New Mexico Uncovered What the DOJ Buried. Now They’re Suing to Get the Rest.
Watch my conversation with New Mexico State Rep. Andrea Romero on the nation’s first truth commission into Epstein's crimes and the cover-up fighting to shut it down.
For over three decades, one of the largest properties in New Mexico sat in plain sight as a hub of Jeffrey Epstein’s operation. Girls were flown in on a private landing strip, survivors say they were abused there, yet no law enforcement agency ever searched the property. Not once. Not until this year. Why? Because everyone with the power to do something either decided it was someone else’s responsibility, or were complicit in the cover-up.
We talk about the Epstein cover-up as redactions in Washington, but for decades it ran on deference. The DOJ asked New Mexico to pause their investigation in 2019, promising to share their findings when they were done. They paused. The information never came. The ranch went unexamined and Epstein kept on going. Then New Mexico assumed New York would handle looking into Zorro Ranch since they were already investigating his actions in NY, Palm Beach and the Virgin Islands. But New York never prioritized New Mexico. That’s why I sat down with the woman who refused to wait for the truth any longer.
Andrea Romero is a New Mexico state representative and an attorney who chairs the New Mexico Truth Commission — the nation’s first truth commission to formally investigate Epstein’s crimes in its own state. And it started right where she lives. Santa Fe kept coming up in the Epstein coverage with no information on why he was there or what he’d done. So she started asking her own questions. And law enforcement just shrugged.
“I don’t know. That just kinda went away,” she told me. She refused to accept that.
With Andrea’s co-commissioner Marianna Anaya, who’d spent years working with survivors, she put on what she called their “sleuthing hats” and built the Truth Commission. A student of international law, Andrea modeled it on the truth commissions countries around the world convene after atrocities happen to establish an official record. She intentionally made it bipartisan, with a prosecutor and a former FBI agent among its members — funded by settlements that were made with Jeffrey Epstein’s banks in New Mexico. So the banks that once enabled Epstein are now paying to expose him.
At least five women and girls were abused at the ranch between 1996 and 2012, with roughly thirty more potential victims the commission is still working to identify and question. The report also found Epstein was dropped from New Mexico’s sex-offender registry just two days after registering through a loophole, skipped required federal check-ins, he even reported stolen firearms at the ranch and still no one held Epstein accountable. The report is also careful to state what it did not find. So far, there’s no evidence Epstein blackmailed anyone or suggested involvement in national security and foreign intelligence.
But Andrea’s Truth Commission is just one part of the effort to hold Epstein and his co-conspirators accountable in New Mexico. While Andrea builds the public record, the state’s attorney general, Raul Torrez, runs the criminal investigation meant to turn the record into prosecutions. And it’s Torrez’s side that really highlights what New Mexico is up against. He requested the unredacted federal files in February. The DOJ promised them, but sent nothing. He followed up multiple times. Still nothing. What finally arrived was 31 pages of already public, heavily redacted files or photocopies of local news stories. The DOJ said its hands are tied. Federal law and victim privacy protections bar it from releasing the files. But New Mexico’s own DOJ pointed out that federal attorneys routinely modify those very court orders to share evidence with state law enforcement — when they want to cooperate. So Torrez sued. He sued Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and his DOJ.
“Every day that the U.S.D.O.J. withholds these records, the foundation upon which a New Mexico prosecution could be built erodes,” Torrez wrote to Blanche in a letter.
This is the same Todd Blanche who just cleared his path to run the department permanently.
The cover-up is bigger than Epstein. It’s decades of people in power: Democrats and Republicans, state and federal, prosecutors and presidents, each deciding it wasn’t their problem. Many trying to protect themselves. But now there’s a whole team that will never let this go.
At the end of each episode, I ask my guests where they find the courage to keep going when all the odds are stacked against them. Andrea told me one in five women in her state is a survivor, so whatever fight this costs her is nothing compared to what survivors have endured.
The cover-up can only work if we’re too tired to keep paying attention. Don’t be.
Listen to our full conversation, read through the report and tell me what you think it’ll take to finally break this case wide open.
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