In January, Irma Ojeda, a 72-year-old grandmother from Jackson, Michigan, urged local officials at a county commissioners meeting to rescind their partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. President Donald Trump, she told the assembled, operated outside the law, and for proof, they needed look no further than the internet.
“I would like everyone to listen to Sascha Riley’s audio,” she said, “and you will get a whole ’nother story of what’s going on. And nobody’s talking about it.”
That same week, at a city council meeting in Spokane, Washington, left-wing activist Mikki Hatfield argued for two minutes against the city accepting federal funding for policing. Taking the money would be “capitulating to the rules of a sadistic pedophile,” they said. “I highly encourage you to look up Sascha Riley.”
Those who seek out Riley will find, on what has become a popular Substack, more than four hours of audio laying out a sprawling and outlandish story of a 52-year-old Iraq War veteran who said he was trafficked and abused as a child in the 1980s at the hands of his adoptive father — a pilot he said flew for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — and a network of men who now occupy the highest positions in American life: members of Congress, a Supreme Court justice and the president of the United States. The story, told through a series of viral interviews with a woman who presents herself as a kind of investigator for abuse victims, is disturbing and includes allegations of child pornography, forced fight clubs, animal killings and snuff films.
Outside of Riley’s testimony, there is no evidence any of it happened. Still, for a network of people that includes half a million of his followers and a broader online audience engrossed by the Epstein files, Riley’s story is confirmation of their darkest beliefs about the man in the White House.
If the right-wing conspiracist community QAnon has held that Trump is secretly saving the world from a pedophile cabal, its left-wing counterpart, derided as “BlueAnon,” has posited the inverse: that the president is a serial child abuser. Those crimes will only be brought to light, this theory goes, by child victims who come forward and the online supporters who dare believe them.
Like QAnon, this community has self-styled investigators who have compiled specious evidence, and creators who have packaged the narratives for millions of followers. Along the way, they too have ensnared regular, innocent people into their false theories, a practice that has time and again led to real harm. Most ironically for this left-leaning congregation of conspiracists, their insistence on unverified claims has only contributed to a post-truth environment that benefits the very people in power they have sought to fight: politicians such as Trump, who have pointed to the claims as proof that every accusation is a hoax.
The release of the Epstein files — a trove of millions of documents that revealed new details about the late financier’s network and decades of abuse of women and girls — also sparked a feverish hunt for something more to be true: that Trump has not merely been credibly accused of harassment and abuse by women, but he also abused children and participated in Epstein’s crimes.
That unfounded narrative was fueled through a 2016 lawsuit by a pseudonymous plaintiff, who dropped the case days before the election, and more recently by an unverified claim from a woman who told the FBI she was sexually assaulted by Trump in the 1980s, when she was 13 years old. Trump has consistently denied these accounts, calling them “disgusting” and a “hoax.”
Riley’s narrative may be the most elaborate and popular one to fuel the BlueAnon theory yet. And though my beat involves reporting on conspiracy theories, I grappled with whether and how to cover this one, mainly because the story’s architect seemed to be a victim too — of what, I wasn’t yet sure.
But for the past several months, believers have shown up at city council meetings and flooded social media with Riley’s claims, which have targeted not just Trump but regular people in Riley’s orbit. In January, Rosie O’Donnell urged 2.9 million TikTok followers to “bear witness” to Riley’s story.
So, in March, I did.
* * *
I met Sascha Riley in the lobby of a hotel in downtown Victoria, British Columbia, on a gray morning. In his profile photos, Riley has long blond hair and wears sunglasses. But when I met him, he wore his hair short and was dressed professionally: in a mustard button-down, khakis and loafers. We walked for hours through the spitting rain, along the harbor and into downtown, eventually settling into a tiny Filipino coffee shop.
Victoria, with its harbor vistas and progressive politics, was a “little slice of heaven,” he said, a welcome change from Duncan, Oklahoma, where he lived until August.
Riley spent his childhood in Tennessee, Alabama and Texas, moving with his family, which included his father, stepmother and two stepsiblings, wherever his dad’s work as a helicopter pilot and instructor took them. As Riley remembered, he was a hotheaded teen, and a fistfight outside an Alabama Hardee’s landed him in court, where a judge gave him a choice: jail or the U.S. Army. He chose the latter. He served about seven years at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg in the 1990s before he got a job welding in Arizona. He rejoined the Army after 9/11 and did three tours in Iraq, getting married along the way to a woman he met in Oklahoma.
Riley spoke softly. He didn’t want to talk much about his experience in the war or the post-traumatic stress disorder he said came after it. Combat was “a series of impossible decisions for which there is no right answer,” he said. “And you have the rest of your life to think about whether or not you got it right.”
Riley said the blame for whatever happened over there ultimately belonged with the politicians who started the war.
“However you process it, you can’t get around the truth: that if we hadn’t been fed a bunch of lies, we wouldn’t have been over there,” he said.
Service records showed Riley retired at the rank of Army sergeant first class in 2016. He reentered civilian life in Oklahoma with his wife and their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter. They started a small trucking business, driving cars between states for their owners, but struggled financially, and Riley filed for bankruptcy in 2018. He was also dealing with the physical toll of 21 years of service, which included being “blown up” a couple of times, and the mental and emotional scars he had seen a therapist for.
Around 2020, though he can’t quite explain how, Riley started to “unlock” memories of abuse he said had been “repressed.” Riley said the memories came in fragments: replayed conversations and vague recollections of his father, powerful people and pain. Riley told me he spent months alone, listening to music, until the memories “solidified.” He said the memories were partly to blame for his separation from his wife in 2021 and their divorce two years later. According to Pearleen Riley (she kept her kids’ last name after the split), this was partly true.
She said Sascha always had a temper, but his new memories — she considered them psychotic delusions — scared her and the kids. She said he would spend days lying in bed with his laptop, reading and posting about politics, as well as “researching.” There, he came to the conclusion that he had dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder, a rare condition in which a person can develop distinct identities and lapses in memory, sometimes in response to severe childhood trauma. (Research has found that social media content about DID has fueled a wave of self-diagnosis.) Pearleen said Sascha would sometimes take on the personality and the accent of a young girl, whom he said he knew as a boy and who was also the victim of the child abuse cabal.
Pearleen said she left on April 6, 2021. Sascha no longer speaks to their children.
A couple of months after his family left, Sascha went public with his recovered memories, posting them to Facebook under his birth name, Sascha Barros. In a series of posts, he told a violent and fantastical story.
Sascha said he was adopted at 4 years old, only to be trafficked in the 1980s by his adoptive father, William Kyle Riley, through a brothel in Duncan, Oklahoma, and at “parties” on farms in Tennessee and Alabama, claims his father would later deny. Sascha said he was about 9 years old when he was first forced to make pornographic films, and he alleged his father sold him to a network of wealthy men, among them Trump and future members of Congress Jim Jordan and Andy Biggs. Sascha told tales of murders, describing the deaths of three girls — Sarah, who asked to be shot by another child; a girl with freckles, who was shot by a group of men at a child abuse “party”; and Sammy, whom Sascha said he choked to death in a kind of mercy killing. In September 2021, he posted: “Donald J Trump. The first time he raped me went like this.” In that post, Sascha described Trump killing a litter of puppies and then raping him. Sacha described fighting back, by impaling Trump with a wooden tent stake, writing that Trump “let out a scream like a banshee and had to be air lifted out.”
Sascha’s posts read like fiction; his claims beg for skepticism. The dates in his stories place his alleged abusers together at a heinous crime scene decades before they rose to prominence in right-wing politics. Jordan and Biggs would have been students in college. Trump was already a famous, wealthy New York real estate developer and tabloid fixture whose appearance at a hospital with such an injury would surely have attracted some attention. And the setting for what Sascha described as a cabal of wealthy elites gathering to abuse and murder children would be sleepy Southern towns such as Enterprise, Alabama — best known for its monument honoring the boll weevil and the headquarters of U.S. Army Aviation at its border.
The posts “never really gained traction,” Sascha remembered, adding that his family and friends didn’t believe him.
“That’s probably been the hardest part. Expecting a certain response from the people that you know and love and care about, and then not necessarily getting that response,” he said.
Sascha called the FBI and the police in Lawton, Oklahoma, at the time. Texts between an agent with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation and a member of Sascha’s family showed the state had looked into his allegations. OSBI said records from any investigation, if they existed, would be confidential and not open to the public. In the end, nothing came of it.
It would be four years before Sascha found the attention and support he was looking for.
* * *
In the summer of 2025, Sascha got a direct message from Lisa Voldeng. Describing herself as a Canadian entrepreneur with connections, she said she believed his story and could help him find justice. Voldeng recorded hours of interviews with him and decided he should move to Canada for his own safety. Voldeng helped him find a place minutes away from her home.
In November, Voldeng published six tapes of her interviews with Sascha. Before those posts, Voldeng’s Substack was sparse — a few nature photos, thoughts on media and woo-woo musings that got dozens of likes, sometimes a few shares. Her post with Sascha’s interviews garnered 30,000 interactions, and she now has the 17th most popular Substack in the international category, with 77,000 followers. Sometime in March, she made the interviews with Sascha available only to paid subscribers; it’s unclear how many of them pay $35 a month for full access.
In the tapes, Sascha’s story expanded from his earlier Facebook posts, with new allegations against other prominent conservatives, including a Supreme Court justice and more current members of Congress. Unlikely helpers were added too, with Sascha saying Jane Goodall, the primatologist, worked with him as an almost feral child. And the Epstein connection, which was absent from his Facebook posts, became central to the story, with Voldeng framing Sascha’s abuse as part of a “Trump-Epstein ring,” and his father a pilot for the convicted sex offender.
After two hourlong phone calls with her, asking as many different ways as I knew how, I cannot say with confidence what Voldeng does.
In the early 2000s, Voldeng created a superhero comic called Überbabe, the main character of which was described by one outlet at the time as a sassy bisexual crime-fighter battling “the forces of fear and bigotry.” One of Voldeng’s many websites lists her work as including (in alphabetical order): advertising, aerospace, defense, education, energy, environment, finance, governance, law, media, science, technology and “realms of sheer starlit wonder.”
Her umbrella venture is Ultra-Agent Industries, a Victoria-based company she described as a media and technology lab that, according to the website, builds markets, companies, experiences, products, services and technologies.
Voldeng also claimed to be working with more than 20 other survivors. Some, she said, are Epstein survivors, others are victims of what she called “ritual abuse,” or the sexual and physical abuse of children as part of occult or satanic rituals. (This kind of widespread abuse has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked. Its most famous recent era was during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, when coercive therapies produced a wave of false allegations that destroyed communities and led to wrongful prosecutions. The panic lives on in online communities and sometimes reappears in the real world.)
In January, Voldeng announced to her followers that she had “filed a case” for those survivors with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. What this meant, according to a copy she shared with me, was that she submitted Sascha’s claims via an online form to the Special Procedures mechanism of the council, a process that allows individuals to flag alleged human rights violations to independent U.N. experts. She has not received a response.
Voldeng has posted that the girls and young women who are survivors of Epstein are a distraction — part of a “false narrative” engineered to obscure the real victims: small children and boys, most of whom were killed, she said, leaving Sascha as the sole survivor.
When asked directly what expertise she brought to survivors of trafficking or child abuse, Voldeng said, “My approach is proactive and pre-emptive.” Her team, she said, is “a mix of Red Cross meets Jedi Knights.”
Voldeng didn’t respond to my request to meet in Victoria. And by the time I got home, she had cut ties with Sascha entirely. She released a statement on Substack last week, saying he was acting “erratically” and “has a reckless disregard for safety and security.”
“During the past few months Sascha has also told falsehoods, and endangered the innocent,” Voldeng wrote.
Sascha had a different version of their falling out. He told me he had lost faith in Voldeng and that she didn’t deliver.
“I think she may be a self-serving con artist,” he said.
Asked whether she might be exploiting vulnerable people, Voldeng said via phone call that such criticism was part of a coordinated campaign against her, orchestrated by pedophile conspirators associated with lawyers who represented Epstein’s victims.
“The truth speaks for itself,” she said.
Before I left Canada, I told Sascha what would come next: I would try to verify what he told me, and I would call people who knew him, including his dad.
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“Anything that you do with William Kyle Riley, be very careful,” he said. “He’s a dangerous person.”
* * *
Disproving a conspiracy theory can be frustrating work.
I asked Sascha and Voldeng for documents and records that might support his specific claims. They didn’t provide any. I inquired with local police departments mentioned by Sascha in Alabama and Oklahoma. They had no corroborating reports from the time. I was able to confirm that Voldeng had shared Sascha’s story with the offices of Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, but aides declined to say anything more. I reached out to everyone Sascha alleged to have been present at the criminal child abuse parties in the 1980s. None of them agreed to speak on the record.
Another way journalists try to verify years- or decades-old accounts of sexual assault is by talking to people who knew the victim when the abuse occurred and can corroborate the account with what they might have witnessed or even been told at the time. Asked for these kinds of contacts, Sascha could only suggest I talk to a woman he met recently who experienced a similar kind of abuse.
I reached out to dozens of people who knew Sascha in real life and as a child. Seven family members spoke with me; most of them asked not to be named, citing fear of harassment, as well as concern for their safety and businesses and relationships they said had already been strained by Sascha’s claims. None of them believed his stories of abuse at the hands of his father or an Epstein-connected cabal.
Presented with this information, Sascha explained they all must have something to hide.
Bill Riley, 77, spent decades flying helicopters for the U.S. military, emergency medical services operations and local law enforcement agencies across the South. Despite claims made in the Substack interviews, Bill said he could not have flown jets for Epstein or anyone else, as he did not have that pilot certificate. Bill’s full name is William Kyle Riley — not William Henry Riley, a private investigator whose name appears in the Epstein files.
And Bill is unequivocal in his denial that he abused his adopted son.
I met Bill and his wife, Cindy, at a local park in Georgia, about an hour outside Atlanta. Bill wore a Vietnam veterans cap, moved slowly and couldn’t talk for long stretches, as he was still recovering from a lung surgery in January.
“I have no idea who the man was,” Bill said of Epstein. “Don’t want to know who the man was, but unfortunately, Sascha has pushed things to the forefront.”
There was no abuse ring or brothels or child murders, Bill said.
Bill and Cindy said they agreed to talk to me because they wanted to set the record straight. But they were also cautious. Sascha had previously posted their address on his social media accounts, and posted Bill’s picture alongside Lynn Hasbrook, Sascha’s stepmother growing up. Sascha also posted that his former stepmother died by suicide after he made his abuse allegations, but according to an obituary and two family members (who were upset by Hasbrook being branded a child abuser on the internet), she died in her sleep in 2018 from a cardiac incident.
Bill and Cindy said sheriff’s deputies showed up weeks earlier to investigate a tip called in to the county’s Division of Family and Children Services, alleging that Bill was trafficking children in his basement. They were relieved to see it was a sheriff coming down their driveway and not one of the strangers who had been sending them threatening mail and leaving voice messages telling Bill to kill himself or turn himself in.
They showed me one of the threatening letters, written in bubbly script on yellow legal paper and postmarked from Kingsford, Michigan. The author called Bill a “sick man” and suggested he testify, lest he go to hell when he died. “Those poor children :(” it ended.
“This is a small county,” Gordon County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Robert Paris said when I went to verify their visit. “We know most of the people — and are related to a lot of them. I don’t know anything about tunnels or people being trafficked.”
Paris gave me a copy of the only record he had on file: a report Bill made in January after Sascha’s Substack interviews. Bill told a deputy he was “afraid that Sascha might actually attempt to do something stupid” and that his son owned guns. The report also noted that the deputy contacted the Secret Service in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and that the agency opened an investigation.
Bill, Paris said, “seemed like a very nice man.”
To believe Sascha’s story — and many people do — one must believe that Bill is a monster and a murderer.
Bill remembers meeting Sascha in Germany, where he was stationed after multiple tours in Vietnam. He said Sascha was about 4 years old and making a bottle for his infant sister, heating the milk on the stove and testing it on his wrist. Sascha’s biological dad, an Air Force serviceman named Manuel Barros, was in prison. And Sascha’s young mother, he said, was not able to care for her kids or interested in doing so. Bill took care of Sascha for his mother on the weekends and got attached.
“Sascha captured my heart,” Bill said.
So Bill adopted Sascha — he said the German government wouldn’t give him both kids — and brought the little boy back to the states, settling in Alabama, where he worked as a flight instructor. Bill said Sascha was bright but defiant early on, but something hardened in him around age 16. No one could tell Sascha anything and he started getting into fights — with Bill, with other kids and with a coach at school. Sascha joined the Army, and the two lost touch for years, until he reached out in the early 2000s, when he was stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado. Bill and Cindy showed me photos of them with Sascha, his wife and their then-toddler son at their home and on Bill’s riding lawn mower in Georgia. Bill said Sascha cut them off again in 2017 without explanation. They didn’t learn about the abuse allegations until a few years later.
“I just don’t understand,” Bill said, shaking his head. “What did I ever do to his life to make him want to be that horrible about me? What’s to be gained from it?”
Days after I met him, on April 3, Bill died while visiting his grandchildren in Texas, according to an obituary that is no longer online. Sascha posted the news of his father’s death with a link to the obituary, leading his followers to bombard the funeral home with harassing emails and calls. The funeral home took the obituary down three days after it was published, Cindy said.
* * *
In the real world, Sascha lives a small and isolated life. But online, he’s never alone. And his more than half a million followers on Threads never seem to tire of telling him how important he is. Beneath every post, they hail him as brave, a hero, a truth-teller and the man who could finally bring down Trump.
Sascha has appreciated the constant support of the strangers who believe him, the ones who send messages at all hours to make sure he is still alive. His online followers provide the validation his family and friends would not. But they are also an intense community, obsessed with trauma.
“It’s a lot,” Sascha conceded.
Something may have happened to Sascha. I don’t know. But what he said happened almost certainly did not. One person who grew up with him, and found themselves caught up in his accusations, told me they were livid. Not with Sascha, but his followers.
“I really wish you guys would just stop putting this on the internet,” the family member said. “It’s really bad, and it’s been bad his whole life. It’s just not fair for him to be paraded around — because a lot of it is just about politics and it’s just not fair. He doesn’t deserve that. I know he’s causing this, but it’s not really his fault.”
In the weeks since we met, Sascha wasn’t doing well. He was being kicked out of his sublet in Canada. He decided to try Ireland next, but hadn’t yet heard back from Rosie O’Donnell, who moved there last year. Sascha was supposed to be on comedian Kathy Griffin’s podcast, but she canceled at the last minute, citing advice from her lawyers. Then I called and told him where my reporting had landed. He’d been teasing our interview to his followers.
I told him the reporting led me to believe his claims against the president were not true; that I’d met his father and talked to his family and I thought maybe something had happened to him, but not the way he said.
“I told you the truth,” he replied. “You can print whatever you like. The truth is going to be the truth forever.”
Sascha is right in that his version of the truth will endure — at least among his supporters. People who believe his story without knowing there is no evidence to support it might be swayed by an article like this one. But as with QAnon, a coalition of true believers uninterested in facts that counter their cause will dig in. They already have.
After our talk, Sascha posted that I would be publishing an article that “essentially says she could find no corroborative evidence to support my allegations.” Within minutes, hundreds of people were in the comments. They said I must have been compromised or threatened, or was simply not brave enough to report the truth.
They said they believed him. And they would never stop sharing his story.
Brandy Zadrozny is a senior enterprise reporter for MS NOW. She was a previously a senior enterprise reporter for NBC News, based in New York.