Democrat Delegate Stacey Plaskett, the Virgin Islands’ non-voting member of Congress, garnered headlines recently when it came to light that she took direction from sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a 2019 congressional hearing.
Her relationship with Epstein is especially notable because Plaskett herself had “private nude images” of her stolen by her own ex-staffers, who used them to attempt to sabotage her re-election campaign. The husband of one of the culprits was, like Epstein, later found dead.
In March 2016, Plaskett asked staffer Juan R. McCullum to fix her iPhone. After snooping around, McCullum found nude images and videos, including one of her husband naked and wearing makeup while their young child was in the room, according to court papers.
Plaskett is a member of the House Intelligence Committee. She has said she had texted with Epstein during a House Oversight Committee hearing because Epstein was providing her information about what to ask President Donald Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, because Epstein “had information, and I was going to get information to get at the truth.”
After the Epstein revelations emerged, she faced a censure vote in the House, narrowly escaping on a 209-214 vote.
In July 2016, after leaving Plaskett’s office to work for Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL), McCullum created an email address and sent the photos to politicians and the media, as well as posted them to Facebook using a fake account. Police traced the accounts to McCullum and found that he had communicated with another former Plaskett staffer, Dorene Browne-Louis, who had gone on to work for the Department of Homeland Security.
“Somebody will pay for how we were treated,” he wrote to Browne-Louis.
Browne-Louis “made numerous false and misleading statements about her knowledge of McCullum’s activities,” and falsely denied deleting relevant text messages, prosecutors said. She later testified before a federal grand jury and provided false statements, including that she “did not know that McCullum wanted to seek revenge against Delegate S.P.,” court papers said.
A superseding indictment said Browne-Louis provided McCullum the email address of the governor of the Virgin Islands and political supporters — taken from confidential campaign documents — for the purpose of sending the pictures to him and others.
Using his fake email account, McCullum sent Browne-Louis multiple messages “containing derogatory statements about” Plaskett, and Browne-Louis “requested that he re-send her the nude Images and Videos,” the indictment said. Browne-Louis gave one of the images to a campaign staffer for Plaskett’s challenger in the August 6, 2016, Democratic primary election, who in turn gave it to a reporter.
In his messages, McCullum “voiced opposition to Delegate S.P. and attempted to use the communications to undermine Delegate S.P.’s re-election campaign.”
Both culprits pleaded guilty. In a victim impact statement, Plaskett told the court that “our family’s privacy was invaded, pillaged and we were basically raped by Juan McCullum and Dorene Browne-Louis… Why, because I was mean? I demanded a lot, I demand most of myself.”
Plaskett continued, “We got calls from the White House with complaints that McCullum was pretending to be a member of the White House staff, we should have fired him then but I asked him to put his head down and let it blow over.”
“I’m so grateful for all the people at home who rallied around me,” she wrote. “The women who saw it for what it was. Bringing a black woman down. McCullum you’re like some creep who rips a woman’s clothes off in public, like the slave seller ripping a black woman’s clothes off.”
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“Then you went further. They tried to first emasculate my husband. Say he was not a man, because there was a picture of him with makeup. Makeup it was obvious he was not happy to be wearing. That he lost in a bet. The worst was that they tried to put in the public that my husband and I allowed our daughter who was around 4-5 at the time of the picture in some perverted unnatural situation. For that reason, I want to physically destroy the two of them.”
Plaskett’s husband, Jonathan Buckney-Small, wrote in his victim impact statement that he ran into McCullum after finding out about the photos and “NEVER had I felt the pulse the beat the flow my blood asking me to take matters in my own hands that night when you couldn’t look me in the eye. It was then it was clear I had a decision I had to make do I go to jail to make myself feel better or do I let time take you do [sic] jail.”
In March 2018, McCullum was sentenced to a year and a day in prison, 100 hours of community service, and two years of probation. In June 2020, a judge agreed to terminate his probation early.
In August 2016, a month after the photos and video were published, Browne-Louis’s husband, Gregory Benson Louis, was shot and killed outside the firehouse where he worked.
Browne-Louis also pleaded guilty. The government did not seek jail time in part because her husband was murdered. She was sentenced to two years’ probation.
