"I'm sure there's something in there about a baby actually being born and then just disappearing — like Ghislaine taking it. I personally never witnessed anything like that, but I do remember overhearing conversations about trying to create the perfect baby, the perfect baby, the perfect gene pool. And I know that there was sort of a hunt, if you will, for the perfect gene pool."
— Shantae Davies, on 60 Minutes Australia, recounting what she heard at Zorro Ranch between 2001 and 2005, when she was between the ages of 17 and 21, and was being raped at the property by Jeffrey Epstein.
A Note Before You Watch
The video above is an investigative segment from 60 Minutes Australia about Zorro Ranch — the Epstein property in New Mexico that federal authorities, alone among his major sites, declined to search after his 2019 death. It contains the testimony of Shantae Davies, the framing of Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury, and the public surfacing of the November 2019 FBI tip alleging that two foreign girls were buried at the ranch. (EFTA00067066)
The reason I cite EFTA documents so heavily is not because the documents are the standard against which testimony must measure itself. The opposite is true. The testimony has been the truth all along. The documents are merely the federal record finally catching up. What is genuinely new in 2026 is not what the survivors are saying. It is that the United States government's own paper trail now corroborates what they said in 2009, in 2015, in 2019, and in every year between.
Watch the segment. Hear the women. Then read the corroboration.
The Three Failures of the 2019 Framing
In July 2019, three weeks before Jeffrey Epstein died in federal custody, The New York Times published a story that has aged in a particular way. James B. Stewart, Matthew Goldstein, and Jessica Silver-Greenberg reported that Epstein had told scientists, over years of dinner parties and private conversations, that he wanted to "seed the human race with his DNA" by impregnating women at his New Mexico ranch. One of the Times's key sources, the computer scientist Jaron Lanier, said Epstein had explicitly modeled the plan on the Repository for Germinal Choice — a real California sperm bank, founded in 1980, that solicited samples from Nobel laureates and high-IQ donors with the avowed goal of improving the human gene pool.
Comment: Given all the irregularities around the "death of Jeffrey Epstein", one wouldn't be wrong in thinking he may very well still be alive: Epstein Cover-Up Deepens; FBI Officers Raise Alarm
The story was written in a register of careful incredulity. The reporters documented the aspiration and found "no evidence that Mr. Epstein's interest in genetics translated into anything more tangible." Scientists who had encountered the idea described it variously as "eccentric," "creepy," and "delusional." The implicit framing was clear: this was the perversity of a wealthy criminal's fantasy life, not an operational program. A footnote to a sex trafficking case, not a separate investigation.
That framing has now been examined three times — and failed each time.
A $10 million biotech investment portfolio pitched to Epstein by Church in July 2014. A legal investment vehicle formed in August 2014 by Epstein's longtime attorney Darren Indyke. A 2017 Harvard PGP newsletter still addressing Epstein as an enrolled participant. And in 2018, a fully operational investment relationship with biohacker Bryan Bishop running an overseas surgical laboratory toward a company whose stated objective was the first live birth of a human designer baby or human clone within five years.
The mainstream press, working from the same EFTA release, has confirmed the documentary core. CNN reported in February 2026 that Epstein had paid for genetic testing and stem cell work through Joseph Thakuria — the MGH physician introduced to Epstein by George Church — explicitly contemplating CRISPR edits to Epstein's own cells "believed to increase longevity." The Telegraph reported the same week that Epstein was "in advanced discussions about funding a gene-editing company." The narrow-aperture framing of 2019 — eccentric dinner-party talk — has not survived contact with the documents in any major outlet that has examined them seriously.
The second failure came from federal investigators. In the unredacted files made available to a small number of members of Congress, Rep. Melanie Stansbury — the New Mexico Democrat whose district contains Zorro Ranch — found what she has described publicly as evidence the FBI declined to act on. Among the documents: a November 2019 email tip from someone identifying themselves as a former Zorro staffer, alleging that "two foreign girls were buried" in the hills outside the property "on orders of Jeffrey and Madam G," after both "died by strangulation during rough fetish sex." The tip was forwarded to the FBI in 2019. It was, by every indication available, never investigated. Stansbury's review of the unredacted file prompted her to formally ask the New Mexico Attorney General to reopen the criminal investigation. The state DOJ began its long-overdue search of the property in March 2026 — twenty-six years and untold survivor accounts after the abuse there began.
Then she said something else. Asked about rumors she had heard from other survivors at Zorro, Davies described:
"girls waking up in sort of like a dark room with like a female doctor standing over them, feeling like maybe there is some kind of procedure that had happened that they weren't aware of. And I believe this is in the files. I'm sure there's something in there about a baby actually being born and then just disappearing — like Ghislaine taking it. I personally never witnessed anything like that, but I do remember overhearing conversations about trying to create the perfect baby, the perfect baby, the perfect gene pool. And I know that there was sort of a hunt, if you will, for the perfect gene pool."Stansbury, asked about what she had read in the unredacted files, used parallel language. Among the documented allegations, she said, were "the harvesting of sex organs,""women having forced abortions or forced pregnancies or coerced pregnancies,"and the overall pattern of "the most horrible and heinous things that anyone could imagine."
Each of these claims, in 2019, would have been treated as the flotsam of trauma — distorted memories, conflated rumors, the kind of thing victims sometimes say that gets quietly redacted from their formal statements because it sounds too far-fetched to anchor a prosecution.
A fourth failure is now in active federal litigation. On April 27, 2026, journalist and former MSNBC host Katie Phang filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Case No. 1:26-cv-01417) alleging that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has systematically violated the Epstein Files Transparency Act — through missed deadlines, failure to redact victim-identifying images, improper redactions of co-conspirator identities, unexplained redactions of grand jury material, and the specific suppression and retraction of documents referring to Donald Trump.
The complaint alleges that DOJ released photos of nude minors that should have been redacted, and simultaneously redacted the names of senders of communications including "your littlest girl was a little naughty" and "I found at least 3 very good young poor but we was so tired." The complaint notes that Blanche himself has stated the underlying investigation is "over" — eliminating, by DOJ's own admission, the only legal basis for redactions related to an active prosecution. The federal record on which this article relies, in other words, is itself currently alleged to be incomplete and unlawfully restricted.
"what i like is the idea that ubermensch could be the melding of humans, put together in one brain an increased motor system, an increased awareness, an increased status calculator., (blacks jews, women) ubermensch could be the combination of the best of humans not the best of a specific race or gender. fun idea. we can call it super intelligence. or uberintelligence"What Davies overheard at Zorro between 2001 and 2005 is, at the level of vocabulary, the same vocabulary the documents use.
— Jeffrey Epstein to cognitive scientist Joscha Bach, July 2016. (EFTA00824159)
In July 2016 — eleven years after Davies's last visit to the ranch — Epstein wrote to the cognitive scientist Joscha Bach in a thread that explicitly engaged race-IQ arguments without dispute. Epstein proposed a concept for what he called "ubermensch," which he glossed as "the combination of the best of humans" assembled across demographic groups. He suggested an alternative term: "super intelligence. or uberintelligence" (EFTA00824159).
The framing in the email is not narrowly racial. It is transhumanist — the assembly of optimal traits into engineered superior humans. But the working vocabulary — the best of humans, combination, the perfect — is the working vocabulary of someone who, according to a survivor with no access to his email, was overheard in his New Mexico ranch a decade earlier discussing "the perfect baby, the perfect gene pool."
Davies could not have read the Bach email in 2026 and built her testimony around it. She gave the testimony of overhearing those phrases as a teenager during years she was being raped at the property. The email post-dates her last contact with Epstein by more than a decade. Either she anticipated his future correspondence, or — far more parsimoniously — she heard, in real time, the ideational framework the documents independently establish he held throughout the entire span of his trafficking operation.
The documentary record contains not only the framework but the operational pursuit of it. The $10 million biotech portfolio George Church pitched to Epstein in July 2014 (EFTA01918194) included, as line items: supercentenarian genome sequencing, aging reversal via CRISPR and epigenetic reprogramming factors, "genome engineering of humans for space," and cold-resistant elephants engineered with mammoth DNA — a portfolio whose unifying logic is exactly the engineered-superior-human framework. Three months after Church sent that portfolio, Epstein's attorney Darren Indyke formed the legal vehicle to invest in it (EFTA00995805).
When Davies says she overheard a "hunt for the perfect gene pool," she is describing — at the linguistic level — what Church's pitch deck describes at the budget level.
"A dark room with a female doctor... a procedure that had happened that they weren't aware of"
"i like implant embryo, wait 9 months. great ending"This is the survivor claim that, in 2019, would have read as the most fantastical. Against the documents, it reads differently.
— Jeffrey Epstein to biohacker Bryan Bishop, August 2018, in the thread that set the operational structure for what Bishop, three days later, would call in writing "the designer baby and human cloning company." (EFTA_R1_01837436)
The Bryan Bishop relationship, documented across more than ten EFTA exhibits between July and November 2018, was an operational program with a surgical laboratory. Bishop's August 30, 2018 update to Epstein (EFTA_R1_01837436 / EFTA02625486) described "ongoing mouse surgeries and microinjection" and "human sperm modification experiments by an unnamed Mississippi contact that 'doesn't work for my purposes yet.'" Earlier in the same thread, in response to Bishop's program description, Epstein wrote: "i like implant embryo, wait 9 months. great ending."
The legal architecture Bishop and Epstein built around the program — documented in their October 2018 exchange (EFTA01019549, EFTA01019439) — was specifically designed to evade U.S. jurisdiction over human applications. Bishop's three legal pathways: keep U.S. activity confined to R&D and animal testing, route human applications through "overseas medical tourism partnerships," and sell additive DNA to overseas clinics as a supplier rather than a practitioner. The lab in question was in Ukraine. Bishop also met in Lithuania with Simon Black, founder of Sovereign Man, the platform for offshore asset structuring.
The structural feature of this program is that human procedures, by design, would not happen on American soil. They would happen overseas, on women whose presence in those overseas locations would not be documented in U.S. medical records or subject to U.S. consent law. (The Epstein Exposed researchers have separately documented at least nine foreign women moved to New Mexico between 2009 and 2017 under the cover of "English-language testing" — a compartmentalized recruitment system whose operational signature parallels the offshore-routing logic of the Bishop program.)
This is not the same as saying procedures from the 2018 Bishop budget happened at Zorro Ranch in 2003. The documents do not establish that. What they establish is the structural fact that — eight years before Bishop, fifteen years after Davies first encountered the ranch — Epstein's network was actively building exactly the kind of legal architecture that would render procedures performed on trafficked women undocumentable: no medical record, no consent paper trail, no jurisdictional remedy.
The medical-record dimension of that architecture is not theoretical. Virginia Giuffre, in her own 60 Minutes Australia interview, described waking up at Epstein's New York mansion in a pool of her own blood, in pain she could not explain, with no clear memory of what had been done to her:
"I thought it was a miscarriage, but I'm not too sure. I have no idea because the medical reports, they lie... Jeffrey even lied on my admission to the hospital. He put... I was born in 1982. I was born in 1983. But he took the doctor to a corner. They whispered about something. Had no idea. I was out of earshot. And nobody asked questions."Giuffre's account establishes, from inside the operation, what the documents establish from above it: a system in which medical events affecting trafficked women were processed through compliant practitioners who falsified records and asked no questions. The "doctors, psychiatrists, gynecologists, dentists" Giuffre named as complicit are the user-end correlate of the legal architecture Bishop and Epstein built four years after Giuffre's last contact with the network.
When Davies reports that survivors described waking up in dark rooms with female doctors standing over them, having no memory of what had been done to them, she is describing the user-end experience of the architecture the documents independently prove was being built. Whether the procedures she heard about were performed at Zorro, at Bishop's Ukraine lab, at a related facility, or in some intermediate stage of the program's evolution between 2001 and 2018 is a question the documents do not answer. What the documents do answer is whether the program had the technical, legal, and personnel infrastructure to perform such procedures and conceal them.
The answer is yes, and was yes by at least 2014.
A separate detail in the documentary record sharpens this further. The biological program had its own biology in active storage. By August 2013, Epstein's own skin biopsy — taken at MGH, personally arranged by George Church, paid for through Epstein's accountant Rich Kahn at HBRK Associates — had produced viable fibroblast cell cultures held in liquid nitrogen and slated for iPS cell line creation (EFTA02131791). iPS cells are the precise cellular technology underpinning therapeutic cloning and somatic cell nuclear transfer. Bishop, in 2018, would describe his preferred technique as "more similar to cloning which does not require an injection to the biodad" (EFTA01015485) — a description consistent with iPS-based nuclear transfer methodology.
"A baby actually being born and then just disappearing"
"This gets us out of our self-funded 'garage biology' phase to the first live birth of a human designer baby, and possibly a human clone, within 5 years. Once we reach the first birth, everything changes and the world will never be the same again, much less the future of the human species."This is the survivor claim hardest to evaluate against the documents, because the documents establish program intent, structure, and timeline — they do not establish a specific birth.
— Bryan Bishop to Jeffrey Epstein, August 5, 2018, in the use-of-funds spreadsheet for "the designer baby and human cloning company." (EFTA01003966)
What can be said is what Bishop wrote, in the use-of-funds spreadsheet for what he called, in writing, "the designer baby and human cloning company" (EFTA01003966):
"This gets us out of our self-funded 'garage biology' phase to the first live birth of a human designer baby, and possibly a human clone, within 5 years."Bishop's five-year timeline ran from August 2018 to August 2023. Epstein died in August 2019, taking with him whatever direct relationship existed with Bishop's lab. What happened to the program after that point is not established by the EFTA release. The Ukraine lab existed. The mouse work was active. The legal architecture for overseas human applications was in place. Bishop, as of the EFTA documents, was operational.
The Davies testimony describes events from 2001-2005, well before the documented Bishop relationship. The documents do not establish that a 2001-2005 iteration of the program had reached the live-birth stage Bishop was budgeting for in 2018. What they do establish is that intent had been continuous. Epstein's first documented cloning correspondence with Church (November 2011, EFTA01850962) was already in the register of someone returning to a known topic ("did the cloning issue, give you pause?"), to which Church replied that he was "working toward this goal fairly rapidly." By April 2014, Richard Merkin was asking Epstein casually for "cloning updates" (EFTA01925437), as one would inquire about an ongoing concern.
What Davies overheard, Virginia Giuffre experienced as a direct proposition. In the same 60 Minutes Australia interview series, Giuffre — who was trafficked through Epstein's network beginning at age 16 and who took her own life in 2025 after two decades of carrying this fight — described being asked, when she was 18 or 19 years old and on Little Saint James, to bear a child for Epstein and Maxwell:
"They asked me to have a kid for them. They tried to sweeten the deal by saying you would get a monthly allowance. We would buy you a house. Everything would be great. Your kid would be taken care of. But you'd have to sign a form that, you know, like I would basically be signing my child over to them if I wanted to do that."
The continuous program intent, together with Davies's account of overhearing a baby disappearing, leaves a question the documents cannot answer alone: whether earlier, less institutionalized iterations of the same operational pursuit produced events that the survivors witnessed from inside the building, but that no document captured because the early-phase pursuit operated below the threshold of formal correspondence.
This is the kind of question only a forensic search of Zorro Ranch could begin to answer. Such a search began in March 2026, under the direction of the New Mexico Department of Justice. The federal government, between 2008 and Epstein's death in 2019, never sought a warrant on the property — the only major Epstein property federal authorities declined to search. Hector Balderas, the former New Mexico Attorney General who in 2019 had been preparing the state's own case, told 60 Minutes Australia that handing his investigation to federal authorities was "probably be a tactical mistake that I'll live with for the rest of my life."
"Harvesting of sex organs... forced abortions or forced pregnancies or coerced pregnancies"
"we deliver human transplantable organ by engineering animals."Stansbury's summary of the unredacted files included the claim of "harvesting of sex organs." This is the claim least possible to evaluate without seeing the unredacted record. What can be said is that the public record of Epstein's documented investments included a venture explicitly built around the production of human-transplantable organs.
— George Church to Jeffrey Epstein, October 2014, pitching the xenotransplantation venture eGenesis with structured investment terms of either a $1.5M convertible note or 9.09% preferred equity at $15M pre-money valuation. (EFTA02090913)
eGenesis — pitched to Epstein by George Church in October 2014 (EFTA02090913), with structured investment terms of either a $1.5 million convertible note (15% discount, 8% interest) or a 9.09% preferred equity stake at a $15 million pre-money valuation — was a xenotransplantation venture. Its stated mechanism, in Church's pitch email: "we deliver human transplantable organ by engineering animals." The animals were pigs; the engineering was CRISPR-mediated removal of immunological barriers; the goal was the production of organs suitable for transplant into human patients.
This is, today, a scientifically legitimate field of research, and eGenesis is a real company that continues to pursue it. The presence of an organ-engineering investment in Epstein's pipeline does not establish that organ harvesting from human victims occurred at Zorro Ranch. The two are different categories of activity.
What the eGenesis pitch does establish is that Epstein's investment portfolio operated, during the years of his trafficking operation, in proximity to commercial efforts to produce transplantable human-compatible biological material. The conceptual distance between "engineer pigs to grow human-compatible organs" and the survivor allegations Stansbury is describing is large in scientific terms but smaller than zero in ideational terms — both inhabit the same imaginative space of the human body as engineerable substrate.
Forced and coerced pregnancies are a different matter. Bishop's budget proposed "the first live birth of a human designer baby" — an operational outcome that, by definition, requires a pregnancy. The "rough fetish sex" framing of the November 2019 FBI tip — combined with Davies's testimony about the room where "Jeffrey's ready for his massage now" meant rape — establishes that pregnancies arising from those rapes, had they occurred and gone to term, would have happened inside an operational environment that Bishop's later documents prove was specifically configured to manage and conceal exactly such outcomes.
"the collaboration with george church was induced by you!!"
— Martin Nowak, evolutionary biologist at Harvard, to Jeffrey Epstein, April 6, 2017, crediting Epstein with personally catalyzing a CRISPR gene drive collaboration with George Church's lab. (EFTA00707374)
This pattern is what makes the Zorro survivor testimony qualitatively different post-EFTA than it was pre-EFTA — but I want to be careful about what I am claiming when I say that.
I am not claiming that the documents make the testimony true. The testimony was already true. Shantae Davies did not become more credible because Bryan Bishop wrote a budget. Annie Farmer did not become more credible because George Church sent an investment pitch. Virginia Giuffre, who carried this fight for two decades and is no longer alive to see it confirmed, did not become more credible because someone forwarded a New York Times article to a biohacker in 2018.
What changed in 2026 is not the truth-value of survivor testimony. It is the public defensibility of disbelieving it.
Before the documents were public, a survivor describing "a hunt for the perfect gene pool" overheard at a New Mexico ranch could be set aside as a traumatic distortion by anyone who wished to set it aside. After the documents — with Epstein's own "ubermensch" framework in his own words — anyone setting aside that testimony is making a choice that requires defense.
Before the documents, a survivor describing other women waking up in dark rooms with female doctors after unremembered procedures could be heard as horror-movie inflation of real abuse. After the documents — with their explicit overseas-lab architecture, their explicit "implant embryo, wait 9 months. great ending," their explicit five-year timeline to first live birth — anyone hearing that testimony as inflation is making a choice the documents now make difficult.
Before the documents, a 2019 FBI tip about two foreign girls buried after death-by-strangulation during "rough fetish sex" could be filed as the unverifiable kind of rumor responsible investigators set aside. After the documents — with the FBI's well-documented decision not to search Zorro, not to follow the tip, not to coordinate with New Mexico's state investigators who had it ready to prosecute — the question is no longer whether the tip was credible enough to act on. The question is why, having received it, federal authorities chose not to find out.
What the documents do, post-EFTA, is reverse the burden of proof. Before, the survivors carried it. They had to convince listeners their accounts were not distorted. Now, the burden has shifted to the institutions that did not investigate. They have to explain, against the federal record, why they treated as fantastical a set of claims the federal record now demonstrates were structurally consistent with documented operational pursuit.
The two records — the documents released through EFTA and the survivor accounts now being collected by the New Mexico Truth Commission and shared in venues like 60 Minutes Australia — are corroborative in a way that would be impossible if either were fabricated. A survivor inventing her testimony in 2026 to fit the documents would have to have invented it before 2019, when the documents were sealed. A document operation fabricating evidence of a cloning program would have to have anticipated, before 2019, the specific vocabulary trafficked women would later use to describe what they overheard.
Neither is plausible. What is plausible — and what the convergence of the records establishes — is that the survivors and the documents are independently reporting on the same operation, from different layers of access, with concordant findings.
What This Establishes — and What It Does Not
Established by the federal record: That Jeffrey Epstein, between 2009 and 2018, conducted a sustained operational pursuit of human cloning and germline modification, involving correspondence with George Church, an MGH skin biopsy, iPS cell lines stored at Harvard, a $10 million Church investment portfolio, an Indyke-formed legal vehicle, a 2018 designer-baby company funded at $9.5 million, an overseas surgical laboratory, and a sustained eight-year intellectual and financial relationship with the leading institutional figures in modern genome engineering.
Established by the survivor testimony and contemporaneous reporting: That Zorro Ranch was the site of repeated rape and sexual abuse of trafficked women including Shantae Davies, Annie Farmer, Virginia Giuffre, "Jane," and others; that survivors at Zorro overheard discussions of "the perfect baby" and "the perfect gene pool"; that other survivors described unremembered procedures conducted by female doctors; that a contemporaneous tip alleged two foreign girls were buried near Zorro after deaths during rape; that men were among those describing rape at the property.
Established by the convergence: That the survivor testimony describes, with linguistic precision, the operational vocabulary and procedural signature of the program the federal record independently establishes was being built. The testimony and the documents are mutually corroborative. Each makes the other harder to dismiss without an explicit argument as to why.
Not established by either record alone: That specific procedures from Bishop's 2018 program were performed at Zorro Ranch in earlier years. That a successful live birth of an Epstein-fathered child occurred. That the two foreign girls in the November 2019 tip can be identified, located, or recovered. That any specific named scientist in Epstein's network — Church, Nikolic, Nowak, Bishop, or others — had operational knowledge of activity at Zorro Ranch. These are questions the New Mexico investigation, the Truth Commission, and any future federal action will have to answer.
Established by the absence: That the federal government, between 2008 and 2019, declined to search the only major Epstein property where federal action did not occur; declined to act on the November 2019 tip about buried bodies; and declined to coordinate with the state of New Mexico, which was prepared to prosecute. The reasons for that absence are not in the public record, and the question of why has now been formally posed to the New Mexico Attorney General by a sitting member of Congress.
The Aspiration Was Never the Question
In 2019, The New York Times documented Jeffrey Epstein's stated desire to seed the human race with his DNA and described it as eccentric. The implicit standard of evidence was: did the aspiration translate into operations? The reporters concluded it had not.
By 2026, the EFTA release has answered that question. The aspiration translated into operations. The operations spanned eight years, multiple universities, multiple investment vehicles, multiple jurisdictions, and a documented timeline to first live birth.
The remaining question — the question the survivor testimony is now placing on the table — is not whether the operations existed. It is whether the operations had a downstream end that occurred to actual women in actual rooms at an actual ranch in New Mexico, and whether the federal authorities who declined to investigate that ranch did so because they did not know, or because they knew enough to prefer not to find out.
The first New Mexico Truth Commission report is due by the end of July 2026. The Zorro Ranch search began in March 2026. Members of Congress with access to the unredacted files have indicated that what they are reading exceeds what has been described publicly. Survivors are giving on-record testimony for the first time about what they experienced at the property, and the language they are using is not the language of trauma distortion. It is the language the federal record independently proves was being used by the people Epstein corresponded with, at the time he was raping the people who overheard them.
Part of The Epstein Files Series. View the full series at sayerji.substack.com/t/epstein-files. All EFTA exhibits cited link to the public searchable archive at epsteingate.org, which mirrors the DOJ Epstein Library; the canonical source remains the DOJ portal. Survivor testimony quoted is drawn from the 60 Minutes Australia broadcast featured above and from the public record of the New Mexico Truth Commission proceedings. Where the documents do not support a conclusion, that boundary is stated explicitly.
Comment: As the 60 Minutes Australia interview alluded to, young men were brought to Zorro Ranch and raped there as well.