A student newsroom at Redwood High School in Marin County, California, briefly pulled and then restored part of an Instagram report about local references in the federal Epstein files after a modeling agent threatened to sue and district officials asked for a takedown.
The fight turned on a fairly plain technical point: Ben Mueller, an 18-year-old senior, had searched the Justice Department’s Epstein Library portal, not the open web. District officials initially said they could not verify the claim at issue, according to journalism adviser Erin Schneider’s notes. Mueller then showed them the federal document on his phone.
Mueller created the post for a journalism class assignment requiring an extended Instagram slideshow. On February 10, he searched through the roughly 3 million pages added to the federal portal 11 days earlier, looking for references to Marin towns and cities. He found many hits, most of them mundane, including references tied to Restoration Hardware in Corte Madera.
Other records were less routine. Mueller found references to a 2014 art gala in Sausalito that Jeffrey Epstein helped promote, a meeting with Woody Allen in Tiburon, and a 2013 email exchange involving Gisele Attias Bonnouvrier of a modeling agency called Mill Valley Connection. In that email, Bonnouvrier referred to an Austrian model and asked about fees.
On February 12, the Redwood Bark, Redwood High’s student-run publication, posted Mueller’s carousel to Instagram. The post asked which Marin towns appeared in the Epstein files and listed local references. Its Mill Valley slide said the town appeared in connection with providing models to Epstein from Bonnouvrier. The post drew more than 4,000 likes and a flood of praise from commenters.
On February 23, Bonnouvrier emailed Redwood High principal Barnaby Payne, called the post defamatory, demanded immediate removal and threatened legal action if the school did not comply within 48 hours. Bonnouvrier later declined to comment and did not follow through with a lawsuit.
Superintendent Courtney Goode of the Tamalpais Union High School District then pressed the Bark to remove Bonnouvrier’s name or delete the slide, according to Schneider and the students. Instagram made that harder than it sounds, since a published carousel slide cannot be edited in place. The practical options were to archive or delete.
The students consulted the Student Press Law Center during lunch, as well as Mueller’s parents, who are lawyers, and another attorney. Schneider said those lawyers concluded the Bark had not defamed Bonnouvrier. The students then reviewed the slide against the federal records word by word.
They temporarily archived the disputed slide before meeting with Payne and Goode. In that meeting, Mueller and fellow Bark editor Madison Bishop asked what, specifically, administrators believed was false or libelous. Goode said the district’s research had not found evidence connecting Bonnouvrier to providing models to Epstein, according to Schneider’s notes.
Mueller opened the federal document on his phone. The students also cited California Education Code 48907, which protects student journalists from prior restraint unless material is obscene, incites violence or illegal acts, or is false or libelous. Goode later told WIRED the post was briefly paused until officials determined the referenced information was factual and public. The Bark restored the slide the next day.
The dispute fed a wider argument over school press freedom. Schneider went on leave from the journalism program on March 9, writing to Bark families that defending student journalists had met “significant resistance.” The Student Press Law Center says requests to its legal hotline from school newspapers have risen 42 percent over two years.
Mueller and Bishop resisted the outside framing that they had been censored into submission. In a May 27 editorial note, the Bark said the slide had been removed temporarily by student choice and described the confrontation with administrators as a misunderstanding. Both students graduated in June. Bishop plans to study journalism at the University of Southern California; Mueller is headed to William and Mary and said he may look at the college paper.
This story draws on original reporting from WIRED.
