The Chair of the Epstein Truth Commission Won't Return My Calls But *Will* Email My Readers to Talk Shit About Me. So Let's Talk, Representative Romero. My Turn.
For months, I have been reporting on the New Mexico Legislature’s Epstein Truth Commission — a body created by unanimous House vote to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s operations at Zorro Ranch, his 7,600-acre property in Santa Fe County, and the state and local officials who looked the other way while children were trafficked and abused there. The commission has subpoena power, a $2 million budget drawn from bank settlement funds, and a mandate to deliver findings by the end of 2026.
Representative Andrea Romero of Santa Fe sponsors the commission and serves as its chair.
I want to be clear about how this reporting began, because Representative Romero’s email to my reader distorts it. I did not begin this work as an adversary of the commission. I began it as a believer. I reached out regularly and in good faith, primarily through Representative Marianna Anaya, because I believed this commission represented something real — a genuine reckoning, long overdue, with what happened to children at Zorro Ranch and who enabled it. I shared my findings. I asked questions. I tried to help.
Then I discovered the procurement conflicts surrounding the commission’s selection of legal counsel. I brought those conflicts to the commission’s attention directly. Representative Anaya told me the commission saw no conflict of interest with procurement officer Gerardo Paredes. I sent my findings to the New Mexico Department of Justice. Every email went unanswered.
That is when I understood what this commission actually is.
It is not a truth commission. It is a public relations operation — damage control for the establishment Democrats in New Mexico who spent years in proximity to Jeffrey Epstein and his network, who took his money, attended his events, and looked the other way. From Representative Romero herself, to the Odessa, Texas personal injury firm that just received nearly forty percent of the commission’s entire budget — a firm whose founders maxed out their donations to Bill Richardson while Epstein was running children through Zorro Ranch — the entire enterprise is designed not to find the truth but to perform the search for it while protecting the people who need protecting.
I did not choose this fight. The commission’s own conduct left me no alternative.
Representative Romero will not return my calls. She will compose careful, polished paragraphs for a constituent’s inbox. She will invoke Benjamin Franklin and the survivors she serves. She will not, however, name a single inaccuracy in my reporting — because she cannot.
This morning, a reader named Jerry Graves forwarded me the response Representative Romero sent him after he emailed her a link to my work. I am reprinting it here in full.
From: Andrea Romero andrea@andrearomero.com Date: Tuesday, May 12, 2026, 4:53 PM To: Jerry Graves Subject: Re:
Thank you for your email, Jerry.
Benjamin Franklin once observed that those who are hardest at work rarely have time to speak ill of others — and that the best response to a lie is simply a life well-lived in pursuit of truth.
I have not publicly acknowledged these blog posts, and I want to be transparent with you about why: they contain so many factual inaccuracies that a full accounting would consume the very time and energy that belongs to the survivors and families this commission exists to serve. To chase every false claim would be to let the distraction succeed.
I want to be clear — the folks that make up the Truth Commission are not a club, nor are the real people who live in our community that surrounds it. We are not representing elites. We’re a formal body of public servants who answer to the people of New Mexico, with a public record, public hearings, and a public mandate. Any suggestion that we are choosing which truths to uncover misreads both our charge and our character. Our choice to engage in community around these issues helps continue to bring awareness to the need to bring justice to the survivors. Our community is finally drawing in awareness of the stories that have gone untold for over 26 years.
What I find genuinely troubling is this: at the very moment survivors are finally being heard, someone has chosen to train her fire not on the predators, not on the systems of power that protected them, but on the people trying to dismantle those systems and demand justice where the systems have failed. That choice speaks for itself.
If Ms. Valdes-Rodriguez has evidence of wrongdoing, the commission’s doors are open. If she has allegations worth investigating, she knows where to send them. What we will not do is be pulled from our work by attacks designed to muddy the water rather than clear it.
The truth is not comfortable. We know that. We are not looking for comfortable truths — we are looking for all of them. That work continues.
With respect and resolve, Andrea
My response follows:
Dear Representative Romero,
A reader forwarded me your email. Thank you for putting it in writing.
You opened with Benjamin Franklin. Charming. A Founding Father who famously valued truth — invoked by a sitting legislator to characterize documented, sourced investigative journalism as lies, without citing a single inaccuracy. Ben Franklin also said that an investment in knowledge pays the best interest. You might want to reconsider your returns.
Let me be super clear about what you just tried to do. You told a constituent that my reporting contains “so many factual inaccuracies” that correcting them would waste resources. I am surprised you’re concerned about wasting resources at all, Representative Romero, given that an audit once found more than $50,000 in improper expenditures on your watch — including a dinner tab with a whiskey order you billed to the public — and that when the coalition asked you to repay $8,000 of it, you simply didn’t. But do go on. You described THE PUGILIST — a Substack publication that has reached number one rising in the world for US politics rankings and currently sits in the top ten, alongside Heather Cox Richardson, Paul Krugman, Adam Kinzinger, and Don Lemon, with more readers than the Santa Fe New Mexican, your hometown paper — as “blog posts.” You said this without naming one inaccuracy. Not one. Because you cannot.
What you actually meant is that my reporting is inconvenient — for you. There is a difference between something being inaccurate and something being inconvenient, at least to those of us who are not politicians. I understand the confusion for you, however.
You wrote that you “have not publicly acknowledged these blog posts.” Representative Romero, you just publicly acknowledged them. In writing. To a constituent. Who forwarded the email to me. That is, by definition, public acknowledgment. Welcome to the record.
Now, since you raised the subject of inaccuracies: let’s discuss yours.
ON THE MATTER OF YOUR BIOGRAPHY
Before your election to the New Mexico Legislature, you served as executive director of the Regional Coalition of LANL Communities — a public agency — under a contract paying approximately $140,000 per year. Your job, in plain language, was to advocate for Los Alamos National Laboratory’s funding and community relationships. Nuclear watchdogs described the coalition not as a lab watchdog (which many assumed, given its name) but as a cheerleader for the billions of federal dollars LANL brings into the state. You weakened a 2016 nuclear cleanup consent order by supporting the removal of hard deadlines and penalties for insufficient cleanup work. Communities downwind of one of the most contaminated nuclear sites in America got less accountability. Those communities were overwhelmingly Hispano and Indigenous and poor. You, though? You got a paycheck.
Then there was the audit.
A 2018 audit found you had submitted a $1,850 dinner bill — including $380 in alcohol — to Los Alamos County for reimbursement, in direct violation of your organization’s own travel policies, which expressly prohibited alcohol as a reimbursable expense. A broader audit covering your full tenure found more than $50,000 in improper payments to you, board members, and other parties. The coalition asked you to repay $8,000. You declined. The organization subsequently collapsed — it could not keep an executive director after your flaming crash of an exit, and member governments withdrew one by one.
You then ran for the legislature. You scrubbed the RCLC role from your public biography. You kept the phone number — a Google Voice line listed as your official contact on both your campaign website and the New Mexico Legislature’s official member directory. A Google Voice number. For a sitting state legislator. Chair of the Epstein Truth Commission. That’s less professional than a glittery MySpace blog. Plus unicorns.
ON THE MATTER OF THE COMMISSION YOU CHAIR
You chair a commission that just awarded $750,000 — thirty-seven and a half percent of its entire $2 million budget — to an Odessa, Texas, personal injury firm that has an office in Albuquerque. Your press releases described them as an Albuquerque law firm, but that’s not exactly true, is it? It took me all of ten minutes to find out that the founding partners of that firm donated the maximum legal amount to Governor Bill Richardson while Epstein was actively operating Zorro Ranch. Richardson was later named as an abuser in the federal Epstein files. The firm’s lead investigator previously sat on the board of the same political action committee that donated to the campaigns of the two Democratic legislators who voted to hire it. One of those legislators is you. Amiright?
You call this serving survivors. I call it a documented procurement conflict. These are not the same thing, and the survivors you love to trot out as a sheild against your corruption deserve better than to have their justice administered by the people who helped themselves to their budget then used that budget to hire pals of one of their abusers.
You tell me the commission’s doors are open and that I know where to send information. I do know, Representative Romero. I sent it. I sent it to you, through Representative Anaya, who told me the commission saw no conflict of interest with Gerardo Paredes. I sent it to the New Mexico Department of Justice, too. Every email I sent went unanswered. The door you are gesturing toward is a wall with a mail slot. I have used it. Nothing came back. Tsk.
ON THE MATTER OF WHERE I AM AIMING AND WHY
Representative Romero, you say in your letter to my reader that I have trained my fire on the wrong targets — that I should be focused on the predators rather than the commission. It is a rhetorically elegant dodge, exactly what I’d expect from you, but sadly for you it reveals exactly what this commission is designed to avoid.
Focusing only on individual predators — on the lurid details of what was done to specific victims in specific rooms — is not justice. It is spectacle. It answers the question of what while deliberately avoiding the questions that matter: why did this happen, who protected it, and what was it for.
I have answers to those questions. But you probably will not like them.
Jeffrey Epstein was not simply a wealthy eccentric predator with unusual appetites and depraved friends. He, like Ghislaine Maxwell, was an intelligence asset operating at the intersection of nuclear technology, transnational capital, and blackmail infrastructure — and Zorro Ranch was not chosen by accident. It sits in the shadow of the very national laboratories that define New Mexico’s relationship to American military and intelligence power. Los Alamos. Sandia. The same institutions that you, Representative Romero, spent three years and $140,000 a year cheerleading for, weakening cleanup accountability for, and billing whiskey tabs to. The same labs Ghislaine’s dad Robert infiltrated with backdoored PROMIS software in the 1980s. You say this sort of thing is not important enough to waste resources on, and yet someone in the Maxwell-Epstein orbit thought it was important enough to make sure the last reporter to speak about it this openly, Danny Casolaro, ended up dead in a hotel bathtub, somehow having managed to slash both his own wrists deeply enough to sever the tendons. Compared to that, I suppose being called a blogger isn’t so bad.
Your commission only ever asks what happened to the victims. Trots them out to cry again for the cameras. Yet you never ask what Maxwell and Epstein’s operation was for. When a constituent suggests you do ask that, you reply by saying it’s not worth the resources. Be honest, Representative Romero. You will never ask who in this state’s political and intelligence infrastructure enabled a known kompromat blackmail operation to run for decades within driving distance of the most sensitive nuclear facilities in the Western Hemisphere, next door to Henry Singleton’s ranch, bestowing gift after gift to The Santa Fe Institute and its scientists. And you won’t ask those questions because you and the people who pay for your fundraisers are not prepared to live with what the answers might make the public think about, well (gestures broadly at the New Mexico government) all of this.
So. You might not ask why, or for whom, or toward what end these crimes were committed and covered up by the powerful people of this state.
But I am. I’m asking those questions. And so are your constituents. The public relations crisis strategy of blaming the literal messenger is cute, but it won’t work. In fact, it’s already backfiring.
That is the difference between journalism and public relations, Representative Romero — and between THE PUGILIST and… Well, and whatever this commission is doing with its $2 million, nearly half of which has already been spent rewarding a Texas law firm whose leaders facilitated a PAC’s donations to your campaign.
Twice.
ON THE MATTER OF MY JOURNALISM — AND YOUR DEFINITION OF “BLOGGER”
I got my master’s in journalism at Columbia University. I have 37 years of professional experience and a master’s degree in journalism. I spent thirteen years as a staff writer at two of the most respected newspapers in the United States — the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. I hold three Pulitzer nominations and an Emmy Award for public service journalism. My debut novel landed on the New York Times bestseller list its first day out, and landed me on the cover of Time magazine as one of the 25 Most Influential Hispanics in America, alongside Bill Richardson. I have more than 1 million books in print in 11 languages around the world, and 16 published books.
THE PUGILIST, my independent journalistic newsletter, has reached number one in world politics rankings on Substack in the past month, and currently sits in the top ten US political newsletters globally, alongside Heather Cox Richardson, Paul Krugman, Adam Kinzinger, Don Lemon, and Andy Borowitz.
Those are my fellow “bloggers,” Representative Romero. For additional context: THE PUGILIST’s readership exceeds that of every newspaper in the state of New Mexico. That is the scale of the platform your publicist told you and your entire camp to start dismissing as a blog. The fact that I have now heard this same talking point twice in a single day from two separate directions tells me exactly how worried your and your network are, about me. No. Not about me. About the truth.
People do not deploy patronizing talking points about work they consider irrelevant.
Politicians deploy patronizing talking points about journalism that is accurate, documented, and reaching an audience large enough to threaten their carefully crafted lies.
You have not identified one inaccuracy in my reporting — though I will say, someone told me your were no longer married to the banker. If that’s so, my bad. I tried to ask you. You did not reply. And you’ve scrubbed the internet of everything about your personal life — as one does, when one has…what? Everything to hide, I suppose.
You did not list a single inaccuracy in my reporting in your email to my reader, because the record I have built is sourced, precise, and correct — and you know it.
And it scares the shit out of you.
As it should.
My inbox remains open. newstipsalisa@proton.me. Name one inaccuracy. I will wait.
With considerably more documentation than you apparently expected,
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez Publisher, THE PUGILIST
What an amazing badass you are.
Excellent response to Representative Romero. She does not represent the people; she represents the power faction she is part of. Keep it up Alisa, you're getting a lot of well-deserved attention.