A Young Journalist Finds Her Place in the Epstein Files. The elders were confused

Making sure they didn’t offend anyone, the Bark crew tried their best. After school, Mueller, Schneider, Bishop, and another Bark editor sat down on blue chairs in their newsroom for a four-hour discussion. Painstakingly, he double-checked every word on Mueller’s slide, confirming it against federal records.

They were about to decide to leave Instagram posts alone. But when Schneider left for the evening, the students thought only to themselves. They decided to temporarily shelve Mueller’s most controversial documents until they met with school officials in person. “I think that at the end of the day, the children felt the pressure of the authorities that they almost looked for a reason to remove them,” says Schneider, who fought with the school authorities several times that year because of Khunwa. (Schneider is also someone I’ve known for years; I’m a massage therapist in Marin County, and Schneider used to be an occasional client before I started working as a reporter.)

In the evening of that day, the students wrote a letter advising Schneider what they wanted to talk to the principal; they planned their download of Mueller’s slide as their privilege. “We want to make it clear that the removal was not in response to your request,” he wrote. “Our choices were based on what we liked and what we liked.”

The message was surprising to Schneider, who saw the demands of the authorities as a classic example of censorship. But Bark’s journalists did not see themselves as defeated.

Finally, that Thursday, Mueller and Bishop met face-to-face with principal Barnaby Payne and Courtney Goode, superintendent of the Tamalpais Union High School District. Schneider also came, but only to write notes. When he remembered this, the meeting became difficult.

Goode opened by explaining that the district cannot fight the charges. Mueller and Bishop remained silent, allowing the moderators to finish before asking them to clarify what was offensive about the post.

The administration, it turns out, was concerned that Mueller had made statements that were not true. The district’s investigation, Goode explained, found no evidence that Bonnouvrier was connected to providing samples to Epstein. “You have to link your source to that,” Goode said.

Realizing that the authorities had just done a Google search, which could not find files within the federal Epstein database, Mueller pulled out his phone and opened the document, revealing his screen. “The sources are the Epstein files,” Mueller said. “It’s true, because it says it here in the official document.” On the screen was Bonnouvrier’s email about his “Austrian model,” which seemed to surprise the two men.

High school students initiated a violation of California Education Code 48907, alerting state law enforcement officials. Unless it is obscene, incites violence or illegal activities, or is false or offensive, academic journalists have full freedom to speak without being monitored by the administration.