The Epstein Files and Australia’s elite underground ‘pedocracy’

Recent developments, including the Epstein Files, prompt renewed scrutiny of long-standing allegations of organised institutionalised child sex abuse, writes Fiona Barnett.

* CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses child sexual abuse and may cause distress for some readers.

DISCLAIMER: The opinions of the author do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Australia

ON 30 JUNE 2026, the U.S. House Oversight Committee held a hearing into the CIA’s illegal human experimentation program MKUltra.

Witnesses testified that MKUltra employed LSD, hypnosis, electroshock, sensory deprivation and psychological torture on unwitting subjects. They described it as a continuation of the Dachau experiments by Nazi scientists imported under Operation Paperclip. The hearing raised hard questions about whether such reprehensible activities continued beyond the program’s officially acknowledged end.

Over a decade ago, I undertook to expose Australian alleged links to domestic and worldwide child sex trafficking networks, including the MKUltra program. For this, I was publicly vilified. To this day, very little has appeared in our domestic media about Australia’s high-profile paedophile networks, such as those shockingly exposed in the U.S. and linked internationally by the Epstein Files.

My efforts to expose what I witnessed began in early 2013, after I reached out to Independent Australia’s founder, David Donovan, with my claims about Australian paedophile networks and their cover-ups. Donovan had previously encountered several similar claims to mine and, after meeting me, began to help investigate and expose their potential existence in this country.

The first articles appeared in late June 2013, in which Donovan not only published but also verified with victims and witnesses claims about the NSW Education Department and NSW Police, covering up a child abuse network in Northern NSW. IA subsequently published numerous other articles in which I similarly exposed contemporary instances of abuse, including by a well-known Gold Coast paediatrician.

Some of my later articles included shocking allegations about sexual abuse I had suffered in my childhood. The historical nature of these claims made them difficult to verify, so I provided statutory declarations to support my testimony.

Those accounts included paedophile allegations against several high-profile senior federal politicians and other well-known identities. Independent Australia included at the end of these articles a disclaimer stating these allegations were unproven and asking for people to come forward to help verify or, indeed, disprove my claims. Despite the grave allegations made, all 15 articles published from 2013 to 2015 remain on IA.

Independent Australia should be congratulated for not disbelieving the victim. This has not been my experience elsewhere in Australia, especially in the broader media. For example, later in 2013, I appeared at the Child Abuse Royal Commission, after which I was vilified for mentioning in my testimony former Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s involvement. In 2019, however, court documents revealed Hawke had asked his daughter Rosslyn Dillon to keep her rape by a Cabinet member “secret”.

Fast forward to 2026. Now, it is excruciatingly apparent that, while my allegations seemed sensational a decade or so ago, they are now far less unbelievable. Recent headlines – including those involving Jeffrey Epstein (and his links to recent U.S. presidents), NXIVM and P Diddy – reflect remarkably similar themes. This suggests my warnings merit serious consideration and may indicate a broader systemic issue.

My fundamental thesis – not necessarily endorsed by this publication – is that child sex trafficking is run as a single, integrated, global operation with links to the CIA. This operation has been, I allege, assisted by British Military Intelligence and certain other prominent parties, such as the Rothschilds.

Amongst my claims, then regarded as outlandish, I reported to police and the Child Abuse Royal Commission that I was trafficked to paedophile events at Parliament House in Canberra and to Richard Nixon at Fairbairn military airport. I also described being flown to California for trafficking to CNN founder Ted Turner at Disneyland’s Club 33 and Billy Graham at Bohemian Grove.

I explained how these abuses were facilitated through interconnected secret societies, including the Rosicrucian Freemasons, OTO, OES and Jesuits – collectively referred to as “The Order”. I identified the national OTO headquarters within the University of Sydney’s Wentworth Building and described an alleged OTO ritual murder on campus, led by Antony Kidman.

Also in attendance was my Lithuanian grandmother’s associate, Nazi physician Leonas Petrauskas, who studied with Kidman at the University of Sydney. A 1949 document reveals Dr Petrauskas and Nazi bioweapons scientist Erich Traub, recruited under Operation Paperclip, were security cleared by ASIO’s forerunner to continue MKNAOMI bioweapons research in Papua New Guinea.

Mainstream media reports increasingly corroborate my assertions. Earlier this year, French authorities charged 22 men – including Freemasons, police, intelligence personnel, military officers, businessmen and a doctor – with offences including murder, alleging a covert criminal network operating through a Masonic lodge.

In 2021, the ABC published an article titled Academic papers from the 1960s reveal how a CIA-funded ‘mind control’ program came to Australia.The article blatantly plagiarised the writings I published a decade ago concerning MKUltra in Australia.

I identified Antony Kidman as a central perpetrator in Australia’s MKUltra program. I traced Australian MKUltra links to the University of Sydney, where CIA psychiatrist Martin Orne trained my alleged future perpetrators in hypnosis during his 1960 visit.

I reported to police that Antony Kidman and his colleagues systematically induced brain compartmentalisation using EEG, hypnosis, LSD, sensory deprivation, electrocution, waterboarding and other torture methods.

I identified many laboratory settings where this occurred in the USA and Australia, including Holsworthy Army Base, Peat and Milson Islands, and CSIRO facilities in the University of Sydney’s Madsen Building, Canberra, and the 20-story underground ANSTO nuclear reactor site in Lucas Heights.

Following my complaint, Antony Kidman travelled to Singapore, where he died 36 days later in unnatural circumstances.

Police, intelligence and certain journalists collaborated to discredit me, portraying me as unstable and thereby justifying my potential detention in the Fixated Persons Units established by British psychiatrist Paul Mullen.

Mullen led the Fixated Persons Project, a British Home Office initiative in collaboration with Monash University. Publications associated with the project, including a paper released around the time of Epstein’s 2008 conviction, characterised people who publicly accused British royals or politicians of paedophilia as psychotic security threats.

Mullen later collaborated with the Morrison Government to establish fixated persons units in three Australian cities. This occurred after I criticised Scott Morrison’s connections with my Freemason abusers and with “serial paedophile” Frank Houston, whose funeral he attended. Houston founded Hillsong Church.

Barnett’s claims of ritual abuse were shouted down, despite highly credible reports of these activities occurring in Australia having been reported in the mainstream media for many years (Source: Canberra Times, 29 October 1991, p5)

Morrison’s friend Tim Stewart, husband of the head bridesmaid at Morrison’s wedding, arranged for Hollywood actor Isaac Kappy to visit me in Australia. Kappy died six months later under disputed circumstances, after I rejected his attempts to weaponise my activism and have me phone Michael Aquino. Aquino died shortly afterwards.

Lt Col Michael Aquino, a political scientist and Satanist, headed the U.S. Army Psychological Operations. He coined the terms “Satanic panic” and “false memory syndrome” to conceal the CIA’s involvement in child trafficking, ritual abuse and mind control. Aquino was one of my direct MKUltra perpetrators.

Despite efforts to discredit me, I succeeded in reintroducing the term “ritual abuse” into Australia’s therapeutic dialogue. Prompted by my social media activity, the PM included the words in his National Apology to child abuse victims.

ABC Four Corners later attempted to associate me with QAnon, another Aquino-related psyop. Aquino’s military associate and friend, Jim Watkins, who admitted profiting from child pornography domains, was identified as hosting QAnon via his 4chan and 8chan websites.

Australian journalism has repeatedly failed survivors of high-profile abusers. In 2010, ABC Media Watch attacked former child actor Sarah Monahan after she publicly identified her Hey Dad! co-star Robert Hughes as a paedophile. That episode quietly disappeared following Hughes’ conviction.

In 2013, Four Corners broadcast Saxon Mullins‘ assault story without her consent.

Then Media Watch host and, as sensationally revealed by this publication, major shareholder in news journal Crikey, Paul Barry, similarly publicly mocked and undermined my credibility, as well as IA’s.

Another British import, Richard Guilliatt, attacked me in The Australian. Guilliatt’s history of defending elite paedophiles dates to the Wood Royal Commission era, when he employed Aquino’s “false memory” rhetoric to question the credibility of victims in both major newspapers and his 1997 book, Talk of the Devil: Repressed Memory and the Ritual Abuse Witch-hunt.

Guilliatt’s writings firmly supported the “False Memory Foundation” headed by Martin Orne. Witnesses to the 1995 Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments identified Orne as a paedophile.

Guilliatt frequently cited Dr Warwick Middleton, who also parroted “false memory” rhetoric during the 1990s.

In Therapy in Turmoil: The Memory Controversy (The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 February 1995), Guilliatt wrote:

One middle-ground view of these stories is that Satanic abuse “memories”, although not literally true, may be a way for incest victims to symbolically represent the evil done to them. “I believe it is a metaphor,” argues Dr Warrick Middleton, a Brisbane psychiatrist specialising in trauma. “It re-creates in the present a scenario that evokes the helplessness of the past”.

Commissioner James Wood cited debunked CIA false memory “research” in his 1997 Royal Commission’s Final Report as grounds for dismissing extensive testimony describing organised child trafficking networks operating across Sydney. Witnesses implicated police, judges, politicians, journalists, businessmen, entertainers, children’s homes, Hillsong Church and the CIA.

In 2024, Guilliatt and The Australian attacked elite athlete Jess Denham (formerly Jessica Gilfillan) through a series of articles and podcasts, defending her coach father after he was convicted of sexually abusing both his daughter and multiple school students.

By contrast, Ian Kirkwood is a Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist whose articles fall on the right side of history. His Newcastle Herald team triggered the national Child Abuse Royal Commission. Kirkwood observed that, despite his professional profile, Guilliatt does not have a Wikipedia page — something he finds impossible to achieve.

This echoes U.S. findings where Senate and journalist investigations revealed that many journalists had covert CIA ties. The approach appears familiar: respected experts are used to challenge victims’ credibility while denying the existence of organised trafficking networks with ritual abuse overtones.

The release of the Epstein Files has altered that landscape. Many of the themes for which I was criticised over a decade ago now appear within official documents. The Files name political leaders, British royals, Bohemian Grove, secret societies, MKUltra techniques and prominent Australians.

There are many links to high-profile Australians and/or their families in the Epstein Files. The Files, or at least those so far released to the public, do not include any lurid claims about Australia’s version of the “Epstein class”, but do detail many high-profile connections. For instance, former PM Kevin Rudd said he was “blindsided” by reports his think tank received donations from Jeffrey Epstein, insisting he never met him. He also denied mainstream media reports that he had attended a 2013 dinner with the notorious American child trafficker.

Other documents and media photographs have placed the daughter of former PM Paul Keating, Katherine, in the company of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew, after Epstein’s 2008 conviction.

[Independent Australia does not suggest Mr Rudd or the Keating family engaged in any impropriety, only that there have been reported connections.]

Epstein Files document EFTA00020457 contains an FBI victim statement alleging that Prince Andrew watched Ghislaine Maxwell torture a young girl at Royal Lodge, Windsor. Document EFTA00040577 is an email in which a witness, Bryan Miller, alleges that he saw Prince Andrew torture a young female victim to death.

In one email, Epstein blatantly states, ‘I represent the Rothschilds’.

The Files also reference my 2014 Independent Australia articles in the context of a Bond University law student’s complaints. His complaints mirror concerns I raised regarding Bond: Psychology Clinic staff concealing child trafficking by DOCS employees, law and psychology lecturers exchanging grades for sexual favours, and convictions of psychology professors Bob Montgomery and Paul Wilson for historical child rapes.

The central question remains: how have your perceptions of my claims been shaped, and what does this reveal about broader efforts to suppress or discredit allegations of government-linked child sex abuse and trafficking?

Fiona Barnett has qualifications in visual arts, art psychotherapy, psychology and neuroscience.

If you would like to speak to someone about abuse, please call the 1800 Respect hotline on 1800 737 732 or chat online. Also, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Support independent journalism Subscribe to IA.