A billionaire Trump foe helped Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors to confront Congress by funding a prime-time ad calling for the full release of the files related to the dead pedophile financier.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, 58, said he helped pay for the ad by anti-trafficking coalition World Without Exploitation, which ran during Monday Night Football.
The activist commercial urges viewers to pressure lawmakers to “release all the Epstein files.”
In a post on X, Democratic donor Hoffman wrote, “The Epstein Files must be released, in full. Tonight, I supported World Without Exploitation to run this ad on Monday Night Football, calling for exactly that.”
The buy would have run comfortably into six figures. Trade data show 30-second commercials on Monday Night Football average well over $500,000 per spot, depending on package and placement, making it some of the priciest non–Super Bowl airtime on TV, according to EMarketer.com.
The haunting PSA, produced by World Without Exploitation, features survivors holding photos of themselves as teenagers and telling viewers how old they were when they say they met Epstein—some as young as 14—before the screen flashes the line: “Five administrations and we’re still in the dark.”
The video ends with a call to “bring the secrets out of the shadows” and a demand that Congress force the full release of the files.
The ad dropped on the eve of a crunch House vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a bipartisan bill from Rep. Thomas Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna that would force the Justice Department to publish all unclassified records on Epstein and his co-conspirator, convicted trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, while shielding victims’ personal information.
Hoffman has long been one of Donald Trump’s most deep-pocketed adversaries. The Silicon Valley investor helped bankroll writer E. Jean Carroll’s civil rape and defamation case against Trump through a nonprofit he largely funds.
He has also poured millions into anti-Trump organizing and Democratic causes, becoming such a prolific donor that Vox once described him as a central player in the party’s “big-money machine.”
Trump, 79, and his allies have seized on that record to paint Hoffman as a partisan hit man, blasting his role in the Carroll case and later attacking him over a multimillion-dollar investment in voting-tech company Smartmatic, which is suing Fox News for defamation.
The Monday Night Football play came as Trump is dragged deeper into the Epstein storm. For months, the president has raged that the files saga is a “Democrat hoax,” lashed out at reporters who ask if his friends are named in the documents, and accused his enemies of planting material to smear him.
But with Republican House rebels and Epstein survivors winning public support, the president has been forced into a series of reversals.
On Sunday, he told Republicans to vote for the files’ release so he could “move on,” after it became clear they would defy him anyway, and he even accused Hoffman of being among the Dems to be named in the files.
In a Truth Social post, he declared, “The Department of Justice has already turned over tens of thousands of pages to the Public on ‘Epstein,’ are looking at various Democrat operatives (Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, Larry Summers, etc.) and their relationship to Epstein, and the House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE!”
A day later, he went further, telling reporters he was now “all for it” and would sign a bill releasing the files if it would stop the uproar.
World Without Exploitation has spent weeks escalating pressure with rallies, billboards, and now one of the most-watched TV stages in America.
The Daily Beast has contacted Hoffman and Trump for comment.
After publication a spokesperson for World Without Exploitation clarified that the ad was “funded and created” by the group “alone.” “Reid Hoffman only came to the table after PSA was complete, saying he wanted to fund the airing of the PSA on Monday Night Football,” the spokesperson said. “World Without Exploitation and the survivors want to be clear that their effort to release the Epstein Files is non-partisan and the PSA was not created, influenced ot funded by any political organization.”
