# Michael Tracey Michael Tracey (b. 1988) is an independent journalist from New Jersey who publishes on [[Substack]]. He has made a career of contesting whichever story dominates the news: first the Trump-Russia investigations, which he and other skeptics call [[Russiagate]], and since mid-2025 the [[Jeffrey Epstein]] scandal. In March 2026 The Hollywood Reporter profiled him as the public face of Epstein skepticism. ## Background Tracey worked as a correspondent for [[The Young Turks]] in 2017 and 2018 and then went independent. He was an early and persistent doubter of claims that [[Donald Trump]]'s 2016 campaign conspired with Russia, a position he shared with [[Glenn Greenwald]] and [[Matt Taibbi]]. He describes himself as a lifelong registered Democrat who has not voted for a major-party presidential candidate in years. ## The Epstein skeptic In July 2025 Tracey began a Substack series arguing that public understanding of the Epstein case had drifted far from the evidence. He does not dispute that Epstein committed crimes against minors. His claims are narrower: that the record does not support the popular picture of an international trafficking ring serving powerful clients, that coverage blurs crimes against minors with claims made by adult women, and that some prominent accusers have credibility problems the press has declined to examine. The argument found a circuit of sympathetic venues: - [[Reason Foundation]]'s magazine gave him a long interview in September 2025 and later defended him against critics. - [[Matt Taibbi]] began publishing him at Racket News in December 2025. - [[The Free Press]] paired him with Coleman Hughes in February 2026. - Piers Morgan's show put him in televised debates, and the conservative Daily Caller picked up his charge that House Democrats were releasing Epstein emails stripped of context to implicate Trump. It also produced confrontations. On Sept. 3, 2025, he was removed from a news conference held by Epstein survivors after asking about allegations against [[Alan Dershowitz]] that an accuser had withdrawn. On Morgan's show in February 2026 the journalist Tara Palmeri asked whether men accused in the case were paying him, which he called defamatory. At a party during White House Correspondents' Dinner weekend in April 2026 he confronted the Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown, argued with [[Jim Acosta]], and was escorted out. ## The Cornell case In late September 2026 Tracey turned to a civil lawsuit in which a former Cornell University student, suing as Jane Doe, accused fraternity members of rape. He asked on X for help identifying her and said he would publish her name, arguing that the suit had named the accused men. On Oct. 2 he posted a name he believed was hers and then deleted it; Reuters could not verify it. The response was the #IAmJaneDoe campaign, in which thousands of women posted that they were Jane Doe to bury the search. ## Why it's on the map Tracey shows how the signature move of [[Heterodox Media]], doubting the story everyone else is telling, travels from national-security reporting to a sex-crimes scandal, and how its venues pass a writer from one to the next. His timing matters too. He made the case that the Epstein story was overblown while the Trump administration was under pressure to release its files (see [[Epstein Files Transparency Act]]), and outlets on the right used his work for that purpose. His supporters say that is what independent scrutiny looks like when it is unpopular. The Cornell episode is the case his critics cite for the opposite view: that the method treats accusers as the story. ## Connections - [[Heterodox Media]] · [[Matt Taibbi]] · [[Glenn Greenwald]] · [[The Free Press]] · [[Substack]] - [[Jeffrey Epstein]] · [[Ghislaine Maxwell]] · [[Alan Dershowitz]] · [[Epstein Files Transparency Act]] - [[The Young Turks]] · [[Jim Acosta]] · [[Mueller Investigation]]