The woman at the party has a gentle Southern drawl and a breathy passion for a godly America. She has a husband somewhere, and she’s a good Catholic; when she curses, it’s to drop an f-bomb—which she apologizes for—rather than take the lord’s name in vain. She pays $500 for the pleasure of dining with the Supreme Court justices, and $1,000 for the chance to pray for Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. If you’re a conservative political figure, this woman might be your biggest fan.
She also happens not to be entirely real. “Lauren Windsor” is the creation of Lauren Windsor, a self-described “advocacy journalist” and founder of the Undercurrent, a political reporting channel under the Young Turks network, whose recent undercover recordings of Roger Stone and Justice Samuel Alito have raised questions of election manipulation and political biases on the Supreme Court—but also of journalist ethics.
Earlier this month Windsor released recordings obtained from inside a dinner for the Supreme Court Historical Society, in which Justice Alito shared that, in our polarized country, “one side or the other is going to win…there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised…. It’s not like you are going to split the difference.” Meanwhile, his wife, Martha-Ann, delivered a discourse ranging from her grudge against the Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan (including an innovative pronunciation of “Balenciaga”) to her fantasy of a flag that says “shame” in Italian, as a response to a Pride flag.
A couple weeks ago, Windsor published another recording, this one of conversations with Stone at a Mar-a-Lago event in which he discusses making preparations to ensure the outcome of the upcoming election that involved “lawyers, judges, technology.” (One of Stone’s several responses to Windsor, published on X: “The radical left have their panties in a twist because I was illegally recorded saying Republicans should use every legal and technical tool to insure an honest 2024 Election.”)
Windsor, who splits her time between Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, was born in Arkansas and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. Raised by a single mother—who was “outspoken,” Windsor tells Vanity Fair, but not particularly political—Windsor identified as a feminist and considered various careers: fashion design, law, public office. “I didn’t think about being a video journalist until much later.”
Now, she says, she wears “many hats.” The undercover work has ramped up over the past four years, but as executive director of American Family Voices, the nonprofit that funds Undercurrent work, “we’re always looking for ways to culture jam.”
Here, she discusses Stone’s supposed “legal action” against her, what she calls her undercover “alter ego,” and the controversy over her methodology.
Vanity Fair: You have been introduced variously as an advocacy journalist, as a liberal documentary filmmaker. So for the record, how would you describe the work that you do?
I’m an activist, but I’m also a journalist. I like to say “advocacy journalist.” I’m also producing a documentary. Everything that we’re doing right now is going into a documentary called Gonzo for Democracy.
You’ve spoken with Stone twice now. What were you and your colleague hoping to learn in the most recent conversations?
The first time I spoke to him was last summer. I asked him, What can we do to make sure Democrats don’t steal the election again? And he said, We have a plan. It’s legal, it’s technical. The RNC should have done it last time. It was in a photo line. I didn’t have the opportunity to speak to him at length about it. So we looked for another opportunity to talk to him, and then going back this time, I wanted to get to that same question: What’s his plan?
And what was your reaction as he was speaking to you?
In the moment it’s really hard to know the significance of everything. This was in March, so it was prior to Aileen Cannon indefinitely delaying the trial. We had it and I didn’t release it because we were working on this SCOTUS project—I didn’t want to jeopardize that—but obviously, as soon as the indefinite delay was announced, it was like, Oh, wow, okay. Stone was talking about having judges be part of this. And when he talked to [my colleague] Allie, he said specifically, Well, it looks like the judge in Florida is on the verge of dismissing the charges. We have a judge’s number on speed dial, or we have it handy for voter fraud, ballot harvesting, whatever.
