Hi Nerve gang, 

It’s Lucia here, and I’m delighted to be writing my first newsletter to you as the newest Nerve hire. I joined the team two weeks ago as an investigative reporter and feature writer, and I honestly couldn’t be more thrilled to be part of such a vibrant, vital team and an equally vibrant, vital community – that’s you guys! 

I have been investigating Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring for the past seven years, and in 2024 I published a book about the survivors of this heinous criminal operation, and so the Epstein story has been my primary beat for a very long time. I cannot recommend to you enough a brilliant piece that we are publishing today by Ellie Leonard on the twisted tale of Michael Wolff, a once-beloved – still beloved by many – journalist and darling of the New York elite who has attempted to spin his recently exposed closeness with Jeffrey Epstein as a legitimate reporter-source relationship. But, as Ellie reveals, dozens of emails reveal that Wolff’s narrative belies a much more complicated truth – one in which his relationship to Epstein appears much more akin to a close confidant, an adviser, and a trusted friend. Ellie asks where, in this unusual relationship, the journalism ended and the entanglement began.

On Friday I spoke with Niamh Kennedy, one of three investigative journalists at CNN who are responsible for shattering the illusion that the deeply disturbing Gisele Pelicot case was an aberration or an exception. Niamh and her colleagues uncovered an online “rape academy” where men are being taught to drug and rape the women in their lives with ease and impunity. Niamh went undercover for six months after discovering a porn site called Motherless which dedicates a section to “sleep content” – videos of women being sexually assaulted while unconscious. On the day of our interview, Niamh got word that as a result of the investigation, Dutch authorities have located Motherless’s servers and taken the site offline. 

Also in today’s rich edition, the brilliant comedian Munya Chawawa answers the Nerve Q&A on how wrestling helped Trump into the White House, our political commentator Sangita Myska’s take on the Starmer shambles and our weekly cultural hotlist.

A reminder that there are some tickets left for tomorrow night’s event with the author and feminist thinker Natasha Walter in conversation with writer Aja Barber and the Nerve’s Carole Cadwalladr. It’s at Conway Hall and we have arranged a 40% discount on tickets for our subscribers. Buy tickets here and enter the code FFWOF5946 at checkout. (For those of you who live in Bristol, Natasha will be in conversation at Bookhaus at Wapping Wharf on Tuesday 19 May. Tickets here.) 

If you are reading for free, please do consider upgrading to paid membership here. And a final request: if you could click on our ad for secure email provider Proton at the end of this newsletter, it helps to fund our journalism.

And now to the links:

As a child Munya Chawawa was a huge fan of WWE wrestling featuring stars such as Hulk Hogan staging cartoonish, scripted fights. Or as he puts it: “the world of oiled-up, budgie-smuggler-wearing superstars”. So he was horrified as an adult when Hogan appeared on stage at a 2024 Trump rally, ripping his vest open and shouting "Make America Great Again". Now, for a Channel 4 documentary airing tonight, the hugely successful comedian has donned the spandex to explore for himself how wrestling helped Trump make it to the White House. Munya spoke to writer Jude Rogers about what he discovered, why he’s the “Lime-bike king of the world” and the inspiration behind his Black Boys Theatre Club. Read the interview here.

Back in January when the US Department of Justice released over 3 million pages related to Epstein there were 1,830 hits for “from Michael Wolff”. What was the relationship between these two men – was it contact, or source, or friend? Ellie Leonard, author of the Substack The Panicked Writer, has been digging into the files. Read her report here.

The inspiring story of the investigative journalists at CNN – Niamh Kennedy, Saskya Vandoorne and Kara Fox – whose dogged reporting led to Dutch authorities locating the server hosting the porn website Motherless and taking it offline. Read the interview with Niamh here.

It's a Starmershambles: 90 Labour MPs have called for him to go, 100 have signed a statement in support. The past few days are, as Nerve political commentator Sangita Myska says: "reminiscent of the end of Tory rule, in which an MP most people have never heard of managed to almost trigger a leadership campaign... while a string of anonymous junior ministers (and Jess Phillips) couldn’t quit their positions fast enough in order to jump on X to make their feelings about this circus known." Meanwhile Starmer's live-or-die speech yesterday was a perfect microcosm of how he has gone wrong as PM. Read Sangita's assessment here.

The 80s are back in this week’s hotlist with the Nerve team recommending the “pure escapism” of Disney’s second series of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals and, on stage at the Liverpool Everyman, a “disturbing but very funny” new adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s short story The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Leaving that decade behind, there’s a new novel from Elizabeth Strout, the fifth album from New Zealand singer-songwriter Aldous Harding, a brilliant (and free!) new installation transforming Tate Britain into a cinema of resistance – and much more. Read this week’s hotlist here.

Thanks for reading. We’ll be back on Friday. Don’t forget to click on the ad below 😄

Lucia, Nerve writer

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