“We don’t endorse candidates,” said Francisco Marte, founder and president of the Bodega and Small Business Group, which represents some 3,000 bodegas, barber shops, beauty salons, mechanics and restaurants in the Big Apple.

“But we favor Andrew Cuomo,” Marte told The Post. “He’s the best of what we have now.”

Francisco Marte is the president of the Bodega and Small Business Association. Robert Miller

At issue for many of these small businesses are Mamdani’s plans to open city-owned grocery stores that would offer customers wholesale prices. Small business owners, especially retailers, have likewise been rattled by Mamdani’s past comments about defunding the police.

Cuomo, the business owners believe, will be tougher on crime and shoplifting.

He is “guaranteeing more public safety and is not coming with this crazy idea to compete with us with city owned grocery stores,” Marte said. 

Marte’s group is taking a stand after a rival organization, United Bodegas of America, blindsided its members this week, including its co-founder Fernando Mateo, by endorsing Mamdani. In response, Mateo angrily resigned from the trade group, which The Post exclusively reported on Wednesday.

Now, United Bodegas’ President Radhames Rodriguez, who made the surprise endorsement at a local eatery in the Bronx this week, is losing members, according to Marte and other grocers.

“I think a quarter of the United Bodega Association’s members will leave because they feel betrayed,” Marte told The Post, adding that several have already told him that they are jumping ship to his group.

Zohran Mamdani was endorsed by United Bodegas of America’s President Radhames Rodriguez. James Keivom

Rodriguez did not immediately respond for comment.

His group has about 2,000 members in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, out of roughly13,000 bodegas in New York City.

“We are planning to ask Mateo to sit with us and to bring members with him to the real association,” said Carlos Collado, who owns two Fine Fare supermarkets in the Bronx and is a vice president of the Bodega and Small Business Group.

Earlier this week, Mateo called Rodriguez’s Mamdani endorsement a “betrayal” and a violation of the trade group’s bylaws as a nonprofit, which is not supposed to publicly back a political candidate.

Mateo also told The Post on Wednesday, “Hundreds of bodega owners already reached out expressing their discontent. I had to explain to them that I had nothing to do with it.” 

Carlos Collado is the owner of two Fine Fare supermarkets in the Bronx and a VP of the Bodega and Small Business Group. Helayne Seidman

An outspoken conservative, Mateo unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in 2021’s mayoral race.

But Mateo and Marte were not always on the same page.

They operated under the same umbrella – Bodega Association of the USA – until 2017, when they had a beef over who would take the lead at a press conference on crime at bodegas, according to Marte.

Mateo and Rodriguez split off to form the United Bodegas of America.

“If we see that we have common ground, we can find a way” to work together again, Marte said.

The post Exclusive | NYC bodega leaders voice support for Andrew Cuomo – appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring who said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” as a teenager to rich and powerful predators, including Prince Andrew of Britain, died on Friday at her farm in Western Australia. She was 41.

Ms. Giuffre (pronounced JIFF-ree) died by suicide, according to a statement by the family. She wrote in an Instagram post in March that she was days away from dying of renal failure after being injured in an automobile crash with a school bus that she said was traveling at nearly 70 miles per hour.

In the statement, her family called her “a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse and sex trafficking” and “the light that lifted so many survivors.”

In 2019, Mr. Epstein was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with sex-trafficking and conspiracy, accused of soliciting teenage girls to perform massages that became increasingly sexual in nature.

Barely a month after he was apprehended, and a day after documents were released from Ms. Giuffre’s successful defamation suit against him, Mr. Epstein was found hanged in his cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan. His death, at 66, was ruled a suicide.

In 2009, Ms. Giuffre, identified then only as Jane Doe 102, sued Mr. Epstein, accusing him and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator and the daughter of the disgraced British media magnate Robert Maxwell, of recruiting her to join his sex-trafficking ring when she was a minor under the guise of becoming a professional masseuse.

In 2015, she was the first of Mr. Epstein’s victims to give up her anonymity and go public, selling her story to the British tabloid The Mail on Sunday.

“Basically, I was training to be a prostitute for him and his friends who shared his interest in young girls,” Ms. Giuffre was quoted as saying in Nigel Cawthorne’s 2022 book, “Virginia Giuffre: The Extraordinary Life Story of the Masseuse Who Pursued and Ended the Sex Crimes of Millionaires Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein.”

“Ghislaine told me that I have to do for Andrew what I do for Jeffrey,” she said.

Ms. Giuffre accused Mr. Epstein, a multimillionaire financier, and Ms. Maxwell, a British socialite, of forcing her to have sex with Prince Andrew, also known as the Duke of York. He flatly denied the accusations, but he relinquished his royal duties in 2019.

In 2021, she sued the prince, who is the younger brother of King Charles III of England, contending that he had sexually assaulted her at Ms. Maxwell’s home in London and at Mr. Epstein’s homes in Manhattan and Little St. James, in the Virgin Islands.

A widely published photograph showed Prince Andrew with his hand around her waist. He said he had no memory of the occasion.

After Prince Andrew agreed to settle the suit by Ms. Giuffre in 2022, he praised her in a statement for speaking out and pledged to “demonstrate his regret” for his association with Mr. Epstein “by supporting the fight against the evils of sex trafficking, and by supporting its victims.”

The settlement included an undisclosed sum to be paid to her and to her charity, now called Speak Out, Act, Reclaim.

In interviews and depositions, Ms. Giuffre said she was recruited to the sex ring in 2000 while working as a locker room attendant at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Fla. By her account, she was reading a massage therapy manual when she was approached by Ms. Maxwell and invited to become Mr. Epstein’s traveling masseuse. She said the two of them then groomed her to perform sexual services for wealthy men.

Ms. Giuffre sued Ms. Maxwell for defamation in 2015 for calling her a liar; they settled for an undisclosed sum in 2017. Ms. Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking and other counts. The verdict was viewed as the legal reckoning that Mr. Epstein had denied the judicial system, and his victims, by hanging himself. Ms. Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Virginia Louise Roberts was born on Aug. 9, 1983, in Sacramento to Sky and Lynn Roberts. When she was 4, the family moved to Palm Beach County, where her father was a maintenance manager at Mar-a-Lago.

She said she ran away from home after having been molested by a close family friend since she was 7. She was placed in foster homes; boarded with an aunt in California; fled to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, the former hippie haven; lived on the streets when she was 14; and spent six months with a 65-year-old sex trafficker, who abused her.

Compared with living on the streets and earning $9 an hour for her summer job at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Epstein’s offer to make $200 a massage several times a day was, Mr. Cawthorne wrote, one that “Virginia had determined for herself she could not refuse.”

But her mandate went well beyond those duties, she told the BBC in 2019: She said that she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” to Mr. Epstein’s friends and ferried around the world on private jets.

In 2002, when she was 19, Ms. Giuffre enrolled in the International Training Massage School in Thailand to become a professional masseuse. There she met Robert Giuffre, an Australian martial arts instructor, and they married.

The couple had three children, Christian, Noah and Emily, and lived in Australia, Florida and Colorado before settling in Perth in 2020. They have since separated. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

Ms. Giuffre told The Miami Herald in 2019 that the birth of her daughter in 2010 prompted her to speak publicly about her victimization. She explained why she had originally agreed to let Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell groom her as a masseuse and to provide sexual services.

“They seemed like nice people,” she said, “so I trusted them, and I told them I’d had a really hard time in my life up until then — I’d been a runaway, I’d been sexually abused, physically abused. That was the worst thing I could have told them, because now they knew how vulnerable I was.”

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Hank Sanders contributed reporting.

The post Virginia Giuffre, Voice in Epstein Sex-Trafficking Scandal, Dies at 41 appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Voice of America, the federally funded broadcaster to the world, has long prided itself on serving as an accurate and fair source of news and on being independent of whichever president and party are in power in the United States.

Since the election of President Trump, that independence is increasingly being tested.

In recent months, Voice of America’s parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, has opened human-resources investigations into Voice of America journalists for reporting on criticism of Mr. Trump or for making comments that were perceived as critical of him, according to several employees. Some journalists raised concerns about the investigations in a meeting this week with the broadcaster’s director.

At least a couple of articles that included criticism of Mr. Trump and his administration were not published or were watered down after publication in recent months, said three Voice of America employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.

And on Friday, the Agency for Global Media informed one of Voice of America’s highest-profile journalists, Steven Herman, that he was being placed on an extended “excused absence” pending a human resources investigation, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Herman confirmed receiving the letter, which said the investigation was into whether his “social media activity has undermined V.O.A.’s audiences’ perceptions of the objectivity and/or credibility of V.O.A. and its news operations.”

Weeks earlier, Mr. Herman came under fire from the Trump administration when he cited a quote on social media from an anticorruption watchdog group criticizing cutbacks at the United States Agency for International Development.

Richard Grenell, Mr. Trump’s envoy for “special missions,” wrote on X that Mr. Herman’s comments were “treasonous.”

“You don’t get to work against the official U.S. government policies while being paid by US taxpayers,” Mr. Grenell continued. “You should be immediately fired.”

Also on Friday, Voice of America officials informed Patsy Widakuswara, the broadcaster’s longtime White House bureau chief, that she was being involuntarily reassigned to another beat, employees said. Some Voice of America journalists suspected the move was part of an effort to reduce friction with the Trump administration, although an official at the broadcaster, who wasn’t authorized to talk to the media, denied that.

The Agency for Global Media declined to comment.

The upheaval at Voice of America comes amid a series of broadsides against the media by the Trump administration. The White House has started selecting which news outlets are part of the press pool that covers the president, and it has barred The Associated Press from events because it won’t reclassify the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The Federal Communications Commission has opened investigations into whether broadcasters are acting in the public interest. And Mr. Trump has filed or threatened lawsuits against news outlets whose coverage he objected to.

Journalists at Voice of America have been fretting about their future ever since Mr. Trump said he would appoint Kari Lake, a former television news anchor and failed Republican Senate candidate who has frequently spread lies and conspiracy theories, to lead the broadcaster.

Ms. Lake has rebuffed calls from Elon Musk and Mr. Grenell to abolish Voice of America altogether. But she has said the broadcaster’s coverage will be free from what she described as “Trump derangement syndrome,” or T.D.S.

“It won’t become Trump TV,” Ms. Lake said during a speech this month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an influential gathering of conservatives. “But it sure as hell will not be T.D.S.”

Under federal law, the Voice of America’s director must be approved by a bipartisan board that oversees the Agency for Global Media. The board has not voted on Ms. Lake’s nomination.

The Agency for Global Media told employees in an email on Thursday that, pending her formal approval by the board, Ms. Lake had been named a senior adviser to the media agency and to Voice of America.

“In this capacity she will oversee and advise agency leadership on administration priorities,” the email said.

Mr. Trump has nominated Brent Bozell, a conservative activist and media critic, to run the Agency for Global Media. Mr. Bozell needs to be confirmed by the Senate.

Even before Ms. Lake’s and Mr. Bozell’s arrivals, officials at Voice of America and its parent agency were tamping down on anti-Trump sentiment.

Shortly after the presidential election in November, Mr. Herman, who is the broadcaster’s chief national correspondent, was interviewed on a Voice of America program and was asked about the criteria that Mr. Trump was using to select cabinet nominees.

“What we’re seeing, again, loyalty being the No. 1 attribute rather than experience,” Mr. Herman responded.

Mr. Herman was soon summoned to a meeting with human resources officials at the Agency for Global Media, according to people familiar with what transpired. He was pressured to acknowledge that he had improperly engaged in speculation and analysis. Two other Voice of America journalists said they had encountered similar blowback.

The official at Voice of America, who wasn’t authorized to talk to the media, defended the investigations as part of an effort to safeguard the perceived objectivity and neutrality of Voice of America’s journalism when it is under intense scrutiny by Republicans in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

David Z. Seide, a lawyer at the Government Accountability Project who defends federal whistle-blowers, represents Mr. Herman and other Voice of America employees who face human resources investigations for what they wrote or said about Mr. Trump and his administration. He said it was notable that those investigations were taking place before Ms. Lake or other senior Trump appointees took the helm.

“They’re acting pre-emptively,” Mr. Seide said. “They can read the handwriting on the wall.” He added that he saw the social media investigation into Mr. Herman as a pretext for ousting one of Voice of America’s most prominent journalists.

Longtime Voice of America journalists said they were surprised and alarmed that the Agency for Global Media was scrutinizing their editorial decisions. To preserve Voice of America’s independence, the agency is supposed to be walled off from questions about its journalism.

At a meeting this week in Voice of America’s newsroom in Washington, the broadcaster’s director, Michael Abramowitz, faced questions from employees who worried that the human resources investigations would have a chilling effect on Voice of America journalists, leading them to mute any criticisms of the Trump administration, people who attended the meeting said.

Mr. Abramowitz, a longtime and well-regarded reporter and editor at The Washington Post who took the Voice of America job less than a year ago, responded by noting that he was acting as “a caretaker” and that Ms. Lake would soon replace him, the attendees said.

In his first term, Mr. Trump’s White House publicly criticized Voice of America’s editorial decisions. In 2020, Mr. Trump appointed Michael Pack, an ally of his former aide Stephen K. Bannon, to run the Agency for Global Media.

Mr. Pack was accused of trying to turn Voice of America into a mouthpiece for the Trump administration, and a federal judge ruled that Mr. Pack had violated the First Amendment rights of the outlet’s journalists. A federal investigation later found that he had mismanaged the Agency for Global Media, repeatedly abusing his power by sidelining executives he felt did not sufficiently support Mr. Trump.

The post Voice of America Journalists Face Investigations for Comments About Trump appeared first on Our Story Insight.