Scouring public files, Roger Sollenberger uncovered huge, unreported news. Then he started digging even deeper
"It’s all right there." The independent journalist explains how he broke massive stories that big newsrooms missed.
Roger Sollenberger never really wanted to be a journalist, but he’s definitely one now. He started out just being interested in covering the rise of Trumpism. Now he’s broken one of the biggest Epstein files stories out there.
Sollenberger was always a writer and cared about politics, but he ended up in journalism by accident. Witnessing the rise of Trump, he started to follow some notable stories coming out of the administration. That curiosity landed him a job at Salon, which then led him to The Daily Beast. Today, he’s doing journalism independently.
In the two years since going independent, Sollenberger has broken some significant stories. His recent Epstein files story revealed the FBI had investigated claims that Trump had sexually abused a minor. And at the end of last year, he published a scoop about Rep. Cory Mills’s (R-FL) connections to a weapons manufacturer.
In the latest edition of Depth Perception, we speak with Sollenberger about going after the big stories as an independent journalist, the trajectory of his career, the state of journalism, and more. —Thor Benson
There are people out there doing independent journalism who get big scoops, but I think it’s harder to do that than when you’re in a newsroom. How have you approached that and what’s your sourcing look like?
With [the Epstein files] story, there wasn’t much in the way of sourcing. It was almost exclusively documents-based reporting. There are sources that I’ve developed in the course of reporting the story, but that’s just using networks and techniques that I developed over time at The Daily Beast.
You can reconstruct the story without needing any special inside sourcing. Of course, it helps to have inside sourcing — if you can have someone go and look at the un-redacted documents, for instance. But this was really just me assembling a narrative that existed in these scattered documents, which cohered over time.
It was astounding to me that the thing that it seemed pretty much everybody was looking for — an allegation against Donald Trump that carried more weight than the frivolous and fantastical and baseless allegations that were on that FBI tip sheet — it’s so weird to me that I happened to be the person to find it. Or at least to find it and be able to pursue it and assemble it into the narrative.
I was pretty sure that big newsrooms had picked everything clean or would be able to pick everything clean. They have teams of researchers and reporters that can afford to just comb through this massive trove of documents for weeks, and I was assuming that that machine was going to filter all the stories out. And then I saw this, and it hadn’t been reported. It was kind of surprising at first, but it’s all right there.
And you had another pretty sizable story not long ago.
I had this story about Cory Mills that was documents-based, but it also took a whole lot of source building and network building. Over the course of reporting that story — which was months of work, talking to hundreds of people, developing trust with members of Congress, developing trust with staffers — I built out a huge network.
I don’t think there are many independent journalists who have the resources to do that. I’m fortunate that I was in a place where I did have the time to stretch my legs and focus on that story and not worry about where my next meal was coming from. My wife had a pretty good job and she was super supportive of me just staying at home and being a dad and kind of doing this work in the background. I thought it was a really important story that I had the time to just be a dog with a bone about and go after. That is rare.
On the flip side of that, I know journalists who work at places that have really deep resources, but they are so overworked and so choked up with the news of the day. It’s dizzying. And perversely, the places that do have the resources don’t seem to be able to afford the time to focus on stories like the Cory Mills story.
It’s a strange set of incentives. It’s hard to capture exactly what the gap is between these worlds of independent journalists or startups and the legacy media or the more well-resourced national news outlets, but there’s definitely a major gap in there that I’ve been able to fill twice. It’s taken a lot of work. It’s a hard road being a freelancer.
Honestly, learn how to read [Federal Election Commission (FEC)] reports. If you learn how to read them for stories, you can find a lot of really interesting reporting from just pulling campaign finance filings. That’s where a whole lot of my reporting stems from. Obviously, not the Epstein stuff, but the Cory Mills stuff.
There are his public disclosures, his ethics disclosures to Congress, the financial disclosures. These publicly available documents [that] don’t require the roll of the dice on a [Freedom of Information Act] request. You learn a lot about a person by what they choose to spend their money on or by who they hire or by who they raise money from. These transactions aren’t just numbers signifying “XYZ.” There are stories there. There’s a reason somebody donates money to somebody. Sometimes those stories are more significant than other times.
More from from Depth Perception:
Your career has had an interesting trajectory. I feel like it kind of reflects the industry. You went from Salon to The Daily Beast. Now you’re doing some independent work. How’s it felt navigating the industry as all these changes have been happening?
I became a journalist sort of accidentally. I have an MFA in fiction writing, funnily enough. I was teaching college English, and I was a musician, and I was just kind of finding different ways to make a living and afford my rent. I had always felt emotionally invested in democracy and in politics, and that comes from my family history. I just sort of felt that the Trump era was something that I needed to write about.
I think it was 2019 that I landed my first real reporting gig. I got Rudy Giuliani’s phone number and wrote some reports. I enjoyed it. I thought it was fun to figure things out and to talk to people and provide information and perspective that I thought was important. And then I just became a reporter after that. I didn’t come into journalism intentionally, and I didn’t come to journalism traditionally. I worked really fucking hard, though.
At Salon, I was doing three to four aggregation write-ups a day. At the same time, I was doing independent, original reporting. I wanted to do that, and I made a role for myself at Salon. I came up with a story and they trusted me, and they published it. They’re like, “Yeah, do another one.” So I did another one, and I worked like 80-hour weeks for about a year.
I went from Salon to The Daily Beast, and the workload, the content demand, dropped down. Instead of three to four [pieces] a day, it was three to four a week, which is still a lot for original reporting. That’s a lot of work, and there’s a lot of churn and burnout. It’s a very difficult job for somebody like me who is obsessive about doing the best job.
“I know journalists who work at places that have really deep resources, but they are so overworked and so choked up with the news of the day. It’s dizzying. And perversely, the places that do have the resources don’t seem to be able to afford the time to focus on stories like the Cory Mills story.” —Roger Sollenberger
By 2024, I wasn’t feeling that I was getting a good return for myself — personally, emotionally, psychologically — for my investment in that work. I just kind of didn’t feel like I fit in the industry anymore, so I took a break, and it’s been good for me to take a break.
It’s getting increasingly difficult to cut through the noise of the news and find a story that would do really well at pretty much any other era in American politics and have editors turn it down. It’s getting really hard to place stories as a freelancer, not just in my experience, but from the people that I’ve talked to. They’re competing with the largest news machine in American history: the Trump administration. As a freelancer, you have to find something really special to get that placed in a national outlet if you want to compete just with the Trump administration.
Substack is gaining a lot of momentum, broadly, and there’s so much great reporting there. But individually, it’s this long tail effect where the individual stories might not get the attention they deserve, simply because they’re on Substack.
And you broke the Epstein story on Substack, which is a big piece to publish yourself. Can you tell me about the timeline of you discovering this thing, deciding to write about it and then it getting picked up by major outlets?
I published the first story on a Sunday evening, and I published five more over the course of that week. NPR and MSNOW published their confirming reports the Monday after I published. It was like a week and a day, and in that time … I was doing everything I could to ensure that the story got the corroboration and confirmation and attention that it deserved from the national press.
I was happy to see it confirmed. I did not care about being cited as the person who discovered this thing or the person who broke the news. This, to me, was always just a major, major story of potentially generational significance — the cover-up I’m speaking of here — setting the allegations aside.
As Julie K. Brown [the writer who first broke the Epstein trafficking story] always says to me, it takes a village. In this scenario, it is just about how many smart people can I get to care about this story the way I think it should be cared about? I was so happy to see so many smart people take that story to different places, and not just to confirm it, but to push it and help get more revelations. We still don’t have all the documents, but I was just incredibly happy to see this story go to the place where I always thought it would go.
Further reading from Roger Sollenberger:
“On Trump Accuser Files, DOJ Establishes Pattern of Obstruction” (Roger Sollenberger’s Substack, March 11, 2026)
“DOJ Exposed Name of Trump Underage Accuser After She ‘Refused To Cooperate’ Against Him” (Roger Sollenberger’s Substack, February 23, 2026)
“Underage Trump Accuser’s Brother Was Arrested For Participating Jan. 6 Riot” (Roger Sollenberger’s Substack, February 19, 2026)
“Sex Workers & A Secret Charity: The Story Of Cory Mills’s ‘F*cking Bananas’ Afghanistan Mission” (Roger Sollenberger’s Substack, November 20, 2025)
Congratulations on all that hard work and reporting. But like you said, an essay needs attention. Even critical stories like yours can get lost in the competition for eyes. Substack didn’t start as a major news outlet, but more as an avenue for creatives.