Val Broeksmit was a self-employed musician, a hacker (who was always fast to point out that he didn’t actually hack), the son of a dead banker, a thief, an addict, a whistleblower, a social engineer, an informant, a self-described “comically terrible spy” and “Special Advisor to Counterintelligence,” a would-be father and — ultimately — a desperate man. In his own words, he was vengeful, impatient, erratic, abusive and prone to far-fetched theories.
Over time, Val became a source for and antagonist of the FBI, Congress, Glenn Simpson & FusionGPS, The New York Times, Distributed Denial of Secrets, and myriad of other journalists. He tried to entrap a lot of people around him — including me — and spun stories to the FBI that were either untrue or distorted beyond recognition. Untangling exactly what happened has been a frustrating and triggering exercise in research and transcribing hours and hours of audio recordings.
When beginning the research for this article, I had planned to limit it to his interactions with the FBI, focusing on his lengthy meeting with them in August 2020, and conclude with his disappearance and death. It became clear as I proceeded, however, that a custody dispute which preceded those events was crucially relevant to both. While questions and unknowns still remain, I’ve gathered and will share what I can.
Thus: I present the narrative of Val Broeksmit, as I have managed to assemble and understand it.
- Death of a Banker
- Fast Times with the FBI
- Death of a Babysitter
- Desperate Times with the FBI
- The Meeting
- Death of a Banker’s Son
Death of a Banker
Valentin “Val” Broeksmit was born in Ukraine in 1976, immigrating to Chicago with his parents three years later. Val would later say that his family snuck out of Russia and Ukraine, paying their way by selling his grandfather’s medals, who Val said had been a war hero that helped liberate Minsk from Nazi control. He would apparently be denied promotion due to being Jewish, remaining a colonel for the rest of his life.
After his parents’ marriage ended, Val and his father lived in a homeless shelter until 1982, when Cook County placed the 6-year-old Val in a foster home. Val’s mother, Alla, re-married and moved to New Jersey with her new husband, Bill Broeksmit, a senior executive for Deutsche Bank. Bill adopted the then-9-year-old Val, and the pair removed him from the foster care system.
Sometime in the next several years, Bill Broeksmit was given a work computer which he often took home. Val was enamored with the machine, which let him make electronic music and explore his interests. Eventually, Val’s curiosity drove him to learn about electromagnets from the Encyclopædia Britannica and while trying to build one, he accidentally tripped all the fuses and bricked the computer. Bill was furious until he learned that Val had been trying to be productive and replicate the science he read about. Bill’s anger melted into pride, and the story became a perennial fixture at family gatherings.
When Val was 16, one of his classmates died of suicide after hanging himself with his belt. According to David Enrich, a reporter who worked extensively with Val, he had been one of the students who had passed the time by tormenting him, and Val “never got over the feeling that he had played a part in pushing the boy over the edge.” As he attended boarding school and college, he became known for livening up parties with drugs like cocaine and stealing from Albright College’s music department.
As a young adult and stretching well into his thirties, Val performed and recorded music while his parents paid his rent and reportedly gave him about $30,000 a year in spending money. On January 26, 2014, everything changed: Bill Broeksmit hanged himself, dying of suicide.
As Val first sought to find some sort of meaning to explain his father’s death, he began going through his father’s computer and emails. Nothing he found meant anything to him at the time, since he was both unfamiliar with finance and consumed with grief. Val found a list of his father’s passwords and decided to write them down so that he could maintain access to the information. Far from expecting conspiracy or corruption, Val seemed to expect to find evidence of a secret affair or unknown debt that had driven his father to suicide.
When Deutsche Bank employees proved extremely interested in Bill’s computer and emails, Val began to wonder if something there had contributed to his father’s death. He later told an editor at The New York Times exactly where his interests and priorities were, saying that he “never wanted to expose any corporate wrongdoing” and that “all I wanted to do was solve the mystery of my father’s death. That’s it.”
For a time, Val’s grief and growing drug addiction consumed him and he went to rehab. After he emerged a few months later, he reestablished contact with David Enrich, who was then with The Wall Street Journal and had reached out to him about his father and Deutsche Bank. Val told Enrich about the emails and files he had, but that he’d been unable to find any greater meaning. With the help of his colleague Jenny Strasburg, Enrich was able to give Val a list of keywords to search for in the data. Four days later, some of the search results had been turned into an article that reduced Deutsche Bank’s stock value by several percent. As Val later told Enrich, he enjoyed the feeling of the effect he’d had.
Accounts of Val’s early interactions with David contradict each other. Val would later say that David and Jenny had begun pestering him on the day of his father’s death, going so far as to slide notes under his door. In his book, David Enrich places it a week and a half later:
Gossip about [Bill’s] having been involved in government investigations and angry at Jain was making the rounds in the city’s banking circles. Val maintained an active social media presence, and I quickly found his email address. In early February, nine days after Bill’s death, I sent him a note asking to speak with him for a potential story about his father.
Later in his life, Val had a well-publicized problem with David Enrich regarding the development of his book, which was re-titled from The Banker’s Son to Dark Towers, and his portrayal of Val in the 2019 article Me and My Whistle-Blower, which Val called a betrayal of their friendship. What’s less well known is that Val had problems with Enrich from the beginning and had concocted an “evil plan” to destroy him after one of the first articles that Enrich wrote about Bill Broeksmit infuriated Val for speculating about his father’s death.
According to Val, his plan had been “to befriend David and get him to be comfortable enough so he does not fact check every document,” after which Val would “slightly doctor a percentage point here or a number there or a name here.” Once Enrich published something that relied on Val’s doctored information, his plan was to reveal that the information was doctored. In Val’s mind, this wouldn’t have just been enough to destroy Enrich’s career – he said he “thought that would be enough to take down The Wall Street Journal.” Val only abandoned his plan when Enrich later proved useful to him by writing about the corporate attempts to censor Val over the Sony hack.
That November, it became public that a group of hackers who went by the name “Guardians of Peace” — and allegedly other names — had hacked Sony Pictures and that the company’s data was being leaked. Val tracked down the hackers’ website from a picture of the links that had appeared on Sony’s compromised computer screens and was able to email them, asking about “joining.” In response, they sent him links to more data. Val unsuccessfully invited them to hack Deutsche Bank and began posting some of the data on Twitter, earning the ire of Sony executives and a small flash of fame for himself.
When Sony threatened to sue Val, he said he would keep posting. “I’m not with a newspaper and I think I can get away with it,” he told VICE. In a curious exchange (archived) on FOX Business, David Asman seems to change the subject to state that Val was working with law enforcement, which went undenied. An obituary in The New York Times also refers to him as a “certified informer” in his dealings with the Sony hackers.
Val: What you guys don’t know, what I did… I’m the guy, because of the Sony, I gave it to the press right away. I, what am I gonna do with the stuff? As soon as they sent it to me or gave me the link, I gave it directly to the press. And it wasn’t like two weeks after it’s been reported on that I started the tweeting. I didn’t even know what was going on.
Host: I see, well then how in hell can David Boies say you’re breaking the law, if in fact you’re dealing with law enforcement?
Val: Dude I don’t know
Host: It seems like somebody’s trying to make you the fall guy doesn’t it, Val?
Val: A little bit, yeah!
It was also during this time period that Val may have first encountered the independent journalist Rocco Castoro, who later acted as Val’s advisor, documentarian, and confidant before the two eventually had a falling out.
During this time, Val continued to work on the Deutsche Bank materials together with journalists like Charles Levinson. To better understand finance, Val downloaded an iTunes University course taught by Yale professor John Geanakoplos. By the end of the year, he had moved to a substance-free facility called Indigo Ranch and began therapy. When Val incorrectly accused his mother of cutting him out of his father’s will, she stopped returning his phone calls.
After he was kicked out of the Indigo Ranch for fighting with a staff member, Val moved into a local hotel until his therapist convinced his mother to raise his monthly allowance back to $2,500, which allowed him to move to a nicer hotel on Manhattan Beach called The Belamar.
Val’s therapist encouraged him to seek closure to his father’s death by continuing his investigation. According to Val, his doctor’s prescription for Adderall gave him the ability to focus enough to learn finance – and hacking.
This unknowingly set Val on the path to what he later described as his only successful hack. Determined to get into his mother’s email account — allegedly to find answers about his father’s death that he was certain weren’t being shared with him — Val taught himself to use Wireshark. He relapsed, drove to New York, and while sitting in the hallway outside his mother’s apartment, captured enough packets to reconstruct her password and gain access to her email account.
Once he was in her emails, Val found credentials and credit card information, letting him charge a room (among other things) to his mother’s accounts. Years later, he joked about reading his mother’s emails with a group of FBI agents.
When Val eventually found the scans of the suicide notes his father had left for other people, the notes left him with more questions instead of closure. Where did his father’s feelings of guilt and failure come from? What drove him to that level of despair? Further investigation, both into Bill’s emails and by the coroner, established that Bill Broeksmit had been plagued by anxiety and fears about government investigations, which David Enrich reported included Libor. Bill internalized Deutsche Bank’s problems and feared that he had failed to adequately protect the bank. His anxiety and fear consumed him, eventually driving him to a desperate and final escape.
In March 2016, Val flew to Paris and used his mother’s American Express card information to buy new computer gear at the airport’s Apple outlet. Before he could copy his father’s emails and files to the new devices, he left them unattended while he snorted heroin in the airport bathroom. It was the last time Val saw the equipment. In a phone call soon after, Val’s therapist encouraged caution and suggested he might be being followed by Deutsche Bank.
Val left Paris, renting a car and driving to Amsterdam, where someone allegedly smashed in the car window and took another of Val’s laptops. When Val later told the FBI about the incident, he said that this laptop had the Deutsche Bank data, but it was fully encrypted.
Val rented exorbitant hotel rooms with his mother’s American Express card, only stopping when her money manager noticed and canceled the card. Val didn’t express any guilt about this when he talked to David Enrich, telling him that it was “the only jab I can take at her, the credit card.” Without her money to support him, Val set up camp outside of Amsterdam. While at the camp, Val met and began dating Julie, a twenty-four-year-old German art student who was fifteen years younger than Val.
After Val found another of his mother’s credit cards in her emails, he used it to begin touring Europe with Julie, with stops in Frankfurt and Nuremberg. Despite stealing at least two credit cards from his mother, Val later fought with The New York Times over their characterization of him as a credit card thief, insisting that he had only ever stolen one credit card.
That summer, Val contacted the widow of David Rossi, a Monte dei Paschi executive whose death had been ruled a suicide after he fell out of his window. The lawyer Val spoke to invited him to visit Siena, where he met Rossi’s widow, Antonella Tognazzi. The three began speaking and exchanging information, with Val furiously writing notes while the others spoke of mafia connections and shadowy deals.
Val told David Enrich that the lawyer gave him copies of files from his investigation into Rossi’s death, which he later gave to Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) while asking for attribution. (After it became clear Val was using the association to bolster his reputation and exploit people, the documents were removed from DDoSecrets until after his death.) To the FBI, Val described it as a quid pro quo deal where Val and the lawyer exchanged data and Val promised to publicize Tognazzi’s story.
Fast Times with the FBI
Val eventually found himself in Prague with a new OxyContin habit. By this time, Julie had left him, but Val found purpose by keeping in touch with journalists and sharing the Monte dei Paschi documents. On a Friday in mid-April 2016, Val sent a message to the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) using their contact form. Aside from an automated reply, Val didn’t see a response from the DOJ or FBI for some time.
To Whom It May Concern,
My name is Val Broeksmit and I’m writing in hopes of speaking to someone at the DOJ in reference to the evidence I have showing major fraud at one of the World’s largest banks.
My evidence shows Billions of dollars in Securities Fraud, (including Mortgage-Backed derivatives, OTC derivatives, Tax Schemes) soothe wing [sic] that highest ranking board members were/are complicit in said fraud(s). My documents, include 2 other major world banks involvement.
I’m hesitant to disclose everything in this email, as I’m not sure how this process works, or how secure this email process is;
I’ve contact the SEC, and The NYC District Attorney’s office.
Both parties suggested I contact the DOJ as well.Perhaps I could speak to someone at the DOJ and explain what I have?
Please call me anytime – [phone number]
Thanks,
Val Broeksmit
[Gmail address]
That September, Val came out of a store and discovered that his rental car from Avis to be repossessed. Val later explained that because he didn’t understand the language, he thought the car was being stolen and tried to fight the repo man while both called for the police.
Eventually the police arrived, and — after pointing lots of firearms at Val and the repo man — helped sort everything out.
Val once again ran low on funds when his mother discovered that he had stolen her credit card information again and cut off his access. Val traveled to Athens and then Rome, where he received an email inquiry from Financial Times reporter Catherine Belton. Catherine was interested in Val’s information and was convinced to fly out immediately, spending New Year’s Eve and several other days with Val. The two were in almost daily contact over the next year and a half while Catherine became a trusted source of guidance for Val. Eventually, Val grew to think of her as his “handler.”
After running low on funds, Val called Catherine Belton to ask for help and if she knew anyone that would pay him for the information he had. Accounts of exactly what happened next vary, but the general consensus is that Belton introduced Val to Glenn Simpson of FusionGPS and Steele dossier infamy. (Contrary to some reports, Val and Glenn began speaking after the Steele dossier had been made public in January 2017.) According to some accounts, Belton may have helped Val receive an initial down payment of a thousand dollars from Simpson, though she told Enrich that she “was not party to any financial deal Val may have reached with anyone.”
The exact amount that Val received is also disputed, though common sense may be able to read between the lines. In Enrich’s telling, Catherine Belton helped Val receive a 1,000 USD advance for the documents and Simpson agreed to pay $10,000. In Glenn Simpson’s book, he says he paid Val $4,000, and documents previously provided by Val confirm that Glenn sent him 2 PayPal payments of $2,000 each. Val has said that he was paid $5,000 out of a total $10,000 he was owed, which matches the alleged payments. Val didn’t hide his feelings about Glenn Simpson, repeatedly tweeting negative anecdotes. Stories about Glenn’s paranoia were a favorite of Val’s and were repeated in both public interviews and private meetings with the FBI.
The two agreed to meet and after spending some time together in Saint Thomas and going through Val’s documents, Glenn departed for Washington D.C., leaving Val alone in a hotel for a while. Glenn sent Val his personal credit card information and told him to book a flight and hotel, but not to charge anything to room service or to buy anything from the gift shop – both of which would be charged to his account. Val seems to have falsely denied doing so to David Enrich, but later admitted he did both of those things in a public interview.
Val later described the hotel he chose as having been frequently used by intelligence services, something which he said had initially raised Glenn’s suspicions.
The hotel’s use by security services was largely dismissed by Enrich, who only found evidence that it was used by the National Guard. However, Val insisted that each of the hotel’s ballrooms had been used by different agencies, and that he was “sure there’s evidence online.”
Before long, Val joined Glenn and stayed at his house in Washington D.C., where their collaboration continued. He began introducing Val to people in Washington, including Senate investigator Bob Roach. At Glenn’s request, Bob Roach — who would later join the House’s investigation of Deutsche Bank — agreed to have Val meet him at the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The two spoke, and Val gave him copies of everything he asked for.
Next, Glenn suggested that Val go to New York City to meet John Moscow, an attorney at BakerHostetler who had spent more than thirty years as a prosecutor in Manhattan. Val told David Enrich that he stopped in Philadelphia to buy heroin before driving the rest of the way to Manhattan. After meeting Val, it didn’t take long for Moscow to want copies of the files. Val proposed an in-kind exchange: he’d give copies of the data if Moscow represented him with some family matters, and in litigation alternately involving Deutsche Bank and Avis. Moscow declined Val’s offer, but the two agreed on an alternative: in exchange for copies of the documents, Moscow would provide Val with legal advice about family estate issues.
With Val’s permission, John Moscow gave copies of the documents to a colleague that investigated money laundering for the New York Federal Reserve Bank, which had long-standing issues with Deutsche Bank. While no direct causal relationship was ever established, David Enrich, Scot Steadman, and other reporters have connected Val’s documents and a subsequent decision by the Federal Reserve to fine Deutsche Bank $41 million.
According to Val, Glenn Simpson told him about Barrett Brown in late 2017 and encouraged him to reach out. In screenshots posted online, Glenn balked when Barrett asked him about this, disavowing Val entirely. “I want nothing to do with Val Broeksmit… If he gave you my name as a referral that was a lie.” Regardless of how, Val and Barrett became acquainted that year, though their relationship didn’t become prominent until later.
In 2018, Val’s life began radically changing. First, he met Marie Peter, who had been a friend and confidant of Val’s mother. In Val’s words, he decided to “flip her” and turn her into an asset and a source of information on his mother and the family that had disowned him. Val and Marie were mutually fascinating to each other, and the forbidden element of their relationship added to the intrigue and excitement. The two first became friends, but before long, Val moved into Marie’s apartment at the Brewery Artist Lofts and began living with her and her young son, who will be referred to as M in this article due to his young age.
The sudden death of Val’s long-time friend Pegi Young in January 2019 left him feeling lost. Val hadn’t known Pegi was even sick while she was dying of cancer. When a film producer invited Val to a dinner party, he met Moby and Heather Graham. The two were taken with Val’s story and Moby decided to introduce him to Representative Adam Schiff, who regularly dined at Moby’s restaurant. Moby also introduced Val to Dan Goldman, who was then a Senate investigator. Despite Goldman’s attempts at courting Val, the two didn’t get along.
When Goldman asked for copies of the documents, Val balked. In his eyes, Moby’s introduction didn’t rule out the possibility that Goldman was a fraud or a spy. Val didn’t know what would happen to the files after he handed them over. He wondered if Goldman would even be able to get them to Schiff. Despite Val’s entreaties, Goldman was unable to fly Val to Washington D.C., so to soothe Val’s concerns he arranged for him to meet with Adam Schiff in the Representative’s California office.
I would love to be [the FBI’s] special informer.
Val Broeksmit to David Enrich
Val, accompanied by Marie’s son M, took a bag full of data to Schiff’s office. When Val tried to give Schiff the data directly, he was surprised to learn that it had to go through Goldman in order for there to be a proper chain of custody.
Val was quickly ushered out of Schiff’s office after asking if he could record them, a request that made Schiff panic. The idea of recording Schiff seems to have been somewhat encouraged by David Enrich, who described the benefits of recording Schiff or the FBI in a Signal message to Val. However, the exchange Val posted doesn’t show who brought it up or in what context.
While Val was dealing with Dan Goldman and Adam Schiff, the FBI finally responded to him. A special agent wrote that they had “just been handed your information which you had sent some time ago via email to the U.S. Department of Justice.” Soon, agents flew to Los Angeles to meet with Val for the first time.
The agents listened to Val for several hours, plying him with snacks and open ears. One agent told Val he was “holding documents that only people within the inner circle of Deutsche would ever see.” The other agent complained about Deutsche Bank’s stonewalling, adding that “clearly things went on in Deutsche Bank which weren’t kosher. What we’re up against is [that] all those bad acts are being pushed down on the little people on the bottom.”
After the meeting, Val called David Enrich from his Lyft ride and told him that “I am more emotionally invested in this than anyone in the world… I would love to be their special informer.”
After Enrich eventually published quotes from the meeting with Val’s permission, Val started to worry that it would be obvious he had been reporting on and possibly recording his meeting with the FBI and asked an editor at The New York Times to obscure his role as the source.
Meanwhile, Val’s discussions with Dan Goldman continued, albeit with less success than his talks with the FBI. When Val said he was worried about his father’s image and things possibly being taken out of context, Goldman tried appealing to both his patriotism and his vanity. He asked Val to “imagine a scenario where some of the material that you have can actually sort of provide the seed that we can then use to blow open everything that he’s been hiding. In some respects, you — and your father, vicariously through you — will go down in American history as a hero, and as the person who really broke open an incredibly corrupt president and administration.”
Goldman told Val that the rules for FBI and Congressional investigations were different, and suggested he tell the Bureau to subpoena Deutsche Bank. Val wasn’t persuaded, and told him that one of the FBI agents he’d been speaking to, Special Agent Tim Lucey, was coming to meet with him again. Val and Goldman agreed that Val’s files probably didn’t contain a “smoking gun” against Trump or his dealings, but Goldman repeated his earlier point that the files could provide a seed for them to build on. In Goldman’s words, Val’s data were the “initial building block that we can then start to expand, and we’ve got a good foundation and a good basis to be able to dig into this.”
While Val expressed interest in helping, he wanted to maintain control of the files. Goldman balked when Val suggested telling him what they were interested in and Val could do the searches for them. Both Committee procedure and security concerns prevented them from doing that or anything close to it; the Committee had to maintain control of the investigation and couldn’t reveal its scope and interests to outsiders.
Val again suggested bringing him further into the Committee’s work, this time by having him sign a contract or a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). “I’ll do whatever you guys want as long as I can have some oversight and there’s some compromise,” he said. Goldman told Val that they would collaborate with him as much as they could, but that the Committee rules were firm, and he was already going out of his way to deal with Val.
Goldman warned Val that if they needed to, the Committee would simply subpoena Val. If that happened, Val’s fears would be realized when everything became public. Goldman felt he had gone out of his way to meet Val’s demands, including getting him a signed letter from Representative Schiff on official letterhead. With Congress’ time left in session running out, Goldman felt his back was against the wall. He promised Val the Committee would continue trying to work with him.
We will be careful and we’ll coordinate with you and we’ll make sure that you understand how we view some things. And we’re happy for you to pick out some and try to explain your father’s tone and the way that he does it. I’m more than happy to go out on the phone with you and go over that so that you can provide us with sort of the personal context of it all.
Goldman emphasized to Val that he wasn’t going to be a part of this. In the Committee’s eyes, Val wasn’t even a witness – he was simply the custodian of records that they needed. Val countered that he was the custodian of his father’s records and his image, both of which he felt compelled to protect.
Val began accusing Goldman of going after a source of The New York Times, insistently repeating that it wouldn’t look good for them. Val tried to frame it for Goldman, “You’re taking the son of a[n] esteemed banker and trying to pressure him [in]to giving you all this shit. And without any oversight, without any control over his name, it doesn’t look good for you. You want to do that?” Val said his view was driven by Goldman having also previously visited David Enrich; the fact that Val had been brought up in their conversation was all the proof he needed.
Goldman denied this, insisting that his visit to Enrich was completely unrelated and wasn’t an excuse to ask about Val. “Did your name come up? It did because you are proving to be very, very difficult to deal with in obtaining these emails… I didn’t know about these emails, but for the fact that you reached out to us… And yet now there are all these strings attached.” Val interrupted Goldman and said he was asking for “one simple thing,” which Goldman immediately rejected. “You say it’s a simple thing – it’s not a simple thing,” he told Val tersely.
Val was unmoved, and repeated his demands as an ultimatum. “Dan, you’re a smart guy. You can figure out a way to make it happen, man. You can figure it out. I can figure shit out on my own. You can do the same thing too. There must be a way to make it happen. It’s really simple. I’ll just want some oversight. What that looks like, show me what that looks like to you,” implicitly rejecting Goldman’s earlier promise that the Committee would voluntarily keep him involved as much as the rules allowed.
“All right, Val,” Goldman said resignedly. “You do what you need to do and I’ll do what I need to do.” After the phone call ended and before he stopped the recording, Val said he took Goldman’s words as a threat.
But no subpoena came. Several weeks later, Val sent Goldman a text asking to talk about an unspecified solution that he said “may prove advantageous for both of us.” On June 11th, he texted Goldman at a new number. “Given my current circumstances, the only way I can get this to you and all the files is via subpoena.” Goldman told Val that they would send the subpoena and thanked him for cooperating. On June 18th, the Committee issued the subpoena. After it arrived, Val framed it.
Pieces of their exchange are missing from the public record. The recording released by Val begins partway through one phone call, and the text messages are examples cherry-picked by Val. While Val doesn’t directly ask for money in the communications he posted online, Goldman may have felt that Val was asking to be hired by the Committee, telling him at one point that there was “absolutely no position” to offer him. In an on-the-record statement to David Enrich, the Committee directly accused Val of asking for payment.
This witness possessed bank records that are potentially relevant to the Committee’s investigation, and committee staff sought to persuade the witness to provide them voluntarily. But when the witness was not willing to provide the information on a voluntary basis – and inappropriately asked the Committee to provide payment after declining to cooperate – we issued a subpoena to secure the evidence.
Meanwhile, Val’s talks with the FBI had been far more productive. The Bureau agreed to give him an advisory title, which Val claimed was “Special Advisor to Counterintelligence.” They also helped Marie obtain a visa to stay in Los Angeles, and agreed to let him share his Bureau affiliation publicly.
In September 2019, Marie and her husband, Stephen T., filed for divorce. When speaking separately to the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), they both said or implied that they were the one who filed for divorce. According to one of Stephen’s statements to DCFS, the two had separated in 2013 before coming to the United States. Val later told the FBI that they unofficially separated in 2013, but that “for the lawyers it’s 2018.” (Val began dating Marie in July 2018, and moved in with her and M soon after.)
In 2004, Stephen had suffered a spontaneous cervical spine hemorrhage that left him paralyzed in Paris. After a month in the hospital (which Val claimed then–finance minister Nicolas Sarkozy paid for), Stephen was flown to a specialist unit in Sydney and regained his mobility over several months. In 2015, a year after they came to the United States and two years after their separation, Stephen, Marie, and their son continued to live together in Brooklyn while Marie finished her Master of Fine Arts degree. While speaking to the FBI, Val spoke about Stephen in purely negative terms and called his parents, who practiced family and commercial law, highly influential.
It’s likely that Val ruined any chance of an amicable relationship with Stephen when he met him, introducing himself as “the guy who’s fucking your wife.” Val later insisted to the FBI that everyone else laughed, but that Stephen didn’t take it well and became obsessive in response.
Val and Marie both alleged that Stephen would send 30 texts and emails a day. Stephen denied this, telling DCFS that he would send “maybe 3 or 4” text messages to make and confirm plans, and that Val and Marie would “blow it out of proportion.” Stephen said that they should show DCFS the alleged obsessive texts, and Marie said she would. According to the report written nearly two weeks later, Marie had not shown DCFS any such evidence.
Stephen said he first became aware of Marie’s drug use in February 2019 after friends of the family, Mr. H and Mr. K, told him about Marie’s use of cocaine, heroin, and ketamine and told him they didn’t want their children at Marie’s anymore. Marie denied using drugs, and Stephen said he thought she “went through a small phase with drugs” but that she “got better,” adding that he never saw her or Val use drugs.
Val later admitted to the FBI that Marie had done cocaine with his mother when they were in New York. Val quickly added that he wasn’t trying to incriminate anyone saying, “It’s a joke, you guys.” The FBI agents laughed and reassured him, brushing off the statement as something you’d say over “coffee with friends.”
Mr. H and Mr. K wrote a declaration for the court about Marie’s drug use, which Stephen believed prompted retaliatory allegations against them. According to Stephen, Marie had first brought the allegations up in 2019 after Mr. H and Mr. K stopped being friends with her and decided to stop letting M visit. Stephen said that M told him that Marie tried to make him embellish what actually happened, and that M’s description of events didn’t indicate signs of abuse. When DCFS asked M about the allegations in 2020, he similarly “reported his mother has ‘a problem’ with Mr. H and Mr. K and denied the allegations.”
Marie and Stephen filing for divorce in late 2019 was in large part a result of Val’s work with the FBI. As Val and Marie later explained to the FBI and DCFS, Marie had to stay married to Stephen because her visa was dependent on him and she was unable to work in the United States. When the FBI helped her obtain a visa independent of Stephen, this freed her to legally separate from him while remaining in the United States.
Around this time, I was introduced to Val by Barrett Brown, who invited him to join research into the #29 Leaks prior to its release. The data was a massive cache of files, emails, phone calls, faxes, and documents from Formations House, an infamous business services firm located in London. The data had been submitted to DDoSecrets, and due to the size and scope, I spoke with Barrett about collaborating with the Pursuance Project. Barrett had publicly announced the dataset in July 2019, months before its release, and mentioned several outlets he was recruiting to be part of the embargo. Ultimately, however, neither Barrett nor Val ended up taking part in the research and publication, which instead relied on the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) to coordinate the project.
In late September, Val’s relationship with David Enrich deteriorated again. In Enrich’s article, he wrote that Val had been “irate that he was not named in a blurb for my book on Amazon, among other perceived slights. He sent me a string of texts claiming that he’d taken out a brokerage account in my name and traded on secret information I’d supposedly fed him. (This is not true.) A little later, he left me a voice mail message saying it was all a joke.”
When talking to Enrich’s editor, Nick Summers, on the phone about it several days later, Val said that he was “seeing red” over the perception that he was being written out of Enrich’s book. Val insisted that Enrich had taken it as a joke and thought it was “hilarious,” but didn’t like being characterized as an asshole in Enrich’s article, which was published online on October 1st. Val tweeted a version of the joke, which remains on his Twitter account.
In an interview a few months later, Val presented a different version of events. In this telling, Val cast himself as David against The New York Times’ Goliath. Val said that David Enrich had contacted his lawyers about the joking threat, and as a result word spread through The New York Times “like wildfire,” and “the word was Val Broeksmit fucked [David Enrich]” and that everyone rallied behind David.
The publication of Enrich’s article at the beginning of October did nothing to calm Val’s temper. When he objected to Enrich, David told him to speak to his editor, Nick Summers. In an hour-long phone call that Val falsely denied he was recording, Val unloaded his frustration and emotional distress onto Summers.
One of Val’s first objections on the call was being referred to as a “credit card thief.” Val had previously denied being a credit card thief to Nick Summers and objected to being characterized in a way that made him seem unreliable. In their phone call, Val admitted to Nick that he had indeed committed credit card fraud — but only once — and argued that that single theft didn’t make the label accurate. He ultimately conceded the point and faulted the English language for its ambiguity. (As noted above, Val reportedly dug his mother’s credit card information out of her emails twice and charged things to Glenn Simpson’s account without permission.)
Diving into the issues, Val objected to the way his father was described in the article. The article called him a “senior executive,” which Val considered reductive. He wanted them to use his father’s full title, the Chief Risk Optimization Officer. Nick said that their description was accurate, and compared Val’s raising it to asking them to say a pizza was “hot” instead of “warm.”
Val next objected to how the article portrayed his motives, particularly the line that he wanted “to expose what he sees as corporate wrongdoing, give some meaning to his father’s death — and maybe get famous along the way.” Val told Nick that he “never wanted to expose any corporate wrongdoings,” he just wanted to solve and understand his father’s death. Less surprisingly, he also objected to being described as fame-seeking.
In the midst of his objections, Val admitted that Enrich was mostly correct when he wrote that Val had “a maddening habit of leaping to outrageous conclusions and then bending facts to fit far-fetched theories. He fantasizes about seeing his story told by Hollywood, and I sometimes wonder whether he’s manipulating me to achieve that ambition. He can be impatient, erratic and abusive.” Val admitted to Nick that “of course I can be impatient, erratic, abusive. I do bend facts to fit far-fetched theories,” but that he strongly objected to his description as “fame-seeking.”
Val instead argued that David was the one who was fame-seeking, pointing to his self-professed eagerness to help Val’s story be told in a Netflix series. Val conceded that the article was correct when it said that he had “moved to Los Angeles to drum up Hollywood interest in his life story” and that fame could come with that, but insisted that most people wanted to be famous. Val felt that repeatedly bringing it up in the article mischaracterized him.
Ultimately, Val only pointed to one factual error in the article: it referred to him as unemployed, while in fact he was a self-employed musician receiving royalties for his work. (Nick promised to look into the error and correct it after verification; the online version of the article still describes Val as having been “unemployed.”) When Nick said that it otherwise sounded like Val wanted to re-write the story, Val objected and said the only thing he wanted was “to not be characterized as an asshole.” Val said that he “would tell my girlfriend’s kid to stay away from” the type of person Val is portrayed as in the article, a conclusion that the DCFS would later share.
Most of the rest of the call consisted of Nick comforting Val and assuring him that he was heard. As Val became overwhelmed by emotion, they took a brief break during which he took a Xanax and smoked a cigarette. The call briefly resumed until Val broke down in tears.
Enrich stood by his reporting, telling Forensic News, “I think the article portrayed Val accurately and fairly. I know and feel badly that he didn’t like it, and I hope that he has a more positive reaction to his and his father’s prominent roles in my forthcoming book.”
Several days later, Marie’s email account sent Nick Summers and Ellen Pollock, two of Enrich’s editors, an 11-page letter detailing their issues with the article and Val’s subsequent phone call with Nick Summers. While the letters are nearly identical, the email they were attached to both emphasized that the letter was written for them individually. The letters completely rejected Enrich’s telling of events, arguing that Enrich had been abusive and had stolen his research from Val and others. There’s no record of a reply from Ellen Pollack, but Nick Summers briefly responded several days later to tell Marie that they stood by their reporting.
I want to thank you for writing such a thoughtful note, especially given that it’s in your third language.
It’s given me a lot to think about, but I trust David Enrich as a journalist, and I believe our story — while difficult to read for Val and those closest to him — is accurate.
At around the same time, Marie reached David Enrich’s wife, Kirsten. After several weeks of attempting to arrange a phone call, they finally connected. Marie recorded the call, later sharing a partial copy of it. During the call, they disagreed about the substance of the article – with Marie insisting that David “even wrote, like, [Val] couldn’t wait for his father to be dead and use his document to become famous.” Kirsten pushed back on this claim, pointing out that what Marie described wasn’t in the article before adding that she wished she could help Marie.
Later that week, Kirsten sent Marie a text message asking how she was doing. Marie responded that she and her son were being ostracized, that people saw Val as unstable and were asking if she was safe, and brought up a then-in-process eviction which she and Val were blaming on Enrich’s article. Marie ended her message by saying it was crucial that she not appear in Enrich’s book. Any response sent by Kirsten was omitted by Marie in the screenshots she shared before her disappearance two years later.
About two weeks later, Marie recorded a discussion between herself and “Heather” from the apartment complex she and Val were staying at. She sent a copy of the recording to David Enrich using iCloud, whose response to Marie was later shared by Val – although the iCloud attachment had already expired. As a result, the recording itself is currently lost, leaving only Enrich’s response to it, according to which Heather was clear that the problems with Val’s behavior and suspected drug use all existed prior to The New York Times article. Enrich conceded that the article may have reinforced some of these perceptions and that the article “could have been kinder and gentler,” but that the issues Val was facing were all independent of his article.
I am very sorry to hear that you guys are getting evicted (although I’m unclear on whether that is actually happening?). I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about whether there were ways I could have been kinder and gentler in the article, and there were, and I feel badly that I didn’t recognize it at the time. (That said, I think you and Val will really like the book. I will send you both copies when it publishes — or in advance if you promise in writing not to share it with anyone under any circumstances whatsoever.)
As for the recording, I don’t know the context (something about a package that was wrongly delivered?), but the woman with whom you’re speaking says repeatedly that her frustration with Val does not stem from the article — it’s because Val doesn’t listen, is difficult to deal with, etc. She says: “All those things happened before this article. … From the leasing office perspective, he’s already been a problem, and no new information we’ve received makes us feel like he’s not a problem.” She also notes that someone became concerned about his apparent drug use “months ago,” long before the article.
It sounds like the article reinforced some of those impressions (which you and I both know to be true, based on our previous conversations about his recent drug use), but this recording does not make it seem like the article is to blame for the situation you’re in.
The mention of the package that was “wrongly delivered” appears to reference an event that allegedly took place several days before, and which was later described in Val and Marie’s eviction proceedings. They had allegedly been recorded on surveillance footage taking packages belonging to other tenants without permission or any explanation.
Val later confirmed that he was still using drugs at this point, with January 2020 being his last admitted use of cocaine.
At the end of the month, Eric Krupke and David Enrich visited Marie and Val’s apartment to record an episode of The New York Times‘ podcast, The Daily. The episode was ultimately never aired, and currently only parts of the audio have been made available. These portions were captured as part of a recorded conversation between Val, Marie, Rocco Castoro, and (at times) M discussing The Daily recording and other events related to David Enrich. While the exact reasons for not airing the episode remain unknown, Rocco suggested at least one – M’s participation in the recording. Rocco has since added that M could have been edited around.
Much of the discussion centered around accusations against David Enrich and attempts to divine his motives, although several moments stand out. In one such example, M pushed back on the idea that Enrich’s article was the cause of his social problems, saying that it “has nothing to do with the whole conversation.” Val and Marie immediately disagreed with M and told him he was wrong.
Val’s habit of secretly recording people was brought up several times while discussing things with Rocco. First, Rocco mentioned it directly, seeming to challenge Val on his trustworthiness. In a moment that seemed to anticipate Val’s habits and his eventual falling out with Rocco, he said, “Just fucking recording everything, huh? … When are you going to turn on me?” Val tried to assure Rocco that he wasn’t going to turn on him, and hadn’t meant to record anything and denies that he’s recording anything at the moment. Several hours later, Val said that he uses the recordings he makes to help correct his memory of who said what, as it became difficult to keep precise track of everything over time.
In the beginning of April 2020, Val registered the company Lime & Coconut Data Intelligence (LCDI) in Delaware, the website which offered to sell NFTs for thousands of dollars and advertised “A.I. packages available for Law Enforcement.” Later that year, Val told the FBI that he was in talks to resell surveillance tech to a private investigator who was a former member of law enforcement.
At around the same time, Marie decided to end the shared custody arrangement with Stephen and kept M. This began the custody dispute that would send Val back to the FBI, and ultimately contributed to unraveling his and Marie’s lives.
According to Stephen, the end of the shared custody arrangement wasn’t the only problem – he also wasn’t allowed to talk to his son except when Val and Marie were listening. A week after he’d last seen M, he went to their apartment but was told he couldn’t see M. According to Stephen, he stuck his head in the door and Val pushed him away; Val later accused him of assault, and additionally of having drawn teeth on his face mask. Both Val and Stephen pointed out that a security camera recorded the visit, and asserted that the footage would back up their version of events.
Val described the alleged incident to the FBI in more detail later, adding additional accusations including that Stephen was looking at porn and dating sites on his phone while waiting for M. Val told the FBI that he pushed Stephen to the sidewalk, at which point Stephen yelled in pain. Val dismissed his cries, telling Stephen that he just lost the divorce and ordering him to leave.
In a moment that hints at the control that Val may have exerted over Marie, he told the FBI that in May 2020 he filed a police report against the school director for M’s school. However, according to the DCFS reports it was Marie who formally filed the complaint against the school director, not Val.
According to Val, the school director was too touchy and hugged children who didn’t like it, and threatened to call Child Protective Services if Marie didn’t attend a parent-teacher meeting that Stephen would also be present at. When police responded to the report against the school director, they told Marie that the invocation of Child Protective Services was “not a criminal threat.” They asked M if he was uncomfortable, and he responded by saying “I don’t know.”
The circumstances surrounding this are further complicated by a story that Val relayed to the FBI. Val and Marie had engaged a lawyer to “fight dirty,” knowing that she was willing to engage in questionable allegations of pedophilia. As Val told the FBI, he and Marie didn’t hire the lawyer until after the police report had been filed against M’s school director, and he had no idea that the lawyer already had a “completely unrelated” file on the school director. Val explained to the FBI that he didn’t know or care if the accusations were true or not.
How much of it is real? I don’t know. How much of it is fake? I don’t know. Because she is, again, fights dirty. But she blends fiction with fact, but she does it well. And I can’t even fucking tell the truth anymore. So I don’t care at this point. Marie doesn’t care. We’re going to have to go to that level and accuse Steve of hanging out with a known fucking kiddie fiddler. Pedophile. If that’s what’s going to win, then let’s just fucking do it.
The next month, Val, Marie and M meet a neighbor of theirs who made crystal jewelry, Pattil. M immediately became enamored with the crystal jewelry and the idea of making it. Val said he thought something was off about Pattil, but nothing serious.
After spending a little more time with Pattil, they agreed to let M spend a few hours a day with her making jewelry, with a break for lunch. The arrangement gave Val and Marie time alone, and made M happy and while giving him something new to do.
During the last weekend of June, Pattil and M sold the jewelry they made at the apartment complex. The neighbors bought a number of pieces, and Val said he personally bought about $250 worth and invited Stephen so he could see M earn money for the first time. Val later insisted that Pattil and Stephen exchanged contact information at this time, while Pattil said she found Stephen online and contacted him that way after briefly meeting him there in person.
After several weeks, M’s visits to Pattil suddenly stopped. According to both Val and Pattil, there was no explanation for why at the time.
Less than two weeks later, DCFS received a complaint alleging that M was being neglected and that Val and Marie were heavy drug users and had been using crystal meth in front of M. The report was anonymous, though Val and Marie blamed Pattil for it. The next day, a police officer conducted a wellness check and the allegations of abuse were denied.
While this was going on, Val continued his simultaneous war against and work with journalists, ingratiating himself with and compromising them. Val would later bring up Barrett Brown as one notable example to the FBI, saying that he and Marie had helped get Barrett off the street when he was homeless, which Val hinted was due to events with Barrett’s girlfriend at the time. According to Val, he gave Barrett money for hotel rooms and Marie had arranged for him to have a place to stay for a month while he helped them. (This appears to be unrelated to Val’s associate Rocco Castoro having paid for Barrett’s AirBnBs with Tim Pool’s money in exchange for filming things such as George Floyd protests, with Barrett variously describing the ultimate source of the funds as either Peter Thiel or “mysterious.“)
On July 20th, DCFS and police visited the apartment to conduct an unannounced visit and assessment. The assessment found no obvious issues, but alleged that “the fridge had scarce food.”
While Marie called their lawyer, the social worker spoke to Val privately. Val notably told the social worker that he took Xanax as needed and used Marie’s prescription.
Marie seemed to have made no mention of providing the Xanax to Val, saying only that he took it “as prescribed” and denied that either of them used any other drugs.
While speaking with the social worker, Marie brought up the previously mentioned allegations against Mr. H and Mr. K. Out of respect for all involved, the details of the allegations will be omitted.
The next day, the social worker received a recording of Val and Marie questioning M. The social worker ends their description of the questioning with a note that “the 57-minute long audio interview of mother and Mr. Broeksmit questioning the child is completely inappropriate. It is evident that the adults are coercing the child into making statements to encourage a particular answer desired.”
To put the allegations and the social worker’s note into context, it’s necessary to examine an event that Val said took place slightly less than two weeks later. As Val later told the FBI, he and Marie decided to call a lawyer who they thought would “fight dirty” by making false allegations of abuse. Before telling her to hire the lawyer, Val told Marie that he didn’t believe the allegations the lawyer had made in the past.
And I’m like, wow. Let’s fuck that. And Marie’s like, fuck that. I don’t think it’s true. I’m like, what? And I’m like, I don’t think it’s true. Like, really? It’s like, we’ve got to get this woman. You need to fucking hire her. Because now we’re so pissed off. We need someone to fight dirty. So we call her.
In the same exchange with the FBI, Val admitted that the lawyer had coached him and Marie on what to get M to say.
But here she says, and I have, and I’m happy if you guys want to take this further and go for it. Because I have, I recorded all of it. So you have her on tape saying to Marie, do you think M, could you get M to say this? Could you get him to say this? She’s like, probably. Yeah. This is what we need M to say. And M’s eight. She’s fucking saying that on the phone. [emphasis added]
A week later, the social worker contacted Stephen and confirmed many of the details about his and Marie’s relationship and separation. Stephen noted that he had been unable to see M in recent months, with the only exceptions being under Marie’s and Val’s direct supervision.
Stephen told the social worker that he had been contacted by Pattil over Instagram about her concerns over Val and Marie’s alleged use of methamphetamines. Pattil had reportedly seen various drug paraphernalia in the apartment, along with M and Marie’s walking around in the middle of the night and digging through the trash. She also alleged that Marie had shown physical signs often associated with drug use, including twitching, scratching, and sores on her arms, and that she’d seen dozens of cell phones at their apartment. Stephen added that there were now allegations against Pattil, which he stated had been made by Val and Marie in retaliation for her statements.
When he later described the event to the FBI, Val dismissed all of Pattil’s allegations against them and said that she was bipolar.
A little over an hour after he told the FBI that Pattil’s allegations were not only false but absurd, including the statement that he had up to 50 cell phones, he made an admission that undermines at least part of that denial. As Val explained it to the FBI, to help him practice phone hacking, “people would find phones on the street for me and just sell it” to him.
Stephen told the social worker that he had no direct evidence of Val’s and Marie’s drug use, only circumstantial evidence based on behavior he had witnessed and that M had reported. However, Stephen added that Val had called his parents in Australia and told them that he was trying to get the FBI to have Stephen deported.
While no available recordings of Val’s phone call to Stephen’s parents survive, there is other evidence of its existence. A pair of tweets from Val’s account link to recordings of the apparent phone call, and emails from Stephen’s account apparently obtained by Val further confirm their contents. The recordings were posted to SoundCloud and YouTube before being removed for privacy violations. When meeting with the FBI several days after posting the recordings online, Val repeated his desire for the Bureau to have Stephen deported.
Stephen ended his interview with the social worker by explaining that he was worried that M was “trapped” in the apartment with “two drug addicts,” which made him concerned for M’s safety. Stephen pointed out that family courts were closed due to COVID, and said that he had tried and failed to get an emergency hearing about the matter.
About a week later, the case was transferred to a new social worker, Saba Habte. During the case transfer, the previous social worker described the case to her, noting that Val had recorded them without permission. The social worker repored that when they spoke to Marie and M, Val constantly involved himself by interjecting and ‘clarifying’ Marie’s and M’s statements, and didn’t allow Marie to sign documents from DCFS. The social worker “stated that in her observation Mr. Broeksmit appears to be controlling and mother goes along with it. … Every time I call the mother, he answers the call. I believe he may have her calls forwarded to his phone.”
Val and Marie seemed to make assumptions about who had made the allegations that the social worker was responding to, and according to the social worker “alluded to wanting to seek retaliation on the reporter.”
On the night of July 29th, Saba Habte and supervising social worker Erasmo Aguilar visited Val and Marie’s apartment, finding Marie away at a friend’s house and Val asleep. After several minutes (DCFS and Val disagreed on how long it took), M woke Val so that he could greet the social workers at the door. They noted Val’s surveillance cameras and said they didn’t consent to being recorded, which Val acknowledged.
Val agreed to let them perform the home inspection and to take a drug test. According to the DCFS report, M “appeared polite and happy” but had disheveled hair and “appeared unkempt.”
The DCFS report describes the apartment as part of the home assessment. According to the social worker, M’s room was “small and cramped” and with “a bed, desk and small closet” and “clothes scattered all over the bed and floor.” Despite pointing out the steep steps to M’s and a messy apartment, the DCFS report conceded that “there were no safety hazards identified.” The note that “the fridge had scarce food” was repeated, with the caveat that “there were plenty of perishable items.”
When the social workers spoke to M, they asked him about the allegations of abuse and he denied them.
When Val eventually described the visit to the FBI, he disagreed with the report on a number of points of varying credibility. According to Val, the social workers didn’t come at 9 PM but an hour and a half later, at 10:30 PM. He also said that it only took two and a half minutes for M to answer the door, and that surveillance footage would confirm this, offering to post the video to YouTube and send it to the FBI. Several days after his meeting with the FBI, Val tweeted a link to a (now-removed) YouTube video that Val alleged “caught the CWS workers smoking weed off camera.” According to an email purporting to be from Stephen to Saba Habte, it was “a 40 minute video of [Saba] and Erasmo talking to Val,” of which Stephen only watched a couple of minutes. Val also contested the statement that there was “scarce” food in the fridge, saying he had receipts showing they had ordered and received groceries just prior to the home assessment.
The next day, the social workers spoke with Stephen about his concerns. According to Stephen, Marie had become “unrecognizable” and there was a history of drug use since 2018, the year before he previously said he became aware of it. Stephen admitted that he hadn’t seen anything personally since Marie had moved downtown, but said that people had told him she was using ketamine, cocaine, and that she smoked opium.
Stephen repeated that Pattil contacted him about her belief that Val and Marie were using crystal meth, adding that she had seen glass pipes in their apartment. According to Stephen, another neighbor had said Val and Marie were ‘well known in the community to be addicts.’ He added that he was worried that M was being influenced against him, and that words were being put in his mouth. Stephen said that M had left him a voicemail accusing him of paying Pattil to lie, which Stephen blamed on Marie.
The next day, an assessment of Stephen’s home found no issues and Stephen agreed to take a drug test the same day.
Several other developments in the case followed that day. First, Val contacted DCFS and told them he wouldn’t take the drug test he had previously agreed to, claiming he felt there were excessive visits and investigation by the social workers and law enforcement and that this constituted harassment. He was told that if he didn’t take the test by 5 PM that day, it would be considered a “dirty test” – a failed drug test. Val didn’t respond until several hours after the deadline had passed, at which point he said he’d consulted with the lawyer and decided to take the test.
Val gave the FBI a different explanation than what he reportedly texted the social workers, initially blaming the refusal to take the drug tests on their lawyer’s instructions. Val also told the FBI that he had agreed to take a drug test, but not at a specific time or on DCFS’ terms. Val claimed to have read online that his doctor could perform the drug test, something that Saba reportedly didn’t allow him to do. Val said that he didn’t understand why a missed drug test would be considered “dirty,” calling it “a bunch of bullshit” and “a lie” that had no explanation other than “that’s just the way it is.” At the end of his summary to the FBI, Val seems to contradict his statement that the refusal to take the drug test was at his lawyer’s instructions.
We’re both ready to go until Thursday night before police come. Okay. And then we’re pissed off. And we’re like, you know what? That’s enough.
That same day, DCFS received allegations against Val and Marie’s neighbor. The allegations were denied and unsubstantiated upon investigation. Based on previous statements by Val and Marie, it appears likely that they were retaliatory in nature. Out of respect for all involved, the details of the allegations will be omitted.
Death of a Babysitter
While this was happening, there were other developments in Val’s and Marie’s lives that would prove momentous, shaping the course of their custody dispute with Stephen and sending Val to the FBI more desperate for help than ever. Within a few days, emergency services would report to their apartment to retrieve the body of their deceased housekeeper and babysitter, Lori Roth. Saba Habte arrived soon after, removing M from Marie’s custody.
As Val explained to the FBI, he and Marie had been looking for someone to clean the house and watch M. Their inquiries resulted in a call from an older woman named Lori Roth, whom Val said he thought had been sent by Pattil, a notion that Marie disagreed with. Val said that he didn’t remember meeting or interviewing her on Tuesday, July 28th, but that Marie had shown him the text messages proving that it had happened.
Val told the FBI that Lori worked on Friday without incident, was paid $80, and went home. She was late the next day because of dental issues, which she was able to document. That day, she reportedly had a pulmonary episode during which her skin became extremely pale, which Val attributed to her having chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Val also told the FBI that she was 60 years old and had been born in 1960, something which is contradicted by the coroner placing her birthday in 1970 and her age as 50.
Curiously, Val said that Marie told him that Lori had taken many of Val’s and M’s personal items, papers, and notes and placed them in trash bags. She allegedly pretended to take them out to the trash, which Val said would have been a cover to steal the materials, some of which were irreplaceable. Val admitted he had no firsthand knowledge of this and made no mention of any security recordings that would have confirmed this, but emphasized that it was very important.
Marie told Val that Lori didn’t want to go home, and asked if she could stay there. Val agreed, and Lori stayed in the room upstairs. When she woke up, she apparently took a bath before cleaning again. Val said that she made frequent trips to her car and always came back in a better mood. He said he assumed that she had been smoking joints. Val asked Marie to get rid of Lori and tell him how much to pay her, which Marie agreed to do.
Val told his FBI handlers that Lori then came into his office area wearing a coat. Lori said she was tired and asked if she could lie down “for a few minutes” before driving home, to which he agreed. She lay down in Val and Marie’s bed and never got up again.
Val explained that they didn’t realize that she had died and had tried to push her awake. Val said it wasn’t until “her face turned” and “it was like a bruise color” that he realized she had died, claiming he’d felt warmth and a pulse in her wrist. Val was thankful that M didn’t see, due in part to encouraging him to watch TV upstairs and in part due to keeping guarding the door that Lori’s corpse was behind to make sure that M didn’t wander in.
It was when Marie finally called the ambulance that, in Val’s words, “all hell broke loose.” As the ambulance arrived around 9:30 AM, Pattil was on the phone with the social worker, Saba Habte. Pattil heard the ambulance and told Saba about it. Val told his FBI handlers he thought this unlikely, saying that “either [Pattil] did not sleep the night before or this is all a lie.” Stephen also came after being contacted, either by Pattil or Saba.
According to Val, others from the complex responded to the commotion, especially the ones who had issues with him and Marie. This included several of his neighbors and the apartment managers. Val accused Pattil of throwing rocks at him and said that when the police came, the apartment manager Ashley Jackson told them that he and Marie were drug users. Another employee at the apartment complex, Stauche, asked to speak with the police in private.
Several days later, Val uploaded a pair of videos of himself physically and verbally confronting Stauche.
According to the DCFS report, the LAPD officer on the scene told Saba Habte that Val and Marie had given conflicting statements about when they met Lori Roth, and that the LAPD suspected “possible foul play and possible drug overdose.” The officer added that Val had told him that Lori Roth had a history of drug issues. LAPD hadn’t located any drugs or paraphernalia and were waiting for the coroner to arrive.
When DCFS spoke to the apartment manager, she described Val and Marie as “squatters” who hadn’t paid rent in nearly a year and were in the process of being evicted before COVID, which court documents confirm. She told DCFS, as Heather seems to have relayed to Marie previously, that Marie’s lease was not renewed due to aforementioned allegations that Val was stealing mail and packages from other tenants. She also indicated that Marie may have been driving under the influence, telling Saba that Marie had driven erratically and almost hit one of the security guards. In a separate incident, Marie allegedly drove a motorbike with M while neither of them wore helmets, and crashed the bike into a wall forcefully enough to damage it. She repeated her concern that Val and Marie were using drugs, adding that “Val is manipulative, controlling, he will not let Marie talk for herself.”
When Saba Habte tried to speak to Marie in private, she found her incoherent and inconsolable. Saba reported that Marie was anxious, unkempt, wearing dark sunglasses, and refused to be separated from Val until he said it was okay. According to Saba, Marie’s “speech was rapid, she was jumpy, and her statements were not making sense.” Marie told Saba that Lori had been recommended, and she “met her through a friend to clean the house.” Marie was unable to provide the name of the cleaning service.
When Saba asked Marie if she had used methamphetamines in the last 24 hours and explained the concerns that there was drug abuse, Marie told Saba that she was being “very aggressive” and called for Val. Marie said she thought Lori had simply been asleep after complaining of tooth pain, and that when Lori died Marie “was in the bed with her” and that she “sat on the edge.”
When speaking to the FBI, Val described the interaction in very different terms. In Val’s telling, Saba screamed at Marie, haranguing her for answers at an inappropriate time. Val told the FBI that he had footage of this, but that he hadn’t reviewed any of it.
When Saba spoke to M and asked if he understood what was happening, he indicated that he didn’t. He said that Lori had “an infection in her tooth” and that Marie and Val had told him “that she’s not dead, she is just having trouble breathing because her tooth infection got into her blood stream,” possibly out of a desire to protect him from the shock of an unexpected death regardless of the actual cause.
M revealingly told Saba that Val and Marie had kept telling him to go back to sleep, first at 8 AM and then again at 9 AM before letting him stay awake at 10 AM. While this is consistent with Val’s statement to the FBI that they kept guard outside the room Lori had died in and that they kept sending M back to his room, it raises the question of when they first discovered Lori wasn’t simply asleep, and why they waited until between 9:30 and 10:00 AM to call an ambulance. According to one document, the call may have been made as late as 1:00 AM.
Val said that when the coroner arrived, “the whole mood changed and all suspicions toward me just sort of dissipated.” Val told the FBI that there was some blood on the sheets, and claimed he was told that “when people die, there’s a blood barrier thing in your nose and the blood drips out the nose.”
The coroner eventually found that Lori Roth’s death was an accident caused by a combination of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and heroin with complications from coronary artery disease.
At around 11:30, after speaking to everyone, Saba Habte decided to have M temporarily removed from Marie’s custody until a hearing could be held. She told Stephen and M about her decision, and that the court hearing would be in a week, on August 10th. As Stephen prepared to leave with M, Val attempted to stop him and demanded to know why M was being removed from Marie’s custody. However, Val had no legal rights to M and was a source of concern for DCFS, so he was simply told that the information was confidential and was only available to members of the family. Val then tried to physically stop Stephen from leaving with M while telling M not to go with Stephen. The DCFS report said that M was frightened by this, and Saba Habte called a police officer over. The officer told Val that he needed to cooperate and leave M and Stephen alone, allowing them to depart.
Val described the events to his FBI handlers similarly, while characterizing them very differently. Val said Stephen was “so sick he’s smiling” when M was being returned to his custody. In Val’s version, Saba’s problem with his behavior had nothing to do with frightening M or everything that had happened that day, but was simply due to Val making her work harder. When the officer intervened, Val unsuccessfully challenged Saba’s identity and authority, saying he didn’t know who she was. (Val had met Saba several days before.)
Val later told the FBI that the event might have been “planned,” a theory he attributed to Rocco Castoro and Marie. Val added that both he and Marie wondered how Saba could have already had a court date ready. (Shortly after, Val admits he doesn’t know how DCFS works.)
Val told the FBI that an important detail was Marie’s reaction after everything had happened and they’d returned to their apartment: she grabbed a blanket and climbed into the bed that Lori Roth had died in. Val said he was surprised at the “coldness” and told her to use it in the future, saying, “You cannot lose your shit like you did today” while dealing with Saba, who Val again described as having “really worked her.”
Desperate Times with the FBI
It was at this moment that Val said he and Marie called the lawyer with the intention of fighting “dirty” and making questionable accusations of abuse.
Saba Habte then reviewed The New York Times article that had been raised by both Val and Stephen, and found a number of descriptions of Val that made him seem unreliable and like a drug user. As Val had said before, he would warn M to stay away from the person described in the article.
She then called the previously mentioned Special Agent Tim Lucey, whose phone number is in the public record, though it remains unknown who gave her the FBI agent’s name. According to DCFS, Lucey told Saba Habte that nothing was generated as a result of Val’s information and that there was no open case on or relationship with Val, and quotes him as saying that Val has a chemical dependency issue.
When Val called and confronted Lucey over the quote, he immediately challenged it. “First of all, I didn’t say you have a chemical dependency problem – I said you admitted to previously having a chemical dependency problem.”
Special Agent Lucey added that he had told DCFS that M appeared to be happy and had a good living space, and agreed with Val that his words had been taken out of context. He said he spoke with two people on a conference call, that Saba was mostly silent, and that he didn’t know they were generating a report from information he shared with them or have a chance to review the report before it was introduced to the court.
Special Agent Lucey then told Val that he made some phone calls to FBI agents in Houston and Los Angeles to try to find people who could help Val, saying that they deal with this sort of thing. Val gladly accepted and was told that he’ll be called by Special Agent David Ko (misidentified first as Kevin and then as David “Ho” in the phone call with Special Agent Lucey).
When Special Agent Ko called Val, he was given “the quick version” and told that Marie’s divorce proceedings have resulted in Stephen launching “a full-on attack” on Val. Val explained this by saying that the divorce proceedings have escalated dramatically and describing Stephen as someone who “would rather see the world burn than lose Marie’s attention.”
Val blamed his problems with the apartment’s building managers and the neighbors on Pattil without going into detail. As he brings up the subject of a housekeeper, presumably Lori Roth, the recording suddenly cuts off.
On August 10th, DCFS produced a report that concluded that M needed to be kept separated from Val and Marie, concluding that there was a “substantial danger” to M and no other reasonable way to protect him. It specifically cited Val’s “paranoid, erratic, and abusive behavior.”
The remotely held hearing didn’t go well for Val and Marie, something Val largely blamed on their lawyer. At one point, he accused their lawyer of throwing them under the bus when Marie lied to the judge and the lawyer contradicted her. Being unrelated to M and Marie, Val had no standing in the case and was not supposed to be in the room while Marie spoke to the judge. Marie lied and said that he wasn’t. According to Val, the lawyer responded to this by telling Marie that she needed to get Val out of the room, which the lawyer may have felt obligated to do either as an officer of the court or to help his client avoid potential perjury or contempt charges.
When he spoke to the FBI, Val blamed a last-minute invite link from the lawyer for Marie using her phone instead of teleconferencing in from a laptop, which Val thought would look better. Val felt that their lawyer wasn’t defending them the way that he wanted and began texting the lawyer during the hearing and trying to tell him what to do. The lawyer responded negatively, telling Val that he was ignoring legal advice and to stop second-guessing him. (Val told the FBI that he wasn’t sure what documents or briefs the lawyer submitted to the judge.)
Val later claimed that their lawyer told Marie that she would have to make a choice between him and M, which Val framed as a threat.
After hearing from Marie, the judge asked to see Val. According to Val, she looked at him for several seconds and without saying anything before ruling that M have no contact with Val and minimal visits with Marie.
Later that day, Val spoke with Special Agent Ko on the phone again. During the call, Val updated Special Agent Ko about the case and revisited a recurring theme in Val’s misunderstanding of the DCFS and civil courts by asserting that there was no due process. Ko responded by explaining the different standards of evidence – that criminal cases need evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, while civil cases only require a preponderance of evidence. Val responded by saying that there was no evidence at all, disregarding the multiple witness statements by DCFS, law enforcement, Stephen, building management, and neighbors.
Special Agent Ko told Val that they’d talk more on Wednesday, when Val was going to tell them more about the situation and the FBI would figure out if they could help him then.
The Meeting
While Barrett Brown’s My Glorious Defeats placed Val’s meeting with the FBI in December 2020, several other pieces of information indicate that it took place on August 12, 2020. First, the date is reflected in his FBI file. Second, the Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine was approved on August 11, 2020 and is mentioned by Val in the audio as happening the day before the meeting. Third, Val specifically references it being August 12th. Barrett may place the meeting in December because that is when Val told Barrett about meeting with Special Agent Ko and swore him to secrecy.
A great deal of scene-setting could be spent on August 12th – on how Marie dropped Val off and briefly met Special Agent Ko, on Val’s nervous energy, on how he made his way through security and tried to impress and connect with the FBI agents in the room. Dissecting the references to 1984 and Star Trek would be more indulgent than revealing, and the FBI’s decision to let Val in with a recording device, while a mistake, was deliberate – they wanted to examine his phone. The greatest mistake was, in spite of the warning signs, trusting him enough to believe that he wouldn’t set it to covertly record them.
For those who wish to listen to the complete four and a half-hour audio, it is embedded below while transcripts can be found here. The article continues below.
After they reached the meeting room and got Val settled, Val told them that it was too thrilling and he couldn’t take it anymore. Asking for permission to guess what the meeting was about, Val told the FBI he didn’t think it was about banking, but rather: “I think it has something to do with Emma.” Val then tried to divine if he was right or not based on the direction the FBI agent’s eyes moved, which led to a debate about deception detection.
The first portion of the meeting was dedicated to recounting the custody battle and events in Val’s life so far, which have been previously described and excerpted. About an hour into the meeting, Val “joked” about recording the meeting with the FBI, then about hacking the meeting from the FBI’s cloud.
As Val finished lamenting the legal problems and lawyer fees he and Marie were facing in the custody battle over M, he asked if the FBI could help. In his words, while they were gauging him, he was gauging them. The FBI agents responded that it’s a difficult situation, and they couldn’t just send an FBI lawyer to represent him, but that it was possible they might be able to get him money. However, secrecy was paramount. In the words of one of the FBI agents, “That’s the only way that we can do it.”
The FBI agents suggested that while they couldn’t change anything that’d already happened, including past statements by DCFS, they could help Val and Marie look like suitable parents with the investigator in the future.
One of the FBI agents told Val that “there’s no evidence that the FBI is helping you or, you know, if we give you money to do that, that’s just cash that you have, right? So all those things are ways that we can help your view in the courts’ eyes.”
As the conversation began to turn to what Val can do for the FBI, he asked the FBI agents about their own skill sets and where and how they learned things. Apparently impressed, Val asked about apprenticing with one of the FBI agents.
When one of the FBI agents asked Val if he knew anything about ransomware, he said that he did before revealing that he had no familiarity with it. Val said that it “doesn’t seem like a difficult thing to break.” Val explained that “it’s gotta be localized on the computer and you can isolate it. If you take the computer offline, it’s not like a self-destruct button where all of a sudden your computer’s gone dead – you can isolate the fucking hack. It’s just like anything, you know, any virus.” A moment later, Val admitted that he didn’t know much about it.
Val then exaggerated the scope of a security problem arising from Intel cache issues, invoked the widely debunked hundredth monkey effect, and said that while he couldn’t code, he could use other people’s programs and his skills were in social engineering.
Val then revealed his ignorance of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, claiming in rapid succession:
- He could find stolen money and money laundering
- He knew how to, then corrected himself to say that he knew people that knew how to trace — “like a reverse trace” — where Bitcoin goes after it reaches a wallet
- That he knew how to do it, but not what it’s called – but he wanted to know what the terms are
The FBI agents told him that’s not how it works, and that the ledger is open. Fumbling with his words, Val insisted that “it’s not that simple.” The FBI agents changed the subject to what information and people Val had access to, specifically journalists.
During the following ten minutes, Val described several exchanges he’d had with people online, some fruitful and some suspicious. One of the exchanges he found more suspicious was with a personality called KayserSozeBro1, who Val felt was feeding him a combination of real and disinformation. A recording of their phone call had been uploaded in May 2020, and is embedded below.
When the FBI asked Val if he was “involved in any hacking groups” or if there were any that he could get into, Val responded by suggesting that the FBI had already found their way into a Signal group run by Barrett Brown. The group had recently had some new identities join that Val said he thought were “either FBI, or it was like, some spies or something.” Val said there was actually more than one group, but that the main group was made up of “some of the greatest journalists, and some of the greatest hackers, and some of the greatest activists, some of the greatest writers, you know, and some just fucking fine, interesting people.” Val denied that it was specifically a hacking group.
Val explained that when he heard that Ko was from Houston, his first thought was that they were after Barrett. While Barrett’s association with Texas is understandable, the Houston Field Office is separate from the Dallas Field Office that had jurisdiction over the Dallas-native Barrett, and which handled Barrett’s case previously. The FBI agents told Val that Barrett was on the radar because of his arrest ten years before.
If the agents were there for a particular case, there is every chance that it was for the BlueLeaks investigation. FOIA documents reveal that the BlueLeaks investigation was being led by the FBI’s Houston Field Office, with support from FBI Los Angeles (where the meeting with Val was taking place) and additional resources coming from the Fusion Center Cyber Squads. According to Val’s heavily redacted FBI file, his notes were taken by a task force officer.
Regardless of whether Ko being from Houston indicated anything, or if they were interested in Barrett, or if he was simply infamous due to threatening an FBI agent, they followed up on Val’s two invocations of Barrett. “What’s Barrett up to? Do you talk to him?” Val proceeded to describe Barrett and their relationship. Val was frustrated that Barrett hadn’t done what he was “supposed to,” which Val blamed on Barrett’s then on-going drug use. But despite being “very pissed off” with Barrett, Val called him a good guy and considered Barrett a kindred spirit, saying they were both on a “vengeful path.”
When the FBI agents asked where Barrett is, Val asked if they really wanted to know. Unsatisfied with the response that they were just asking, Val pressed the FBI agents for why they were asking. “If I’m going to take the accountability of doing something to somebody here, I’m going to get someone in trouble or put in jail, I would like to know who it is, why I’m doing it, and what for it.”
The FBI agents gave him a seemingly honest answer – they were going to stonewall Val.
I get it, I mean, I’ll tell you this right now, I can’t tell you everything we do, right? Like I said, I’ll be honest with you as much as you’re going to be honest with me. I can’t tell you the motivation behind every single question I ask, because there’s a lot of things that the FBI does, like if we had an investigation into whatever, I don’t know, call it Barrett Brown, for example. And you wanted to know why, and it’s because, oh, we’re going to arrest him tomorrow, right? And then you don’t say, hey, Barrett, by the way, the FBI’s going to fuck you tomorrow. It probably wouldn’t go well for us, right?
Val told the FBI that he wasn’t going to give them Barrett, and that if it was part of a vendetta he didn’t want any part in it. The FBI agents dismissed that and said they were just there to assess what information Val had, emphasizing the distinction between Houston and Dallas. Val then claimed to know “Jeremy Hammond, Gregg Housh, all the guys, all these people.” While Val may have known Gregg through Barrett Brown, it’s very unlikely that he knew Jeremy Hammond, who had been arrested in 2012 and would not be released from prison until November, several months later.
After the FBI once again explained that it would be a one-way street of information, Val said that if he was “going to be accountable for someone’s life” he wanted to be able to think about it. They all understood and agreed that everything he told them was voluntary.
Immediately after he told them that there were things he wouldn’t do, Val seemed to contradict himself and said he would blindly follow orders if it was what it took to “save M.” Surprisingly, Val’s FBI handlers told him that he should make the same decisions before and after things are resolved with M, and hypothetically take M out of the situation. Val said that it would depend on the FBI agents themselves, but that since they had been sent to him by the agents he had already worked with he felt like they weren’t “bad apples.” The FBI agents tried to assure Val that they did the job “for the right reasons.”
When the FBI told Val that they needed to assess what information he had, he immediately brought up DDoSecrets and the OCCRP. In just under two minutes, Val made several false and exaggerated claims. From consistently forgetting the “R” in OCCRP, to overstating the access that OCCRP had to DDoSecrets’ library, to conflating DDoSecrets’ searchable archive (the Hunter Memorial Library) with the main library and restricted libraries, Val talked himself up and even claimed to have admin access to OCCRP, a claim he seemed to walk back. Asked for comment, the OCCRP responded that Val’s claims were “really inaccurate.”
During this exchange, Val additionally brought up the government’s targeting of DDoSecrets, the warrantless seizure of DDoSecrets server in Germany, and myself by first name. The FBI agents’ follow-up revealed their immediate familiarity and interest by asking about me, using both my first and last name.
Who’s Emma Best and why is she important?
Val responded that he didn’t think I was important (this is objectively correct), and falsely said that I claimed to have been part of the CIA – a conspiracy theory I’ve loudly mocked since at least 2019, while also acknowledging the reality of my past work. The FBI asked Val if Emma Best was my real name (it is), to which he responded that he didn’t know, and that he had been trying to figure out the specifics of my gender and transition, but “not, you know, in any pejorative manner,” he assured the FBI. (May you never have to hear informants and cops speculate about your gender.)
This level of familiarity and curiosity is consistent with what’s known of the government’s investigation at the time. Two weeks earlier, three agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) had visited an activist who had discussed BlueLeaks online, offering money to become an informant against me. According to emails released by HSI, three weeks later they remained unsure of where I lived and were monitoring a legal defense fund launched in response to the investigation.
After Val proceeded to complain about my wife, speculating about their gender and claiming that being overwhelmed by work and our family being targeted by an overzealous federal investigation somehow constituted a scam, Val began attempting to implicate me in crimes while contradicting himself and getting basic, public facts wrong. First, Val claimed that he had hacked Deutsche Bank, something he immediately admitted wasn’t true in any real sense of the word.
I felt like I hacked Deutsche Bank, although I didn’t hack Deutsche Bank, I felt like I did a pretty good job of hacking it, not directly, I didn’t go into their servers and do it, but I fucking hacked that bank. And it, well, not maybe in the sense of a hacker, you probably, if you’re a proper hacker, you would not see it.
Val brought this up in the context of a leak of data from the Cayman National Bank and Trust (Isle of Man), a hack which has been widely attributed to Phineas Fisher, aka Subcowmandante Marcos, who Val bizarrely and baselessly claimed had a LulzSec affiliation. Alongside the release, Phineas Fisher announced a $100,000 hacktivist bounty which Val decided to ask for.
Because DDoSecrets had published the leak, Val had sent me a message asking me to help get him the money, something which I refused to get involved in for legal reasons which should be self-evident. I had told Val that he could contact Phineas Fisher using the publicly available information and ask himself, but that I doubted he would be given anything due to the fact that he hadn’t actually hacked Deutsche Bank, something he had admitted to me at the time.
Talking to the FBI, Val argued that my refusal to get involved meant that I was the hacker, forgetting or omitting my actual reasoning for declining to get involved. Val then admitted to trying to entrap me, telling the FBI that he had asked me to hack David Enrich. While I don’t remember that particular request, Val certainly asked me to hack other people, something I also refused to have any involvement in.
When the FBI agents asked Val if he thought I was or had been a government employee, he said no – but repeated that he thought I was a hacker. Val’s evidence this time? I had recommended ElcomSoft, a piece of commercial forensic software, when he asked for help recovering data from his phone.
With no apparent sense of irony, Val then complained to the FBI agents that my wife and I had called him an informant both publicly and privately. He first described a private confrontation where, in the aftermath of HSI’s attempt to recruit informants against me, I asked him if he had spoken to the FBI about me. Val denied that he had, and claimed that he would tell me if he did. As Val told the FBI, when I called him a known informant, he responded by going on a tirade and saying, “Fuck you, I’m not an informant. I’m a source, like, help the FBI. I do not inform on anybody.” (Note: I am unable to precisely place this discussion on the timeline, but estimate it was during the last week of July or first week of August.)
Val then complained about a similar instance where my wife publicly called him an informant, prompting his friend Andrew to defend him. Val later recommended the FBI attempt to recruit Andrew.
When he asked, the FBI agents told Val that their interests were largely unrestricted at the moment and included “everything.” Val said that that was great and that he’d “like to catch people,” adding that he was better versed in financial things than cyber matters. Realizing that Val was losing steam after nearly three hours, the FBI agents decided to take a break. As they began to adjourn from the more active discussion, Val told the agents that he had “no allegiance” to the people he had been working with, whom he considered “sort of friends” at most.
As Val showed the FBI some of the people in Barrett’s Signal group, he drew attention to Joe Fionda and his role in The Hacker Wars documentary. (Coincidentally, in mid-August 2017, Fionda had provided the Department of Justice with a document cache focused on the Russian propaganda outlet Sputnik, Cassandra MacDonald, Lee Stranahan, and the Russian persona Guccifer 2.0.) Val said he admired Fionda’s activism, which he contrasted with himself, saying that he didn’t believe anything that strongly.
Val then brought up his aforementioned friend Andrew, who had defended Val against accusations of being an informant. Val extolled Andrew’s investigatory skills, which were described in a 2017 Bloomberg article; during the meeting, Val said that Andrew would probably work with the FBI, and that he — in fact — thought Andrew was already working with the FBI or CIA. Val agreed to ask Andrew about putting him in touch with the FBI. A tweet later posted by Marie’s account appeared to attribute this to Rocco Castoro, after his falling out with Val.
As Val described his life to the FBI agents and how he taught himself hacking and finance, he described the perceived virtues of controlling and/or suppressing emotion through either self-control or drugs. Val called it “the greatest freedom.”
After Val asked the FBI about “Casanovas,” spies and undercover officers who Val said used their role to sleep with people, the FBI agents denied being familiar with it (though something similar has been a scandal in the United Kingdom). A few minutes later, one of the FBI agents brought up the “going dark” debate around cryptography and seemed to concede that the government shouldn’t be given a “front door” to encryption systems, and that it simply needed to adapt.
Like, for example, this whole encryption key battle, we’ve had previous leaders talk about what do you need to give up the encryption key? But we all kind of know philosophically, that’ll never, and that shouldn’t happen.
Val repeatedly asked the FBI agents if he would be allowed to break the law for them. He described several scenarios, including what seem to be plausible deniability scenarios where he might break the rules for the FBI by hacking something with unofficial permission, or without telling them the details.
I’m sure you have people like this in your agency, where other agencies have the same types, where you find an outside person like myself, that you hire basically to break the rules, but you don’t say to break the rules. You need someone that – you don’t do that? No? Okay.
The FBI agents shut down each of these suggestions, saying they would use warrants and existing procedures to gain legal access to a bank’s servers. It’s during this exchange that the FBI agents told Val that a lot of things he thought about the FBI actually weren’t true, to which Val agreed that he had been learning a lot.
When the FBI agents briefly brought Barrett back up and asked if he was doing anything illegal, Val said no and dismissed him as “a rabble-rouser” who was “high a lot” and was more a cause of worry for his friends than someone who was taken seriously.
Val told the FBI that he was the only one in Barrett’s Signal group who was talking about actually hacking, and again referenced his unsuccessful attempts to entrap me by asking me for help with hacking people.
Val told the FBI agents that people in Barrett’s signal group had been interested in who was “behind Lulz,” which Val claimed was “the abbreviated version of LulzSec.” Val repeated his baseless theory that there was a connection between LulzSec and the hack of the Cayman National Bank and Trust, and again attempted to implicate me in the hack. This time, Val argued that the hacker wasn’t a native Spanish speaker, citing Marie’s translation of the writing, and that he thought I had similar political beliefs to those in the manifesto.
Val made it clear, however, that his main reason for accusing me was my prompt refusal to get involved in the hacktivist ransom.
On the subject of BlueLeaks, Val correctly said that I had nothing to do with the hack. Val admitted that he had no evidence for this, and demonstrated that he had no understanding of how the hack had happened. A week after the mid-August meeting, details of the hack would be reported, completely contradicting what Val had proposed. However, even initial reporting was enough to contradict Val’s speculation about how the hack happened.
Val then claimed that I had insisted he relay information to the FBI agents he had worked with previously, and that he had an email which showed as much. In reality, Val had repeatedly begged me to let him provide the FBI with a copy of the Formation House data after Barrett had let him into the initial research group. I said no, but Val kept insisting; eventually his behavior convinced me that he would do whatever he wanted and give them the full data regardless. As a compromise, I gave him permission to provide them with Formations House’s client list. I told him that if there were concerns about any of them, such as terrorism investigations, the client list would act as a form of warning to them. Since the Formations House project had already been announced publicly by Barrett, its existence could not be compromised, and it seemed like a minimal risk to take in the hopes that Val wouldn’t compromise things more.
Val had asked for an email with the data giving him permission, which raised my suspicions further. I remember writing the email to him and emphasizing in the first line that it was at his insistence. The rest of the email consisted of instructions about what parts of the project he wasn’t allowed to discuss or provide, and that he wasn’t allowed to mention any unrelated projects to them. An authentic copy of the email mentioned by Val would be DKIM signed and begin with a note that it was at his request, and end with a note limiting what he was allowed to tell the FBI.
When he spoke to the FBI in August 2020, he either misrepresented or misremembered events, incorrectly saying that I’d wanted to help the FBI when I’d actually been eager to contain the damage Val could do and find out what happened as a result of his actions. Val’s FBI handlers expressed interest in the email and asked for a copy of it.
As their meeting began to wrap up, the FBI agents asked Val about the Signal groups again and Val told them that people would start different groups, including himself. Some groups were essentially star chambers, in Val’s words, or “beat-down rooms,” as one FBI agent put it. Louise Mensch was the target of one room, and David Enrich had been another planned target.
Val claimed to know an FSB agent, or possibly a former FSB agent, named Dmitri, which the FBI agents seemed interested in.
When the FBI agents said that they were going to focus on making sure that the investigators saw the right things when it came to Val and Marie, Val said he was worried that it might not be enough. He suggested that the FBI try to sanction DCFS, and go after them for what he saw as lies.
Val’s last resort, before the FBI got involved, had been to use Barrett’s Signal groups for help and to target his enemies.
However, one of the FBI agents was able to explain to Val that he was better off working with his lawyer to understand the rules of the system and use them to his advantage.
So the thing would be, if your attorney also sees that there’s this corrupt system where the judge is in bed with everyone else, they may be able to change a venue. They may be to do something. But they would have that knowledge, right?
Val said that he had hoped the FBI would help him tear down the system, and that he still hoped to do that at some point. For the moment, however, he said he would play by the rules.
As the meeting finally ended after four and a half long hours, the FBI agents explained that its main purpose had been to assess what Val’s access and skills were, and what his needs were, a process which would require follow-up within the Bureau.
Today was just to assess what kind of access you have, or what kind of skills you have. So what I’ll do is I’ll write this up and ask around, like maybe there’s someone who might call a crime who has, you know, a need for something that you can help with, and then I’ll find them and say, hey, this is what he’s got, this is the skills he has, this is the access he has. That’s all based on what we’ve said today. That’s why if there’s anything else that you have access to, or crimes that you’re aware of, all those things are useful, because then we can use that to say, okay, this person can use you…
Later that day, Marie spoke to Agent Ko on a recorded phone call. Agent Ko assured Marie that Val would be safe and that if she was ever worried and unable to reach him she could call Ko. He impressed on her the need for secrecy, and the importance of the work that Val would be doing. As the call drew to a close, Val and Marie told Agent Ko that if he missed his flight, he was welcome to come to their apartment.
Over the next month and a half, events seemed to progress slowly. By the end of September, FBI Agent Boeing Shih had left Rocco Castoro a pair of voicemail messages, having apparently gotten his information from Val. Rocco said he returned the second voicemail after confirming that Shih was affiliated with the FBI and told him that he wasn’t interested in being a source. Tweets posted by Marie’s account after falling out with Rocco accuse him of providing information to Agent Shih.
A week later, Val had his final known pair of recorded interactions with Agent Ko of the FBI. Although the exact date for the first recording is difficult to place, it is presumed to have taken place on the same day or shortly before the recording of the second phone call which followed up on the first. As such, based on the available metadata, it is believed that both conversations took place on approximately October 6th.
When Val’s phone call begins with Agent Ko, he starts by telling Ko about a credit card scammer who offered to hire him and that he had turned down the work. According to Val, the person had claimed to earn up to $300,000 a month at one point, but was just one part of the food chain. By Val’s own description, some of the initial information he offered Ko came from an unreliable source. The most revealing part of the initial exchange was that Val believed that it was connected to the fraud scheme Andrew had uncovered years before. Most interestingly, Val says that this was why he had introduced Andrew to Agent Ko, something that Ko lets pass without remark.
Val went on to explain that he thought that Representative Curt Weldon was involved, and that the scheme involved helping Russians bypass sanctions and work in the United States through lobbying and by somehow helping the Russians claim that they were Native Americans and working on reservations.
At one point, Val said that he was losing money in the stock market.
After his computer shut down suddenly, Val asked Agent Ko if the FBI would buy him a laptop if he worked for the FBI. Ko replied that Val’s ask came with “a lot of ifs,” highlighting Val’s status as a source and informant rather than an employee.
While Val was talking to Ko, his phone died, suddenly stopping the call. He continued to talk to himself: “Um, are you still there? Oh, I just got a missed call from you. What the hell? Oh, my phone died. Shit. I’m talking to myself now. Hold on. I mean, why am I telling you to hold on? You’re not even on the phone? All right.” Soon after, a bag rustles. Val begins crushing something, then sniffing. A blowtorch or jet lighter ignites, followed by the sounds of a glass pipe being smoked. More than two minutes after the phone call with Agent Ko had ended, Val — finally — stops recording himself.
When Agent Ko returned Val’s call, Val began to tell him about the various things he’s become involved in, focusing largely on a business venture sponsored by John Porter. Porter was a former law enforcement officer who had become “a very renowned, well-known” private investigator, and who wanted to buy surveillance technology from Val. Val described a piece of tech called an O.MG cable, which he claimed would “automatically dump an entire phone” once he did “a little tweak on it.” Agent Ko, however, was immediately skeptical.
According to Val, he had impressed his private investigator enough that the PI had offered to work for him and Marie in exchange for one of Marie’s paintings, one of the O.MG cables, and a phone that Val claimed could clone another phone by simply being near it. Agent Ko was again skeptical, telling Val that “it’s not as simple as, like, I put my phone next to yours and it steals everything.”
However, Val was insistent that it was and told Agent Ko that he had seen just such a device perform in 2015. Val claimed that they could do it more easily now, though he seemed unsure of the details. He asked Agent Ko about the different protocols, and seemed to suggest that process involved NFC, RFID, Bluetooth and WiFi. Agent Ko was neither impressed nor convinced.
I think the claim that you’re making might be conflated with other data that might also be present. There might be a lot of other things that also have to happen in order for this thing to work.
After a little more pressing, Val conceded that he had been wrong and it wasn’t able to clone everything. Agent Ko pressed, pointing out that this had been obvious.
The reason why I know that that’s not true is because just based on data throughput alone. Like you say you have a regular iPhone that’s like 64 gigs. You know like 64 gigs with the data just transfer that data alone, not via either type wirelessly. I mean at best at best you’re gonna get like 10 15 megabytes per second. And that’s if you’re like burning through it and you’re like phone to phone. 10 to 15 megabytes per second think about that it takes forever to get 64 gigs.
When Agent Ko pointed out that it was impossible for the phones to connect via WiFi the way Val suggested, Val said that Ko’s debunking allegedly “confirmed” that Val was right and it was Bluetooth. While Ko remained skeptical and called it “total bullshit where someone is just scamming other pretend hackers,” Val was adamant that it was real. However, Agent Ko pointed out that even if it was real, it was a theoretical vulnerability – not something for the FBI to investigate unless it was being used in a crime.
Val was undeterred, however, and told Agent Ko that his private investigator wanted to finance Val’s resale of the O.MG cables, claiming he knew “a thousand people that will spend a thousand dollars” on the cables, which ordinarily sold for $20 at the time.
Val explained that his private investigator introduced him to Diana, who needed help with a Russian who apparently had videos that Val believed was of an FSB officer because he had “16 phones.” Val believed that he was connected to a Russian hacker named “Ruslan,” with the recording ending before it can become clear who Val is referring to, and if he is mixing the details of different cases.
In the following days, Val posted recordings of himself calling Stephen’s parents in Australia, and of interacting with the DCFS investigators. Both were eventually removed from SoundCloud and reported to the court as inappropriate and abusive. At around the same time, notes from Val’s August 12th meeting with the FBI were submitted, and about a month later additional interview notes were added to his file by an unknown task force officer.
On December 8th, the courts held another hearing in the custody case, during which they scheduled a further hearing for the following month and issued a bench warrant for Special Agent Lucey to appear. (Like the DCFS report, the court document spells his name “Luccy” instead of “Lucey” as it appears in state records and on LinkedIn.) On the 11th, Val messaged Barrett that he had been “called into a special meeting at the federal building” with Special Agent David Ko. Val told Barrett that they needed to talk, asking that he keep the information to himself. Barrett promised Val that he would, until nearly a year later when he posted a screenshot of the exchange.
Death of a Banker’s Son
That winter, Val and Marie were “broke as shit” and began looking into cryptocurrency as a way to make money. (While Wired simply places this as winter 2021, tweets by Val show that he was using cryptocurrency in late 2020.) Before long, Val’s Binance account was locked, and after multiple support tickets were unable to resolve the problem he turned to Twitter. Still, months later Val tweeted that they still owed him a lot of Bitcoin.
By that April, the stage was set for Val’s life to irrevocably change as it entered its final year. On the 4th, he uploaded the previously discussed audio of himself as a podcast, Marie and Rocco Castoro reviewing and discussing The Daily podcast recording. The Spotify for Creators page for the podcast contained a link to another website run by Val, Intelespion.com. The typo-ridden website, which is credited to Val Broeksmit and his company LCDI Inc., claimed to use a “proprietary A.I.” and that the company “watch[ed] the watchmen” by subcontracting with former agents from CIA, FBI, FSB, Interpol, NSA, and MI6.
On April 5th, Rocco Castoro sent an email to Los Angeles County Superior Court Commissioner Padilla which summarized many of the events in Val’s recent case. About four hours later, Val sent Rocco an email praising the writing and “polite threat.” Screenshots of both emails were later posted online. Recently asked about it, Rocco said that his email was sent at Val and Marie’s urging.
What happened next has been the subject of considerable debate and deception, and several conspiracy theories. On April 6th, Val went “missing” and was last officially seen around 4 PM after dropping off Marie to play tennis at Griffith Park. Val didn’t return to pick Marie up, and she notified police on the 7th after GPS reportedly notified her that the car Val was last seen in was in a warehouse district of downtown Los Angeles. Tweets by Marie’s account later claimed she had notified every agency she could and that she had filed a missing persons report, but that the report and all records of her calls and conversations were lost.
Social media posts later focused on reporting by the Beverly Press that the LAPD Detective’s unawareness of Val’s more recent meetings with the FBI, which would add to the speculation that his disappearance was connected to his work with the FBI, Congress, or various journalists. In reality, the conspiracy had been hatched and executed by Val, with one of the earliest hints coming from the same article, which reported that:
[Marie] surmised that Broeksmit’s disappearance is somehow connected to a custody battle involving her son, but said she has no concrete evidence. She said she lost custody of her 9-year-old son to her ex-husband, and her relationship with Broeksmit was and remains a contentious part of the custody battle. She said Broeksmit spoke to a case worker from the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services on the day he disappeared, and she thinks he may have been upset over prospects of her regaining custody of her son.
A Twitter thread posted by Marie’s account two days before the Beverly Press’ article was printed appears to offer some corroboration for this narrative, if the posts can be believed. According to the tweets, Val left a folder on his computer labeled “Marie,” containing a single audio file of a recorded phone call between Marie and their former lawyer, Mike Kretzmer. The phone call was allegedly recorded the day before Val’s meeting with the FBI and was briefly described by him during the meeting. The call reportedly included Kretzmer telling Marie that Val needed to go because DCFS was “concerned that Val’s situation, his past problems, [and] actions” were interfering with her capacity to parent, and that Val had been a bad influence.
Val appears to have directly admitted that his so-called disappearance was motivated by the custody and divorce proceedings, writing in private messages posted online after his death that he did it to help “Marie & her 9 year old escape [sic] her abusive soon/to/be ex-husband.” In the private messages, Val also linked to a Twitter thread posted from Marie’s account which indicated his alleged disappearance was motivated by the custody dispute. In the same tweet, Marie said that Val told her to “call on the Court of public opinion.” Tweets posted by Val the next year similarly invoked the dispute and said it was the reason he “ran.” As he later described the reasoning for his plan, “if I am gone, they won’t be able to mention me in court.”
By April 12th, there was no official missing persons report for Val with the LAPD. Rocco Castoro has recently said that he recalls calling the LAPD on the 12th, which may account for the missing persons report listing this as the day he was last seen. However, the LAPD press release lists the more consistent April 6th date as Val’s last known sighting. There do not appear to have been public references to Val being allegedly missing until April 13th when it was announced by Rocco Castoro and Scot Steadman on Twitter. Marie’s Twitter account later claimed that on the same day, police stopped her, searched her car, forced her to do repeated field sobriety tests, and allegedly made comments implying they had been sent for her. The missing persons report with the LAPD appears to have been officially filed the next day.
Over the next few weeks, Val remained officially missing while colleagues and internet sleuths spread the word that he was missing and asked the public for leads to his whereabouts. Meanwhile, word quietly spread that Val might not be missing.
A source who was close to the family and has asked not to be named relayed word at the time that Val had been variously spotted and heard around the Artist Brewery Lofts, and claimed that a photograph confirmed it. On April 30th, Val’s account uploaded and tweeted the audio recording of himself and Nick Summers, which Marie said had been set up on a timer. A week later, on May 6th, Rocco Castoro tweeted that he had confirmed that Val was alive and in touch with his family’s representative.
By July, Val’s relationship with Rocco had deteriorated considerably. The metadata for the FBI audio files indicate they were last modified on July 3rd after having been reportedly given to Rocco days before Val’s alleged disappearance. On the same day, Barrett posted a tweet that said Agent Ko should contact him “within 48 hours to discuss our missing mutual friend” before leaving Barrett alone. By the next day, things had changed irrevocably for Val.
On July 4th, Val emailed Rocco asking him to strip references to the FBI agents, specifically Tim Lucey, from his social media accounts “with extreme immediacy.” Rocco refused, and on the same day Barrett began posting the first public excerpts from the FBI audio recordings. In posts from the 5th, he promised to release the full audio later, writing that it would “appear via press and lawsuits on a slow-burn timetable.” Two days later, a report generated from open source information was added to Val’s FBI file, almost certainly in response to the audio recordings. If Barrett hadn’t had the FBI’s attention before, he had gotten it.
Meanwhile, Val’s relationships continued to crumble. By July 13th, Rocco and Val were engaged in a heated email thread, parts of which would later be posted online. Rocco was angry at Val for his alleged disappearance, writing that “not only did others not help me, they actively worked against me. I was lied to repeatedly, by you and Marie, and used as a bargaining chip in others’ business.” Val sent Rocco a lengthy and furious reply, which Marie’s Twitter account later posted online and claimed to have sent. The version posted by Marie redacts information which would identify the sender of the email, though it does show that the email was forwarded to Marie before she posted screenshots of it. An unredacted albeit incomplete version of the email posted by Rocco, as well as the email’s references to Marie in the third person and Val in the first person, confirms that the email was actually sent by Val.
Val’s email called Rocco a stalker with a “need to be seen and heard” who was equally fixated on himself and Barrett. Val accused Rocco of having hurt himself, Marie, and M through his “selfish actions.” Val proceeded to fire Rocco and attempted to revoke his consent for Rocco to use his image and likeness before claiming that he never signed a consent form. Val claimed that he had proof of this: an unsigned copy of the consent form. Anything that had his signature, Val insisted, would be “an obvious forgery.” The email ended with a threat to release recordings of “the mad rants of the disturbed Rocco Castoro.”
The next day, Rocco posted screenshots he had been sent of messages from Marie where she accused Val of being abusive. In the messages, Marie wrote that she had been crying all night and felt unable to stop Val’s animosity and verbal attacks. In addition to verbally denigrating her, Marie said that Val blamed her for what David Enrich had written, had lost respect for her, and was “done” with her. Tweets posted by Marie’s account denied the screenshots were real and accused Rocco of “toxic misogynistic hate speech.” (The screenshots were later verified by Marie and the person she originally sent them to.)
Two days later, Val confirmed to Scott Stedman that he was home. Word quickly spread, along with doubt that Val had ever been missing. By November, Val had begun openly tweeting as himself, despite remaining technically missing.
While the precise timeline remains unclear, according to posts by Val and reporting by Wired, around this time Val was busy minting custom cryptocurrency tokens on the now-defunct Incognito Wallet, investing the money he did have into it, and attempting to manipulate the market to make the tokens valuable. December came and went with no signs of success, but on January 9th Val opened his wallet and found a balance of $1,112,172,834.
But Val was unable to liquidate his newfound riches, and couldn’t transfer his Parsec (PRSC), Bikini Robot Army (BRA), or Drone Algo Red 41 (DRONEALGO) tokens. Val’s attempts to cash out his new found riches always resulted in the error message: “No trade route found.” Wired replicated the error when attempting to transfer some of the tokens gifted by Val off of Incognito Wallet. Val knew that the valuation must be wrong, acknowledging to Wired that there was nothing close to that in the liquidity pools. But he thought he could find a way to keep it, he told Wired; that mistake “was when I became just like everybody else. That was my tragic, stupid error. I got greedy.”
On January 13th, Val declared himself “the wealthiest individual non-corporate pecuniary entity in the world” and announced that he was “giving it all away – with the exception of the bits I’m keeping for myself.” Val’s plan was to “get everyone to complain until they do something about it,” as he described it. “Then everyone’s gonna be happy and everybody wins.” While he gave the tokens away on Twitter, he encouraged people to report it to Incognito support if the error didn’t stop. On the 14th, Val posted a tweet calling the issue with liquidating his tokens “bordering on illegal and infuriating.”
On the 15th, Val sent me a Twitter DM about “a new data leak & dissemination,” which I neither responded to nor acknowledged.
February saw Incognito crack down on Val’s tokens as their value dropped by 80% in a matter of days, followed by Incognito announcing a new review policy to verify custom tokens. Val furiously and baselessly accused Incognito of being a Russian operation, while Wired’s Gian Volpicelli was unable to find “evidence of any ties between Incognito and Russia.” By mid-February, Incognito’s community manager Jared Maxwell explained that the valuation on the tokens was based on the number of tokens and their trading history. With the token’s entire trading history having been manipulated by Val, the algorithm had produced values that were as absurd as they were hypothetical.
By February 19th, Val’s wallet balance had reached zero. His custom tokens were worthless, and he had lost everything he and Marie had invested. People he had paid with his custom tokens were angry with him, and things were about to get worse for the couple: on the 23rd, the court ruled against them in the eviction case.
On March 8th, Val sent me another Twitter DM asking for access to restricted data on DDoSecrets. Like before, I never acknowledged or responded to his message and he wasn’t given access to the data he asked for.
On the 15th, Val and Marie were served with the eviction notice and by the 31st, they had been evicted from their apartment, having seemingly abandoned hundreds of paintings, musical instruments, books, comics, and other possessions in the apartment, which were auctioned off after Val’s death and Marie’s disappearance.
On April 5th, Val called Gian Volpicelli and told him that he and Marie had been going to sneak back into their old apartment when Marie had disappeared, simply saying that “she’s gone.” Four days later, Val returned to the apartment complex alone and removed an AC unit from the wall, crawled through the hole in the wall, and replaced the AC unit. One of the tenants saw him and called the police, who searched Val’s vehicle and found a “ghost gun (a privately made firearm that lacks a commercially applied serial number, rendering the weapon untraceable).”
Another four days later, on April 13th, Val returned and once again broke into the apartment complex. LAPD returned and the next day the Brewery Artist Complex filed a petition for a restraining order against Val, citing “a continuing pattern of unlawful and harassing conduct occurring over a significant period,” according to VICE.
On April 23rd, Gian Volpicelli received a text message from Val’s number that said, “Marie has been found and now we need to find Val who is missing.” When he asked who sent the message, he received no answer. California’s Department of Justice listed this as Marie’s last date of contact before she went missing again. According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, her date of last contact was April 28th. No explanation has been identified for this contradiction, and Marie was eventually removed from both systems.
On April 25th, Val was found dead. At around 7 AM, employees arriving at Woodrow Wilson Senior High School in northeast Los Angeles found him unresponsive in a dark-colored shirt, sweatpants, and jacket in the school’s courtyard. (One news report says Val was found by a cleaning crew, while the case report says he was found by a teacher.) Unnamed sources were reported as saying that the LAPD believed Val had been on the school grounds most of the weekend, while school police said there was no video footage and they didn’t know how long he had been on campus. Authorities later determined that he hadn’t been there on Saturday and had died either on Sunday or earlier on Monday. Another report cited a school employee saying that “very little investigation was done and the entire area was quickly pressure washed.”
Val’s death was instantly the source of speculation, with some suggesting that his death was either drug-related or a cover-up for something more nefarious, while others doubted he was even dead. While the police said that no foul play was suspected, the coroner’s report was delayed in a backlog, and suspicions grew on the internet and among some of the people who knew him. In conspiracy circles, Val’s name was added to various all-purpose conspiracy theories ranging from QAnon to the so-called “Clinton body count,” while others pointed to his Trump- and Russia-related activities. Comparisons were made to Vince Foster and Seth Rich. Even Hunter Biden was invoked when Val’s laptop was sold by his former landlord a month later, billed as a “possible laptop from hell” – ironically listed as lot 404.
On April 26th, the initial autopsy — and two days later, on the 28th, the full autopsy — was conducted. The report concluded that Val died of accidental blunt force trauma while trying to climb down a tree on either the 24th or the 25th. According to the LAPD, Val “appeared to be locked out in between two towers of the school and while attempting to climb down a pine tree, fell to his death.”
While the initial examination showed abrasions but no external signs of trauma, a CT scan revealed internal trauma. The autopsy also found bilateral rib fractures, a lumbar spine fracture, that the right clavicle was fractured, and that there was a large amount of blood in the left chest cavity, in addition to bruising of the lung and other damage. The toxicology report, which wasn’t signed until September 21st, found “a relatively low level of methamphetamine” in Val’s blood and fentanyl in his postmortem urine. According to the autopsy report, this indicated that he had likely used fentanyl more than a day before his death, and that he had used methamphetamine an unknown amount of time before his death.
The autopsy report provided a summary of Val’s suspected final movements:
The totality of the findings indicated that the decedent had been present at many locations around the school including the area around the football field bleachers, walking on the school track, a small building opposite of the football field, and the larger South Building of the school. On the 4th floor of this South Building the decent exits to a 4th floor breezeway between that building and another building (Central Building). Due to the locking mechanism, the decent was subsequently locked out on the hallway breezeway connecting the 2 buildings, on the 4th floor. It appears then that the decent attempted to exit the area by climbing onto a tree which was several feet away from the steel handrail. It appears that the decent subsequently fell to his death, breaking some branches of the tree on the way down, as well as possibly striking a portion of the steel handrail on the 2nd floor of the walkway. The decedent was found near the base of the pine tree.
On October 11th, the FBI’s Houston Field Office sent a Closing Electronic Communication regarding Val’s case. Approximately three pages of the document are redacted, virtually the entirety of the contents excepting the heading and standard closing text. On October 19th, the coroner’s office signed off on the final medical report for Val’s case. For anyone else, this should be the end of their story. But true to form, Val had one or two last surprises left.
On October 21st, his account retweeted a South Korean crypto-based game that Val had played and posted a reply to it, writing, “Congratulations to the team for their efforts and dedication and highly appreciated the visionary thought of the project @MATAHARImthrwm [Marie’s Twitter/X account] @JGPorter.” On the 25th, his account posted again, this time simply tagging “@MATAHARImthrwm @JohnGPorter1 [Marie’s Twitter/X account]” with no other text.
While it is unclear who made the posts or how, the text in the first post appears to be a copypasta associated with crypto giveaways. Both the @JGPorter and @JohnGPorter1 accounts are references to the Private Investigator John Porter, though only one account appears to have been actively used by someone portraying themselves as John Porter, and the current @JGPorter was created after the posts by Val’s account. The @MATAHARImthrwm account was created in January 2022, and appears to have been used almost exclusively to assist in Val’s cryptocurrency endeavors.
End of an Article
Val’s saga seemed to finally come to a rest until June 24, 2024 when Special Counsel Jack Smith filed exhibits in the case against Donald Trump over his handling of classified materials after his first term as President. Included in the filing’s exhibits were photographs taken by FBI agents during the seizure of materials at Mar-a-Lago. One of the photographs showed a stack of newspapers in a document box labeled CONFIDENTIAL. On top of the newspapers was a copy of The New York Times article about Val Broeksmit, Me And My Whistleblower. While this raised eyebrows with some, especially with some of those who knew Val in some capacity, Newsweek noted that the placement was unlikely to signify anything.
The article was the cover of the Sunday business feature section. Trump did not cut it out to read it and there is no indication that he was even aware of its existence. It is resting on top of a pile of other newspaper sections, which suggests its placement is coincidental.
As for Marie, her Twitter account and all her tweets was deleted without explanation in mid-June or July 2025. In early June, the LAPD and NamUs declined to comment on her case or why she is no longer listed as missing on public indices. Her whereabouts and status are unknown, despite various rumors. I was able to reach Marie several days before publication, and learned she’s sober and working to put her life back together. In an email, she described abuse by Val.
Val began to destroy everything and everyone in my life from the moment he came into contact with me. This wasn’t random — he had been stalking me online for two years beforehand. By the time we met, he already knew everything about me, my son, and my son’s father.
What followed was a prolonged and traumatizing period of emotional, psychological, and physical abuse. Val was controlling, manipulative, and extremely violent. It was a dark, horrific time in my life — filled with so much misery I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone, not even my worst enemy.
Val would administer a combination of substances — including various narcotics — without my knowledge or consent. He did this under the pretense of helping me “calm down,” pointing to the stress I was under as a result of being isolated from my mother, my son’s father, and close friends — a painful isolation he himself had engineered.
But his true intention was to exert control and inflict harm. He abused me psychologically, emotionally, and physically. His perverse, brutal, narcissistic behavior destroyed my life — as a woman, a mother, and an artist.
I became dependent on illicit substances. Val stole all my money and gambled away every last dollar I had saved or earned, until I was left completely destitute. He took everything — and everyone — I loved away from me.
I was living in the most horrific kind of prison, and I remained in it for years.
Whenever I asked him to leave or tried to stand up for myself, he would beat me. I called 911 several times, but he would hold a gun to my forehead and force me to tell the police I was fine. He was so violent that I once had to pretend to be ill for weeks because my entire face and body were bruised. He slammed me against the concrete floor of my studio with such force that he broke my teeth.
I was entrapped. I feared for my life every single day. I became completely dependent on narcotics and lost all sense of who I was.
Gaslighting was one of his most effective weapons — making me question everything and everyone I had loved and trusted for decades, including my own mother and the father of my child.
He imposed his will on every form of communication I had. He took complete control of my phone, my email, my social media — and used them to speak for me. He would write out exactly what he wanted me to say, and I was forced to read it aloud or send it. Online, he pretended to be me. He sent messages and posted things under my name without my knowledge or consent.
On many occasions, I fought back. I demanded that he leave my home. But standing up to him always came at a cost. He would retaliate by cutting me off from everything I was dependent on — particularly the substances he had made me rely on. I was forced to comply with whatever he wanted, just to avoid the agony of withdrawal.
Val was a toxic, perverse, narcissistic man — and a compulsive liar. He distorted the truth constantly: to authorities, to friends, to me, about me, about my own mother, about my son’s father, his family, the media — even to the people he claimed to love. The lies were relentless.
He was a master of manipulation. After days of forced sleep deprivation, he could convince me that what I knew to be true was false, and what was false was somehow real. I saw through him early on, but the way he took control over me was like a spider web — holding me hostage without my realizing it. And by the time I did, it was too late.
He used his imagination — twisted, grandiose, and sadistic — to dominate every part of my reality. He lied about everything: about himself, his past, his experiences, about me, my son, my son’s father, and our entire history. He spread vile claims about my mother, calling her sick and evil. He even spoke with open contempt about his own parents and sister.
M looks happy and healthy in pictures Stephen posted online, while Stephen seems to have continued writing.
According to Rocco Castoro, his documentary of Val and Marie is still in development. At the time of this writing, no release has been announced.
Val’s legacy will remain a complicated one. His destructive behavior, unreliability, and questionable motives will not detract from the good things he helped accomplish. Though some will curse his name for the damage he did, others will continue to praise him, while some members of both groups will continue to speculate and spin conspiracy theories. Unless more information is forthcoming, some of those conspiracy theories may be difficult to disprove.
Though I would like to forget about Val, he had a lasting impact on my life. Whatever his motives were, Val falsely implicated me as the hacker Phineas Fisher and his manipulations and misstatements contributed to people harassing and snitch-jacketing me. Researching and writing this is likely the most closure I’ll find from the fallout around Val.
I’m loathe to spend time highlighting Val’s mistakes, so I don’t know what else can I say about Val other than “I’m glad it’s over.”
Updates and corrections: Fixed characterizations of Joe Fionda, Representative Weldon and Dan Goldman, clarified the timeline for the removal and restoration of Val’s submissions to DDoSecrets, clarified timeline on the 911 call after Lori Roth died, various typographical and formatting fixes.
