Tag: Pizzagate

Did Jeffrey Epstein eat babies?

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“Get your hand off my knee and get me, uh, my lunch!

What’s leading the news? Wars roiling the globe? Economic dislocations? Warnings about possible new and very nasty pandemics?

No. All anyone seems to want to talk about is Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier and convicted sex offender, and the millions of pages of documents and photos that are being released (the latest and final batch on January 30) by the US Department of Justice in a hodgepodge of verified or dubious forms, some heavily redacted.

Claims are now circulating online that Jeffrey Epstein engaged in cannibalism or, to be more precise, “ate babies”.

One document, cited by online users, contains allegations that babies were dismembered and their remains consumed. The same document makes a reference to “George Bush 1”. However, the claims have not been substantiated, and their origins remain obscure.

Babies are the first choice of predators and scavengers like humans, because they are easier to catch and their meat more tender. Think of how “lamb” or “veal” sell at a premium to “mutton” or “beef”, how “suckling” pigs are a delicacy, or how so-called “broiler” chickens are killed and eaten at six to seven weeks old. As Curtis says in the movie Snowpiercer:

Some have even suggested, satirically, that eating babies would be a good thing for the environment.

The allegations have been further amplified by the resurfacing of a video from 2009 featuring Gabriela Rico Jimenez, recorded in Mexico. In the clip, Jimenez alleged that she attended a private gathering of wealthy individuals where she witnessed cannibalism.

This story was covered by this blog some months ago, when it last made the rounds due to an exposé on a podcast called Mexico Explained. The blog about her is linked here.

Interest in Jiménez’s case has now surged again, after newly released Epstein documents referenced a party on a yacht and included allegations involving extreme behaviour. One email allegedly sent from Epstein’s known email address read:

“Where are you? Are you okay? I loved the torture video.”

These references, revealed as part of the January 2026 document release, sparked widespread public concern and renewed online theories linking Epstein’s network to past claims made by Jiménez. The material has led many online to speculate on connections between the Epstein files and Jiménez’s 2009 accusations. While no new verified information has emerged about Gabriela Rico Jiménez’s whereabouts or fate, the mystery surrounding her disappearance continues to enthral internet users worldwide. However, there is a dearth of concrete evidence linking her allegations to Epstein.

Social media users have drawn further conclusions from unrelated material, including an image (heavily redacted) that they claim emerged from the Epstein files showing a baby among chicken corpses. Observers have noted that the photograph was actually an art work from 2003 by a German artist named Harald Seiwert, used in vegetarian campaigns.

Why cover it up? Well, maybe because it was showing a guy’s hairy bum. Here’s the original:

Several posts on X have promoted conspiracy theories in response to the files. Others are circulating (again) a long-debunked image, clearly a deepfake which first appeared in 2023, purporting to show Epstein with young boys from a rap duo called “Island Boys”, Alexander (Alex) and Franklyn (Franky) Venegas. Some are even claiming the twins are Epstein’s children. However, Snopes rated the claim false in January 2026, Reuters found no supporting evidence, and the Island Boys themselves denied ever meeting Epstein in a 2023 statement to TMZ.

Still, a bit of evidence (or lack thereof) should not spoil a good story. One user wrote:

“These scumbags ate children. Some documents state that they conducted rituals on a yacht and consumed the fetus; they even compared its taste to cheese. They are messengers of the devil in their purest form.”

Another claimed:

“Jeffrey Epstein emails with the gruesome subject ‘Slicing a Pizza’ probably means that Pizza-Gate is most certainly real. Sadly Conspiracy Confirmed.”

The Pizzagate theory — since widely debunked —was a conspiracy theory that exploded online during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, alleging that a child sex-trafficking ring involving prominent Democratic officials was being run out of a Washington pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong, interpreting food-related terms as code words. Posts suggested that words such as “pizza” or “steak” were code for children. One user alleged that an adoption charity founder asked Epstein if he needed “new steaks” for his island. A text search for the word “pizza” in the Justice Department documents comes up with an astonishing 849 results, most clearly related to Italian cuisine, but someone will no doubt find something there to reignite Pizzagate.

Others invoked comments made by comedian Roseanne Barr in 2024, when she claimed on a television appearance that Hollywood and political elites were “vampires” who drank blood and ate babies.

Note the antisemitic implications in the post above from someone who calls himself “ShavedWallaby”:

“Jeffrey Epstein and all his friends had code words for how they prepared the goyim babies and children to eat.”

“Goyim” is a word from Hebrew, found in the Bible where it means “nations”, particularly those being described in the narrative of wars from over 3,000 years ago: Hittites, Amorites, Jebusites, etc. Since then, its use has evolved to refer, sometimes disparagingly, to Gentiles, or everyone who is not Jewish. Most languages have a sometimes extensive range of words for outsiders; the Roma refer to outsiders as Gadjo, and the Japanese talk about foreigners as Gaijin. The person posting the above is implying that only non-Jewish children are being eaten at these dinner parties. Epstein of course is a Jewish name, although there is absolutely no indication that he adhered to any religious precepts whatsoever, and was certainly not a Zionist according to a tweet to Deepak Chopra revealed in the latest batch of documents from the Justice Department.

Other posters have alleged that they found evidence in the files proving Epstein was involved in “Baal worship”, was a “Mossad agent” or championed “Jewish supremacy,” old conspiracies are being repackaged as new revelations. In fact, the bank account named “Baal” was a scanning failure: the document says “Bank”. Also, for those who have ever looked at a Bible, a lot of it involves God telling the Israelites to avoid any contamination by the idolatrous Baal worshippers.

The reference to Jews eating (non-Jewish) children is, however, very familiar, even in the twenty-first century, and derives from the “blood libels” that caused riots and pogroms for centuries throughout Europe, starting in the twelfth century. Jews, and those accused of being witches, were tortured, exiled or slaughtered due to totally unsubstantiated claims of infant cannibalism, or more precisely the use of infant blood in religious rituals – an accusation that makes no sense when placed against the strict Kosher rules that forbid eating blood of any animal in any form. But such claims do not fade easily, and will often be seen in new forms, such as descriptions of Israeli soldiers deliberately starving, kidnapping or killing Gazan children in a (singularly unsuccessful) attempt to perform genocide. Only the most malicious and vituperative claims now involve cannibalism, and they are usually posted anonymously (I presume the above is a pseudonym since, in Australia, we do not usually shave wallabies).

A protest in Washington, D.C. on November 20 2025 featuring activists dressed as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Donald Trump, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials dining on food and drink meant to resemble organs, skin and blood. The demonstration took place both inside and outside Union Station, the capital’s central train station. The activists deemed it as “Israel’s Friendsgiving Dinner,” with signage behind a long dining table displaying a menu consisting of “starter: Gaza children’s limbs,” “main: stolen organs,” “drink: Gaza’s spilled blood” and “dessert: illegally harvested skin.”

Meanwhile, this image appeared on the campus of San Francisco State University, or perhaps a modernised version of it (this one was from the second intifada). It is classic blood libel: Thomas of Monmouth would be jealous of the modern technology, but would recognise the vilification strategy.

Epstein’s crimes involved a type of cannibalism – the exploitation and abuse of children who were also supplied to other sexual predators. But despite the volume of accusations filling the social media of those with nothing better to do, there is no concrete evidence in the released documents that Epstein or anyone else in his circle of the rich, entitled and depraved engaged in actual consumption of babies. But then, I guess it’s a bit much to expect them to leave proof, or even bones, lying around. Men (and I guess a few women) who see themselves as gods, masters of the universe, happily guzzle all the evidence.

“Embracing cannibalism”? THE NEW YORK TIMES July 2022 (and the backlash)

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I guess it was only a matter of time before cannibalism became part of the culture wars. A light-hearted article in the New York Times July 23 by freelance writer Alex Beggs looked at the undeniable plethora of cannibalism narratives in contemporary movies, TV series, books and news reports, including the TV series Yellowjackets and the recent novel A Certain Hunger by Chelsea Summers, in which a (female) restaurant critic develops a taste for (male) human flesh. The article asserted:

“Turns out, cannibalism has a time and a place. In the pages of some recent stomach-churning books, and on television and film screens, Ms. Summers and others suggest that that time is now.”

Alex Begg has also written for Bon Appétit magazine, making her well qualified to write about food, of whatever provenance. Cooking shows are full of lumps of meat being baked and braised and broiled and smothered in sauces; why not add humans to the livestock list? There certainly are billions of us.

The appearance of cannibalism in secular culture reflects the fading of traditional morality. As Dostoevsky warned in The Brothers Karamazov, without a belief in “immortality” (implying divine judgement), “everything would be lawful, even cannibalism”. Our reflexive distaste for cannibalism (and our fascination with it) comes from the belief that humans are somehow not animals, or animals that have transcended animality – it all comes back to the Biblical statement that we are made in “the image of God”, whatever that means.

Such a belief, with or without support from on high, is called anthropocentrism, or sometimes speciesism, and is maintained by the practice of killing other animals in ever increasing numbers, to prove our superiority. Jacques Derrida called that “carnivorous virility”, but what happens when the lust to kill outruns the limits of anthropocentrism and is instead turned back on fellow humans? We have people who see humans as just another edible species, like Sawney Bean, Sweeney Todd, Albert Fish, Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer and of course Hannibal Lecter. Not all of those were real people, and not all the facts about the real ones are real facts, but one fact remains: humans are animals, and animals are made of meat. When a society reaches a point where the old ethical agreements are disintegrating, it can either forge new ones or dissolve into chaos, war and, yes, cannibalism. At a time when the news is full of pandemics, climate change, famine, school shootings and political turmoil, is it so surprising that cultural representations show us eating each other?

Did I mention culture wars? Those who despise the New York Times (a certain and fairly large section of America apparently) came out with their anti-cannibalism guns blazing (they like guns, love meat, don’t like cannibals – it does seem a little inconsistent.)

Rod Dreher, a senior editor of The American Conservative opined:

“It’s a sign that our culture and civilization has become so decadent, so enamored by sensation, that we actually fetishize eating death…. We now live in a Culture of Death, in which we regard books, television, and film drama about the eating of human beings as pleasurable, as exciting.”

On Twitter, reactions poured in such as that of writer Emmanuel Rincón:

Zack Kanter tweeted 

“A zero sum worldview, irrational fear of overpopulation, and hatred of success will inevitably lead NYT journos to the literal conclusion of ‘eat the rich.’”

Journalist Tom Fitton tweeted

“NY Times, taking a break from promoting the mass killing of the unborn through abortion, promotes cannibalism.”

Others linked the article back to the QAnon mythology of Democrats torturing and eating children (particularly Hillary).

American Thinker said (under the headline “Cannibal Communists Crave Kids”):

“maybe there was more to that Pizzagate conspiracy than I realized!”

Many had clearly not even bothered to read the article:

And a blessedly brief journalist, Sameera Khan, tweeted

“THIS IS SATANISM”

Greg Gutfeld on his high rating Fox talk show (if you haven’t seen him, imagine a fairy waved a wand and turned The Colbert Report into a real boy) took the opportunity to pack every cannibal pun imaginable (“it’s an ATE part series”) into a short segment, as well as several digs at other shows run by Liberals such as Samantha Bee, and their regular target, CNN. Gutfeld accuses comedian Tom Shillue (formerly of The Daily Show!) of thinking he would be delicious, because he is all white meat.

The gist of much of the criticism was that the Liberal elite are trying to normalise cannibalism, as a way to – what? Reduce overpopulation? Feed the hungry? The website Editorials 360 accuses a “globalist cabal” of planning to make us all eat insects and humans, and drink recycled sewage, a fiendish plot “to enslave, denigrate and dehumanize humanity.”

The website TMZ recalled that the movie Soylent Green was set in 2022, which was then fifty years in the future, but is now, well, now. Are we in fact normalising cannibalism, because it is the logical end-point of voracious consumerism?

Soylent Green is a good place to start the analysis of this “normalizing” phenomenon. Even after fifty years, it is still the movie many people name when cannibalism comes up in discussion (as it seems to do quite a lot whenever thecannibalguy is around). The movie [spoiler alert] was set in 2022 New York, which is portrayed as part of a failed state, in which overpopulation and global warming has led to a chronic shortage of food, leading the authorities (secretly) to grind up humans who have died (or agreed to be euthanised) and convert them into nutritious protein crackers called Soylent Green. Setting it in 2022 was a bit pessimistic, but let us remember that the world’s human population has almost doubled since the movie was made fifty years ago, and that CO2 concentration was 330 parts per million in 1973, compared to around 420 now. Are we entering a time when our voracious consumerism will so deplete the planet that, as Cormac McCarthy suggested, the only thing left to eat will be each other?

Chelsea Summers put it in a political context, relating cannibalism to capitalism:

“Cannibalism is about consumption and it’s about burning up from the inside in order to exist.”

The magazine Evie, which describes itself as “the sister you never had” explains the extraordinary growth of interest in cannibalism stories by referring to the quasi-religious conceits of anthropocentrism:

“Cannibalism is the extreme conclusion of the idea that humans – and their bodies – do not have inherent value that demands respect. American society has been traveling down this philosophical road for a while. It started with legalizing abortion: After Roe v. Wade in 1973, any baby born or killed was just a “choice” at the mercy of their parents. They were not recognized as having inherent value with rights to their body or their life. More recently were the mandatory lockdowns, mask wearing, and vaccinations for Covid-19. Again, a lack of respect for human bodies and for our ability to make decisions for ourselves occurred. The encroachment on human dignity could potentially continue to progress into cannibalism – where the bodies of others have no inherent meaning, value, or sacredness that separates them from the animals we do rightfully and naturally eat.”

Lots of problems with that explanation, not least no attempt to explain the “inherent value” of humans or the assumption that we can eat other animals “rightfully and naturally.” But it is a pretty good summation of the unexamined assumptions at the heart of most writings on cannibalism, or carnivorism, or vivisection, or hunting – the idea that humans are somehow more than animals, and less than edible, while every other species on the planet is stripped of all moral value.

However, talking about cannibalism can put people off the slaughter treadmill altogether. When fact checkers came to ask Chelsea Summers about the way the book’s anti-heroine gastronomically prepares her murdered lovers, their questions about the intricacies of human butchery so disturbed her that she went “full raw vegan for two weeks.” Tobe Hooper gave up meat while making The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, saying “the heart of the film was about meat; it’s about the chain of life and killing sentient beings”. He also claimed that Guillermo Del Toro, no shrinking violet himself in abject filmmaking, gave up meat after seeing it. Bryan Fuller, creator of Hannibal, gave up eating meat during filming of the first season, telling Entertainment Weekly he had been:

“writing about cannibalism for the last three years but also doing considerable research on the psychology of animals, and how sophisticated cows and pigs and the animals that we eat actually are.”

Shows like Hannibal and The Santa Clarita Diet show human flesh as “just meat.” But to do that, they have to (their legal departments insist) come up with ways of simulating the human flesh without actually killing people (or digging them up like Ed Gein). The Yellowjackets prop team chose to use venison (think Bambi). But, the showrunners warned,

“they’ll have to find an alternative for future episodes, because many in its cast are vegan.”

Portrayals of cannibalism, whether actual or fictional, can make some people hungry, and turn others against eating flesh.

Gutfeld points out that:

“In the mind of the NY Times, it’s probably more humane to eat a human being than an animal.”

By “animal”, Gutfeld presumably means every multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the biological kingdom Animalia except one – Homo sapiens. We know we are a species of great ape, but spend much of our time pretending we don’t know that.

Being humane, being ethical, is largely about respect and consent. Which was precisely the defence offered by Armin Meiwes when arrested for eating a man who had made it very clear he wanted to be eaten. Cannibalism texts, in ever-increasing numbers, joyfully confound the human/animal divide, and show the human body as edible flesh. So it is not surprising that such questions will be raised, and that, as the NYT said, “that time is now.”

However, Ted Cruz, who likes cannibalism jokes as much as the next meal, came up with a brilliant two-word solution that will put people off human flesh for a considerable time:

THE UTAH CANNIBALS – Satanic Panic in Utah County

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While we’re talking cannibalism investigations (it’s what we do on this blog), we’ve now got the Utah County Attorney going public to deny accusations that he and his wife are cannibals.

Here’s how it went down.

On June 1, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office (UCSO) sent a media release stating that:

Special Victims Unit Detectives and investigators from multiple county and federal agencies are investigating reports of ritualistic child sexual abuse from as far back as 1990.

The statement specified investigations into child sexual abuse and child sex trafficking that occurred in Utah County, Juab County, and Sanpete County between 1990 and 2010.

Sgt. Spencer Cannon with the UCSO stated that:

“We have gotten to the point where we believe we have been able to verify some of the information that we’ve been told.”

The Utah County Attorney, David Leavitt, held a press conference that day, calling for the resignation of Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith and for an investigation into his activities for misuse of taxpayer and county resources. He said that he had been wrongly accused of cannibalism, as well as the murder of small children.

Leavitt said that he had been provided a copy of an alleged witness statement from a person he called a “tragically mentally ill woman.”

“And for the first time in the reportedly 15 or 20 years since the report was given, I learned that my wife and I were part of those allegations, alleging that we were guilty of cannibalizing young children.”

Leavitt says the woman in question made sex abuse claims against 15 to 20 people before he was ever in office in Utah County. That case was dismissed, he said, because the allegations were deemed not credible by the special victims unit. He called the allegations “ludicrous” and “outlandish” and a “pack of lies.”

When asked whether Leavitt is a subject of that investigation, the sheriff responded: “We don’t talk about who is under investigation.”

But Leavitt insisted that the report names him. He believed the timing of the announcement from the sheriff’s office was suspicious, since Leavitt is running for re-election — and ballots are expected to go out next week.

“I am calling upon Sheriff Mike Smith to open his office to an outside investigation,” Leavitt said, “where outside, independent investigators are able to investigate and confirm or deny that documents from a debunked investigation from more than a decade ago were or were not used for political purposes in a Utah County Attorney’s race.”

Sheriff Smith said he won’t resign, and he doesn’t apologize for using county resources on the investigation. He stressed that this “was not a politically motivated investigation,” and that a year ago his office was contacted by people reporting crimes that were similar in nature to those brought up by Leavitt.

“Leavitt,” said Sheriff Smith, “is using his authority and his pulpit to bully, distract, and mischaracterize the facts of an ongoing investigation.”

The sheriff emphasized that while Leavitt focused on accusations of “cannibalism”, the primary investigation involves sexual abuse.

The only forum where Leavitt is publicly alleged to have been involved with the sex ring is purportedly published online by a man who Leavitt’s office is prosecuting for a 2008 rape case. Prosecutors allege that the man faked his death in the United States, and is now living in Scotland under a different name. He has denied, through his attorney, that he is the person prosecutors allege he is.

That website claims that County Sheriff Sgt. Spencer Cannon confirmed that Leavitt was the head of a “widespread ritual sex abuse ring in Utah.” Cannon said Wednesday that he spoke to the man, but never confirmed to him that Leavitt or any other specific persons were suspected.

Conspiracy theories are not a new phenomenon, and they have often involved cannibalism, often in the form of drinking blood, such as the blood libel accusations levelled at Jews during the Middle Ages, and resurfacing in the development of antisemitic movements from the nineteenth century until the Nazis, and even present day.

Since the 1980s, accusations of “ritual sex abuse” have been rife in the United States, and in Utah in particular. The US has seen over 12,000 alleged cases of satanic ritual abuse, leading to the coining of a new term: SATANIC PANIC. Satanic cults were said to have engaged in bizarre sexual acts such as necrophilia, forced ingestion of semen, blood and faeces, cannibalism, orgies, liturgical parody such as pseudo-sacramental use of faeces and urine; infanticide, sacrificial abortions to eat fetuses, and human sacrifice. Accusations of Satanic groups engaging in torture and cannibalism of children were extensively made during recent US elections. The event called “#Pizzagate” arose from QAnon claims that Democrats were torturing and killing children in the basement of a (basementless) pizza shop in Washington DC, following which a dude with a rifle entered the shop to save the supposed victims.

Proponents of the conspiracy theory #Frazzledrip believe that a video is circulating showing Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, a former aide, ripping off a child’s face and wearing it as a mask before drinking the child’s blood in a satanic ritual sacrifice. Supposedly, the video was later found on the hard drive of Abedin’s former husband, Anthony Weiner, under the code name ‘Frazzledrip’. Snopes found the whole thing to be a giant fake.

Looking forward to hearing new and, hopefully, more original cannibalism stories in the mid-terms!