How Sex Scandals are Used to Steal the Thunder From Corruption & Fraud Bombshells

Sex scandals have become an increasingly popular topic for political journalism worldwide. Sometimes, the mainstream media is even more interested in the juicy details of politicians' affairs than instances of fraud, corruption and money laundering. What’s behind this?

"Everything in the world is about sex, except sex," said Oscar Wilde. The British author's aphorism has taken on new significance: salacious stories have increasingly been used by mainstream journalism to obliterate damning issues and shield those in power.

Polyamorous FTX

The story of FTX employees' weird sex life has raised a lot of eyebrows, eclipsing its record of "dark money" donations to the US Democratic Party. FTX’s 30-year-old founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) led a ten-person cabal of roommates that operated the company and its affiliates from a lavish penthouse in the Bahamas. All ten were allegedly in polyamorous relationships with each other, according to the US press.

"When I first started my foray into poly, I thought of it as a radical break from my trad[itional] past," SBF's ex-girlfriend and Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison allegedly wrote in her Tumblr diary unearthed by the Daily Mail. "But tbh [to be honest] I’ve come to decide the only acceptable style of poly is best characterized as something like 'imperial Chinese harem'."

The sex games abruptly ended in the beginning of November with FTX, Alameda Research, and more than 100 affiliates filing for bankruptcy in Delaware. SBF's assets sank from $16 billion to zero. He pinned the whole affair on his polyamorous partner, Ellison.

Meanwhile, the story of SBF's family's generous donations to both the Democrats and the Republicans is apparently less sexy in the eyes of the western media. SBF's parents, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, have long been big supporters of the Democratic Party. Barbara Fried was the co-founder of Mind the Gap, a secretive Silicon Valley PAC that reportedly quietly funneled millions of dollars to Democratic candidates and groups across the country in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles.

Powerful donors from Silicon Valley kept it on the hush, with politicians having no clue where the money came from. The organization's "raison d’être is stealth," as one person with ties to the entity told Recode. According to the media, it was the way for the tech giants to expand their influence.

Likewise, Dems apparently didn't know and, perhaps, never asked where SBF's money originated from as long as it went into their coffers. Furthermore, in March, April and May 2022, SBF and his brother visited the White House to meet with Joe Biden's senior advisers, as per the Washington Free Beacon.

US conservative media platform Gateway Pundit suggested that FTX was a laundering machine for Democrats. Perhaps, therefore, US authorities turned a blind eye to FTX providing a whopping $38 million to Democratic candidates while being registered in the Bahamas, i.e. a foreign entity (which is prohibited by US laws).

Remarkably, both Bill and Hillary Clinton previously found themselves in a campaign finance controversy when some reporters suggested that they had received money from foreign sources. FTX appears to be a convenient vehicle to solve such a dilemma: hypothetically, it could quietly funnel crypto from any country for Democrats' campaigns.

Moreover, FTX was allowed to operate while not being a licensed money transmitter in 49 US states. The firm likewise offered a 8% return on deposits, securities and cyber currencies, but ran afoul of US Treasury regulations, as Robert Bishop, a retired Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and business executive, told Sputnik earlier this month. Still, these questions have been smeared as a conspiracy theory and largely silenced by the US legacy media.

Hunter Biden's Extravaganza

The Hunter Biden laptop story is also mostly seen as a huge sex-and-drug ignominy, which involved the son of the incumbent president of the United States.

Remarkably, following the October 2020 dump of damning emails originating from his laptop, the First Son published his "tell-all" memoir "Beautiful Things" on April 6, 2021. Hunter's opus about drug addiction, sex, and survival was lauded by the US mainstream press as "astonishingly candid and brave," "unflinchingly honest" and deeply moving.

However, while detailing his painful and shameful experiences, Hunter missed the juiciest part of his journey for love, money and power. The genuine expose featuring the younger Biden is not about his sexual extravaganza, prostitutes and illicit substances, but about the "Big Guy," who apparently received his "fair" share from Hunter's business endeavors. According to Tony Bobulinski, a former business associate of Hunter, the Big Guy, mentioned in the laptop's emails, was no one else but Joe Biden.

Hunter struck a lot of lucrative business dealings during his father's vice presidency, despite having little if any expertise in the areas he worked in. While Joe Biden is continuing to claim that he knew nothing about these dealings, files from the "laptop from hell" and information shared by Hunter's ex-associates suggest that the opposite is true.

Miranda Devine, an Australian columnist and author, scrupulously examined the files from Hunter's hard drive and described in her book how the younger Biden traded his father's name and influence for cold hard cash, providing high-level political backing, financial and technological opportunities to foreign players in return.

Devine's "Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide" (November 30, 2021) has not been as widely celebrated as Hunter's "Beautiful Things." The latter seems to be part of a broad "damage control" operation involving Big Media, Big Tech and the US intelligence community. Elon Musk's recent exposure of Twitter Files demonstrated how Team Biden, Twitter executives and federal intelligence operatives tried to stamp out the story from the US mediasphere.

People attend a protest to demand New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's resignation after a third woman accused him of sexual harassment in New York City on March 2, 2021. -

© AFP 2023 / KENA BETANCUR

'Womanizer' Andrew Cuomo

Andrew Cuomo, the 56th governor of New York, one day also found himself mired in a sex scandal. Starting from December 2020, a number of Cuomo's female employees came forward accusing the top-ranking Democrat of harassment or inappropriate behavior.

By February 28, 2021, the scandal had grown out of proportion, prompting the New York State Attorney General Letitia James to open a full-fledged probe into the claims and name two outside lawyers to lead it.

Interestingly, the fuss came on the heels of another and arguably bigger scandal which erupted on January 28, 2021, when AG James released a 76-page report revealing that New York’s nursing-home death toll from COVID-19 was apparently over 50% higher than officials had claimed.

On February 11, 2021, the Post broke that Cuomo's top aide, Melissa DeRosa, had privately told Democratic lawmakers that the state withheld its nursing home COVID-19 death toll out of fear that Donald Trump's DoJ would use it against them. According to the US press, about 15,000 long-term care home residents have died of COVID-19 in the state since the start of the pandemic, while just 8,500 deaths were disclosed by the Cuomo administration.

However, it was not Cuomo's attempts to hide the real numbers from Trump's DoJ which apparently disturbed his fellow Democrats the most, rather the State Assembly launching an impeachment inquiry into the NY governor in March 2021.

It was suspected that the high death toll in New York's nursing homes stemmed from the COVID policy pursued by Democratic governors in several blue states. In 2020, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan "required nursing homes to admit COVID-19 patients to their vulnerable populations, often without adequate testing," the Department of Justice highlighted on August 26, 2020. All four blue states reportedly saw the spike in deaths of elderly people.

One might imagine that if Cuomo were convicted in relation to the nursing home scandal, the heads of other Democratic governors could have rolled likewise. Eventually, Cuomo resigned on August 10, 2021, over the sex scandal, not the nursing home scandal. According to the US press, the federal probe into the former governor's handling of nursing homes had been ongoing as of the beginning of 2022. The topic, however, has been largely buried by the mainstream media.

Audrey Strauss, acting United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, speaks during a news conference to announce charges against Ghislaine Maxwell for her alleged role in the sexual exploitation and abuse of multiple minor girls by Jeffrey Epstein, Thursday, July 2, 2020, in New York

© AP Photo / John Minchillo

Jeffrey Epstein, a Rich Guy From Nowhere

One would argue that Jeffrey Epstein's case is all about sex. It was reported that the convicted sex offender committed suicide on August 10, 2019, in his Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York, jail cell. Epstein was arrested just a month earlier, on July 6, 2019, and charged by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) with sex trafficking of dozens of underage girls between 2002 and 2005.

A day prior to his death, a federal appeals court unsealed nearly 2,000 pages of documents related to Epstein, his associate Ghislaine Maxwell and lots of rich and powerful people allegedly involved in the sexual abuse of minors.

Epstein's madam, Maxwell, was arrested in July 2020. In December 2021, she was found guilty of child sex trafficking and other offenses. On June 28, 2022, she was sentenced in a New York court to 20 years imprisonment. Remarkably, no prominent establishment figures have been harmed in any stage of the Epstein and Maxwell trials.

Meanwhile, lots of questions concerning Epstein's biography, life, connections and wealth origins remained unanswered. The financier, rich and powerful like the count of Monte Cristo, literally came from nowhere. He was born in a middle-class, blue-collar family in Brooklyn. His mother worked as a school aide and was a homemaker, while his father was a groundskeeper and gardener at the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

Some alleged that he was a "frontman" for some billionaire, citing, in particular, Victoria's Secret magnate Leslie Wexner as his potential benefactor. The Daily Mail reported on November 30, 2022, that Epstein tried to lobby then-President Bill Clinton to change US trade laws on behalf of Wexner in 1994.

They drew attention to the fact that just days before his death, Epstein wrote a will and placed $578 million in assets in a trust, thus shielding their distribution from the public. What if Epstein did not own his assets but simply managed them for someone else?

It also turned out that Epstein worked as a paid consultant during the 1980s and 1990s at Towers Financial, a New York financial firm that engaged in a massive Ponzi scheme. Towers Financial's founder, Steven J. Hoffenberg, reportedly defrauded investors of more than $450 million between 1988 and 1993. In 1997, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison and was released in 2013. "We ran a team of people on Wall Street, investment people that raised these billion dollars illegally. He was my guy, my wingman," Hoffenberg told CBS News of Epstein in August 2019. Hoffenberg was found dead on August 23, 2022, at his home in Derby, Connecticut.

The others asked whether Epstein's real "business" was operating "honey traps" for many investigative and intelligence agencies, inside and outside the United States, so that they could have harvested information and exploit the vulnerabilities of his guests. Epstein's "little black book" contained the names and personal phone numbers of the world's most famous, influential and richest people, including Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Kevin Spacey, Donald Trump and many others. Some US pundits have suggested that Epstein may have been an agent of either the CIA or Israel’s Mossad.

Epstein was also seen helping the Clintons with their charities, which Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel alleged to be "the largest unprosecuted fraud ever." In 2002, Epstein "hosted" a trip for the Clinton Global Initiative to Africa on his private Boeing 727 (aka the "Lolita Express") and directed at least $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation in 2006, to name but a few instances of collaboration.

All in all, former US President Bill Clinton flew at least 26 times on the pedophile's jet. For his part, the financier visited the White House 17 times to see Bill during the latter's presidential tenure.

Would one agree that murky "money-and-power" deals deserve a little bit more attention than spicy sex stories?