Ben Mueller’s assignmentfor his journalism class was to tell a news story—any news story—in the form of an extendedInstagramslideshow. So when the high school senior got home on the afternoon of February 10, 2026, he grabbed a snack, went upstairs to his room, and settled in to work.
After allowing himself a few minutes of procrastination—scouting prospective college campuses on Google Earth—Mueller navigated over to the Department of Justice’s Epstein Library portal and clicked through the page asking whether he was 18 or older (he was, just barely). Then he began poking around for ideas in the 3 million pages of Epstein files that had been added 11 days earlier.
Mueller really liked working in his bedroom, with its beanbag chair and view of people strolling and biking along one of Marin County,California’s sun-dappled waterways. Having lived his whole life in one of the wealthiest parts of America, Mueller couldn’t help thinking his area probably had some ties toJeffrey Epstein. “I think it’s very difficult to get an immense amount of money without—this is my opinion—without doing something a little shady,” Mueller says. So he sat on his bedroom floor and spent the next five hours combing the federal database for links to the towns and cities of Marin.
He found thousands. Most of them were trivial (Epstein liked to shop online at Restoration Hardware, headquartered in nearby Corte Madera). But a few things stood out: a 2014 art gala in Sausalito that Epstein helped promote; a meeting with Woody Allen in Tiburon; and—above all—a 2013 email exchange between Epstein and a woman from a modeling agency called Mill Valley Connection. “Regarding Hannah, my Austrian model,” the woman wrote in one particularly chilling message, “we can come and see you this evening if you are interested, and in that case let me know how I can get my fees.”
Two days later, on February 12, Mueller posted his story to the Instagram feed of the Redwood Bark, his school’s student-run publication. It was a carousel-styleslideshowpitched at readers across the county. “Which Marin towns were mentioned in the Epstein files?” the first panel reads. “Scroll to see how many times your town was mentioned.” Rather than quote from the most alarming document he’d found, Mueller kept his descriptions fairly general and brief: “Mill Valley was mentioned in the context of providing models to Epstein from a woman named Gisele Attias Bonnouvrier.”
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More than 4,000 people liked the story. The comments filled up with praise: “This is the kind of journalism we need.” “Higher quality reporting than local outlets.” “High schoolers doing better reporting than national news.” “Didn’t think I’d be following a random CA HS newspaper in 2026 for their breaking reporting but here we are.”
As Mueller watched the numbers climb, he felt excited but also a little perplexed. “I didn’t really think I was doing groundbreaking journalism,” he says. “I was just like, this is another piece of homework that I have to do today, and I’ve just got to get it done—but also be thorough, because people are going to see it on the internet.”
About a week and a half later, Mueller was home sick with a light fever and cough when the phone rang. It was his journalism teacher, Erin Schneider, with bad news. “This person mentioned in your post is now threatening to sue the district,” she said.
On Monday, February 23, Bonnouvrier, the modeling agent, had sent an email to the principal of Redwood High School, calling Mueller’s post defamatory, demanding its immediate removal, and promising legal action if the school did not comply within 48 hours. And now the district superintendent was demanding that the Bark either redact Bonnouvrier’s name or delete the slide entirely.
The Redwood Bark won eighth place last year in a major national competition run by the National Scholastic Press Association.
The redwood barkhappens to be one of the most award-winning high school newspapers in the United States. Madison Bishop—a poised, rosy-cheeked, 18-year old colleague of Mueller’s—says she was an avid Bark reader even as a kid, before her older sister served as editor in chief back in 2022. “It was just such a well-known student paper,” she says.
Bishop and Mueller both arrived on the Bark staff during a time of experimentation. Over the previous decade, Schneider and her students had pushed the Bark beyond old-school print and basic web articles, expanding into Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and a podcast. Then during the first few weeks of this past school year, Schneider says, they flipped the switch toward being “social-media first”—publishing some full stories directly to the platforms.
As the Bark’s social media manager, Bishop oversaw the transition, which she saw as a kind of power move: Social media wasn’t just where all the Bark’s students got their news, it’s where kids have the most natural authority. “It gives us a space to have a leg up from adults,” she says. “It really lets them sit down and listen and absorb what we have to say, because we are the quote-unquote professionals.”
Case in point: As soon as the Bark leaders saw the superintendent’s demands, they knew Instagram wouldn’t allow them to edit an already published slide; simply redacting Bonnouvrier’s name, in other words, was not a viable option. Another problem was that Redwood High’s principal was out of the country and unable to meet. With the pressure of a 48-hour legal threat looming over them, they would have to decide how to respond to the district on their own.
