Two Epstein survivors enter the battle for Congress with ads against GOP senators: For six years, Marina Lacerda was known publicly only as “Minor Victim 1,” the name federal prosecutors gave her in their 2019 sex-trafficking indictment of Jeffrey Epstein. Last year, she stepped out from behind it on Capitol Hill, joining fellow survivors in demanding that the government release the Epstein files.
Now, just over a year later, Lacerda is the central figure in a new political ad against Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan, who once voted against forcing the files into public view. It launches online Monday and hits Kansas TV on Tuesday.
Hers is one of three new ads featuring Epstein survivors, In another, Jena-Lisa Jones takes aim at Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss. Lacerda also appears in the third, which targets Sen. Ashley Moody, R-Fla., which is expected to air Wednesday.
The ads mark the first time Epstein survivors themselves have campaigned in a congressional race. The family of one survivor got there first: Sky and Amanda Roberts, the brother and sister-in-law of the late Virginia Giuffre, recently appeared in an ad opposing their own congressman, Texas Republican Rep. Jeff Crank, who they say refused to meet with them.
The new ads are sponsored by New Deal for All, a PAC registered just this month and launched by Steve Pajcic, a Florida lawyer and former Democratic state legislator. Pajcic and his children “are spending at least $7 million for a blitz of ads in Florida, Kansas, Mississippi and South Carolina,” the New York Times reported last week in a profile of him.
To date, the PAC has spent roughly $4.55 million on ads and ad reservations through Election Day, according to AdImpact data reviewed by MS NOW. A Democratic strategist close to the project who was granted anonymity to discuss internal plans told MS NOW that the group has put roughly $2 million behind the Epstein-related ads targeting Marshall, Hyde-Smith and Moody, at least to start.
In the Kansas ad, Lacerda says she was 13 when she first met Epstein and was abused by him. “I… https://www.ms.now/news/epstein-survivors-political-ad-2026-kansas-senate-marshall-mississippi-hyde-smith