Some four years ago, a reporter learned from fellow Sarah Lawrence College alumni about a "troubling" website about an ex-student there. The website, whose address had been in the student's name, looked like an attempt to blackmail her with written and videotaped false confessions. Two reporters researched that lead extensively before publishing an exposé titled “Larry Ray and the Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence.”

The central figure in the article, Lawrence Ray, is now standing federal trial in Manhattan on a 17-count racketeering indictment, and the woman on the website, Claudia, has been testifying against him for three days. She claims that Ray forced her into prostitution to the tune of $2.5 million over the course of four years, in key testimony for Ray's sex trafficking count.

On the latest episode of Law&Crime's podcast “Objections: with Adam Klasfeld,” the authors of the New York Magazine article that first uncovered the unsettling case—Ezra Marcus and James Walsh—describe the origins of their discovery and their impressions of the ongoing federal trial.

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After special prosecutor John Durham filed a document claiming that a tech executive "exploited" internet traffic data to find derogatory information about Donald Trump, the allegation instantly set off a furor on the political right.

"The most striking example I recall hearing was Jesse Watters on Fox saying that Durham had disclosed that Hillary Clinton paid people to hack into Donald Trump's home and office computers in order to plant evidence of Russian collusion," the Cato Institute's senior fellow Julian Sanchez recalled on the latest episode of Law&Crime's podcast "Objections: with Adam Klasfeld."

Describing Watters's assertion as "impressive" in its falsehood, Sanchez added: "Literally no part of that sentence is correct."

Specializing in issues of technology and civil liberties, Sanchez explains on the podcast that the actual story buried beneath the mound of overheated rhetoric is a thorny problem of privacy in an age of bulk data analysis.

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Once considered one of most dangerous criminal probes orbiting the former president, the Manhattan district attorney's investigation that led to indictments against Donald Trump's business and former associate Allen Weisselberg now stands in turmoil.

Officially, the investigation continues, but two of its top prosecutors—Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz—resigned late last month. A recent New York Times exposé on the heated arguments preceding their departure suggest both men strongly disagreed with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's reluctance to bring charges against Trump himself. The Times quoted Dunne explaining his need to "disassociate myself with this decision because I think it was on the wrong side of history.”

On the latest episode of Law&Crime's podcast "Objections: with Adam Klasfeld," former Brooklyn prosecutor Julie Rendelman provides insight on line prosecutors' disagreements with district attorneys—and what this clash could mean for the future of the Trump probe.

"You've heard that saying, 'You can indict a ham sandwich,' and in many ways, it's true," Rendelman notes. "You can indict a ham sandwich. It doesn't take much to get you indicted. It takes a whole hell of a lot in order to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone is guilty. And with Trump, it's not just about whether he cooked the books. It's also whether he intentionally cooked the books for the purpose of some level of criminality."

Rendelman, a former homicide prosecutor behind the upcoming Law&Crime podcast "Without a Body," explains how an investigation deals with the absence of seemingly crucial evidence. Her podcast draws from her prosecutorial experiences to show how investigators proceed in a homicide case where a body is never found.

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Ratcheting up the financial sanctions that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden announced a dedicated Department of Justice task force to go after Vladimir Putin's oligarchs during Tuesday night's State of the Union address: "We are joining with our European allies to find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets. We are coming for your ill-begotten gains," the U.S. president declared.

Investigative journalists have long traced the opaque flows of Russian oligarch money around the world, and few have done it as tenaciously and effectively as the European collective Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

On the latest episode of Law&Crime's podcast "Objections: with Adam Klasfeld," OCCRP's co-founder and publisher Drew Sullivan describes how Putin and his oligarchs hide their money through what he calls the "criminal services industry."

"These law firms and banks are really helping these relatively provincial, Eastern European leaders to suddenly find that they could steal money and move it offshore, bring it back in another form and get done what they wanted to get done," he noted.

Sullivan also details the "laborious" process through which reporters uncover assets hidden in layers of "nested," anonymous corporations. Devastating sanctions to Russia's most important banks prompted Putin over the weekend to effectively threaten nuclear war, a development Sullivan construes as a sign that the global financial backlash to his war on Ukraine has hit the autocrat where it hurts.

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As the 10-year anniversary of the mass shooting approaches, families of Sandy Hook victims have been racking up a string of legal victories. Nine of them reached a $73 million settlement last week with insurers for the arms manufacturer Remington, the maker of the Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle that gunman Adam Lanza used in the massacre.

In her soon-to-be-released book “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth,” New York Times feature writer Elizabeth Williamson charts the families' longstanding litigation against InfoWars broadcaster Alex Jones, who defaulted late last year on a string of lawsuits about his conspiracy theory that the shootings that killed 26 people inside the elementary school—plus the gunman and his mother—did not happen.

Discussing the book on the latest episode of Law&Crime's podcast "Objections: with Adam Klasfeld," Williamson describes Sandy Hook conspiracy theories as a template for others to come.

"Sandy Hook was the first mass shooting to create these viral conspiracy claims online," she said in an interview. "Then, it was every mass shooting. Then, it was Pizzagate. Then, it was QAnon. Then, it was coronavirus, and then, it was the election."

Late last year, Jones defaulted in defamation litigation, and he faces a damages trial in the spring. The book will be released on March 8.

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The leader of a Texas butterfly preserve vividly remembers the day in July 2017, when she saw five workmen around the levee of her refuge, three of them wielding chainsaws, cutting down trees and mowing down vegetation.

"It was a shocking moment," recalled Marianna Treviño Wright, the executive director of the now-closed National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas. "I said, 'Who are you, and what are you doing here? And they said, 'Well, the government sent us to clear this land for a border wall.'"

Little did she know at the time, Treviño Wright said, that her fight against the construction of a U.S.-Mexico border wall would plunge her into a years-long battle with prominent figures in MAGA-world, including ex-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and possibly, former President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. Nor did she know, she says, that her well-publicized court battles against those powerful forces that be would make her the target of QAnon-style conspiracy theories that would shut down her preserve and make her fear for her life.

In an extended interview with Law&Crime's podcast "Objections: with Adam Klasfeld," Treviño Wright describes how her 100-acre haven for nature lovers and lepidopterists leapt into national headlines — and became a lightning rod for right-wing conspiracy theories with a history of provoking violence.

After years of this campaign, she says, an alarming incident involving a fringe congressional candidate in Virginia shut down her refuge indefinitely weeks ago. Its doors remain closed as of publication.

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As Ahmaud Arbery's murderers prepared to plead guilty to federal civil rights charges last week, two of the men appeared ready to tell a judge that they chased and killed a 25-year-old man because he was Black. Those admissions would have represented a long-delayed reckoning in a case that animated the racial justice movement globally and drew attention to what many described as a modern-day lynching in the Deep South.

Then, the deal fell apart, with Arbery's family denouncing prosecutors for even contemplating such a plea agreement.

On the latest episode of Law&Crime's podcast "Objections: with Adam Klasfeld," prominent legal commentator Ken White—better known by the nom de plume Popehat—unpacks why that happened, what it means for the criminal justice reform movement and what to expect at the trial which began this week with jury selection.

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When Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes first had a detention hearing following his seditious conspiracy indictment, his estranged wife Tasha Adams felt certain that he would be locked up and kept away from her and their six children.

Then, Adams noticed an alarming report in Politico report suggesting that a federal judge appeared ready to let her ex loose.

"I got a little panicked," Adams told Law&Crime in an interview with Law&Crime's podcast "Objections." "I really thought it was a done deal. Like, I didn't not expect any chance of bail whatsoever."

In an extraordinary interview, Adams details why she told a judge she wants to keep Rhodes in jail. She also details her allegations of physical abuse, the history of the Oath Keepers, and her fears that Rhodes may harm her children and become a "Brownshirt" acting as an "unseen arm" of former President Donald Trump, if released.

Read more about the episode here: https://lawandcrime.com/objections-podcast/oath-keepers-founders-estranged-wife-tells-why-she-asked-a-judge-to-keep-ex-in-jail-fears-hell-take-their-kids-and-become-brownshirt-for-trump/?utm_source=mostpopular

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When she landed the world's first interview with a Ghislaine Maxwell juror, journalist and author Lucia Osborne-Crowley knew that the story would be significant—and perhaps even fraught.

"It was a really, really overwhelming interview for me because there were so many things going through my head," Obsorne-Crowley recounted.

The juror, once anonymized only as Juror No. 50 and now known by the name Scotty David, had told her that he was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. He also told her that those experiences informed his decision to convict Maxwell of sex trafficking and other federal crimes that could lock up the Jeffrey Epstein accomplice for the rest of her life.

"This is a verdict for all of the victims," David declared in what ran as a pull quote in the headline of Osborne-Crowley's exclusive in the U.K.'s Independent.

Now, that verdict may stand in turmoil. Two news outlets have reported that David wrote in a sworn juror questionnaire that he was not a sexual abuse victim, and Maxwell's defense attorneys have asked for a retrial.

On this episode, Obsorne-Crowley—an accomplished journalist, trained lawyer, and published author on the subjects of her own sexual abuse—unpacks the complicated ripples of her major scoop and how it has resonated in her life and career.

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Throughout Ghislaine Maxwell's sex trafficking trial, her attorneys have sought to discredit her alleged victims along themes of "memory, manipulation and money." The lawyers will likely cast those themes into sharper relief as the defense case begins on Thursday.

Attorney Lisa Bloom, who has represented eight women awarded settlements from a fund designed to compensate Jeffrey Epstein victims, unpacks that defense strategy through the eyes of her clients in the latest episode of Law&Crime's podcast "Objections: with Adam Klasfeld."

"There's no perfect victim," Bloom said in a Zoom interview. "There's no perfect plaintiff, and I do civil cases. And you know, you take your victim as you find them. It's very common that there would be drug abuse, or you know, selling sex for money or inconsistent memories."

"I've never been prouder of a group of clients. They went through so much agony, and so many mental health disorders as a result of being sexually abused by this man," she added later in the show, referring to Epstein.

Bloom's clients are not the same women who took the stand against Maxwell, but they share some similar stories.

This episode was first published the day before the opening of Maxwell's defense case.

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