Too Good to Be True
John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff for Palm Beach County, told me he has 478 Jeffrey Epstein sex tapes. He may be lying, but he's become a major force behind Russia's flood of disinformation.
Even though I’ve written at length about Jeffrey Epstein in my book American Kompromat, I’m a bit confused by all this talk about his client list.
Epstein had his own financial consulting firm. His financial affairs were very mysterious. And they were likely riddled with corruption.
But no one really cares about those clients.
What people really want is a list of Epstein’s rich and powerful friends who had sex with the young girls he trafficked. Given that Epstein’s various homes were chock-full of hidden cameras that were perfectly positioned to capture intimate moments, given that Epstein’s little black book was filled with countless bold‑ faced names— Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Ehud Barak, Prince Andrew, and many more (you can read it here)—hundreds of millions people are dying to know which Masters of the Universe engaged in sexual acts with the dozens of young girls Epstein brought in.
Now, I don’t know whether such a list exists, but I’ve interviewed a man who told me he had something that is even more sought after than a list. He had the tapes. Sex tapes. Hundreds of videos of Epstein’s “friends” engaged in sexual acts with young girls. And, he says, there are 478 tapes to be exact.
All of which constitutes a treasure trove of kompromat, as compromising material is referred to in the world of intelligence. This was the kind of stuff over which intelligence operatives in Russia’s FSB would be salivating.
If the story is true.
The man’s name is John Mark Dougan, and I wrote about him in my 2021 book American Kompromat.
Dougan’s story is filled with inconsistencies and lies, but it’s still worth telling because it shows how the Russians cultivated an intelligence operative who became a significant figure in spreading disinformation in the 2024 election.
As I’ve already shown in previous posts, both Lana Pozhidaeva and Masha Drokova appear to have been Russian intelligence operatives when they worked with Epstein. Dougan’s story adds another component to what we know about Russia’s active measures in America at the time.
His story begins in 2005 when Palm Beach authorities began investigating Epstein’s sex crimes. That meant the Epstein case had entered the court system, which in turn meant that his computers and videos became evidence, and new people—detectives, police, lawyers, and the like— suddenly had access to his secrets.
Enter John Mark Dougan, who had served as a deputy in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office (PBSO) from 2002 to late 2008. With his shaved head and the sturdy build of a former Marine, Dougan is the sort of macho antihero of highly questionable reliability one encounters in the comic Florida crime fiction of Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard. His patchy job history has taken him laterally from police work to horse transportation to database design to piloting. In interviews with me in 2020, he presented himself as a hapless and Quixotic underdog who has been taking on the powers that be in Palm Beach County since he resigned in 2009.
But now he is an operative for Russian intelligence.
Dougan’s role in the Epstein saga took place after he had resigned as deputy sheriff in the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office(PBSO) in an area that includes Jeffrey Epstein’s house on El Brillo Way, Mar‑a‑Lago, and the Trump International golf course.
When I first talked to Dougan in 2020, he told me he resigned from PBSO because he was so fed up with his colleagues’ racist behavior that he quit and launched an online whistleblower forum(now defunct) to expose alleged abuses and corruption in the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office.
Then, around 2010, Dougan says he got a call from Joseph Recarey, a detective with the Palm Beach Police Department. Recarey was working on a case that began a few years earlier when a woman came into the station and charged that Jeffrey Epstein had paid her fourteen‑year‑old stepdaughter $300 to strip to her underwear and perform an “erotic massage.”
This was the beginning of legal proceedings in the Epstein case, and, as chief detective, Joe Recarey was deeply committed to the case. According to Julie K. Brown’s reporting in the Miami Herald, in the first seven months of his investigation, he discovered twenty‑one possible victims. Eventually, the probe identified at least thirty‑five underage victims, and there were more cases still being investigated.
As the evidence mounted, however, internal pressures to drop or downgrade the investigation snowballed. But according to the Herald, Recarey and Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter stood fast as courageous cops who were willing to risk their careers to go after Epstein.
Then, Dougan says, he got a call from Recarey. The two men did not know each other well, but Dougan told me he thought highly of his colleague. “He was a serious guy,” Dougan said. “But not so serious where he couldn’t take a joke. He was really nice and down‑to‑earth.”
As Dougan recalled, Recarey told him, “I’ve got some stuff I want you to keep for me.’ ”
Since Dougan had founded a whistleblower site, it was not unusual for him to get requests like that. “Everybody knew that I designed the system to keep everybody absolutely confidential. So people would give me things like a deposition where the sheriff got caught stealing a gun from the evidence room. I was like the dumping ground for stuff.”
So, Dougan said, Recarey came over to his office in Palm Beach with a cartful of boxes. “One of the boxes was a bunch of DVDs— the blank kind that you record your own media on,” Dougan recalled. “They were labeled by date and spanned from 1994 to 2005 or so.”
Recarey didn’t elaborate about the contents of the boxes, but he said they were related to the Epstein case. In addition, Dougan told me, Recarey explained that his investigation was being sabotaged by both Epstein and his powerful allies, and he wanted to make sure he had copies in case they tried to make the originals disappear.
Dougan also told me that he later found out that Recarey’s disk contained 478 sex tapes of Epstein’s friends having sex with young girls, many of whom were underage.
If true, in terms of kompromat, this was the Holy Grail.
Recarey died in 2018, so Dougan’s account could not be confirmed. But Recarey’s fears were also reported in the Miami Herald by Julie K. Brown and David Smiley.
Meanwhile, Dougan told me, he had struck up an online relationship with a Russian woman on Facebook. It was the beginning of a virtual romance that he hoped to transform into a real one, or so he said. So in February 2013, he went to Moscow for the first time.
Dougan loved Moscow immediately. “It was like the Wild West meets New York City,” he told me.
About a week after he arrived in Moscow, Dougan posted a photo on his Facebook page of himself having lunch at the Bison Steakhouse in Moscow with an unusually intriguing companion— former Kremlin official Pavel Borodin. (The photo, shown below, has since been removed from Facebook.)
Up until this point, whatever you thought of Dougan, everyone could all agree on one thing: In the context of world affairs, John Mark Dougan was small‑time. Insignificant. A nobody. However, the photo he posted on Facebook suggests something else entirely.
Pavel Borodin is not a familiar name to most Americans, but in Russia, he’s a major figure. Dubbed “Putin’s mentor” by Time Magazine, Borodin had overseen the Presidential Affairs Department during the Boris Yeltsin administration in the nineties, and as such was in charge of the upkeep of the Russian Federation’s assets.
In 1999, the New York Times reported that Borodin was in charge of supervising some $600 billion in assets— nearly $1.25 trillion in 2025 dollars. “Mr. Borodin is unequivocally, far and away the Russian that people would most love to bribe,” the Times reported. “Forget Russia. Few people on earth have this much largesse at their fingertips.”
Moreover, in 1996, at a time when efforts to develop a real market economy were failing, Borodin hired Vladimir Putin and put him in a vital position that allowed him to broker relationships between the oligarchs and the Kremlin.
So one has to ask what such a powerful figure like Borodin was doing with a small fry like Dougan? According to Dougan, the meeting was perfectly innocent, and Borodin was just another Facebook friend.
But it’s hard to understand how a nobody like Dougan would get instant access to one of the most powerful people in Russia because Borodin needed a new Facebook friend.
I asked Yuri Shvets, a former major in the KGB, what he thought. “It’s like two needles meet each other in a haystack,” he said. “Pavel Borodin is searching Facebook, waiting until the guy comes from Florida to Moscow? This is what I would trust: Borodin has direct contact with the Kremlin, with the FSB.”
According to Neil Barnett, a London‑based intelligence consultant, Dougan was “an aggrieved individual with a fragile ego and sense of his own grandeur.” He added that Dougan exhibited “the classic traits of a suitable target for recruitment by a hostile intelligence service.”
That meant the Russians.
According to Neil Barnett, Dougan’s trip to Moscow “would have allowed Russian intelligence to fully recruit Dougan.”
In any case, when Dougan returned to Florida, he spent the next three years honing his technical skills, playing email pranks on politicians, disseminating fake news, and creating a website that posted confidential information about thousands of police officers, federal agents, and judges.
And what about the treasure trove of Epstein sex tapes?
When I asked if I could see any of the files, Dougan said he was not going to broadcast child pornography over the Internet. He then gave me a long, convoluted explanation of the elaborate measures he had taken to protect precious tapes. Finally, he sent me a clip of a young woman having sex with a middle-aged white man. The tape was black-and-white, grainy, and appeared to be the product of technology that dated back to the Nineties. Neither the man nor the woman on the tape was recognizable.
In the end, there was no way to verify Dougan’s assertion that the tape came from the Epstein investigation, and, as a result, I omitted it from my book. In Perversion of Justice, Julie Brown cited a similar tape Dougan showed her—perhaps the same one— and came to the same conclusion: Dougan’s claim that he had the Epstein sex tapes was indeed too good to be true.
For all that, Dougan remains a significant figure participating in Russia’s active measures against the U.S. By this time, according to a statement from the Palm Beach Sheriff’s office, Dougan was “a wanted felon for cyberstalking using unsubstantiated and fabricated claims that have NO factual basis.”
As a result, the FBI was after him. Dougan was on the lam. In Bad Volf, his rather dubious memoir about his adventures, Dougan says he donned a blond wig, rented a small plane, and flew to Canada. (He was later indicted on 21 Florida felony charges.”
According to Neil Barnett, Dougan’s departure bore all the hallmarks of “a professional exfiltration plan put together by an intelligence service. First, Dougan got a car with no documented connection to him and drove it to the Canadian border. He then chartered a light aircraft to overfly Canada. During the flight, he claimed he was having a heart attack, and then ran off when the pilot made an emergency landing. From Toronto, he bought a ticket to Istanbul, and from Istanbul, bought a new ticket to Moscow.”
There, he became the fourth American in history to obtain political asylum in Russia. (Before Dougan, Edward Snowden had been the most recent.) When I asked why Russia, he responded rhetorically, “Where else am I going to go that my country can’t extradite me back? You’ve got North Korea. You’ve got Africa. China. Forget it. I like this country(Russia) very much.”
Once he returned to Russia, according to the New York Times, Dougan became “a key player in Russia’s disinformation operations against the West” and put together “an ever-growing network of more than 160 fake websites that mimic news outlets in the United States, Britain, and France.” His appearances on state media included shows with Maria Butina, a former intelligence operative who penetrated the NRA and other pro-Republican circles, and Anna Chapman, who, the Times reported, was one of ten spies who inspired the long-running television series “The Americans.”
As the 2024 presidential race got underway, Dougan went to work setting fake news sites such as the DC Weekly, the Miami Chronicle, the Chicago Chronicle, and so forth, using artificial intelligence to translate Russian news articles into English. According to The Washington Post, his first viral hit came when he ran a fake story in DC Weekly alleging that Zelenskyy’s wife, Olena Zelenskyy, had spent over $1 million on a shopping spree at Cartier’s in New York. Another phony story alleged that Zelenskyy had bought two luxury yachts, a false claim that was repeated by Marjorie Taylor Greene(R-Ga). (Dougan has denied being behind such sites.)
In October, just before the election, Catherine Belton reported in The Washington Post that Dougan was directly working with the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, that he was being mentored by Alexander Dugin, a far-right ideologue sometimes known as “Putin’s brain,” and that his posts smearing Tim Walz and Kamala Harris had reached at least 64 million people.
In the end, no one has corroborated any of Dougan’s assertions that he has the Epstein tapes. But, according to NewsGuard, he played a key role in Russia’s disinformation operations that put out a flood of 3,600,000 articles in 2024, and he still has greater ambitions. As he told a conference of Russian officials last January, "By pushing these Russian narratives from the Russian perspective, we can actually change worldwide AI."
And, by the way, if anyone wants to release those 478 sex tapes, I guarantee they’ll be pretty explosive.
If you have tips, leads, or insights, please reach out—I am always looking for new information. And don’t forget to comment and share your thoughts!
For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat. And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!
House of Trump, House of Putin
The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia
American Kompromat
How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery
Den of Spies
Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House
It feels like the majority of America's government has surrendered to Russia. Personally, I have no doubt elections have been compromised. I strongly suggest a hand count of the 2024 results.
As I watch Trump's Republican regime dismantle and corrode any system meant to be the guardrails of democracy and ethics, the more I suspect the future holds a massive sell off of national treasures, similar to what happened when the Soviet Union collapsed.
If the Epstein scandal results in Trump's removal from office- probably excused as failing health reasons- and Vance assumes power, these efforts to privatize America will proceed unabated. Vance won't need to stand for election, due to Trump's early resignation, and America will fully descend into authoritarian rule. Will Peter Thiel, with his treasure trove of intelligence, sit on the throne? Will the country be split up into fiefdoms ruled by broligarchs?
The main question that needs to be addressed is: Will Americans stand by and watch their country destroyed by these criminals, and sentence themselves to a future of personal irrelevance, in the governance of their nation?
Every American has the moral obligation to seek out the recent CIA whistleblower who just exposed the 2024 software hack from ES&S.
Donald Trump is NOT our president.