Brendan Carr—Trump’s federal communications commission chairman who likes to troll journalists and who preceded his role by authoring the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC—is so much more than the state-media-curious guy he seems to be, apparently! That is, per a new investigative report by the Guardian, which revealed Carr spent his teens and early 20s in the Midtown Group, the infamous “cult” disguised as an Washington, D.C. Alcoholics Anonymous chapter—or what one former member called the “Epstein of AA.”
If Midtown Group sounds familiar at all, it’s because it brought about shock headlines in 2007, or when the pre-Jeff Bezos Washington Post revealed that it was an “unusual adaptation of AA” in which “older men had sex with teenage girls.” Much of the allegations circled around the chapter’s founder, Michael Quinones, who’d started the group in his Bethesda home.
According to the Guardian, Carr joined the Midtown Group in 1996, as a 17-year-old senior in high school. He stayed on for about nine years, during which he also attended law school. And while it’s not clear when exactly he left, the outlet obtained a group picture of a Midtown Group retreat in 2006, which portrays a 27-year-old Carr. (A spokesperson for Carr has since denied he was a member “up and through 2006.”) Quinones died of cancer a year later, in 2007.
Now, to be clear, there’s no indication that Carr participated in any of the inappropriate behavior, and all of the 14 former members the outlet spoke to for its reporting made it clear he “wasn’t part of the abuse.” In fact, several indicated he himself was a victim of the group’s manipulative culture, with one source referring to him as a “fragile guy,” and another saying he was “sensitive and desperate for the approval of others.” Others added that he would sometimes aid them from mistreatment, with one woman saying he snuck her french fries while she was being kept on a restrictive diet.
Strict diets were just a fraction of the horrible culture at Midtown Group. Membership ranged from anyone who was an alcoholic to purportedly troubled teens sent by their parents, with many of them losing control over their lives. “It was widely known that teenage girls were sleeping with older men,” one of the former members told the Guardian, “It took me to my late 20s to understand it was wrong…I was 16, sleeping with a 55-year-old. That was just the way things worked there.”
While, again, there’s no evidence saying Carr took part in any of this, some members agreed that his positioning in the administration warrants reportage. “A man who has the power to control what types of stories the mainstream public have access to is a man who should expect the narrative of his own life to fall under scrutiny,” one of the former members said. Alas, Carr’s spokesperson disagrees, saying that he has been sober for more than 30 years and that weaponizing it is some “effort to embarrass or pressure him into doing his job differently.”
Now, to be clear, we don’t condone any kind of coercion culture here, and when we say Carr should be doing his job differently, we don’t say it because he was part of an alleged sex cult for at least one part of his life. Rather, it’s because he’s been licking his lips over state-controlled media, and censoring popular Dem. candidates; going after ABC, CBS, and NBC for being “legacy media”; and reportedly working closely with the White House and right-wing media throughout his tenure.
