The couple behind a Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-boosting political action committee—and a disastrous scrapped birthday fundraiser for the White House aspirant—are a “trusted” media contact for Ghislaine Maxwell and her producer partner, both former delegates to the Republican National Convention.
Daphne Barak and Erbil “Bill” Gunasti and their Fighting 4 One America PAC were supposed to host a celebrity-packed fiesta with Kennedy in January to celebrate his 70th birthday and amass cash for his independent campaign for the White House. But the plans for the shindig swiftly disintegrated as various stars the duo claimed would attend—such as Martin Sheen and Dionne Warwick—denied and denounced the event, and Kennedy himself pulled out. But Barak’s personal Instagram page shows the gathering did go on at a somewhat more modest scale, and with Kennedy himself in attendance and enjoying cake.
The only celebrity in the shots, however, was hip-hop legend Louis “Eric B.” Barrier.
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In a statement to The Daily Beast, the Kennedy campaign played down his connection to the pair, dismissing them as minor supporters who had each bought a $500 ticket to an event last July. The party, they claimed, was a “breakfast brunch” that only “a small group of about a dozen friends” attended.
“As far as we know, there was no money raised for the campaign or the PAC,” campaign manager Stefanie Spear wrote.
Barak and Gunasti did not respond to repeated emails, phone calls, and text messages with questions for this story.
But it’s undeniable they have gotten close not just to Kennedy but to the uppermost reaches of the American and international elite: Barak’s Instagram flaunts photos new and old of Barak and Gunasti with such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and now-King Charles, as well as top Republican Party officials like ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH). It even features multiple shots of Barak with former President Donald Trump himself, as well as a few of his famous boosters, such as Roseanne Barr and Jon Voight, at Mar-a-Lago.
They have also clashed in the past with a few of the rich and almost-famous. The pair, who style themselves as scoop-obsessed journalists and political experts, quoted Britney Spears’ ex Kevin Federline claiming the pop star was likely using meth in reports the Daily Mail and The Sun published last year—a quote both Federline and Spears disowned as a fabrication. The father of late singer Amy Winehouse also attacked the two for planning an unauthorized biopic of his daughter based on Barak’s book Saving Amy, and for selling NFTs with her image via Gunasti’s website.
But what has undoubtedly won Barak the most attention in recent memory are a series of exclusive, sympathetic jailhouse interviews with Ghislaine Maxwell, consort and co-conspirator to perverted late financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The media hits, for which Gunasti served as photographer, enabled Maxwell to complain about the food and conditions in lock-up, protest her “dear friend” Prince Andrew’s innocence, and refuse to apologize to her and Epstein’s victims. The Maxwell family, which had the fallen socialite’s brothers participate in the interviews, did not respond to The Daily Beast’s questions about how they selected Barak as an interviewer.
But after airing one of the segments, Britain’s TalkTV host Jeremy Kyle introduced Barak as “someone Ghislaine has known and trusted for the best part of 19 years.” Yet evidence shows Barak’s relationship with Maxwell stretches even further back than that.
It was Barak who conducted the first interview with Maxwell after the daughter of the late Daily Mirror publisher Robert Maxwell arrived in New York. In the 2022 Paramount-produced Ghislaine: Partner in Crime, Barak described conversations she later had with Maxwell about her relationship with Epstein.
“She suddenly started to talk a lot about sex. Total obsession about how she looked like. She was showing everything, and she was very worried about her body,” Barak tells the camera in the first installment of the four-part series. “Looking back, it looks like that she really was very worried if she’s pretty enough or sexy enough for him.”
Barak even described dispensing advice to the allegedly lovelorn high-society fixture.
“I said to her, ‘look, Jeffrey Epstein is not going to marry to you. And I was just like, just like, why are you wasting your time,’” Barak continues. “She didn’t want to hear what I had to say. She didn’t accept it. She told me ‘I know what I’m doing.’ I mean, she had a plan.”
Oddly, this contrasts with an earlier description Barak gave of her relationship with Maxwell in a 2021 radio interview, in which she claims she “didn’t keep in touch” with the socialite outside a few interviews in the 1990s.
In her public appearances around the Maxwell exclusives, Barak sought to preserve at least the appearance of journalistic impartiality: decrying the conditions of her confinement and acknowledging her presumed innocence prior to the guilty verdict, while also expressing sympathy for her and Epstein’s victims.
Fighting 4 One America’s webpage, however, questions whether Maxwell is “evil or [a] sacrificial lamb?”—while a post penned on the site by Gunasti calls her trial “an American disgrace,” and argues the jetsetter was the victim of nefarious “globalists.”
“Globalism decided to go after the US Justice with Ghislaine’s Saga,” the post reads. “All Globalism had to do to achieve its evil aim was to put the ‘Presumption of Innocence’ clause into fray.”
He has published similar material on his Substack, and even tried to sell NFTs with Maxwell’s image and names like “Ghislaine Against BS” and “Ghislaine Against the World.”
Kennedy has his own ties to Maxwell and Epstein. In a recent interview, Kennedy admitted that his ex-wife knew Maxwell, and that he and his ex-spouse had traveled to Palm Beach once on the financier’s infamous private jet. He confessed to again boarding the craft on another occasion for what he described as a “fossil-hunting trip,”
And, judging by Barak’s Instagram, he and his political allies have maintained close ties to Barak and Gunasti—even though federal law forbids coordination between candidates and supporting super PACs. Barak and Gunasti met with former Kennedy campaign manager Dennis Kucinich in September, as documented in an Instagram post in which Barak promised “much strategy in the works.”
Just a week later, Fighting 4 One America filed with the Federal Elections Commission. But the creation of the PAC did not impede contact between the couple and the Kennedy camp. Just days after the filing, Barak published an interview in the Daily Mail with Kennedy bride Cheryl Hines, in which the aspiring First Lady begged President Joe Biden to grant her husband a Secret Service detail. The article provided an address for Fighting 4 One America’s website, but did not disclose that Barak was running a PAC backing Kennedy.
In late November, Barak posted photos of a dinner she organized that featured herself, Hines, Kennedy, and Palestinian pharmaceutical billionaire Dr. Adnan Mjalli.
And in a post from February, Barak asserted she and Kennedy text “daily.” The Kennedy campaign refused to answer repeated questions about whether the ongoing contact was consistent with the ban on coordination.
Fighting 4 One America is also entangled with the official Kennedy super PAC American Values 2024, which created the controversial ad which aired during the Super Bowl. American Values 2024 promoted the failed January fundraiser and also—according to its reports to the FEC—dumped $75,000 into Fighting 4 One America in December.
However, Fighting 4 One America PAC reports this gift as coming not from American Values 2024 but from its treasurer and co-chairman Tony Lyons. Lyons is the president of publishing house Skyhorse Books, which has put out titles by both Kennedy and by Barak and Gunasti.
The FEC also documents Barak and Gunasti’s history of financially supporting Republicans, particularly Rep. Darrell Issa (D-C.A.) and the California GOP. However, the duo did give money to Hillary Clinton while she was a U.S. senator and candidate for president in the first decade of the century.
Both Barak and Gunasti were pledged delegates for former President Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 Republican National Conventions, Golden State records show. A local paper even credited the duo with bringing Trump—with whom Barak claimed to be friends—and his campaign manager Steve Bannon to their home state eight years ago. Fighting 4 One America’s website even attributes Gunasti’s decision to launch an unsuccessful campaign for mayor of Palm Springs to Trump’s presidential announcement that June.
