I don’t need to tell you how iconic Tina Brown is as a writer, editor and critic.
She is also a mentor and close personal friend.
Therefore, I care greatly what she thinks. The good news: She loved The Idaho Four!
Thank you, Tina, for a fantastic conversation. You can watch it here. And, yes, of course, we get into Epstein at the end.
Thank you Kelley Smoot, intrinsic self, Bonnie Sonder, Leo, Elicia Wetstein, and many others for tuning into my live video with Tina Brown! Join me for my next live video in the app.
If you had told me 23 years ago, when I first met Jeffrey Epstein, that I’d still be reporting on him in 2025, I’d have been stunned and appalled. Back then very few people knew who he was, and he made my life hell, as I’ve written many times over.
If you’d told me one year ago, that Epstein’s ghost would try to interfere with the launch of The Idaho Four, I’d be less shocked because Epstein’s mythology refuses to die. But I’d have been just as appalled.
And yet, here we are.
Yesterday was publication day for The Idaho Four and, as those of you watched my segment with Jim Acosta yesterday may have noticed, I found myself talking equally about the book – and Jeffrey Epstein.
Yesterday, I gave this first in-depth interview about the book to Jessica, because it was her reporting on the murders Moscow in her newsletter, that drew me in to the story.
Watch the interview here with Jessica.
Watch my discussion with Jim Acosta (my former colleague at CNN) about Epstein-Gate and my new book, with James Patterson, The Idaho Four on Vicky Ward Investigates. Thanks for having me on, Jim!
You can’t just fly into a small town on the opposite side of the country and expect people to talk to you. For my research for The Idaho Four, I had a great deal of help and support in Moscow from a prominent local therapist, Dr. Rand Walker.
He and I spoke on the phone many times before I got to Moscow and he was kind enough to introduce me to a network of people he thought would be critical for my reporting. He was also kind enough to drive me around and show me 1122 King Road, the scene of the murders, and Bryan Kohberger’s student housing in Pullman in Washington State.
I’m not sure the book would have happened without him and the network he gave me. I discovered upon arrival, that because people trusted Rand, they trusted me. And once they met with me, they wanted to introduce me to others. It snowballed.
I came to love Moscow. You’ll see the town becomes a character of its own in the book. Locals, many of whom are academics, are very proud to live there.
They deeply resented that the murders put a stain on the community and that it was so widely publicized. And they hated that it caused a rift amongst them during the six weeks when no one knew who could have committed the murders. People started looking at each other’s arms in case there were signs of a knife wound. And of course, there were, given that elk-hunting is common in that part of the world.
Here’s a snippet from the book about Rand’s reaction to the murders:
Dr. Rand Walker, a trusted local therapist whom Chief Fry has put on standby to treat his traumatized officers and their families, is observing rare and frightening instances of the six-degrees-of-separation connections among the town’s residents. The fact that everyone in Moscow knows everyone else has morphed overnight from a source of comfort to something deeply unsettling.
Neighbor suddenly mistrusts neighbor. Friend mistrusts friend. Customer mistrusts vendor. People are shutting themselves in. Hiding from one another.
Walker is hearing from his patients, from townspeople, from members of his own family, that suddenly the connectivity between them all feels toxic. Walker’s son Kristian, a former UI student, knew the victims.
His girlfriend is the daughter of the owner of the Mad Greek, where Xana and Maddie worked. Now the restaurant is closed, and a handwritten placard is in the window:
We are closed temporarily to mourn the loss of two staff members. We will update FB on status of store soon. Please keep all the family and friends of yesterday’s victims in your thoughts.
— MG Family
It’s all too close to feel comfortable. Because who knows who among them is the murderer?
You can pre-order The Idaho Four here.
The Idaho Four is about much more than the story of awful murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin.
There are many relevant cultural themes in it, one being the thorny question of the First Amendment on college campuses.
When does “free speech” become dangerous? And when should colleges intervene?
Should administrators at Washington State University where Bryan Kohberger was both a PhD student and a Teaching Assistant have done more when confronted with his obvious odious attitudes towards women in the classroom and out of it?
It’s a question that is on the minds of the victims’ families and one I think they hoped to get some clarity on in the trial that now won’t happen.
Watch the promo video on Vicky Ward Investigates.
Michael Wolff and I had a chat yesterday about the so-called “Epstein files.”
There were a few “news bombs” in it, regarding assertions Jeffrey Epstein made to Michael, who he confided in in his final years, because he hoped Michael would agree to write his biography.
I do urge you to remember, that per my reporting on the topic, Epstein was a con-artist, and in my experience, lied all the time. And I don’t agree with everything Michael says about Epstein. I don’t agree that the women around Epstein were adult, and I also know that there are many powerful, rich men out there who propped Epstein up financially and otherwise, who knew exactly what was going on behind closed doors in his “massage” room and are therefore worth questioning by the FBI.
I also find it impossible to believe, given Epstein’s extraordinary network and access to powerful figures around the world, that the FBI has got “nothing” other than child pornography in its files on him.
Watch the full video and read the full text on Vicky Ward Investigates.
You can’t just fly into a small town on the opposite side of the country and expect people to talk to you. For my research for The Idaho Four, I had a great deal of help and support in Moscow from a prominent local therapist, Dr. Rand Walker.
He and I spoke on the phone many times before I got to Moscow and he was kind enough to introduce me to a network of people he thought would be critical for my reporting. He was also kind enough to drive me around and show me 1122 King Road, the scene of the murders, and Bryan Kohberger’s student housing in Pullman in Washington State.
I’m not sure the book would have happened without him and the network he gave me. I discovered upon arrival, that because people trusted Rand, they trusted me. And once they met with me, they wanted to introduce me to others. It snowballed.
Watch the full promo video and read the full text of insights on Vicky Ward Investigates.
Stunning news out of Idaho.
Bryan Kohberger is set to take a plea deal on Wednesday, if the judge accepts it. Yes, he’ll go to jail for the rest of his life for the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Maddie Mogen, Ethan Chapin and Xana Kernodle without appeal, but he gets to live rather than face a firing squad. And he may never fully explain to the families his hideous rationale.
The closest they’ll get to that is the reporting in The Idaho Four, which does detail Kohberger’s formative years, the misogynistic world he inhabited online, and his professional disastrous descent to the bottom in the weeks before the murders occurred.
Sources tell me it was the prosecutor, Bill Thompson, who put the offer on the table. My sources also add that Thompson, who graduated law school 45 years ago, may not have wanted to go through a grueling three month trial and he was concerned that a jury can be unpredictable.
But…
The four families of the victims have waited nearly three years for a trial in which they hoped they’d get answers. Three frustrating years during which they’ve learned very little about why and how their children were murdered in their beds…
The Goncalves family is furious about the turn of events and has said so on their Facebook page. I suspect the family of Maddie Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves’s best friend, feels similarly, and also the family of Xana Kernodle. Those three families have been in sync these past years when it comes to feeling under-supported and under-informed by the police and the prosecutors.
But the Goncalves family has been the most vocal. And I get why.
You’ll read in The Idaho Four just how badly the relationship went from the get-go. The family was huddled round the TV for Sunday afternoon football, when they could see from friends of Kaylee’s with cellphones that the King Road house she’d been staying in, had police tape around it. Clearly something terrible had happened. And yet it was a few hours before anyone knocked on their door with minimal information.
And so the tension began…
Steve Goncalves has felt so unsupported that only last week he told me that he felt a lot better talking to me on the phone, than talking to them…”You, at least, are always sympathetic,” he said.
I haven’t yet got hold of Stacy and Jim Chapin, Ethan’s parents, but I suspect their reaction is different. One of the themes in The Idaho Four is how the victims’ families reflect the political divisions in the Pacific North West. Moscow is a liberal college town, but Idaho is a deeply Republican state.
Here’s a passage from the book about the moment Jim and Stacy Chapin hear about the arrest of Bryan Kohberger:
They have no idea what his connection to Ethan is, and they are not interested in finding out. The bottom line is that their son is in a jar in their basement and nothing can change that.
But when Jim sees Kohberger’s face on the news, weirdly, it resonates. “He just looked like a bad guy . . . the long, drawn face . . . he just fit the picture that I had in my mind,” he said later.
Jim is glad they’ve got him. He wants this guy to pay. And he feels certain that he will, no matter what happens next.
“Stace will shoot me for saying this . . . but . . . there’s three ways you can look at it. He’s either going to go to jail for life or he is going to be put to death or he’s going to walk out the front door. And I’m okay with any one of them. Because the outcome for him is going to be the same.”
What he means is that Kohberger is not likely to survive even if he gets off. This is Idaho, after all.
“You really think Steve Goncalves,” Jim asked months later with a wry smile, “is going to sit back while he walks around freely?”
The answer is no.
Standby for more…
You are going to need to read The Idaho Four to get the definitive account of what happened and why.
You can pre-order it here.
Watch the promo video here.