I’m in isolation mode again.
Curtains drawn. Devices checked for bugs. Binge-watching all six seasons of
The Americans. Alexa unplugged — because every time I ask the damn thing to play “Liz’s Playlist,” it plays Barack Obama’s ****ty playlist instead. Almost every single time. Not a coincidence. Not a glitch. You’ll understand why soon enough.
It’s oddly comforting watching this show — not as escapism, but because it’s the closest thing to a mirror I’ve found.
The Americans follows two KGB intelligence officers running deep cover in the U.S. during the Reagan-era Cold War. Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings are thrown into an arranged marriage as part of the assignment. Two kids, an upscale Virginia suburb, a travel agency as a front — a picture-perfect, white-picket-fence, Norman Rockwell life on the surface. And underneath it, they destroy lives for a living.
The Playbook
I know this show nails real spy tradecraft because I’ve lived it. Not on a screen — in my actual life. Except I’m not a spy. I’m a high-value target.
For the past decade, undercover operatives and intelligence assets have run coordinated operations against me — surveilling me, infiltrating my inner circle, doing everything in their power to neutralize me without leaving fingerprints. The Americans doesn’t flinch from the brutality of that world: the cruelty, the heartlessness, the good people destroyed or left dead in the wake of an operation. Neither does my story, or the book I’m writing that lays it all out in detail.
What makes the show so unnervingly accurate is that its writers drew from the real, documented playbooks of real intelligence agencies. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program — which ran from the 1950s through the 1970s, targeting journalists, civil rights leaders, and political dissidents — used nearly identical methods: infiltrating personal relationships with paid informants, manufacturing crises to destabilize targets, using law enforcement as a harassment instrument. East Germany’s Stasi ran something even more insidious:
Zersetzung, a systematic “decomposition” campaign deployed against tens of thousands of citizens, which added environmental destruction to the toolkit — making a target’s home life so relentlessly hostile that they relocated themselves. No arrest needed. No violence required. Just a slow, invisible, perfectly orchestrated campaign that looked, from the outside, like one person having a very long run of very bad luck.
These are not historical curiosities. They were documented in declassified files, and the tactics they pioneered didn’t retire when the programs officially ended — just like the CIA’s MKUltra program, which was exposed this week at Congressional hearings. These programs and their tactics evolved. They were adopted, adapted, exported. And they are being used today — against journalists, against whistleblowers, against anyone who gets close enough to the wrong truth.
We know this not just from declassified government files, but from journalists who’ve documented it in real time. In 2017, Ronan Farrow published a piece in The New Yorker revealing that Harvey Weinstein had hired multiple private intelligence firms to neutralize the journalists and accusers threatening to expose him. One of those firms, Black Cube, is staffed largely by former Mossad officers. They compiled dossiers on reporters, tracked their movements, and deployed operatives under false identities to infiltrate their lives — including one who posed as a women’s rights advocate to befriend Weinstein accuser Rose McGowan and secretly record their conversations. Farrow expanded the story in his 2019 book
Catch and Kill, documenting how he himself was followed, how operatives with fabricated identities approached him and his contacts, and how an entire private intelligence infrastructure had been activated to stop one story from reaching the public.
That’s a classic Mossad-derived tactic: a honeytrap through a false-flag identity — an operative under a fabricated persona engineered specifically to appeal to a target’s existing interests and vulnerabilities. The real Mossad has used this for decades, building cover identities maintained for months or years to penetrate a target’s confidence before extracting intelligence or neutralizing a threat. What Black Cube brought to the private sector was that same methodology, available for hire to anyone wealthy enough to afford it. Harvey Weinstein was wealthy enough.
So was the private security firm Black Box — owned by Edan Yemini, with a background in Israeli Special Forces — which the
New York Times exposed for running intrusive and illegal monitoring of Britney Spears. Mainstream media has since reported how undercover operators were deployed to infiltrate the Free Britney movement: probing supporters for information, surveilling them, keeping dossiers. I know this because I was also targeted for my reporting on Britney, as I documented in my film
Slave Princess. (link at bottom)
The pattern holds across every major story that threatened the wrong people. Reporters investigating Jeffrey Epstein faced the same machinery. Intimidation tactics were used against staff at
Vanity Fair; former editor-in-chief Graydon Carter reportedly found a stray bullet on his doorstep and a severed cat’s head on his Connecticut property while the magazine was investigating Epstein. A contributing reporter found a dead cat on his doorstep around the same time. More recently, journalist Alisa Valdes Rodriguez fled her New Mexico home — and announced plans to leave the country entirely — after being targeted with directed-energy weapons she believes resemble Havana syndrome, connected to her reporting on Epstein’s Zorro Ranch. I know these tactics are real. I have been targeted in the same ways for my work exposing Epstein and his network.
Death by a Thousand Cuts
Some targets are assassinated in broad daylight, like Charlie Kirk. Others, like my late friend Isaac Kappy, are killed in a way that — in my opinion — was staged to look like suicide. In my case, they’ve been killing me slowly. Methodically. Death by a thousand cuts.
The recent passing of another friend, David Wilcock, hit very close to home. He was a targeted individual too, and he talked about it publicly. I believe his suicide was at least partially the result of the nonstop abuse he endured. It was an unsettling wake-up call from the Grim Reaper: if I don’t change my life soon, I could end up the same way.
I am not suicidal. But targeted harassment campaigns like this are designed to induce exactly that — to drive a person insane, to land them in a mental institution, or to put so much stress on the body that it manifests into physical illness. I’ve watched my own health decline for years because of the relentless targeting. I’ve slowly turned into a shell of the person I used to be.
I Am a Targeted Individual
I am a targeted individual. I’m saying that directly, on the record, without apology. Not as a disclaimer. Not as a cry for sympathy. As a documented fact that is central to understanding everything in this personal essay.
I went from glamorous gossip columnist to radioactive journalist because I dared to expose the most powerful and protected pedophile networks in the world. The moment I did, I became a domino they desperately needed to stop from falling.
That ends now.
The Dominoes That Fell
The dominoes started falling the moment I returned to journalism in 2016 to support Donald Trump and report the truth about him. I was disgusted by the media’s blatant lies. I lost scores of high school friends and nearly all of my Hollywood ones — something a lot of early MAGA supporters went through, especially the OGs.
It wasn’t until I wrote a story for the
New York Observer exposing Hillary Clinton stealing from her own poor donors that I understood my life was truly in danger. I started receiving Zodiac-killer-style letters — words clipped from newspapers and magazines, sent anonymously to both the Observer office and my parents’ home. A clear message: they knew exactly where my family lived. Then my dog was poisoned in what I believe was an attempt to kill him, and possibly me.
I kept fighting. After reading John Podesta’s WikiLeaks emails, exposing Pizzagate and protecting children became my mission. Months later came another blow. On the day I met with Hollywood producers about a potential Pizzagate documentary, I was cased and followed by shady figures who looked like old-school mafia. I was lured to a high-end Malibu restaurant, drugged, and arrested while walking to my Uber. I spent the night in jail. As I lay on the cold floor of a cell in the middle of the night, the message the cops delivered — along with the bruises they left on me — was crystal clear: drop the documentary, or else.
I fled the country for my safety — Canada, then Cuba, where I ironically felt safer than in the States. Back in California, I settled in Huntington Beach, thinking I could continue the fight in peace.
I was wrong. For the next nine years I endured infiltration, gang-stalking, harassment, honeytraps, online smear campaigns, and media hit pieces from hundreds of operators and assets — including more than a few well-known MAGA influencers who befriended me for months or years before stabbing me in the back. It got so severe that I stopped dating, stopped making new friends, and lived in near-total isolation for four years.
The Price on My Head
When I first started exposing Pizzagate in 2016, I was naïve. I knew there’d be blowback — you don’t expose powerful people who rape and traffic children without consequences. But I didn’t expect to lose my career, my livelihood, my life as I knew it. I didn’t expect that for the next decade I’d become a high-value target living inside a real-world spy thriller with more parallels to
The Americans than I ever could have imagined.
I use the phrase “high-value target” deliberately. I can actually quantify my value.
One of my former neighbors was offered $50,000 in cash to spy on me. That was the starting rate. The offer came from a man covered in tattoos and gold grilles who showed up with a woman he introduced as his girlfriend. She wasn’t his girlfriend. I could tell immediately — no chemistry, contradicting stories, and she casually mentioned she worked in Washington, D.C., which is always a red flag. Too polished. Too controlled. Too deliberate to be who she claimed. They were operators. I recognized it on instinct and got out of there fast.
My neighbor stayed and chatted. Minutes later, they made him the offer — and opened the trunk of their car to show him a suitcase full of cash.
Yes. Just like in the movies. Except it was real.
This kind of neighborhood-level recruitment isn’t unusual in documented targeting operations. During COINTELPRO, the FBI routinely approached people in a target’s immediate social and residential circle — neighbors, coworkers, acquaintances — and paid them to report on the target’s movements, visitors, and activities. Declassified FBI files show that Martin Luther King Jr. alone had dozens of paid informants in his inner circle. The Church Committee, which investigated U.S. intelligence abuses in 1975 and 1976, documented hundreds of cases of ordinary citizens recruited and compensated to surveil private individuals the government had designated as threats. Fifty thousand dollars to a neighbor isn’t extraordinary tradecraft. It’s standard procedure with a fifty-year paper trail.
Since becoming a target, I’ve become extensively educated in the world of espionage — not by choice, but by necessity. They haven’t been able to kill me, though not for lack of trying. Their operating doctrine has been consistent from the beginning: destroy the messenger, and the message dies with her.
The tactics deployed against me include honeytraps, smear campaigns, career sabotage, surveillance, lawfare, hacking, gaslighting, gang stalking, break-ins, forced relocation, and financial destitution. Every one of these appears in the declassified files of real intelligence programs: smear campaigns and career sabotage from COINTELPRO; forced relocation through environmental harassment from
Zersetzung; financial strangulation documented in the FBI’s own files against civil rights activists and antiwar journalists; gang stalking — coordinated, multi-person surveillance designed to induce paranoia and isolation — documented in testimony before the European Parliament and in lawsuits against law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and U.K. These are not random misfortunes. They’re a coordinated, sustained, intelligence-grade operation designed to neutralize one journalist without the inconvenience of a dead body.
I have no doubt the intent includes driving me to a complete mental breakdown. To total public ruin. To self-destruction. I believe they want me to reach a level of madness so extreme that I’m forced to either work for them or kill myself.
So let me state this clearly, officially, on the record: I am not suicidal. I have never been suicidal. If anything ever happens to me, it was not self-inflicted.
The Machine Behind the Targeting
Hundreds of assets and agents have moved through my life over the past decade. Dozens came in posing as friends, colleagues, lovers — some for months, some for years. I’ve discovered, sometimes long after the fact, that people I trusted were being paid to destroy me. They told me they loved me while committing crimes against me behind my back. They smiled at me while filing reports. They hugged me goodbye before going home to their handlers.
This isn’t unique to me. It’s the documented reality of what happens to people who become high-value targets of coordinated intelligence operations. The women deceived by undercover British police officers in long-term fake relationships described exactly this: the intimacy, the manufactured trust, years of what felt like genuine connection — and then the devastating discovery that every moment of it had been a mission. Frank Wilkinson, the American civil liberties activist subjected to FBI surveillance for over forty years, had his closest associates filing reports on him since the 1940s. NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake watched his professional network dissolve overnight as colleagues he’d trusted for decades distanced themselves under pressure from the agency. Betrayal by people you believed were your friends isn’t a personal failing. It’s a feature of the operation — designed to isolate, destabilize, and break you.
The mainstream media such as
The Daily Mail and
Politico (links in article) has documented how people in the MAGA movement ran honeytrap operations against Democrats under the guise of investigative journalism, through outlets like Project Veritas — formerly run by James O’Keefe — and Steven Crowder’s Louder with Crowder. What a lot of people don’t know is that many so-called conservatives ran the same operations against other conservatives and truth-tellers in the movement. I don’t believe these people were ever genuinely MAGA, or the Christians so many of them publicly claim to be. They’ll post Bible verses on social media while leading utterly degenerate lives behind closed doors — and getting paid to destroy good people in both parties. To be clear: deliberate romantic deception is not journalism. It’s emotional manipulation, fraud, identity fraud, wiretapping, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and a breach of confidentiality. In more serious cases, it crosses into blackmail, extortion, and computer crimes.
This is what being a targeted individual looks like. It’s quiet. It’s intimate. It’s the person sitting across from you at dinner who isn’t who they say they are. It’s the slow, grinding psychological warfare of never being able to fully trust anyone, and always being proven right when you do.
They’ve been setting up dominoes around me for years — carefully positioned assets, manufactured crises, fabricated narratives — all designed to build a wall of falling pieces that would crush me before I could push the first one over myself.
The Toll
These people moved into every building I lived in. They terrorized me with loud music, middle-of-the-night banging on walls and doors — even during live shows — break-ins, and neighbor smears that made home life unbearable. Some were violent felons with drugs and guns; others ran online scams; one who moved in next door openly promoted her prostitution ring online. I’ve had to move six times since 2016, with law enforcement offering little to no help each time.
Every avenue I had to earn a living as an independent journalist was systematically destroyed. I was de-platformed from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, PayPal, Shopify, Etsy, and Buy Me a Coffee, among others. My website, LizCrokin.com, and my email,
Liz@LizCrokin.com — which I’d owned and used for over fifteen years — were hacked and stolen. The thief ran gambling ads on my site using my old articles and photos, posing as me for years. My original Instagram was hijacked and used to scam my supporters; despite providing government ID, Instagram dragged its feet for months. Losing my platforms, my site, and my primary email didn’t just kill my income — it severed me from thousands of journalistic contacts and sources.
Almost every job or “opportunity” offered to me over the past decade — including from recognizable names — turned out to be a scam, a setup, or a physical danger. I can’t even sell merchandise anymore; orders get hacked on my Printful account and customer service can’t fix it. It’s one thing to have my Alexa hacked to play crappy music or my iCloud hacked to put fat filters on my photos — yes, they’ve done that too. But hacking my social media, email, website, and online stores has made it impossible to earn a living.
The lawfare has been relentless. My surf accident case against the Hyatt — a slam-dunk liability claim involving their failure to provide a leash for my surfboard as contracted, and their lack of licensing for the surf lessons that cost me two fingers at the second knuckle — should have settled easily. Instead, they refused a reasonable offer for my hospital bills, prosthetics, and damages, and spent well over a million dollars dragging me through a rigged trial. Witnesses lied under oath. The juror who convinced the rest to award me nothing was an FBI agent. The Hyatt is owned by Tom Pritzker, an alleged Epstein co-conspirator according to testimony from Virginia Giuffre. Do the math.
On a side note: I typed this essay with broken prosthetics held together by medical tape, because I can’t afford to replace them.
On top of it all, everyday life is a minefield. Operatives have drugged my drinks, planted objects like USBs in my bags, secretly recorded me — even at Mar-a-Lago — and had strangers attack or harass me at events, social gatherings, and even family dinners with my elderly parents.
I’ve also watched infiltrators and opportunists — some who were never genuine Trump supporters — get propped up, rewarded, and enriched by the very movement I helped build, while truth-tellers like me continue to get suppressed. On X, my account carries dozens of labels that throttle my reach and earnings despite clear evidence I’ve provided. Some of the biggest grifters thrive while real researchers are treated like second-class citizens. Rhetoric and actions from parts of the administration on Epstein and Pizzagate have felt like slaps in the face to victims, especially when Epstein cover-up figures are given access and protection. I love and support President Trump, but I won’t ignore what’s wrong, or pretend I haven’t been abandoned by much of this movement.
I’ve watched respected, admired leaders in it mock anons and supporters behind closed doors — laughing, bragging about how those supporters are cash cows. So many have weaponized this movement and the good people in it simply to enrich themselves and grab more power. In the worst cases, I’ve watched some of them abuse good patriots with slanderous lies, false accusations, interrogations, gaslighting, even attempts to frame innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit — then minimize that abuse as nothing more than petty drama. That’s the ugly truth of this movement, once you pull back the velvet curtain and look past the flashy Instagram photos of fancy dinners and black-tie events at glamorous places like Mar-a-Lago.
Stepping Back, Not Backing Down
After more than a decade of this, I’ve reached my limit. The nonstop targeting has exhausted me physically, emotionally, and financially — taken an enormous toll on my health, my peace, and my ability to function. I’ve tried every possible way to sustain myself through independent journalism, only to watch every door slam shut and every revenue stream dry up. It’s no longer possible to continue this work the way I once did.
So I’m stepping back from active political commentary and the daily fight exposing elite pedophile networks. Not because the truth doesn’t matter — it does, more than ever — but because I can no longer stand the cost. The invisible machine has made the battlefield unsustainable. I refuse to let it destroy me completely.
I’ve been a lifelong patriot who has always loved this country. But the corruption in our government has grown so vast and so deep that I genuinely worry the powerful people who harm children may never face accountability. I believe in the First Amendment — especially freedom of the press — but I know now that it’s largely an illusion. Just because I haven’t been thrown in prison for exposing corruption, the way dissidents are in Communist countries, doesn’t mean I’m free. I’ve been thrown into a psychological prison that has terrorized me for far too long. And I have been treated worse than the actual child sex predators and criminals I expose.
The people who ran operations against a woman who was trying to save children will carry what they did. Not as an abstraction. As a weight. The specific gravity of having chosen, with full knowledge, to protect child sex predators by destroying the journalist exposing them. That does not go away. Philip Jennings, a fictional character who was a KGB spy in The Americans, could not carry it. In my life, these are real people and what they chose to do is real. Karma is not a mystical concept. It is the lived experience of being the person you decided to become. They decided to become people who hurt a woman trying to save children. They will live inside that decision for the rest of their lives.
What these operators cannot do — what they will never be able to do — is take away the impact of my work. They can’t change the fact that I have single-handedly woken up millions of people to the truth about elite pedophile rings. That is mine. That stays.
On the eve of this nation’s 250th birthday, I think the Founding Fathers would be rolling in their graves if they knew how deep the corruption had gotten, how many people in positions of great power have harmed children and still walk free, still living their best lives with zero accountability. And yet — I remain an eternal optimist. I still see this country as the Shining City on the Hill. My faith in God is unshaken. Justice will be served, in this life or the next. No one escapes death. No one escapes God. In the end, everyone answers to Him.
A decade of this — and you know who kept me standing? Not the powerful. Not the wealthy. Ordinary Americans. Good people with good hearts who care about children. I would not have survived any of this without you. For that, I am eternally grateful.
Moving forward, I’m channeling what’s left of my energy into a new chapter: the kind of lighter journalism I used to do at the
RedEye edition of the Chicago Tribune, and the book — which I’ll turn into a series like a modern-day version of
The Americans.
The full story will be told on my terms.
https://lizcrokin.substack.com/p/liv...s-my-real-life
Source:
https://www.rumble.com/video/vm31mg/?pub=4