In Other Media-eg New Statesman, AJE, FP, Georgia, NYT,  Azerbaijan, CSM Click here to contact us     .

By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive Follow up
Honduras - The Source - The Root - etc

SDNY COURTHOUSE, Oct 10 –  When Wolfe Margolies came up for sentencing on December 2, 2019 after pleading guilty to narcotics and child pornography charges, his lyrics including being a rapist who beats cases were quoted by Judge Kimba M. Wood of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

   Judge Wood sentenced Margolies to 168 months or 14 years in prison, to be followed by five years of supervised release. She quoted the lyrics from the pre-sentencing report which is not part of the public docket. While Assistant US Attorney Mollie Bracewell quoted another lyric in her sentencing submission, the rapist-beating-cases lyric was not quoted there.

See below -- Inner City Press' reporting has found Wolfe's mother Liz with Joe Biden: Blog-cast, Part 1.

    On the narcotics conspiracy, Margolies worked with Erik Erkan, who has managed to get into the SDNY's Young Adult Offender Program.

    Bracewell's sentencing submission, perhaps sensing the disparity argument Margolies' attorney Maurice Sercarz could make, argues that "there are substantial differences between these defendants," that is, the government is not aware that Erkan had any involvement with the child pornography offense to which Margolies pled guilty.

   Margolies will also, upon his release, be required to register as a sex offender. In his sentencing proceeding, at which Inner City Press was the only media present, Margolies said that when arrested in Louisiana in February of this year he was in a coding boot camp, and that he wants to continue to pursue that as a profession when he gets out.

    He flashed a sheaf of certificates at Judge Wood. Inner City Press said it would have more on this.  And now it does, deciding to publish this edited version:

Good day Mr. Lee... Despite my fear, I am writing to you today for three reasons. The first is my pre-existing and somewhat personal knowledge of Wolfe Margolies. The second is that you are evidently the only journalist who is demonstrably interested in covering Wolfe's story. The third and final reason has to do with the details reported in your December 2, 2019 article, which covers Mr. Margolies' sentencing hearing and is how I found your contact information--and also raises questions on how his story will develop in the future. 

First off, as you note in the article, no other media was present at this hearing. Given that I watched through my computer screen for years leading up to his 2019 arrest as Wolfe rose to C-list NYC celebrity status, then was suddenly wiped from the internet practically overnight, this detail from your report hit me as just one in a long line of similar censorship-themed events surrounding this case. Worse yet, per your report, Mr. Margolies only received a 14 year sentence, after which he need only register as a sex offender...and he apparently intends to further pursue coding upon his release - a fact I found especially disturbing in light of the charges involving Mr. Margolies' exchange of child pornography over what he believed what an encrypted "private" app.

In 14 years from now, I will have children approaching a prime age for Mr. Margolies' pedophilic victimization on apps and the internet - a terrain where registered sex offender status is unfortunately meaningless.

This whole situation reminds me of all the employees and contractors of men like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein who are only speaking out now--individuals who together over the years are complicit in creating a culture of silence that protected these powerful men, and perhaps even helped create them by protecting them through silence. Any one of these people could theoretically have pierced the veil of silence had any one of them spoken up sooner, potentially crippling the power of these men and preventing the harm to many subsequent victims.

Right now, the most effective way to make sure myself, my sisters, and my daughters avoid predators like Wolfe is the equivalent of the stall graffiti in the women's bathrooms at my college, telling you which guys to avoid being alone with. Unlike bathroom-stall graffiti, however, and as has been heavily covered in the post-#metoo era, press coverage is easily influenced by money.

Accordingly, I have a terrible feeling that Mr. Margolies' family - and particularly his mother, Liz Margolies, for her own very specific reasons - have thrown significant financial resources behind making sure Wolfe and his sordid story get no press, that no graffiti with Wolfe's name can ever stick to the wall. And so I ask myself, in 14 years, how could women NOT be less safe, unless someone does something about this issue, right now? 

I do not want to be like those in the orbits of Weinstein and Epstein, complicit in maintaining a veil over the misdeeds of a powerful, wealthy individual through the simple act of not saying what I know I should say, to who I know I should say it.  Remembering the Farmer sisters' futile outcries against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislene Maxwell in the 1990s, however, it occurred to me that one must sometimes watch for or seek out the right right time and the right place within which to make a move. I have thought about many ways I could try and make what I have to say public, but I feel the safest way which most shields me from accusations of doing this for any kind of pecuniary or personal gain (rather than because it is the right thing to do) is to speak through a professional journalist, which I am not.

 I have therefore been watching and waiting for the right "right now" journalist for months now, in hopes of finding someone who can help tell this story, someone who understands the importance of telling it and yet also is not vulnerable to the financial coercion which almost certainly stands in the way. So in summation, I have decided to write to you.. to do something in the face of dangerous predator, before he becomes the next Weinstein or Epstein.

I met Wolfe through mutual friends when we both went to a small, public high school, Bard High School Early College or BHSEC, Manhattan campus. I was a grade ahead of him, but a friend of mine from my grade (10th) was hanging around with Wolfe and one of his 9th grader friends, which was how we got acquainted. Shortly after we first met, I had a very brief personal/intimate relationship with Wolfe during what was probably the lowest point of my life in terms of confidence, being 15 years old and slightly overweight. I realized pretty quickly though (as in, within weeks), that Wolfe was too dangerous and too disgusting, even for me, even with the self-esteem issues I had back then. 

The tipping point, I think, came one day when we were sitting on the sidewalk outside the school with some other people, and Wolfe kept forcibly making out with me--something I had never experienced before and did not know how to deal with. I never did like kissing him, as I quickly realized he was not brushing his teeth and I have always been very into oral hygiene... but he kept physically tackling me backwards from my sitting position to lay back on the sidewalk, like in the middle of my conversation with a friend, and smashing the back of my head into the concrete in the process.

I would sit up and begin talking to my friend again, clearly not into it but not quite sure what else to do, only to have him do it again, over and over again--one time so hard I saw dark blue with little white stars fill up my view as I laid there on the concrete. As someone who previously experienced physical and sexual abuse, I probably would have blocked out the entire experience, to be honest - but one of our friends who was sitting with us happened to be taking photos without me noticing, which I still have in my possession.

Looking at those photos again after the fact, I couldn't ignore the disturbing event. That was not who I was. I broke off the personal/intimate relationship with Wolfe immediately and completely soon after that. We had barely made out and gone to second base.

 Once that was done, my next step was trying to tell people in high school that Wolfe was dangerous. But these were high school age people, and so was I. They had no reason to listen to me.

I had about zero social capital in high school, I was overweight and had transferred into the school in 10th grade instead of starting in 9th grade like everyone else. So I was basically at the bottom of the high school social ladder. Wolfe, on the other hand, had a fairly strong strong pull for a few reasons. He was thin and blonde and generally considered good-looking. He had good taste in music, he was "cool," the older hipsters liked him, so no one really listened to me. I thus watched him go through a string (as in, at least two) of long-term relationships with girls in his grade and lower grades after me, in which the girlfriends as well as those close to Wolfe and them would later say that he was abusive.

One of those girls, I ended up going to college with, and a mutual friend spoke to her recently as well. I have a feeling that if I reached out to her through our mutual friend, she would be interested in helping us... In any case, back in high school, and during the years subsequent, as Wolfe stayed centered in this same area and remained in the same social spaces as some of the people I knew, my tactic was just to back off and keep an eye out and warn where and when I could. I continued to keep watch over the situation from the safe vantage point of the internet.

As time passed, some of my friends from high school (who eventually came to understand about Wolfe) also did the same thing. I know because we spoke about it--about Wolfe's escalating and public predatory behavior, his continued insistence that it was all a "persona" perpetrated in the name of "creativity" and "artistic license," along with our futile attempts to warn and protect others--at different points over the years.

Because again...we (that is, people my age, around 30) all knew eventually that Wolfe was dangerous, and yet he remained in close proximity to a lot of younger people we knew and cared for, our younger siblings and their friends for example, who would not listen to us when we said they needed to get away and stay away from Wolfe. Mind you, keeping watch over Wolfe via the internet was not a difficult task at that time, since prior to his arrest he carried on an extensive public life on the internet and even requested to be my "Facebook friend" on more than one occasion, which I denied on more than one occasion before blocking him on Facebook entirely.

So this, in combination with having spoken to several of his ex-girlfriends from high school, is how I knew he also remained very obviously, publicly dangerous. Other people that I knew tried to do something about Wolfe at various times over the years, and yet, until 2019, it seemed like no one could touch him at all, despite as I said there being a lot of very publicly accessible (via the internet) behavior that would have indicated that he was dangerous to any reasonable observer. 

Connect the dots (potentially) as to why it is especially important to the family/mother to keep this whole thing under the rug."

  Since then we found the mother Liz with Joe Biden, here. In fairness, some dispute this link.

Inner City Press aims to have more on this - and on other cases, in this same blog-cast way.

This case is US v. Margolies, 19-cr-178 (Wood). 

***

Your support means a lot. As little as $5 a month helps keep us going and grants you access to exclusive bonus material on our Patreon page. Click here to become a patron.

Feedback: Editorial [at] innercitypress.com
SDNY Press Room 480, front cubicle
500 Pearl Street, NY NY 10007 USA

Mail: Box 20047, Dag Hammarskjold Station NY NY 10017

Reporter's mobile (and weekends): 718-716-3540

Other, earlier Inner City Press are listed here, and some are available in the ProQuest service, and now on Lexis-Nexis.

 Copyright 2006-2019 Inner City Press, Inc. To request reprint or other permission, e-contact Editorial [at] innercitypress.com for