Like sharks and Nazis, gangsters who kill other gangsters are a reliable source of fascination for the British public. When a gangland hit makes the news, it opens a window onto a high-stakes world of extreme characters and cold-blooded violence. The execution of the Essex Boys — three drug-dealing gangsters blasted to death in a Range Rover, down a farm track in 1995 — spawned a wave of  “Essexploitation” movies and documentaries which are still being churned out three decades later.

The presumption is that the kind of people who carry out hits are a bit like Eddie Redmayne’s assassin in The Day of the Jackal reboot: mysterious, smooth, deadly professionals, whose employers are criminal masterminds who know how to organise a clean liquidation. But in Britain at least, nothing could be further from the truth.

Here is an exchange of real-life text messages intercepted by police as part of an investigation into a planned triple homicide in 2019. The boss of an influential Turkish organised crime group in North London is hiring a criminal broker to arrange the killing of three men. “I’ll pay 150 bro then give u like 5 bricks new year January or something”, he writes. (That means £150,000 up front, plus five kilos of cocaine or heroin on completion.)

The man taking on the contract, formerly a senior member of a local street gang, feels the need to reassure his Turkish paymaster of his credentials, despite their longstanding criminal relationship: “U know I’ve killed about 9 people and made about 4 die bro its fucked up init,” he replies. Then: “First person was in 1st year in school bro kmt bro, after I do the ones on the list I think I’m gonna go into retirement.” Kmt is urban slang for “kiss my teeth”, an expression of contempt or nonchalance.

In this case, the planned murders were prevented before any shots were fired — thanks to the police monitoring these communications as part of a surveillance operation. But in May last year, an assassination attempt linked to the same long-running feud — which is linked to at least 20 murders in two decades — did play out on the streets of North London. A gunman hired by the Tottenham Turks pulled up on a stolen Ducati Monster motorbike outside a busy restaurant in Dalston and fired six shots, injuring three members of the Hackney Turks, who were sitting outside. He also accidentally shot a nine-year-old girl who was eating ice cream, leaving her with severe injuries. The bullet remains lodged in her brain.

Last month, a North London criminal named Javon Riley was jailed for life for his role as a spotter and getaway driver in the hit. But Riley refused to name the individual who paid him £40,000 to help the gunman, telling the court he feared for his life. Meanwhile, the hitman himself remains on the run.

“We’re a million miles away from [the high death count] portrayed on TV shows like Mobland and Gangs of London, but these executions do happen,” says Ian Broughton, a former Met detective who advises on court cases involving drugs and firearms. “If it can’t be solved by diplomacy, when all else has failed, murder is the last course of action.”

Still, in the real world, gangsters are actually pretty bad at murder, and organising an execution can hit the same problems as organising a legitimate business project: service delivery can be unreliable; outsourcing means no one takes responsibility when something goes wrong; and too often efforts are more performative than results-based. High-level gang hits on Britain’s streets are, mercifully, less frequent than you might think, but when they do happen, they are often brutal, shambolic, and orchestrated from thousands of miles away.

We know this thanks, in part, to a fascinating study into subcontracted violence among London drug gangs recently carried out by Jack Warburton, a researcher at Oxford University who specialises in organised crime. Warburton analysed 17 contract hit cases, gaining access to closed-case police files relating to a large and detailed surveillance operation into the activities of a North London crime network as it planned three assassinations in 2019. The intercepted phone chats, beginning with the text exchange detailed above, show how the job was offered around the London criminal underworld like a gig on the chore-outsourcing app, TaskRabbit — with one of the three killings ultimately taken on by a low-level drug user who was seemingly incapable of finding his target, let alone killing him.

The job begins with the Turkish gang boss ordering the triple hit. A big figure in London’s drug trade, the Gang Boss is now living in Turkey, where he moved to evade the attention of the police. One of the three men he wanted dead was a member of a rival Turkish crime group, whom he held responsible for the murder of his cousin. Surprisingly, however, the other two were members of his own organisation. He targeted one for going to the police, and the other for acting without the approval of senior group members.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the case, however, is that despite his organisation’s nationwide reputation for violence, the Gang Boss opts to subcontract out the killings — using a senior member of a local street gang as a criminal broker. The pair trust each other, because the Turkish Gang Boss has been supplying the Broker with wholesale amounts of Class A drugs to sell on London’s streets for several years. Like last year’s attempted murders at the Dalston cafe, the use of predominantly black street gangs to carry out hits has been a regular feature of ethnically Turkish and Kurdish crime groups, enriched by decades operating as the chief gatekeepers of London’s heroin supply. Police have recovered numerous pistols and machine guns that have been passed from Turkish crime groups to black street gangs — who rely on their supply of drugs to make their own money.

The text exchanges reveal the Gang Boss and the Broker identifying the targets and agreeing the fee. However, even though he boasts about his own credentials as a killer, the Broker himself opts to subcontract the hits, asking an Accomplice to help him. The Accomplice is similarly reluctant to become directly involved himself, and so he in turn tries to find someone else to do the actual killing. And as the job moves down the chain, the plot starts to get a bit haphazard.

The Accomplice picks out a Journeyman — low-level drug user and dealer with little experience in carrying out contracted violence — to kill the rival gang member. However, he has no luck finding anyone to kill the other two victims. Frustrated, the Broker casts the net wider, bringing in a trusted relative with underworld connections. It is this Relative (now the fifth person involved in the conspiracy) who recruits the other two hitmen (the sixth and seventh people) from a prominent violent gang from another city.

Meanwhile, the Journeyman sources a gun, and alongside the Accomplice, steals an Audi 4×4 and fixes it with a number plate pinched from a similar car. They hide the weapon inside the Audi before parking it near the home of one of the targets. Little do they know that all of this time, the police have been intercepting their phone messages. The police are aware that one of the targets is in imminent danger — but they also want to continue monitoring the criminal conspiracy. So they decide to steal the Audi containing the gun, making it look like a regular car theft.

The criminals fall for it. Assuming the theft to be an unfortunate coincidence, they resolve to start again. But they find it challenging to source a new gun for the right price, and the plot descends into the kind of cluelessness familiar from Guy Ritchie films.

The Broker is meanwhile telling the Accomplice that one of the other three victims is an easy target. He’s recently been released from prison so must wear an electronic tag, meaning he’ll be at a certain address after a certain time every day. “…we should be cashing in tomorrow, this really is light work,” says the Broker.

But it doesn’t turn out to be light work. The Accomplice struggles to find the target or the property he’s tagged to. So the Broker pays £10,000 to a member of a local street gang from the target’s neighbourhood — now the eighth conspirator in the plot — to carry out surveillance. When the two assassins recruited from outside London finally arrive to carry out the hit, they find the property is teeming with armed men providing protection. They abort the mission agreeing that they need more guns.

Meanwhile, the Journeyman is back to surveilling his target, who lives in a remote area on the outskirts of London. He carries out four separate surveillance sessions, each lasting between 10 minutes and a couple of hours — and the police know this as his mobile phone connected to the local cell tower. Bringing your mobile with you to a hit counts as a schoolboy error, and shows just how far out of his depth the Journeyman is. And so, with the plot nearing its violent conclusion, police swoop on the gang, arresting and convicting several of the UK-based conspirators.

It’s a case worth dwelling on, because it encompasses several traits that have become common in modern gangland assassination attempts. You would think violence and murder would be an essential in-house capability for an organised crime gang. But subcontracting out murder “makes strategic sense,” notes Warburton. It distances the criminal act from the person ordering it, and allows bosses to get on with the important business of making money. Note how the Gang Boss remained safely in Turkey, where he is less likely to be found by police or by rivals seeking revenge.

The safe haven du jour for European gangsters, however, is Dubai. For years, criminals have flocked to the Emirate to take advantage of its luxurious living, lack of gang violence, and crucially, its lax rules on money laundering and extraditing criminals. In June, British cocaine baron James Harding was jailed for 32 years after plotting to pay a hitman £100,000 to put a rival “permanently out of business” while lounging by a pool in a five-star hotel in Dubai.

Nevertheless, by operating remotely and subcontracting out hits, British gangsters have surrendered some control over the actual operations — which often come with a distinct air of amateurism. Part of this is down to Britain’s tight gun laws, which mean there are simply not many people around who are proficient in wielding a gun. When gangs are able to source firearms, their lack of expertise means they tend to “spray and pray”. In the space of 24 hours, innocent bystanders Ashley Dale, 28, and Olivia Pratt-Korbel, 9, were killed in totally separate incidents in Liverpool in 2022, with both killed by gunmen hired to murder rival gangsters.

But even hiring trained gunmen is no guarantee of success. In 2021, a serving British soldier was jailed after he was paid to kill a man in Cheshire by a regional crime boss living in Spain. The soldier turned up at the man’s home with a Glock hidden in a pizza delivery box. Despite having a photo of his target, he managed to shoot the wrong man, blasting the intended victim’s stepfather in the legs.

Then there was the case of Anis Hemissi, the killer hired to execute the Swedish-Albanian drug trafficker Flamur Beqiri in 2019. Bequiri was shot dead in front of his wife and children on the doorstep of their £1.7 million home in Battersea. It’s a story that made national news, in part because Bequiri’s sister Misse starred in The Real Housewives of Cheshire. But despite being able to carry out the killing, Hemissi’s methods had a distinct flavour of Inspector Clouseau.

“The media presented [Hemissi] as this kickboxer, this professional killer, but he was the complete opposite,” Warburton tells me. Hemissi, who had flown in from Sweden under his own name to carry out the hit, was identified as the culprit within days because his attempts at subterfuge were so useless. “When he did the surveillance he rode a distinctive women’s bike and was litter-picking wearing a latex mask and a Swedish bin-collector’s uniform, so a local resident, thinking he was crazy, asked him what he was doing, and reported it to the police.” Hemissi was jailed for life in 2022.

Still, criminals are capable of learning from their mistakes. One of the main concerns crime experts now have is their increasingly sophisticated use of technology, with tracking devices increasingly preferred to human spotters to monitor targets’ movements. In 2022, Koray Alpergin, a Turkish radio DJ, was tortured to death in a disused bar in Tottenham while his girlfriend Gozde Dalbudak was forced to listen to his screams. The Tottenham Turks wanted him dead over a drugs-related feud — and the thugs they hired captured him after attaching a tracking device to his car.

Nevertheless, such killings remain extremely rare. There are no detailed statistics on how many attempted and successful hits are carried out in Britain each year, but a College of Policing study estimated that 5% of annual homicides in England and Wales are linked to organised crime groups. That would equate to 28 of 570 killings last year. More general gang-related killings, including teenagers attacking each other with knives and machetes over petty beefs, were roughly twice as frequent.

But that stands to reason. Killing is bad for business in the criminal world, as it attracts reprisals, extra heat from the police, and impacts revenue. And despite their fearsome reputation, British organised crime groups are much more money-making machines than killing machines.

The underworld is, after all, a distorted mirror of the world we live in. As in the legitimate business world, crime organisations are now run by remote and unaccountable leadership, often based offshore, hoovering up the proceeds; there is a chain of harassed middle management giving everyone plausible deniability; and then there are the undertrained, underpaid workers actually doing the jobs. On the rare occasions they succeed, it’s almost always these hapless individuals who get caught — and almost never the person who bankrolled them. As in the business world, the reputation of the people at the top must be preserved at all costs.

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Max Daly is an award-winning crime journalist. His Substack is Narcomania.

Narcomania

• Pfizer mRNA flu vaccine trial: Involved 45,000 participants, including 27,000 over 65, comparing mRNA shot to standard flu shot without placebo.
• Efficacy in older adults: mRNA recipients 6% more likely to get flu; 49 deaths versus 46 in standard shot group.
• Safety signals in older adults: 22 cases of kidney issues (acute injury, chronic disease, end-stage) versus 9; 17 acute respiratory failures versus 6.
• Side effects comparison: 69% of mRNA patients reported local reactions like swelling, versus 26% for standard shot.
• Announcement delay: Pfizer promised results by end of 2023 but posted quietly on clinicaltrials.gov in May 2025.
• Younger adults (18-64): mRNA reduced flu risk slightly (prevented 30 cases in 9,000), but caused 174 extra adverse events.
• Pfizer's pipeline status: Lists mRNA flu vaccine as Phase 2 despite completing Phase 3 trial.
• Publication focus: NEJM article highlighted younger adult data positively; media reported outperformance without noting side effects increase.

Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine for influenza failed when tested against the standard flu shot in a 27,000-person trial of older adults — a failure Pfizer has not announced for years.

Almost three times as many people who received the mRNA shot suffered acute respiratory failure or major kidney problems. More died, too. Overall, mRNA patients were much more likely to report side effects than those who got the standard flu shot.

But mRNA shots did not protect patients from the flu better than standard shots.

mRNA Covid jab sales have already cratered. This new failure may effectively end development of mRNA shots for respiratory viruses — and many other viruses too.

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(They hide the truth. I find it. Help me, for pennies a day!)

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Pfizer has never publicly announced the failure of the trial.

In a statement on Halloween 2023, the company promised to release the results by the end of 20231. It did not.

Instead, in May 2025, long after its self-imposed deadline, Pfizer quietly updated the “study results” page for the trial on the clinicaltrials.gov Website with trial’s results.

They reveal across-the-board failure on both safety and efficacy for the mRNA influenza shot. (I am suing Pfizer chairman Dr. Albert Bourla and director Dr. Scott Gottlieb for conspiring to violate my Constitutional rights and forcing Twitter to ban me in 2021.)

The trial included about 45,000 people, about 27,000 over 65 and 18,000 under 65. Patients were randomly chosen to receive either the standard flu shot or Pfizer’s mRNA jab.2 There was no placebo arm in the trial, though there probably should have been, since many epidemiologists doubt the value of standard flu shots and a placebo arm would have shown potential safety risks even more clearly.

Older people who got mRNA shots were about 6 percent more likely to get the flu than those who got standard shots. And 49 older people who received the mRNA shot died, compared to 46 who received the flu shot.

The study also revealed a significant safety signal for the mRNAs on kidney damage. Twenty-two older patients who received the mRNA shot were diagnosed with acute kidney injury, chronic kidney disease, or end-stage renal disease, compared to nine who received the standard shot.

In another worrisome finding, 17 older people who received mRNA suffered “acute respiratory failure,” compared to only six who received the standard flu shot.

mRNA patients were also much more likely to have less serious side effects. For example, about 69 percent reported injection-site swelling or other local side effects after the jab, compared to 26 percent who received the flu shot.

—

(Dial F for failure. RVE stands for “relative vaccine effectiveness” — in other words, how much the mRNA shot reduced the chances that a person who got it would get the flu compared to someone who got the normal vaccine.

But the mRNA shot had NEGATIVE effectiveness - in other words, it raised the risks of getting the flu.)

[

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(SOURCE)

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These results are so bad that it is not clear whether the Food and Drug Administration could or would possibly approve an mRNA shot based on this data.

Even if the FDA did, the shot’s commercial prospects would be effectively nil. Doctors have no reason to give patients a newer, more expensive jab that has far more side effects but is less effective.

Pfizer appears to know very well that these results are disastrous.

In its most recent discussion of its “pipeline” of future drugs, Pfizer oddly referred to the mRNA flu vaccine as being in “Phase 2” development.

Companies put most potential new drugs and vaccines through three phases of human trials before submitting them to the FDA for approval. Phase 3 is the final phase, and consists of large trials — like the 45,000 patient trial Pfizer has already run.

In other words, Pfizer has already put its flu shot through Phase 3 but it seems to be pretending it did not.

—

Instead of coming clean about the failure, Pfizer has instead chosen to publish results from the part of the trial that covers younger adults, the 18-to-64 group.

In that group, the mRNA vaccine slightly reduced the risk of flu, though at the cost of much higher side effects.

In absolute terms, the shot prevented 30 cases of flu among 9,000 younger people — while causing an extra 174 adverse events. Yes, you read that right. For every flu infection they stopped in young and middle-aged adults (for whom the flu is unlikely to be serious), mRNA jabs caused SIX cases of side effects.

—

(Nope, not making that up.)

[

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Somehow, Pfizer’s scientists spun that finding as positive in a New England Journal of Medicine article last week, and the usual legacy media bootlickers ran with it.

“Pfizer’s mRNA flu shot outperforms standard flu vaccine in late-stage trial,” NBC reported.

Sure, if you don’t count the six-fold increase in side effects.

But the findings in older adults are even worse — so bad that Pfizer decided to break its 2023 promise to investors to disclose them and simply stick them in the virtual filing cabinet that is clinicaltrials.gov.

Once again, when proper trials are run, they show mRNA-based vaccines for healthy people are not ready for prime time and will likely never be.

Too bad we didn’t run those trials on Covid shots in 2020. Or 2021. Or ever.

1

See pages 11 and 12 of Pfizer’s Oct. 31, 2023 earnings release on “First-Generation modFlu mRNA Influenza Vaccine Candidate (PF-07252220)”: “A readout from the Phase 3 trial’s cohort in adults ages 65 and over is expected later this year.”

2

The mRNA flu shots work on the same principle as the mRNA Covid shot, by giving the body a dose of genetic material called mRNA. In the case of the mRNA flu jab, that material causes cells to make a part of the flu virus and thus primes the immune system to respond more quickly to the real flu virus, if someone is infected.

• Epstein emails reveal elite connections: Messages show Jeffrey Epstein's ties to figures across politics, business, academia, and media, including Trump, Summers, Chomsky, and others.
• Elite network disregards suffering: Group linked to financial crises, wars, inequality, and other harms, enabling Epstein's post-conviction rehabilitation.
• "Epstein class" defined: Modern power elite with nomadic lifestyles, world citizenship, blending governing, profiting, thinking, and philanthropy.
• Communication rituals: Emails start with whereabouts updates like travel plans to New York, Davos, facilitating meetings and connections.
• Barter of information: Exchanges of nonpublic insights, insider tips on politics, finance, and conferences, valued over public knowledge.
• Capital laundering dynamics: Trading money for prestige, intel for access, with Epstein gaining reputation via associations like Summers and New.
• Status and loyalty markers: Terseness in replies signals power; network loyalty trumps ideological clashes, prioritizing self-preservation.
• Examples with key figures: Interactions include Summers seeking tips, Ruemmler's job advice and casual observations, highlighting elite indifference.

As journalists comb through the Epstein emails, surfacing the name of one fawning luminary after another, there is a collective whisper of “How could they?” How could such eminent people, belonging to such prestigious institutions, succumb to this?

A close read of the thousands of messages makes it less surprising. When Jeffrey Epstein, a financier turned convicted sex offender, needed friends to rehabilitate him, he knew where to turn: a power elite practiced at disregarding pain.

At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against.

The Epstein story is resonating with a broader swath of the public than most stories now do, and some in the establishment worry. When Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, speaks of an “Epstein class,” isn’t that dangerous? Isn’t that class warfare?

But the intuitions of the public are right. People are right to sense that, as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped.

It is no accident that this was the social milieu that took Mr. Epstein in. His reinvention, after he pleaded guilty to prostitution-related charges in Florida in 2008**,** would never have been possible without this often anti-democratic, self-congratulatory elite, which, even when it didn’t traffic people, took the world for a ride.

The emails, in my view, together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is.

The idea of an Epstein class is helpful because one can be misled by the range of people to whom Mr. Epstein ingratiated himself. Republicans. Democrats. Businesspeople. Diplomats. Philanthropists. Healers. Professors. Royals. Superlawyers. A person he emailed at one moment was often at war with the ideas of another correspondent — a Lawrence Summers to a Steve Bannon, a Deepak Chopra to a scientist skeptical of all spirituality, a Peter Thiel to a Noam Chomsky. This diversity masked a deeper solidarity.

What his correspondents tended to share was membership in a distinctly modern elite: a ruling class in which 40,000-foot nomadism, world citizenship and having just landed back from Dubai lend the glow that deep roots once provided; in which academic intellect is prized the way pedigree once was; in which ancient caste boundaries have melted to allow rotation among, or simultaneous pursuit of, governing, profiting, thinking and giving back. Some members, like Mr. Summers, are embedded in all aspects of it; others, less so.

If this neoliberal-era power elite remains poorly understood, it may be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a noblesse-oblige elite, a political elite or a narrative-making elite; it straddles all of these, lucratively and persuaded of its own good intentions. If it’s a jet set, it’s a carbon-offset-private-jet set. After all, flying commercial won’t get you from your Davos breakfast on empowering African girls with credit cards to your crypto-for-good dinner in Aspen.

Many of the Epstein emails begin with a seemingly banal rite that, the more I read, took on greater meaning: the whereabouts update and inquiry. In the Epstein class, emails often begin and end with pings of echolocation. “Just got to New York — love to meet, brainstorm,” the banker Robert Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein. “i’m in wed, fri. edelman?” Mr. Epstein wrote to the billionaire Thomas Pritzker (it is unclear if he meant a person, corporation or convening). To Lawrence Krauss, a physicist in Arizona: “noam is going to tucson on the 7th. will you be around.” Mr. Chopra wrote to say he would be in New York, first speaking, then going “for silence.” Gino Yu, a game developer, announced travel plans involving Tulum, Davos and the D.L.D. (Digital Life Design) conference — an Epstein-class hat trick.

Landings and takeoffs, comings and goings, speaking engagements and silent retreats — members of this group relentlessly track one another’s passages through JFK, LHR, NRT and airports you’ve never even heard of. Whereabouts are the pheromones of this elite. They occasion the connection-making and information barter that are its lifeblood. If “Have you eaten?” was a traditional Chinese greeting, “Where are you today?” is the Epstein-class query.

Their loyalty, it appears, is less downward to people and communities than horizontal to fellow members of their borderless network. Back in 2016, Theresa May, then the prime minister of Britain, seemed to capture their essence: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” Mr. Epstein’s correspondents come alive far from home, freed from obligations, in the air, ready to connect.

And the payoff can be real. Maintain, as Mr. Epstein did, a grandmother-like radar of what a thousand people are doing tomorrow and where, and you can introduce a correspondent needing a lending partner to someone you’re seeing today. Or let Ehud Barak know a Rothschild has the flu. Or offer someone else a jet ride back to New York and reward the journalist who tipped you off by setting him up to meet a Saudi royal.

But the whereabouts missive is just the first flush of connection. Motion is the flirtation; actual information, the consummation.

How did Mr. Epstein manage to pull so many strangers close? The emails reveal a barter economy of nonpublic information that was a big draw. This is not a world where you bring a bottle of wine to dinner and that’s it. You bring what financiers call “edge” — proprietary insight, inside information, a unique takeaway from a conference, a counterintuitive prediction about A.I., a snippet of conversation with a lawmaker, a foretaste of tomorrow’s news.

What the Epstein class understands is that the more accessible information becomes, the more precious nonpublic information is. The more everybody insta-broadcasts opinions, the dearer is the closely held take. The emails are a private, bilateral social media for people who can’t or won’t post: an archipelago of single-subscriber Substacks. And in the need to maintain relevance by offering edge, a reader detects thirst and swagger, desperateness and swanning.

“Saw Matt C with DJT at golf tournament I know why he was there,” Nicholas Ribis, a former Trump Hotel executive, wrote to Mr. Epstein, making what couples therapists call a bid for attention. Jes Staley, then a top banking executive, casually mentioned a dinner with George Tenet, the former Central Intelligence Agency director, and got the reaction he probably hoped for: “how was tenet.” Mr. Summers laid bait by mentioning meetings with people at SoftBank and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Mr. Epstein nibbled: “anyone stand out?” Then Mr. Summers could offer proprietary intel. On it went: What are people saying? Who are you hearing for F.B.I. director? Should I drop your name to Bill Clinton?

Sometimes these people give the impression that their minds would be blown by a newspaper. Mr. Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein: “Love to get your sense of Trump’s administration, policies.” And while it may seem strange to rely on Mr. Epstein for political analysis when you can visit any number of websites, for this class, insight’s value varies inversely with the number of recipients. And the ultimate flex is getting insider intel and shrugging: “Nthg revolutionary really,” the French banker Ariane de Rothschild wrote during a meeting with Portugal’s prime minister.

Nomadic bat signals get things going, and edge keeps them flowing, while underneath a deeper exchange is at work. The smart need money; the rich want to seem smart; the staid seek adjacency to what Mr. Summers called “life among the lucrative and louche”; and Mr. Epstein needed to wash his name using blue-chip people who could be forgiving about infractions against the less powerful. Each has some form of capital and seeks to trade. The business is laundering capital — money into prestige, prestige into fun, fun into intel, intel into money.

Mr. Summers wrote to Mr. Epstein: “U r wall st tough guy w intellectual curiosity.” Mr. Epstein replied: “And you an interllectual with a Wall Street curiosity.”

In another email, Mr. Epstein offered typo-strewn and false musings on climate science to Mr. Krauss, including that Canada perhaps favored global warming, since it’s cold (it doesn’t), and that the South Pole is actually getting colder (it’s melting rapidly). Mr. Krauss let Mr. Epstein indulge in his rich-man theorizing while offering a tactful correction and a hint that more research funding would help.

For this modern elite, seeming smart is what inheriting land used to be: a guarantor of opened doors. A shared hyperlink can’t stand alone; your unique spin must be applied. Mr. Krauss sends his New Yorker article on militant atheism; Mr. Chomsky sends a multiparagraph reply; Mr. Epstein dashes off: “I think religion plays a major positive role in many lives. . i dont like fanaticism on either side. . sorry.” This somehow leads to a suggestion that Mr. Krauss bring the actor Johnny Depp to Mr. Epstein’s private island.

Again and again, scholarly types lower themselves to offer previews of their research or inquiries into Mr. Epstein’s “ideas.” “Maybe climate change is a good way of dealing with overpopulation,” muses Joscha Bach, a German cognitive scientist.

The nature of this omnidirectional capital exchange comes into special focus in the triangle of emails among Mr. Epstein, Mr. Summers and his wife, Elisa New. Mr. Summers seemingly benefited from Mr. Epstein’s hosting, tip-offs, semi-insight into Trumpworld and, most grossly, dating advice many years into his marriage.

Ms. New sought Mr. Epstein’s help contacting Woody Allen and revising her emails to invite people on her televised poetry show. Mr. Epstein tutored her in elite mores and motives: Don’t say, Come on my show; say, Join Serena Williams, Bill Clinton and Shaq in coming on my show. Mr. Epstein reaped the benefits of smarts by association in hanging around them, of the reputation cleanse of affiliation with Harvard professors and a former Treasury secretary, and of getting to cosplay as statesman, once sending an unsolicited intro email to Mr. Summers and a Senegalese politician, Karim Wade, who, Mr. Epstein informed Mr. Summers, is “the most charismatic and rational of all the africans and has there respect.” There are 1.5 billion people and 54 countries in Africa.

This class has its status games. One is, when getting a tip, to block the blessing by saying you already know. Another is to apologize for busyness by invoking centrality — “trump related issues occupying my time.” When an intro is offered, the coldest reply is “no.” The ultimate power move is from Mohamed Waheed Hassan of the Maldives, whose emails ended: “Sent from President’s iPad.”

If you were an alien landing on Earth and the first thing you saw was the Epstein emails, you could gauge status by spelling, grammar, punctuation. Usage is inversely related to power in this network. The earnest scientists and scholars type neatly. The wealthy and powerful reply tersely, with misspellings, erratic spacing, stray commas.

The status games belie a truth, though: These people are on the same team. On air, they might clash. They promote opposite policies. Some in the network profess anguish over what others in the network are doing. But the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins.

Mr. Epstein may despise what Mr. Trump is doing, but he still hangs with Steve Bannon, the Trump whisperer and attack dog, seeking help on crypto regulation. Michael Wolff is a journalist, but that doesn’t stop him from advising Mr. Epstein on his public image. Kenneth Starr, who once doggedly pursued sexual misconduct allegations against Mr. Clinton, reinvented himself as a defender of Mr. Epstein. These are permanent survivors who will profit when things are going this way and then profit again when they turn.

“What team are you pulling for?” Linda Stone, a retired Microsoft executive, asked Mr. Epstein just before the 2016 election.

“none,” he replied.

In one email, he commiserates with Mr. Wolff about Mr. Bannon’s rhetoric; in another, he invites Mr. Bannon over and suggests an additional guest — Kathryn Ruemmler, who served as President Barack Obama’s White House counsel.

His exchanges with Ms. Ruemmler are especially striking — not for the level of horridness, but for how they portray this network at its most shape-shiftingly self-preservational, and most indifferent to the human beings below.

Like so many, she had gone from Obama-era public service to private legal practice, eventually becoming the chief lawyer for Goldman Sachs. That people move from representing the presidency to representing banks is so normal that we forget the costs: the private job done with the savvy to outfox one’s former public-sector colleagues, the public job done gently to keep open doors.

In some exchanges in 2014, Ms. Ruemmler appears to be contemplating a job offer: attorney general of the United States, according to contemporary reports. And who does she seek advice from? A convicted sex offender.

In another email, Mr. Epstein asks a legal question about whether Mr. Trump can declare a national emergency to build a border wall. She responds that a prospective employer has offered her a $2 million signing bonus. The glide from tyranny to bonus distills a core truth: Regardless of what happens, the members of this social network will be fine.

Ms. Ruemmler told Mr. Epstein she was going to New York one day. “I will then stop to pee and get gas at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, will observe all of the people there who are at least 100 pounds overweight, will have a mild panic attack as a result of the observation, and will then decide that I am not eating another bite of food for the rest of my life out of fear that I will end up like one of these people,” she wrote in 2015.

But in the class of permanent survivors, today’s jump scare may yield to tomorrow’s opportunity. A few years after she joined the company, Goldman Sachs declared anti-obesity drugs a “$100 billion opportunity.”

Generally, you can’t read other people’s emails. Powerful people have private servers, I.T. staffs, lawyers. When you get a rare glimpse into how they actually think and view the world, what they actually are after, heed Maya Angelou: Believe them.

American democracy today is in a dangerous place. The Epstein emails are a kind of prequel to the present. This is what these powerful people, in this mesh of institutions and communities, were thinking and doing — taking care of one another instead of the general welfare — before it got really bad.

This era has seen a surge in belief in conspiracy theories, including about Mr. Epstein, because of an underlying intuition people have that is, in fact, correct: The country often seems to be run not for the benefit of most of us.

Shaming the public as rubes for succumbing to conspiracy theories misses what people are trying to tell us: They no longer feel included in the work of choosing their future. On matters small and big, from the price of eggs to whether the sexual abuse of children matters, what they sense is a sneering indifference. And a knack for looking away.

Now the people who capitalized on the revolt against an indifferent American elite are in power, and, shock of all shocks, they are even more indifferent than anyone who came before them. The clubby deal-making and moral racketeering of the Epstein class is now the United States’ governing philosophy.

In spite of that, the unfathomably brave survivors who have come forward to testify to their abuse have landed the first real punch against Mr. Trump. In their solidarity, their devotion to the truth and their insistence on a country that listens when people on the wrong end of power cry for help, they shame the great indifference from above. They point us to other ways of relating.

Source photographs by Cynthia Johnson, Tim Sloan, William Philpott, Charles Ommanney, Win McNamee, Wally McNamee, Bill Olive, Rick Friedman and Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Anand Giridharadas is the author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.”

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This year alone, we’ve completed…

• Documentary Premise: "The Stringer" investigates authorship of "Napalm Girl" photo from Vietnam War, concluding Nick Ut did not take it and Nguyen Nghe did.
• Carl Robinson's Account: AP photo editor claims Horst Faas instructed crediting the photo to Ut despite rejection over nudity.
• Robinson's Views: Expressed regret over publishing photo, called it "pedo war porn," showed bitterness toward Ut and AP after dismissal.
• Horst Faas Allegations: Accused of taking credit for Vietnamese stringers' photos; loyalty to Ut linked to Ut's brother's death.
• Nguyen Nghe's Claim: States he took photo, brother-in-law delivered film to AP for $20; trained photographer with U.S. media experience.
• Nick Ut's Record: Portfolio includes other iconic images; no additional photos shown from Nghe despite his credentials.
• Reenactment Findings: Forensic recreation using satellite image and ITN footage positions Ut away from photo scene.
• Camera Evidence: Negatives suggest Pentax used, not Ut's claimed Leica; AP investigation supports this.

The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo, which lands on Netflix this week, opens with a line implying Nick Ut is a liar: “What you do know is what you didn’t take.” But is that really true? I’ve always thought the inverse makes more sense.

SPOILER WARNING: This article contains many spoilers for The Stringer.

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When a photographer takes a picture, the shutter flips up, rendering them blind for a millisecond. You don’t know exactly what you’ve shot until you see the photo. Therefore, when a photographer sees the frame they wanted in their viewfinder, they know they’ve missed it because the shutter wasn’t up. So perhaps the more accurate saying would be: “What you do know is what you missed.”

It’s one of the many questionable claims and statements made by The Stringer, a documentary examining the true authorship of The Terror of War, colloquially known as Napalm Girl. One of the Vietnam War’s most famous images, it shows a terrified Kim Phuc and her brother running through the village of Trang Bang on June 8, 1972, just after it had been bombed. Phuc had removed her clothes because the napalm was searing her back.

Associated Press

Produced by the VII Foundation and led by photojournalist Gary Knight, the documentary takes viewers on a gripping investigation that arrives at a devastating conclusion: photographer Nick Ut did not take the photo for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and unknown stringer Nguyen Nghe is the true author of the photo.

A still from The Stringer that shows freelancer Nguyen Thanh Nghe at the scene of Napalm Girl.

Origin of the Claims: Carl Robinson

The Stringer came about because of one person: Carl Robinson. He was the photo editor at the Saigon Bureau the day the photos from Trang Bang arrived. Before the documentary, Robinson was best known as the man who rejected the famous photo because of its full-frontal nudity.

The established lore of Napalm Girl is that when AP darkroom editor Yuichi ‘Jackson’ Ishizaki developed the photo, he and Robinson got into an argument over whether the photo should be transmitted to the media because it showed Kim Phuc fully naked. Ishizaki told an office employee to go and fetch the chief of photos in Saigon, Horst Faas, to settle the argument. Faas immediately saw the power of the photo and sided with Ishizaki.

It was when Robinson was typing up the caption and credit information that he says Faas leaned in his ear and said, “Nick Ut. Make it Nick Ut.” Ishizaki, Faas, and a darkroom technician called Huan were all present with Robinson in the room that day. All are now dead apart from Robinson.

Robinson working at AP’s Saigon Bureau. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025

That Robinson disagreed with the decision to publish Napalm Girl is conveniently omitted from The Stringer. To this day, Robinson still believes AP made the wrong call wiring the image despite the undoubted impact the photo had; it became an anti-war symbol, and President Richard Nixon even mused whether the photo was “fixed.”

In an article for The Australian written this year, Robinson maintains the photo should never have been published, saying that other news organizations had “more discretion” by leaving the distressing images of Kim Phuc on the cutting room floor.

In a 2005 interview, Robinson reportedly said AP had “created a monster” by focusing too much on Kim Phuc, and not on all of the war’s victims. In 2022, he called the photo “pedo war porn” and railed against Ut, whom he called a “false idol.” In 2024, Robinson directed yet more anger against Ut, saying he “has gone all Hollywood, I don’t like that.”

Robinson was dismissed from AP in 1978 for unknown reasons. In his autobiography, he wrote that he had a “simmering anger, resentment, and bitterness, especially toward AP.”

None of the above is mentioned or brought up in The Stringer. The film instead presents Robinson as a man who has been wrestling with his conscience for 50 years because of the great secret that he holds.

Gary Knight, left, and Carl Robinson. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025

Putting aside the fact that most would argue Robinson made the wrong call on the most important photo he ever worked on and the fact he has expressed bitterness toward Ut and Faas, what other evidence does Robinson have? He says it was an “open secret” among Vietnamese staff at AP and NBC that the photo had been wrongly attributed, a claim disputed by others who were working in Saigon. He also claims that he raised the issue repeatedly to colleagues and directly to Ut himself. There are some Vietnam War hacks in the documentary who back up Robinson’s claims, but there are others who say they’ve never heard of them, or say they’ve heard of them but dismiss them.

Horst Faas

In an attempt to explain what motivated Faas to change the credit on the photo, the film’s protagonist, Knight, explores Ut’s brother, who was killed while on assignment for Faas, which made the photo editor loyal to Ut.

“Giving this image to Ut wouldn’t make up for his brother’s death, but is it possible Faas thought it would make Ut more secure at AP?” Knight writes in an article for Rolling Stone.

Knight also highlights the photo agency battle playing out in Saigon; AP was reportedly “losing the play” to UPI in 1972. “This was not a moment for an ‘icon of all time’ to be transmitted with the byline of a stringer,” says Knight.

Horst Faas. | Wikipedia

The AP’s chief of photos in Saigon, Horst Faas, is perhaps the most famous photographer of the Vietnam War. Faas, originally from Germany, spent more time in Vietnam than any other foreign journalist and his portfolio — including his iconic portrait of a young American soldier bearing a “War is Hell” headband — is the stuff of legend.

But The Stringer takes aim at Faas more than anyone else in the film. Knight makes the incendiary claim that Faas was regularly in the business of taking photos from local Vietnamese stringers and putting his own credit on them. In the Rolling Stone article, Knight says that fellow photojournalist legend Tim Page, with whom Faas was friends, told him that Faas would take credit for pictures that weren’t his. Page died in 2022.

“Had Faas grown to rationalize occasionally changing the credit on photographs over nearly a decade of war?” Knight asks. “Would this explain how he might have taken something from a stringer he didn’t know, given AP and the younger brother of his dead colleague the kudos, and enhanced his standing at the agency?”

Nguyen Nghe – The Stringer

The documentary goes into detail about the hunt for Nguyen Nghe, which it names as the real author of The Terror of War. Nghe is now an elderly man in ill-health, but he and his family strongly believe that he is the photographer of Napalm Girl.

The film explains that Nghe was a media professional who had even received training in the United States after he joined the South Vietnamese army.

Nguyen Thanh Nghe as a young man. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025

Nghe’s story is this: he took the famous photo in Trang Bang and his brother-in-law, Tran Van Than, who worked for NBC, took the film to the AP office and was paid $20 for it while also being given an 8×10 print of the image. Six months later, he heard about the photo’s popularity and its misattribution, but when he went to find the print AP gave him, his wife had thrown it in the trash.

“Why do you have this photo?” Nghe’s wife reportedly asked him. This is vexing; if Nghe was a trained photographer and freelancing for Western media while an almighty war is raging in the country you live in, then surely it would be obvious to his wife why he had a photo like that?

And if it was an open secret among the media in Vietnam that Ut didn’t take the photo, then wouldn’t Nghe have been aware of the photo and the impact it was having immediately? After all, his brother-in-law worked next door to AP for NBC.

Nguyen Nghe, pictured, says he is the true author of the photo. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025

A still from The Stringer that shows freelancer Nguyen Nghe at the scene of Napalm Girl.

And then there are Nghe’s credentials. The film goes out of its way to highlight his U.S. media training — even flashing his film lab certificates on screen. Knight goes so far as to claim that Nghe was the “most accomplished photographer” on the road that day, a blatant lie. Yet despite this emphasis, the film never shows a single additional photograph taken by him. In fact, Nghe told the AP via email that Napalm Girl was the only image he ever sold to any international outlet, which directly contradicts the film’s own claims.

Nick Ut

Throughout The Stringer, Ut is portrayed as the man who knows he’s lying. But while Ut is best known for Napalm Girl, he has a remarkable portfolio featuring other famous photos including Paris Hilton crying the back of a police car, James Hunt and Niki Lauda smiling together before the famous crescendo of the 1976 Formula 1 season immortalized in the movie Rush, and photos of OJ Simpson arriving at court.

Contrast this with Nghe: the documentary can’t produce a single other photograph he took. Like many Vietnamese photographers, Nghe would have lost a great deal during the Fall of Saigon in 1975. But the absence of any other work is difficult to comprehend.

The Reenactment

Ultimately, the first two-thirds of The Stringer is a game of he said, she said. But in case the viewer was not yet convinced, Knight hires a team of experts to forensically recreate June 8, 1972, and ultimately prove once and for all that Ut did not take the Napalm Girl photo.

The detailed recreation of that day is damning, as it appears to put Ut away from the scene of Napalm Girl.

Using a satellite image taken five months after the photo was taken, the team from Index Investigations attempts to map out the sequence of events. But while landmarks and distances are presented as fact, AP says it is impossible to distinguish the exact locations and measurements. At the very least, a margin of error should be built into the findings.

The reenactment that appears in the film. | INDEX Investigation/Courtesy of Netflix © 2025

A figure in the footage shot by British TV station ITN is key. If it is Ut, then it puts him far from the scene of the Napalm Girl photo. After a cut in the footage, we see Ut coming from that same direction, making it appear that he couldn’t have shot the photo.

But we don’t know how long that cut was. Unlike modern digital cameras, there are no timestamps or metadata. Crews working in the field had to be careful they didn’t run out of film. The children, who are all in shock, are zig-zagging around and stopping when they encounter people. It is therefore difficult to know the exact timing of their walk out of Trang Bang and impossible to know the media’s movements — including Nick Ut’s.

The Camera

Perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence that Ut did not take Napalm Girl is the mystery of the camera used to take the shot.

Ut himself has said that he was carrying four cameras that day: two Nikons and two Leicas. After forensically analyzing the surviving negatives, AP’s own investigation declared it was unlikely the photo was taken on a Leica, the camera that Ut has always said he used.

Instead, AP finds it likely that the photo was shot on a Pentax. This is because film that’s been run through a Pentax tends to have slightly rounded corners. Although Nikons can reportedly show similar characteristics.

A Pentax that could have shot ‘Napalm Girl’ is produced in ‘The Stringer’. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025

The two surviving frames of ‘Napalm Girl’ held by the AP.

Ut says that he did carry a Pentax, namely his slain brother’s, which was gifted to him by his widow. But The Stringer spends surprisingly little time on this intriguing storyline. Perhaps that’s because it was AP that flagged this finding.

A Documentary Worth Watching, With Caveats

It’s impossible to prove with absolute certainty who took the photograph in Trang Bang that day. Personally, I believe there should be a statute of limitations on photo-credit disputes. Once fifty years have passed — and many of the key figures are no longer alive — you shouldn’t be able to drag the reputations of people or organizations you clearly hold a grudge against.

Since The Stringer presents a one-sided case with virtually no counter-arguments throughout the film, the vast Netflix audience will likely come away from the movie believing its version of events. Therefore, it is important to scrutinize the evidence put forward by Gary Knight and the VII Foundation.

To my mind, it’s utterly reprehensible that you would wait for the deaths of Horst Faas, Tim Page, Yuichi ‘Jackson’ Ishizaki, and Hal Buell before airing these claims. At best, it makes you a coward, at worst it’s malevolent.

Robinson is hardly an objective player here; his axe to grind is unmistakable, yet The Stringer barely acknowledges his animosity toward Ut and AP.

Faas has always been a giant of press photography and has a reputation for compassion. Yet the film assassinates his character, labeling him a plagiarist.

As for Nghe, it is difficult to know what to make of him. Perhaps he really has been cheated out of a lifetime of accolades and adoration. Or, perhaps he did take a photo of Kim Phuc that day, just not the one he thought he did.

At the end of the film, Nghe’s daughter, Jannie, miraculously discovers a copy of the Napalm Girl photo that their mother supposedly kept after discarding the original print. But the image is actually a newspaper clipping from years later, identifiable by the accompanying photo of an adult Kim Phuc. The VII Foundation tells PetaPixel that the cutting is from the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, published in November 1982.

It’s a strange ending, and after feeling misled for so much of the film, I found myself questioning whether the moment was even genuine.

Should You Watch It?

Absolutely. The film offers a fascinating look at one of the most iconic moments in press photography. Its exploration of authorship, power and privilege, journalistic ethics, truth and memory, war, and dignity makes for an engaging and compelling hour and forty minutes.

• Facebook feud: Upper East Side moms in MUES and UES Mommas groups clash over Zohran Mamdani's mayoral win.
• Neighborhood vote: Area supported Andrew Cuomo by 24-point margin, prompting panic posts about fleeing NYC.
• Departure talks: Over 300 members discuss moving to New Jersey or Florida due to fears of radical policies.
• Safety concerns: Posts highlight worries over free buses leading to crime and Mamdani's stances on Hamas and Intifada.
• Counterarguments: Defenders label critics racist or Islamophobic, urge relaxation and dismiss actual moves.
• Media portrayal: New York magazine depicts groups as hysterical; residents like Robyn Reiter call it reductive and stereotypical.
• Group response: Moderator Valerie Iovino defends MUES diversity across politics, religion, and socioeconomic lines.
• Broader sentiment: Jewish activists like Samantha Ettus voice pre-WWII parallels; similar reactions on Upper West Side.

Moms on Manhattan’s Upper East Side are embroiled in a Facebook feud over the mayoral election of Zohran Mamdani.

The private cyber scuffle spilled out into the pages of left-leaning New York magazine, which published a gossipy hit piece detailing how warring factions were battling it out on two private chat groups: Moms of the Upper East Side (MUES) and UES Mommas.

Barely were the ballots finally counted before hundreds of residents in the ritzy neighborhood — who voted for Andrew Cuomo by a 24-point margin — posted panicked messages saying they were frightened and fleeing, fearing the Democratic socialist’s radical policies would turn the Big Apple into 1930s Germany.

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The election of Zohran Mamdani sparked feuding among members of two popular, private Facebook groups for Upper East Side locals. REUTERS

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The ritzy neighborhood overwhelmingly voted for Andrew Cuomo, but members of the Facebook groups are divided over support for Mamdani. Posh Park Avenue is pictured. Olga Ginzburg for N.Y. Post

“With all my love for NYC I can’t believe 50% +- of the city voted for this joker,” one mortified momma moaned on the MUES page, which has more than 35,000 members and is usually reserved for advice about nannies, strollers and schools.

“Wondering who’s actually leaving? To where, Florida?” they then asked.

More than 300 locals responded, per the report, claiming they were considering moving to New Jersey or Florida following Mamdani’s win.

Meanwhile, others on the pages proclaimed that the incoming mayor’s proposal for free buses would result in riders being raped and murdered.

However, users on both Facebook pages fought back, accusing their neighbors of being overwrought and Islamophobic.

“It IS racist to just be mad that your new mayor is a Muslim,” one member maintained.

Meanwhile, one mom named April, who is a member of MUES, told New York magazine that the complainers were all talk and actually had no plans to leave Manhattan.

“No, you’re not (moving),” she stated. “Just relax.”

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Samantha Ettus, a Jewish activist, is not a member of the Upper East Side Facebook groups, but believes Mamdani will not be good for New York City. While the outspoken mom-of-three is willing to share her opinion on the record, many other moms are more reluctant to do so in the wake of the New York magazine piece.

The feuding between the two factions recently reached fever pitch, with the MUES group admins recently forced to instill a new rule for users.

“You may not attack or threaten other members while anonymous (or ever),” they implored.

Other more apolitical users urged calm, with one calling for all members to “get a collective grip.” 

The article featured posts by Upper East Side resident Robyn Reiter, a doctor of physical therapy and a single mother of a 13-year-old son.

 “We are literally terrified that a mayor who won’t condemn Hamas and won’t condemn the phrase ‘Globalize the Intifada’ is now running the city with the second largest Jewish population in the world,” Reiter wrote on the MUES page.

“It feels very immoral to me at this moment to pay tax dollars to a city that just elected someone who would love to see my people murdered,” she told New York magazine directly in a follow-up interview. “We’re all looking for an out, because I can’t jeopardize the safety of my son.”

She told the publication that she was considering leaving the Upper East Side and moving to Hoboken, New Jersey.

However, Reiter says she is disappointed with how she was portrayed in the article, telling The Post she found it inaccurate and reductive.

Reiter says she was forced to make her social media profiles private after the story came out “because of all the hatred I was getting.”

“I think I’m maxed out on this topic already, unfortunately,” she told The Post. “Instead of being portrayed as a smart and hardworking Jewish woman who has every reason to worry about the safety of my Jewish son in today’s New York, the article portrayed me (and others) as hysterical rich women having meltdowns.”

“I’m a single mother who works 10-hour days to support my son on my own,” she continued. “He attends public school because I can’t afford private [school] without significant financial aid. I am neither a ‘rich mom’ nor ‘going to war.'”

MUES moderator Valerie Iovino echoed Reiter’s disappointment in how the group was portrayed, telling The Post that the piece “reduced a group of 35,000+ diverse women — a small fraction of which engaged in an important debate and conversation — into caricatures based on their own stereotypes of Upper East Side women.”

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Members of MUES were upset by their depiction in the New York magazine article, saying they were stereotyped as privileged and out of touch.

“MUES includes members with a wide range of political views, and a full spectrum of religious, socioeconomic, and racial backgrounds,” Iovino further stated. “Yet they flattened the entire community into a two-dimensional image of Marie Antoinette clutching her pearls.”

In the wake of digital drama, many moms on the Upper East Side are reluctant to reveal their political persuasions publicly.

When The Post attempted to speak with one mom in the neighborhood, clad in a chic activewear outfit paired with a pair of large Gucci sunglasses and pushing a blanket-covered baby stroller, she quickly dismissed a request for comment.

Although she was cautious not to go on the record sharing her views, she did mutter under her breath, “I f—ing hate that man” in reference to Mamdani as she scurried away.

She briefly told the reporter that she does not use Facebook and is not a member of either of the aforementioned online groups — but clearly feels just as strongly as those online.

However, there are still some moms willing to go on record.

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Amid a rise in anti-Semitism, Ettus believes the current climate resembles pre-World War II for Jews.

Samantha Ettus, a Jewish activist and mom of three, is not a member of either of the Facebook groups covered by New York magazine, but the native Upper East Sider aligns herself with those who believe Mamdani is not a good fit for the Big Apple.

“For many Jews that are paying attention, we see what’s going on and we see the patterns,” Ettus told The Post. “We see how closely the environment for Jews across the world right now resembles the pre-World War II environment, and it’s a time where we can’t afford to make great mistakes.”

Meanwhile, Upper East Side moms aren’t the only ones finding themselves wrapped up in online exchanges regarding the new mayor.

On the adjacent Upper West Side — long thought to be a liberal bastion — one member of the UWS Mommas Facebook group was also advertising to locals looking to move out of New York.

Member Gitty Leiner said she knew of an excellent real estate agent for those considering moving to Florida. Others wanted to know more.