighteen. There’s no real gaps in Riley’s life for Sammy to emerge into except when he was a minor.)
I obviously can’t prove this is what happened. I’ve also read enough ethnographies of shelters for trafficking survivors to appreciate that trafficked minors are not indistinguishable from children their own age who grow up in healthy environments, so the fact that I can’t imagine my third-grader niece doing this doesn’t mean much. (That said, it is noticeable that Sammy seems to be largely free of the kinds of behavioral and mental health issues we’d expect from someone in that environment, in the stories where she is recounted.)
But on its face, this explanation does make sense of a few things, like the fact that Sammy was imprisoned at a brothel in the town where Riley lived at age fifty, but was murdered in the duplex thirteen hours away where Riley lived as a child. It also explains things like how this brothel was several states away from where the Riley family lived, but Riley’s stepmother Lynn was central to its operations. Would the Rileys really have been managing a brothel a thirteen-hour-drive away, when there’s no internet and long-distance calling is still a thing? Wouldn’t this require a lot of flexibility to travel on their part — something which, presumably, people in the Army don’t have?
Now, here’s the thing. The story about an officer asking Riley about images of him is one of the few things that does have a modicum of external corroboration, which is Snopes’ emails with Michael Balis. Balis was able to confirm that Riley was questioned about sexually explicit images of a boy that looks like Riley, and that a soldier was found with CSAM. That’s all we have. The live possibilities we have here are that the boy was not Riley, or that Riley was older in these images and the CSAM in question did not involve him. Neither Balis nor Riley saw the video, so neither can confirm this. Or, someone on the base really did have CSAM of Riley, and this officer was able to accurately spot Riley twenty-five years later.
Either way, the series of claims here are really difficult to square.
That claim is the one that Riley first expressed in 2021, where he himself confronted a group of soldiers who admitted to having seen this video. In 2025, Riley finds out the video is on base because he is asked about it by an officer. This is the version that Balis’s account comports the most with. I was able to find a 2009 report of two Fort Carson officers being arrested for CSAM possession, but this just adds a new confounding factor (we have two offenders, not one or a group, and neither of these names fit with the name that Riley gives in Audio File A. Likewise, the investigation recounted in the news article did not seem to have started with eyewitnesses alerting police, which seems to be suggested in Riley’s Facebook account.)
So parts of this story seem true, and parts of it don’t. The 2009 report might even be of a different incident – there’s enough variations that this is certainly a possibility. Balis’s testimony does mean this story isn’t out of thin air, but it is also very limited in the claims being made. And for the rest of it, we’d need a lot of corresponding evidence to find out if it’s true or not.
But this is the problem with any story that depends on one person’s memory. I’m sure the pushback I’ll get here is that maybe Riley remembers Samantha wrong, maybe she actually didn’t carry a gun, maybe she actually wasn’t ten, maybe she actually wasn’t the way she was described here, etc. The issue here is that there’s only so many times we can shave off part of the story before we don’t have a story anymore.
Conclusion
This story is exactly the kind of thing people latch onto in every era of history when there is a panic about crimes against children. It’s lurid, it’s graphic, it involves a lot of famous people, and like any forty-year-old story, it’s unbelievably difficult to prove or disprove. In the best of circumstances, proving something did not happen is nearly impossible, because one can always just come up with a new story that fits the data. (“Okay, so maybe it wasn’t in Oklahoma. Maybe it was somewhere else.” “Maybe it wasn’t this senator, it was a different senator.” And on, and on, and on.)
There’s obviously no way to prove with no data that something did not happen. But the data we have consistently points to something more like confabulation than truth (timelines, driving distance, lack of plausible connections between people, and adult behaviors and strength ascribed to small children all point away from this being a true story).
The information that is consistently missing from every investigation into this I’ve seen is the most important one: there is no connection anyone has been able to find connecting Riley’s story to Trump or Epstein. The stickiness of stories like Michelle Smith’s and Paul Ingram’s is that there were enough facts present for people to feel justified in hanging completely unfounded stories on them, which the facts did not support. You can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Paul Ingram really was a cop and he really did know all the people he was accused of knowing, but that had no bearing at all on whether or not he was part of a Satanic cult that was ritually abusing his daughters and sacrificing dozens of children. Of course Ingram’s daughters could accurately identify Igram’s friends. What they couldn’t do is provide evidence that the rest of these events happened.
I think we’re left in the same position here. Yes, there’s very good corroborating evidence that Sascha Riley really was adopted by William Riley, that William Riley really was a pilot, that they really lived around bases in the American South and Riley can recall a lot of his childhood addresses, that William Riley was really married to Lynn Riley, and that Sascha Riley was really in the army. And, in 2009ish, two people really were caught with CSAM in Fort Carson, and someone did ask Riley about his resemblance to someone in a video found in someone’s computer.
But none of that provides any evidence about whether or not a person who was serving in the US Army was able to also work as a helicopter pilot, that this person was specifically Donald Trump’s helicopter pilot, that he worked for a group of sadistic billionaires who murdered children at a series of locations around the American South, that Trump and Epstein knew each other more than ten years before any extent evidence of them knowing each other appears, that these Democrats specifically recruited future Republicans from public colleges around the country, that a KGB agent in Dresden was working with a person transitioning into a role with the Reagan administration, that all of this was accomplished with 1980s-era technology and left no discernible paper trail until the early 1990s, and a ten-year-old girl killed several children in Oklahoma a few miles from where Riley lives now.
All of this is a black hole. We have no evidence for any of that.
And yes, this story – not whether or not Riley was adopted – is extraordinary enough that it needs a lot more evidence to stand. In addition, every part of the story would need corroboration. Maybe someone can find evidence that Trump actually did use a private helicopter in 1980. That would be something, but it would still not be evidence that William Riley was the pilot. It would also not be evidence that Andy Biggs was on that helicopter. We need corroboration for each of those claims. The allure of conspiracy theories is skipping those steps and looking only at the cloud of facts to arrive at the conclusions you want to reach: if Epstein bought a ranch in New Mexico in the early 1990s, then he must have been associated with farms in Oklahoma. But that doesn’t follow. That’s just appealing to the cloud of facts to suggest that the evidence is pointing where you anticipate new evidence will lead. Or it’s just answering questions with new hypotheses that would also require evidence, instead of answering them with evidence. How did Andy Biggs end up connected with a network of billionaire traffickers? Maybe he was also trafficked! Maybe his dad was a trafficker! Maybe Epstein was also trafficked and that’s how he got into it! And maybe he was familiar with Utah traffickers because he was trafficked in Utah, and they knew the Oklahoma traffickers!
It doesn’t take long until you’re just building a castle out of air with more and more “maybes” that sound plausible to you because you remain reasonably confident that one day, evidence will emerge that answers your hypotheses with “yes.” But this is not investigation. This is how a guy bursts into Comet Ping-Pong with a gun.
If this all sounds a lot like Q Anon, you would not be insane for making that comparison.
I know the response to this will be “maybe the evidence is still out there.” Sure, but you also need to anticipate, in the event that you don’t find evidence, the point at which the anticipation is over. Looking for nothing is going to turn up nothing. The day does come when you have dug up Paul Ingram’s yard and found no baby skeletons. You don’t dig up the whole country because maybe there’s a baby skeleton out there.
There’s a thousand reasons why the Epstein files need to be released immediately, but I think the future of this story is already written in stone. My strong suspicion is that there is not corroborating evidence for these stories in these files. I could be wrong. But I don’t think I am. I say this because the files that the DOJ has, and needs to release, are not the sum total of all that can be known about Epstein. The army of journalists and lawyers who have been investigating Epstein for years have produced tons of material and tons of information, and none of them have turned up anything that fits these years, these locations, and these crimes.
But I think if the files are released and provide no corroboration for this story, people will still believe it. Because there could still be evidence out there somewhere. The improbabilities introduced by the timeline will be hand-waved away. Sure, it would be odd if these people all knew each other in the 1980s. But what if one day we find out evidence that they did?
The problem with this kind of thinking is that in the meantime, innocent people get hurt. This is obviously true in the case of something like the satanic panic, but as I discussed in the footnotes, it’s also true recently with the Epstein files. There are people, right now, dealing with harassment from internet sleuths trying to figure out if they covered up their daughter’s murder, because a tipster called the FBI tipline and said that they were. There are people all over TikTok calling Lynn Riley’s children trying to get information about whether or not she was a child murderer. These are not police officers or people with any professional training about how to collect evidence. These are private citizens who have deputized themselves to go after people for no reason other than the sense that if they do this enough, they might find that evidence that’s out there, somewhere.
It’s not a game. There are real people, right now, who have done absolutely nothing, except be named in public, who are facing the consequences of conspiratorial thinking right now. This is not justice. This is the hunt for the evidence that might be out there somewhere and completely disregarding that there are actual people, who have made no public claims and have been charged with no crimes, being treated like child traffickers.
I am not saying that people who have tried to verify this story using publicly available information need to take responsibility for people who have engaged in more aggressive actions. I would obviously be among their number, after all. You can’t control what someone else does. But we need to be honest about the fact that there actually is a good reason to engage critically and skeptically with public claims. It’s not to protect abusers. It’s to protect everyone else.
I’ve been at pains to emphasize that I don’t think Riley is lying. I don’t want to accuse him of that. I can’t distinguish between a true story distorted with false memories, a thoroughgoing false memory, and an outright scam. But this is when I actually want to remind people that there’s more than one way to look at this story and accuse someone of wrongdoing without evidence. On January 25, 2026, none of you have any evidence that anyone in the Riley family has committed or is covering up a crime, except for the word of a person you have never met. They could be monsters. They also could not be. You don’t know one way or the other. And that is not enough to justify harassing another person you have never met.
Do not call these people. Do not go to their houses. Don’t try to get in touch with them on social media. You do not know these people. You don’t know which of them you can trust and which you can’t. You don’t know them. Don’t start trolling for names you can find in an online phonebook who are mentioned in the Epstein files and start trying to get in touch with them. There is plenty of publicly available evidence to look into. You do not need to make other people bear the wait of your frustrations with the DOJ.
I understand that we all feel powerless in the face of injustice right now, but that’s not an excuse to turn the internet hate machine on to whoever gets dangled in front of our faces. If there’s evidence to support these stories, I’m certain it will come out.
But until then, think about what you would want someone to do if your family member accused you of a crime. Do you want to explain yourself to every person with a phone who comes along asking to talk to you? No, of course you don’t. But I wrote this whole damn article, and the last one, without harassing a single person. There is a lot of public information on Epstein you can read right now. You can call your congresspeople and demand the rest! But let’s remember that there are real consequences for innocent people caught in the crossfire. And when it comes to private individuals, who have not been charged with crimes, we have no way of knowing who’s innocent at this point.
So call your congresspeople. Keep your anger focused at the unimpeachable targets. The danger of conspiracies is that they can lead us away from the culprits in myriad other directions. Let’s not let this be one of those times.
- Concerning names and pronouns: I am sticking with the name and pronoun in Voldeng’s original blog. I’ve seen some people favor the name “Sascha Barros” and others use “they/them” pronouns, but since the material I’m primarily responding to comes from Voldeng, I’m assuming she got Riley’s name and pronouns correct. As of January 26, 2026, Voldeng’s blog uses the name Sascha Riley, and the pronouns “he/him.” ↩︎
- This does bring me to the difficult subject of redactions. I appreciate that redactions are frustrating and can be used to protect the guilty, but they also can be used to protect the innocent.
The problem with the files is that anyone can call a tip line and not everyone who called the FBI tip line told the truth. One example that I’ve personally seen is an incident involving a man named Dan Furee, who called claiming that his ex-girlfriend’s daughter Dusti Duke, who committed suicide in 2000, was actually raped and murdered by Epstein and Trump. Furee further alleged that his ex-girlfriend has been paid off by the government to ignore this. Duke’s family has strenuously disagreed with this narrative, particularly that they would have covered for Duke’s rapists and murderers. The mother and sister of this girl, twenty years after Dusti committed suicide, now face online harassment from people who think they were financially motivated to cover for ther daughter and sister’s murder.
While the DOJ is legally obligated to release these files, we need to be aware that not everything in them is substantiated and true, and there are going to be incidents where innocent civilians are named in these documents who did nothing wrong. In these cases, their names only appear because someone accused them of something. ↩︎ - Someone is going to point out that in August 2006 Trump announced his association with Trump Towers Atlanta, which didn’t end up coming to fruition. Trump didn’t own the property, though, and investigative reporters in 2016 couldn’t find evidence that Trump had done more than license his name. This is one of those coincidences people will go nuts with that looks more rewarding than it is. Trump licensed his name to an Atlanta property in August 2006, and someone named William Kyle Williams got his PI license in Atlanta in August 2006. We have absolutely no evidence that these events have anything to do with each other. ↩︎
This is the part where I lost my damn mind and realized that Halliburton was started in Duncan, OK. If someone can find a close association with all these people and Halliburton, that actually could stand a chance of solving the plausibility problem. The issue I have with this being the centralizing factor is that Riley specifies that hardly anyone was ever in the Duncan brothel except for one Dixie Mafia person and the rest of the operations were centered on video production — not that people who were plausibly connected with oil money were in and out regularly. (In fact, since Riley’s Duncan is populated by hillbillies and not engineers, this might be another example of Riley’s memory reflecting 2021, not 1980. In 1980, Halliburton had just opened a new research facility in Duncan. By 2021, more jobs had moved to Houston and Duncan was in comparative decline.) ↩︎
Editor’s Note: At American Crime Journal, we believe that compassion and skepticism are not opposing values. Genuine concern for victims and survivors must coexist with a commitment to evidence, verification, and factual accuracy. It is precisely because allegations involving abuse, trafficking, and exploitation are so serious that they demand careful scrutiny rather than unquestioning acceptance.
We are grateful to Dr. Laura Robinson for her thoughtful and extensively researched examination of the claims surrounding Sascha Riley. Whether readers ultimately agree with her conclusions or not, the questions she raises are legitimate, evidence-based, and rooted in a commitment to intellectual honesty. Her analysis reflects the same investigative principles that guide American Crime Journal: follow the facts, evaluate the evidence, identify what can be verified, and resist the temptation to substitute belief for proof.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary corroboration. As journalists, we have an obligation not only to report allegations but also to examine them critically, test them against available evidence, and consider alternative explanations when the facts warrant it. Dr. Robinson’s article does exactly that.
American Crime Journal found Dr. Robinson’s reporting compelling, methodical, and fact-driven. While readers are free to draw their own conclusions, we stand behind her right to ask difficult questions and present her findings. Responsible skepticism is not cynicism. It is an essential safeguard against misinformation, conspiracy thinking, and the unintended harm that can result when serious accusations are accepted without adequate evidence.
We thank Dr. Robinson for her contribution and for the rigor, integrity, and courage she brings to difficult subjects.
Readers interested in Dr. Robinson’s work can follow her research and commentary: Not Peer Reviewed: By Laura Robinson on Substack.
Resources & Further Reading
Individuals Under Scrutiny – American Crime Journal |
Sascha Riley and the Long Hangover of the Satanic Panic – American Crime Journal |
The End of the Sascha Riley Story – American Crime Journal |
Exposed: The Coco Berthmann Child Sex Slave Hoax – American Crime Journal |
Elizabeth Frazier: Another Professional Trafficking Victim – American Crime Journal |
Will the Real Eliza Please Stand Up? – American Crime Journal |
Discover more from American Crime Journal |
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