Indy’s Epstein Island

Friends and Constituents,

What a week in local politics.

Councilor Crista Carlino left the Democratic caucus after being forced to publicly apologize to Council leadership and relinquish her committee leadership positions.

After Carlino called for leadership changes over the obviously bungled Fisher Phillips investigation process, Democratic caucus leaders threatened her with expulsion unless she publicly ate crow, denounced her own statements, and stepped down from her committee chair assignments.

Despite Carlino’s humbling of herself, Council Vice President and Democratic caucus member Ali Brown proceeded to publicly bully Carlino, describing her as “an Instagram politician” and a “terrible” committee leader who “fails and fails and fails,” even suggesting that Carlino’s principled criticism of Council leadership was motivated by racism, sexism and fatphobia directed towards Council leadership.

Carlino arrived at the Monday, July 7th caucus meeting seeking an apology or accountability for Ali Brown’s vicious public attacks but received no support from caucus members. Instead, the caucus initiated a binding vote on the question of Council leadership, leading Carlino to walk out of the caucus meeting and announce her departure from the Democratic caucus.

Side note: are we seeing the hypocrisy here? When I called my colleagues to task over their clandestine support for charter schools, Osili, Ali Brown, and Lewis had no hesitation in bringing a motion for my expulsion. Yet Ali Brown’s vitriolic attacks against another Democratic councilor have been tacitly endorsed by the Democratic caucus remainder, and Carlino, not Ali Brown, has been forced from the caucus.

Before Monday’s Council meeting, Council leadership shored up support from the remaining Democratic caucus members.

Just prior to Monday's full council meeting, Leader Lewis asked the caucus for a binding vote on a motion to support Vop Osili as President and Ali Brown as Vice President if and when the issue of removal came before the City-County Council.

Votes are very rarely taken in Democratic caucus meetings, let alone binding votes, which compel Democratic councilors to publicly adhere to a caucus position, regardless of their personal conscience or their constituent views. (For example, in the year and one month that I spent in the Democratic caucus, I can only recall two times we ever voted on any issue, and both of those were on the question of my expulsion.)

A binding vote of the Democratic caucus forces caucus members to publicly support a caucus position under the threat of discipline and/or expulsion.

We do not know if the Democratic caucus ultimately voted to protect President Osili and Vice President Ali Brown from removal, but there is strong evidence to suggest it did. Carlino and myself were the only Democratic councilors to vote for Osili and Ali Brown’s removal from leadership positions, despite public discontent with Council leadership.

Keith Graves became embroiled in his own sexual abuse scandal.

Just a few days later, allegations of abuse against Councilor Keith Graves became public. An IndyStar article reported on allegations from two different women. Let me be clear, these women are telling the truth. They have produced photographs, text messages, call logs, and CashApp receipts that support their claims. I have personally spoken with both of Graves’ accusers, and their accounts are consistent and credible. Meanwhile, Graves has made inconsistent statements, first claiming that his relationship with the named accuser ended in 2021, later admitting it lasted until at least 2022.

So far, Council leadership's response has been disjointed and confused. President Osili has at once claimed that the Council has no authority to investigate the abuse allegations, while also insisting that they will be investigated under “due process.” Leader Lewis also claimed an investigation would be underway, without explaining how such a process would occur. No Councilor has publicly called for changes to the Code of Ethics that would prohibit sexual abuse by elected officials, and no Democratic party official has commented on the allegations.

This is neither the first, nor will it be the last, sexual abuse scandal in Indianapolis politics. Lobbyists, aides, pages, legislative assistants, staff people, and young people first getting involved in politics privately have long been sharing horror stories about the sexually inappropriate, abusive, and exploitative culture in local politics - like our own local version of Epstein Island.

“For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again,” -Donald Trump on Truth Social, July 12, 2025

Donald Trump has been in hot water after flipping on a campaign promise to release information about his old friend Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump’s administration claimed they found no client list or evidence that Epstein had used blackmail, and claimed that Epstein definitely killed himself (though the footage they released to substantiate those claims had been doctored).

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see the evidence of blackmail. With or without an explicit quid pro quo, Epstein’s tactics are clear.

The strategy can be summed up in four points.

1. He used his money and power to obtain an endless supply of fresh young people to rape and sexually exploit.

2. He attracted rich and powerful people into his circle, invited them to participate in sexual crimes, and documented their participation.

3. He used the complicity of powerful people as a shield for himself. Even after many abuse survivors spoke out against him, many powerful people continued to support him silently.

4. As a result, justice was slow and his behavior was not deterred. Most of Epstein’s collaborators have not been brought to justice, and odds are that many of them never will.

As we are now seeing, Indianapolis Democratic party politics operates according to a sickeningly familiar playbook.

1. For abusers, party politics delivers an endless supply of fresh young people ripe for sexual exploitation.

Thanks to the cyclical nature of electoral politics and the youthful tendency towards idealism and change, there will always be an influx of young people in politics, whether they are party volunteers or government staffers. Abusers take advantage of their proximity to young people.

I find it telling that Keith Graves’ named accuser was a young Democratic volunteer when she met Graves through Democratic party politics; that Thomas Cook’s accusers were both early-career rising stars in the party when they were groomed and abused by Cook; and that former Council Vice President Zach Adamson faced rape allegations from a young campaign volunteer. (Those charges were eventually dropped.)

Political insiders know that there is even more scandal waiting to be reported. Individuals in both parties have admitted to me that they would never allow their daughters or grandchildren to work in the Statehouse, where sexual abuse is incredibly pervasive.

We will likely never know how many how many good public servants, promising young people, and good Democrats have left the politics because of sexual abuse. For sexual abusers at the top of party leadership, there are always more young, enthusiastic volunteers to exploit. For victims and survivors, lives, careers, and mental health are ruined. For the public, problems go unaddressed, and corruption endures.

2. There is widespread participation in sexual abuse.

As demonstrated by the Epstein case, sexual abusers surround themselves and encourage others to sexually abuse as a tactic to protect themselves and silence victims.

For all of its flaws, even the Fisher Phillips’s report rightly describes the Hogsett administration as rife with “professionally inappropriate workplace conduct” operating “more of a fraternity … than emblematic of a business setting,”

IndyStar reported that Hogsett and right-hand-man Cook had engaged in the same boundary-crossing behavior: both sending late-night texts to women subordinates, using poetry as an inroad to unprofessional conversations. This inappropriate behavior didn’t end with Hogsett and Cook: local media has reported on other high-ranking Hogsett staffers fired for sexual misconduct, and more claims are still being investigated.

For powerful powerful people, surrounding themselves with known abusers is insurance. If everyone's guilty, no one can tell.

3. Powerful abusers use blackmail and kompromat in order to control would-be whistleblowers.

Corrupt leaders thrive when they surround themselves with compromised people. Compromised individuals have a strong incentive to bury stories, and not only the ones in which they themselves are implicated. This manifests as refusing to comment, stifling investigation, calling for “due process” in what are fundamentally political (i.e., not legal) issues, and casting aspersions on accusers.

As I’ve previously described, kompramat enables leadership to smear and discredit those that oppose them Take, for instance, Vop Osili's rise to power after a survivor went public with abuse allegations against former Council President Stephen Clay, or just recently, when Crista Carlino was goaded into admitting to a friendship with a Hogsett administration staffer who was fired for sex harassment.

On the flip side: abusers very much don’t want non-compromised people in positions of power precisely because they cannot be controlled.

Before I even took office, President Osili and Leader Lewis threatened not to seat me with the Democrats because I was not endorsed by the party establishment. They didn't succeed, not only because there was nothing there, but because I don’t rely on big donors, I insist on total transparency with my constituents, and I’m held accountable as a member of a mass movement for democratic socialism.

Similarly, when my comrade Zohran Mamdani, now the Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City, first called on Andrew Cuomo to resign over his abuses, Cuomo’s team leapt into action, trying to find ways to discredit or silence legislators who were calling for accountability. A text message sent by Cuomo’s secretary described the problem for Cuomo perfectly: “Zohan [sp] is DSA so we don’t have play there.” In other words, Zohran couldn't be played because his commitments and power came from his politics, not party leaders.

The lesson here is not that all politicians are sick or that we can’t have a government and party free of sexual abuse. The point is that the system selects for abusers and compromised individuals so that the people in power can stay in control. We can change the way politics works in this city - but only by taking a systemic approach, and only with a mass movement that refuses to put the feelings and careers of powerful individuals above the needs of our constituents.

4. Is justice possible?

Despite two different IBJ editorials and four Councilors calling for the Mayor’s resignation, Joe Hogsett is staying the course.

So did Joe Biden until the day he stepped down as a candidate.

Just as Donald Trump and all of Jeffrey Epstein’s other protectors and defenders have tried and failed to kill that story of abuse, the local Indianapolis Epstein Island will continue to poison our politics and rot out our institutions until it’s shut down for good.

Here, as there, justice is delayed, but justice is coming. Stay tuned for my next newsletter, where we will talk about what it looks like and how we as a city can get there from here.

In love and solidarity,

Jesse

PS - I hate including fundraising links in my emails, but as I take on powerful enemies within the political establishment, I guarantee a heavily-funded primary challenger in 2027.

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