Since November 2024, dozens of states have moved to protect their internal sovereignty against President Trump’s campaign to consolidate an autocratic central government.
The flamboyant resisters have mostly been loudmouths like Illinois, New York, and California. But now New Mexico, a quieter player, has entered the fray. The New Mexico state legislature is bringing rigor, tactical acumen, and moral imagination to the cause.
Last month, the New Mexico statehouse launched a Truth Commission, chaired by state Representatives Andrea Romero and Marianna Anaya.
Their plan, which won bipartisan support in the majority-female state legislature, is Hague-like in scope: to investigate human rights violations and atrocities carried out in New Mexico by the child rapist Jeffrey Epstein and his many enablers.
A four-person panel is now holding public hearings and conducting private interviews about crimes and cover-ups, using subpoena power and a $2 million budget. A request for proposals from the House of Representatives to law firms that may want a piece of this action went out on March 13.
The physical investigation of Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in Santa Fe County started March 9, and it turned sinister in short order. New Mexico Public Lands Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard proposed that cadaver dogs pore over the state land around Zorro to search for the bodies of girls alleged to be buried there. “The state land was used almost as a buffer, a shield to hide what activity was occurring on the ranch,” she said last month.
From a drone’s-eye view, the ranch looks cadaverous itself. It’s a pale-flesh-colored colonial monstrosity of 28,636 square feet that sits goonishly amid the sagebrush in the high desert, sucking it dry.
Though Epstein bought the land in 1993 from Bruce King, who was then New Mexico’s Democratic governor, his Temu Xanadu, with its helipad, giant pool, firehouse, and private airship, always irritated locals for putting “inordinate burdens on the scenic and water resources of our region,” as a local journalist wrote in 1999.
Nationally, the face of the Truth Commission’s investigation is New Mexico Representative Melanie Stansbury, who as a member of Congress has had a look at the unredacted files. “I spent a fair amount of my time this morning looking at the files on Zorro Ranch,” she told reporters last month. “There aren’t words to describe what are in those files.” Stansbury has repeatedly emphasized to the press that “both girls and boys” were abused at the ranch.
On Thursday, after sitting through Attorney General Pam Bondi’s evasions in a closed-door “fake hearing,” Stansbury reported on social media: “If anyone wondered whether there is a coverup, there is a coverup happening in the Department of Justice and in the White House.”
Stansbury has 1.2 million followers on TikTok alone. (For comparison, Connecticut Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who is also outspoken on the Epstein affair, has 125,000.) Comments on Stansbury’s videos are effusive. “Ma’am, thank you,” read a recent one. “I’m from Florida and follow you for the truth.”
New Mexico’s Truth Commission is clearly ambitious. But what does conducting an investigation of a local crime scene have to do with defying federal overreach?
That is the real motivation for these New Mexico lawmakers. Back in 2019, when Epstein was arrested and charged with sex trafficking of minors, the state geared up for a probe into his activities in the region. Girls and women, after all, had alleged for decades that Epstein groomed, abused, or raped them, many as teenagers, at Zorro Ranch. New evidence surfaces all the time that New Mexico was the site of some of Epstein’s gravest misdeeds, not to mention his obscene plan to seed a master race with his own DNA. What’s more, the FBI at the time was investigating all of Epstein’s global houses of horror: properties in France, the Virgin Islands, New York, and Florida.
But before the New Mexico investigation could even take its first step, the feds stopped it in its tracks. The then New Mexico attorney general said in 2019 that federal prosecutors in New York told him they were running a complex, multi-jurisdictional investigation, and New Mexico should just back off.
And thus seven years have passed without Epstein’s ranch being so much as dusted for fingerprints. Zorro has also changed hands. Whatever evidence was there at the time of Epstein’s 2019 death in prison has likely been Lysoled away and hauled off in GOT-JUNK trucks.
How could criminals manage to get officials to let their radioactive crime scene devolve into tumbleweeds? Through the usual trick of the Trump-Epstein class: Butter everyone up. In this case, Epstein sucked up to the most powerful men in the state with his trademark mix of money and “massages.”
Epstein was especially close to Bill Richardson, a Cabinet secretary under President Clinton and governor of New Mexico from 2003 to 2011. Richardson regularly visited Zorro Ranch for sex, according to Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre. Or, rather, as she clarified in a 2016 deposition, Richardson came for “massages,” which, she said, “means sex.”
Like Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Richardson, who died at 75 in 2023, just after evidence emerged that connected him closely to Epstein, denied ever meeting Giuffre. He also denied being friends with Epstein, though documents have since revealed otherwise. (Richardson, the author of How to Sweet-Talk a Shark, was known for canny diplomacy.)
In 1993, King, who served three nonconsecutive terms as New Mexico governor between 1971 and 1995, sold Epstein the tract of land in Stanley on which he built his ranch. Epstein had the mansion built later in the 1990s, and the King family still owns the land around it.
King died in 2009, but his son Gary, who served as New Mexico attorney general from 2006 to 2014, was even closer to Epstein. When Gary King was running for governor in 2014, he took money from the child rapist via a rat’s nest of secret shell companies.
During the failed 2014 campaign, King and his running mate, Deb Haaland (later secretary of the interior), also took one of Epstein’s jets to fundraising events in Washington, D.C. King long maintained that he didn’t know the source of the plane, but an email sent to Epstein on August 21, 2014, says that Gary King “wanted to speak to you about possibly using your plane to get him from Sante Fe evening of Sept 8th (around 8pm) so he could make a breakfast in DC on Sept 9th.”
Several members of the powerful King family show up in Epstein’s so-called little black book.
Whatever the Truth Commission turns up, the formation of such a boldly conceived investigation right now, while Donald Trump is back in the White House and obfuscating about Epstein, comes not a moment too soon.
Though always imperfect, truth and reconciliation commissions on human rights abuses—notably, the ones launched in South Africa on apartheid in 1996, and in Canada on Indian residential schools in 2008—change the record. Such commissions foreclose historical denialism and are the minimal act of compensation that a government must provide witnesses, victims, and survivors of state-abetted violations of human rights.
The investigation in New Mexico says what no one else has: that the American people deserve a candid audit of the catastrophic injustices of the age of Trump. It’s early days, but read the brief. The Truth Commission asks New Mexicans, and all of us, to raise our expectations and imagine the possibility, post-Trump, of contrition, justice, and even reparations.
