My Fallout with Troy Barile-Simleness.

Troy presents himself as the lead investigative journalist into the story of Sascha Barros. He runs a Substack called The Fallout with TBS, a series he calls The Machine, and a suite of adjacent properties: grifter-nation.com, grifter-nation.help, followthefiles.com. He sells a donation based, $10 suggested, OSINT workbook for those wanting to learn investigative journalism. He contributes to WhoWhatWhy. He describes himself as a survivor-centric investigative journalist who has spent years mapping the network operating to rehabilitate Ghislaine Maxwell’s public image and attack the credibility of Epstein survivors.

Troy explicitly states he is a “Survivor Advocate.”

What I believe is that Troy Barile-Simleness is a fraud. I believe he used false professional credentials in order to build his career, mislead the people he represented, carelessly uses illegal methods to gain his information, and even to attempted to intimidate other people into silence.

On January 16th, 2026, Troy posted his first documented acknowledgement of Sascha Barros (Riley) by sharing a post from a professional clinician. Troy has specifically stated he did not know Sascha Barros in January. He says he didn’t know of Lisa Voldeng or Sascha until Voldeng platformed George Tonks — someone Troy has known since they were both young. Voldeng platformed Tonks on February 18th. This is the same day Troy unloaded five rounds of premade articles that named Sascha before its end. He first messaged Sascha on the 10th of that month — more than a week before the article released.

A few days after Troy’s repost of Sascha’s story, a Kickstarter campaign Troy ran for a fantasy novel and collectible toy line called The Elementlings: The Great Symphony - Book One closed without reaching its funding goal. He raised $3,311 of an $18,000 target from 9 backers. The project was described by a local news anchor as his life’s work, motivated during a time of genuine grieving. He was interviewed by a local network after distributing little gift baggies; a toy and some heartfelt words. The interview shows a human being behind the modeling-style photographs of their internet presence.

A week after that failure, a new funding page was created.

One week after the Kickstarter ended, a new, sophisticated fundraising page to help document the story of Sascha Barros was created by user K2 Gives, in Las Vegas. The banner image places a childhood photo of Sascha alongside Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump.

While the fundraiser sits at zero donations, it is seeded with high-profile influencer followers that suggest a professional marketing infrastructure rather than a grassroots effort. This organization shares a profile with K2 Analytics, a Las Vegas digital marketing firm specializing in social strategy.

Sascha’s position is clear. The second statement was made at the early stages of our timeline, before any major events had occurred.

I restate: we do not know who made this crowdfunding page. But whoever made it doesn’t change the reality: this is a financial instrument pointed at a human being, waiting for a trigger.

Troy has at least three websites:

It is worth noting that the choice of the last domain name came directly from Sascha, the website was made for Sascha, and Troy is just the one who owns it. He has since removed any positive mention of Sascha in exchange for The Riley Protocol and other documents strictly asserting Sascha is lying.

That’s not illegal, but it’s not right.

Sascha confirmed Troy claimed to have built these websites himself. Grifter Nation, Follow The Files, and Amalgamated Army were made within extremely short timeframes. The complexity of the websites, the information architecture, and the visual consistency are unlikely to be the work of someone who clicked through a default template on a common website builder. Whether they were hand-made or built on a platform is something I cannot confirm. What I can say is that the competence he claims to demonstrate fits precisely with someone who spent years in digital marketing, PR, and media strategy.

It does not fit with someone whose primary identity is a research neuroscientist who spent the better part of a decade in a doctoral program.

A PhD candidate in cognitive neuroscience building polished activist media websites in their spare time is possible. But a marketing professional with a decade of digital strategy experience doing the same thing is expected.

One of those backgrounds is documented. The other has no public record anywhere.

The documented record

Troy’s documented professional background, confirmed on his own LinkedIn, has nothing to do with journalism, investigation, or even neuroscience. He spent two and a half years as a Senior Model Scout at Aesthetics PPD in the Greater Tampa Bay Area, scouting and booking individuals of all ages for fashion and editorial productions. He then moved to New York, where from 2009 to 2011 he co-owned and operated a dog walking company. His education is in marketing and business.

His LinkedIn profile reads: “Entrepreneur — Cannapreneur — Therapist — Educator — Philanthropist.” His entire documented professional history is marketing, PR, talent management, cannabis industry work, and pet services. His own workbook, the one he provides to people who want to learn investigative journalism, states in the author bio: “He is not a trained journalist, learned to do this by doing it.”

That is the most honest sentence in his entire public record. To be clear, he has been doing this for 3 months.

His LinkedIn, which lists him as Professor at City Cannabis College in Chico, California, is expansive:

• Bachelor (of Science; inferred) in Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Temple University, 2005–2008
• Bachelor (of Science; inferred) in Clinical Psychology, Temple University, also 2005–2008
• Bachelor (unspecified) in Marketing, University of South Florida, 2008–2010
• Master of Business Administration in Marketing, University of South Florida, 2010–2013
• Advanced Certificate in Cannabis Industry Management, Oaksterdam University, 2017–2018
• Master of Science in Organizational Leadership, Colorado State University Global, 2019–2020

No doctorate. An MS in Leadership and an MBA in marketing. No master’s in any psychology-related field.

It’s worth noting the overlap in timeframes for two of these degrees. Running two full bachelor’s programs simultaneously at the same institution over the same three years is unlikely. Accreditation standards, credit hour requirements, and institutional policy make it extremely difficult to complete two independent bachelor’s degrees in the same timeframe at the same school. What you can do in that window is declare a dual major, which produces one degree with two fields listed, or a major with a minor.

So what?

Simply lying about having a degree is not a crime. However, when false credentials are used to obtain employment, establish authority over a victim or representative of a victim, or to induce someone to disclose information or resources they would not otherwise have provided, the conduct becomes fraud.

When a stranger questioned his doctorate, instead of producing his credentials, he decided it was an operation against him. He called one of those people questioning him my “chihuahua”, and told me to tell them to back off. Troy then stated that it was too late even if I did, and that “others are now keeping an eye on [them] as well”.

It is important to note that “my chihuahua” is a respected individual within their highly specialized field. They are a Licensed Therapist with over 20 years of experience in trauma therapy, a recognized expert intimately familiar with the intersection of mental health and the legal system. They have won awards from the City of Berkeley for their work training other clinicians to recognize and treat dissociative disorders.

A PhD in any field requires years of sustained, focused academic work; prior degrees, original peer-reviewed research, and a dissertation that survives scrutiny from real experts in that field. Troy’s documented career between his last confirmed degree and the claimed 2024 doctorate is cannabis industry work, digital marketing, and PR.

There is no published research.
No conference presentations.
No academic affiliations.
No institutional record of any kind connecting him to any kind of research environment.

Cognitive Neuroscience specifically makes his claims absurd. It is among the most rigorous and methodologically demanding fields in all of science, a discipline that sits at the intersection of neurology, psychology, and biology, that requires fluency in neuroimaging, statistical modeling, and experimental design, and that holds itself to extraordinarily high standards precisely because the consequences of bad science in that space are unusually severe.

Bad cognitive neuroscience gets cited in courtrooms. It shapes how we treat trauma survivors, how we assess credibility, how we build policy around memory and mental health. The people in that field are acutely aware of what it costs when someone misrepresents what the science says.

Primary court records

In 2007, Troy was charged in Pasco County, Florida — an insufficient funds check, Florida statute 832.05 (case CTC0705042MMAW). It is confirmed on the Pasco County clerk’s primary court database. The disposition was Adjudication Withheld: the judge declined to enter a formal conviction, which keeps the charge off a standard background check. But it is not an acquittal. This is not a background aggregator entry. This is a primary court record.

In 2022, a consumer lending company called United Finance CO filed a small claims case against Troy and a co-defendant in Jackson County, Oregon. The two were sued jointly, which means they had some kind of shared financial relationship at the time. The defendants successfully moved to dismiss before any judgment was entered. The case is confirmed on the Jackson County court database.

It is worth noting that Medford is also where, around the same period, Troy was reported as being found in a stolen or unauthorized vehicle. He has denied this, but the report includes his full name.

Aggregator entries

These websites pull data regularly, allowing them to obtain and retain information that other databases delete. This cuts two ways: these sites can also be unreliable. It’s important to remember exactly how unreliable this section is when reading it.

In 2006, Troy was charged with obtaining property by worthless check over the felony threshold — a third-degree felony under Florida statute: Adjudication Withheld. The Hillsborough County clerk’s public portal returns no result for his name, which in Florida is consistent with a record that has been expunged. This charge appears 3 separate times on aggregators.

In 2021, a charge appears of Theft From An Elder Or Dependent Adult. It’s worth noting the co-defendant that appears in the 2022 fraud charges. This same charge appears twice.

These are among several court-processed evictions, traffic violations, failures to provide registration, and failures to appear in court.

When I began my own personal investigation into Sascha Barros, I was not covering Sascha as a believer. I was skeptical. At first I thought it was a set of good opportunities to test the skills in investigative journalism that I had been learning for nearly a year. Eventually after joining the discourse around the story, I began to feel the level of organized hatred directed at Sascha was disproportionate to what any ordinary person, even a person with a factitious disorder, actually deserved. That disproportionality felt like a signal worth investigating.

So I pushed my way in with Iterative Adversarial Inquiry specifically to test who in the discourse was a genuine actor and who was performing as one. I began calling out well known figures on their hypocrisy and self-stated contradictions: Laura Robinson, Brandy Zadrozny, and eventually, one of those targets was Troy Raymond Barile-Simleness.

Troy published a Substack piece on April 15th that withdrew his support for Sascha, called them a liar, and labeled them dangerous. On its face, as journalism, it was indefensible, it attacked an alleged trafficking survivor’s credibility with no new evidence and compounded the existing harassment campaign against them. Its’ entire methodology was built off the idea that finding minor irregularities in great enough numbers would invalidate their story, even going further to say that because of these inconsistencies it also proved Sascha was dangerous.

I called him out publicly for it, in direct terms. I called him weak. I called him a bad investigator. And most importantly, I told him he was a liability in the space he worked in. I called him a coward, and refused to speak in private about these things, as I was responding to a public article he published. I told him he would make a good case study as someone who used cultural rhetoric to defend their worldview, and an even better one than my previous case study, Laura Robinson. This would be his focus for the next few days.

I made it clear that I wanted to engage in public view, and only removed myself from the view in good faith. Since that good faith is now gone, I am exposing him for his behavior.

Troy eventually messaged me on another account, telling me that his entire article was actually a plot: it was a tactic designed to gain the trust of Astra Crosby, and regain Sascha’s vehicle that was left at her house. According to Troy, his article was the first stage of a covert operation designed to insert himself into Astra’s social circle with the ultimate goal of gaining information about Lisa Voldeng. In 2023, he was found in a stolen car in Medford OR and arrested, a possible comparable situation, but we can only speculate. He was quickly released.

This is not an appropriate methodology in any space, but especially not in the space he has built his career in. He works in spaces where the line between victim and victimizer is often a thin one, where indoctrination is a standard method, and weaponizing trust in figures with institutional backing and allyship is an actively dangerous one. I have documented nearly a dozen honeypot victims of Troy.

Troy has been in this space 3 months.

His attack on Sascha was a manufactured entry point into this honeypot.

He wanted to appear as someone who had turned against Sascha so that Astra, who had already expressed opposition to Sascha, would trust him. At this point our differences were a matter of Sascha’s discretion, and that I thought his plan was stupid. I made that clear and spelled my logic out to him. His only answer was to allude that Lisa Voldeng was a bad actor.

I told him Sascha has given me no reason to indicate that they disapproved of my writing. Troy’s entire assertion was that his plan was approved by Sascha, that they were in support, and that me attacking Troy on the merit of his own article would ruin his operation. When I told him I had asked Sascha directly, and that they gave me no indication they knew about this operation or didn’t want me to publish, Troy told me Sascha agreed with him — I just needed to talk to Sascha.

So I did.

He called me a liar.

When the threats began to escalate, my only possible safety in case these were credible threats was public visibility. I shared general details of what was happening with the clinician I had contacted weeks ago about Sascha in relation to their experience with trauma and DID. They believed I was having reasonable responses to real events, and that I was not having a psychotic break or experiencing a delusional episode.

Troy contacted someone who already knew of the operation and knew Sascha in order to have them reach out as a mediator. As the new mediator and I were talking, we eventually agreed: the plan was irresponsible, its damage went beyond Sascha, that Troy would likely have to come clean about everything he had done, exfiltrate from the covert operation, and hopefully even grow as a person as a result.

I was eventually convinced he was a genuine actor with a bad methodology and a severe insecure immaturity. After I wrote a formal 7k-character apology to Troy apologizing for my insults and explaining why this was still important — directly stating why it was dangerous for him to continue doing what he was doing — he seemed to agree.

Over the rest of the night and all of the next day, everyone in that conversation, including Sascha, reached the same conclusion. Sascha states they were never fully comfortable with the operation. Troy initially appeared to accept the terms, but was not explicit.

I felt the potential danger was not being understood. I made it clear that I felt Troy was missing key context. I was about to describe things that could put me in danger in order to make him understand. Maybe I was wrong, maybe the statements I was about to make weren’t dangerous. But that was what I made clear before I made them.

Specifically, a context Troy agreed with.

He then shifted again to belittling me and refused to engage a single point I made even when directed to focus on the issues directly. I told him I was sorry we could not reach him, that we had all hoped he would grow as a person, and I left the group chat.

That section title quote came from before I was invited into the group chat, when the threats were minor, and I was not scared for my life. It is extremely important that this context be understood for what followed. He found my personal Facebook and messaged me there after I left that group chat.

His constant threatening and diverting was wearing on me. At this point, it became clear to me it didn’t really matter if these threats were credible — someone in his space, with his choice of career, should never behave like this.

I showed him a new statement I was adding to the article — explaining how the people I was dealing with seemed concerned with sending AI images of opponents to laugh at them, were following leads that have no chance of finding evidence, that I feared they may have been put there to discredit the investigation, and that Sascha agreed the operation was putting the entire investigation at risk.

He responded swiftly:

I responded with his statement about not being “the architect” in mind. Nothing I said should have put anyone at risk.

Though I still desperately wanted to believe Troy was genuine, my faith was slipping away. This is the moment threats became gleeful, direct, and genuinely unhinged.

My response at the time? “Lol”

When I refused to remove that paragraph, Troy said in response:

These statements were clearer threats than before. They were not vague. They were direct. He included Sascha and their children.

When I asked Sascha if Troy should know where they lived, they said that he should not know where they were at that time. This began to worry me, the idea that maybe Troy was not genuine finally began creeping up my spine.

As soon as I reached that stage, I could not in good conscience keep my roommate in the home that Troy claimed to know the location of. Since I was planning on releasing soon, she needed to be out of the house.

When I said I needed to focus on moving my roommate to safety, he said: “It doesn’t matter where they go.” Then: “You aren’t understanding. You can’t hide.” Then a thumbs-up emoji. Eventually: “Just be careful who you talk to online because they may not be who you think they are. Because you already have.” Then a winky face.

Troy’s last message to me was at 3:14 AM on the 20th of April:

When I read those messages a few minutes after he sent them, I blocked him.

He had proved this was about intimidation over personal embarrassment, or he wouldn’t have released everything anyway.

I became more scared than I had ever been in my life. I suddenly believed everything Troy had said. I fled my home to a hotel. I checked my car for GPS trackers. I may have been posting about the threats I was receiving for the previous 24 hours, but this is the first moment I actually believed them.

On April 17th, just before I was added to any group chat, and soon after I first blocked Troy’s Threads over his constant threats, something happened that I didn’t think twice about at the time. An abandoned car near our home was removed. This car had been there since before we moved in — about two years — and held a thick layer of likely years’ worth of pollen buildup. In its place was a lone, unmarked white work truck, bundles of electric cords in the back. This was not a tow truck. It was not suspicious.

That night, my roommate and I went to a 24/7 grocery store — not unusual for us, we almost never go during the day. As we were walking in, an older white car with solid black windows, including windshield, came close to hitting us both. They were speeding down the center of both lanes of the road that separated the grocery store from its parking lot. At the time I did not believe any of the threats from Troy — I was laughing at them as we walked in.

I did not even look at the license plate. I assumed this was a random act of aggression.

The car stopped directly in front of us, blocking our path, then turned perpendicular to the lanes in front of us, and too slowly began pulling away. It stopped diagonal in the road, cutting us off from the store, effectively pinning us against the edge of the road. As we quickly walked away, it turned back toward us as we entered the store. It only occurred to me once we were inside what it could have meant. I was still not yet paranoid.

That night, as my roommate evacuated from our home, and as she was pulling away, she drove past the place where the abandoned car had been, where the work truck had been earlier that very day. She says what she saw, given the context, gave her chills. She said she saw a dark truck or van with a similarly blacked-out windshield parked nearby. At that point, she was in so much fear she couldn’t even bring herself to look at the vehicle. She cannot event identify if it was a truck with a bed, or a SUV or van. When she returned hours later to bring me to a hotel due to the next events that happened, both the trailer and vehicle was were gone.

Four hours after my roommate left, I experienced the sound event.

Before this moment, I truly believed that all the threats were just talk. My position relative to the door would lead the source of the sound to directly in front of my home, or a wall of the asymmetrical duplex that extends further forward than our unit. If the sound was not coming from directly in front of my home, it must have come from far enough that it must have come from the other side of that unit. The other side of that unit is fence, then another duplex.

I have never been so scared in my life. Even now, I am not comfortable entertaining the idea this was anything but a hallucination inside my own head, but I can’t ignore the possibility. I left after that and did not return for days, until drafting a series of statements, buying security cameras, and checking with a licensed therapist.

Directional Ultrasonic Devices — commercially available.

These systems utilize ultrasonic transducers to create a narrow, laser-like beam of sound that only becomes audible when it interacts with a surface or the listener’s head, allowing for precise targeting that leaves little acoustic trace in the surrounding environment. While once highly inaccessible technology, these devices are now widely accessible for legitimate uses in high-end retail displays, museums, and targeted advertising. Anyone determined enough can build a DIY acoustic device for as little as $5 to $15 thousand dollars.

This commercial availability means that any corrupt organized group, or any individual with a budget, can deploy these tools to harass a target or disrupt a space without the massive logistical footprint or power requirements of older, military-grade LRAD systems.

I was evaluated more informally by the same clinician I have mentioned. I do not claim this as a definitive answer to whether I was being delusional or hallucinating, only as an anecdotal against that. They had already told me my work reads like a person in their right mind.

Soon after I fled and before I returned home, I released a “cold” version of the article. I avoided mentioning Troy because of the threats. I have calmed since, and my perspective has changed.

His response document

Troy dropped his next article about Sascha, called The Riley Protocol, about 48 hours later. Formatted as a congressional reference document on Sascha’s own website, filled with academic citations, evidentiary tiers, and a forensic matrix that goes far beyond anything in his previous career. Seven of nine narrative dimensions score below 30% on a “credibility chart” he built himself.

Amalgamated Army has since been taken offline. Archived copies: Introduction · Part I · Part II · Part III · Part IV.

The full response to its specific claims will be the subject of a separate piece. What needs to be said here is simpler and more foundational.

The Riley Protocol treats inconsistency as fabrication, memory gaps as evidentiary failures, and absent records as proof that nothing happened at all.

Inconsistent story. Bad timing. Wants attention. Waited too long. Doesn’t act right. The checklist has one function: producing a predetermined conclusion while making it look earned.

The Riley Protocol is framed within the thesis of my own article, that Troy himself complimented. He said it couldn’t be argued with. He said even without sources and receipts, the article was so valuable that everyone should read it. He then wrote the most comprehensive and intensive investigative reporting of his entire career within two days based on a thesis in the core of an article about which he stated:

The “credibility chart” does not become data because it looks like data. Troy chose the number 14%, applied it himself, and had it validated by no one. He then submitted it to congressional offices as forensic analysis.

Why? Was Congress actively investigating? He didn’t do this for Congress; he did it to fool everyone who read it into thinking it was a legitimate piece of journalism.

His own $10 OSINT workbook, sold to the same audience reading The Riley Protocol, explicitly states that an investigator’s job is to present documented facts and let readers draw conclusions. He violated that in every scoring category. The chart is his conclusion wearing a lab coat.

Memory science is not ambiguous.

Inconsistent memory is normal, expected, and exceptions to that are so rare they are labeled: Eidetic Memory, Savant Syndrome, etc. Troy cites memory science in his own theoretical framework, which makes his application of it inexcusable.

Peripheral details, names, sequences, and specific locations are vulnerable to distortion. The emotional core of trauma — the fear, the pain, the helplessness — is encoded differently and is much more stable. Treating a wrong name or a timeline gap as evidence the abuse didn’t happen is not skepticism.

This cognitive fragility is often culturally weaponized through the tactic of DARVO: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. By hyper-focusing on a single chronological error, bad-faith actors “poison the well,” shifting public scrutiny from the actions of the accused to the cognitive flaws of the survivor. This is often bolstered by a “False Memory” defense, which uses the history of induced memories to create a blanket shield for powerful entities.

It demands a courtroom standard of proof that the human brain is not evolved to provide for childhood events. We must understand the space we are creating for survivors using this kind of rhetoric.

A detailed response to The Riley Protocol’s specific claims, named-figure chronology, and evidentiary methodology will be the subject of a dedicated article I will be writing.

Most important of all of this, the document was produced by a man who threatened a survivor he was working with directly — including them and their children — threatened other victims into a state of paranoia that led them to flee their home, threatened gang-stalking of a clinician who questioned his credentials, and fabricated the academic authority he used to give his conclusions institutional weight, then submitted a forensic takedown of an alleged trafficking survivor to Congress under a dangerously flawed thesis.

The production value of the document does not change who produced it.

The feigned empathy in their belittlements here did very little to counter the obvious implied joy he got from making these statements.

The legal framing

The following potential offenses are drawn from the documented record in this article and the screenshots available on request.

None of this is the behavior of someone aligned with survivors. It is the behavior of someone who learned the language of survivor advocacy well enough to weaponize it.

The thing I wanted, in the end

I respected Troy before all of this happened. I complimented one of his articles in the past. I was excited when he responded. I told my roommate, “that guy I told you about actually responded to me!”. I offered my services as an unpaid, volunteer “intern”. I was filled with respect for their fight for Sascha. He projected a high-profile visibility I chose not to double-check, and as such, I held him on a pedestal.

When he released that article, it did not hurt because he had betrayed Sascha’s trust. It hurt because he betrayed my trust. No matter how many times I insulted him, I was always clear: I wanted to believe him. I wanted him to grow, show he was capable of being humble. I wanted him to prove he was deserving of that respect.

His article on Sascha hit me in the face because all of his attacks on Sascha applied to me directly as a survivor of abuse. I told him this at the very beginning. Before any DMs had been exchanged, in my very first post tagging him about his article.

I wanted during all of this for him to come back into the light. I used this metaphor a dozen times. If he had shown the ability to correct his course at any point during these events, I would have welcomed him back. I told him I would even defend him myself.

There was a point both of us were in tears, together, because of these events. I was convinced he was undergoing a stupid, but well-intentioned operation. I thought he was choosing to grow. This exchange meant a lot to me for a single day:

In the end, none of this mattered. In the end, he made his choice.

Over hundreds more messages, dozens of threats, belittlements, and refusal to grow — whatever Troy Raymond Barile-Simleness believes about himself, whatever hero narrative he has built in the hall of mirrors he operates in, the documented record describes a man who caused real harm to real people while claiming to protect them.

The severity of Troy’s conduct lies in his willingness to transition from an ally to an aggressor the moment his narrative was challenged. His documented threats against a journalist, a clinician, a survivor, and even children, reveal a pattern of behavior designed to induce terror — and does not require credibility to be used as a weapon of fear.