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The Bay Area Demo Legal Collab and friends are hosting a Grand Jury education and training event. Join us for a political history of how Grand Juries are used for political repression, hear from Grand Jury resisters and learn how to plan for repression for yourself and your community.
In the Bay Area there have been recent FBI visits, Grand Jury subpoenas and investigations into our political movements. If you are contacted by the feds or other law enforcement agencies you should exercise your rights and reach out to legal support:
· You do not have to open your door or let FBI or other agents into your home without a warrant.
· You have the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney: you do not have to talk to FBI or other agents or answer their questions. It can be dangerous to do so. Say, "I do not want to answer questions without my lawyer. Please slip your card under the door and my lawyer will call you."
· For legal help, call the Bay Area Federal Defense Line, 415-285-1041 and someone will return your call within 48 hours.
The Bay Area Federal Defense line can help connect you to a lawyer if you are contacted by agents related to progressive political activism. It is sponsored by the Bay Area Demo Legal Support Collaborative- a joint effort of Legal Solidarity Bay Area, NLG-SF, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, Anti-Repression Committee, and Oaklaw.
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity CampaignAn appeal for financial supportMay 12, 2026 Dear Friends of the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign, It has been more than two years since Boris Kagarlitsky began serving the five-year sentence meted out to him by a Russian military court as a way of silencing and punishing him for his opposition to Putin’s war on Ukraine. With a multitude of longstanding friends and colleagues throughout the world, Boris is one of the best-known victims of the steadily escalating political repression in Russia. He has borne the gross injustice of his incarceration with characteristic courage, determination and defiance. But there is no denying that Putin’s gulag takes a toll on even the most valiant spirits. The Boris Kagarlitsky Solidarity Campaign has worked continuously these last two years to draw attention to Boris’s plight, and by extension to that of other prisoners unjustly condemned for protesting the ongoing war that has already cost upwards of half a million lives and vastly more maimed, according to estimates. We have sought, through a variety of activities, to bring pressure to bear on the Russian authorities to free Boris. The many people involved in the Campaign are happy to volunteer their time. However, we rely on the generosity of the Campaign’s supporters to cover the periodic expenses we incur. We recently reached out for help to defray costs associated with the participation of Boris’ daughter and tireless advocate for Russian political prisoners, Kseniia Kagarlitskya, in the international antifascist conference in Porto Alegre at the end of March. That trip was a great success. It allowed Kseniia and Mikhail Lobanov, Russian mathematician, political activist, and former associate professor at Moscow State University, to introduce the thousands of conference-goers from Brazil and across the world to the grim realities confronting Russian political dissidents. The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Committee has many plans in store for the coming months and especially the fall, including a virtual conference devoted to the global manifestations of political repression. We are appealing to you for a little financial help to carry out our projects and support the day-to-day ongoing work of the committee. We would be deeply appreciative of any assistance you can provide. Because the members of the Campaign coordinating committee are scattered across Europe, North America and beyond, it has been a little complicated to set up a campaign bank account, although we are making progress on that front. For the time being we are asking that you send any contributions you can manage directly to our de facto treasurer Suzi Weissman who is located in Los Angeles, California. The details of her account are: Bank: Wells Fargo Swift/Bic: PNBPUS6L Account holder: Susan Claudia Weissman Account number: 0657205076 International wire transfers: WFBIUS6S wise.com personal account: @susanclaudiaw We thank you in anticipation of any contribution you can make to help keep the Campaign running. Yours in solidarity, Dick Nichols Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Meet the Americans Who Can’t Afford Hair Cuts or Toilet Paper
By Nicholas Kristof, Aug. 1, 2026
Opinion columnist, reporting from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky
Tamara Reynolds for The New York Times
After a 1,000-mile road trip across a swath of America, I can’t get one person out of my mind: Trinity Goodman, a cheerful, chatty woman in Oklahoma City who had a bandage on her arm.
The reason for the bandage? Goodman, 44, survives by selling blood plasma twice a week. She had $3.78 in her checking account, one cent in her savings account to keep it open, and six pennies in her piggy bank.
“That’s my full assets,” she said, smiling in mockery of her own poverty.
“Barely making it,” she added. “It’s really hard and it’s miserable.”
She dwells in an America that many of us might have trouble imagining. For five years she staved off homelessness only by staying in the home of a man who was not a romantic partner but who took advantage of her vulnerability, she said, by regularly demanding sex. A heroic local nonprofit, Hope Community Services, helped her get low-income housing for $50 a month, she said; otherwise she would still have to choose between unwanted sex and homelessness.
Food stamps, $298 a month, sustain her, but they can’t be used for toilet paper or feminine hygiene products. So she searches for them at church-run pantries — lifelines in much of America.
Haircuts are likewise unaffordable. “I’ve never been to a barber or any of those places,” she said. “Never. I don’t have that luxury.”
Many sectors of America — and many Americans — are thriving. Yet my sense is that many of us are blind to how many people have been left far behind. So far behind that they scarcely inhabit the same country as the rest of us. And this pain across America is now magnified by President Trump’s cuts in food stamps, Medicaid, mental health funding for children, pregnancy prevention initiatives and other social programs, as well as by rising gas and food prices. Republicans are also imposing tougher work requirements for benefits; this is reasonable in theory, but in practice such requirements have proved costly to administer and end up mostly just driving people deeper into poverty.
On this trip, I talked to so many people who are losing food stamps and other benefits and increasingly desperate — and resentful, understandably, of elites who seem indifferent to their struggles. A recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that two-thirds of Americans consider groceries unaffordable.
Goodman is among those feeling the squeeze, and there appears to be some risk that she will lose her food stamps — and in that case she doesn’t know how she would get by.
I’m on my annual win-a-trip journey, which I started 20 years ago to take a university student on a reporting trip to cover neglected issues. Usually we travel abroad, often in Africa, but this time we explored poverty, addiction and human trafficking in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kentucky.
My student winner this year is Brunella Tipismana, who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Lima, Peru, and just graduated from Yale University. One thing we saw repeatedly on this road trip is that poverty in America is not just about a lack of money, but is often multigenerational and self-replicating.
Goodman, for example, says she grew up steeped in trauma, in a toxic family that often abused drugs. She told us that she was raped and sexually abused beginning at the age of 6 or 7. She was 9 when her mother killed herself; afterward, Goodman was raised by other family members, she said. All the trauma left a mark: She says she was clinically diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder that has left her unable to work. She has applied for disability benefits, and says she was denied, but is now appealing.
I asked Goodman what message she would have for Trump as the cuts and work requirements he ordered ripple across the land.
“You do not know what you’re doing to people who are struggling to live,” she said. “You got money in the bank. You don’t know how it feels to struggle. Live in my shoes for one day. You wouldn’t be able to handle it.”
In Pine Bluff, Ark., a largely Black city that is struggling economically, racked by crime and losing population, I visited the home of Latoya Foster, 31, a single mother with six children who has lost food stamps and as a result is behind in rent.
Foster works as a shift manager at Taco Bell, earning $13.40 an hour. She relied on $1,172 in food stamps per month — but they were abruptly cut off in May, apparently because of suspicions that two of her children were collecting improper benefits in other states. She denies that and says there was some kind of mistake in the system.
Nationwide, some 1.5 million children have lost food stamps under Trump’s crackdown over the last year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. It notes, and superb reporting by my Times colleague Jason DeParle underscores, that pressure on states to cut costs and reduce error rates may lead to wrongful denials of benefits. In addition, some three million Americans have lost Obamacare health insurance since the beginning of this year, after Republicans cut subsidies to help pay for insurance.
Without food stamps, Foster now is behind in her rent — $650 a month for a three-bedroom home in a crime-ridden neighborhood — and accumulating a $25-a-day late fee on top of the rent owed.
“I hit rock bottom daily,” she told me. “The more I work, the harder stuff gets.”
And then she broke down and wept.
The push to cut benefits for struggling Americans is partly rooted in a desire to trim federal spending, but that’s hard to square with the expense of the Iran war, as well as subsidies for private planes and tax cuts for the wealthiest. It’s also based on a perception that the “undeserving poor” are exploiting the system, but I think we exaggerate the degree to which it is the poor rather than the rich who get away with manipulations. As of 2019, according to ProPublica, the place in America with the highest percentage of tax audits was not a haven of billionaires but rather Humphreys County, Miss., with a majority Black population and a median household income then of roughly $26,000.
In any case, the age group most likely to live in poverty — by far — is children, particularly children 2 years old and under, and they can’t be accused of fraud, laziness or personal irresponsibility. Yes, many end up making bad choices, but we fail them before they fail us.
Trump initially proposed eliminating Head Start, the federal program with bipartisan support that serves those vulnerable children in poverty. He later backed off that idea, but congressional investigators found that his administration illegally withheld $12 billion from the program for several months, causing great hardship.
But while it’s easy to focus on Trump and Republicans cutting Medicaid, food stamps and other benefits, it’s not just the Trump administration that seems to have a myopia about Americans falling behind.
Democrats talk a good game about housing being a human right, but the three states with the highest rates of unsheltered homelessness right now are blue ones: California, Oregon and Hawaii. Liberals rightly protest Trump’s plans to abolish the Department of Education, but it is a handful of red states — especially Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi — that have shown astonishing progress and now may represent the best hope for American education.
A Black fourth-grader in Mississippi is now two and a half times as likely to test proficient in reading as a Black fourth-grader in California. Democrats have every right to call out Trump, but they should also look in the mirror at their own failures to help those left behind.
When the problems are structural, we tend to ignore them. Palo Alto, Calif., is full of well-meaning liberals — four-fifths of voters supported Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in 2024 — and it makes its outstanding public schools available to children of all colors and classes … as long as their families can afford an average home price of $3.6 million.
It’s understandable that many working-class Americans feel betrayed. As I see it, politicians of all parties have been far too complacent about Americans being left behind, even as 1.3 million Americans have died of overdoses since 2000. That’s roughly the number of American service members who have died from all the wars in American history.
One reason for the complacency is that the problems, at least in their complexity, are often invisible. Americans may see a homeless person shooting drugs, but they won’t see the arc of hopelessness that began with, say, foster care — which at its worst is a government system of child abuse.
Courtney Williams, 31, endured that broken foster care system. I met her in Oklahoma City, where she is caring for a new baby and hoping her $298 a month in food stamps won’t be taken away.
We taxpayers paid for Williams to be incarcerated — three times — but we never provided her the protection and opportunities she needed, especially when she was young and most needed help. And when we don’t invest in the front end, we end up paying at the back end.
Some of Williams’s earliest memories are of men sexually assaulting her, perhaps when she was 3 or 4. Her mother was a prostitute with addictions, she said, and at age 6 she saw her younger sister killed and was then put in foster care.
From there she bounced around foster homes in seven states, carrying her life belongings with her in a trash bag. When she was 11, one foster home put padlocks on the refrigerator, freezer and food cabinets, keeping her and other foster children hungry, she said.
Williams first tried meth at age 12 and at 14 became pregnant by a man in his late 20s who, she later found out, was a convicted sex offender. She put the baby up for adoption and dropped out of school in 10th grade.
Not every foster family was abusive or hosting her for the money, she said; she recalls that one was wonderful and wanted to adopt her. But Williams, by now deeply suspicious of human kindness and full of self-doubt, asked for a different placement.
When Williams was 17, her foster mother stopped getting checks for her — she’s not sure why, but perhaps some snafu in the system — and kicked her out. After that, Williams spent a decade largely homeless, wrestling with drugs, washing up in Dunkin’ Donuts restrooms and periodically getting locked up. Finally a new boyfriend, now husband, who didn’t use drugs helped her rebuild her life, and she says she hasn’t used drugs since last September, when she discovered that she was pregnant.
Conservatives often emphasize the importance of “personal responsibility,” and they have a point. Self-destructive behaviors are real. Scholars have said that of millennials who follow the “success sequence” (finish high school, get a full-time job and have children only after marriage), 97 percent avoid poverty by their late 20s.
Yet if we want to talk about lack of personal responsibility, we also have to have a conversation about our collective lack of responsibility, about the way we treat some kids as throwaways — or the way we’re now taking food stamps from 1.5 million children.
In Pine Bluff, I spoke to several elderly Black residents who said that in some ways life was actually better in the Jim Crow era. Black people can vote now, of course, and some have thrived.
But these seniors lamented that the quality of life for the Black population had not progressed as they had imagined. Costs have soared, crime is a threat, obesity is common and ailments like diabetes and hypertension are widespread, taking a toll on well-being. Life expectancy in the county is shorter than in Iran or Bangladesh. Schools are still de facto segregated and lagging; the Pine Bluff school district gets an F from the state.
“Civil rights were probably better back then,” grumbled Barbara Ollison, 76. I don’t know that she was really arguing that there had been no progress at all, but she’s right that Black children in places like Pine Bluff still struggle to find opportunity in 2026.
“You had enough back then to make it,” she told me. “And right now it’s terrible.”
One of the few institutions that did not utterly fail places like Pine Bluff was the U.S. military. It offered a path upward and outward, along with skills training, discipline and respect. But some people here see Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, ousting Black senior officers and no longer perceive the armed forces as a path of opportunity for people of color.
“The military is out,” said Glayton Johnson, a retired Army veteran who pointed to Hegseth’s impact on the military’s reputation. “No, we’re not going there.”
One of the people I most wanted to see on this trip was Emanuel Laster, whom I met a decade ago in Pine Bluff when he was a sweet, smart 13-year-old boy — at risk of joining a gang. You sensed that he could go either way: Maybe he would thrive and go to college, or maybe he would succumb to the gravity of his crime-ridden neighborhood. Emanuel’s bedroom was a portrait of dysfunctional America: It had three televisions, but electricity was supposed to be cut off the day I arrived for nonpayment (his mom had stationed a pit bull to deter the man from the power company from getting near enough to accomplish this).
What had become of Laster? It turned out that he never finished high school, had tangles with the law and is now in jail, awaiting trial this month on federal gun charges for possessing a handgun that had been converted into an automatic weapon. Visits in the jail weren’t permitted, but I spoke to him by phone. I asked him what had gone wrong, and he said, “I hung out with the wrong crowd.” His mother, when I visited her, said the same thing.
Laster told me that he had two boys, ages 4 and 6, with a former girlfriend, so I located them and their mother, Autumn Holman. She and her sons had been evicted and were homeless, couch surfing temporarily in a crowded apartment with a cousin and trying desperately to find a place to live.
Holman works in the kitchen of a nursing home, but her car isn’t working, so commuting is a daily crisis. She’s trying to get food stamps and thought they would begin in July, but they haven’t materialized.
She said that she loved Laster, her high school sweetheart, but that they had quarreled because he was an irresponsible parent. “He got mad because I had to ask him for money for his kids,” she said, adding that she simply wanted him to pay for little things like the boys’ haircuts.
“He knows for a fact that I’m going to be on his tail like I’m his mama,” she added. “Who else is going to do it? ‘You got kids,’ I tell him, ‘and I didn’t have them by myself.’”
Laster’s sons are beautiful children full of potential, but they are now growing up without a dad, just as Laster himself did. Visiting that crowded home, I kept thinking back to Emanuel a decade ago as an equally sweet child, about the obstacle course of life that Black boys face in Pine Bluff, and I wondered if his children were on a trajectory to replicate his path.
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2) With a Series of Big Donations, State Department Restores Some Global Health Aid
The amount is still far below what the U.S. spent previously on humanitarian and health aid, but resumes the flow of money for key efforts to fight malnutrition and disease.
By Stephanie Nolen, Aug. 2, 2026
"Jeremy Lewin, the top official for foreign aid at the State Department, said his team continues to be focused on remaking foreign assistance to be leaner and more efficient and to end recipients’ dependence. 'These international organization relationships, we can use them tactically where they’re important, but it doesn’t mean we need to fund them year after year after year when they don’t have that same nexus to something that we care about,' Mr. Lewin said."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/health/trump-health-aid-state-department.html
A camp for people displaced by violence and drought in Somalia’s southern Gedo region, seen in April.F inbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times
Over the past two months, the United States has made financial commitments that hint at a limited return to global health and humanitarian assistance partnerships, after the abrupt severing of many of those relationships a year and a half ago.
Last week, the State Department notified Congress that it would send $600 million to Gavi, the organization that helps low-income countries buy essential childhood immunizations, a year after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. withdrew American support.
It was the latest in a series of financial commitments from the U.S. government to international organizations, working on issues such as hunger and tuberculosis, totaling nearly $2 billion.
In most cases, these payments move money that had been appropriated by Congress but which had been stuck since the Trump administration took office in January 2025 and instituted a freeze on foreign aid.
It was not yet clear whether the disbursements represented a lasting shift, or how close any further commitments would bring the total to what the United States used to spend on aid and global health. People who have been part of talks with the State Department about this funding said that there were at least two motivations behind the money flowing to resumed partnerships.
First, recent health threats including, most notably, the ballooning Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, reinforced the need for funding multilateral agencies that work on global health security.
Second, with the Trump administration’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development and absorption of a skeleton crew of its staff into the State Department, there was no longer the infrastructure or staff for the United States to move humanitarian assistance on this scale by itself, making these large international agencies necessary partners.
“What may be happening here is that reality is sinking in for decision makers,” said Mark A. Green, who served as administrator of U.S.A.I.D. during President Trump’s first term and who is president of ONE, an advocacy organization for foreign assistance. “The good news is that Secretary Rubio clearly realizes that global health is what we do, and we’re really good at it. That’s why you’re starting to see more money moving.”
He added, “I think there’s a realization that global health security is also American national security, too.”
Eighteen months ago, the freezing of assistance was perceived internationally as a significant U.S. retreat from multilateralism. It created immediate financial crises for many aid institutions, leaving gaping holes in budgets such as that of the World Food Program (WFP), which provides emergency food aid in war and disaster zones. And it presented an existential crisis for a humanitarian assistance and global health architecture that had long been predicated on bedrock U.S. support.
Jeremy Lewin, the top official for foreign aid at the State Department, said his team continues to be focused on remaking foreign assistance to be leaner and more efficient and to end recipients’ dependence.
“These international organization relationships, we can use them tactically where they’re important, but it doesn’t mean we need to fund them year after year after year when they don’t have that same nexus to something that we care about,” Mr. Lewin said.
In addition to the money for Gavi, recent major funding announcements from the State Department include:
· $800 million for the World Food Program to fight malnutrition in countries including Ethiopia, Myanmar and Ukraine
· $218 million for Unicef to work improving child health through nutrition, water and sanitation projects
· $100 million to Operation End Starvation, a new public-private partnership working to lower child mortality from malnutrition
· $50 million to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations for the development of new Ebola vaccines
· $203 million to the International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies for disaster response and humanitarian assistance
· $220 million for the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of Congo and $350 million in new humanitarian funding to the affected region, as of June 12
· $661 million to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a payment against what was owed from prior year appropriations
“I’m hoping we’re back to a regular order of payouts that are consistent with the Global Fund being an important partner,” said Chris Collins, the president of Friends of the Global Fight, an advocacy group that lobbies for support of the Geneva-based health organization.
Gavi’s chief executive, Sania Nishtar, also expressed relief about the restoration of U.S. support this week. “This new funding is vital,” she said. “It will help us maintain emergency vaccine stockpiles for Ebola and other deadly diseases and help countries turn the tide on malaria.”
At the outset of Mr. Trump’s second term, he and his officials were sharply critical of most of the big international organizations the United States used to disburse assistance, calling them bloated and wasteful, and saying American participation in large U.N. agencies was an ineffective use of funds.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was historically a champion of some of the institutions that were crippled by the foreign aid cuts he oversaw last year, including those to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), for which he repeatedly cosponsored bills for new funding while he was a senator. He also pushed a number of global health security measures in the Senate, including the establishment of a permanent global health security coordinator position at the National Security Council. He advocated funding for efforts to lower maternal mortality and fight neglected tropical diseases.
But by June, the last month for which data is available, the State Department had obligated $2.5 billion less to PEPFAR in 2026 compared with what the program had received at the same point in 2024. A recent invitation from the department sent to dozens of organizations that deliver PEPFAR programs inviting them to submit proposals for more work — and funding — suggests that more money will likely flow to PEPFAR by the end of September.
Mr. Lewin said the international agencies receiving State Department funding have made significant changes to their operations to align with the administration’s priorities. He said U.N. agencies were charging lower rates of overhead than they did for U.S.A.I.D. contracts, and providing more accountability to U.S. auditors and more transparency into their operations.
A former senior Rubio aide, who worked on foreign assistance reform and was not authorized to speak publicly, said that the Trump administration’s engagement had produced meaningful changes at the United Nations but added that these large awards also reflect a scramble within the department to move money and a realization that it would take excessive time and cost to set up a separate system.
But despite the recent announcements, large amounts of congressionally appropriated funding for global health and foreign aid remain unspent, or marked for likely rescission.
The Office of Management and Budget, headed by Russel T. Vought and charged with shutting down U.S.A.I.D., in April notified Congress of a plan to use $2 billion of global health money for “closeout costs” for grants from the dismantled U.S.A.I.D. — costs such as severance to employees and terminating leases for office space around the world.
Since that notification, about $650 million of those funds have been redirected for the Ebola response and other global health security efforts. But $1.35 billion, which has to be used by Sept. 30, remains marked by the O.M.B. for closeout costs.
Organizations working to support health programs in low-income countries are watching the closeout budget with alarm. Vincent Lin, associate director of health policy and advocacy at Partners In Health, said the fear was that the budget office was running down the clock, so that the funding allocations would expire at the end of the fiscal year in September.
Mr. Lin noted that while the budget office has not provided Congress with a breakdown of those closeout costs, many of the canceled U.S.A.I.D. awards were already closed. He said it would be hard to understand how the remaining costs could register in the billions of dollars.
“We can prevent a tremendous amount of suffering from TB, malaria, malnutrition and deaths of mothers and babies in childbirth by using these funds as Congress intended,” he said.
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3) How a Top Law Firm Went From Standing Up to Trump to Bending the Knee
Paul Weiss was a progressive stalwart for decades and led the legal resistance against President Trump in his first term. Then it surrendered without a fight. This is the inside story of its transformation.
By Michael S. Schmidt and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Aug. 2, 2026
The reporters have covered the president’s retribution campaign against law firms since it started weeks after Trump took office. For this piece, they reviewed a range of internal documents and conducted dozens of interviews with current and former Paul Weiss lawyers.
"But the Times reporting, based on extensive interviews with current and former lawyers at the firm, access to internal documents and communications, and detailed accounts of firm meetings, shows there was a cost. The pursuit of Wall Street business in service of higher profits per partner — a key metric for law firms — was at odds with its social justice principles. When Mr. Trump took aim at Paul Weiss, in part because of its activist history, the firm’s long-simmering identity crisis became an existential crisis."
Mark Harris
The reporters have covered the president’s retribution campaign against law firms since it started weeks after Trump took office. For this piece, they reviewed a range of internal documents and conducted dozens of interviews with current and former Paul Weiss lawyers.
On his desk at the law firm Paul Weiss, Brad Karp keeps a framed picture of a young girl and her father embracing after they had been separated at the border by the immigration policies of the first Trump administration. It is a reminder of one of the firm’s proudest moments — when Mr. Karp, as chairman, led its lawyers to fight the administration in court and undertake the painstaking work to reunite families.
“It was a call to arms,” Mr. Karp said later.
But two months into the second Trump administration, when the president came for Paul Weiss with an executive order imposing crippling sanctions, Mr. Karp did not just lay down arms. He rushed to the White House to surrender.
The legal and political worlds were shocked. Paul Weiss was a titan in the legal business, known for its stable of elite litigators and for its history of standing up to the government and championing progressive causes going back to the civil rights movement. But sitting in the Oval Office in March 2025, Mr. Karp bent without a fight to an executive order that was widely seen as illegal.
Four law firms that fought similar executive orders won quick injunctions from incensed judges, making Paul Weiss’s capitulation particularly consequential for President Trump’s retribution campaign against an array of perceived enemies. Eight other firms followed Paul Weiss in making deals with the White House, agreeing to perform a total of nearly $1 billion in free legal work for causes Mr. Trump supported.
“They’re just saying, ‘Where do I sign?’” Mr. Trump bragged. “No one can believe it.”
But behind the public disbelief was a deeper story of an institution that had slowly come loose from its roots. That story, pieced together in a New York Times investigation, reveals that Paul Weiss’s bow to the White House was the culmination of a reordering of power and finances behind the scenes at the firm for years.
The shift had begun when Mr. Karp decided years earlier to develop a more robust corporate practice alongside Paul Weiss’s litigation work. The wealthy firm became even wealthier, partly by riding the growth of private equity and the lucrative legal work generated by the rapid buying and selling of companies.
But the Times reporting, based on extensive interviews with current and former lawyers at the firm, access to internal documents and communications, and detailed accounts of firm meetings, shows there was a cost. The pursuit of Wall Street business in service of higher profits per partner — a key metric for law firms — was at odds with its social justice principles. When Mr. Trump took aim at Paul Weiss, in part because of its activist history, the firm’s long-simmering identity crisis became an existential crisis.
At the center of the conflict were two dominant and very different figures — Mr. Karp and Scott Barshay, whom Mr. Karp had hired to supercharge the corporate practice.
Mr. Karp, described by colleagues as the consummate people pleaser, sometimes to a fault, tried to keep happy both the socially conscious litigators and the increasing crop of corporate lawyers. Mr. Barshay, the colleagues say, is a driven dealmaker, aggressive to the point of being abrasive. As his power grew with the revenue he generated, he worked to curtail the social justice litigation at the core of the firm’s culture, viewing it as bad for business because it could alienate clients.
Mr. Barshay particularly clashed with a young rising star at Paul Weiss, its first openly transgender partner, The Times found.
The lawyer, Lex Korberg, decided to leave Paul Weiss after Mr. Barshay pushed against the social justice work. But Mr. Barshay had told other firm leaders that after Mx. Korberg — who uses they/them pronouns — transitioned, he did not want them dealing with his clients. He said a transgender lawyer could hurt business by making clients uncomfortable, according to two people who heard Mr. Barshay make those remarks and two others who were told about them at the time.
To insulate the firm, Paul Weiss struck a secret $3.5 million deal in 2023, never previously revealed, under which Mx. Korberg agreed not to sue or disparage the firm.
While Mr. Barshay was changing the firm’s culture, Paul Weiss continued to oppose Mr. Trump, even more aggressively when he was out of office. In an unusual arrangement, the firm paid associates to work for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, helping build a criminal prosecution against Mr. Trump.
Once Mr. Trump won re-election, the firm scrambled to avoid his ire. It stopped representing a drone manufacturer that was suing the Pentagon, partly out of concern about tangling with the administration, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter. It also started scrubbing its websites of content that might draw the attention of Mr. Trump and his aides.
When Mr. Trump issued his executive order against Paul Weiss, leaders at the firm were convinced they could beat it in court. But they feared opposing the president would hurt the firm’s finances and its clients. And after the deal was struck, when a top partner wanted to bring a reproductive rights case as a show of independence from the administration, she was shut down by Mr. Barshay and Mr. Karp.
As a sign of how skittish the firm had become, an email exchange reviewed by The Times documents a heated discussion among partners about how — or whether — to alter a website that recounted the firm’s work against white supremacists and the rioters of Jan. 6, 2021. Some even proposed checking with the administration to see whether the website would anger the White House. Another partner warned that “there likely won’t be a next time” for Paul Weiss “if we get hit by the administration again.”
In response to questions about its deal with the White House, a Paul Weiss spokeswoman, Laura Van Drie, said that “any assertion that our independence has been jeopardized is completely false.”
Most pointedly, Ms. Van Drie said that Mx. Korberg had been “a highly valued partner” and that Mr. Barshay had been “happy” for Mx. Korberg “to work for his clients.”
While Ms. Van Drie said that Paul Weiss’s pro bono work had continued to increase, the firm did not provide any examples of work it had done opposing the second Trump administration.
In addition, the firm declined to make Mr. Karp and Mr. Barshay available for interviews.
Meanwhile, the firm’s transformation has altered the trajectories of both of their careers.
In pursuit of new business clients, Mr. Karp landed the private equity giant Apollo Global Management in 2011. Through Apollo’s then-chairman, Leon Black, Mr. Karp met Jeffrey Epstein and later offered the sex offender free legal advice. When the extent of his ties to Mr. Epstein emerged early this year in a trove of Justice Department documents, Mr. Karp was forced to step down as chairman of Paul Weiss.
His replacement? Mr. Barshay.
Doing Well and Doing Good
In the fall of 1982, Ted Sorensen visited Harvard Law School to interview candidates for Paul Weiss’s class of summer associates. Mr. Sorensen was a prominent Democratic lawyer who had served as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy and helped write his 1961 Inaugural Address. After the Kennedy assassination, Mr. Sorensen became head of Paul Weiss’s international practice, counseling corporations and heads of state.
One ambitious student Mr. Sorensen met that day was Brad Karp, a liberal Long Island native. As a top student, Mr. Karp had many options for summer work, but he was swayed by Mr. Sorensen’s pitch. Like its competitors, Paul Weiss offered an opportunity to make a good living advising the world’s most important people and corporations. But Paul Weiss had an unmatched record supporting diversity, Democratic politics and social justice litigation.
Paul Weiss had fashioned itself as the firm of firsts — the first major law firm to name a female partner, the first to hire Black associates, and a pioneer among New York firms in having Jews and non-Jews practice together.
It had represented the “Scottsboro Boys”— Black Alabama teenagers falsely accused in 1931 of raping two young white women — in a case that ultimately led to establishing the right to counsel. In the 1950s, the firm assisted Thurgood Marshall, then counsel for the N.A.A.C.P., in the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case.
The future liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor were all summer associates.
During the second half of the 20th century, the firm was steered by two revered figures: Simon H. Rifkind, a former federal judge, and Arthur Liman, a former federal prosecutor. In 1963, Judge Rifkind wrote what became the firm’s credo, a “Statement of Firm Principles” stressing a commitment to diversity, excellence and responsibility not only to the legal profession but to “a free democratic society.”
By the late 1990s, both Judge Rifkind and Mr. Liman had died, leaving leadership of the firm to a staid tax lawyer. While the firm flourished, many partners felt it needed to adapt to an increasingly competitive landscape.
In 2008, Mr. Karp was elected chairman after establishing himself as a top litigator and an indefatigable networker who had helped land clients like Citigroup.
Mr. Karp was determined to enhance the story the firm told of itself, the story of doing well and doing good that originally had attracted him.
He made a two-pronged plan. The first was to publicly embrace Paul Weiss’s pro bono work, partly to help recruit young talent by distinguishing the firm from competitors that were more focused on the bottom line.
The second part of Mr. Karp’s plan was to focus on the bottom line. At the time, Paul Weiss partners made about $2.5 million annually. The firm was thriving thanks to banking clients that were navigating the fallout from the financial crisis.
But Mr. Karp envisioned that work eventually slowing. The rise of private equity offered a lucrative line of legal work assisting in mergers and acquisitions. That highly competitive area of corporate law was different from Paul Weiss’s specialty — handling complex, long-running litigation. Mr. Karp decided that maintaining and increasing the firm’s robust profits required pivoting hard to corporate work.
Over the next decade and a half, Mr. Karp would drive his firm and himself to new heights of power and prominence. But decisions he made during that period set the stage for the eventual dislodging of Paul Weiss from its deep roots and for Mr. Karp’s own eventual tumble.
A Corporate Turn
Mr. Karp scored an early victory in his campaign to increase corporate business when he landed the private equity firm Apollo, which would become its highest-paying client.
But he needed a bona fide rainmaker who would telegraph that Paul Weiss had come to play in a different arena. He found his man in Mr. Barshay, a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, a top Wall Street law firm, where over two decades he had built an impressive record of generating corporate work, particularly in mergers and acquisitions.
Mr. Karp — along with Paul Weiss’s head of corporate law, Robert Schumer, the brother of Senator Chuck Schumer of New York — wooed him over drinks and dinner at Le Bernardin, the Michelin-rated restaurant near Paul Weiss’s Midtown Manhattan offices.
To seal the deal, Mr. Karp agreed to pay him millions of dollars more a year than he earned at Cravath — and more than many veteran Paul Weiss partners.
Announcing Mr. Barshay’s hiring in April 2016, Mr. Karp called Mr. Barshay “one of the nation’s leading M&A lawyers, if not the leading M&A lawyer.”
Mr. Karp said elite firms needed strength in four areas of practice — mergers, private equity, litigation and white-collar defense — and “we believe, especially with Scott’s addition, that we are the only firm that has market-leading practices in all those areas.”
But there was unease among some at Paul Weiss. Partners and associates learned from lawyers at Cravath that some people there were not unhappy to see Mr. Barshay go. His ego made him difficult to work with, the Paul Weiss lawyers were told.
“There was a worry that he was going to change the culture,” said Elizabeth Grossman, a former Paul Weiss associate.
Mr. Karp and Mr. Schumer reassured wary colleagues. Mr. Barshay said he just wanted to grow the firm’s business and had no interest in being part of leadership. Besides, they reasoned, Paul Weiss had a well-established culture.
At the end of every year, the firm held a dinner where new partners offered heartfelt remarks about what Paul Weiss’s values meant to them. The year Mr. Barshay joined the firm, Mr. Karp splurged, renting out the blue-whale room at the American Museum of Natural History.
Beneath the 94-foot model whale, partners and their spouses drank and ate. When it came time for Mr. Barshay’s remarks, he used the opportunity to slip in some criticism of his former Cravath colleagues, according to three people who were present. It was a brief episode, but it raised eyebrows among some Paul Weiss partners.
The Legal Resistance
Roughly a month after that dinner, Mr. Trump was sworn in, ushering in his first-term blizzard of norm-breaking, law-challenging actions. True to its history, Paul Weiss positioned itself as the leader of the legal resistance.
When Mr. Trump restricted travel to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries, Mr. Karp jumped in. He sent roughly 100 Paul Weiss employees, including dozens of lawyers, to airports to provide free legal services to stranded travelers and sued the administration over the ban.
The next year, when the administration began separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border, Mr. Karp tapped his legal and political network to organize a campaign against the policy. He persuaded 33 other law firms to help and deployed Paul Weiss lawyers to find the children, leading to about 250 reunifications.
It was a moment of pride for the firm. One lawyer memorialized the number of families reunited with a tattoo. The Financial Times gave Mr. Karp a special achievement award for “standing up to the White House.”
“Senior lawyers can be reluctant to speak in public about controversial issues,” the publication wrote in an article. “With Brad Karp, not so much.”
That was just one measure of how the firm’s ethos was different then. In 2019, firm leaders looking to hire a high-powered litigator identified a Washington lawyer, according to one current and two former Paul Weiss partners. But an impassioned debate followed after Paul Weiss lawyers learned he had done legal work for groups that opposed abortion, and he was not hired.
In another snapshot of that era, Mr. Karp came under attack on his left flank after announcing Paul Weiss’s class of 2019 partners: 11 white men and one white woman. Nearly 200 legal officers of major corporations — including Heineken USA and Booz Allen Hamilton — warned Mr. Karp in a letter that they would take their business elsewhere if Paul Weiss failed “to reflect the diversity of the legal community.”
Privately, Mr. Karp was irate that the firm’s values were being questioned. Publicly, he was contrite.
“I wish I could be Superman and fly backward and make time go back and make sure that we had special individualized mentoring for every single female associate and associate of color,” Mr. Karp said at the time. “But we didn’t do that. And we’ve learned very valuable lessons.”
As the firm assembled the next year’s partner class, one associate was a perfect candidate, a young litigator who seemingly embodied everything Paul Weiss valued: Mx. Korberg.
A Progressive Litigator
Mx. Korberg was a third-year law student at Yale in 2011 and working at the American Civil Liberties Union when they heard that Paul Weiss needed junior associates to work on the case of Edith Windsor, which helped lead to the recognition of same-sex marriage in the United States.
Mx. Korberg went to work for Roberta Kaplan, who was leading the litigation at Paul Weiss.
Mx. Korberg’s work quickly stood out, and they logged hundreds of hours on the case. On the day the Supreme Court ruled in 2013, Mx. Korberg was by Ms. Windsor’s side as Paul Weiss was hailed as a leader for progressive legal causes. This was the signature pro bono work Mr. Karp wanted to trumpet, and in the following years, the firm promoted its work on the case to lure clients and fresh talent.
By 2018, Mx. Korberg was one of the lead lawyers representing Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Mississippi — in the Dobbs case that led the Supreme Court to overturn the federal right to abortion.
Mx. Korberg also proved they could generate revenue as a litigator of complex business disputes. The lawyer said in a podcast that they had envisioned a career devoted exclusively to liberal causes but had come to embrace Paul Weiss’s dual track.
“I love that in the morning I’m representing the last abortion clinic in Mississippi and in the afternoon I’m representing the board of directors of CBS,” they said.
While Mx. Korberg was a year shy of the eight years usually needed for associates to be made partners at Paul Weiss, Mr. Karp elevated Mx. Korberg, given their stature and the pressure for diversity after the uproar over the 2019 partner class.
If Mx. Korberg was emerging as the new face of the firm’s historical values, Mr. Barshay was the face of the new Paul Weiss. The American Lawyer named Mx. Korberg a “Young Lawyer of the Year” in 2021, two years after the publication named Mr. Barshay “Dealmaker of the Year.”
Starting in the early 2020s, the corporate work Mr. Barshay had been hired to enhance accounted for 65 percent of the firm’s revenue, dwarfing its litigation work, according to a copy of Mr. Karp’s 2023 annual address to partners.
By then, Mr. Barshay, who had initially said he had no interest in leadership, had joined the “Deciding Group,” which manages the firm and determines annual compensation.
The firm had always been the domain of litigators, who by reputation are experts in the intricacies of the law and writers of well-argued briefs. Now, the firm was becoming dominated by corporate lawyers, whose expertise was making deals for titans.
Mr. Barshay’s power was ascending, threatening Mr. Karp and the firm’s culture. Mx. Korberg was caught in the middle.
Partners and Rivals
It began with the classic pandemic-era workplace dispute: the return-to-office policy.
In 2021, Mx. Korberg was appointed to lead the committee on in-office work and pushed for three days in the office after surveying employees. Mr. Barshay pushed for five, mirroring the financial institutions that he and his corporate group were serving.
In a phone conversation on Mother’s Day 2021, Mr. Barshay lashed out at Mx. Korberg, insisting on the five-day requirement, according to four people familiar with the call. (The firm’s spokeswoman said Mr. Barshay recalled a “robust but respectful discussion.”)
Mx. Korberg prevailed, but news of the call spread through the firm.
In 2022, Mr. Barshay started asking partners about Mx. Korberg’s billable hours, suggesting they were doing too much pro bono work, according to two people briefed on the matter. Those questions concerned some partners, because the head of corporate law was questioning the work of a high-performing litigator. But fearing Mr. Barshay’s questions could not be ignored, they arranged for Mx. Korberg to brief him on their work.
At a dinner with young litigators the next year at Marea, a fancy Italian restaurant on Central Park South, Mr. Barshay belittled the litigators, saying that they were soft and didn’t know how to bring in business, according to a current Paul Weiss partner and three former partners. Some sent what amounted to S.O.S. texts to colleagues who weren’t there, said two of the former partners, who received them.
When someone asked Mr. Barshay if he eventually wanted to replace Mr. Karp as chairman, he said he was essentially running the firm already, with Mr. Karp more as a puppet. He said he liked the arrangement because he could wield power without attending to the tedious tasks of the firm’s daily operations.
When word of the dinner got back to Mr. Karp, he confronted Mr. Barshay, telling him he could never behave like that again, according to one of the partners.
In response to The Times’s reporting, the firm provided a statement signed by 10 lawyers who had attended the meal, saying that The Times “completely mischaracterizes the dinner” and that “over the course of the evening, we had a candid, mutual and constructive exchange of views on various topics related to law firm practice.”
In closed-door leadership meetings, Mr. Barshay pushed his view that lawyers were too focused on pro bono work and that the firm needed to operate as a business and recruit more aggressive associates, not soft, idealistic lawyers interested in social justice cases.
It was clear that Mr. Karp was feeling the heat. In a conversation with one lawyer, Mr. Karp tearfully acknowledged he was losing control to Mr. Barshay, according to a person with direct knowledge of the encounter. Mr. Karp said that he was trying to protect the firm’s culture and employees from Mr. Barshay, the person said. (In a statement released by the firm, Mr. Karp said: “That story is false. I have enormous respect for Scott, and we have always been the closest of colleagues.”)
But Mr. Barshay’s influence and the shifting political winds were pressing on Mr. Karp. In his annual address to partners in May 2023, Mr. Karp lauded Paul Weiss’s pro bono work as having “made our country more fair and equitable and helped burnish the firm’s reputation and profile over several generations,” according to a copy of the speech reviewed by The Times.
But while “this unique aspect of our history attracted many of you to Paul Weiss,” he said that as the firm had grown, it had recruited lawyers “with divergent political sensibilities.”
“We are, after all, a commercial law firm, and not a public interest advocacy organization,” Mr. Karp said. He proposed that the firm continue its “core pro bono work” but “be sensitive as to which matters we publicly promote.”
“We need to recognize that there is a woke, anti-woke, blue-state, red-state war in our country and being embroiled in that war is not good for business,” he said.
Weeks later, the issue came to a head.
Idaho had passed a law making it a felony to give gender transition care to minors, threatening doctors with up to 10 years in prison. The A.C.L.U. and Paul Weiss — with Mx. Korberg taking the lead — sued to stop the law.
Typically, Paul Weiss promoted its involvement in such cases. But when Mr. Barshay learned the firm would be mentioned in the A.C.L.U.’s news release, he demanded that its name be deleted, according to five people with direct knowledge.
Going forward, firm lawyers were told, Mr. Barshay would have to approve all such releases.
The Idaho case was the breaking point for Mx. Korberg, according to the people, and they told Mr. Karp they wanted to leave.
Mr. Karp tried to appease Mx. Korberg. Though the news release had already gone out, Mr. Karp had Paul Weiss’s name added to the post on the A.C.L.U.’s website and his own name as a lawyer on the case.
But Mx. Korberg was not swayed. In addition to what they saw as a retreat from progressive causes, Mx. Korberg confided to a senior partner, they felt that Mr. Barshay was unfairly singling them out for scrutiny and that the only difference between them and their colleagues was that they were trans.
Top partners were concerned that Mr. Barshay had treated Mx. Korberg differently after they had transitioned in 2021. Four people with direct knowledge of what occurred inside the firm said that once Mx. Korberg transitioned, Mr. Barshay said behind their back that he considered them a liability because of how clients might react.
Although Mx. Korberg never threatened to sue, partners feared they could go public, harming the firm and Mr. Barshay, according to one of the people.
While Paul Weiss had become a go-to firm during the #MeToo era for internal investigations of other institutions, including Fox News, it never thoroughly investigated how Mx. Korberg was treated, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
Instead, firm leaders began negotiating an exit with Mx. Korberg.
Ultimately, Mx. Korberg agreed not to sue or disparage the firm or even reveal the existence of a deal. In exchange, Mx. Korberg remained at the firm for another year, working mostly on pro bono cases and mentoring, and received about $3 million in compensation, according to four people familiar with the arrangement.
On top of that, Mx. Korberg was given another year’s salary, roughly $3.5 million. While the money was substantial, they would have made many millions more had they remained at the firm for years.
Paul Weiss’s spokeswoman strenuously insisted that Mr. Barshay had nothing but respect for Mx. Korberg. The firm provided The Times with an internal email exchange from April 2023 in which Mr. Barshay said he was “totally comfortable” with either Mx. Korberg or two other lawyers staffing a matter for one of his clients.
The exchange indicates Mx. Korberg was not assigned to work on it.
A 2024 news release about their exit from the firm and their new job at Her Justice, a legal advocacy group for impoverished women, cast the move as Mx. Korberg chasing a dream.
“I have loved my time at Paul Weiss, and I am so grateful to the firm for its unwavering commitment to social justice,” Mx. Korberg said, adding, “In these exceptionally challenging times, I feel called to commit myself full time to public service.”
Mr. Karp said that Mx. Korberg “is a brilliant lawyer and wonderful colleague who has made an indelible contribution to Paul Weiss’s long legacy of social impact.”
The War With Trump
As Mr. Trump returned to office last year, Mr. Karp’s initial strategy for the firm was paying off big time. A Bloomberg Law News article in mid-February declared, “Paul Weiss Climbs Deals Chart to Challenge Wall Street M&A Elite.”
“Paul Weiss, long known as a top-tier litigation law firm, has surpassed storied New York rivals to also become a mergers and acquisitions behemoth,” the article said. By that point, the firm had doubled in size under Mr. Karp’s chairmanship to well over 1,000 lawyers. Mr. Barshay and Mr. Karp were each making more than $20 million a year, according to three people with direct knowledge of their compensation, and the average partner was making $8 million.
During the years Mr. Trump had been out of office, Mr. Karp had held true to Paul Weiss’s public interest strategy by waging legal and political war against the once and future president.
In 2022, the firm deployed two associates — paid by the firm — to work on a criminal investigation of Mr. Trump being led by a former Paul Weiss partner, Mark F. Pomerantz, for the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Another Paul Weiss lawyer, who had worked on Robert S. Mueller III’s special-counsel Russia investigation, sued the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers for their role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Ms. Van Drie, the spokeswoman, said it was typical for firms to send associates to work for “clients, public interest organizations and government agencies.”
As Mr. Trump rebounded politically, Mr. Karp headlined a fund-raiser for President Joseph R. Biden Jr. One of the firm’s top lawyers, Karen Dunn, led Vice President Kamala Harris’s debate prep. Overall, Paul Weiss partners gave more money to Democrats in 2024 than any other firm.
In November 2024, Mr. Trump, who had campaigned on a promise of exacting revenge on his enemies, won re-election. Now, Paul Weiss had a lot to lose financially and was an even bigger target politically. Mr. Karp told a senior partner that the firm would not be able to take on the administration as it had during Mr. Trump’s first term, according to the partner.
The firm went into a defensive crouch even before Mr. Trump was sworn in.
In October, Paul Weiss had sued the Defense Department on behalf of the Chinese drone manufacturer DJI, challenging its designation by the Pentagon as an arm of the Chinese military, which could undercut its business. But after Mr. Trump was re-elected, Mr. Barshay argued on a heated call with a number of lawyers that Paul Weiss should not be in an adversarial position with the government and said he had concerns about the company more generally, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation. In December, Paul Weiss withdrew from the case. Ms. Van Drie said the decision “would have been made regardless of which political party was in office.”
Amid the tension over Mr. Trump’s impending return, Mr. Karp had a heart attack four days before the inauguration. He had led the weekly Tuesday partner lunch just before and returned to lead the next Tuesday’s lunch, fearing that the firm would be thrown into turmoil if he appeared to be ailing.
The next month, Paul Weiss’s leaders noticed that Elon Musk, then a top Trump aide, had posted on X: “Which law firms are pushing these anti-democratic cases to impede the will of the people?”
Paul Weiss began scrubbing its website of references to public interest work that might conflict with Mr. Trump’s war on “wokeness.” The page highlighting its efforts to find “parents deported by the Trump administration and to reunify families” vanished, as did mention of its work on L.G.B.T.Q. issues.
In March, Mr. Trump started signing executive orders targeting law firms.
One of the first was Perkins Coie, which had represented the Clinton campaign in 2016 and played a role in assembling a dossier of allegations about Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia.
The executive order leveled a string of financially devastating punishments — ending federal contracts, stripping lawyers of security clearances and restricting access to federal buildings.
Lawyers at Paul Weiss took nervous note of a side comment Mr. Trump made to an aide at the public signing of the Perkins Coie order.
“You’re looking at about 15 different firms?” Mr. Trump asked.
“That or more, sir, yes,” the aide responded.
Mr. Karp told colleagues that the Perkins Coie action was one of the greatest attacks on law firms in his lifetime. He said that even if a judge halted it, he did not believe a firm could survive such a vindictive administration, because most legal actions and clients intersect with some federal agency that reports to the president.
Underscoring the vindictiveness, Mr. Trump’s ally Stephen K. Bannon said on his podcast that Mr. Trump would destroy firms that opposed him. “They’re not going to be walking around making 4 and 5, 6 million bucks a year, because he’s going to put those law firms out of business,” Mr. Bannon said.
While Mr. Karp, like leaders of other major firms, remained publicly quiet, he tried to reprise his role during the first Trump administration and rally the legal community. But he found little support.
When Perkins Coie sued, a U.S. District Court judge, Beryl Howell, said the executive order “sends little chills down my spine” and issued an injunction. She later wrote that the message was clear: “Lawyers must stick to the party line, or else.”
Undeterred, Mr. Trump signed an executive order titled “Addressing Risks From Paul Weiss” on March 14. Asserting that law firms had played a role in “the destruction of bedrock American principles,” the president’s bill of particulars against Paul Weiss included its association with Mr. Pomerantz, its choice of pro bono cases and unexplained allegations of employment discrimination.
Like the Perkins Coie order, the punishments were potentially devastating for the firm and its clients. Companies represented by the firm could lose federal contracts, and more than three-fourths of the firm’s clients had government contracts.
Mr. Karp received messages of support from lawyers and clients. But some clients made clear they would have a fiduciary duty to sever ties with the firm if the order remained or if the firm were at odds with Mr. Trump, according to emails reviewed by The Times. Mr. Barshay reiterated that point in private conversations with firm leaders, according to a Paul Weiss partner.
The pressure mounted. Several lawyers on Mr. Barshay’s team blamed Mr. Karp and his public-facing work opposing Mr. Trump for putting a target on the firm. They said they were receiving overtures from rival firms. Top partners feared that if a major corporate lawyer like Mr. Barshay left, others were likely to follow, according to three former and one current Paul Weiss partner.
Mr. Karp, meanwhile, was expressing conflicting reactions.
To a wide group of partners, he signaled an intention to fight, saying the order was unconstitutional and directing the firm’s litigators to draw up a lawsuit demanding that a judge halt the executive order. Mr. Karp hired a prominent Washington lawyer, Bill Burck, to file it.
The lawyers were in a race against time. To obtain a temporary restraining order from a judge, Paul Weiss needed to prove that it was being irreparably harmed. Any delay in filing would undercut its argument.
But to a much smaller group of top partners, he said that even if the firm won in court, it would still have problems representing clients before an administration stocked with loyalists. He imagined the Justice Department simply refusing to deal with Paul Weiss lawyers. He and Mr. Barshay privately concluded that the only way out was to cut a deal with the president.
Yet getting a meeting with the president was daunting, especially for Mr. Karp, who was so closely identified with Democrats. Mr. Karp worked his network and found an unlikely Trump ally to help in his attempted Hail Mary: the New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
Cutting a Deal
About a dozen years earlier, Mr. Karp and Paul Weiss had become legal advisers to the National Football League. The firm led its investigation into the “Deflategate” scandal — in which the Patriots and the quarterback Tom Brady had been accused of deflating footballs to make them easier to throw.
The investigation and the punishment of the Patriots and Mr. Brady turned the team and its owner against Paul Weiss. But Mr. Karp rebuilt his relationship with Mr. Kraft, who told Mr. Karp to call if he ever needed a favor.
That’s just what Mr. Karp did. He floated for Mr. Kraft a possible deal involving Paul Weiss doing free legal work for the administration. Paul Weiss had done work for previous administrations, including during the financial crisis in the Obama years.
Mr. Kraft, a friend of Mr. Trump, vouched for Mr. Karp with the president, who had Mr. Kraft give Mr. Karp his cellphone number.
At the same time, Mr. Karp asked Mr. Burck, initially hired to fight the executive order, to explore whether the president would entertain a deal, according to four people with knowledge of the matter. Even White House officials seemed surprised that Paul Weiss might give in, according to one of the people.
It took two days of Mr. Karp leaving messages before Mr. Trump called back. He told Mr. Karp that in addition to Mr. Kraft, Marc Rowan, the head of Apollo, had vouched for him. They agreed to meet the next morning at 8 a.m. in the Oval Office.
Mr. Karp arrived alone. In the Oval Office was the president’s personal lawyer Boris Epshteyn. Another one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Robert Giuffra, was dialed in.
For Mr. Karp, Mr. Giuffra’s presence was likely to be unnerving.
Mr. Giuffra is a fierce rival of Paul Weiss as co-chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell, and he was handling Mr. Trump’s appeal of his criminal conviction in the Manhattan district attorney’s case involving Stormy Daniels. Now, Mr. Giuffra appeared to be helping the president bring Paul Weiss to heel.
The meeting lasted several hours. Mr. Trump complained that Paul Weiss had wronged him. He raised the fact that E. Jean Carroll, the woman who won a civil judgment against him for sexual abuse, was represented by Ms. Kaplan, a former Paul Weiss partner, at a trial overseen by a judge who was also a former Paul Weiss partner.
Mr. Karp refused one demand from the White House: that Mr. Karp commit to help re-litigate the 2020 election and that Paul Weiss say it had been part of weaponizing the justice system against Mr. Trump.
Among the leadership of Paul Weiss, there was enthusiasm for resolving the executive order, according to multiple people involved. Even Ms. Dunn, who had helped the Harris campaign, pushed to finalize the deal.
“Let’s get this done!!!!” Ms. Dunn wrote to Mr. Karp and other senior leaders in an email reviewed by The Times.
When Mr. Karp presented the framework of the deal at a meeting of the firm’s partners on March 20, no one objected. He said that Paul Weiss would perform $40 million in free legal work for causes that both Mr. Trump and the firm backed.
The text of the agreement, reviewed by The Times, also said that the firm would show no political favoritism in choosing clients, that its pro bono work would represent “the full spectrum of political viewpoints,” and that it would hire “experts” agreed upon with the administration to review the firm’s hiring practices.
Still, Mr. Karp assured partners that Paul Weiss would maintain its independence.
But that evening, when Mr. Trump announced the deal on Truth Social, he put his own twist on the agreement. He said that Paul Weiss had agreed to “not adopt, use, or pursue any DEI policies.” At the same time, the White House put out a statement declaring that Mr. Karp had “acknowledged the wrongdoing of former Paul, Weiss partner, Mark Pomerantz.”
Mr. Karp was floored. “I cannot believe this,” he wrote to partners in an email reviewed by The Times. “He changed the agreement, added a no-DEI provision, and came up with a completely false quote saying I acknowledged things I never said. My god.”
Still, Mr. Karp never publicly rebutted the White House, and told colleagues that he thought he would be praised for striking an agreement that could be a model for other firms confronted by the White House. But once it was made public, the mere fact that the firm had capitulated in any form drew intense outrage.
A public letter to Mr. Karp signed by more than 100 of the firm’s alumni called the decision “a craven surrender to, and thus complicity in, what is perhaps the gravest threat to the independence of the legal profession since at least the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy.”
Even the granddaughters of Judge Rifkind, the author of the firm’s guiding principles, wrote a scathing letter about the decision. “It is plain to us, as it would have been to our grandfather, that taking action to stay off an enemies list does not advance the rule of law,” Amy and Nina Rifkind, both lawyers, wrote in the letter.
Inside the firm, 43 associates who had no say in the decision emailed Mr. Karp asking to discuss the “firm’s commitment to longstanding principles,” according to a copy of the note reviewed by The Times.
Pressure grew from rivals as well. A partner at a competitor, Wachtell Lipton, mistakenly copied Mr. Karp on an email discussion about trying to poach Paul Weiss lawyers.
Mr. Epshteyn bragged that he now had leverage over Mr. Karp, according to “Regime Change,” a book by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Mr. Epshteyn told a friend: “I’m in a pretty good place now. I’m the chairman of Paul Weiss.”
The War Within
Two days after the deal was announced, Mr. Karp wrote a letter to the firm, hoping to calm the backlash. He insisted the White House arrangement would “have no effect on our work” and said the firm would “continue our proud, century-long legacy of courageously standing up for fundamental rights and liberties.”
But an internal debate captured in an email exchange among partners and confirmed by four people shows how sensitive the firm was about rankling the White House. At issue was Paul Weiss’s website for the Center to Combat Hate, which highlighted its work against the organizers of a 2017 racist rally in Charlottesville, Va., as well as the Proud Boys, some of whose leaders had been convicted of seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
After taking down the site around the time of the White House deal, top partners scrambled to edit it, navigating between the sensitivities of the Trump administration and the record of the work the firm had proudly pursued, according to the four people. News outlets inquired about the missing website, intensifying the internal debate.
Ms. Dunn, who had helped secure a $26 million judgment against the Charlottesville organizers, wrote in the exchange with colleagues that she wanted the site returned unchanged.
“The problem is putting back a website with any changes from where it was,” Ms. Dunn wrote. “The compare will be a huge problem.”
Ms. Dunn proposed checking with Bill Burck — the Washington lawyer representing the firm — to ensure that it would not be an issue with the administration.
One of Mr. Barshay’s top deputies, Angelo Bonvino, wanted the site restored but with major changes.
“We are poking the bear if we leave the website as is,” he wrote. “What is Bill going to do, ask Boris or Miller to read it. Really — is that better than an article where a few people are unhappy that we changed around the website.” (“Boris” and “Miller” are apparently references to Mr. Epshteyn and Stephen Miller, a deputy chief of staff.)
“Last week was miserable for all of us and our firm was saved from the brink of disaster,” Mr. Bonvino wrote. “Our firm should not be taking any risks. There likely won’t be a next time if we get hit by the administration again.”
Ms. Dunn wrote that she had spoken with Mr. Karp, who said the site should be restored with minimal changes.
“I strongly disagree with this approach and have all day,” Mr. Barshay replied. “I don’t care about the internal audience or the press.” He added that having endured the stress of the executive order he would not go “through that again.”
Ultimately, the website went back online, though it no longer mentioned suing the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers over their role in Jan. 6.
In the days following the deal, as the howl of criticism grew, Ms. Dunn urged other firm leaders to sue the administration as a sign that it had retained its independence. She had been looking for a potential client, including talking to an abortion rights group that was considering a lawsuit. She raised it with Mr. Karp. He was lukewarm. Mr. Barshay said he was strongly opposed, given the risk of angering Mr. Trump anew.
Paul Weiss never took on the case.
That decision caused a rift between Ms. Dunn and Mr. Barshay.
In May, an exodus of partners from the firm began as Ms. Dunn left along with Jeannie Rhee, a former prosecutor in Mr. Mueller’s investigation, and two other litigators in the Washington office to form their own firm. Over the next year, other top litigators — including Kannon Shanmugam and Andrew Ehrlich — departed.
With Ms. Dunn and Ms. Rhee’s departure, the firm’s Deciding Group was heavily slanted toward corporate lawyers.
Mr. Karp personally weathered the storm and Paul Weiss’s profits continued to flourish. By the summer of 2025, Paul Weiss was doing free legal work for the Commerce Department, and unlike in the first Trump administration, it was not publicly associated with any action against the White House.
But then came another twist.
In January, the Justice Department released a trove of more than three million documents involving its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Mr. Karp had been assuring senior partners that his name was in the files only because of his longstanding legal relationship with Leon Black, the Apollo co-founder and private equity billionaire, who had become Mr. Epstein’s primary source of income in the later years of his life.
But as the news media sifted through the documents, emails surfaced suggesting Mr. Karp’s relationship with Mr. Epstein had been more extensive than Mr. Karp had claimed, according to three senior lawyers with direct knowledge of the matter.
Among the documents was a March 2019 email in which Mr. Karp weighed in on a legal filing responding to some of the women who had accused Mr. Epstein of abusing them as minors.
“The draft motion is in great shape. It’s overwhelmingly persuasive. Truly,” Mr. Karp wrote to Mr. Epstein. “I particularly liked the argument that the ‘victims’ lied in wait and sat on their rights for their strategic advantage, knowing you were in prison, before they came forward,” Mr. Karp added.
Mr. Karp, the email showed, was advising Mr. Epstein, who was not a client of the firm, on something that did not relate to Mr. Black. Some senior partners felt that Mr. Karp’s leadership had become a liability, according to the three lawyers.
Top partners convened the Deciding Group without Mr. Karp. The group met over several days. Some lawyers conveyed how disappointed they were in Mr. Karp. Others shared that they were hearing from irate clients. They decided that Mr. Karp had to step down as chairman. Mr. Barshay was named the new chairman. His first task was to inform Mr. Karp.
The transformation of Paul Weiss was complete.
Reporting was contributed by Jonah E. Bromwich, Matthew Goldstein, Benjamin Protess and Aric Toler.
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4) On Venezuela’s Coast, Life Is Reduced to Survival and Burial
More than a month after the earthquakes, the coastal region of La Guaira — once Venezuela’s main gateway — is completely unrecognizable.
By Emma BubolaVisuals by Fabiola Ferrero, Aug. 2, 2026
Emma Bubola and Fabiola Ferrero reported from La Guaira, Venezuela.
Prayer near a collapsed building where rescuers were working in La Guaira last month.
There was a billboard on the seaside road along Venezuela’s northern coast with a gigantic photo of a smiling Nicolás Maduro, the country’s former leader, and the words “a land flowing with milk and honey,” a biblical phrase that describes a blessed land.
But there was no Mr. Maduro, no milk and no honey behind the sign. Just mountains of rubble, body bags and makeshift encampments for thousands of Venezuelans left homeless by June’s devastating, back-to-back earthquakes.
La Guaira, once a lively beachside escape, and the state hardest hit by the disaster, is completely disfigured. Tall residential towers overlooking the Caribbean are dusty piles of contorted debris. With about 24,000 people left homeless and hundreds of buildings damaged or destroyed, according to the government, the coastal strip has become an immense humanitarian camp, with many living in tents by the debris.
The inescapable presence of the sea and its salty summer breeze clashed with a near-constant presence of death — in the corpses that kept emerging from the rubble, in the body bags on pickup trucks, in the boxes of ashes carried from the morgue to cars, homes, shelters or church altars.
Spaces designed for leisure or business or commerce now serve only two essential functions: survival or burial.
The McDonald’s, a popular stop for residents and tourists on the way to the beach, functions as a field hospital. The port has been turned into a crowded morgue. The golf course and a surfing resort are homeless camps.
The muddy, fly-infested encampments in La Guaira raise urgent questions about where the huge numbers of displaced will eventually live and what a future for the region, once a main gateway into Venezuela, could look like.
The challenges are magnified because it is the second time in less than three decades that the area has faced a colossal reconstruction task following a natural disaster.
After mudslides killed at least 15,000 people along the coast in 1999, and floods forced thousands of people out of their homes in 2010, the government built a forest of high-rise apartment buildings meant to fulfill a pledge by Venezuela’s socialist president, Hugo Chávez, to provide the poor proper homes.
This year, many of those buildings collapsed, trapping and killing large numbers of residents. Some critics have said that builders did not account for the loose soil that made them vulnerable in quakes. (The official death toll stands at more than 5,500, but that is most likely an undercount.)
Many Venezuelans see the sprawling ruins, months after U.S. forces captured Mr. Maduro, as the culmination of a failed political and economic project overseen by a corrupt and incompetent authoritarian government.
Just as major questions loom over what lies ahead for Venezuela, the fate of La Guaira is also deeply uncertain.
Venezuelan authorities have promised to build housing that can better withstand earthquakes.
But many Venezuelans question whether their government has the capacity or resources for such a colossal endeavor. The country’s finances have been cratered by mismanagement and U.S. sanctions and the regime struggled to handle even immediate disaster response.
Others wonder whether quake survivors would be willing to stay in the area at all.
“I don’t know what will happen with us,” said Iraida Rivas, a nursery school director, as she stood at the gate of her school. Three toddlers who had attended the school died in the quakes. “We have lived through too much.”
For now, the region is trapped in a painful limbo between tragedy and the future.
Woven through debris — where for weeks hands of the dead were still visible from beneath the crushing weight of massive columns — were people sleeping, eating and waiting.
A Seaside Town Turned Grim
The basketball court at the Juan José Mendoza school, which had over 1,400 students, became a camp for foreign volunteers supporting rescue and recovery efforts. The court’s walls still showed students’ writing — initials encircled by hearts, declarations of love — near mattresses where volunteers slept.
The quakes killed 110 students and left 50 more missing, said the school’s director, Diana Ferrer.
At the Republic of Panama high school, bunk beds replaced desks to house hundreds of refugees. Inside the “Hugo Chávez’’ classroom slept people injured in the collapse of public housing constructed by and named for Mr. Chávez. Amputees lay next to colorful school banners depicting the muscular system, while teenagers sat below a whiteboard titled “My Future Project.”
It was unclear what future they will have in La Guaira. Taxi drivers, commercial painters, hairdressers, builders, beach sellers and many others lost their jobs.
On a recent morning, a now unemployed port worker waited in line at a soup kitchen near a makeshift morgue. He had bought bus tickets to leave for Colombia with his wife.
“There is nothing here,” said his wife, Zenaida Pacheco Mata, 64.
Around La Guaira, cheerful signs that read “Coconut Beach,” and “Children’s Bay,” are now juxtaposed with the names of missing people, spray-painted on the walls of houses where they are assumed to be entombed. Photos of the disappeared hung from the trunks of palm trees and lampposts.
Coated in a pale layer of dust inside the wreckage of higher-end condos, broken fish tiles looked like they were abandoned lifetimes ago.
Colorful, ripped beach umbrellas stood on the empty shore. The few beach clubs still open distributed medicines and supplies, or housed survivors. Some families were living in Los Caracas, a tourist resort and popular surf destination nestled between the Caribbean and tropical mountains. Among postcard-perfect patios guests talked of orphaned children and funerals.
And unlike the resort’s usual clientele, “We have no place to go back to,” said Raid Lara, 40, one of the refugees.
Even those whose homes still stood had their normalcy completely shattered.
Celia Figueira’s small seaside cottage was relatively undamaged, but her part of her daughter’s house next door had toppled directly into a swimming pool. It listed there now, tilted atop the water like a sinking ship.
Still, Ms. Figueira, 66, wanted to leave La Guaira, and not simply because her garden now looked like a surrealist painting.
“There were two buildings where my friends lived there,” she said, pointing at an empty space outside. “Now I stand here and I don’t see them. And my friends are below.”
The Sprawling Encampments
Outside her window, camping tents and shelters fashioned out of trash bags, towels and blankets filled every corner of La Guaira.
Venezuelan authorities, foreign governments and nongovernmental organizations have set up multiple camps and shelters around the region and in the capital — in parks, squares, schools, basketball courts, baseball stadiums and parking lots.
But many people preferred to put up tents beside the rubble where they were still digging to find loved ones’ bodies.
“I’m not leaving until I get him,” said Dayana Delgado, whose 8-year-old son, Braine was buried under debris on a basketball court. “They are not going to build apartments and put people to live on top of my son’s body.”
Zoe Santander, 38, whose 9-year-old son, Xavier, was underneath the collapsed tower where they lived, was also staying near the ruins. “Leaving would mean abandoning him,” she said. The tent where she was sheltering is not waterproof and her boyfriend, Carlos López, 33, said he had a bad cough from the constant, soaking rain.
“It’s not life to live like this,” he said, between coughs. “We need to figure out what we are doing next.”
Jorge Rodríguez, the leader of Venezuela’s Congress and whose sister Delcy is the country’s interim leader, said the government had identified potential plots of land in La Guaira to build new homes.
“We are sure that La Guaira will be reborn with great strength,” said José Alejandro Terán, the region’s governor.
The Trump administration, which effectively controls the country’s finances, government and natural resources, has said it had been working with Venezuelan authorities and the private sector to open more housing options, and was working to prepare areas for demolition and reconstruction.
Beyond doubts about whether their government’s pledges can be trusted, many in this quake-ravaged region are traumatized.
“La Guaira scares me,” Ms. Santander said. “I don’t want to live here.”
Many residents are terrified of ever living in a high-rise again. They spend their days tracing the vast geometry of these buildings — mapping every square inch of pancaked floors to find their relatives.
“I am not going back to a tall tower,” said Dionisia Rangell, 70, who lost a daughter and a granddaughter and broke an arm when the Hugo Chávez housing projects collapsed. “This land was left hurting.”
More than a month after the earthquake, cranes have completely swept up the rubble from some of the buildings. The Maduro billboard that once stood on the La Guaira highway had been torn down. It was replaced by a new sign advertising the government’s campaign to rebuild, under the slogan “Venezuela is reborn.”
Isayen Herrera and Adriana Loureiro Fernandez contributed reporting from La Guaira, and Sheyla Urdaneta from Buenos Aires.
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5) It Wasn’t a ‘Civil War.’ It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion.
By Anthony Conwright, Aug. 2, 2026
Mr. Conwright is a writer focused on U.S. history.
Bina Thorsen
In a written statement on the anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, President Trump described the Confederacy’s defeat in 1865 as the end of “four brutal years of suffering.” Rather than condemn the Confederacy’s treason or name slavery as the cause for which it fought, Mr. Trump quoted Ulysses Grant’s remarks to the vanquished army: “The war is over. The rebels are our countrymen again.”
Rebranding rebellion is nothing new. Americans take it for granted that the war between the Confederate states and the Union was always called the Civil War, but it was not. During the war and in its aftermath, it was primarily called an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” Its current name is a result of decades of lobbying by Confederate heritage groups and white Southerners committed to rejuvenating the South’s image and ignoring its treason and slaveholding.
As Mr. Trump and his allies try to whitewash the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, we should return to an older and far more accurate name for the Civil War. We should once again call it the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. If a country unquestioningly adopts language that obscures its bloodiest crimes to absolve their worst perpetrators, how can we expect successive generations to remember the new assaults on democracy without deploying equally forgiving language?
In the war’s early years, the South’s rebelliousness was emphasized in part as a legal necessity. Congress was underlining the president’s constitutional authority to call forth the militia to suppress the Southern revolt. But in the decades after Lee’s surrender, Confederate heritage groups lobbied Congress, educators and the broader public to adopt a name for the war that avoided calling the Southerners “rebels.”
The use of “Slaveholders’ Rebellion” began early. Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy’s July 1861 bill to “suppress the slaveholders’ rebellion” was one instance. But the language was subject to debate. One senator who later defected to the Confederacy said it created “odium and prejudice against a particular interest” — that is, slavery.
Conventions shifted only decades after the war, when white Southerners and their representatives in Congress collaborated to rewrite the history of the conflict. In 1899, one group pushed to expunge references to “rebellion” from historical and public discussion of the war. They preferred the misnomer “War Between the States,” freeing the Confederacy of the stigma of revolt. From 1905 to 1911, the campaign’s sympathizers in Congress moved to strike “War of the Rebellion” — the common name at the time — from legislation. “Civil War” became a compromise solution, mollifying Confederate nostalgics while being more acceptable to their opponents than War Between the States.
Other nomenclature followed. The Dewey Decimal System shifted its classification from “Rebellion, Southern” in 1876 to either the same term or “Civil War” two decades later. In 1895, the American Library Association directed its readers looking up “Rebellion” to instead search “U.S. History, Civil War.” In 1907, Congress declared a preference for “Civil War,” too. To this day, though, the U.S. Government Style Manual lists Civil War, War of the Rebellion and War Between the States as acceptable, a paper vestige of a hard-fought linguistic battle. One is an agreed-upon euphemism; one is accurate; the last is a lie.
American society’s use of Civil War to rhetorically veil the slaveholders’ rebellion has consequences. After the redemption of the Confederacy, ex-Confederates and their heirs helped create a regime of anti-Black violence by instituting a legal architecture of disenfranchisement and lynching. That is what makes confronting how we refer to the Civil War a civic imperative. The danger of rhetorical abstraction lies not only in its distortion of the past, but also in its pre-emptive justification for future assaults on democratic life.
When Mr. Trump pardoned the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, he described them as victims of a “grave national injustice,” framing their release as an act of “national reconciliation.” It was a demonstration of the power clichéd tropes and evasion have to rewrite a country’s moral code, rendering treachery as justifiable as patriotism. Jan. 6 became simply “the events.”
Yet Mr. Trump’s obfuscation of the insurrection could not erase the character of the rebels he sought to absolve, many of whom returned to criminal enterprises following their pardon. In February, Christopher Moynihan, who was among those who breached police barricades at the Capitol, pleaded guilty to charges associated with threatening to kill Representative Hakeem Jeffries. Enrique Tarrio was serving a 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy for his role in the insurrection when he received Mr. Trump’s pardon, only to be arrested a month later at the Capitol on charges of simple assault.
These pardons operate using the same logic of rehabilitation once used for the Confederacy, even if the consequences have not registered on the same scale. In both instances, moral laundering begins by changing the label applied to rebels. Mr. Trump’s use of “national reconciliation” in his pardon helps revise the meaning of Jan. 6, reframing insurrectionists as martyrs and violent attempts to suppress American democracy as acts of patriotism.
The linguistic whitewashing of the Confederacy is more than a manufactured myth of Southern redemption. It is a ritual of national forgetting, one in which American society participates every time we call the Slaveholders’ Rebellion against the United States the Civil War. “Civil War” is no name for a war waged by slaveholding traitors against the United States to hold Black Americans in human bondage. Now, 165 years since the war’s first shots, we should be honest about how we hold its memory.
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6) Trump Is Trying to Force Americans to Unlearn What We Know
By M. Gessen, Opinion Columnist, Aug. 3, 2026
Xinyue Chen
“We live in a country with an unpredictable past.” This was a saying among the intelligentsia in the Soviet Union when I was growing up. We never knew which part of our history would be obliterated next.
Now Americans, too, live in a country with an unpredictable past. Two months into his second term, President Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, in which he directed officials to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums, to cut funding to “programs that degrade shared American values” and to reinstate some monuments removed following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. A very incomplete list of things that have happened since that order was issued: The National Park Service has been removing signs about slavery; the statue of a Confederate general has been reinstalled in Washington; a scathing report by the White House Domestic Policy Council accused the Smithsonian of using history “as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens”; and on July 24, Trump issued a new executive order mandating that signs be installed outside the Smithsonian “warning visitors about the ideological capture at the National Museum of American History.”
Re-evaluating history has the potential to change a people’s future by changing its self-understanding. It can unite people in a genuinely new project. And then there is the rewriting of history, which is crazy-making. The Soviet Union repeatedly forced the whole country to unlearn what was already widely known. In the 1950s, after Joseph Stalin died, the Communist Party denounced his “cult of personality” and some of the extent of his terror. A decade later, it reversed itself, exiling or imprisoning authors who wrote about the crimes of Stalinism. The same process was repeated when the Soviet Union collapsed. Vast amounts of information about Soviet terror emerged; under Vladimir Putin that knowledge has been forced back into oblivion.
Trump wants Americans to unlearn what they have come to know about the history and legacy of enslavement. What his executive orders really promise to restore is a sense of comfort contained in the most reductive and sanitized stories about the United States — the bliss of ignorance. Trump appears to believe that the job of museums and memorials is to instill “pride in the hearts of all Americans,” as one of the executive orders put it. The report from Trump’s Domestic Policy Council faulted the National Museum of American History for failing in this precise mission.
A couple of months ago, I visited Montgomery, Ala., where an organization called the Equal Justice Initiative is undertaking a very different project. It is telling the story of Black Americans. The E.J.I. has so far built a lynching memorial, a Legacy Museum, a vast sculpture garden and a public square with a permanent exhibit on the civil rights movement. Each element of the complex, which is still growing, is as powerful as any museum or memorial I have visited.
Bryan Stevenson, who leads the E.J.I., is a litigator whose clients have included Black men on death row and children tried as adults and sentenced to life in prison. He came to feel, however, that the change he could achieve in the courts was not enough. “The real evil,” he told me — the enduring evil — “was the narrative we created to justify enslavement.” It’s a striking statement. Can stories really do as much harm as a vast infrastructure of violence and cages? His point is that the stories underlie the violence. Stories that systematically rendered Black people as less than human enabled enslavement and segregation. Stories that rendered Black people as dangerous and predatory fueled lynching and mass incarceration. Unless we create new stories, the abuse will never stop.
Stevenson, too, talks about pride. “States like Alabama have very little to be proud about,” he told me. Montgomery’s days of wealth and glory are in the past. It’s a city with dozens of monuments to the Confederacy, a city where one in five people lives in poverty, in a state with one of the highest incarceration rates in the country.
But the E.J.I.’s museums and memorials have made Montgomery a tourist destination, and that has direct economic benefits for the city. Most important, these institutions have helped to make Montgomery a center for engagement with American history. Stevenson believes that the conversations they foster can and should make people proud. He cites as one of his inspirations the German Holocaust memorials and museums that make the promise of “Never again,” a profoundly hopeful message.
My traveling companions couldn’t help noticing that when Stevenson described actions the United States had taken to oppress Black people, he said “we” instead of “the government” or “racist lawmakers.” We asked him why. “I refuse to give America to anyone else,” Stevenson explained. That is one way to interpret the word “inclusion” in D.E.I.: a story in which your ancestors aren’t elided.
Stevenson has not received any federal or state funding for his sites. The Trump administration, therefore, cannot target them for defunding. But Montgomery exemplifies the conflict at the root of Trumpian memory politics.
I went to Montgomery with my wife, Lynne, and four of my former colleagues from Russia who now live in exile. After a few days there, we drove to Charlottesville, Va., the site of the 2017 Unite the Right rally, during which white supremacists flooded into town, ostensibly to defend a monument to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and counterprotesters showed up in droves to oppose their message. Trump — then in the first year of his first term — remarked that there had been “very fine people on both sides.” Today, a bald rectangular patch in an otherwise green lawn downtown is all that remains of the statue, which was removed four years after the rally. The city plans to install a sculpture of a baobab tree there, created from the melted bronze of Lee’s statue. But when I was there, I didn’t see any marker indicating what had happened. The result is a sort of memorial visible only to those who know what to look for, a perfect symbol of both what was and was not accomplished in the nation’s last attempt at a racial reckoning.
Another such symbol is Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s residence and plantation just outside Charlottesville. All visitors of the house are required to sign up for a tour, a tightly scripted affair that, if you listen closely, bears the signs of numerous edits made over the years. The original narrative is one of progress — precisely the narrative that the Trump executive orders demand. Jefferson was a man of science and a lover of art; he brought progressive political ideas and maps and clocks and advanced engineering and neoclassical architecture and French food to Monticello. But this story is now interrupted repeatedly by inconvenient facts that used to be elided. Jefferson was a slave owner who fathered at least six children of Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman with whom he had a sexual relationship when she was a teenager and he was a middle-aged widower. There’s a separate tour about slavery at Monticello, but the main tour did not acknowledge the tension between the core story and these additional facts. Here is a juxtaposition that stayed with me: Jefferson’s daughter by his late wife lived in the house with him, as did her 11 children, whom she educated in keeping with Enlightenment ideals. The children Jefferson had with Hemings lived in the slave quarters and were put to work on the estate from a young age.
While my fellow exiles and I were traveling in the American South, the campaign against memory continued back in our homeland. Putin’s government had long since shuttered Memorial, an organization devoted to preserving the memory of Stalinist terror; in April of this year, the Russian Supreme Court declared Memorial an “extremist” organization. Two years ago, the government closed the Gulag Museum in Moscow. In June, it was reopened as the Memory Museum, telling the story of Nazi crimes against the Soviet people. The memory of Stalinist terror has once again been ordered obliterated.
Ilya Venyavkin, one of my traveling companions, is a historian of Stalinism. He observed that Stevenson’s project is, in a way, more ambitious than anything Russian memory activists had tried to do: It draws a direct narrative line from the past to the present. It makes the argument that the way we live now is shaped by the way our forebears organized society. This is exactly what can make the project of revisiting the past so vital: It’s not about the past. It’s about choosing our future. Do we want a future that challenges us to reckon with the truth and find ways — genuinely new and inventive ways — to deliver on the American promise, or a future that forecloses the possibility of conversation and change? I suppose there is a third option, too: a future of unease and confusion, of muddled stories like the one I heard at Monticello, of facts half known and truths half said.
I remember a line from a satirical underground novel I read as a teenager. A boy asks his father, “Did the year 1937 ever happen? I don’t know whom to believe?” That year was the height of Stalin’s Great Terror. “It hasn’t happened yet,” the father responds. “It hasn’t, my son. But it will.” It’s still the funniest and most haunting way I’ve encountered of saying that those who do not face history are doomed to repeat it.
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7) Inside the Secretive Boards Deciding Trans Troops’ Fate
The Pentagon is relying on closed-door hearings to kick out transgender service members. An Army Reserve lawyer is one of the few who have seen how they really work.
By Greg Jaffe and Dave Philipps, Aug. 3, 2026
Greg Jaffe reported from West Point, N.Y., and Dave Philipps from Colorado Springs, Colo.
Capt. Kai Proce before his separation board hearing at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in June. Kate Warren for The New York Times
She had lost 26 of her last 27 cases, a string of defeats and disappointments unlike anything she had experienced in her legal career.
“It’s my first time getting kicked in the face over and over,” Priya Rashid was telling another lawyer over the phone.
She looked over at client number 28, who was sitting in a hearing room where a separation board would soon decide whether to force him to leave the military. He was a 33-year-old transgender Army captain named Kai Proce.
He grimaced at the thought of what was to come.
“Sorry,” Ms. Rashid said.
Last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued an order that effectively forced all trans troops out of the military. Many of the more than 4,000 who were serving accepted that the Pentagon was going to force them out and took a cash payout to leave quickly.
But others decided to stay and fight, taking their cases to special separation boards set up by the military.
The boards operate like court proceedings, with lawyers and a panel of three officers who decide whether to retain or remove the service member. It is the same process the military uses to determine whether it should kick out troops who abuse drugs, beat their spouses or steal.
The Pentagon has treated the trans separation hearings with levels of security and silence usually reserved for state secrets. They take place behind closed doors on military bases. There are no cameras and no transcripts; the public is not allowed to attend.
In some cases, service members’ spouses and even the service members themselves are kept out.
One of the few people who have seen the process over multiple hearings, at multiple bases, is Ms. Rashid.
What she has seen are troops who deployed around the world and earned the respect of their peers. They waited patiently, in some cases for years, until the Pentagon finally told them that they could serve openly.
Now, separation boards — afforded almost no leeway by the Trump administration — were punishing them for it.
“It’s in a lot of ways a public humiliation ritual,” Ms. Rashid said in an interview. “Going in, I had hoped I was paranoid, and boards’ outcomes were not predetermined. It turned out to be much worse than I thought.”
The Pentagon declined to comment on the boards.
At least six of Ms. Rashid’s clients were barred from attending their own separation board hearings because they refused to cut their hair and appear in the uniform of their sex assigned at birth. One was a master sergeant in South Korea with 17 years of service who was allowed to testify by video, but only if she turned off her camera.
“I have gone to pretrial confinement hearings where somebody is so addicted to meth that they are throwing up on my shoes,” Ms. Rashid said. “They were allowed into their own hearing.”
For Captain Proce’s hearing in June, she had assembled a nearly 500-page binder that included his personnel records, his military awards, two dozen letters testifying to his character and hundreds of pages of policy papers and legal arguments.
The night before his hearing, Ms. Rashid and Captain Proce rehearsed his testimony one last time. Ms. Rashid asked him about his 11 years in the Army.
He talked about arriving at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point when he was 18 and training to shoot down incoming enemy missiles as an air defense officer.
He deployed to Korea and the Middle East. His last assignment was at West Point, where he mentored 125 cadets and worked for the commandant, who described him in his final performance review as an exceptional leader.
“CPT Proce is easily in the top 1 percent of officers I have served with in 29 years of service,” he wrote.
Before they broke for the night, Ms. Rashid reminded Captain Proce to make eye contact with the Army officers on the panel who would decide his fate.
“It’s harder to sucker punch somebody if they’re looking you in the eye,” she told him.
She packed up her whiteboard and exhibits around 10 p.m.
“How are you feeling?” Ms. Rashid asked.
“I’m not going to be able to sleep,” Captain Proce replied.
‘A Hard No’
Mr. Trump was only a few days into his second term when he issued an executive order proclaiming that being transgender “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle” and ordering the Pentagon to ban all trans troops.
Mr. Hegseth was blunter: “No more dudes in dresses,” he announced.
Their words described a problem Ms. Rashid said she had never encountered. She had grown up on military bases as the child of an Army doctor who had immigrated from India. The Army had helped her mother get her citizenship and pay her medical school loans.
Ms. Rashid, 33, had joined the Army Reserves in 2020 as a lawyer. Trans troops had been allowed to serve openly since 2016. In Mr. Trump’s first term he blocked transgender people from joining, but allowed those already in the military to continue serving. The Biden administration lifted any restrictions on transgender service members in 2021.
In every assignment — officer training, legal work, a deployment to the Middle East — Ms. Rashid had served with transgender soldiers who had largely been accepted and had thrived, she said.
When the Trump ban was announced, she knew trans troops would need experienced lawyers, so she called the colonel in charge of the Army’s defense attorneys and asked to be assigned to represent them.
The colonel told her to stand down. Trans troops were not being charged with crimes, he explained, and did not require experienced lawyers, like her.
As a new Army lieutenant, Ms. Rashid had been told it was her job to be “the Constitution in the room” for the troops facing discipline. That ethos had led her to take cases that other Army lawyers refused: Soldiers arrested at the Jan. 6 riot; soldiers who refused to get the Covid vaccine; soldiers accused of sexually abusing children.
She told the colonel that she wanted to be that same advocate for the trans troops who were fighting to hold on to their careers.
“I got a hard no,” she recalled.
If the Army was not going to assign her, she decided, she would assign herself. Army reserve lawyers can take on private clients as long as there is no conflict with their military duties.
Working as a civilian attorney, she and a handful of other lawyers reached out to trans soldiers through an online support group that was fighting the ban. She thought they would end up with at most a few dozen clients. They now have advised about 600. They represent all of them for free.
“We just can’t turn people away,” she said. “I think right now we have a budget of, like, $8.”
The separation boards began hearing cases in February. At that point, the Pentagon was required to assign the trans troops military lawyers. Ms. Rashid continued representing them as a civilian.
Her first client was a military police sergeant named Clara Davis. She was tall, with long, auburn hair and a stack of glowing performance reviews. The evidence Ms. Rashid submitted on her behalf included a memo from her battalion commander, who, at risk of retaliation from the Pentagon, recommended that the Army let her serve.
“It was a very brave thing,” Ms. Rashid recalled.
The hearing at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii was unlike any of the hundreds of criminal cases and separation boards Ms. Rashid had handled in her military career.
The Army ordered Sergeant Davis to appear with a male haircut and uniform. Sergeant Davis was willing, but Ms. Rashid said no. “The Army is not allowed to take away your dignity,” she said. “And I’m not going to ask you to do it, either.”
The Army barred Sergeant Davis from entering the hearing room, so she listened from a room down the hall via a bad cellphone connection. Ms. Rashid presented testimony from 25 soldiers who described Sergeant Davis as an asset to the Army.
The core of the hearing, though, focused on her gender dysphoria diagnosis.
The Trump administration’s ban targeted troops with gender dysphoria, a medical condition defined by at least six months of significant distress or impairment because of gender incongruence. Such troops would break under the stress of combat, the Trump administration contended.
Not all transgender people experience gender dysphoria.
Like many medical insurers, the Pentagon had required transgender troops to get a gender dysphoria diagnosis before they could receive hormone therapy or transition.
Ms. Rashid argued that Sergeant Davis had sought out the diagnosis so that she could get access to treatment, even though she did not experience gender dysphoria. The sergeant’s strong service record proved she was never impaired or in distress and was not suffering from gender dysphoria, Ms. Rashid said.
Her diagnosis was essentially used as a trap, she argued.
The board deliberated for two hours and then voted to kick her out. After the verdict, Ms. Rashid found Sergeant Davis in her room down the hall. She hugged her client.
“We were right,” said Ms. Rashid through tears. “And it didn’t matter.”
In the months that followed Ms. Rashid represented trans troops at bases all over the country, sometimes sleeping in her clients’ spare bedrooms to save money. As a lawyer and an officer, she had felt the need to maintain a professional distance from her clients. The trans troops were different.
“I don’t feel like that boundary has to be there,” she said.
As the losses mounted, she was stunned to see soldiers so quickly dismiss other soldiers who, just like them, had spent years in uniform.
One was Maj. Kara Corcoran, 40, who led an infantry platoon in combat in Afghanistan. On the day of her hearing, she was five days short of the 18 years of service she needed to secure her pension and health care benefits for herself and her two daughters.
The government struck half of her character witnesses, arguing that her competence had been established. The question for the board was not whether she was a good soldier, but whether she had gender dysphoria.
The three board members concluded that she did and kicked her out, but they recommended that the Pentagon make an exception and allow her to receive her retirement benefits. She is still waiting on a final ruling from the Army.
“People need to know that this whole thing is cruelty,” Major Corcoran said in an interview. “It was intentionally designed to hurt us.”
Ms. Rashid had hoped the hearings would be therapeutic for her clients — a chance to show they were honorable, truthful and disciplined soldiers. But as the losses piled up, her view shifted.
“Did I just put this person through hell?” she often asked herself after a loss.
The defeats were also taking a toll on her. She believed that all her transgender cases were winnable. Each new defeat brought a new wave of frustration, anger and guilt.
“Did I not explain things in a way that resonated?” she would ask herself. “Am I missing something? Am I supposed to be saying something different?”
Then something completely unexpected happened. The case involved a sergeant first class who worked with classified electronics and had deployed around the world.
The soldier showed up to her hearing in a civilian skirt suit, her hair up in a bun, fully expecting that she would be barred from her own hearing.
At the last minute, Ms. Rashid suggested that she change into camouflage and boots. The officer overseeing the board allowed her into the hearing room.
That gave Ms. Rashid a bit of ammunition: The accused could speak directly to the board members about her decade-long service and show them that she was not a dude in a dress, as Mr. Hegseth had often asserted. She was a soldier who had followed the rules and transitioned after the ban on trans people serving in the military was lifted in 2016.
The hearing ended. “We did the best we could,” Ms. Rashid told the sergeant as they waited for a decision.
A few hours later, the three-person board returned and announced that it had voted to retain her. Ms. Rashid was so stunned that the verdict did not register. She assumed they had lost again.
Then she saw the board members shaking the sergeant’s hand. The victory was a glimmer of hope. Other losses followed. Still, she thought that she had finally found an approach that could win.
Case Number 28
Now it was time for case number 28.
The heavy wooden door at the West Point hearing room swung shut. Ms. Rashid sat down at the defense table next to Captain Proce, who wore his Army camouflage uniform. His hair was cropped short in a style that met Army regulations for either a man or a woman.
The New York Times pieced together what happened next through interviews with the participants and notes from the hearing.
Ms. Rashid argued that Captain Proce’s stellar military record proved that he had never experienced a period of distress or impairment that prevented him from excelling at his job. He was transgender, she acknowledged. But he had never suffered from gender dysphoria.
She called Col. Chad Foster, West Point’s deputy commandant, who was Captain Proce’s last boss. He described Captain Proce as a mentor to the cadets, someone they regularly sought out for advice about personal problems or Army life.
He would happily serve with Captain Proce again, he testified.
Ms. Rashid called Capt. Jessica Jackson, who worked alongside Captain Proce as an air defender. She remembered Captain Proce as the best officer in their battalion.
And Ms. Rashid called Captain Proce, who took a seat in the witness box at the front of the hearing room. He reminded himself to make eye contact with the three colonels on the board.
Captain Proce talked about his grandfather, a former enlisted soldier who had been wounded fighting in Vietnam. “He sat me down and told me that his officers never seemed to care about their soldiers and made decisions with seemingly no regard for their lives,” Captain Proce said. “He made me promise that I would be fast, fair, sure and, above all else, honorable.”
He then recounted his 11 years in the Army, which had taken him to Korea, the Middle East, Texas and Oklahoma. And the 20-minute exam by an Army psychiatric nurse in 2021 that now threatened to end his career.
He had welcomed her diagnosis, which had allowed him to transition. “If I can have this happiness, why would I forgo it?” he asked.
The Army’s case boiled down to a few simple facts. Captain Proce had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and sought out gender-affirming care, including hormone therapy. The language of the Trump ban was clear, the Army’s lawyer said. The captain needed to go.
The board members spent three hours deliberating in a small room with a coffee maker and a view of a West Point parking lot. When they returned, Captain Proce noticed that they were avoiding eye contact with him. He knew he had lost.
Ms. Rashid gathered her binders, containing the story of Captain Proce’s life and career, in a cardboard box. “I think we can head out,” she said, her voice cracking.
Captain Proce was quiet.
“Are you going to be OK?” she asked. She had started to cry.
“Don’t worry about me,” he replied. “I’ll be fine. I’m worried about you.”
The losses were breaking her faith in the Army, which had been a part of her life since childhood.
“I don’t recognize the military anymore,” she said.
She stood in the hall, tears still in her eyes, and checked her phone. She saw a new email from the Army. Her next client’s separation board hearing was a couple of weeks away.
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8) ICE Killed Him. A.I. Helped Turn Him Into a Folk Ballad, Fast.
A.I. is helping people write corridos within hours, accelerating a tradition of memorializing tragedy through song.
By Sasha von Oldershausen, Photographs and Video by Antranik Tavitian, Reporting from Austin, Aug. 3, 2026
The melancholic songs began to appear on social media just days after an immigration agent fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo while he was on his way to work in early July.
One such melody, or corrido, the more-than-century-old Mexican tradition of creating narrative folk ballads, was made by Jaime Velasquez — with a little help from A.I.
Mr. Velasquez, 42, had grown up in Houston’s close-knit, heavily Latino, Magnolia Park neighborhood. Mr. Araujo was killed there during a traffic stop on July 7. That sense of solidarity made Mr. Araujo’s death especially painful.
“It’s like somebody took my uncle or my dad,” Mr. Velasquez said. “Even though I don’t know the family, it touched me. It touched my heart.”
He began jotting down the details of the shooting gathered from news broadcasts. Then he wrote a corrido, in Spanish, from Mr. Araujo’s perspective. The lyrics included:
It was early on the morning of July 7th,
roosters were crowing and the sun was rising,
when I left my home filled with love and hope …
Once he’d finished writing, he used an A.I. song generator called Zona to compose the tune.
“It lets you put instrumentals on it and choose a voice,” he said.
Within seconds, the software had produced a finished corrido that he shared on Facebook. Two days after Mr. Araujo was killed, the corrido was already echoing through the Magnolia Park neighborhood, blaring from car stereos.
For generations, corridos have helped Mexican and Mexican American communities make sense of violence, injustice and loss on their own terms. Now the centuries-old tradition is colliding with a modern reality: high-profile immigration arrests and shootings, A.I. that can create songs in seconds and social media that can spread them before the deaths have been investigated.
Since the mid-19th century, corridos have functioned as a form of news, preserving the version of events remembered by communities rather than authorities.
“It was news as the public experienced it — not the way that official channels were going to report about it in newspapers,” said Teresita Lozano, a ballad scholar at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, whose work explores the intersection of immigration politics and corridos.
The corrido tradition traces its roots to the Spanish romance ballad, which colonizers brought with them to Mexico. The music emerged as a distinctly Mexican form as tensions mounted along the Texas-Mexico border after the Mexican-American War in the mid-1800s.
The thousands of corridos written since then resemble an alternative history of the border, documenting moments of violence, injustice and loss.
When Texas Rangers descended upon the small border village of Porvenir in 1918, killing 15 unarmed Mexican American men and boys, members of the community memorialized the massacre in a corrido. They did the same after Esequiel Hernández, a high school sophomore, was shot and killed by U.S. Marines patrolling the Texas border in 1997.
Mr. Araujo’s death, scholars said, fits squarely within that tradition.
“This is a community reacting in the way it has been doing it for over a hundred years,” said Juan Carlos Ramírez-Pimienta, a leading corrido scholar at San Diego State University.
“The corrido tradition still serves that purpose,” he added. “To communicate indignation.”
What has changed, thanks to technology, is the speed at which these corridos are made.
Ms. Lozano noticed the proliferation of A.I.-assisted corridos on social media following Charlie Kirk’s death in September 2025.
“I remember them popping up really quickly,” she said, “and I was thinking, ‘Is it even possible for someone to write it this quickly?’”
In the past, a corrido’s reach was constrained by geography, radio DJs and the recording industry. Today, a new corrido can be recorded, uploaded and shared across platforms like TikTok and YouTube within hours.
Mr. Araujo’s death has left a scar across Houston’s East End. A father of three U.S.-born children who spent 35 years building homes around the city, he was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer during an operation aimed at another man. His story has turned into something more than one family’s tragedy; it’s a communal loss that has long inspired people like Mr. Velasquez to write corridos.
“He was a hard-working man who went out every day for his family,” said Mr. Velasquez, who owns and operates a mobile collision repair business in Houston. “That’s what I do every day.”
Norma Galo Medina, who lives in North Carolina, was similarly moved to create a corrido following Mr. Araujo’s death.
“I felt a great deal of sadness and shock,” she said. “What we immigrants are living through in this country made me think about the importance of honoring his memory.”
She spent two sleepless nights writing the lyrics, then used an app called BandLab to create a musical arrangement.
“I told it I wanted regional Mexican music — a sad, mournful norteño corrido,” Ms. Medina said.
She adjusted the instrumentation and chord progressions. Then she recorded herself singing, using A.I. to alter her range.
“I used a male voice so it would sound stronger,” she said.
She shared the corrido in a TikTok post that has since been viewed more than 40,000 times. Ms. Medina said she was overwhelmed by the response.
The corrido genre has seen its share of reinvention. Contemporary artists like Peso Pluma and Junior H have popularized “corridos tumbados,” or trap corridos, which fuse the traditional narrative ballad with hip-hop and trap influences. Traditionalists have questioned whether these trap corridos qualify as corridos at all.
Andrea Daniela, a mariachi alternative artist originally from Magnolia Park, whose own work blends corridos and spirituality — a style she calls “corridos metafísicos,” — believes that A.I. crosses a line.
“A.I. can’t replicate presence,” she said. “A.I. can’t replicate my passion, my heart.”
Mr. Ramírez-Pimienta, the corrido scholar, is not convinced this new technology poses an existential threat to the art form. When commercial records and radio became dominant, he said, corridos that once stretched seven or eight minutes long were truncated to fit the constraints of a three-minute recording.
“Despite all the technological advances, the genre is still here,” Mr. Ramírez-Pimienta said. “It still serves a purpose.”
Ainara Tiefenthaler contributed reporting.
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9) How the War in Iran Is Complicating Trump’s Agenda at Home
As President Trump heads to the West Coast to talk to Americans about the economy, the war in Iran is driving up costs and polls show the already unpopular conflict is losing support.
President Trump has been the only president in the modern era to take the country to war without the support of the American public. Pete Marovich for The New York Times
The war in Iran, along with a cycle of threats and walk-backs, has upended President Trump’s domestic agenda at a dire political moment.
Americans are facing rising gas prices; Republicans in Congress are being forced to fund and defend an unpopular war that they never voted to approve; and with the midterm elections looming, polls show cratering support for a war that has no end in sight.
Mr. Trump will hit the road this week for a swing through the West Coast to talk about the economy and sell his agenda to the American people. Here are three domestic hurdles Mr. Trump is facing because of the war.
Pain at the Pump
Mr. Trump’s war in Iran has driven up the cost of oil around the world, and Americans are paying, on average, more for gas than they have since 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Gas prices on Monday were at a national average of $4.10 a gallon, according to the AAA motor club. The increase has raised the cost for drivers by more than 37 percent since the war began at the end of February. And it compounds a cost-of-living crisis caused by persistently high inflation that Mr. Trump struggled to address before the war even started.
Mr. Trump has asserted that oil prices per barrel have been far lower than expected because of the conflict, and that gas prices will “drop like a rock” when the war ends.
On Monday, Mr. Trump tried to pass the blame on to oil companies, boasting in a social media post that they had grown much more profitable as a result of his policies.
In a social media post, and in an Oval Office appearance, he cited Chevron and Exxon for record profits, and suggested they should ease prices for the public. “That goes for other Oil Companies as well,” he wrote, “and get your consumer (retail!) Oil Prices DOWN, NOW!”
Plummeting Polls
Mr. Trump has been the only president in the modern era to take the country to war without the support of the American public.
In the most recent Quinnipiac University poll, 60 percent of voters said they opposed military action against Iran, a slight uptick since May. And in a recent CNN/SSRS poll, 74 percent of Americans — including about 43 percent of Republicans — said the war in Iran had not been worth the cost in terms of the financial burden or American casualties.
Despite the fact that Mr. Trump ran on getting and keeping America out of wars, the conflict has now lasted far longer than his promise of “four to five weeks,” and it has killed 18 U.S. service members.
Mr. Trump has dismissed the pains being experienced from the war, saying they are temporary. And he has downplayed the number of American troops’ deaths by comparing them to casualty counts of past wars like Vietnam.
On Monday, Mr. Trump wrote that he believed that any polling showing discontent was “the Radical Left’s Fake Poll numbers.”
Political Risks
As Republicans face a tough midterm in a matter of months, even Mr. Trump’s closest allies have intensified their calls for a clear end to the conflict.
“We got to wrap it up,” Speaker Mike Johnson said last month, as the United States launched a fresh barrage against Iran, signaling the collapse of a temporary cease-fire.
Mr. Trump went to war without the authorization of Congress, an issue that came to a head in recent weeks as members have been asked for billions more in funding. Last week, Senate Republicans declined to limit Mr. Trump’s power to continue the war, but days later many complained that they were unsure where the conflict was headed.
“I don’t know whether the president should start a new bombing campaign again, because I don’t have the military intelligence,” Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, said on Sunday during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Now, that’s a problem, too, because it’ll cause a lot of pain. It’ll cause energy prices to go up, and a lot of inflation for the American people. They’re all hellish choices.”
Democrats are already employing their strategy to use Republicans’ support of the war against their opponents in upcoming races.
In Maine, Majority Forward, a major Democratic group, has spent more than $1.5 million on ads accusing Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, of giving Mr. Trump a “blank check” for the war, according to an analysis by the media tracking firm AdImpact.
Ruth Igielnik, Katie Rogers and Jess Bidgood contributed reporting.
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10) Uber’s Strategy for Fighting Sexual Assault Suits: ‘What Were You Wearing?’
The ride-hailing giant promised to handle legal claims “in a way that is best for the survivor.” Its lawyers are pursuing a far more aggressive strategy.
By Emily Steel, Aug. 4, 2026
You can send the reporter tips at nytimes.com/tips.
max-o-matic
A 24-year-old woman logged onto a videoconference from her bedroom in Florida on a Friday morning in April 2025 to face a deposition in her lawsuit against Uber.
Her driver had already pleaded guilty in criminal court to raping her vaginally, anally and orally while she was unconscious during a ride in Tampa one night in 2021. He was in prison, serving a 10-year sentence. The woman, identified as Jane Doe in court documents, was suing Uber in civil court for negligence, arguing that the company should have done more to screen and supervise the driver, a man with prior violent felony convictions.
Publicly, Uber proclaims itself to be a company devoted to handling sexual violence in a “survivor-centric” and “trauma-informed” way, supporting survivors and treating them with dignity. After years of fielding reports of sexual misconduct, the company developed instructional videos for drivers that stated, “Sexual violence is never the survivor’s fault.”
But in court filings, Uber argued that Ms. Doe had “conducted herself in a negligent and careless manner” and “contributed to causing her own injuries.” And it said Ms. Doe’s claims of pain and suffering were “unrelated to the at-issue accident.”
Now, during her deposition, Uber’s lawyer Taylor Silverberg zeroed in on Ms. Doe’s behavior on the night she was raped. Ms. Silverberg asked Ms. Doe exactly how much Tito’s vodka she had drunk, how many milligrams of Adderall she had taken and whether she had “felt regret” about mixing the two. And she asked Ms. Doe what she had been wearing. “Can you describe the dress?” Ms. Silverberg said. “Were you wearing heels or boots or flats?”
Ms. Silverberg also probed Ms. Doe’s childhood, asking if she had felt abandoned by her father or degraded by her mother.
She pushed Ms. Doe for details about consensual sex and asked whether she had previously been sexually abused or had sex in exchange for money. That is when her lawyer ended the deposition.
“I am not anywhere near done,” Ms. Silverberg protested. “It’s her lawsuit, and I have an obligation to defend my client to the best of my ability,” she added.
Later, she offered an apology: “I know this is hard for you, Ms. Doe. I am sorry. I really am. But ——”
“I’m grateful it is ending,” Ms. Doe said, interrupting. “This kills me,” she added.
Uber’s approach in Ms. Doe’s case is part of its defense strategy as it battles thousands of lawsuits from passengers accusing the company of failing to protect them from sexual violence they said they had suffered during rides, according to thousands of pages of court records, including deposition and trial transcripts.
More than 4,000 lawsuits have been filed, so many that thousands were combined to streamline procedural matters. Most remain in the early stages. The New York Times reviewed documents from the three cases that reached trial and about a dozen others that have advanced to the stage when the parties start exchanging documents and conducting depositions.
The litigation has revealed a clear pattern: Uber’s lawyers scour women’s private communications, medical records, therapy notes and other sources for sensitive details, including other sexual assaults, childhood abuse and domestic violence. They grill the women about those issues, their sex lives and their behavior on the night of the incident.
In one case, Uber petitioned a judge to force a woman to turn over details about sexual abuse she experienced as a child by a family member and family friend. In another, Uber compelled a woman to undergo a psychiatric exam to investigate other sexual assaults she had reported. And in another, a lawyer for Uber asked a woman whether she had been wearing underwear on the night in question and if she had become “extra sexually active” after the Uber incident.
At trial, the company has put a spotlight on the women, their choices and their credibility. Uber’s lawyers have argued that the women’s past traumas or use of drugs or alcohol made them unreliable narrators. They have suggested that the women consented to the encounters, or that they never happened. And they have asserted that even if an assault occurred, something else was the true cause of her pain.
Uber’s strategy contradicts its own stance as a champion in the fight against sexual violence and reflects the business calculations of a $145 billion publicly traded company facing an avalanche of litigation.
Uber has long said it treats all survivors with respect and compassion, including when they sue. The company has struck partnerships with leading anti-sexual assault groups, and it has committed more than $15 million to organizations fighting gender-based violence.
And a training guide for Uber’s customer service agents who handled reports of sexual violence instructed them to “recognize and interrupt victim blaming attitudes,” stating that people rarely lie about sexual assault and that victims do not provoke attacks by what they wore or how much they drank, according to a copy.
How Uber’s lawyers question women about their outfits
Examples from depositions in four different cases:
California
August 27, 2024
Q: Do you know if you had the bikini on at that time?
Florida
December 16, 2024
Q: And what were you wearing?
A: Um, the planned outfit was joggers. But I don’t remember the top. I do remember the sneakers because the police took them away, and I really liked them.
Florida
April 4, 2025
Q: Do you have a recollection of what you were wearing that evening: your outfit, your shoes, your bag?
Missouri
January 17, 2026
Q: And what were you wearing that night of the incident?
A: I don’t know what I was wearing on the top half of my body, but I know I was wearing a skirt.
Q: Do you remember which skirt you were wearing?
A: No, I don’t. Before this incident and there’s a lot of picture proof of this, I wore almost only skirts. Afterwards I started wearing pants.
Q: Do you remember if you were wearing a long skirt or a short skirt?
A: It was probably short.
Q: Do you remember if you were wearing underwear?
“I’ll be the first to say that our adversarial legal system can be particularly tough for survivors,” Uber’s chief legal officer, Tony West, said in a statement.
“I’ve made clear to my legal team that they must always treat survivors with respect, compassion, courtesy and dignity, and that’s exactly what I’ve seen them do,” he added. “Defending the company in a lawsuit and treating survivors with humanity are not mutually exclusive; we must do both.” Mr. West declined to be interviewed.
Katie Waitzman, Uber’s chief deputy general counsel, said in a statement that Uber had a “right and responsibility” to defend itself against lawsuits, which vary widely in severity and validity and included about 30 cases dismissed for fraud.
In multiple statements, lawyers for Uber said their questions about women’s past trauma as well as what they were wearing, drinking or how they acted had been intended to gather and evaluate specific facts — not to blame, shame or suggest they had done anything wrong. Ms. Silverberg acted “with skilled, ethical and professional representation consistent with the law,” her law firm, Bowman and Brooke, said.
The Times previously found that Uber received a report of sexual violence in the United States almost every eight minutes, on average, from 2017 to 2022, a rate far higher than what the company had disclosed. Uber maintains that a vast majority of rides are safe, with 99.9 percent occurring without an incident of any kind.
Legal and sexual violence experts said Uber’s tactics go beyond simple fact-gathering and force the women to relive not just the incident in question but also the most painful moments of their lives. This is likely to re-traumatize the women, they said, and intimidate many into settling their claims, or to avoid suing the company at all.
The approach also has “a deep irony at its core,” because the company has long marketed itself as one of the safest ways to get around — especially after a night out, said Nora Freeman Engstrom, a legal ethics professor at Stanford Law School.
“Uber’s strategy recycles an old and ugly script: If a woman drank, if she rode alone, if it was late, if her memory is imperfect, then maybe she is to blame,” Ms. Engstrom said. “But those are precisely the circumstances when Uber told consumers its service was supposed to protect them.”
For decades, defense lawyers routinely questioned sexual assault accusers about their sex lives, mental health and alcohol consumption to characterize them as promiscuous and unstable. That started to change in the 1970s, as state and federal lawmakers began passing rape shield laws that restricted evidence about an accuser’s sexual history at trial.
The lawsuits against Uber are civil disputes, seeking to hold the company accountable for corporate safety issues.
While some involve drivers who were criminally convicted, many do not. Criminal cases require prosecutors to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, which can be difficult with sexual assault cases when defendants argue the encounter was consensual. The standard of proof in civil court is lower, requiring juries find that the plaintiff’s claim is more likely true than not.
Most of the women suing Uber are seeking compensation for pain and suffering, which means that a key legal question is how much the incident caused their distress compared with other events in their lives. That line of inquiry is common in personal injury cases. In the Uber suits, it has opened the door to an expansive investigation into past trauma, including sexual assault.
Interrogating drinking
California
August 12, 2024
Q: Got it. Did you want to take an Uber because you thought maybe there was some chance you were over the blood alcohol limit to drive?
Florida
April 4, 2025
Q: Were you taking shots and chasing, or were you doing mixed drinks?
A: Just straight up pulling.
Q: And what was your chase?
A: I think we had Sprite or something. I can’t remember the exact. But I’m assuming it was some bottle of soda or something. I don’t know. I don’t recall.
Q: Did you have a sip of any other type of liquor, wine, beer, any other type of alcoholic beverage?
A: No, not that I recall.
California
July 18, 2024
Q: OK. And do you remember how much you had to drink?
FLORIDA
December 16, 2024
Q: Do you know how many High Noons you had that night?
MISSOURI
January 17, 2026
Q: Do you recall how many drinks you had?
A: No.
‘Turning the Lights On’
When Mr. West joined Uber as chief legal officer in 2017, the company was plagued by scandal, including for how it dealt with sexual violence. One case involving a rape by a driver in India made global headlines after revelations that executives had obtained and mishandled the victim’s medical records, thinking the assault may have been a conspiracy hatched by a rival.
Mr. West, a former Justice Department official and brother-in-law of Kamala Harris, painted himself as a champion of women who had fought sex crimes as a federal prosecutor and worked on legislation aimed at protecting women from violence.
The same month that Mr. West started at Uber, in November, two passengers sued the company, claiming they were raped by their drivers. Uber tried to force the claims into arbitration.
Several more women joined the suit, and in April 2018, they wrote an open letter, pleading that the company allow them to sue in open court. It was the height of #MeToo, and the use of forced arbitration in sexual misconduct cases was a central issue, with critics decrying it as a tool to silence victims and protect abusers.
The next month, in a blog post titled “Turning the Lights On,” Mr. West said Uber would no longer require arbitration for individual sexual assault or misconduct claims.
“We always want to try to resolve these, these claims in a way that is best for the survivor,” Mr. West told “CBS This Morning” in 2018. “If you can’t do that then we want to make sure that we try to litigate these as fairly as possible,” he added.
For years, Uber settled sexual assault lawsuits long before trial. Some executives worried that the company could be perceived as attacking victims if it fought lawsuits in court, according to three people briefed on the conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.
But it soon became clear that the move to end forced arbitration had unleashed a wave of lawsuits. Litigation costs mounted as cases increased, the people said. That coincided with a collapse of revenues during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Internal discussions shifted: Uber could save millions of dollars if it fought back, the people said.
The company did not respond to questions about when or how the strategy changed.
Sex, Drugs and Trauma
Uber’s defense kicks into gear long before a case goes to trial. The company uses the discovery process to delve into the plaintiff’s most painful moments.
Uber has sought documents about past sexual assault, medical records about diagnoses in the five years before the incident, as well as anything that detailed instances of depression, anxiety or trauma. It also has asked for social media communications related to the women’s mental or emotional state.
In one case, Uber combed through years of a woman’s gynecological records, psychiatric intake forms, therapy notes and other documents, finding references to her birth control, heavy menstrual periods and bowel movements — as well as to childhood abuse, concussions, suicide attempts and other sexual assaults.
Depositions allow the company to investigate these issues further.
“Other than the deaths of your four family members that we spoke about earlier, was there any other traumatic event that happened to you in high school?” a lawyer for Uber asked one woman.
“When you say you ended up with a black eye — and I’m sorry, this is unfortunately questions I have to ask — are you saying,” a lawyer for Uber asked one woman about her spouse, that he “hit you in the eye?”
Uber also has deposed the women’s friends, parents, spouses, exes and therapists, according to transcripts reviewed by The Times.
When friends, family and therapists are deposed
November 21, 2024
Q: And in the years that you and your wife were either dating or married, has your wife ever been unfaithful?
Q: Had you known Ms. Doe to invite strangers up to her apartment when she was drinking?
July 23, 2025
Q: Has Ms. █████ ever told you about the instances in which she was physically beaten?
May 28, 2025
Q: Did you suspect that the plaintiff may only know how to interact with men in a sexual way? I mean, she’s got sexual assault starting junior high, high school, college.
During some of those depositions, Uber’s lawyers have revealed sensitive information. In one, a woman’s father, from whom she is estranged, learned that she had been sexually abused as a child and had an abortion, her lawyer said in court filings.
“What discovery in these cases entails is brutal for someone who is contemplating coming forward, especially against a defendant with resources and lawyers who will comb through everything, ask for everything,” said Deborah Tuerkheimer, a law professor at Northwestern University who focuses on sexual violence.
Ms. Waitzman, Uber’s chief deputy general counsel, said that it was “standard practice” to dig into pre-existing trauma. “When plaintiffs claim damages for emotional injuries, and assign 100 percent of those injuries to the Uber-related incident despite evidence to the contrary, we have to pursue that line of inquiry, albeit reluctantly,” she said.
On Trial
Uber tested out its defense in front of jurors during the first three sexual assault lawsuits that went to trial.
In all three, Uber sought to include evidence about other sexual assaults the women had reported. Judges limited how much could be discussed, to varying degrees.
The first, in California last September, involved a woman identified as Jessica C. who testified that during a ride in 2016 her driver pinned her down, kissed her, groped her and tried to take off her pants.
Alli Brown, a lawyer representing Uber, put a spotlight on Jessica’s choices, including that she did not report the incident to Uber at the time. Ms. Brown also excavated painful moments from Jessica’s past, detailing childhood abuse, suicide attempts and other trauma.
“Having a history of trauma like that can affect the way you perceive the world,” Ms. Brown told jurors during closing arguments, citing testimony from Jessica’s psychiatrist.
The second trial started in Arizona in January. Jaylynn Dean testified that her driver raped her during a ride in November 2023, while she was “dozing in and out of consciousness.”
Kim Bueno, another lawyer representing Uber, called attention to the driver’s side of the story, telling the jury that “in his heart” he believed that the encounter was consensual.
“He said she was wanting to do it and was encouraging this situation,” she said.
Ms. Bueno challenged Ms. Dean’s claims that she had been too intoxicated to consent to sex, arguing that Ms. Dean appeared “lucid” in video footage shortly after the ride. In graphic detail, she went through Ms. Dean’s history of sexual assault and other traumas.
Ms. Dean’s lawyers urged jurors to focus on other testimony from the driver, who said during his deposition that Ms. Dean had told him that she was “very drunk” when she entered his car. In his deposition, the driver said that he “had a responsibility to make sure that she is in a right frame of mind to give consent, and I didn’t do that.”
In the third trial, in North Carolina in April, Brianna Mensing testified that her Uber driver grabbed her upper, inner thigh and asked if he could “keep it with him” during a ride in March 2019.
Uber’s lawyer, Ms. Brown, described the allegation as a brief leg touch and said the driver denied it. Ms. Brown focused on Ms. Mensing’s history of substance abuse, saying the ride occurred “during the height of her drug addiction.”
During each trial, lawyers for the women accused Uber of shaming and blaming them.
“What kind of evidence does Uber need to actually believe a woman?” William Smith, a lawyer for Ms. Mensing, said during closing arguments. At trial, Ms. Brown and Ms. Bueno said that they did not intend to shame the women.
Uber won the first case but lost the next two. All are being appealed. After both defeats, a company spokesman said the plaintiff won far less money than she could have. The jury awarded Ms. Dean $8.5 million, for example. She had been seeking $144 million.
In an interview, Ms. Dean said that she was proud to hold Uber to account but that its courtroom tactics added trauma — beyond the pain of reliving the Uber incident.
“Focus was shifted away from the actual assault and on to my choices,” she said. “It just made me feel like coming forward was a mistake.” When she returned home to Oklahoma, she said she needed to take a break from nursing school.
In a statement, Ms. Bueno and Ms. Brown, partners at the prominent law firm Kirkland & Ellis, said that they have an “ethical and professional obligation” to examine the credibility of each claim.
“We believe we performed our jobs as defense lawyers, and perhaps more significantly, our responsibility as women lawyers in these trials with a deep regard and appropriate deference not just to the seriousness of the allegations but also the impact of the trial on both these plaintiffs and women more generally,” they said.
Uber recently agreed to settle hundreds of lawsuits, including some nearing trial.
With others, it continues to fight — even in cases when drivers have been criminally convicted.
A woman in Texas claims that Uber was negligent after a driver forced her to perform oral sex while driving down the highway. In a criminal trial, a jury found the driver guilty, sentencing him to 11 years in prison. The conviction was affirmed on appeal.
The woman’s lawsuit is scheduled for trial in October. Uber has referred to the assault as an “alleged incident” in court documents. During a hearing in June, a judge asked Uber’s lawyers whether the company would contest that the sexual assault happened.
“We certainly don’t know enough at this stage,” responded Geoffrey Wyatt, a Kirkland & Ellis partner representing Uber. “Having a criminal trial transcript is a nice start to understanding the factual allegations in the case,” he added. “That’s all it is. It’s just a start.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
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11) 100 Animals and Plants Just Got Some Much-Needed Help
A new fund called the Phoenix Species Project will provide $200 million to help pull imperiled wildlife back from the brink of extinction.
By Catrin Einhorn, Aug. 4, 2026
Some of the imperiled animals included in the Phoenix Species Project. Joel Sartore/National Geographic Photo Ark
The Trump administration is rolling back protections for endangered species. Countries around the world are failing to deliver on their conservation commitments. Corporations are backpedaling on environmental pledges.
Still, 100 imperiled animals and plants got some good news on Tuesday.
A new fund called the Phoenix Species Project said it would pump $200 million into efforts to pull these animals and plants back from the brink of extinction and even restore them in the wild. It’s among the largest philanthropic funds focused entirely on species recovery and it stands out for both the scope and specificity of the wildlife included.
The project is a collaboration between Re:wild, a nonprofit group co-founded by the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, and the Bezos Earth Fund, a private foundation created by Jeff Bezos, the billionaire behind Amazon.
The move comes amid alarming declines in global biodiversity, meaning the variety of life on the planet. Species and ecosystems are shrinking as humans plow, pave and mine the earth’s land, pollute its rivers and pull fish from its oceans. Climate change is adding new pressure. Human consumption — of food, energy and countless material goods — is ultimately to blame.
The hundred species were chosen because they were near extinction, had local organizations already working to save them and represent a diversity of habitats, countries and types of species.
There’s the Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander in North Carolina, whose already dwindling habitat was largely leveled by mudslides from the remnants of Hurricane Helene in 2024. There’s a charming plant in South Africa called the fuzzy belly button whose sudden popularity as houseplants, particularly in East Asia, has driven it to near extinction in the wild. And there’s the bowmouth guitarfish in the Indo-Pacific, which looks like a cross between a ray and a shark and is killed for its prized fins.
“Even species down to very small numbers have been able to recover with the right resources, the right partners on the ground,” said Wes Sechrest, co-founder and chief executive of Re:wild.
For some species, the money will unlock resources that should make recovery relatively straightforward, Dr. Sechrest said. Others, like Mexico’s vaquita porpoise, face far more challenging paths.
Julia P.G. Jones, a professor of conservation science at Bangor University in Wales whose research seeks to make environmental efforts more effective, welcomed the sizable donations. And she said that broader, system-level changes were also needed to ensure that wild nature and people can thrive into the future.
“While species conservation can win some battles, we risk losing the war without bigger changes to how we use our environment,” Dr. Jones said.
Take Mr. Bezos’ company, Amazon. Last week, it reached No. 1 on the Fortune Global 500 list of the largest companies. But its enormous sales are helping fuel the very problems that conservationists are left trying to solve.
“Amazon, like other big multinational corporations, is driving habitat loss and extinction through massive consumerism,” said Brian O’Donnell, who runs a nature advocacy group that has received money from the Bezos Earth Fund. He emphasized his admiration for the people there, praising their good work and noting his excitement for this latest effort.
“Does it fully offset their responsibility?” he continued. “No, but this is a really cool fund that is super needed.”
Amazon’s emissions have been going up in recent years, even though it helped start the Climate Pledge in 2019, promising to reach net-zero emissions by 2040. A spokesperson for the company said supply chain emissions and artificial intelligence were largely responsible for the rise but said Amazon remains committed to achieving its pledge.
The Bezos Earth Fund declined to make Mr. Bezos available for an interview. Tom Taylor, who worked at Amazon as a senior executive for more than 20 years and is now chief executive of the Bezos Earth Fund, acknowledged that companies must do far more to improve sustainability.
At the same time, he noted that consumers play an important role. Yes, Amazon makes it easy to buy stuff, he said, “but each of us individually have responsibility to make the decisions we make.”
Beneath the economic and political dynamics are the local groups fighting to stave off extinctions, who say this influx of money is going to make a big difference.
For the Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander, it will mean boosting numbers in a captive breeding program and restoring habitat lost to the storm and invasive tree diseases so that the salamanders can be returned to the wild, said JJ Apodaca, executive director of the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy, which will be receiving a grant from the new fund.
“It gives us a real chance of success that we wouldn’t have had otherwise,” Dr. Apodaca said.
For the fuzzy belly button plant, a succulent that has lost more than two-thirds of its population to harvesting since 2019, when it became very popular abroad, the money will allow conservationists to breed more plants in captivity, buy trail cameras for security and fund work with communities so the plant can be returned to the wild without getting overharvested again, said Domitilla Raimondo, the threatened species program manager at the South African National Biodiversity Institute.
“They’re not as charismatic as a panda bear or a rhino, so they don’t tend to get the love and attention that other species get,” she said. “What is really great about this Phoenix recovery plan is it’s giving equal love to different species.”
Still, it includes only three invertebrates, among them a snail in Tahiti, and no insects.
Vivek Menon, chair of the Species Survival Commission at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said the 100 species were a “fantastic first step” and emphasized the need to scale quickly.
More than 11,000 species are classified as either critically endangered or extinct in the wild on the I.U.C.N. Red List, the leading global scientific authority on the status of species. Almost 40,000 more are endangered or vulnerable.
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