I love this one.  It is such obvious bullshit.  

This is code for the powerful and the monied are to be protected.  Or protect law enforcement and/or dirty prosecutors. This is code for “I want to keep my job.”  This is code for “I like to keep my head down.”  This is code for we have decided the truth is too much for us to deal with and for you to consider.  This is code for there is nothing we can do anyway.  This is code for settle-down civilians, we know better than you do.  It is essentially an unspoken agreement that we will all look away and never speak of it again.  

What “too big to tell” means in sex crimes cases, especially cases involving sex rings and rape of minors, is that the perpetrators are wealthy, powerful, high-ranking executives at big companies, politicians, big thinkers, celebrities, attorneys, judges, cops.  The Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America used to think their “stories” were too big to be told.  Not any more.  The same needs to happen with sex rings catering to pedophiles at any income level.

“Too big to be told” involving big fish in politics and industry criming in mutually protective packs allows pedophile and CSAM rings from corporate offices like General Motors back in the day to go unchecked and unpunished.  It allows the rapists, the organizers and the photographers to threaten victims and their parents.  It silences those that survive.

It allows the boys’ “nature camp” at N. Fox Island to operate in plain sight in the 1960s and 1970s and the sick client list of wealthy pedophile and CSAM producer Frank Shelden to expand exponentially.  Too big to be told.  We can’t/won’t extradite Shelden, or touch his clients, so fuck it.  No one needs to think about this.  

It’s too big to be told, so allegations of sexual abuse by former faculty members at wealthy institutions like Interlochen Arts Academy (Grand Traverse County, MI) and Cranbrook Schools (Bloomfield Hills, MI) take decades to surface, long after perpetrators should have been identified, stopped, investigated and charged.  

These stories are too big to tell, so of course we get another version.  We get Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and the monied and powerful “clients” who are happy to get in on the sex crimes game in Manhattan, West Palm Beach, outside Santa Fe, and on Little St. James Island as long as their identity can be kept secret from the public–and their wives.  

The biggest “too big to be told” myth is that of the OCCK crimes and the ensuing investigations. Yet it has been told. In Guarded by Jackals. See also https://guardedbyjackals.wordpress.com/. And it was essentially told in a fictionalized versions in the first season of True Detective (group killings) and in the book The Alienist and the movie it is based on (a sole killer with occult-type/religious impulses).

Some stories are complex and therefore harder to tell.  But stories about pedophile rings and CSAM rings really aren’t that complex if you start by  believing the survivors.   The rich and powerful not only engage in these crimes, they are often protected from any exposure or arrest, even as they threaten victims and their families.  Their tentacles can be followed if someone cares enough to do it.

I post a lot of news stories and links about “lone” sex offender criminals, many of them from the State of Michigan, where the OCCK cases remain an open but untreated wound.  Men like this (and let’s face it, the vast majority of them, Ghislaine Maxwell to the contrary, are male) are arrested with fair frequency these days given greater societal awareness and computer crimes investigations by state and federal law enforcement.

But a pedophile ring involving rich/powerful participants from around the world?  An actual investigation into the criminals who can afford big criminal defense teams, file defamation actions right and left and who have numerous enablers and security?  Maxwell was tried, convicted, sentenced to 20 years for her participation in human trafficking and sexual abuse and then . . . moved to a Club Fed where sex offenders are not even permitted and probably preparatory to a pardon or commutation when the time is right. Someone has yet again decided that Epstein’s sick story is too big to tell.  

House Speaker Mike Johnson:  Yield, man.  Release the Epstein files and protect the survivors.  Quit protecting the predators.  We know they contribute to political campaigns and that y’all love the dough.  The story is an old one and it is certainly not too big to tell.  The FBI informant story was a laughable first draft.  Try again.

These stories do not age well and always carry the footnotes of enablers and people who looked the other way. These predatory/pack animal sex crimes will continue flourishing until the men who had sex with minors in the Epstein ring are named and charged.  Until these types fear the exposure and treatment that the average-income “lone” pedophile faces upon arrest, the Epstein-N. Fox-GM child sex/CSAM ring-OCCK crimes infection will continue to spread across the decades, swallowing up and silencing victims as they always have.

Enough. 

From a reader:

Hi Cathy,

I just read that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that the number of on-line enticement reports to its Cyber Tipline is nearly twice what it was at this time last year–that amounts to a staggering 518,720 reports.  As if that is not concerning enough, the number of reports of sadistic on-line enticement has also doubled, from 508 last year to 1,093 this year.   

One of those latter reports names James Richard Ess, 43, of Jackson, MI.  He had been contacting minor girls via social media in a number of states, allegedly offering them some guidance with personal problems.  Once he had sufficiently groomed them, he asked them for sexually explicit photos, and also told at least some of them to cut and or bruise themselves and send photos of those self-inflicted injuries as well.  He demanded that some of the girls draw symbols on their bodies with markers to prove that they were now his “owned and marked property.”

Ess is now facing multiple federal charges for sexual exploitation, receipt and possession of child abusive material, and coercion and enticement of minors. 

In the late 1970s, Lansing, Meridian Twp., and Grand Ledge, had their own sadistic enticer, but he used the phone.  In 1979 a man calling himself ”Dr. Stevenson” was apparently randomly calling telephone numbers.  When a young child answered, he identified himself as a “school doctor” and told the child that he or she could not return to school unless he was able to conduct an over-the-phone exam.  He would then ask the child to disrobe and describe his or her body.  He also encouraged the children to harm themselves—boys were told to cut their penises, girls to inset things into their vaginas.  He asked them to describe the self-injury, and the pain.

The calls continued over 1979.  The caller was cool, calm, articulate.  He seemed to have a slight preference for boys because if a girl answered the phone he would ask if she had any young brothers he could talk to.   Six separate incidents were reported to police.  The victims ranged in age from 6 to 9.  Several of the children engaged in self-injury; a couple of them seriously hurt themselves. 

To the best of my knowledge, the caller was never identified, let alone arrested.  So, I guess if there’s a moral to the story it’s that the internet did not create these predators, it just made it easier for them to get their desired results.        

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2025/09/15/feds-charge-jackson-man-exploiting-children-child-porn-possession/86161424007

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2025/09/15/michigan-man-accused-of-telling-children-to-self-harm-draw-symbols-on-body

https://www.wilx.com/2025/04/25/jackson-man-charged-with-sex-related-crimes-against-child

Lansing State Journal, Dec 21, 1979, p. 15.

Lansing State Journal, Feb 16, 1978, pp 1, 2.

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