What I Sincerely Hope Will Be My Last Word on this Epstein Conspiracy

Editor’s note on April 16, 2026 at the bottom.

A quick note on pronouns: In the last 2 articles, I referred to Sascha Barros Riley using “he/him” pronouns, trusting that Lisa Noelle Voldeng got Sascha’s pronouns right. In the only live footage I can find of Sascha in 2026, they use they/them pronouns. I will refer to Sascha using these pronouns below.

In Our Last Episode

Starting in the winter of 2026, I began digging into a story I had seen making some inroads on social media. This was the story of William Sascha Barros Riley, hereafter “Sascha” (there are a lot of Rileys in this story). Sascha claimed that in the late 1970s he was adopted by a Vietnam veteran named William Kyle Riley, hereafter “Bill.” Bill, per Sascha, was a pilot and private detective in Jeffrey Epstein’s employ. He sold his son and other children to serve as bare-knuckle fighters and sex slaves for the amusement of Donald Trump, Andy Biggs, Jim Jordan, and a number of other famous, wealthy Republicans – notably, though, not including anyone who was a famous, wealthy Republican in the early 1980s, when these events allegedly happened. This network also made snuff films and CSAM, which Sascha maintained was available to this day.

I thought the evidence that this did not happen was overwhelming, for a number of reasons. The implausibility of the locations and timeline, the extent to which Sascha’s allegation did not fit with the extant and better-corroborated claims against Trump and Epstein, and the surreality of many of the claims all looked to me like this came from delusions. The lynchpin of Sascha’s story, after all, was the time that, at age 10, Sascha tricked Trump into anal sex by covering a tent peg with a condom, inserting it into Trump’s rectum, and then kicking it to the point that Trump now has permanent bowel problems.

I think if you believe that story, there is a real chance you do not understand anatomy, or sex, or crime. I try to not be too graphic on this blog, but I’ll just say that I’ve seen fewer red flags at a Hoosiers home football game.

People got really mad about this, arguing that I was failing to believe victims, which is simply begging the question. You can’t believe someone because they are a victim when the very subject in question is whether or not they are a victim at all. At the time, no major media outlets or attorneys had picked up the story. The sole source for access to Sascha was a woman named Lisa Noelle Voldeng (don’t worry, we’ll talk about her) who posted the raw audio files of her conversation with Sascha on her Substack. At the time, Voldeng had promised that she would post the evidence just as soon as she had it. Then she cancelled plans to release the evidence. No other evidence emerged.

So, at the time I had written my second blog about this, I thought – indeed, I dearly hoped – I was done writing about this forever. I have been trying to keep my head down and finish the manuscript for which I’m actually getting paid (updates on that coming soon). I wanted this story to away on its own. In the end, there were really only two options a person could take regarding Sascha’s story. You could believe it because Sascha said it, or you could not, because of the absence of evidence in the face of extraordinary claims.

To this day, the only part of Sascha’s story that has been corroborated at all is the following: Sascha really was adopted by Bill Riley, raised by him and his then-wife Lynn, and Riley really was in the military. From there on, everything else depended completely on Sascha. There is no corroborating evidence for any other claims. Either you take Sascha at their word, or you don’t.

But the story didn’t go away. Instead it got weirder.

How Do I Explain This Quickly?

There’s two things that happened that made me realize I had more I wanted to say about this story.

The first thing that happened is that, on April 9, 2026, Brandy Zadrozny published the first extended major investigation into Sascha Riley’s claims. Zadrozny was able to speak to some key figures, including Bill Riley (who denies the allegations), members of Sascha’s family and friends from childhood (who find this all implausible), and family members of Lynn Riley (who deny that she was a sex trafficker and sadist).

This actually matters because these are the kinds of conversations that can open up new avenues of investigation. Even if you don’t take Bill at his word – and you shouldn’t, you should weigh everyone’s testimony critically – a plurality of witnesses does actually matter here. It’s not terribly common for an abuser to have only one victim. Finding another person who saw Bill or Lynn’s dark side would have gone a long way towards establishing the likelihood of these allegations.

The second thing that happened is that Sascha Riley and Lisa Noelle Voldeng, the blogger who originally publicized these allegations, had an incredibly public falling out.

This is Voldeng’s version of what happened. I’ve linked the whole document, but in short, it seems that Riley was overly public about their location in a way that Voldeng thought put herself and all the other supposed survivors she is representing at risk, that they had personality conflicts with other involved people, and, uh, this happened:

Oh!

On the other hand, this is Sascha’s explanation of the… RICO charges, murder-for-hire investigation involving powerful mafia figures they were involved in at age 12.

So what actually happened?

I don’t know. I don’t believe literally any of this. I don’t believe Voldeng has twenty other survivors who need to maintain perfect OPSEC in order to be kept safe from the United States government. I don’t believe this because according to Sascha, Donald Trump has gone more than forty years knowing exactly which kid caused him a permanent, humiliating injury and did absolutely nothing with this information while continuing to employ their father. No one is looking for these people. No one from the US government is looking for Sascha. Sascha is perfectly safe in the United States. Voldeng and Sascha may believe otherwise, but the evidence is not on their side. Somehow, Sascha made it from 10 to 52 with all the most dangerous and violent people in the world knowing where they are – indeed, employing their father! – and no one has acted on that information. If Sascha hasn’t been assassinated yet, they never will be.

Nor do I believe that Sascha was charged with murder for hire at age 12 owing to Sascha’s involvement with mob bosses they met through their extensive connections with middleweight boxing champion trainers.

Nor do I believe… well, any of this stuff.

Do you think Marvin Hagler traveled regularly in the early 1980s to train Sascha Riley to box when Sascha was a child? Because I don’t believe that. I think you’d have to be very gullible to believe that. I also think that if someone tells you a story like this, you should maybe rethink the validity of other stories they’ve told you. For example, you might wonder about the time this person supposedly put a tent peg in the president’s rectum.

I hope this gives you an idea of the kind of data I’ve had to wade through.

So why did Sascha and Voldeng fall out? I don’t know. They seem like the kinds of people who would get into fights with each other. No one in this story sounds particularly well-balanced or mature.

By the time this all started to happen publicly, I was getting contacted by people who knew both Sascha and Voldeng personally, and without going into detail or giving away anyone’s identity, I felt more and more correct every day. The story that was gradually emerging was what I always thought was true: Sascha had a series of significant personal issues and health issues that culminated in a series of abortive attempts to persuade people that they had been trafficked by their father to famous politicians, until they came upon Voldeng.

Voldeng’s story was – well, I’ll just say I can’t get a lot further than Zadrozny did:

After two hourlong phone calls with her, asking as many different ways as I knew how, I cannot say with confidence what Voldeng does.

If Voldeng has a career, I don’t know what it is. The only thing I can say with confidence is that she’s chronically online and commodifies attention.

What I can also say is that, between platforming George Tonks, who has worked to discredit female survivors of Jeffrey Epstein, and well as posts like this, invalidating the women and girls who did survive Epstein has always been part of this project, even if Voldeng didn’t intend it to be. Even if Voldeng did not deliberately set out to do this, it has always been true that insisting on focusing on lurid claims about very young children is part and parcel of reframing claims of assault against teenage girls and women as “not that bad.” By far, the best corroborated claims about Epstein are that he and his clients victimized teenage girls and young women – not that he victimized prepubescent boys. It is hard for me to explain focusing on these anomalous and poorly founded claims, apart from their potential to draw focus from the real and well-known things Epstein did.

Did Voldeng mean to relativize violence against teenage girls and women? I don’t know. But it’s part of the story.

So what else is there to say at this point? One is that we do learn something important about Sascha’s story by looking at the first source to believe it and publicize it.The market for this story seems to primarily be people who simply don’t require further evidence in order to believe something – Sascha’s word or anyone else’s is simply good enough. Voldeng is not a journalist. She has repeatedly promised to produce evidence to validate Sascha’s story and hasn’t. Sascha has not provided anything either. To be clear, this is anomalous. When we talk about believing victims, we usually mean in practice “believing evidence that victims provide,” because by the time a congressional hearing or a newspaper is willing to print something there is some supporting evidence the event actually happened. Christine Blasey Ford would not have ended up in front of Congress if she had no evidence but her own word. She didn’t. She had earlier witnesses showing that this was a story she had believed she was assaulted by Brent Kavanaugh long before he became a household name. Sascha Riley explicitly does not have that, and said so to Brandy Zadrozny. They did not have any recollection of being abused by famous politicians until well after these politicians were famous.

It also seems to have an audience among people who find that the better-corroborated Epstein allegations leave something to be desired. Either they don’t plainly implicate their own least-favorite politicians enough, or because as a culture we’re still not quite convinced it’s wrong to sexually exploit someone as long as they passably resemble a woman.

So that brings me to the Brandy Zadrozny article. What did we learn, if anything?

Some Questions that Got Answered

Why Did Sascha Go from Not Knowing Trump to Knowing Trump between 2019 and 2021?

One thing I noticed weeks ago is that Sascha has a long, highly political social media history, and before 2021 none of it shows any signs of Sascha thinking they know Trump personally.

As far as I can find, Sascha didn’t even name Epstein as one of their abusers until 2025. This makes sense of why Sascha Riley’s allegations don’t appear in any of the public Epstein files, even as many other equally lurid, extreme, and unfounded allegations do. Even if Sascha did go to the police, their specific complaints don’t seem to have ended up in the Epstein files – likely because, I suspect, Sascha’s original complaints didn’t mention Epstein at all, so there was no reason to pass anything on to the FBI.

(You’ll notice that in one of my last articles, I mentioned that Sascha had a OSBI business card from filing a report, not an FBI card. I suspect this is because, in the absence of any Epstein-related claims, they treated this as a state level offense.)

So it’s always been true that to some extent, this was a fluid story. The original 2021 allegations name five figures: Sascha’s adopted father, Sascha’s deceased step mother, Donald Trump, Andy Biggs, and Jim Jordan. By 2025, we’ve added Vladimir Putin, Clarence Thomas, Lindsay Graham, and critically, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. By 2026, we’ve also added Les Wexner and Chuck Grassley.

So why has it been fluid? We have two explanations from Sascha Riley, and one from Pearleen Riley (hereafter Pearleen), their ex-wife.

Here’s one explanation from Sascha:

Around 2020, though he can’t quite explain how, Riley started to “unlock” memories of abuse he said had been “repressed.” Riley said the memories came in fragments: replayed conversations and vague recollections of his father, powerful people and pain. Riley told me he spent months alone, listening to music, until the memories “solidified.”

Here’s the other explanation:

So according to what Sascha told Zadrozny, these memories did emerge around 2020. According to Sascha’s Threads account, though, they always had them, but weren’t ready to speak about them. What is undeniable is that Sascha cannot be telling the truth every single time. Either they had the memories and didn’t want to discuss them, or they took effort to recover them in the 2020s and this is what came out.

The only story with a corroboration is the second one. Here’s what Pearleen said:

She said Sascha always had a temper, but his new memories — she considered them psychotic delusions — scared her and the kids. She said he would spend days lying in bed with his laptop, reading and posting about politics, as well as “researching.” There, he came to the conclusion that he had dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder, a rare condition in which a person can develop distinct identities and lapses in memory, sometimes in response to severe childhood trauma… Pearleen said Sascha would sometimes take on the personality and the accent of a young girl, whom he said he knew as a boy and who was also the victim of the child abuse cabal.

So we have two witnesses for this being a recovered memory – Sascha, and their ex-wife. We also have the fairly novel explanation of Sascha having DID, which was not mentioned at all in any of the previous material. It doesn’t seem to be a condition Sascha has now, at least as far as I know.

Recovered memories of dramatic, years-long traumas that preserve no evidence except for the person having the memory are themselves inherently suspect. I believe that, in your fifties, a person might confront or contextualize a blank spot in their memories. I don’t believe that, well into middle age, someone should suddenly recall an international conspiracy with themselves at the heart of it that left no traces except what they recently remembered – even though this belief is on the rise yet again. The best explanation for such an experience is obviously a delusion.

So that’s question one. Why didn’t Sascha seem to know they were a Trump victim before 2021? The answer is, because Sascha did not know about this until 2020, or because Sascha did not want to talk about it yet. Sascha has said both, but I think the stronger explanation is that Sascha abruptly started believing these stories during 2020-2021.

What’s Up with “Samantha Jackson?”

One detail I noticed early on is that Sascha’s Sammy/Samantha changed roles dramatically from 2021 to 2025. In 2025, Sammy is more or less interchangeable with the other girls, but that’s not true in earlier strata. In 2021, she’s a “main character” of sorts in the story, a child manager of a child brothel who carried a weapon and had a number of heroic escapades.

One of the most important things to note about Samantha is not just that she was an armed madam and experienced bookkeeper. She was also a fantastic lover, whose electric sexual chemistry with Sascha was precisely why they both were in demand as sex objects.

Oh, and they were both ten.

I soft-pedaled the hell out of this in my last blogs, but I do want to be a little more forward about this here. Sascha’s stories are perverse, and it’s not just because of what they describe. There’s something unsavory about the language Sascha uses that can’t be reduced to frankness, and that I don’t know how to explain.

The above screenshot is Sascha talking about how their stepsister, age fifteen, now and then enjoyed being raped by her stepfather. That is not a thing that I would expect a sexual assault survivor to say.

It is impossible to ignore the fact that Sascha Riley’s narrative is lurid, and not in a way that is inevitable for the material. I don’t know why. This is not clinical discussion of graphic memories of horrible crimes with as much deference as possible.

While it’s not hostile, this lurid language also shows up around Sammy, or Samantha Jackson. The thing that I already suspected was going on in this original narration of Sammy is that Sammy represents wish fulfillment. Sammy is, in these stories, Sascha’s beautiful, hyper-competent, sensual, aggressive, talented, fun-loving, no-nonsense, tough, brave lover. Sammy emerges as an ideal partner at the very time during which Sascha was getting a divorce. The need that this delusion serves is a fairly obvious one. Sascha might have been left by one wife, but they had fond memories of the superior, previous wife who would not have left, and in fact was cruelly taken away.

I was generally willing to acknowledge that for Sascha, “Sammy” may not really be ten, as they live in Sascha’s mind. Sascha never really ascribes childish attributes to her. Narratively speaking, Sammy is impossible to distinguish from an adult woman.

But then we get to two other critical stories that Zadrozny discovered. One is that Sammy first emerged because, in 2020, Sascha began to believe that they had dissociative identity disorder, because they would adopt the affect and personality of Sammy.

She said he would spend days lying in bed with his laptop, reading and posting about politics, as well as “researching.” There, he came to the conclusion that he had dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder, a rare condition in which a person can develop distinct identities and lapses in memory, sometimes in response to severe childhood trauma. (Research has found that social media content about DID has fueled a wave of self-diagnosis.) Pearleen said Sascha would sometimes take on the personality and the accent of a young girl, whom he said he knew as a boy and who was also the victim of the child abuse cabal.

Dissociative identity disorder is, to say the least, a complex and controversial diagnosis. What Sascha seems to describe in themselves, though, and what Pearleen saw, looks more like the internet subculture of “multiplicity” than DID as is usually seen in a clinical setting.

Even in Sascha’s own words, Sammy seems to have emerged first as an alter ego, and then later as someone Sascha believed they had known.

So why might this have happened?

As uncomfortable as I am with some of this language, there actually does seem to be a really sad story here. And that’s the story of Sascha’s sister.

According to Bill Riley, and at least partly corroborated by extent documents, Bill adopted Sascha when they were four years old. Bill did this, he says, because Sascha’s biological father was in jail, their biological mother was negligent, and Sascha was largely left to take care of their baby sister. When Bill was prevented from adopting both siblings, he adopted Sascha alone.

Bill remembers meeting Sascha in Germany, where he was stationed after multiple tours in Vietnam. He said Sascha was about 4 years old and making a bottle for his infant sister, heating the milk on the stove and testing it on his wrist. Sascha’s biological dad, an Air Force serviceman named Manuel Barros, was in prison. And Sascha’s young mother, he said, was not able to care for her kids or interested in doing so. Bill took care of Sascha for his mother on the weekends and got attached…So Bill adopted Sascha — he said the German government wouldn’t give him both kids — and brought the little boy back to the states, settling in Alabama, where he worked as a flight instructor.

I can’t even imagine how traumatic that would have been for four-year-old Sascha, and I really want to stop and emphasize here that multiple things can be true at the same time. Sascha’s language about their stepsister makes my skin crawl, and that doesn’t mean that Sascha has never been through anything terrible. This is a horrible story. At age four, Sascha was already responsible for an infant. They were separated from them, and their family, and taken to another country. That must have been devastating.

So who’s Samantha?

Samantha definitely looks like a wish-fulfilling delusion for a wife. She emerges as a character at the moment Sascha is losing their marriage. But Samantha’s also a wish-fulfilling delusion for Sascha’s sister. In real life, Sascha didn’t get to know their sister as a child. They didn’t get to save her and take care of her. They didn’t get to be their hero. But in the fantasy world, Sascha did. Sascha did get to be Samantha’s hero, and got to know her, and loved her. But in the delusion, Sascha’s relationship with Samantha ends on their own terms. They mercy-kill Samantha, at Samantha’s request. The loss is still there, but this time Sascha isn’t passive.

I don’t think Samantha was ever in a brothel. I don’t think she’s buried in Alabama. I think she’s Sascha’s sister.

Why Doesn’t Sascha Riley Aggressively Pursue Evidence that Would Prove This Happened?

People often take it for granted that an allegation about an old, old crime would leave no evidence, but that’s actually not true. After all, E. Jean. Carroll successfully sued Donald Trump because of the strength of her contemporary corroborating witnesses. And that was just one perpetrator, and one victim, of a sexual assault. Surely there’s actually tons of evidence out there for the kinds of crimes Sascha had alleged.

One can see all kinds of potential evidence implied in Sascha Riley’s story as well. According to Sascha, they knew the location where one of the children, Samantha, was killed, and the site of her burial. Surely someone could easily go confirm the existence of those locations, or maybe even find a body. Finding the body of a teenage girl would undoubtedly force a criminal allegation. Wouldn’t it? Why hasn’t Sascha pointed out the location?

What about the CSAM material that Sascha has repeatedly cited by name and said is in wide circulation? Sascha has gone so far as to say that they have been recognized by more than one stranger from CSAM – a claim I find surprising, but there it is. Surely a cybercrimes expert would be able to confirm the existence of such material. Who has been asked, and what have they said?

Or what about all the people who knew Sascha as a child? Sascha says they spent several months in a brothel where they were forced to make snuff films. Surely some friends, step-siblings, and cousins remember the year Sascha was gone for a long while. Sascha also spoke of the many occasions they were beaten severely or even nearly to death. Weren’t there any days a teacher asked where he got that black eye, or broken rib?

What about character witnesses for Bill and Lynn Riley? Bill Riley apparently had a whole second life where he was making tons of money in dangerous work, and had years of experience in organized crime even before he adopted Sascha. Surely such a person would have at least some enemies. Or what about sexual sadist Lynn who flew into a rage when she was denied the opportunity to murder a child for her own gratification? There’s no way that she went her whole life able to successfully hide such an extreme pathology from everyone. She must have had other victims, right? Sascha even says on Threads that Bill and Lynn victimized both their stepsiblings. Surely they would be eager to bring the crimes against them to light and get justice for a fellow victim.

You would expect Sascha to think of all these things and bend over backwards to produce all this undeniable evidence. You would expect that. Right?

Wrong. When Zadrozny asked about who she might follow up with for leads, Riley couldn’t think of a single person, except for someone they’d met on the internet who had a similar story. When Zadrozny pursued leads of her own, all she found was people who said that they’d known Sascha and didn’t see how anything Sascha said could possibly be true.

I’ve always been somewhat puzzled by Sascha’s passivity in demonstrating the truth of their own allegations. To me, it seemed like the biggest flaw in my theory that Sascha was sincerely convinced of what they said. I could think of dozens of ways to corroborate this story and have been repeatedly flummoxed by Sascha’s decision to not pursue any of them. It’s hard for me to not wonder that, even if Sascha is completely convinced of what they’re saying, that there is a little fear there of investigation. External evidence contradicting a recovered memory is a common reason for retraction, which is a stressful and embarrassing experience.

So, I suppose Zadrozny answered my second question. Why doesn’t Sascha pursue evidence about their claims aggressively? I think the clearest answer is “because it doesn’t produce corroborating evidence.” Every trail is colder than the one before it, and I think at some level Sascha must anticipate that this is the case. I can name ten people right now who could testify to the weeks of school I missed when I had mono when I was eight. But Sascha, when asked to name someone who could testify to the fact that they were regularly beaten to death and that all the members of their family were raping each other in convoluted configurations, couldn’t think of anyone who might have suspected something was wrong?

That’s weird, isn’t it?

It’s noticeable that when Sascha announces plans to investigate their own case (and let’s be realistic here: Sascha has had six years to do this, whether or not this happens is anyone’s guess), it’s always evidence that has maximum potential for ambiguity.

We know Sascha has had a significant number of bone injuries, owing to their service in Iraq. Demonstrating that Sascha has bone injuries proves nothing about their allegations. How could we possibly tell the difference, in 2026, between a rib that was broken by an IED in Iraq in 2003, and a rib that was broken by Jim Jordan in 1985?

You can’t. But, if you want to believe, you’ll believe the second story.

Same with a polygraph. Polygraphs are, for one thing, famously unreliable. But they also can’t do more than demonstrate deception. If Sascha is completely convinced these things happened, then a polygraph will not show that Sascha is trying to be deceptive. It doesn’t mean it’s true.

Why doesn’t Sascha more aggressively pursue evidence? Because the same thing happens every time. The lead goes cold. Nothing emerges. Insinuations and loose connections are suggestive for people who want to believe. The rest is silence.

The Problem of Debunking

Zadrozny got stuck with the same problem that many of us have ended up with – that in the end, all you can do is find cold leads. There will never be a way to prove beyond doubt that nothing Sascha said actually occurred. What evidence could we possibly find that would prove beyond doubt that Donald Trump never killed puppies? Or that he never had a tent peg shoved up his rectum? Or that Jim Jordan, during his undergrad years, never once took a small plane to the south to pay $5000 to beat a child? What would evidence that this did not happen look like?

You can’t find the evidence that something like this did not happen.

All you can do is keep looking for evidence that it did happen and keep realizing it doesn’t exist. And at some point, when that keeps happening, you have to ask why.

Either Sascha Riley has had the most consequential life in human history and it left absolutely no traces whatsoever except in Sascha’s memory, or this didn’t happen. Sascha has met more celebrities than any non-celebrity I have ever heard of – and the roster is not limited to victimizers. Sascha also has a laundry list of famous connections in the sports world. One would at least suspect that Sascha’s highly public boxing trainers would have remembered Sascha having severe injuries, deformed legs, and broken ribs – right? That can’t have happened in a normal bout – right? Have you ever seen a boxer break both legs in the ring? I haven’t. Didn’t anyone think that was surprising?

When I think of how much evidence this story would leave behind, the fact that in six years nothing has shown up makes this baffling. No one can find evidence of the plane or the helicopter that Trump or Epstein used in the 1980s. No one can find even incidental references to Bill Riley or Lynn Riley in the Epstein files. Trump’s time in the 1980s is exhaustively photographed and recorded, and no one seems to be able to find evidence of him disappearing for weekends in a small aircraft. No one can locate any of the farms or brothels where these events occurred, or who owned them. No one has found the bodies. No one remembers the time when Trump was seriously ill in the early 1980s. No one reports remembering Jim Jordan or Andy Biggs having uncharacteristic amounts of money or unexplained absences. No one is looking for any of the missing girls. No one has the court records for the RICO case Sascha was caught up in. No one remembers Sascha’s injuries or long absences. No one has found the footage, even as Sascha regularly insists it’s widely in circulation.

The crimes that Sascha alleges would have left hundreds of witnesses across multiple states, along with property records, flight records, and extensive video and photography evidence. Much of that evidence could easily be presented to law enforcement or the public without any risk of implicating oneself. If you lived near a farm in rural Alabama and remembered the weekend that a lot of helicopters arrived and there were dozens of gunshots, that is information you could easily share with the public. But no one has.

This is incredibly suspicious. An elaborate, years-long event with hundreds of witnesses that was spontaneously recalled in 2020 that left no evidence at all should be treated as a delusion until proven otherwise. It is, by far, the simplest explanation for what’s happened.

But does the vacuum of evidence “disprove” the story? No, it doesn’t. Nothing can disprove the story. There is no evidence that could exist that would prove this story did not happen – including Sascha saying that they made the entire thing up. People would still think that Sascha must have been pressured into retracting this.

There is no way to debunk a story this big and this vague. Which means that as long as Sascha wants it to go on, it will.

But there’s another reason this story will stick around, and it’s this: it turns out that, in the end, Sascha was kind of right.

What, What?

Here’s what I don’t mean.

I don’t think it’s true that Sascha was trafficked in a group of wealthy Republican politicians that, at the time, contained exactly zero wealthy Republican politicians. I don’t believe Riley was trafficked in a network of billionaires that consisted of one billionaire and almost entirely working to middle class people. I don’t believe Trump has gastric problems because of a tent peg accident. I don’t believe he kills puppies for fun. I don’t think Sascha strangled a prepubescent brothel manager. I don’t think this story is true.

But here’s the question that Sascha raised on Threads in the wake of Zadrozny’s article:

Let’s take that question seriously.

Why was Sascha so angry? Why wouldn’t they be? Sascha’s own biological father wasn’t there for them. He was in prison, and their mother was apparently negligent. Sascha’s biological parents were willing to give away their own child who was old enough to speak and remember them, and was apparently willing to give away another one except for the intervention of the German government.

At age four, Sascha was ripped from everything he’d ever known to be raised by a new couple, one of whom does not seem to have remained in his life after this (the woman on Sascha’s adoption certificate is not the woman who raised Sascha). They then spent their childhood moving around the American south. Sascha had behavioral issues, which many little boys who weren’t adopted internationally at age four also have. This can’t have made bonding with educators and new stepfamilies easy, which is a shame, because Sascha presumably had to do this fairly often as the family moved around. This eventually became severe enough that Riley required in-patient treatment, after a series of fights.

Bill Riley could have been the best father on the planet and the odds that Riley ended up with complex trauma after all that would still be really good. Sascha never had a stable moment of their childhood. Sascha lived through a kaleidoscope of stepparents, stepsiblings, schools, states, crushing responsibilities, and heartbreaking loss. I don’t know what kind of a father Bill was, but we do know that Bill probably had his own trauma. He seems to have had relatively unstable marriages until his last one. He served several tours in Vietnam. Was Bill ready to parent a severely traumatized preschooler? I can see how he wouldn’t be.

Both Bill and Sascha seem to agree that their relationship was bad enough that, in Sascha’s late teens, they completely lost touch. Then they reconnected. Then they fell out again.

Then Sascha went to Iraq. Then they were subject to severe war violence and trauma. Then they came back. Then they started to see things. They started to see rich politicians, throwing around handfuls of cash, glorying in the slaughter of children and treating violence as a game that they could leave whenever they wanted.

When you think about where Sascha was in 2020, it makes sense why these were the images that came to them.

It is true that presidents, congresspeople, and foreign leaders orchestrate hideous violence that they themselves will never have to suffer through. It is true that as a society, we spend tremendous amounts of resources on a meat grinder that chews up human lives when we could spend that money on basically anything else. It is true that children have few rights in a world that often regards them as commodities and property, and they are often the first casualties in conflicts between powerful men that they themselves have nothing to do with. Sascha Riley saw this for themselves in Iraq, just as their own father did in Vietnam.

If you want to understand what it feels like to be an American in 2026, an isolated compound where politicians spend money, children are massacred, and no help is coming isn’t a crazy image to land on.

But what this doesn’t mean is that Sascha is telling the truth.

This is where I actually want to take a second to acknowledge that Sascha themselves may be reading this, and where I want to acknowledge some things about Sascha that I don’t think have gotten as much attention as they should have. I cannot find evidence that Sascha has ever consciously lied. I cannot find evidence that Sascha has made money from their claims. I cannot find evidence that Sascha has asked for money in exchange for these claims. I don’t know exactly who Sascha is and why they do what they do, but I maintain here what I have said in every other article about this: I think Sascha thinks they are telling the truth.

That doesn’t mean Sascha’s story hasn’t done harm. It has. It also doesn’t mean Sascha themselves haven’t done harm. Sascha’s children have probably seen another side of them that the internet hasn’t. I myself have been frank about how uncomfortable some of Sascha’s statements make me, particularly those about their stepsiblings.

But even so, here is where I want to address Sascha directly. So here we go.

Sascha,

The things that happened to you are serious. The weight of responsibility you carried at age four, the loss of your biological parents and siblings, the instability of your childhood shaped by adoption, divorce, and remarriage – I am so sorry that happened to you. That must have been brutal. It was serious, and it was severe. Don’t ever let anyone tell you it wasn’t.

If that was brutal, then your tours in Iraq are beyond description. You were used by politicians. You were somewhere you shouldn’t have been. Horrible things happened to you and you were forced to make decisions you didn’t want to make. It was evil, and it was wrong, and it shouldn’t have happened.

I don’t know if anything else happened to you. But even if that is the end of it, you would still be carrying more pain than any human heart and body should ever have to bear.

You didn’t ask for my opinion, but if you’ve read this far, I hope I did an okay job. Hear me out one last time.

I think your memories reflect reality. I think the challenge of figuring out exactly what that reality is is the task you now have to bear. It will take a very skilled medical team to help you work through these memories and understand where they came from. But you deserve it. You deserve to be happy and healthy. Your children deserve a father. They deserve the stability you never got.

Go home. Find a psychiatrist. Get off the internet and take time to focus on your health. Get healed. It’s okay if the reality these memories reflect is not the one you think it reflects now. You can always walk away from this story. No one will judge you. You can be an ordinary, happy person. It will take time. It may take years.

If there is a story within the story here – if there is a memory here – you will not find it on the internet. You will find a lot of fleeting validation, but it will consume you. Find people you can see and hear and touch who will talk to you. Be in relationships with people who see you as a whole person, not an avatar for their own political wish fulfillment. Let them help you figure out the next steps of what it means to deal with the grief you’re carrying.

I truly wish you nothing but the best. I wish you healing and deliverance and wholeness and comfort. I also wish you truth and understanding. I hope you find it, and I wish you the strength to look for it. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart. -Laura

William “Bill” Kyle Riley died on April 3, 2026. His family has requested, in lieu of flowers, that donations be made to Project Lifesaver, which provides equipment to protect individuals suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Editor’s Note as of April 16, 2026.

Since I published this article, video and audio footage of Sascha Riley publicly and unapologetically describing incidents in which they violently assaulted a woman have come to light.

If I had seen that footage before I wrote this, the tone of this article would have been significantly different.

Whatever has happened to Sascha does not erase the fact that they seem to have committed serious acts of domestic violence, and it is not clear that they believe such acts are wrong.

Editor’s Note

American Crime Journal would like to thank Dr. Laura Robinson for her extensive research, analysis, and reporting on the claims advanced by William “Sascha” Barros Riley.

This report is important because it addresses a principle fundamental to both journalism and justice: extraordinary allegations require careful scrutiny, independent verification, and evidence. Dr. Robinson’s work examines not only the claims themselves, but also the available records, witness accounts, timelines, corroborating evidence, and the challenges investigators face when attempting to verify or refute allegations of this magnitude.

At a time when social media often rewards virality over verification, this investigation serves as a reminder that responsible journalism demands more than repetition. It requires examination, corroboration, context, and a willingness to follow the facts wherever they lead.

Whether readers ultimately agree with every conclusion is secondary to the value of the process itself. Dr. Robinson’s reporting demonstrates the importance of asking difficult questions, testing claims against evidence, and maintaining intellectual honesty when confronting narratives that generate strong emotional reactions but limited independent verification.

American Crime Journal is grateful for Dr. Robinson’s commitment to evidence-based inquiry and her contribution to an informed public discussion.

Readers interested in Dr. Robinson’s work can follow her research and commentary: Not Peer Reviewed: By Laura Robinson on Substack.