@benryanwriter
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Independent investigative journalist Contact via Signal: benryan.23 Subscribe: https://xitter.cf/t.co/dQRHZHqWHn
New York City
Joined August 2013
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NY Democratic Socialists Boss Railed Against Landlords. His Rich Parents Rented Out Their Florida Mansion for $18,000 a Month, Bought Him a $1 Million NYC Home.
Gustavo Gordillo has benefited greatly from his parents’ real estate fortune, even as he denounces capitalism and landlords who want good returns on their investments, I report for the @FreeBeacon.
Gustavo L. Gordillo, the embattled co-chair of New York City's chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America @nycDSA, has made a name for himself railing against property ownership, landlords, and real estate investors who enjoy robust rates of return.
"It's time to take over apartments owned by landlords freeloading off hardworking taxpayers," Gordillo @unionGustavo, 38, posted on social media in June.
But Gordillo—a Yale-educated art-world staffer turned fired union electrician who once proclaimed that "inheritance is DEI for white people"—may want to take a look at the eye-popping rents charged by his wealthy parents, who’ve heavily subsidized his life.
Gustavo E. and Elizabeth Gordillo are successful real estate investors who recently rented out a Florida mansion they own for $18,000 a month. For six years, their socialist son lived in a nearly $1 million Brooklyn home owned by the couple, who had paid the younger Gustavo’s rent for at least three years prior. He’s now living elsewhere while the Brooklyn home undergoes an extensive, $1.4 million roof-raising renovation his parents have bankrolled.
To uncover the Gordillo family fortune and how it’s benefited the prominent DSA leader, the Washington Free Beacon scoured thousands of pages of documents obtained through public-records requests and searches of public databases. Many of the revelations are being reported for the first time.
The Gordillos immigrated with their son from Peru and have spent three decades flipping homes to acquire what is now nearly $5 million in South Florida real estate (that the Free Beacon could identify). They have recently charged $17,000 to $18,000 in monthly rent for a five-bedroom mansion they bought for $2.24 million in Weston outside Fort Lauderdale, a property they’ve struggled to sell at a robust rate of return.
In a July 17 @FoxNews interview, Gordillo notoriously criticized New York City landlords for enjoying what he claimed (absent evidence, and likely in error) was an average 12 percent rate of return on their investments. The prominent socialist said of his political tribe, "We don’t think that anyone should have a constitutional right to double-digit returns on their investment."
But the younger Gustavo has directly benefited from his parents’ profitable adventures in real estate, given that in 2019 they purchased for nearly $1 million a 2,400-square-foot, 2-family home in Brooklyn for him to live in, as his father told the New York Post. Voter rolls indicate his brother Gabriel, 33, in 2025 moved from their parents’ Florida home to Brooklyn. The brothers are both now believed to be renting temporarily as they await the completion of the seven-figure renovation of the spacious Brooklyn home owned by their parents.
Here is the full video of the town hall held with Nikole Hannah-Jones about integration in NYC public schools: youtube.com/watch?v=hMLwdj0x…
NYC Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels found himself in the hot seat Tuesday night as investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and a crowd of students laced into him over his failure to clearly lay out a plan to tackle segregation in public schools. politico.com/news/2026/10/20…
Benjamin Ryan retweeted
The #stanfordprisonexperiment is now a reality show on Netflix--but there is a lot of a debate about what really happened in the original study.
For nearly a half century it has been understood to show that assigning people to a toxic role will, on its own, unlock the human capacity to treat others with cruelty.
But when we examined material in the Stanford archives, we found compellingthe evidence that, rather than guards conforming to role of their own accord, experimenters directly encouraged Guards to adopt roles and act tough in a manner consistent with tenets of identity leadership
The History Channel just did a great summary of the original experiment and some of the controversies: history.com/articles/stanfor…
You can read our re-analysis here:
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3138…
Benjamin Ryan retweeted
NEW —
The extraordinary story of how Mark Zuckerberg wheeled and dealed to get Meta’s board of directors to protect him from California’s wealth tax.
With @elitanjourno
nytimes.com/2026/10/21/techn…
This lament from astrophysicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein raises the question of whether all colds and flus can now be blamed on the selfishness and nihilism of people who do not mask when sick. Put another way, if everyone masked when sick, would no one get sick again?
Elliott Page has also reported a dearth of acting opportunities.
"John Wick 3" and "Billions" star Asia Kate Dillon says acting jobs have "all but diminished” after 11 years in the industry, so they are now seeking customer service work.
"I love customer service. I love creating welcoming environments for people to relax in and connect with each other. I love food and drink. I am passionate and curious, and a great teammate. I imagine the hurdle to reentry will be learning the new POS systems, but I’m a quick study. I’m available for part time, night and weekend work."
variety.com/2026/tv/news/bil…
Benjamin Ryan retweeted
My Theranos story: when the original whistleblower story was published, I immediately recognized him. He had dated my college girlfriend when we were “on a break”: of course I remembered him.
I then realized in the photo he was standing IN MY HOUSE. I had moved three months earlier and unbeknownst to me he was the next tenant.
Needless to say, I was team Holmes for about three minutes.
Benjamin Ryan retweeted
I looked this up. It’s a very weird situation.
The group makes “mitigation films” for people charged with crimes. The goal is to convince a judge to give a much lighter sentence than they would otherwise be inclined to give.
Oppenheim made a doc about the group and these kinds of films, but he got private footage by essentially making, according to the group, empty promises and stealing a password to their private video library.
On the one hand, our prison system is often more about profit than justice. A factory can poison an entire community and the CEO receives zero punishment, while someone who was late to a parole hearing gets 25 years.
So something like mitigation advocacy can be necessary in giving those with less a fighting chance. The videos are a last attempt to humanize someone in a system that’s very comfortable dehumanizing them. When they work, defendants go from facing years of prison time to mere months or even just “time served”.
On the other hand, isn’t it kind of crazy that this is a whole thing? And that for many years people didn’t really know that there’s an entire industry that specializes in using cinematic techniques to manipulate judges into lighter sentencing?
So some people are convinced that Oppenheim raised awareness. Others that he crossed a line and hurt an organization focused on helping David in his battle against Goliath.
Breakout 'You Can See Everything' director faces unseemly allegations about previous NY Times documentary trib.al/ALjDIMw
Benjamin Ryan retweeted
When I broke the story that imprisoned Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans were secretly forming a new startup to get back into the medical device industry, Evans fought me hard over Holmes’ involvement, saying she was on the outside of it and not an advisor. Which is why it was quite striking when, minutes into You Can See Everything, Fielder captures Holmes making calls about the new startup….
npr.org/2025/05/10/nx-s1-539…
Benjamin Ryan retweeted
In 2013, I wrote this really puzzled blog post for The Atlantic (which got me a lot of flack). Turns out the collapse was basically just about to start.
The number of people writing dissertations in the humanities has collapses, now the same thing is happening in the social sciences.
I'd wager that we will see a similar trend in psychology and other fields before long. Cuts in funding, the tight academic job market, and AI are rapidly changing the university and cratering graduate programs.
Benjamin Ryan retweeted
The reporter who exposed Theranos loved the new Elizabeth Holmes documentary but says its ‘artistry’ shouldn’t obscure the fraud fortune.com/2026/10/20/john-…
Benjamin Ryan retweeted
Great piece by @matthewherper in STAT. He reminds us of some of her lies, including one she told him on stage in front of an audience statnews.com/2026/10/20/eliz… via @statnews
Benjamin Ryan retweeted
🇮🇪 The Irish state has published an advert discouraging grandparents from hugging their grandchildren, as part of a campaign designed to promote "consent".
JK Rowling, in a new essay about her positions about sex and gender, writes:
"What to the average person seems so obvious as to barely need stating – that women who’ve been raped would rather not discuss the details of their rape or their subsequent trauma in the presence of men they don’t know, whether or not the men are wearing dresses – is seen as not only irrational, but actively harmful and cruel, by many trans activists. Beira’s Place has been defamed as ‘anti-trans’ and ‘anti-rights’, the latter by Amnesty International, which has whole-heartedly embraced gender identity ideology and is now behaving exactly like the kind of authoritarian, speech-censoring, witch-hunting governments it once stood against (the irony is not lost on me; I once worked for them).
"As everyone knows, I’m in the privileged position of never needing to work again and of not needing state run services, but I once lived hand to mouth. I was one of the women who couldn’t afford to insulate herself from potential physical harm and who fell into the categories of both domestic abuse and sexual assault victim. Large numbers of women who’ve never been poor, who’ve never worked the kind of job where they’d be vulnerable to predatory men and who’ve never needed a rape crisis centre have spent the last few years vilifying members of their own sex for fighting to retain their hard-won rights and single-sex spaces, in ways that have shocked and disgusted me. I freely confess that I feel an extra layer of abhorrence for any woman who claims to be a feminist while doing it."
I wrote a new piece about women’s rights and whether or not I want trans people dead. (Spoiler: I don’t)👇
jkrowling.com/opinions/an-up…
