“When people don’t know you’re coming, they don’t know how to stop you. And so I feel like they don’t know I’m coming. And so I’m just tiptoeing in.”
~ Ellie Leonard ~
Nick Paro sits down with Ellie Leonard — Substack writer, mother of four, and one of the independent journalists pulling Epstein survivor stories out of the place legacy media stopped looking — for a conversation that begins as a check-in and turns, by degrees, into an argument about who gets to tell which stories, what it costs to tell them, and what kind of men are produced by the homes that raise them. Ellie has been on the show before, back when she was still introducing herself as “the unpaid writer.” She rebranded to the Panicked Writer; Nick floats “the less panicked writer” as the next iteration, since her rent is paid now and the panic in her face has visibly loosened. The joke holds the whole episode in miniature. Ellie has always done serious work. Now the work is finally feeding her, and the rest of us are catching up to what she’s been doing all along.
The path here was not short and it was not glamorous. Ellie reached out to over 200 literary agents and was rejected by 153 of them; the rest ghosted. She wrote two books that nobody would publish. She came up through transcript correction work — the kind of behind-the-scenes labor that, as Nick points out, can make or break a case in court — and through years of fly-on-the-wall proximity to the Weinstein, Woody Allen, and Kanye stories. When she pitched her own writing on those subjects, the publishing industry told her, in so many words, that they were tired of women reclaiming their narratives. They were bored. That sentence, casually delivered by a literary gatekeeper, is the thing the rest of the episode keeps circling. The bored editor is the Maxwell-letter problem in microcosm. When the institutions that exist to surface these stories decide they are bored of them, the stories don’t stop being true. They just stop reaching the public — until someone like Ellie picks up a Substack and starts writing them anyway.
She came to Substack at the urging of her close friend Tiffany Torres Williams of The Modern Jezebel, who told her to come write because she loved it. The plan was cathartic. Memoir-esque. A little fiction for her kids. And then the election happened, the Epstein stories started moving, and her writing turned. She doesn’t claim it was strategic. She calls it curiosity. Curiosity, in Ellie’s case, turned out to be a discipline — the kind that produces investigative reporting at the rate she now produces it, with a network of sources and survivors and other writers she could not have imagined before this year. Her word for the year, borrowed from Tiffany’s habit, is “plot twist.” She means it.
What she has stumbled into is something the rest of journalism has nearly forgotten how to do. She talks about Maritza Giorgio of the Grounded Podcast scooping her up — the calls at 11 p.m., the texts at 2 a.m., the constant low-grade communal triage of writers and journalists who have decided that the work matters more than the byline. Katie Phang and Jim Acosta call her up to ask what she’s working on, what’s stressing her out, how they can help. People share information instead of hoarding it for the scoop. That, Ellie says, is what true journalism looks like when you actually find it — and it does not look like the news as we have been trained to understand it. It looks like dishes being washed and dinners being eaten while people break down what they know on the phone with each other. The legacy version of the business — the one obsessed with breaking news and exclusivity and access — has been so thoroughly captured by celebrity and money that the actual work of telling the public what it needs to know has migrated to Substacks and podcasts and group threads. Ellie is one of the people the work migrated to.
The Michael Wolff line lands like a thrown punch and lingers like a bruise. Wolff called Ellie and several other women who have been writing about the Epstein files and called them opportunists. He told them they were caught up in hysteria. Ellie’s read of that is precise: when men of his stature in the industry use words like “hysteria” against women who are reporting on the abuse of children, they are not describing the women’s behavior. They are describing their own discomfort at being reacted to. “I didn’t ask you to do that,” she says of the men whose work she now critiques, “but you did it, and now I’m reacting to it.” That sentence is half the thesis of this whole episode in one breath. Powerful is the word she keeps using for women who do not perform smallness on cue. Hysterical is the word the people who built the structure use back at her. The gap between those two words is where the work lives.
The conversation about the language we use lands hard, and it lands without becoming a lecture. Ellie is unsentimental about which words have to go and which we are still pretending are fine. “B*tch” still gets a free pass in music, in casual conversation, in books — Nick names the Dungeon Crawler Carl series specifically and agrees with affection and frustration in equal measure. “Karen” has no male equivalent that lands the same way. “C*nt” is normalized in MAGA discourse against women in the administration whom Ellie and Nick both consider monstrous. Both of them refuse to use it anyway. Ellie’s argument is the unfussy one: we have moved on from words about other groups when we decided to. We can move on from these too. It is not, she says, a burden to learn something new. She mentions a trans person in her life and the work of relearning pronouns and a name; it was not intuitive, and it was not impossible, and it got easier quickly because she stayed consistent and did not make the relearning somebody else’s job. That is the whole argument she’s making about language, scaled up.
Nick offers his own corollary, half joke and half operating principle: if you have to insult someone in the regime, use male anatomy, because men’s anatomy is the weak one. Kick a man in the balls and he falls down. Kick a woman in the same spot and she does not. He’s making a point with a grin, but the point is real. The slurs we have been handed are almost all built from the assumption that female bodies are the soft target. They are not. The bodies the slurs were supposedly built around belong to people who carry, deliver, and feed children — the most physiologically demanding work the human animal does — while the actual fragile equipment hangs off the men insisting otherwise. The joke, in Ellie’s hands and Nick’s, becomes a small piece of evidence in the larger case the episode is making. The story we have been told about who is strong was a marketing campaign, and the campaign has been losing for a while.
The hour’s most generative thread is the one about raising boys. Ellie has three sons and a daughter, and she talks about her household with the matter-of-factness of someone who long ago decided that the home is not a small project. Her boys come home from school saying things — “that’s a boy job,” “boys can be soccer players, Charlotte can’t” — and they do not get condemned for it. They get a conversation. Their pockets are deeper than her pockets and they notice it; she tells them yes, that is a great question, here’s why. She breastfed all four kids tandem-style well past the cultural cutoff, which means the woman’s body in their household was first a thing that fed them and only later, somewhere out in the world, a thing the magazines sexualized. Her boys grew up associating breasts with hunger and care. The grocery-store checkout aisle was the place that tried to teach them otherwise. Some grocery stores, she notes, have figured this out and gone to family-friendly checkouts. The fact that the rest haven’t is one of the small structural ways boys are quietly trained, before any of them have language for it, to read women as decoration.
She is similarly clear about why she will not let her boys’ rights be eroded by the work of teaching them about her daughter’s. Equality, in Ellie’s house, is not subtraction. The boys are not made smaller so the girl can be made bigger. They are taught that all four of them are full people and that the things they will hear at school and on screens are stories, not facts. She watches them grow up gentle and she does not mistake gentleness for weakness; she names it as the result of hearing real conversations at home about real things. This is where Ellie quietly answers the show’s central question without being asked. The home, she says, is 80% of how a small child develops. You do not get to control everything that comes at them out in the world. You get to control what they hear from you. That is what she’s done.
Nick brings the definition into the room — intelligent masculinity as the refusal to outsource accountability and the discipline to live with the consequences of your values and actions — and Ellie immediately folds it into something she’s been working on independently. Even the worst men in public life, she says, would tell you they think they are trying to be better every day. The ones doing the most damage are very often the ones with the strongest internal narrative that they are the heroes of their own story. The work, then, is not just the disposition; it is the willingness to actually look at whether the disposition is producing anything. She tells the Antioch, Tennessee story to make the point. She and her husband worked at a car dealership outside Nashville right after they got married. The casual racism was not casual. She set a single boundary on her first day — if I hear it around me, I leave — and the people around her recalibrated immediately. She did not change their hearts. She did not need to. She made it expensive to perform the worst version of themselves around her, and they stopped doing it. That is what living your values looks like in a room where most people aren’t. It is small. It is repeated. It works.
The discussion of confronting friends arrives through a chat question and lands on the same point. Both Ellie and Nick agree: you have to do it, and you can do it without humiliating anyone. You pull them aside. You tell them quietly that the word bothers you. You do not deliver a sermon. The friends who care about you will adjust. The ones who don’t will reveal themselves, and the revelation is information you needed. Ellie tells the story of being a kid in a Montana family that used words she didn’t understand were wrong, and a more progressive family that loved her enough to tell her. She was not crushed by the correction. She was grateful. That is the model. Not policing. Loving people enough to give them the chance to grow.
The episode’s quietest and most devastating moment comes near the end. Last fall, in Ellie’s network, a 12-year-old boy fell off a parade float during a homecoming parade and was killed in front of his entire community. Everyone is still grieving. Ellie uses the moment not as a digression but as evidence. The boys who saw it happen have been told their whole lives that boys don’t cry, that they have to be strong for the women, that emotion is a thing to be managed and not a thing to be felt. She asks the obvious question: how heart-wrenching is it that we have built a culture where a child cannot break down and weep over a thing that demands weeping? The answer is the whole reason this show exists. We do not teach boys not to feel because feeling is dangerous. We teach them not to feel because the system that profits from masculine performance needs them numb. Ellie’s house teaches the opposite. There is good crying and there is manipulative crying — her kids know the difference — and the good crying, the legitimate kind, is welcome. You can come hug her. You can sit alone. You can do whatever your body needs. That is a working definition of a healthy household, and it is also a political position, whether anyone in the household calls it one.
The Mulan lightning round closes the episode with Ellie at her sharpest. Swift as a coursing river: trust your gut and your first response when something happens. Force of a great typhoon: she is not afraid to speak her mind, even when she has been told her whole life she is too loud. Strong as a raging fire: she is a mom, and anyone who steps in front of her kids will see her burn down the world. Mysterious as the dark side of the moon — and this is the line that contains the whole thesis — the bad dudes in the Epstein files have never heard of her, do not take her seriously, and do not know she’s coming. “When people don’t know you’re coming, they don’t know how to stop you.” She is, by her own account, just tiptoeing in. The men whose names the publishers got bored of hearing are about to learn that the boredom of the institutions did not protect them. It just delayed her arrival.
What Ellie expands in the series is something few other guest have quite done: she takes the question of intelligent masculinity and locates it inside the homes where boys are made before the world gets to them, and inside the journalism that tells the public what those boys’ future targets actually did. She is doing both jobs at once — raising three sons against the script and writing toward a public that the legacy press decided was tired of survivor stories — and she is doing them with the same disposition. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Don’t hoard what you know. Burn down the world for your kids if you have to, and write the article either way.
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I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community!.