Some 15 percent of Americans are enrolled in Medicare Part D, which covers outpatient prescription drug costs for older adults and other qualifying individuals, providing nearly $140 billion a year in support to about 50 million people. But the program is administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services—which President-elect Donald Trump has nominated celebrity physician Mehmet Oz to lead.

It’s questionable how a man infamous for promoting questionable supplements, who has commented that there’s no right to health for people who can’t afford it, will help lead and provide government health insurance in the United States. On his show, the cardiothoracic surgeon has mounted attacks on medications that Part D covers, such as antidepressants, claiming that they do not work for most patients (the evidence is against him).

Given his history, it makes sense that Oz would be part of Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” cohort, which does seem fairly anti-science: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s attacks on vaccines, for instance, also conveniently ignore that measles and polio can cause lifelong health conditions. Medicare Part D currently covers the costs of all recommended vaccines.

But what kind of damage could Oz do from his new post? Will he be able to cut medications that actually help people manage chronic health conditions—conditions that people who qualify for Medicare are more likely to have? The short answer is no. At least not on his own.

Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of health nonprofit KFF‘s program on Medicare policy, explains that the range of medications covered by Medicare Part D is specified in the Social Security Act.

“Generally speaking, Medicare Part D covers drugs and vaccines that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration,” Cubanski told Mother Jones. “The law specifically excludes some types of drugs from coverage under Part D, including drugs used for weight loss or cosmetic purposes.” So dubious supplements that Oz promoted on his show could not readily be added to the list, nor could he easily remove actual medication.

“Congress would need to change the law in order to change what drugs Medicare Part D covers,” Cubanski said. “An agency official acting under their own authority can’t do that.”

There is still the possibility that some aspects of Medicare Part D could change through a regulatory process, says University of Pennsylvania health law and policy professor Allison Hoffman, but that too is a rigorous procedure—and attacking Medicare would also be a risky political move.

“Medicare Part D was passed during a Republican administration and with Republican control in Congress, with Democratic support,” Hoffman said. “Trump knows to tread carefully in this space because Medicare is a widely popular program and the Part D program has really created a lot of financial security for people.”

But if Republicans do, as they have pledged, go after the Inflation Reduction Act, which helped fund and improve Medicare affordability, Part D isn’t necessarily in the clear. The IRA instituted a new $2,000-a-year cap on out-of-pocket spending costs for prescriptions—still a lot for many older Medicare patients, and for qualifying younger disabled people, but an extremely short-lived protection if it’s immediately overturned by the GOP.

And while Oz on his own can’t screw up Medicare Part D too badly, there’s no guarantee he’ll let it work smoothly, either. In practice, the plans are administered by private insurance companies, which can choose which pharmacies to work with and even which medications to cover. Federal health reforms like the Affordable Care Act have focused in part on making it harder for insurers to weasel out of providing care—not a likely priority for Trump’s health officials. If someone on Medicare needs to start a new medication, they could meet with a rude awakening.

“That would require them to either switch to a different drug in the class, or switch plans during the next open enrollment period,” says Julie Donohue, chair of the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Health Policy and Management.

Such limitations in Part D—and related programs, like private-insurer-run Medicare Advantage plans—illustrate the consistent failures of privatizing Medicare, something Oz nevertheless pushed for more of during his unsuccessful 2022 Senate campaign.

With the chaos and uncertainty that’s marked Trump’s White House nominations—like former Rep. Matt Gaetz withdrawing on Thursday from consideration to be his Attorney General—Hoffman also cautions us to “wait to see if people are confirmed,” rather than immediately panicking about “our imagination of what these policies might be.”

Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, a stalwart moderate who rose to power on the heels of his late father’s political legacy, seems likely to lose his reelection bid. Shortly after Election Day, the Associated Press called the race for his opponent, former hedge fund executive Dave McCormick, who had a narrow lead in returns. Even though McCormick has declared victory and was invited by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to the US Senate orientation, Casey has not conceded, citing thousands of uncounted ballots. 

The two candidates are engaged in ongoing legal battles over how counties are handling certain ballots, with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently ruling that undated or misdated mail-in ballots are not valid. There are still thousands of provisional ballots pending, some of which are subject to legal challenges, but it seems unlikely that enough will break for Casey. A recount is currently underway and should be completed by November 26—though this too is unlikely to significantly alter vote counts. On Thursday morning, McCormick was leading by just over 16,000 votes. 

After unsuccessful efforts by hardline MAGA Republicans like Dr. Mehmet Oz in the 2022 election, McCormick was a return to a more traditional Republican candidate. But he still managed to win over GOP voters and ride President-elect Donald Trump’s coattails. Casey’s campaign emphasized his moderate sensibilities and long-standing ties to the state—his father, Bob Casey Sr., was a popular two-term governor—but he ultimately underperformed Vice President Kamala Harris in crucial Democratic strongholds. 

In a cycle where Democrats lost up and down the ballot in Pennsylvania, 2024 was “like no race Casey had run before,” said Berwood Yost, a political science professor at Franklin & Marshall College. Casey was last up for reelection during a presidential cycle in 2012, when Barack Obama won Pennsylvania by five points.

“He needed Democrats to turn out to vote for him, and clearly, some people who voted for the top of the ticket abandoned him.”

“Casey had a difficult needle to thread because he had to distance himself from the policies of an unpopular president to be viable,” Yost said. “But at the same time, he needed Democrats to turn out to vote for him, and clearly, some people who voted for the top of the ticket abandoned him.”

On the day before Election Day, I watched Casey make his final appeal to voters in Bucks County, one of the closely watched suburban “collar counties” surrounding Philadelphia. Around 60 supporters—mostly white and almost all of them appearing to be of retirement age—gathered in the small town of Warrington. The mood was cautiously optimistic, despite polls showing a virtual tie. It seemed difficult to imagine that Casey, who had become an institution in Pennsylvania, was subject to the same shifting political waters that would decide the presidency for Trump.

In the summer, polls showed Casey with around a five-point lead over McCormick, but that gap narrowed as Election Day approached. When I asked rallygoers why it was so close, one man rubbed his fingers together—money. Around $283 million was spent on the race in total, according to a PennLive analysis, making the matchup among the most expensive Senate contests—likely second only to Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown’s unsuccessful reelection bid. McCormick lagged behind Casey in fundraising and sunk at least $4 million of his own wealth into the race. But spending in support of McCormick mostly came from super-PACs and far outpaced Casey: The Senate Leadership Fund and Keystone Renewal PAC, whose largest donor is the CEO of the hedge fund Citadel, each spent about $50 million on McCormick’s behalf. WinSenate, a Democratic-aligned PAC, spent about $54 million on Casey’s behalf.

Casey first was elected to the US Senate in 2006, winning by 15 points and ousting tea party star Rick Santorum. Since then, Casey has enjoyed comfortable reelection margins, winning by 9 points in 2012 and 13 points in 2018. The senator grew up in an Irish Catholic family in Scranton and has an enduring homegrown appeal. At the Warrington rally, voters repeatedly told me that Casey was a “good man” and described him as a familiar presence—though they were vague on the particulars of his congressional accomplishments.  

Casey has a reputation for being understated—Pennsylvania’s junior senator, John Fetterman, calls Casey “Mild Thing”—which often has been considered an asset. He is seen as principled and dependable. But Casey has shown that he can move on issues when the political moment arises. He shifted his position on gun control after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting and became an outspoken critic of the Trump administration’s family separation policies in 2017.

But the most notable change came regarding abortion. Casey has described himself as a “pro-life Democrat,” and his father was, at one time, a national face of the anti-abortion movement. As governor, Casey Sr. signed laws requiring a 24-hour waiting period for abortion and parental consent for minors. The legislation led to the 1992 Supreme Court case Planned Parenthood v. Casey. But in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Casey Jr. voted for the Women’s Health Protection Act and has attacked Republicans for their extreme restrictions on abortion care.

Republicans used this evolution to create the narrative that Casey had become dangerously progressive. Even though his moderate image had won him crossover support in previous elections, he struggled this year with an association with the Biden administration—particularly on inflation and border security. He made fentanyl smuggling across the southern border a key issue and ran an ad claiming he had sided with Trump on fracking and trade. But as a longtime friend of President Joe Biden, a fellow Catholic, and a Scranton native, it was difficult to create any credible distance from his administration. 

McCormick was Casey’s strongest political challenger. A West Point graduate and Gulf War veteran, McCormick earned a PhD in international relations at Princeton. After a stint in George W. Bush’s administration, McCormick rose in the ranks at Bridgewater Associates, a Connecticut-based hedge fund giant, to become CEO. In 2022, he left Bridgewater to compete in the Republican primary to represent Pennsylvania in the US Senate. He was ultimately no match for Oz, the controversial physician and television personality, whose Pennsylvania residency was widely questioned (and whom President-elect Trump has recently named the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services). After McCormick refused to say that the 2020 election was stolen, Trump all but sank his candidacy by endorsing Oz and dubbing McCormick “not MAGA.” Oz won the nomination by fewer than 1,000 votes, then lost to Fetterman by almost five points. 

During the 2024 campaign, McCormick leaned heavily into the more ruggedly patriotic aspects of his biography. His website is peppered with photos of him in military uniform, and the campaign’s most frequently used headshot features McCormick standing in front of a pastoral barn backdrop wearing a chore coat and a denim button-up. But Bridgewater is also presented as a point of pride, with his website describing it as “one of the largest, most successful investment firms in the world” that manages the pensions of “teachers, firefighters and law enforcement.” 

McCormick had the difficult task of triangulating within today’s Republican Party, where Trump remains the gravitational center of power. Though Trump acolytes have previously succeeded in Republican primaries in Pennsylvania’s statewide races, like Oz, they tended to fail in the general election. In the 2022 gubernatorial race, Trump loyalist and election denier Doug Mastriano also lost badly. McCormick distanced himself from the party on some issues: He is against a national abortion ban, for instance, and in favor of exceptions in the cases of rape, incest, and the life of the mother. 

But there was no path to victory without Trump, and, this time around, McCormick did his best to remain in the former president’s good graces. He spoke at Trump’s rally in Butler shortly before the attempted assassination, and he has amplified some of Trump’s favorite culture-war talking points. In early November, McCormick told a group of veterans that the country needs “a military that’s not woke and focusing on millions of hours of DEI training.”

“He just doesn’t draw the same type of animosity that more traditional Republicans receive from the populist element within the ranks.”

Christopher Borick, a political science professor at Muhlenberg College, called McCormick the “Goldilocks Republican”—occupying a comfortable middle in the party. “He just doesn’t draw the same type of animosity that more traditional Republicans receive from the populist element within the ranks,” Borick said. 

Casey’s campaign strove to paint McCormick as an out-of-touch “Connecticut mega-millionaire.” (McCormick grew up in Pennsylvania. He lived for many years in Connecticut and still has a home there.) Casey also tried to drive a wedge between McCormick and working-class voters by highlighting Bridgewater’s extensive investments in China and the fund’s bets against American-owned steel companies. But McCormick’s high-finance background ultimately didn’t alienate as many voters as Casey might have hoped. 

At the rally in Warrington, Casey’s remarks were narrowly focused on what he’s “delivered for the people of this county”: funding for public education and infrastructure. Wearing a navy gingham button-up and blue jeans, he was even-keeled and self-assured. In a political landscape dominated by whoever can shout the loudest, Casey wasn’t a remarkable orator or a natural showman—and he’d never had to be. After all, he was Pennsylvania’s native son. 

But that doesn’t seem to have been enough to put him over the top. Casey ended up winning fewer votes than Harris—current vote counts show him with about a 40,000 vote deficit—and the dropoff was particularly notable in traditionally Democratic areas like Philadelphia and its surrounding counties. Yost said that early analysis shows that Casey lagged four and a half points behind Harris in Philadelphia. In such a narrow race, those Harris-only voters could have made the difference not only for the incumbent but also for the balance of the Senate.

It looks as if Casey also lost many of the split-ticket voters who, in 2012, punched their ballots for both him and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. In comparison, Montana Sen. Jon Tester and Ohio Sen. Brown both ran significantly ahead of Harris in states where Trump won by wide margins. (They both lost.) Tester and Brown are Democrats who were elected to the Senate the same year as Casey and similarly leaned on reputations as salt-of-the-earth moderates. 

Despite his familiarity with the state, it seems like Casey was unable to break out of the mold of a “generic Democrat,” as Brian Rosenwald, a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, explained. “If anything, I think it was less about a moderating campaign,” he said, “and more about a lackluster campaign in general.”

It looks as if McCormick, with the help of Trump, had seized onto a more compelling narrative. In October, he went on Fox Business and described his “blessed” ascension from a small-town upbringing to West Point and through the ranks of the world’s largest hedge fund. “I’ve really lived the American dream,” McCormick said, “and I think that dream is slipping away.”

Pennsylvania voters appeared to agree.

Educators are flipping out over Donald Trump’s choice of pro wrestling exec and longtime donor Linda McMahon for secretary of education. Predictably so, since experts in just about every field are flipping out when Trump chooses some poorly qualified (yet very loyal) hack to oversee their specialty—or selects another fox to guard the henhouse.

America’s biggest union, the National Education Association, for instance, slammed McMahon as unqualified and bent on a privatization agenda:

Her chief goal for education is to promote vouchers, which drain resources from public schools and send taxpayer money to unaccountable private schools that are permitted to discriminate against students and educators. The policies she promotes are aligned with Trump’s Project 2025 plan. 

McMahon, who served as head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s initial term, has scant education experience. She earned a teaching certificate in college and was a student teacher for a semester, but resigned from the Connecticut Board of Education in 2010, according to the Washington Post, after the Hartford Courant found that she’d claimed an education degree she never obtained. More recently, a lawsuit accused McMahon and her estranged husband, Vince, of tolerating the sexual abuse of children by an employee of their company, World Wrestling Entertainment. (A lawyer for McMahon told CNN the allegations are “baseless.”)

But hey, she likes vouchers.

Voucher-esque programs, speaking of discrimination, were first deployed across the South during desegregation so authorities could shutter public schools—the white parents didn’t want their kids mixing with Black kids—and instead provide grants to fund the private education of exclusively white children at hundreds of new private schools that popped up to serve them. This was a sordid and horribly racist enterprise, as you will glean from this history compiled by the Center for American Progress.

When states expand voucher programs, shoddy and established school operators both cash in, and public schools and their students are the losers.

And it’s still happening, de facto. ProPublica reported the other day that tens of millions of dollars in public funds are still flowing to these “segregation academies”—of the 39 schools the reporters found in North Carolina alone, more than half had reported to the federal government that their student bodies were at least 85 percent white.

Republicans have been drooling over vouchers for as long as I can remember. They were talking about them when I was in grade school, and I’m a geezer. But now the messaging revolves around school “choice,” with proponents claiming that vouchers, which a number of states have revived in the form of education savings accounts (ESAs), allow low-income parents to escape failing public schools. And this is certainly true to some extent.

But the voucher/ESA cheerleaders neglect to mention that those public schools are failing in significant part because affluent families have fled en masse, and that their budgets have been gutted by, well, the same voucher-loving politicians and/or charter school systems championed by billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and the Waltons, and affluent members of both parties. All this drainage leaves many public schools underfunded to the point that teachers literally have to beg for basic classroom supplies—as some did during parents’ night at the public high school my kids attended in Oakland, California.

McMahon or no McMahon, vouchers have come back into vogue recently, likely in reaction to the educational upheaval of the Covid pandemic. “In 2023 alone, seven states passed new school voucher programs and nine expanded existing plans—highlighting a push that is largely coming from red states,” notes a Brookings Institution report published last year.

And sure, some low-income families will benefit from the programs, which channel money that would have gone to the local public school into private accounts (the ESAs) that can be used for private K–12 tuition and related expenses. But there can be a lot of collateral damage, notes the Brookings report.

First, whenever you expand government payouts—and this is something the Republicans complain about in other contexts—fraudsters and opportunists will come out of the woodwork. The report cites research showing that when traditional voucher programs were enacted, a host of “pop-up” private schools would follow, of which many fail quickly. “That’s exactly what is happening with the ESA-style expansions in Arizona now,” the report notes. (Arizona, which in 2011 became the first state to offer ESAs for selected students, expanded its program in 2022 to all students—including those already enrolled in private schools—according to a subsequent Brookings paper that deems the program “a handout to the wealthy.”)

Voucher programs also lead to tuition hikes by existing private schools, according to the Brookings report, “and that is exactly what recent reports are showing with ESA passage.” So, basically, shoddy and established operators alike cash in, and public schools and their students are the big losers.

There are other consequences, too. From the report:

The last decade of research on traditional vouchers strongly suggests they actually lower academic achievement. In Louisiana, for example, two separate research teams found negative academic impacts as high as -0.4 standard deviations—extremely large by education policy standards—with declines that persisted for years. Those results were published across top journals for empirical public and education policy. Similar results in Indiana found impacts closer to -0.15 standard deviations. To put these negative impacts in perspective: Current estimates of COVID-19’s impact on academic trajectories hover around -0.25 standard deviations.

Vouchers, more broadly, are of a piece with what I’ve been calling the Plunder—the steady rigging of our economic system over the past four and a half decades to benefit people who need no government support at the expense of those who really do. This, as I argued in a recent piece, was a primary reason why Trump won a second term, as ironic as that may sound.

I wrote about the rigging of our educational system in my 2021 book about excessive wealth in America. (Chapter title: “Getting In.”) Take the tax-advantaged 529 college savings plans our government offers. Like private retirement plans—401(k)s, IRAs, etc.—these plans provide far more help to rich families than to poor ones. The example I used in my book involved two (fictitious) students living in Ohio, one rich, the other middle-class.

The middle-class family could only afford to put $6,000 a year into their daughter’s 529—an investment fund that grows tax-free over the years and can be used to pay college tuition and qualified expenses when the child comes of age.

And that’s good. They needed that assistance. But for some reason the rules also allow the rich couple in my example to frontload their son’s 529 with up to five years’ worth of the maximum contribution all at once. So, they put $150,000 into a 529 that they set up for him as a newborn, do this again during his fifth year, and then, when he’s 10, bring the balance up to maximum the state allows, beyond which they can contribute no more. With so much cash in their fund from the start, you can imagine how quickly the interest accumulates.

Rich families gained yet another lucrative perk in late 2017, when Donald Trump signed his most notable first-term achievement, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Beyond cutting taxes for wealthy folks and corporations, the TCJA stipulated that parents could now take up to $10,000 a year from their child’s 529 fund for private K–12 tuition. It’s worth noting that elite private high schools—where tuition typically runs between $40,000 to $60,000 a year—offer extensive college admissions mentoring, whereas a middle-class kid at an underfunded public school cannot use their 529 fund to cover expenses like SAT prep, college advising, or essay coaching that their school doesn’t offer in any meaningful way.

When I crunched the numbers, here’s what I found: Even assuming a conservative annual investment return of 5 percent for the students’ 529 funds, the rich family got some $117,000 in tax breaks, nearly seven times what the middle-class family received, not to mention that young Nigel (XTC fans will get the reference) had two and a half years of his private high school tuition covered by the taxpayers. He also ended up with a staggering $688,660 in his fund—likely enough to also cover the cost of law school or med school or business school should he choose any of those paths.

Small wonder that, at the time I reported these numbers, the “Ivy Plus” colleges were enrolling more students from the top-earning 1 percent families than from the bottom 50 percent. And that, compared with kids with families in the bottom 20 percent of the wealth spectrum, the children of 1 percenters were 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy Plus college. 

Vouchers only add insult to this injury. They can be marketed to sound like a good and equitable thing—a perk for all Americans—when in reality, without serious means-testing, they end up delivering the most benefit to families who need it the least. They are but one of the levers (here’s another) the Project 2025 people and Trump’s new administration may use to accelerate a plunder that has been in progress for decades, under the watch of both major parties.

One can almost hear it now: the “giant sucking sound” that the late Ross Perot used to talk about, except in this case it won’t be the sounds of US jobs going to Mexico. It will be the sound of the remaining wealth of the middle class getting sucked ever upward and into the coffers of our most privileged.

Melissa Turnage approached the 12-year-old girl with the imposing affect of a cop: arms crossed, lips pursed, badge visible, tone skeptical.

“So, you don’t know how many times this has happened this week?”

Taylor Cadle slouched on a couch, staring at her lap and picking at her nails. That morning, in the summer of 2016, she had gotten into a fight with her adoptive parents when they took away her phone on the ride to church, on the outskirts of Tampa, Florida. A minister’s wife, noticing Taylor’s tear-stained face, pulled her into an office to ask what was going on. Taylor hadn’t been planning to tell her everything, but it all came spilling out. The minister called the police, and now Turnage, a detective with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, was standing before her.

Taylor spoke tentatively, in barely more than a whisper, as she told Turnage in a recorded interview that her adoptive father, Henry Cadle, had been sexually assaulting her for years. The inappropriate touching had started when she was 9 years old, shortly after Henry and Lisa, Taylor’s great uncle and his wife, had adopted her. Over time, the abuse escalated. Now, he assaulted her “anytime he gets the chance,” she said. She didn’t like going with him on errands because it happened then, on the side of a quiet road that cut through a swamp. Standing outside the car, he would put his privates inside of her privates, she told Turnage. Taylor couldn’t say how many times he had raped her, but it had happened just the night before. He did it whenever they drove to get milk, too, which was three times a week.

“That’s a lot of driving,” Turnage said.

Taylor said nothing. 

Turnage was embarking on the type of investigation that her boss, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, had made a core mission of his agency. Judd is a beloved figure in Polk County, where he has served as sheriff for the past two decades and was just reelected to his sixth term. Known for his tough-on-crime rhetoric and social media presence, Judd gives a near-daily “morning briefing” to his 700,000 TikTok followers, holding up mugshots of suspects, telling the stories of crimes they allegedly committed—from stealing baby formula to driving drunk—and welcoming them to jail, which he calls “Grady Judd’s Bed & Breakfast.” Fans buy Grady Judd bobbleheads, Grady Judd mugs, and sweatshirts reading “God Guns and Grady Judd.”

An old joke that has been repeated by Judd himself is that the most dangerous place in Polk County is between Judd and a camera. He’s a regular guest on Fox News, where he shares his outspoken views about subjects ranging from the dangers of undocumented immigrants to the peril of looters after hurricanes, and where the stories in Judd’s TikTok posts often find a national audience. 

But he claims his top priority is protecting children from sexual predators. The county’s deputies have traveled to faraway places—from Colorado to Guatemala—to extradite men accused of victimizing children in Polk County. “If you think that you’re going to physically, sexually, or emotionally abuse a child and I’m not going to get in there and protect them, you’re making a big mistake,” he told MSNBC in 2015. In 2020, President Donald Trump appointed Judd to a federal council overseeing all programs related to juvenile delinquency, and missing and exploited children.

One might think that someone accused of the crimes Henry Cadle was accused of would be a prime target for the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. But when Turnage spoke with him, on a patio outside the church, she kept the interview brief and light. Henry, who was 57, spoke about his relationship with Taylor with a breezy confidence. She had anger issues and could be difficult—traits he attributed to her rocky upbringing—but he loved her to death. “Does she have dad wrapped around her finger? Yes. Everybody will tell you that,” Henry said.

Rather than asking him if he had sexually abused Taylor, Turnage floated a theory: “Basically, Taylor, I guess, has made up these allegations, okay? That you have been sexually abusing her.” 

Henry brimmed with righteous indignation. “Why in the heck she would conjure up something like this about me, I don’t know. Only thing I’ve ever did with that kid is loved her.”

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To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Henry Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.

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Lisa Cadle was also dumbfounded by the allegations against her husband. Taylor adored Henry, Lisa told Turnage, and always begged to go with him on errands. She was quick to point out that Taylor was “mouthy” and “has been known to say things.” Turnage assured Lisa that kids had a way of making unfounded accusations “when things don’t go the way that they want it to.” 

“Back when we were younger, it was, you know, ‘We’ll call [the Department of Children and Families] and say you abused me,’” Turnage said. “Now it’s, ‘We get sexually abused.’”

By the time Turnage spoke to Taylor again, later that afternoon, her skepticism sounded palpable. Turnage focused on one particular inconsistency: whether Taylor actually liked going for rides with Henry. “If you’re mad because you got your phone taken away, let’s say that now and be done with it,” she said in the recorded interview. “Because I have three stories that say you like to be with your dad, you’re daddy’s little girl, you love to go with him because you like to get out of the house.”

Taylor went silent. By necessity, she had developed a keen sense of the unsaid moods and whims of the adults around her. She had done the mental math when she joined Henry on the car ride the night before to visit his sister in the hospital. Taylor thought the somber occasion would keep her safe. But after the hospital and a quick stop at Taco Bell, Henry pulled into the Handy gas station and came out with a box of condoms stuffed into his front pocket, and she knew she had miscalculated. 

Now, faced with an irritated deputy, Taylor realized she miscalculated again: She assumed the police would believe her.

“They’re going to pull you from your mom and your brother, and you’re going to have to go back into foster care.”

“What’s going on, Taylor?” Turnage asked. “Because you understand, if your dad goes to jail, he doesn’t come back.” There would be other consequences too, Turnage said. Her dad’s mower repair business would shut down. Her mom would lose the car while police checked it for DNA. She wouldn’t get the shoes she wanted, or the braces she needed. “They’re going to pull you from your mom and your brother, and you’re going to have to go back into foster care,” Turnage said. 

A moment passed, and then another. Finally, in a small, strained voice, Taylor said, “Everything I told you earlier is not a lie.”

With that, Turnage told Taylor that she was going to the regional hospital “to have a sexual assault kit done.” Taylor didn’t know what that was. 

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To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Taylor Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.

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Later that night, she slipped her arms through the sleeves of a too-big hospital gown and gingerly placed her feet into the stirrups. She shivered under the bright, fluorescent lights, nauseated from hunger and exhaustion. Although a doctor had walked her through what the examination would entail, Taylor was still shocked by the cold, hard metal thing that she later learned was called a speculum. As the doctor took one swab, and then another, and then another, Taylor clenched the side of the hospital bed, knuckles white, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Now 21 years old, Taylor has the same long hair and slight frame that she had when she was 12, but she no longer holds herself like she’s trying to make herself small. When we first met her in person, at an Airbnb for an interview in front of cameras and lights, she walked in as if she did this all the time, deftly setting her then-8-month-old daughter up for a nap in the bedroom before speaking, for nearly five hours straight, with the self-assurance and confidence of someone much older. She has a tattoo of the birthday of her son, who is 3 years old, in roman numerals on her left forearm, a nose ring, and dyed black hair—all decisions, she notes with a trace of pride, that she made despite Lisa’s disapproval soon after she turned 18.

But perhaps the biggest act of defiance is that she has decided to speak publicly about what happened to her when she was 12. Asked if she wanted to use a pseudonym or just part of her name, she said no—she wants to use her full name, and she wants to share her whole story. 

The way Taylor was treated—as a victim, but also as a suspect—flies in the face of best practices in handling sexual assault investigations. Her case isn’t an isolated one. In a multiyear investigation, the Center for Investigative Reporting identified hundreds of similar cases across the country in which police criminalized the very people reporting sexual assault. 

“I think from the beginning—from our first interview—she had already had her mind made up about me. She made me feel like the monster.”

Armed with hours of recorded interviews, police reports and state records stemming from her report eight years ago, Taylor simmers with fury about how Turnage handled her allegation. “I think from the beginning—from our first interview—she had already had her mind made up about me,” she says. “She made me feel like the monster.”

But when she thinks about herself that night on the hospital bed, Taylor crumples. In court records from her case is a photo from the sexual assault exam, her 12-year-old self looking up at the camera from the hospital bed.

“Little me,” she said recently, her voice catching as she stared into her own eyes. “Broken inside. With a look of ‘Are you listening yet? Do you believe me yet?’”

Taylor’s earliest memories are of parenting her younger siblings. As a child, she gave them baths, made them food, and tucked them into bed. She was her mom’s “best friend,” she says. Taylor served as a lookout when her mom would steal drugs from her boyfriend, and she knew to pee in a cup and leave it under the bathroom sink when the probation officer came by.

“I worried about everything,” she says. “I stressed about everything that, quite honestly, a child should never have to worry about.”

When she was 7, amid drug use and violence at home, the Department of Children and Families placed Taylor into foster care, according to agency records. “I wasn’t relieved as much as I probably should’ve,” Taylor says. “It was still hard because being a child, and all you ever want is your mom.” 

For the next year and a half, she bounced from foster home to foster home. It was a “scary, confusing” time, Taylor says. She desperately wanted to be reconnected with her parents and siblings, who had been placed in other homes. Her birth father had been a source of normalcy and stability before she was taken into state custody, but his drug use, too, precluded him from being cleared by DCF. 

Taylor’s tendency to assert control, key to her survival as a young child, became a liability that was pathologized in reports and case notes. Foster parents and case workers labeled her “defiant” and “bossy.” She had tantrums often and was accused of lying about little things, like stealing peanuts from the grocery store and taking another child’s phone. “Lying seems to have been a defense mechanism that has worked in the past to keep her safe,” noted one social worker in an assessment.  

When Taylor was 8, Lisa and Henry “surfaced,” as it was described in a case manager’s notes. They were relatives of her birth father—Taylor didn’t really remember them—and were excited about adopting Taylor. They said their 6-year-old adoptive son wanted a big sister.  

Taylor soon began making regular visits to the Cadles’ home in Polk City, partway between Tampa and Orlando. The family lived in a small mobile home surrounded by pastures and swamps, 45 minutes from the nearest Walmart. Taylor had reservations, telling staffers on her case that she was wary of moving again and scared of being rejected. 

But she had little say in the matter: Two days before Taylor’s ninth birthday, her adoption was finalized. The Cadles had taken Taylor on shopping sprees and trips to SeaWorld during her weekend visits, but after the adoption, the family dynamic shifted. Discipline was harsh: Lisa was quick to smack Taylor across the mouth if she talked back, Taylor says, “but when Henry got ahold of us, it was a whole different story.” She still remembers having to wear jeans to school one sweltering day because his beating with a cooking spoon on her calves had left welts. 

She felt claustrophobic in the cramped home, and begged Henry and Lisa to let her get out of the house. Lisa and her adoptive brother were homebodies, but Henry also liked to go for drives, so she went along. 

It was on these long drives that he would assault Taylor, sometimes several times in a week, she says. A turnoff on an isolated backroad became his go-to spot. Across from a wilderness preserve, next to a cell tower access road, he would pull over.

Taylor tried to predict and avoid situations where he would see opportunity for abuse. “If I knew we were taking a back road or anything of the sort, I didn’t want to go because I knew what would happen,” she says. “I had to be on all 10 toes, 24-7.”

Fearful of going back to foster care, Taylor didn’t tell any authority figures—until that Sunday morning in July 2016, when she met Detective Melissa Turnage.

Turnage was in her ninth year with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office and considered a model deputy, according to her performance reviews. Turnage’s “integrity is above reproach,” wrote her supervisor in the spring of 2015.

But mistakes quickly followed. In November 2015, during an interview with a man suspected of sexually assaulting a child, Turnage failed to read the suspect a key part of his Miranda rights—an omission that resulted in the suppression of the suspect’s confession. Turnage was suspended for eight hours, according to department records. 

The following month, Turnage interviewed children who alleged their father was raping them, and then left for Christmas vacation without bringing the suspect in for questioning or updating her supervisors on the status of the case. While she was away, her colleagues found out about the seriousness of the accusations and immediately arrested the suspect. “Your decision to not complete this investigation or advise me of the interview results is inexcusable,” her supervisor wrote in a letter that year. “Disclosures made by children in this case must be acted upon immediately if the investigation allows for it.” 

By August 2016, Turnage was in the middle of her investigation into Taylor’s case, and she wanted to do a “clarification interview” with Taylor—at a noisy truck stop parking lot. As cars whizzed by on the highway, Taylor thought it was an odd location to meet. Perhaps, she thought, it was out of convenience—the midpoint between the sheriff’s office and Tampa, where Taylor had been crashing with Henry’s adult daughter ever since that day in church. 

Leaning against her car, Turnage said she’d gone through Taylor’s phone records, and saw that she was texting continuously at the time she said she was raped. Taylor explained that she used her phone as a barrier so Henry wouldn’t talk to her during the abuse. If that was the case, asked Turnage, why didn’t Taylor alert someone to the abuse while it was occurring? Taylor said she didn’t know. 

Turnage looked for Henry on surveillance footage from the gas station where he supposedly bought condoms, she told Taylor, but he wasn’t there. Taylor had been quiet, if skeptical, in her interactions with Turnage up to this point, but now her temper flared. Henry was there, Taylor said, and it wasn’t her fault if Turnage couldn’t find evidence. “I am telling the truth,” she insisted. She stormed to her sister’s car and locked herself inside.

Turnage concluded that there wasn’t evidence to support a criminal charge against Henry. The surveillance footage turned up nothing. The car hadn’t shown any evidence of bodily fluids. The hospital exam hadn’t found evidence of trauma. Taylor had said the abuse happened near a pile of tires on a quiet road near the Cadles’ home, but Turnage only found a busy road with no tire pile in sight.

Sexual assault investigations involve sensitive gathering of information by trained professionals who understand the dynamics of abuse—ideally in neutral, safe, quiet settings with no distractions, said Jerri Sites, an expert in child abuse investigations who facilitates trainings on best practices. After listening to recordings of Turnage’s interviews, Sites concluded that they sounded like interrogations by a biased detective. “It seemed as though she was trying to pressure the child to recant,” she said. “It was really, really hard to listen to.” 

Turnage didn’t bring the same skepticism to her interviews with Lisa and Henry. Her interview with Henry outside the church—the only time he was officially questioned—lasted just 20 minutes. During this time, he made a troubling admission. When asked if he would take a polygraph test, Henry declined. “I’ve had sex with a lot of people in the shower with my eyes closed, if you know what I mean,” he explained. “I’m a man.” 

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To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Henry Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.

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If Turnage was concerned about Henry acknowledging he had sexual thoughts about his adoptive daughter, she didn’t show it. “Daydreaming about it and answering questions in reference to the allegations are two totally different things,” she told him.

There were other missed opportunities during the investigation. There is no indication that Turnage asked for Henry to be forensically examined, even though the suspect’s body sometimes provides more evidence than the victim’s. When Turnage went looking for the remote road with the pile of tires, a location that Taylor described with the uncertainty of a 12-year-old who doesn’t drive, she never asked Taylor to join her to show her where it was. 

Finally, Turnage erred in gathering a key piece of evidence: video of Henry buying condoms at a gas station. Surveillance footage from Henry and Taylor’s previous stop, Taco Bell, showed them leaving at 7:43 p.m. They should have arrived at the gas station about a half hour later, but confoundingly, Turnage requested footage starting 45 minutes later. In those missing 15 minutes, Henry likely would have already come and gone. 

Turnage’s investigation came to a head after five months, in December 2016. She spoke with Taylor on the porch outside the Cadles’ home to deliver the news: The final results from the rape kit had come back, and there was no evidence of Henry’s DNA. “I’m not saying you’re lying,” Turnage told Taylor. “I just want to know why, if everything you said is true, why am I not finding anything?”

Taylor’s voice came out as a whimper. “I don’t know,” she said. “I swear on my life it happened.”

In fact, rape kits often don’t show evidence of abusers’ DNA, especially when more than 24 hours have passed since the abuse occurred, or when a condom was used—both of which applied in Taylor’s case. 

“If it happened, there would be—there would be DNA found,” Turnage said. “And we didn’t find anything.” 

If Taylor lived in another county, perhaps her case would have ended there: allegations made, no corroborating evidence found, no charge against the alleged abuser. But in Polk County, no wrongdoing is too small for a consequence. Sheriff Judd often quotes a phrase he learned from his late father: “Right is right, and wrong is never right.”

“Polk County has a very pro-arrest outlook,” said Joel Dempsey, a detective with the office until 2018. “If charges are deemed justifiable, then [suspects] are likely going to be charged.”

Inside the house, Turnage told Lisa that the sheriff’s office planned to move forward with a criminal charge against Taylor for lying to a law enforcement officer about a felony. Lisa was on board. “We know she’s mouthy, and she tries to act older than what she is,” she said.

Afterward, Turnage spoke with Taylor’s adoptive sister about what Taylor’s life would look like if she were sent to the juvenile detention center.

“You’re in your pretty little blue jumpsuit, with your little flip flops, and you’re housed with everybody else,” said Turnage. “She would come in and look like the pretty girl.”

Hearing bits and pieces of the conversation through the sliding porch door, Taylor had the distinct feeling that she was drowning.

Two days after meeting with Taylor at the Cadles’ home, Turnage filed an affidavit. The real crime wasn’t the alleged sexual abuse—it was that Taylor had given false information to a law enforcement officer, a first-degree misdemeanor. The victim of this crime, according to the affidavit, was the Polk County Sheriff’s Office.

Taylor is one of hundreds of victims alleging sexual assault who have been charged with false reporting nationwide. No federal agency tracks the prevalence of false-reporting charges, but over a multiyear investigation, documented in the Emmy Award–winning film Victim/Suspect, the Center for Investigative Reporting (which produces Mother Jones and Reveal) identified more than 230 cases of reporting victims charged with crimes, originating from nearly every state.

Most criminal justice experts estimate that 2 to 8 percent of sexual assault allegations are actually false. But law enforcement officers tend to assume the rate of false reporting is much higher—in part because police officers don’t always receive training on how trauma can affect memory or behavior.

Through dozens of freedom of information requests, we amassed a first-of-its-kind trove of audio and video evidence documenting the police practice of criminalizing those who report sexual assault. We found examples of police officers lying, deploying interrogation techniques meant for criminal suspects that, when used on unsuspecting, traumatized people, can undercut their credibility and even cause them to recant. Of 52 cases analyzed closely, nearly two-thirds resulted in the alleged victim recanting. In nine cases, the recantation was the only evidence cited by police.

Most cases centered on adults accusing other adults, largely because juvenile arrests are not usually matters of public record. But a few examples emerged of children being charged.

In 2008, after an 11-year-old girl in Washington, DC, twice reported being sexually assaulted, she was charged with making a false report. But, as a Washington Post investigation detailed, detectives didn’t follow basic guidelines for how to treat victims of sexual assault. They lied to her, saying there was evidence contradicting her account, despite two medical reports confirming that she suffered genital injuries. Still, police and prosecutors wanted her punished for fabricating her report. After a plea deal, she was taken in as a ward of the District of Columbia, and spent more than two years in residential mental health facilities.

In 2014, a 12-year-old Indiana girl told police that a boy forced her to have sex with him. Phone records revealed that the boy apologized to her after the incident. Still, a detective challenged her use of the word “force”—she told the boy no, she said in a recorded police interview, but he didn’t hold her down. The detective sent the case to prosecutors, who charged her with lying.

We also learned of a 12-year-old girl in Polk County, Florida: Taylor. Last year, we sent Taylor a message on Facebook, explaining our investigation into police turning the tables on victims and asking if she’d like to talk about what happened to her. She immediately responded: “I’m sorry I’m shocked,” she wrote. “Is this real?” Within an hour, she called to talk.

There were few public records tied to the case due to confidentiality laws meant to protect children. So Taylor wrote records requests, signed release forms, and notarized documents to obtain case files and recordings from the sheriff’s office, the juvenile court, the circuit court, the Department of Children and Families, and the Department of Juvenile Justice. Then she shared them with us.

The culture of consequences that permeates the Polk County Sheriff’s Office applies to kids as well as adults. The same year as Taylor’s case, for example, the sheriff’s office accused an 11-year-old girl of lying about an attempted abduction. She, too, was charged with filing a false police report, which the sheriff’s office wrote on Facebook would “help re-enforce the lesson” after she wasted police resources. 

Between 2019 and 2023, more children in Polk County were charged with misdemeanor obstruction of justice—an umbrella category that includes false reporting—than in any other Florida county. Children in Polk were twice as likely to face the charge than children in the state overall, according to an analysis of data from Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice.

Such charges may be intended to make the community safer, but they can do the opposite, said Sites, the child abuse expert. “It’s hard enough to come forward in the first place,” she said, “and if the community feels that someone might be charged, people aren’t going to come forward.” Even in cases when a child isn’t telling the truth, she said, the response should be support services to help a child understand that it’s not okay to lie—but also efforts to understand why they did so in the first place. “Something is not right if somebody’s going to go to those lengths to falsely accuse somebody,” she said.

Turnage’s conclusion that Taylor was lying had bigger ramifications: DCF was supposed to conduct its own investigation, but it closed the case on the grounds that Turnage hadn’t found evidence of abuse. 

The agency also appears to have used Taylor’s years of records against her. DCF records reference two allegations of sexual abuse before 2016. When Taylor was 5, her mother’s friend was arrested for sexually assaulting Taylor. And when Taylor was 11, DCF investigated a report made by her school that her gym teacher had touched her inappropriately. Taylor didn’t report the incident herself—rather, it was a rumor started by a group of girls. Taylor denied the rumor, and the case was closed with no indicators of abuse, according to the report. 

“It’s hard enough to come forward in the first place, and if the community feels that someone might be charged, people aren’t going to come forward.”

But by 2016, the details didn’t seem to matter to DCF. In its report closing the investigation into Henry’s alleged abuse, the agency noted, “There is a pattern of...reports involving Taylor with allegations of sexual abuse and being touched by other males.”

Richard Wexler, who leads the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, said that child protective services agencies often give adoptive families the benefit of the doubt. “Whenever a child welfare agency investigates abuse in foster care or in an adoptive home it is, in effect, investigating itself—because they put the child there in the first place,” he said. “That creates an enormous incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the casefile.”

Remarkably, the same day Turnage filed the affidavit accusing Taylor of lying, she received a disciplinary letter from a lieutenant regarding another case. After investigating the sexual assault of a minor, Turnage had arrested the wrong person. A video of the assault showed the suspect had visible tattoos, but the man she detained had none. “It is imperative that as a detective you look at the totality of the circumstances and all evidence present in developing probable cause to make an arrest,” the letter read. It concluded, “You are a valued member of this agency and I am confident this will not recur.”

After four months with her adoptive sister, Taylor moved back in with the Cadles. Henry was friendly with her, full of smiles. “It was like a sticky sweet,” she says. He didn’t ask about the past four months or comment on the investigation—instead, he acted as if nothing had happened.

Taylor kept to herself, holing up in her room. She wrote about her dreams in her journal, like the one where she was trapped with an alligator in a locked room. Sometimes, she’d get so upset that she’d crouch on the floor, rocking back and forth, pulling out fistfuls of hair. 

She vacillated between depression, fury, and exhaustion. She worried that if she stuck to her story in the face of her criminal charge, she would be sent to juvie. “I was basically like, I have no other choice,” she says. “I have to recant my story.”

In a meeting in February 2017 with Lisa, Henry, and her probation officer, Taylor said that she lied about being raped because she was mad about her cellphone being taken away. A report from the meeting reads, “Father extremely hurt by youth’s actions but forgives her.” 

Three months later, on the way to the Polk County Courthouse for her arraignment, Lisa told her to “take it on the chin,” Taylor remembers. The state had offered Taylor a deal: If she pleaded guilty to her charge and completed the terms of her probation, the charge would be dismissed. Lisa and Taylor both signed a document agreeing for Taylor to “freely and voluntarily” waive her right to a lawyer and represent herself. She pleaded guilty to giving false information to a law enforcement officer. 

Judge Mark Hofstad ordered probation, and signed an order for the terms: 15 hours of community service, a 7 p.m. curfew, and limits on leaving a tri-county area without permission from Taylor’s probation officer. 

Taylor also had to write two apology letters: one to an unspecified officer, and the second to Henry. Without giving the words any thought, she scribbled in her journal and tore the pages out.  

“Dear dad,

im sorry for what i did. I didn’t stop and think of my consequences of these actions. This will not happen again + im sorry.”

One evening in July 2017, a month after writing the apology letters, Taylor accompanied Henry to pick up a mower that needed repairs. 

The sun was setting as they made their way home, and Henry pulled into a Dollar General to get something to drink. Taylor waited in the truck—now that she was 13, she could finally sit in front. As Henry walked out of the store, she saw that he was empty-handed, but his front pocket was bulging. 

She realized several things simultaneously. The first was that he had bought condoms—which was confirmed when he got into the car and tossed a Lifestyles box in her lap. The second: She had thought that Henry would be too scared to abuse her again after all the scrutiny, but he had been emboldened. The third: She didn’t have anyone to call for help. The adults in her life—and the police—thought she was a liar. 

Finally: She had to document what he did to her that night, so there would be no question about what had happened.

“I had to find the evidence for them,” she says. “Because if I didn’t find the evidence for them, I wasn’t too sure they would find it.”

As Henry drove, she made sure he could see that she was playing a game called Piano Tiles, tapping black piano keys as they floated across the screen. About 15 minutes into their drive, Taylor tilted the screen away from Henry for a moment and snapped a photo of the condom box. 

Henry drove to the same spot as he had a year before, on the turnout of the quiet road that cut through the swamp. It was dusk outside, the road empty, the night quiet other than the chirping crickets and cows bellowing in a nearby pasture. As Henry walked around the back of the truck, Taylor recorded a six-second video panning to four crucial visuals: the radio clock reading 8:29 p.m., the back of Henry’s head, the condoms on the dashboard, and the view outside her window.

Then, she says, Henry unzipped his pants and ordered her to pull down hers. “You know what to do,” he said. Taylor’s Android allowed her to take photos by swiping up anywhere on the screen. When Henry told her to hurry up with her phone, she told him to wait a second—she was just closing applications. She swiped up again and again, silently snapping photos.

After it was all over, when he turned around to check for cars, she shoved the empty condom box under the seat. They began the drive home—AC pumping, pop music playing on the radio—and Taylor mentally collected more evidence: the white smear on the seat, the bushes where he threw a used tissue, the stretch of grass where he tossed unused condoms out the window as they drove.

Once home, Taylor told Lisa she was taking the dogs for a walk. Standing in the yard in the dark, she deliberated. She was terrified of calling the cops. If she wasn’t believed again, surely she’d face an even harsher punishment than the first time. But if she didn’t call the cops, nothing would change. The thought, on repeat: Am I going to do it? 

She dialed 911.

Taylor describes the next few hours like scenes in a movie: the cars driving up, no lights or sirens, as Taylor had instructed, since Henry was sleeping. A cop’s flashlight through the backdoor. Taylor standing outside with an officer, showing the photos and video on her phone. The lights of cop cars bouncing off Henry’s vacant face as he was escorted through the yard in handcuffs. Taylor bawling after an officer asked her to go back to the godforsaken, freezing hospital in the middle of the night for another rape kit exam.

“I was fighting for my life, in a very quiet scream.”

At first, Henry denied any wrongdoing. “I don’t know what the hell—why is she doing this again?” he told Polk County Detective Joel Dempsey in a recorded interview. It was only when Dempsey showed Henry the photos that Henry admitted that the photos were, in fact, of him.

Henry continued to deflect blame in recorded calls from jail, insisting that he had been set up. “I was dealing with a venomous snake,” he told his sister. In another call, he insisted, “It’s not all my fault neither. Yes, I’m the adult, but it’s not all my fault.”

Two days after the assault, Taylor sat through a videotaped forensic interview at a child advocacy center—the same child advocacy center and the same case worker she spoke to the year before. She spoke with urgency as she explained the evidence she had collected, still convinced that, somehow, Henry would work his way out of this. 

“I mean, I really hope that they actually, like, take the time to, like, actually investigate and to listen to my side of the story before they just want to accuse me of giving false information,” Taylor told the case worker. “I tried everything. I did everything I could do.”

Today, Taylor remembers this moment in vivid detail. “I was fighting for my life,” she says, “in a very quiet scream.”

The next day, Henry Cadle was charged with sexually assaulting Taylor.

“I don't remember any other case where the victim had the forethought or the intelligence to collect their own evidence and to be so thorough,” Dempsey said recently. “Just, unbelievable amount of presence of mind that she showed.”

Assistant State Attorney Joni Batie-McGrew, who approved the original false-reporting charge against Taylor, filed a motion to vacate Taylor’s probation and guilty plea. The information Taylor had provided to the police, the motion said, “has since been determined to be true.” 

The Department of Juvenile Justice sent Taylor a letter terminating her supervision, adding that it was the department’s hope that the experience was beneficial to her.

In February 2019, Henry pleaded no contest to the sexual battery of a child. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Taylor still lives in Polk County, just a half hour away from where she once lived with Lisa and Henry. She stays at home with her two kids—a 3-year-old boy and a 1-year-old girl—and the family’s massive pitbull mastiff while her fiancé works at an auto glass repair shop. 

Motherhood comes naturally to Taylor. In the moments of chaos—when she’s trying to feed her baby and her toddler is climbing on her back and the dog is barking—she laughs. When her baby cries, she coos, “What’s wrong, girlie?” In her free time, Taylor vlogs about beauty and parenting in a way that’s refreshingly real, talking, for example, about how to wax your armpits or how dinner that night will be subs because the Walmart bread is getting stale.

In October, our interview with Taylor aired on PBS NewsHour. “Why punish me?” she said on camera, with an unflinching gaze. “What did I do for you to punish me?”

The video got millions of views on TikTok, and local and national publications picked up the story. Viewers flooded the comments sections of the Polk County Sheriff’s Office’s social media pages to demand justice for Taylor. But some of those comments mysteriously disappeared from view, prompting more outrage. Taylor decided to send Judd an email directly. She admired his work overall, she wrote, but she was outraged.

“I thought you guys were supposed to help? Not silence a victim.”

Judd has often said that the key to being a good sheriff is transparency with the public. One of his often-repeated phrases is: “If you mess up, then dress up, fess up, and fix it up.” But records show Henry Cadle’s arrest didn’t prompt any disciplinary action at the time. Judd has not responded to questions about the case publicly, or to Taylor.   

Turnage didn’t respond to our attempts to reach her, and Judd’s office declined an interview. When we showed up at the sheriff’s office in August and asked to speak with Judd, we were told that a public information officer would come down to talk. Minutes later, we were told, she had been pulled into a meeting and didn’t know when she would be available. (A spokesperson told the Lakeland Ledger that the sheriff’s office wouldn’t speak to us because it “became clear they were not interested in accurately reporting an investigation that occurred in 2016.”)

Florida Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book, however, had more luck. A Democrat from Broward County, Book sponsored recent legislation requiring law enforcement to receive training in trauma-informed sexual assault investigations. After listening to audio of Turnage’s interviews that we shared with her, an incensed Book asked Judd for information about Taylor’s 2016 case.

In a letter to Book last month, Polk County Captain Dina Russell defended Turnage’s "thorough investigation” and doubled down on the same concerns with Taylor that Turnage had back in 2016: Taylor had said she didn’t like going on rides with Henry, but family members said otherwise. Henry wasn’t on the surveillance video buying condoms. Taylor was texting during the abuse, but, Russell wrote, “made no mention in her texts she was being abused.” 

But after listening to a recording of an interview from the case, Russell acknowledged that Turnage’s approach didn’t meet the department’s standards. She sent Turnage a “letter of retraining” last month. 

“Several of your questions and comments were inappropriate,” Russell wrote. “While your intent may have been to elicit the truth and gather essential information, referencing personal circumstances such as foster care or financial hardships can create an environment of discomfort, fear, mistrust is simply unacceptable.” The letter made no mention of the ramifications of these failures for Taylor, or the fact that Taylor was later deemed to be telling the truth.

The captain’s demands of Turnage were minimal: Within a week, she was required to complete an online course on interview and interrogation techniques. The captain’s conclusion echoed the disciplinary letter Turnage received in 2016, when she arrested the wrong suspect: “I am confident you will take the appropriate steps to prevent any similar events in the future.” 

Turnage is still a detective, though she’s no longer in the special victims unit. Her latest performance review noted that she’s on track to become a sergeant.

Batie-McGrew, who prosecuted Taylor’s first case, also didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. But the state attorney’s office said in an email that after Taylor was proven to be telling the truth, they made a policy change: They now require that the office be consulted before charging a juvenile who claims to be a victim of sexual abuse, according to Jacob Orr, the chief assistant state attorney for the 10th Judicial Circuit. 

Since Taylor’s case, Orr said, the office has charged three other juveniles with falsely reporting sexual abuse. He said those cases included “irrefutable evidence proving the falsehood” of their claims, but he didn’t elaborate on how police were able to irrefutably prove that the children were not sexually abused. 

For Taylor, three more children is far too many. “It should have stopped with me,” she says. “It shouldn’t have even gotten to me, but it should have stopped with me.”

Once in a while, Taylor drives on the quiet road through the swamp, past the spot where Henry abused her. It’s still hard, but having her kids in the backseat makes clear how much things have changed over the past seven years. She’s no longer a child being driven there against her will, bracing herself for the worst, preparing to crouch on the floorboard if anyone drives by. 

Now, she is in the driver’s seat. “It’s a sense of relief, in a way,” she says. “I’m going past this spot because this is the route I chose to take.”

Melissa Lewis contributed data analysis.

On Monday night, Christian Pulisic, the star of the US men’s national soccer team, scored in a match against Jamaica and promptly jogged over to the corner flag. After a jumping fist pump, the red, white, and blue bedecked central midfielder did what’s become known as the “Trump Dance,” laughing as he wiggled his arms and hips.

This dance is more than just “fun.” It’s a symbol of shifts in power and policy.

In a post-game interview, Pulisic—a multi-millionaire who is a registered Republican—was questioned about his celebration, and disavowed that it carried any deeper meaning: “It’s not a political dance. It was just for fun.”

No matter what Pulisic intended, there’s no denying he’s part of a larger wave of athletes, from the NFL to the collegiate level, who in the wake of Trump’s 2024 win have been imitating the president-elect’s dance, which he is known to perform along to “YMCA.” 

In discussing the trend, Fox News liberal commentator Jessica Tarlov identified a hypocrisy in contrast to the national stick-to-sports outrages that followed political statements by stars like Colin Kaepernick and LeBron James: “I guess we’ve gotten to the portion of the Trump era where we have moved past shut up and dribble, and now it is fantastic for athletes to talk about their politics.”

There’s no doubt some athletes are doing the dance as a show of support for Trump and his agenda. Take San Francisco 49ers pass-rusher Nick Bosa, who, a week before the election, wore a “Make America Great Again” hat during a post-game appearance. He was eventually docked $11,255 for breaking rules barring displaying written messages on the field, but, as the Wall Street Journal reported, the NFL delayed the fine until after Election Day in hopes of avoiding controversy or retribution from Trump. The following Sunday, Bosa did Trump’s dance in celebration of a sack; a video went viral after being shared by Sean Hannity on social media.

Trump’s election win is visible beyond American athletes. Players from the English football club Barnsley F.C—founded in 1887 and now playing in the third tier of professional British soccer—celebrated a goal with the dance. The display was broadcast to the world by the team’s social media managers, who shared a video backed up by the sounds of YMCA. And this month’s attacks in Amsterdam on Israeli soccer fans were kicked off after at least one supporter of Maccabi Tel-Aviv, the visiting team, was photographed hoisting a Trump banner. 

As Trump’s win reverberates in American culture and across the world, his reelection has confirmed his status as a global right-wing figure. In that sense, symbols that are associated with him will always speak to shifts in power and policy. When they crop up in sports, it’s hard to argue they are simply “just for fun.”

It was clear from the outset that the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would not pass. The trio of bills, brought to a vote on Wednesday night, would have stopped $20 billion in weapons from being sent to Israel. Every single Republican in the Senate voted against Sanders, as expected. A majority of Democratic senators voted against the bills, too. 

But there has still been movement in favor of limiting military aid: About 40 percent of the Democrats present for the vote wanted to stop billions in arms sales to Israel, despite loud opposition from the White House, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Major figures in the Democratic Party—Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.)—voted for at least one of the resolutions. Nineteen senators backed at least a piece of Sanders’ call to limit aid, a historically high number showing explicit, public support for upholding American law as it applies to Israel.

Polls show that the majority of Americans support suspending offensive weapons to Israel until an end comes to the country’s yearlong bombardment of Gaza—in which, experts estimate, over 100,000 people have already been killed. But that majority view—endorsed even by some explicitly pro-Israel organizations, such as J Street—has not been reflected in the US government.

In fact, hours before Sanders brought his resolutions to the Senate floor, the United States vetoed another ceasefire resolution in the United Nations. It is the fourth such resolution since Israel’s war in Gaza—which United Nations agencies, independent experts, and several world governments have declared a genocide—began. (That resolution would have demanded the release of all hostages, and implemented Biden’s own ceasefire plan.)

On the Senate floor, Sanders spoke next to a large photo of a dead, emaciated Palestinian child. “Every member of the Senate who believes in the rule of law, that our government should obey the law, should vote for these resolutions,” he said. “The Foreign Assistance Act and the Arms Export Control Act are very clear. The United States cannot provide weapons to countries that violate internationally recognized human rights or block US humanitarian aid. That is not my opinion, that is what the law says.”

In mid-September, Biden administration leaders sent a letter to Netanyahu warning him of these specific provisions of US law, and saying Israel had 30 days to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza or face cuts to military aid. But 30 days came and went, Palestinians continued to starve, and the Biden administration refused to enforce its own deadline.

Joint Resolutions of Disapproval are not unheard of—they’ve previously been levied against Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for example—but this is the first time that this type of weapons-trade-restricting measure has been brought against Israel, which is by a far larger recipient of US weapons, having been given about $310 billion in military aid from the US since its founding.

Sanders recounted anecdotes from doctors who saw civilians shot in the head in Gaza, explained that per satellite imagery two-thirds of the buildings in Gaza are flattened entirely, and told fellow congresspeople that reporting showed almost no one in Gaza has had consistent access to electricity or clean water for nearly 14 months. 

“Fundamentally, [President] Joe Biden will not uphold the law,” Matt Duss, a former Sanders aide now at the Center for International Policy, said of the White House pressure campaign to vote against Sanders. Instead, it’s “purely ideological: [Biden] just believes that Israel is entitled to absolute total wall-to-wall support, no matter how catastrophic the impact on Palestinians or Lebanese.” 

“A lot of people wrongly thought that it was because of political considerations,” Duss continued. “But no, even after the election, [the administration] remains completely committed to ignoring US law and keeping the flow of weapons running, even with the knowledge that these particular weapons will not reach Israel for over a year.”

The first bill to be voted on Wednesday night concerned exploding tank shells. Cat Knarr of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights noted that these shells are thought to have killed 6-year-old Hind Rajab as she sat alone with the bodies of her family, pleading for help. Knarr’s group staged a protest the day before the vote at the Senate. “You’re either on the side of justice and stopping the weapons, or you’re on the side of arming a genocidal state, and you will go down in history for how you vote today,” she said. 

When opponents of the JRDs came to the floor, their talking points sounded like they were lifted directly from a White House memo circulated earlier that morning. As reported by Akbar Shahid Ahmed of the Huffington Post, the White House declared that those who would block weapons to Israel were aiding Hamas and prolonging the war.

Ted Budd (R-N.C.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are among the senators who seemed to speak from that playbook. “If you love peace you have to destroy those who hate peace,” Graham said. 

No one argued against Sanders’ fundamental point—that sending weapons to a nation blocking humanitarian aid is illegal. Instead, they said Israel needed to defend itself against a region in which it is the only reliable ally for the West. Senator John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) said of the Palestinian people: “They hate Americans. They want to kill us and drink our blood out of a boot.” 

But the closeness of Israel and the West is showing signs of cracking.

The next day, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for using starvation as a weapon of war as well as “murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” This marked the first time the ICC has ever indicted a pro-Western official on war crimes charges—which means the United States is certain to push back. After 14 months of unabated carnage, opposition to arming Israel even within the United States is looking less fringe.

Amid the escalating debate over whether to release a highly damaging report into allegations that he had sex with a minor, Matt Gaetz on Thursday announced that he was withdrawing from consideration to become President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general.

“While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” Gaetz wrote on social media. “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1.”

The surprise announcement comes one day after the House Ethics Committee failed to agree to release the long-awaited results of the report surrounding Gaetz’s sexual relationships and payments to several women, including at least one minor. Trump shocked even close allies by tapping Gaetz for the role and was reportedly phoning members of Congress as recently as this week to rally support for the disgraced Florida Republican.

Those who have opposed the report’s release, including Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, have argued that such a move would set a poor precedent since Gaetz, who resigned shortly after Trump announced his intention to appoint him, is technically no longer a sitting member of Congress.

“I remain fully committed to see that Donald J. Trump is the most successful President in history,” Gaetz continued. “I will forever be honored that President Trump nominated me to lead the Department of Justice and I’m certain he will Save America.”

The long, strange saga of the “nonprofit-killer bill” continues. The legislation—officially called HR 9495, or the “Stop Terror Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act”—would give the Secretary of the Treasury unilateral power to designate nonprofits as suspected “Terrorist Supporting Organizations,” taking away their tax-exempt status unless they are able to prove they are not terrorist supporting.

The bill was unable to meet the two-thirds majority vote it needed to make it through the House last week. But, today, with only a simple majority vote required, the legislation passed the House in a 219–184 vote. This time, it garnered far less Democratic support than it had only days ago.

In the bill’s original iteration, it was popular among both Republicans and Democrats, who saw it as an appealing way to police Palestinian rights organizations after protests last year. An earlier version, in April, passed the House easily, with only 11 votes against the bill. It didn’t make it through the Senate and was reintroduced in the House this fall.

One of those early no votes was Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who said on the House floor today, “This is going to be my third time voting against this bill, because I don’t care who the president is. This is a dangerous and an unconstitutional bill that would allow unchecked power to target nonprofit organizations as political enemies and shut them down without due process.”

Meet HR 9495: The nonprofit killer. pic.twitter.com/kN6X5Sypwm

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 20, 2024

When Tlaib was first voting against the bill, most Democrats disagreed with her. Since then, they have become concerned that a law they would have considered reasonable under a Harris administration would be dangerously applied under Trump.

This time, 183 Democrats and one Republican voted against the bill, and only 15 Democrats voted for it—down from 52 last week. Since then, there’s been a full-court-press civil society campaign to take down H.R. 9495. Nearly 300 organizations—including the ACLU, the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO, Planned Parenthood, and the NAACP—have signed a letter pointing out that Trump is likely to use this bill to silence any of his enemies, not just Palestinians and their supporters. As Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) pointed out, that could also include nonprofit news outlets.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) is one of the dozens of Democrats who flipped their vote on the bill since Trump’s election.

He gave a personal example of why. One of the organizations whose nonprofit status Trump wants to terminate, Doggett said, “has protested one of my speeches.”

“Protests are inconvenient,” he said. “The one I had was inconvenient.” Nonetheless, “America is stronger when we protect dissent in all its forms, as long as it is done in a proper way.” For Doggett, the bill itself is less of a concern than the man who could be utilizing it.

“There has been much made in this debate of the fact that some of us have been switching positions,” he said. “Well, we listen to our constituents.”

Of the many absurd things Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said over the years—about vaccines, about 5G technology as a tool of mass surveillance, about Covid being an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon designed to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people—his claims about HIV and AIDS have been some of the most fact-free.

“He is entirely unqualified.”

Kennedy has suggested there are questions about whether HIV causes AIDS. (There are not, and it does.) His book The Real Anthony Fauci heavily quoted the work of Berkeley professor Peter Duesberg, an infamous first-wave AIDS denialist. Kennedy has also promoted the idea, debunked since the late 1980s, that the party drug poppers might cause AIDS. All of which has led experts to ask a simple question: what will become of the United States’ policies towards HIV/AIDS if Kennedy is confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services? 

Donald Trump announced his plans to nominate Kennedy to lead HHS last week, generating immediate concern among scientists and public health experts. Given the extraordinary scope of HHS, one told Mother Jones, him taking charge of the agency would be “a genuine catastrophe.” In the case of HIV/AIDS, the damage could be global, if Kennedy’s previously-stated beliefs about the disease and its treatments still hold true.

Along with the State Department, HHS helps implement the President’s Plan for Emergency AIDS Relief, which was created by George W. Bush in 2003. The PEPFAR program has been an incredible success, spending about $100 billion to save millions of lives in the developing world, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, by helping people access antiretroviral medication, testing, and prevention.

While AIDS denialism and revisionism take many different forms, one of the most common is suggesting that HIV may not be the true cause of AIDS. By that metric, Kennedy has engaged in overt denialism, writing in his Fauci book that he “takes no position” on whether HIV causes AIDS. In an video clip unearthed by the Twitter account Patriot Takes, he falsely told an audience that “a hundred percent of” the earliest AIDS deaths “were people who were addicted to poppers…people who were part of a gay lifestyle where they were burning the candle at both ends.” He went on to claim that some government scientists involved in early AIDS research believed the disease was environmental, but, RFK explained, “for Tony Fauci it was really important to call it a virus” because it “allowed him to take control of it.” 

The idea that AIDS is “environmental,” rather than being caused by a virus, is a clear reference to the roundly and repeatedly discredited Duesberg hypothesis. Duesberg—who was a biologist, but not an AIDS researcher—claimed that HIV was a harmless “passenger virus” and that the true cause of HIV/AIDS was drug use. In citing Duesberg, Kennedy took part in a small but noticeable resurgence of AIDS denialism, with people like Joe Rogan parroting Duesberg’s ideas, and NFL superstar Aaron Rodgers suggesting that Fauci used the AIDS crisis for personal gain and recklessly promoted the first-wave antiretroviral drug AZT. (Rogers wrongly suggested the drug was “killing people.”)

When I wrote about this resurgence in AIDS denialism earlier this year, Seth Kalichman, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut and the author of Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy, expressed relief that nobody in a position of power in the US government had yet taken up the cause. 

Now, he says, “it’s hard to believe we’re having this conversation.” Kalichman predicts the danger of a Kennedy-controlled HHS is not that Kennedy will directly target AIDS studies, but that he’ll preside over a general reduction in science funding which will impact HIV research. Kennedy has already laid out a plan to radically reshape the National Institutes of Health, which is a division of HHS. Cuts to the NIH could mean, Kalichman says, that “the Office of AIDS Research, which is at the forefront of AIDS research globally, could easily go away.” 

“PEPFAR won’t be a priority,” in a new Trump administration, Kalichman adds, explaining that with Marco Rubio as the likely Secretary of State, he predicts “more isolationism” and “a real pulling-in of our resources across the board.”

“All of us would hope that any nominee will be committed to evidence-based decisionmaking.”

For Kalichman, Trump’s selection of Kennedy brings the United States closer to a “worst-case scenario” akin to what “they had in South Africa, where you now have AIDS denialism at the highest levels.” Thabo Mbeki, who became South Africa’s president in 1999, was persuaded by the denialist arguments of his health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, as well as by American AIDS denialists who he hosted while he was in office. Tshabalala-Msimang argued that AIDS could be cured with beetroot and garlic while dismissing antiretroviral medications as toxic; her role was, Kalichman points out, “really the parallel position in government to the secretary of HHS.” 

Major AIDS research and philanthropy groups have made their opposition to a Kennedy nomination clear. The nonprofit amFAR, which has donated some $635 million to AIDS research over the years, released a statement citing “the many controversial and false statements made by RFK Jr in relation to HIV and AIDS.”

“Sadly, he repeats disproven and debunked theories. It is amfAR’s intent to refute these statements and to vigorously oppose his nomination to lead HHS—a position for which he is entirely unqualified,” it adds. (Kennedy could not be reached for comment. An email sent to his campaign press team bounced back; one sent to group set up to promote his Make America Healthy Again movement went unreturned.)

Emory professor of medicine Dr. Carlos del Rio is a widely recognized HIV and infectious disease expert who once chaired PEPFAR’s scientific advisory board. He declined to comment on what Kennedy might do at HHS, other than to say that “all of us would hope that any nominee will be committed to evidence-based decisionmaking.”

Rio also pointed out that Trump’s first term featured a surprisingly robust focus on AIDS. His 2019 State of the Union address called for more funding to end AIDS in the United States, although congressional Republicans subsequently attacked that allocation. “Say what you want,” del Rio says, “but he did good with PEPFAR.”

As one of the most effective public health interventions ever, del Rio says that Americans “should be very proud of PEPFAR.” If the program were to end, he points out, “30 million people currently in antiretroviral therapy would potentially die. Would you want to be the president who’s responsible for killing 30 million people globally?” 

“The one thing you don’t want to become, is the laughingstock of the world,” del Rio says. “I don’t think anybody in this administration would like that.” 

Melissa Turnage approached the 12-year-old girl with the imposing affect of a cop: arms crossed, lips pursed, badge visible, tone skeptical.

“So, you don’t know how many times this has happened this week?”

Taylor Cadle slouched on a couch, staring at her lap and picking at her nails. That morning, in the summer of 2016, she had gotten into a fight with her adoptive parents when they took away her phone on the ride to church, on the outskirts of Tampa, Florida. A minister’s wife, noticing Taylor’s tear-stained face, pulled her into an office to ask what was going on. Taylor hadn’t been planning to tell her everything, but it all came spilling out. The minister called the police, and now Turnage, a detective with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, was standing before her.

Taylor spoke tentatively, in barely more than a whisper, as she told Turnage in a recorded interview that her adoptive father, Henry Cadle, had been sexually assaulting her for years. The inappropriate touching had started when she was 9 years old, shortly after Henry and Lisa, Taylor’s great uncle and his wife, had adopted her. Over time, the abuse escalated. Now, he assaulted her “anytime he gets the chance,” she said. She didn’t like going with him on errands because it happened then, on the side of a quiet road that cut through a swamp. Standing outside the car, he would put his privates inside of her privates, she told Turnage. Taylor couldn’t say how many times he had raped her, but it had happened just the night before. He did it whenever they drove to get milk, too, which was three times a week.

“That’s a lot of driving,” Turnage said.

Taylor said nothing. 

Turnage was embarking on the type of investigation that her boss, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, had made a core mission of his agency. Judd is a beloved figure in Polk County, where he has served as sheriff for the past two decades and was just reelected to his sixth term. Known for his tough-on-crime rhetoric and social media presence, Judd gives a near-daily “morning briefing” to his 700,000 TikTok followers, holding up mugshots of suspects, telling the stories of crimes they allegedly committed—from stealing baby formula to driving drunk—and welcoming them to jail, which he calls “Grady Judd’s Bed & Breakfast.” Fans buy Grady Judd bobbleheads, Grady Judd mugs, and sweatshirts reading “God Guns and Grady Judd.”

An old joke that has been repeated by Judd himself is that the most dangerous place in Polk County is between Judd and a camera. He’s a regular guest on Fox News, where he shares his outspoken views about subjects ranging from the dangers of undocumented immigrants to the peril of looters after hurricanes, and where the stories in Judd’s TikTok posts often find a national audience. 

But he claims his top priority is protecting children from sexual predators. The county’s deputies have traveled to faraway places—from Colorado to Guatemala—to extradite men accused of victimizing children in Polk County. “If you think that you’re going to physically, sexually, or emotionally abuse a child and I’m not going to get in there and protect them, you’re making a big mistake,” he told MSNBC in 2015. In 2020, President Donald Trump appointed Judd to a federal council overseeing all programs related to juvenile delinquency, and missing and exploited children.

One might think that someone accused of the crimes Henry Cadle was accused of would be a prime target for the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. But when Turnage spoke with him, on a patio outside the church, she kept the interview brief and light. Henry, who was 57, spoke about his relationship with Taylor with a breezy confidence. She had anger issues and could be difficult—traits he attributed to her rocky upbringing—but he loved her to death. “Does she have dad wrapped around her finger? Yes. Everybody will tell you that,” Henry said.

Rather than asking him if he had sexually abused Taylor, Turnage floated a theory: “Basically, Taylor, I guess, has made up these allegations, okay? That you have been sexually abusing her.” 

Henry brimmed with righteous indignation. “Why in the heck she would conjure up something like this about me, I don’t know. Only thing I’ve ever did with that kid is loved her.”

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To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Henry Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.

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Lisa Cadle was also dumbfounded by the allegations against her husband. Taylor adored Henry, Lisa told Turnage, and always begged to go with him on errands. She was quick to point out that Taylor was “mouthy” and “has been known to say things.” Turnage assured Lisa that kids had a way of making unfounded accusations “when things don’t go the way that they want it to.” 

“Back when we were younger, it was, you know, ‘We’ll call [the Department of Children and Families] and say you abused me,’” Turnage said. “Now it’s, ‘We get sexually abused.’”

By the time Turnage spoke to Taylor again, later that afternoon, her skepticism sounded palpable. Turnage focused on one particular inconsistency: whether Taylor actually liked going for rides with Henry. “If you’re mad because you got your phone taken away, let’s say that now and be done with it,” she said in the recorded interview. “Because I have three stories that say you like to be with your dad, you’re daddy’s little girl, you love to go with him because you like to get out of the house.”

Taylor went silent. By necessity, she had developed a keen sense of the unsaid moods and whims of the adults around her. She had done the mental math when she joined Henry on the car ride the night before to visit his sister in the hospital. Taylor thought the somber occasion would keep her safe. But after the hospital and a quick stop at Taco Bell, Henry pulled into the Handy gas station and came out with a box of condoms stuffed into his front pocket, and she knew she had miscalculated. 

Now, faced with an irritated deputy, Taylor realized she miscalculated again: She assumed the police would believe her.

“They’re going to pull you from your mom and your brother, and you’re going to have to go back into foster care.”

“What’s going on, Taylor?” Turnage asked. “Because you understand, if your dad goes to jail, he doesn’t come back.” There would be other consequences too, Turnage said. Her dad’s mower repair business would shut down. Her mom would lose the car while police checked it for DNA. She wouldn’t get the shoes she wanted, or the braces she needed. “They’re going to pull you from your mom and your brother, and you’re going to have to go back into foster care,” Turnage said. 

A moment passed, and then another. Finally, in a small, strained voice, Taylor said, “Everything I told you earlier is not a lie.”

With that, Turnage told Taylor that she was going to the regional hospital “to have a sexual assault kit done.” Taylor didn’t know what that was. 

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To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Taylor Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.

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Later that night, she slipped her arms through the sleeves of a too-big hospital gown and gingerly placed her feet into the stirrups. She shivered under the bright, fluorescent lights, nauseated from hunger and exhaustion. Although a doctor had walked her through what the examination would entail, Taylor was still shocked by the cold, hard metal thing that she later learned was called a speculum. As the doctor took one swab, and then another, and then another, Taylor clenched the side of the hospital bed, knuckles white, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Now 21 years old, Taylor has the same long hair and slight frame that she had when she was 12, but she no longer holds herself like she’s trying to make herself small. When we first met her in person, at an Airbnb for an interview in front of cameras and lights, she walked in as if she did this all the time, deftly setting her then-8-month-old daughter up for a nap in the bedroom before speaking, for nearly five hours straight, with the self-assurance and confidence of someone much older. She has a tattoo of the birthday of her son, who is 3 years old, in roman numerals on her left forearm, a nose ring, and dyed black hair—all decisions, she notes with a trace of pride, that she made despite Lisa’s disapproval soon after she turned 18.

But perhaps the biggest act of defiance is that she has decided to speak publicly about what happened to her when she was 12. Asked if she wanted to use a pseudonym or just part of her name, she said no—she wants to use her full name, and she wants to share her whole story. 

The way Taylor was treated—as a victim, but also as a suspect—flies in the face of best practices in handling sexual assault investigations. Her case isn’t an isolated one. In a multiyear investigation, the Center for Investigative Reporting identified hundreds of similar cases across the country in which police criminalized the very people reporting sexual assault. 

“I think from the beginning—from our first interview—she had already had her mind made up about me. She made me feel like the monster.”

Armed with hours of recorded interviews, police reports and state records stemming from her report eight years ago, Taylor simmers with fury about how Turnage handled her allegation. “I think from the beginning—from our first interview—she had already had her mind made up about me,” she says. “She made me feel like the monster.”

But when she thinks about herself that night on the hospital bed, Taylor crumples. In court records from her case is a photo from the sexual assault exam, her 12-year-old self looking up at the camera from the hospital bed.

“Little me,” she said recently, her voice catching as she stared into her own eyes. “Broken inside. With a look of ‘Are you listening yet? Do you believe me yet?’”

Taylor’s earliest memories are of parenting her younger siblings. As a child, she gave them baths, made them food, and tucked them into bed. She was her mom’s “best friend,” she says. Taylor served as a lookout when her mom would steal drugs from her boyfriend, and she knew to pee in a cup and leave it under the bathroom sink when the probation officer came by.

“I worried about everything,” she says. “I stressed about everything that, quite honestly, a child should never have to worry about.”

When she was 7, amid drug use and violence at home, the Department of Children and Families placed Taylor into foster care, according to agency records. “I wasn’t relieved as much as I probably should’ve,” Taylor says. “It was still hard because being a child, and all you ever want is your mom.” 

For the next year and a half, she bounced from foster home to foster home. It was a “scary, confusing” time, Taylor says. She desperately wanted to be reconnected with her parents and siblings, who had been placed in other homes. Her birth father had been a source of normalcy and stability before she was taken into state custody, but his drug use, too, precluded him from being cleared by DCF. 

Taylor’s tendency to assert control, key to her survival as a young child, became a liability that was pathologized in reports and case notes. Foster parents and case workers labeled her “defiant” and “bossy.” She had tantrums often and was accused of lying about little things, like stealing peanuts from the grocery store and taking another child’s phone. “Lying seems to have been a defense mechanism that has worked in the past to keep her safe,” noted one social worker in an assessment.  

When Taylor was 8, Lisa and Henry “surfaced,” as it was described in a case manager’s notes. They were relatives of her birth father—Taylor didn’t really remember them—and were excited about adopting Taylor. They said their 6-year-old adoptive son wanted a big sister.  

Taylor soon began making regular visits to the Cadles’ home in Polk City, partway between Tampa and Orlando. The family lived in a small mobile home surrounded by pastures and swamps, 45 minutes from the nearest Walmart. Taylor had reservations, telling staffers on her case that she was wary of moving again and scared of being rejected. 

But she had little say in the matter: Two days before Taylor’s ninth birthday, her adoption was finalized. The Cadles had taken Taylor on shopping sprees and trips to SeaWorld during her weekend visits, but after the adoption, the family dynamic shifted. Discipline was harsh: Lisa was quick to smack Taylor across the mouth if she talked back, Taylor says, “but when Henry got ahold of us, it was a whole different story.” She still remembers having to wear jeans to school one sweltering day because his beating with a cooking spoon on her calves had left welts. 

She felt claustrophobic in the cramped home, and begged Henry and Lisa to let her get out of the house. Lisa and her adoptive brother were homebodies, but Henry also liked to go for drives, so she went along. 

It was on these long drives that he would assault Taylor, sometimes several times in a week, she says. A turnoff on an isolated backroad became his go-to spot. Across from a wilderness preserve, next to a cell tower access road, he would pull over.

Taylor tried to predict and avoid situations where he would see opportunity for abuse. “If I knew we were taking a back road or anything of the sort, I didn’t want to go because I knew what would happen,” she says. “I had to be on all 10 toes, 24-7.”

Fearful of going back to foster care, Taylor didn’t tell any authority figures—until that Sunday morning in July 2016, when she met Detective Melissa Turnage.

Turnage was in her ninth year with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office and considered a model deputy, according to her performance reviews. Turnage’s “integrity is above reproach,” wrote her supervisor in the spring of 2015.

But mistakes quickly followed. In November 2015, during an interview with a man suspected of sexually assaulting a child, Turnage failed to read the suspect a key part of his Miranda rights—an omission that resulted in the suppression of the suspect’s confession. Turnage was suspended for eight hours, according to department records. 

The following month, Turnage interviewed children who alleged their father was raping them, and then left for Christmas vacation without bringing the suspect in for questioning or updating her supervisors on the status of the case. While she was away, her colleagues found out about the seriousness of the accusations and immediately arrested the suspect. “Your decision to not complete this investigation or advise me of the interview results is inexcusable,” her supervisor wrote in a letter that year. “Disclosures made by children in this case must be acted upon immediately if the investigation allows for it.” 

By August 2016, Turnage was in the middle of her investigation into Taylor’s case, and she wanted to do a “clarification interview” with Taylor—at a noisy truck stop parking lot. As cars whizzed by on the highway, Taylor thought it was an odd location to meet. Perhaps, she thought, it was out of convenience—the midpoint between the sheriff’s office and Tampa, where Taylor had been crashing with Henry’s adult daughter ever since that day in church. 

Leaning against her car, Turnage said she’d gone through Taylor’s phone records, and saw that she was texting continuously at the time she said she was raped. Taylor explained that she used her phone as a barrier so Henry wouldn’t talk to her during the abuse. If that was the case, asked Turnage, why didn’t Taylor alert someone to the abuse while it was occurring? Taylor said she didn’t know. 

Turnage looked for Henry on surveillance footage from the gas station where he supposedly bought condoms, she told Taylor, but he wasn’t there. Taylor had been quiet, if skeptical, in her interactions with Turnage up to this point, but now her temper flared. Henry was there, Taylor said, and it wasn’t her fault if Turnage couldn’t find evidence. “I am telling the truth,” she insisted. She stormed to her sister’s car and locked herself inside.

Turnage concluded that there wasn’t evidence to support a criminal charge against Henry. The surveillance footage turned up nothing. The car hadn’t shown any evidence of bodily fluids. The hospital exam hadn’t found evidence of trauma. Taylor had said the abuse happened near a pile of tires on a quiet road near the Cadles’ home, but Turnage only found a busy road with no tire pile in sight.

Sexual assault investigations involve sensitive gathering of information by trained professionals who understand the dynamics of abuse—ideally in neutral, safe, quiet settings with no distractions, said Jerri Sites, an expert in child abuse investigations who facilitates trainings on best practices. After listening to recordings of Turnage’s interviews, Sites concluded that they sounded like interrogations by a biased detective. “It seemed as though she was trying to pressure the child to recant,” she said. “It was really, really hard to listen to.” 

Turnage didn’t bring the same skepticism to her interviews with Lisa and Henry. Her interview with Henry outside the church—the only time he was officially questioned—lasted just 20 minutes. During this time, he made a troubling admission. When asked if he would take a polygraph test, Henry declined. “I’ve had sex with a lot of people in the shower with my eyes closed, if you know what I mean,” he explained. “I’m a man.” 

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To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Henry Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.

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If Turnage was concerned about Henry acknowledging he had sexual thoughts about his adoptive daughter, she didn’t show it. “Daydreaming about it and answering questions in reference to the allegations are two totally different things,” she told him.

There were other missed opportunities during the investigation. There is no indication that Turnage asked for Henry to be forensically examined, even though the suspect’s body sometimes provides more evidence than the victim’s. When Turnage went looking for the remote road with the pile of tires, a location that Taylor described with the uncertainty of a 12-year-old who doesn’t drive, she never asked Taylor to join her to show her where it was. 

Finally, Turnage erred in gathering a key piece of evidence: video of Henry buying condoms at a gas station. Surveillance footage from Henry and Taylor’s previous stop, Taco Bell, showed them leaving at 7:43 p.m. They should have arrived at the gas station about a half hour later, but confoundingly, Turnage requested footage starting 45 minutes later. In those missing 15 minutes, Henry likely would have already come and gone. 

Turnage’s investigation came to a head after five months, in December 2016. She spoke with Taylor on the porch outside the Cadles’ home to deliver the news: The final results from the rape kit had come back, and there was no evidence of Henry’s DNA. “I’m not saying you’re lying,” Turnage told Taylor. “I just want to know why, if everything you said is true, why am I not finding anything?”

Taylor’s voice came out as a whimper. “I don’t know,” she said. “I swear on my life it happened.”

In fact, rape kits often don’t show evidence of abusers’ DNA, especially when more than 24 hours have passed since the abuse occurred, or when a condom was used—both of which applied in Taylor’s case. 

“If it happened, there would be—there would be DNA found,” Turnage said. “And we didn’t find anything.” 

If Taylor lived in another county, perhaps her case would have ended there: allegations made, no corroborating evidence found, no charge against the alleged abuser. But in Polk County, no wrongdoing is too small for a consequence. Sheriff Judd often quotes a phrase he learned from his late father: “Right is right, and wrong is never right.”

“Polk County has a very pro-arrest outlook,” said Joel Dempsey, a detective with the office until 2018. “If charges are deemed justifiable, then [suspects] are likely going to be charged.”

Inside the house, Turnage told Lisa that the sheriff’s office planned to move forward with a criminal charge against Taylor for lying to a law enforcement officer about a felony. Lisa was on board. “We know she’s mouthy, and she tries to act older than what she is,” she said.

Afterward, Turnage spoke with Taylor’s adoptive sister about what Taylor’s life would look like if she were sent to the juvenile detention center.

“You’re in your pretty little blue jumpsuit, with your little flip flops, and you’re housed with everybody else,” said Turnage. “She would come in and look like the pretty girl.”

Hearing bits and pieces of the conversation through the sliding porch door, Taylor had the distinct feeling that she was drowning.

Two days after meeting with Taylor at the Cadles’ home, Turnage filed an affidavit. The real crime wasn’t the alleged sexual abuse—it was that Taylor had given false information to a law enforcement officer, a first-degree misdemeanor. The victim of this crime, according to the affidavit, was the Polk County Sheriff’s Office.

Taylor is one of hundreds of victims alleging sexual assault who have been charged with false reporting nationwide. No federal agency tracks the prevalence of false-reporting charges, but over a multiyear investigation, documented in the Emmy Award–winning film Victim/Suspect, the Center for Investigative Reporting (which produces Mother Jones and Reveal) identified more than 230 cases of reporting victims charged with crimes, originating from nearly every state.

Most criminal justice experts estimate that 2 to 8 percent of sexual assault allegations are actually false. But law enforcement officers tend to assume the rate of false reporting is much higher—in part because police officers don’t always receive training on how trauma can affect memory or behavior.

Through dozens of freedom of information requests, we amassed a first-of-its-kind trove of audio and video evidence documenting the police practice of criminalizing those who report sexual assault. We found examples of police officers lying, deploying interrogation techniques meant for criminal suspects that, when used on unsuspecting, traumatized people, can undercut their credibility and even cause them to recant. Of 52 cases analyzed closely, nearly two-thirds resulted in the alleged victim recanting. In nine cases, the recantation was the only evidence cited by police.

Most cases centered on adults accusing other adults, largely because juvenile arrests are not usually matters of public record. But a few examples emerged of children being charged.

In 2008, after an 11-year-old girl in Washington, DC, twice reported being sexually assaulted, she was charged with making a false report. But, as a Washington Post investigation detailed, detectives didn’t follow basic guidelines for how to treat victims of sexual assault. They lied to her, saying there was evidence contradicting her account, despite two medical reports confirming that she suffered genital injuries. Still, police and prosecutors wanted her punished for fabricating her report. After a plea deal, she was taken in as a ward of the District of Columbia, and spent more than two years in residential mental health facilities.

In 2014, a 12-year-old Indiana girl told police that a boy forced her to have sex with him. Phone records revealed that the boy apologized to her after the incident. Still, a detective challenged her use of the word “force”—she told the boy no, she said in a recorded police interview, but he didn’t hold her down. The detective sent the case to prosecutors, who charged her with lying.

We also learned of a 12-year-old girl in Polk County, Florida: Taylor. Last year, we sent Taylor a message on Facebook, explaining our investigation into police turning the tables on victims and asking if she’d like to talk about what happened to her. She immediately responded: “I’m sorry I’m shocked,” she wrote. “Is this real?” Within an hour, she called to talk.

There were few public records tied to the case due to confidentiality laws meant to protect children. So Taylor wrote records requests, signed release forms, and notarized documents to obtain case files and recordings from the sheriff’s office, the juvenile court, the circuit court, the Department of Children and Families, and the Department of Juvenile Justice. Then she shared them with us.

The culture of consequences that permeates the Polk County Sheriff’s Office applies to kids as well as adults. The same year as Taylor’s case, for example, the sheriff’s office accused an 11-year-old girl of lying about an attempted abduction. She, too, was charged with filing a false police report, which the sheriff’s office wrote on Facebook would “help re-enforce the lesson” after she wasted police resources. 

Between 2019 and 2023, more children in Polk County were charged with misdemeanor obstruction of justice—an umbrella category that includes false reporting—than in any other Florida county. Children in Polk were twice as likely to face the charge than children in the state overall, according to an analysis of data from Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice.

Such charges may be intended to make the community safer, but they can do the opposite, said Sites, the child abuse expert. “It’s hard enough to come forward in the first place,” she said, “and if the community feels that someone might be charged, people aren’t going to come forward.” Even in cases when a child isn’t telling the truth, she said, the response should be support services to help a child understand that it’s not okay to lie—but also efforts to understand why they did so in the first place. “Something is not right if somebody’s going to go to those lengths to falsely accuse somebody,” she said.

Turnage’s conclusion that Taylor was lying had bigger ramifications: DCF was supposed to conduct its own investigation, but it closed the case on the grounds that Turnage hadn’t found evidence of abuse. 

The agency also appears to have used Taylor’s years of records against her. DCF records reference two allegations of sexual abuse before 2016. When Taylor was 5, her mother’s friend was arrested for sexually assaulting Taylor. And when Taylor was 11, DCF investigated a report made by her school that her gym teacher had touched her inappropriately. Taylor didn’t report the incident herself—rather, it was a rumor started by a group of girls. Taylor denied the rumor, and the case was closed with no indicators of abuse, according to the report. 

“It’s hard enough to come forward in the first place, and if the community feels that someone might be charged, people aren’t going to come forward.”

But by 2016, the details didn’t seem to matter to DCF. In its report closing the investigation into Henry’s alleged abuse, the agency noted, “There is a pattern of...reports involving Taylor with allegations of sexual abuse and being touched by other males.”

Richard Wexler, who leads the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, said that child protective services agencies often give adoptive families the benefit of the doubt. “Whenever a child welfare agency investigates abuse in foster care or in an adoptive home it is, in effect, investigating itself—because they put the child there in the first place,” he said. “That creates an enormous incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the casefile.”

Remarkably, the same day Turnage filed the affidavit accusing Taylor of lying, she received a disciplinary letter from a lieutenant regarding another case. After investigating the sexual assault of a minor, Turnage had arrested the wrong person. A video of the assault showed the suspect had visible tattoos, but the man she detained had none. “It is imperative that as a detective you look at the totality of the circumstances and all evidence present in developing probable cause to make an arrest,” the letter read. It concluded, “You are a valued member of this agency and I am confident this will not recur.”

After four months with her adoptive sister, Taylor moved back in with the Cadles. Henry was friendly with her, full of smiles. “It was like a sticky sweet,” she says. He didn’t ask about the past four months or comment on the investigation—instead, he acted as if nothing had happened.

Taylor kept to herself, holing up in her room. She wrote about her dreams in her journal, like the one where she was trapped with an alligator in a locked room. Sometimes, she’d get so upset that she’d crouch on the floor, rocking back and forth, pulling out fistfuls of hair. 

She vacillated between depression, fury, and exhaustion. She worried that if she stuck to her story in the face of her criminal charge, she would be sent to juvie. “I was basically like, I have no other choice,” she says. “I have to recant my story.”

In a meeting in February 2017 with Lisa, Henry, and her probation officer, Taylor said that she lied about being raped because she was mad about her cellphone being taken away. A report from the meeting reads, “Father extremely hurt by youth’s actions but forgives her.” 

Three months later, on the way to the Polk County Courthouse for her arraignment, Lisa told her to “take it on the chin,” Taylor remembers. The state had offered Taylor a deal: If she pleaded guilty to her charge and completed the terms of her probation, the charge would be dismissed. Lisa and Taylor both signed a document agreeing for Taylor to “freely and voluntarily” waive her right to a lawyer and represent herself. She pleaded guilty to giving false information to a law enforcement officer. 

Judge Mark Hofstad ordered probation, and signed an order for the terms: 15 hours of community service, a 7 p.m. curfew, and limits on leaving a tri-county area without permission from Taylor’s probation officer. 

Taylor also had to write two apology letters: one to an unspecified officer, and the second to Henry. Without giving the words any thought, she scribbled in her journal and tore the pages out.  

“Dear dad,

im sorry for what i did. I didn’t stop and think of my consequences of these actions. This will not happen again + im sorry.”

One evening in July 2017, a month after writing the apology letters, Taylor accompanied Henry to pick up a mower that needed repairs. 

The sun was setting as they made their way home, and Henry pulled into a Dollar General to get something to drink. Taylor waited in the truck—now that she was 13, she could finally sit in front. As Henry walked out of the store, she saw that he was empty-handed, but his front pocket was bulging. 

She realized several things simultaneously. The first was that he had bought condoms—which was confirmed when he got into the car and tossed a Lifestyles box in her lap. The second: She had thought that Henry would be too scared to abuse her again after all the scrutiny, but he had been emboldened. The third: She didn’t have anyone to call for help. The adults in her life—and the police—thought she was a liar. 

Finally: She had to document what he did to her that night, so there would be no question about what had happened.

“I had to find the evidence for them,” she says. “Because if I didn’t find the evidence for them, I wasn’t too sure they would find it.”

As Henry drove, she made sure he could see that she was playing a game called Piano Tiles, tapping black piano keys as they floated across the screen. About 15 minutes into their drive, Taylor tilted the screen away from Henry for a moment and snapped a photo of the condom box. 

Henry drove to the same spot as he had a year before, on the turnout of the quiet road that cut through the swamp. It was dusk outside, the road empty, the night quiet other than the chirping crickets and cows bellowing in a nearby pasture. As Henry walked around the back of the truck, Taylor recorded a six-second video panning to four crucial visuals: the radio clock reading 8:29 p.m., the back of Henry’s head, the condoms on the dashboard, and the view outside her window.

Then, she says, Henry unzipped his pants and ordered her to pull down hers. “You know what to do,” he said. Taylor’s Android allowed her to take photos by swiping up anywhere on the screen. When Henry told her to hurry up with her phone, she told him to wait a second—she was just closing applications. She swiped up again and again, silently snapping photos.

After it was all over, when he turned around to check for cars, she shoved the empty condom box under the seat. They began the drive home—AC pumping, pop music playing on the radio—and Taylor mentally collected more evidence: the white smear on the seat, the bushes where he threw a used tissue, the stretch of grass where he tossed unused condoms out the window as they drove.

Once home, Taylor told Lisa she was taking the dogs for a walk. Standing in the yard in the dark, she deliberated. She was terrified of calling the cops. If she wasn’t believed again, surely she’d face an even harsher punishment than the first time. But if she didn’t call the cops, nothing would change. The thought, on repeat: Am I going to do it? 

She dialed 911.

Taylor describes the next few hours like scenes in a movie: the cars driving up, no lights or sirens, as Taylor had instructed, since Henry was sleeping. A cop’s flashlight through the backdoor. Taylor standing outside with an officer, showing the photos and video on her phone. The lights of cop cars bouncing off Henry’s vacant face as he was escorted through the yard in handcuffs. Taylor bawling after an officer asked her to go back to the godforsaken, freezing hospital in the middle of the night for another rape kit exam.

“I was fighting for my life, in a very quiet scream.”

At first, Henry denied any wrongdoing. “I don’t know what the hell—why is she doing this again?” he told Polk County Detective Joel Dempsey in a recorded interview. It was only when Dempsey showed Henry the photos that Henry admitted that the photos were, in fact, of him.

Henry continued to deflect blame in recorded calls from jail, insisting that he had been set up. “I was dealing with a venomous snake,” he told his sister. In another call, he insisted, “It’s not all my fault neither. Yes, I’m the adult, but it’s not all my fault.”

Two days after the assault, Taylor sat through a videotaped forensic interview at a child advocacy center—the same child advocacy center and the same case worker she spoke to the year before. She spoke with urgency as she explained the evidence she had collected, still convinced that, somehow, Henry would work his way out of this. 

“I mean, I really hope that they actually, like, take the time to, like, actually investigate and to listen to my side of the story before they just want to accuse me of giving false information,” Taylor told the case worker. “I tried everything. I did everything I could do.”

Today, Taylor remembers this moment in vivid detail. “I was fighting for my life,” she says, “in a very quiet scream.”

The next day, Henry Cadle was charged with sexually assaulting Taylor.

“I don't remember any other case where the victim had the forethought or the intelligence to collect their own evidence and to be so thorough,” Dempsey said recently. “Just, unbelievable amount of presence of mind that she showed.”

Assistant State Attorney Joni Batie-McGrew, who approved the original false-reporting charge against Taylor, filed a motion to vacate Taylor’s probation and guilty plea. The information Taylor had provided to the police, the motion said, “has since been determined to be true.” 

The Department of Juvenile Justice sent Taylor a letter terminating her supervision, adding that it was the department’s hope that the experience was beneficial to her.

In February 2019, Henry pleaded no contest to the sexual battery of a child. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

Taylor still lives in Polk County, just a half hour away from where she once lived with Lisa and Henry. She stays at home with her two kids—a 3-year-old boy and a 1-year-old girl—and the family’s massive pitbull mastiff while her fiancé works at an auto glass repair shop. 

Motherhood comes naturally to Taylor. In the moments of chaos—when she’s trying to feed her baby and her toddler is climbing on her back and the dog is barking—she laughs. When her baby cries, she coos, “What’s wrong, girlie?” In her free time, Taylor vlogs about beauty and parenting in a way that’s refreshingly real, talking, for example, about how to wax your armpits or how dinner that night will be subs because the Walmart bread is getting stale.

In October, our interview with Taylor aired on PBS NewsHour. “Why punish me?” she said on camera, with an unflinching gaze. “What did I do for you to punish me?”

The video got millions of views on TikTok, and local and national publications picked up the story. Viewers flooded the comments sections of the Polk County Sheriff’s Office’s social media pages to demand justice for Taylor. But some of those comments mysteriously disappeared from view, prompting more outrage. Taylor decided to send Judd an email directly. She admired his work overall, she wrote, but she was outraged.

“I thought you guys were supposed to help? Not silence a victim.”

Judd has often said that the key to being a good sheriff is transparency with the public. One of his often-repeated phrases is: “If you mess up, then dress up, fess up, and fix it up.” But records show Henry Cadle’s arrest didn’t prompt any disciplinary action at the time. Judd has not responded to questions about the case publicly, or to Taylor.   

Turnage didn’t respond to our attempts to reach her, and Judd’s office declined an interview. When we showed up at the sheriff’s office in August and asked to speak with Judd, we were told that a public information officer would come down to talk. Minutes later, we were told, she had been pulled into a meeting and didn’t know when she would be available. (A spokesperson told the Lakeland Ledger that the sheriff’s office wouldn’t speak to us because it “became clear they were not interested in accurately reporting an investigation that occurred in 2016.”)

Florida Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book, however, had more luck. A Democrat from Broward County, Book sponsored recent legislation requiring law enforcement to receive training in trauma-informed sexual assault investigations. After listening to audio of Turnage’s interviews that we shared with her, an incensed Book asked Judd for information about Taylor’s 2016 case.

In a letter to Book last month, Polk County Captain Dina Russell defended Turnage’s "thorough investigation” and doubled down on the same concerns with Taylor that Turnage had back in 2016: Taylor had said she didn’t like going on rides with Henry, but family members said otherwise. Henry wasn’t on the surveillance video buying condoms. Taylor was texting during the abuse, but, Russell wrote, “made no mention in her texts she was being abused.” 

But after listening to a recording of an interview from the case, Russell acknowledged that Turnage’s approach didn’t meet the department’s standards. She sent Turnage a “letter of retraining” last month. 

“Several of your questions and comments were inappropriate,” Russell wrote. “While your intent may have been to elicit the truth and gather essential information, referencing personal circumstances such as foster care or financial hardships can create an environment of discomfort, fear, mistrust is simply unacceptable.” The letter made no mention of the ramifications of these failures for Taylor, or the fact that Taylor was later deemed to be telling the truth.

The captain’s demands of Turnage were minimal: Within a week, she was required to complete an online course on interview and interrogation techniques. The captain’s conclusion echoed the disciplinary letter Turnage received in 2016, when she arrested the wrong suspect: “I am confident you will take the appropriate steps to prevent any similar events in the future.” 

Turnage is still a detective, though she’s no longer in the special victims unit. Her latest performance review noted that she’s on track to become a sergeant.

Batie-McGrew, who prosecuted Taylor’s first case, also didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. But the state attorney’s office said in an email that after Taylor was proven to be telling the truth, they made a policy change: They now require that the office be consulted before charging a juvenile who claims to be a victim of sexual abuse, according to Jacob Orr, the chief assistant state attorney for the 10th Judicial Circuit. 

Since Taylor’s case, Orr said, the office has charged three other juveniles with falsely reporting sexual abuse. He said those cases included “irrefutable evidence proving the falsehood” of their claims, but he didn’t elaborate on how police were able to irrefutably prove that the children were not sexually abused. 

For Taylor, three more children is far too many. “It should have stopped with me,” she says. “It shouldn’t have even gotten to me, but it should have stopped with me.”

Once in a while, Taylor drives on the quiet road through the swamp, past the spot where Henry abused her. It’s still hard, but having her kids in the backseat makes clear how much things have changed over the past seven years. She’s no longer a child being driven there against her will, bracing herself for the worst, preparing to crouch on the floorboard if anyone drives by. 

Now, she is in the driver’s seat. “It’s a sense of relief, in a way,” she says. “I’m going past this spot because this is the route I chose to take.”

Melissa Lewis contributed data analysis.

Hours before the results started coming in on November 5, when Democrats were still full of hope, the exit polls released by the major news networks contained a striking piece of data that gave supporters of Kamala Harris reason for optimism. 

Voters chose the “the state of democracy” as their top priority over any other issue. Harris, taking notes from President Joe Biden, had spent much of the campaign portraying former President Trump as an existential threat to American norms, echoing the dominant message of her party for the past eight years. 

In some ways, this worked. The 34 percent of voters who chose democracy as their deciding issue favored Harris by 62 points. But the problem for her campaign was that, with the exception of abortion, voters who cited other issues as their top priority, such as the economy, immigration, and foreign policy, broke heavily for Trump. 

This failure of the Democrats’ focus on democracy points to a bigger problem: many voters do not believe that democracy is benefitting them or that the American political system is worth preserving. (Republicans also care about democracy for different reasons, believing that the 2020 election was stolen and Trump was prosecuted by “the deep state.”)

The warning signs were flashing—and top Democrats ignored them. 

A Pew Research poll from September 2023 found that only 4 percent of US adults believed that the political system was working extremely or very well. More than six in 10 expressed little to no confidence in its future. At the same time, only 16 percent of the public said they trusted the federal government always or most of the time, the lowest level of faith in Washington in nearly seven decades. A poll by the New York Times days before the election found that 45 percent of the public did not believe American democracy did a good job of representing ordinary people. 

“People care about democracy but it needs to be more than just ‘elect me and not the other person.’ That’s not democracy, that’s just a campaign.”

By talking so much about preserving democracy without outlining an alternative vision for improving it, or showing how democracy can tangibly improve people’s lives, Harris and other Democratic leaders were perceived as defending a status quo that many Americans revile. “Democrats walked into the trap of defending the very institutions—the ‘establishment’—that most Americans distrust,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former national security adviser, wrote after the election. 

The pre-election New York Times poll found that 58 percent of voters thought that the country’s political and economic system needed major changes or a complete overhaul. By largely defending that system, Democrats allowed Trump to run as the change candidate. As former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer pointed out, “Trump won the voters who said that the ‘ability to bring about change’ was the most important quality in a candidate by 50 points.”

In his first major speech of the 2024 campaign, which coincided with the third anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, President Biden described democracy as “America’s sacred cause.” At the outset of his presidency, Biden said that the nation, and indeed the world, was facing a battle between democracy and autocracy. His goal was to “prove democracy still works.”

But many voters don’t view American democracy that way. They see a system that is plagued by money and corruption, one dominated by elites and self-interested politicians who skew the rules to benefit themselves.

The policies Biden thought would restore public faith in democracy—like the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill—proved unpopular or were ignored by a skeptical public. The administration also did a terrible job of selling and explaining these policies—nearly a year after the IRA’s passage, 7 in 10 voters said they had heard little or nothing about the law’s provisions. Biden even seemed to predict the trouble ahead. He worried that the IRA’s benefits would not come fast enough to convince voters that “Joe did it.”

As we noted in 2022, during the January 6 hearings, the idea of running on democracy “doesn’t work as well if everything, the very system itself, is broken. The material benefits of democracy must flow to people from the institutions to earn all this defense.”

There is an ongoing and worthwhile argument about whether Biden delivered on his economic promises. But, the basic facts remain the same. Biden began a campaign, and Harris followed it through, that was all about defending the basic norms of American democracy. This won in 2020, when voters were eager to regain a sense of normalcy. But, in 2024, it began to feel—fairly or not—like the promises had not materialized. Bidenonomics might pay off someday. It didn’t seem to help enough people right now.

This failure went beyond just economics. When Democrats had control of Washington for the first two years of Biden’s presidency, they failed to pass policies on voting rights, abortion, and gun control that a majority of Americans favored because they could not overcome the structural impediments to majority rule, namely the Senate filibuster, that are deeply embedded in America’s political system. 

Biden stubbornly resisted calling for filibuster reform during the first year of his presidency, failing to use his political capital when it might have mattered. When Harris said, on the campaign trail, that she would sign legislation reinstating Roe v. Wade or restoring the Voting Rights Act, voters were left to wonder why Democrats hadn’t already done that. Harris gave few indications of how she would differ from a Biden presidency on that score.

Too often, the Democrats’ message of saving democracy began and ended with defeating Trump. “The Biden campaign’s defense of democracy was not about a bold agenda of better democracy, it was about electing Joe Biden instead of Donald Trump,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at the New America Foundation. “Harris inherited that and didn’t have time or energy to reframe it, other than some nods in her speeches to the voting rights bills. People care about democracy but it needs to be more than just ‘elect me and not the other person.’ That’s not democracy, that’s just a campaign.”

Democrats also actively shut down any discussion of the structural flaws to American democracy. At a pair of fundraisers in early October, Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz said that “the Electoral College needs to go. We need a national popular vote.” Two-thirds of the public favors that position. But Walz was forced by the Harris campaign to quickly disavow the remark and the comment was portrayed in the press as yet another gaffe by an unscripted and inexperienced candidate. It was immediately deemed off-limits to criticize a system that devalued the votes of 85 percent of Americans, violated basic notions of one person, one vote, and was rooted in slavery and white supremacy. 

Other cracks in the system were dismissed as well. In the 2023 Pew poll, the number one thing that Americans hated about the US political system was the amount of money in politics and the corruption it breeds. Eighty-five percent of Americans believed that “the cost of political campaigns makes it hard for good people to run for office” and 80 percent said big campaign donors have too much influence on decisions made by members of Congress. 

Yet Democrats, instead of running against the unchecked power of the moneyed elite, actively worked to further deregulate campaign-finance laws to compete in the oligarch arms race, petitioning the Federal Elections Commission to allow political action committees to coordinate directly with campaigns. That ended up benefitting Republican billionaires like Elon Musk, who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign. When Harris raised $1.5 billion, and her allied Super PAC took in $900 million, it was viewed as a sign of enthusiasm for her candidacy, with little acknowledgment that Democrats might be bragging about the very thing that voters disliked most about the political process.  

The Democrats’ failure to show how they would not only preserve, but ultimately strengthen and reform American democracy, boxed them into the unenviable position of defending the skewed institutions that the public blames for their everyday problems. Because they were presented with no alternative vision for how to improve a broken democratic process, Americans chose the candidate who they believed was more likely to tear that system down. “If the message of democracy is just we’re going to keep this system of democracy that people feel isn’t working, you can see why that doesn’t resonate with a lot of people,” Drutman said.

A majority of voters in 2024 weren’t convinced that voting for Democrats would save democracy or that the real-life consequences of losing democratic rights would be worse than the status quo. Going forward, Democrats have to go back to being the party of political and economic reform that challenges rather than celebrates a political system that is leaving too many people behind.

Trump owns Washington once again and if his early nominations are any indication, he’ll do a disastrous job of running it. But Democrats can’t just be anti-Trump. They can’t just be pro-democracy. They need to convince skeptical voters that democracy is worth saving in the first place and that a better system can ultimately replace the flawed one we’ve got now. 

Last Thursday, workers with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were told they would be laid off without severance and with little notice, according to the DNC’s union. The cuts included some longtime workers of the organization, the union said.

With the election over, the DNC intends to downsize from about 680 staff to fewer than 200. Some degree of seasonality is expected in political campaign jobs. But this degree is unusual—and has affected DNC staffers who’ve stayed with the organization across several campaigns, or even multiple decades, according to the union.

One former DNC union member, whose last day was Friday, said she was shocked. “For a lot of folks, this is life-altering,” said the laid-off employee, who spoke with Mother Jones on the condition of anonymity.

“Amongst the members that were laid off includes one deeply beloved union member who worked at the DNC for 38 years,” the staffer said. “So I push back against the claim that this is normal, because we have members who have been here for decades who are shocked and angry and trying to figure out how they’re going to survive this layoff.”

In a statement to the Washington Post, the DNC said that “while the DNC has met the terms of the union agreement negotiated by the CBA, we share the entire DNC family’s frustration and continue to provide resources to all members of the team to support them in this transition.”

A DNC official told Mother Jones that all workers were informed of the possibility of layoffs as early as September 13, and that 95 percent of those being let go had a post-election end date in their offer letter.

But one laid-off worker who spoke with Mother Jones said that she, like some other employees, felt pressured into leaving a full-time role for a temporary contract position prior to the election. 

“I was told in order to get a title change or a promotion or any raises, it would only be if I agreed to sign a contract that had an end date of November 15,” she said. The staffer said management had said an extension was expected.

“We tried to get answers about why this was happening, and we were stonewalled over and over again by management,” she said. DNC representatives would not comment on specific workers’ cases, but stated that all of the terms of the workers’ collective bargaining agreement are being upheld.

The DNC workers are not trying to get their jobs back. Instead, the union is organizing for a severance package, similar to what workers on the Harris-Walz campaign got. (Run for Something, a major Democratic campaign support PAC, also faced a wave of post-election layoffs in recent weeks, letting go off 35 percent of its staff—and well over half of its staff union.) A DNC spokesperson told Mother Jones that the DNC is in ongoing communication with SEIU Local 500, the union representing DNC workers.

Among those DNC employees who have not been laid off, the mood is uncertain, said one employee who was unaffected by the layoffs but requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the DNC. 

“One thing that has been a common thread during my employment has been that we’re trying to break the boom and bust cycle of democratic infrastructure. So I’d say this feels very antithetical to that,” she said. She plans to look for another job soon—but calls that decision “heartbreaking” as someone who’s spent years working in Democratic electoral politics. 

Workers said that DNC donors have reached out to them, concerned about how, exactly, the money the Harris campaign raised is being spent, if not to allow them severance pay. 

“We find it very cruel that DNC management is trying to claim that layoffs are just part of the job,” a DNC union member said. “And we feel strongly that losing an election has not absolved the organization of its responsibility to treat its workers with basic dignity.”

Correction, November 21: An earlier version of this article misstated the conversation between SEIU Local 500 and the DNC. They are in communication, not negotiations.

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

When Miguel Zablah bought his five-bedroom home in Miami’s leafy Shenandoah neighborhood in June of 2020, he said he paid $7,000 a year for homeowner’s insurance. 

The house, built in 1923, sits on high ground and has survived a century of famously volatile South Florida weather. But in just four short years, Zablah said his homeowner’s insurance premium has more than doubled to $15,000 a year. Quotes for next year’s premiums are looking even worse. 

“Some insurance companies are now quoting me at $20,000, $25,000 on my house, which is ridiculous,” said Zablah, who works in private equity. The premium increases are so steep that he’s considering just paying off his mortgage—and foregoing the insurance that his lender requires him to carry. “I’m very grateful that I’m in a good position,” he added. 

Zablah’s premium increases are a symptom of a broader insurance crisis plaguing real estate markets across America. Experts say it’s fueled, in large part, by the disastrous effects of human-caused climate change. 

Flooding is more frequent. Higher temperatures stoke stronger hurricanes. Wildfires burn more acres. And Americans have spent generations moving to sunny places that are often the most in harm’s way, including Florida, Texas, and California. 

In Louisiana, some residents along coastal Highway 56 have decided to leave, in part, because they can’t get coverage. 

So, the cost of insuring homes against natural disasters is spiking along with atmospheric temperatures and carbon dioxide levels.

Now, new research shows that higher insurance premiums like the one Zablah is paying significantly increase the probability of people falling behind on their mortgages—or motivate them to pay the debt off early. The outcomes spell trouble for banks, and for homeowners. 

How significant is the increase in mortgage trouble? A $500 spike in annual insurance premiums was linked to a 20 percent higher mortgage delinquency rate.

That figure was extracted from findings in a recent study, which will be expanded and then undergo peer review, according to Shan Ge, an assistant professor of finance at New York University and one of the paper’s authors.

“What we found, which is the first in the literature, is that as insurance premiums go up, we have seen an increase in delinquency of mortgages,” Ge said. The research adds to a growing body of scientific literature proving that the climate crisis is also a housing crisis.

It’s a crisis with a brutal, but important side effect: Higher premiums may convince people in vulnerable areas like Miami to move out of harm’s way. 

“The market is clearly adapting, and there will be winners and losers…but ultimately there should be more winners to the extent that it sends signals and people get out of the way,” said Jesse Keenan, a professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning at Tulane University who was not involved in the study. 

Zablah also heads the board of the Brickell Roads condominium association in Miami, where he owns an investment property. The effects of climate change are felt there too.

Brickell Roads residents had been paying $350 a month in condo fees in 2022. But then Weston Insurance, the carrier of the association’s windstorm policy, went bust. 

It was the fifth Florida insurance carrier to fold that year in the wake of Hurricane Ian, which slammed into the Southeast United States, causing an estimated $112 billion in damage. It was the most expensive storm ever in Florida and third most expensive in US history. 

As the association scrambled to find a replacement policy, it confronted a stark reality: Monthly condo fees would more than triple under their new insurance policy. On October 1, 2023, it raised the condo fee at Brickell Roads to $1,000 a month. (The board has since found another insurance carrier and hopes to lower the fee to $700 a month, according to Zablah.) 

“In some Florida counties, homeowners are paying over 5 percent of their income just on their policies.” 

Climate change has blown a hole through insurance markets across the United States. In Louisiana, some residents along coastal Highway 56 have decided to leave, in part, because they can’t find companies willing to insure their homes. 

In California, that state’s Department of Insurance has barred carriers from not renewing policies in certain fire-prone zip codes, essentially forcing the companies to insure properties there. And in Florida, a volatile mix of fraud, litigation, floods, and hurricanes has left homeowners like those in Brickell Roads scrambling for coverage. 

One major reason for the spike in insurance prices is a rise in the cost of the insurance coverage that insurance companies purchase for themselves, known as reinsurance. Globally, reinsurers raised prices for property insurers by 37 percent in 2023. (Prices stabilized somewhat in 2024.)

Insurers have passed those costs on to customers, said industry analyst Cathy Seifert during a Bloomberg TV appearance on November 4. “The insurance industry will leverage climate change into pricing strength,” she said. 

Analysts and scholars who study the nexus between climate change and housing had long theorized that higher insurance rates would negatively affect property markets. 

An August 2024 report by the Congressional Budget Office noted that in 2023, 30 percent of losses from natural disasters went uninsured. Those losses further constrict an already tight supply of housing. Researchers have also found that higher insurance rates affect the availability of affordable housing. It turns out, housing markets might be more sensitive to premium spikes than many thought.

Using a dataset that links insurance policies with mortgages for 6.7 million borrowers, Ge and two other researchers established that spikes in insurance premiums led a significant number of borrowers to either pay off their mortgages early or fall behind. Obviously, many homeowners can’t afford to accelerate their mortgage payoff.

The researchers found that the effect of premium increases on mortgage delinquency is twice as large for borrowers with a high loan-to-value ratio, meaning they owe a lot of money on their homes compared to the home’s value.

“This is how many people across the country are beginning to directly experience how climate change is changing our world and the cost it’s going to have,” said Moira Birss, a research fellow at the Climate and Community Institute. “In some Florida counties, homeowners are paying over 5 percent of their income just on their (insurance) policies.” 

Conversely, the NYU study found that people who took out jumbo mortgages—large loans for expensive houses that regular loans won’t cover—were three times less likely to end up falling behind on payments. Because more than two-thirds of mortgages are backed by the federal government, it’s taxpayers who could be left holding the bag from rising climate-caused delinquencies.

“I think it’s the tip of the iceberg.” said Wayne Pathman, a Miami-based land use attorney who has spent years working on resilience issues in the region. “I think it is going to get a lot worse.”

Pathman says he is seeing similar premium increases in the commercial property insurance market—and is also witnessing owners of office buildings consider choices similar to that of Zablah, the homeowner. 

Pathman recounted how one of his clients, a hotel operator, handled a looming increase in his insurance premiums. He paid off the mortgage on the building and decided to forego the $1-million-a-year premiums for windstorms. 

So next time a hurricane blows in, he’ll be on his own.

Last week, a bill that would give the Treasury Department power to designate a nonprofit as a “terrorist-supporting organization” for supporting pro-Palestine protests was narrowly voted down in Congress. But the saga is far from over. It could still be passed in the coming days.

Called the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, the bill initially was introduced with broad bipartisan support. But after Donald Trump’s reelection, many Democrats flipped, fearing the incoming administration would use the bill not to stop terrorism, but to kneecap Trump’s political enemies.

Funding terrorism is already illegal. Still, all but one Republican in the House backed the bill when it came to a vote last week. There were also 52 Democrats who supported the measure.

Nonprofits such as the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and NAACP came out against the bill in a letter in to House leaders. “These efforts are part of a concerted attack,” they wrote, “on civil society that is targeted at more than just groups involved in the campus protests regarding Gaza.”

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) has been particularly outspoken against the bill, which he believes could be applied beyond those opposed to Israel’s mass killings in Gaza to pretty much anyone opposed to Trump.

“A university has too many protests against Donald Trump? Terrorists,” McGovern said on the House floor Tuesday. “Environmental groups suing the administration in court? Terrorists. Think tanks that think differently than Donald Trump? Terrorists…Donald Trump says you’re a terrorist, so you’re a terrorist.” 

“This bill has been hijacked and turned into a vehicle to give the incoming administration the ability to revoke the nonprofit status of any advocacy group they want, simply by labeling them as terrorist sympathizers.”

Meet HR 9495: The nonprofit killer. pic.twitter.com/kN6X5Sypwm

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 20, 2024

As I wrote last week, the bill shows the ways in which the Biden-era crackdown on pro-Palestine activists sets up the possibility for Trump to take revenge on protesters.

On a day meant to commemorate the transgender people who have been murdered in violent acts of bigotry, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) have united in bringing their transphobia to Congress.

On Wednesday, one day after Mace introduced a resolution to bar trans people from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity, Johnson unilaterally announced a policy doing just that. If enforced, the rule will apply to trans people using bathrooms and locker rooms in the Capitol building and House offices.

“Women deserve women’s only spaces,” Johnson told reporters. “And we’re not anti-anyone, we’re pro-woman.”

“It’s always been, I guess, an unwritten policy,” he added, “but now it’s in writing.” In an emailed statement, Johnson said, “It is important to note that each Member office has its own private restroom, and unisex restrooms are available throughout the Capitol.”

The move came on the annually recognized Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Speaker Johnson just now: “Yeah like all House policies it's enforceable. Look, we have single-sex facilities for a reason. Women deserve women's only spaces. And we're not anti-anyone, we're pro-woman. I think it's an important policy for us to continue.” pic.twitter.com/m3FakHHoz7

— Ellis Kim (@elliskkim) November 20, 2024

As I wrote yesterday, although Mace’s resolution does not mention Rep.-elect Sarah McBride by name, Mace said the effort is “absolutely” meant to target McBride, the first openly trans person to be elected to Congress. (Mace has also repeatedly misgendered her on social media.) On Monday, McBride called Mace’s resolution “a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing” and alleged that Mace was “manufacturing culture wars.” After Johnson announced his support for it Wednesday, McBride responded in a lengthy statement posted on X, calling the bathroom ban an “effort to distract from the real issues facing this country.” 

“Like all members, I will follow the rules as outlined by Speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them,” McBride wrote, adding that she is looking “forward to getting to know my future colleagues on both sides of the aisle.”

Johnson on Wednesday claimed the policy would be enforceable, but did not say how. He also did not commit to including it in the Rules package, which outlines protocol for the House, and which members will vote on at the start of the next session in early January. Mace’s resolution says the House Sergeant-at-Arms would be charged with enforcing the rule; that office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

LGBTQ advocates have since slammed the policy—and questioned how it could even be enforced. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, called Johnson’s announcement “a cruel and unnecessary rule that puts countless staff, interns, and visitors to the U.S. Capitol at risk.” Mace’s resolution specifies it applies to “members, officers, and employees of the House,” but Johnson’s statement is less specific, and therefore potentially broader. It states, “all single-sex facilities…are reserved for individuals of that biological sex.”

Pocan also asked: “Will the Sergeant at Arms post officers in bathrooms? Will everyone who works at the Capitol have to carry around their birth certificate or undergo a genetic test?” Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said in a statement, “This new cruel and discriminatory policy has nothing to do with helping the American people or addressing their priorities—it’s all about hurting people.”

Mace isn’t stopping with the Capitol bathrooms, though. On Wednesday, she announced she plans to introduce a bill that aims to go further than her resolution does, by seeking to ban trans people from using women’s bathrooms and locker rooms on all federal property. It’s unclear if Johnson will support it. In a statement, Mace said: “The radical Left says I’m a ‘threat.’ You better believe it. And I will shamelessly call you out for putting women and girls in harm’s way.”

While questions over the enforceability of the policy go unanswered, both Mace and her GOP colleague Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) have openly threatened to use physical violence against trans people in Congress who violate the bathroom policy. “It will come to throws—there will be fists if this happens,” Mace told the YouTube personality Michael Knowles on Wednesday.

Johnson’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment about whether or not he condemns the threats of violence from the members.

At least 36 transgender and gender-nonconforming people have been killed in the US over the past year, according to a report by the Human Rights Campaign. On top of that, hundreds of pieces of legislation targeting LGBTQ people have been introduced in state legislatures nationwide, hate crimes against LGBTQ people reported to the FBI have reached record highs, and calls to a suicide crisis line for LGBTQ youth spiked nearly 700 percent the day after Trump’s reelection.

But on these realities, Mace and Johnson seem to have nothing to say.

Update, November 20: This post was updated with a response from McBride.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Biden administration has backtracked from supporting a cap on plastic production as part of the United Nations’ global plastics treaty.

According to representatives from five environmental organizations, White House staffers told representatives of advocacy groups in a closed-door meeting last week that they did not see mandatory production caps as a viable “landing zone” for INC-5, the name for the fifth and final round of plastics treaty negotiations set to take place later this month in Busan, South Korea. Instead, the staffers reportedly said United States delegates would support a “flexible” approach in which countries set their own voluntary targets for reducing plastic production.

This represents a reversal of what the same groups were told at a similar briefing held in August, when Biden administration representatives raised hopes that the US would join countries like Norway, Peru, and the United Kingdom in supporting limits on plastic production. 

Following the August meeting, Reuters reported that the US “will support a global treaty calling for a reduction in how much new plastic is produced each year,” and the Biden administration confirmed that Reuters’ reporting was “accurate.” 

“If there was a misunderstanding, then it should have been corrected a long time ago.”

After the more recent briefing, a spokesperson for the White House Council on Environmental Quality told Grist that, while US negotiators have endorsed the idea of a “‘North Star’ aspirational global goal” to reduce plastic production, they “do not see this as a production cap and do not support such a cap.”

“We believe there are different paths available for achieving reductions in plastic production and consumption,” the spokesperson said. “We will be flexible going into INC-5 on how to achieve that and are optimistic that we can prevail with a strong instrument that sends these market signals for change.” 

Jo Banner, co-founder and co-director of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit advocating for fenceline communities in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” said the announcement was a “jolt.”

“I thought we were on the same page in terms of capping plastic and reducing production,” she said. “But it was clear that we just weren’t.”

Frankie Orona, executive director of the nonprofit Society of Native Nations, which advocates for environmental justice and the preservation of Indigenous cultures, described the news as “absolutely devastating.” He added, “Two hours in that meeting felt like it was taking two days of my life.”

The situation speaks to a central conflict that has emerged from talks over the treaty, which the UN agreed to negotiate two years ago to “end plastic pollution.” Delegates haven’t agreed on whether the pact should focus on managing plastic waste—through things like ocean cleanups and higher recycling rates—or on tamping down the growing rate of plastic production.

Nearly 70 countries, along with scientists and environmental groups, support the latter. They say it’s futile to mop up plastic litter while more and more of it keeps getting made. But a vocal contingent of oil-exporting countries has pushed for a lower-ambition treaty, using a consensus-based voting norm to slow-walk the negotiations. Besides leaving out production limits, those countries also want the treaty to allow for voluntary national targets, rather than binding global rules.

“It just made you want to grab a pillow and scream into the pillow and shed a few tears for your community.”

Exactly which policies the US will now support isn’t entirely clear. While the White House spokesperson told Grist that it wants to ensure the treaty addresses “the supply of primary plastic polymers,” this could mean a whole host of things, including a tax on plastic production or bans on individual plastic products. These kinds of so-called market instruments could drive down demand for more plastic, but with far less certainty than a quantitative production limit.

Bjorn Beeler, executive director of the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network, noted that the US could technically “address” the supply of plastics by reducing the industry’s projected growth rates—which would still allow the amount of manufactured plastic to continue increasing every year. “What the US has said is extremely vague,” he said. “They have not been a leading actor to move the treaty into something meaningful.”

To the extent that the White House’s latest announcement was a clarification and not an outright reversal—as staffers reportedly insisted was the case—Banner said the Biden administration should have made their position clearer months ago, right after the August meeting. “In August, we were definitely saying ‘capping,’ and it was never corrected,” she said. “If there was a misunderstanding, then it should have been corrected a long time ago.”

Another apparent change in the US’s strategy is on chemicals used in plastics. Back in August, the White House confirmed via Reuters’ reporting that it supported creating lists of plastic-related chemicals to be banned or restricted. Now, negotiators will back lists that include plastic products containing those chemicals. Environmental groups see this approach as less effective, since there are so many kinds of plastic products and because product manufacturers do not always have complete information about the chemicals used by their suppliers.

Orona said focusing on products would push the conversation downstream, away from petrochemical refineries and plastics manufacturing facilities that disproportionately pollute poor communities of color. “It’s so dismissive, it’s so disrespectful,” he said. “It just made you want to grab a pillow and scream into the pillow and shed a few tears for your community.”

At the next round of treaty talks, environmental groups told Grist that the US should “step aside.” Given the high likelihood that the incoming Trump administration will not support the treaty and that the Republican-controlled Senate will not ratify it, some advocates would like to see the high-ambition countries focus less on winning over US support and more on advancing the most ambitious version of the treaty possible. “We hope that the rest of the world moves on,” said a spokesperson for the nonprofit Break Free From Plastic, vesting hope in the EU, small island developing states, and a coalition of African countries, among others. 

Viola Waghiyi, environmental health and justice program director for the nonprofit Alaska Community Action on Toxics, is a tribal citizen of the Native Village of Savoonga, on the island of Sivuqaq off the state’s western coast. She connected a weak plastics treaty to the direct impacts her island community is facing, including climate change (to which plastics production contributes), microplastic pollution in the Arctic Ocean that affects its marine life, and atmospheric dynamics that dump hazardous plastic chemicals in the far northern hemisphere.

The US “should be making sure that measures are in place to protect the voices of the most vulnerable,” she said, including Indigenous peoples, workers, waste pickers, and future generations. As a Native grandmother, she specifically raised concerns about endocrine-disrupting plastic chemicals that could affect children’s neurological development. “How can we pass on our language, our creation stories, our songs and dances, our traditions and cultures, if our children can’t learn?”

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

When Miguel Zablah bought his five-bedroom home in Miami’s leafy Shenandoah neighborhood in June of 2020, he said he paid $7,000 a year for homeowner’s insurance. 

The house, built in 1923, sits on high ground and has survived a century of famously volatile South Florida weather. But in just four short years, Zablah said his homeowner’s insurance premium has more than doubled to $15,000 a year. Quotes for next year’s premiums are looking even worse. 

“Some insurance companies are now quoting me at $20,000, $25,000 on my house, which is ridiculous,” said Zablah, who works in private equity. The premium increases are so steep that he’s considering just paying off his mortgage—and foregoing the insurance that his lender requires him to carry. “I’m very grateful that I’m in a good position,” he added. 

Zablah’s premium increases are a symptom of a broader insurance crisis plaguing real estate markets across America. Experts say it’s fueled, in large part, by the disastrous effects of human-caused climate change. 

Flooding is more frequent. Higher temperatures stoke stronger hurricanes. Wildfires burn more acres. And Americans have spent generations moving to sunny places that are often the most in harm’s way, including Florida, Texas, and California. 

In Louisiana, some residents along coastal Highway 56 have decided to leave, in part, because they can’t get coverage. 

So, the cost of insuring homes against natural disasters is spiking along with atmospheric temperatures and carbon dioxide levels.

Now, new research shows that higher insurance premiums like the one Zablah is paying significantly increase the probability of people falling behind on their mortgages—or motivate them to pay the debt off early. The outcomes spell trouble for banks, and for homeowners. 

How significant is the increase in mortgage trouble? A $500 spike in annual insurance premiums was linked to a 20 percent higher mortgage delinquency rate.

That figure was extracted from findings in a recent study, which will be expanded and then undergo peer review, according to Shan Ge, an assistant professor of finance at New York University and one of the paper’s authors.

“What we found, which is the first in the literature, is that as insurance premiums go up, we have seen an increase in delinquency of mortgages,” Ge said. The research adds to a growing body of scientific literature proving that the climate crisis is also a housing crisis.

It’s a crisis with a brutal, but important side effect: Higher premiums may convince people in vulnerable areas like Miami to move out of harm’s way. 

“The market is clearly adapting, and there will be winners and losers…but ultimately there should be more winners to the extent that it sends signals and people get out of the way,” said Jesse Keenan, a professor of sustainable real estate and urban planning at Tulane University who was not involved in the study. 

Zablah also heads the board of the Brickell Roads condominium association in Miami, where he owns an investment property. The effects of climate change are felt there too.

Brickell Roads residents had been paying $350 a month in condo fees in 2022. But then Weston Insurance, the carrier of the association’s windstorm policy, went bust. 

It was the fifth Florida insurance carrier to fold that year in the wake of Hurricane Ian, which slammed into the Southeast United States, causing an estimated $112 billion in damage. It was the most expensive storm ever in Florida and third most expensive in US history. 

As the association scrambled to find a replacement policy, it confronted a stark reality: Monthly condo fees would more than triple under their new insurance policy. On October 1, 2023, it raised the condo fee at Brickell Roads to $1,000 a month. (The board has since found another insurance carrier and hopes to lower the fee to $700 a month, according to Zablah.) 

“In some Florida counties, homeowners are paying over 5 percent of their income just on their policies.” 

Climate change has blown a hole through insurance markets across the United States. In Louisiana, some residents along coastal Highway 56 have decided to leave, in part, because they can’t find companies willing to insure their homes. 

In California, that state’s Department of Insurance has barred carriers from not renewing policies in certain fire-prone zip codes, essentially forcing the companies to insure properties there. And in Florida, a volatile mix of fraud, litigation, floods, and hurricanes has left homeowners like those in Brickell Roads scrambling for coverage. 

One major reason for the spike in insurance prices is a rise in the cost of the insurance coverage that insurance companies purchase for themselves, known as reinsurance. Globally, reinsurers raised prices for property insurers by 37 percent in 2023. (Prices stabilized somewhat in 2024.)

Insurers have passed those costs on to customers, said industry analyst Cathy Seifert during a Bloomberg TV appearance on November 4. “The insurance industry will leverage climate change into pricing strength,” she said. 

Analysts and scholars who study the nexus between climate change and housing had long theorized that higher insurance rates would negatively affect property markets. 

An August 2024 report by the Congressional Budget Office noted that in 2023, 30 percent of losses from natural disasters went uninsured. Those losses further constrict an already tight supply of housing. Researchers have also found that higher insurance rates affect the availability of affordable housing. It turns out, housing markets might be more sensitive to premium spikes than many thought.

Using a dataset that links insurance policies with mortgages for 6.7 million borrowers, Ge and two other researchers established that spikes in insurance premiums led a significant number of borrowers to either pay off their mortgages early or fall behind. Obviously, many homeowners can’t afford to accelerate their mortgage payoff.

The researchers found that the effect of premium increases on mortgage delinquency is twice as large for borrowers with a high loan-to-value ratio, meaning they owe a lot of money on their homes compared to the home’s value.

“This is how many people across the country are beginning to directly experience how climate change is changing our world and the cost it’s going to have,” said Moira Birss, a research fellow at the Climate and Community Institute. “In some Florida counties, homeowners are paying over 5 percent of their income just on their (insurance) policies.” 

Conversely, the NYU study found that people who took out jumbo mortgages—large loans for expensive houses that regular loans won’t cover—were three times less likely to end up falling behind on payments. Because more than two-thirds of mortgages are backed by the federal government, it’s taxpayers who could be left holding the bag from rising climate-caused delinquencies.

“I think it’s the tip of the iceberg.” said Wayne Pathman, a Miami-based land use attorney who has spent years working on resilience issues in the region. “I think it is going to get a lot worse.”

Pathman says he is seeing similar premium increases in the commercial property insurance market—and is also witnessing owners of office buildings consider choices similar to that of Zablah, the homeowner. 

Pathman recounted how one of his clients, a hotel operator, handled a looming increase in his insurance premiums. He paid off the mortgage on the building and decided to forego the $1-million-a-year premiums for windstorms. 

So next time a hurricane blows in, he’ll be on his own.

Last week, a bill that would give the Treasury Department power to designate a nonprofit as a “terrorist-supporting organization” for supporting pro-Palestine protests was narrowly voted down in Congress. But the saga is far from over. It could still be passed in the coming days.

Called the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, the bill initially was introduced with broad bipartisan support. But after Donald Trump’s reelection, many Democrats flipped, fearing the incoming administration would use the bill not to stop terrorism, but to kneecap Trump’s political enemies.

Funding terrorism is already illegal. Still, all but one Republican in the House backed the bill when it came to a vote last week. There were also 52 Democrats who supported the measure.

Nonprofits such as the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and NAACP came out against the bill in a letter in to House leaders. “These efforts are part of a concerted attack,” they wrote, “on civil society that is targeted at more than just groups involved in the campus protests regarding Gaza.”

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) has been particularly outspoken against the bill, which he believes could be applied beyond those opposed to Israel’s mass killings in Gaza to pretty much anyone opposed to Trump.

“A university has too many protests against Donald Trump? Terrorists,” McGovern said on the House floor Tuesday. “Environmental groups suing the administration in court? Terrorists. Think tanks that think differently than Donald Trump? Terrorists…Donald Trump says you’re a terrorist, so you’re a terrorist.” 

“This bill has been hijacked and turned into a vehicle to give the incoming administration the ability to revoke the nonprofit status of any advocacy group they want, simply by labeling them as terrorist sympathizers.”

Meet HR 9495: The nonprofit killer. pic.twitter.com/kN6X5Sypwm

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 20, 2024

As I wrote last week, the bill shows the ways in which the Biden-era crackdown on pro-Palestine activists sets up the possibility for Trump to take revenge on protesters.

On a day meant to commemorate the transgender people who have been murdered in violent acts of bigotry, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) have united in bringing their transphobia to Congress.

On Wednesday, one day after Mace introduced a resolution to bar trans people from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity, Johnson unilaterally announced a policy doing just that. If enforced, the rule will apply to trans people using bathrooms and locker rooms in the Capitol building and House offices.

“Women deserve women’s only spaces,” Johnson told reporters. “And we’re not anti-anyone, we’re pro-woman.”

“It’s always been, I guess, an unwritten policy,” he added, “but now it’s in writing.” In an emailed statement, Johnson said, “It is important to note that each Member office has its own private restroom, and unisex restrooms are available throughout the Capitol.”

The move came on the annually recognized Transgender Day of Remembrance.

Speaker Johnson just now: “Yeah like all House policies it's enforceable. Look, we have single-sex facilities for a reason. Women deserve women's only spaces. And we're not anti-anyone, we're pro-woman. I think it's an important policy for us to continue.” pic.twitter.com/m3FakHHoz7

— Ellis Kim (@elliskkim) November 20, 2024

As I wrote yesterday, although Mace’s resolution does not mention Rep.-elect Sarah McBride by name, Mace said the effort is “absolutely” meant to target McBride, the first openly trans person to be elected to Congress. (Mace has also repeatedly misgendered her on social media.) On Monday, McBride called Mace’s resolution “a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing” and alleged that Mace was “manufacturing culture wars.” After Johnson announced his support for it Wednesday, McBride responded in a lengthy statement posted on X, calling the bathroom ban an “effort to distract from the real issues facing this country.” 

“Like all members, I will follow the rules as outlined by Speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them,” McBride wrote, adding that she is looking “forward to getting to know my future colleagues on both sides of the aisle.”

Johnson on Wednesday claimed the policy would be enforceable, but did not say how. He also did not commit to including it in the Rules package, which outlines protocol for the House, and which members will vote on at the start of the next session in early January. Mace’s resolution says the House Sergeant-at-Arms would be charged with enforcing the rule; that office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

LGBTQ advocates have since slammed the policy—and questioned how it could even be enforced. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, called Johnson’s announcement “a cruel and unnecessary rule that puts countless staff, interns, and visitors to the U.S. Capitol at risk.” Mace’s resolution specifies it applies to “members, officers, and employees of the House,” but Johnson’s statement is less specific, and therefore potentially broader. It states, “all single-sex facilities…are reserved for individuals of that biological sex.”

Pocan also asked: “Will the Sergeant at Arms post officers in bathrooms? Will everyone who works at the Capitol have to carry around their birth certificate or undergo a genetic test?” Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said in a statement, “This new cruel and discriminatory policy has nothing to do with helping the American people or addressing their priorities—it’s all about hurting people.”

Mace isn’t stopping with the Capitol bathrooms, though. On Wednesday, she announced she plans to introduce a bill that aims to go further than her resolution does, by seeking to ban trans people from using women’s bathrooms and locker rooms on all federal property. It’s unclear if Johnson will support it. In a statement, Mace said: “The radical Left says I’m a ‘threat.’ You better believe it. And I will shamelessly call you out for putting women and girls in harm’s way.”

While questions over the enforceability of the policy go unanswered, both Mace and her GOP colleague Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) have openly threatened to use physical violence against trans people in Congress who violate the bathroom policy. “It will come to throws—there will be fists if this happens,” Mace told the YouTube personality Michael Knowles on Wednesday.

Johnson’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment about whether or not he condemns the threats of violence from the members.

At least 36 transgender and gender-nonconforming people have been killed in the US over the past year, according to a report by the Human Rights Campaign. On top of that, hundreds of pieces of legislation targeting LGBTQ people have been introduced in state legislatures nationwide, hate crimes against LGBTQ people reported to the FBI have reached record highs, and calls to a suicide crisis line for LGBTQ youth spiked nearly 700 percent the day after Trump’s reelection.

But on these realities, Mace and Johnson seem to have nothing to say.

Update, November 20: This post was updated with a response from McBride.