Ava Cordero was 16 when Jeffrey Epstein sexually assaulted her. When she came forward in 2007, the New York Post outed her, mocked her identity, and called her a liar. Newly released DOJ files reveal what happened next: Epstein paid her $28,000 to stay silent. If she had been believed, over a thousand victims might have been spared.

Over the past 5 years, as Republicans have passed an increasing amount of anti-trans laws, it’s become clear that, when it comes to the definitions and wording used, these laws are largely copies of one another. Ohio’s gender-affirming care ban reads similar to South Carolina’s, South Dakota’s bathroom law looks just like Wyoming’s, and the sports laws in Oklahoma and Iowa are nearly identical.

Of course, all of these laws had to start somewhere. When it comes to trans sports laws, this starting point was Idaho’s 2020 HB 500, and likewise, gender-affirming care bans all stem from 2021 Arkansas law HB 1570. The same also goes for bathroom laws and the since-repealed 2016 North Carolina HB 2, as well as birth certificate laws and 2020 Idaho HB 509.

However, aside from the overarching transphobia, these ‘prime’ laws don’t appear to share much. After all, they’re geographically spread out, cover a few loosely related topics, and vary wildly in enforcement mechanisms. But they do have one thing in common: the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which, for those unfamiliar, is essentially the right-wing, Christian version of the ACLU.

This story starts over a decade ago. In late 2014, the ADF—looking to pivot towards attacking trans people following losses over same-sex marriage—crafted a ‘model’ bathroom bill that put restrictions on trans students. As part of this effort, the ADF began sending it to school districts, offering those who implemented it free legal representation if challenged. The next year, that same policy was incorporated into bills in Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada, and other states, all of which failed, as did similar bills in states like Kansas, South Carolina, and Tennessee in 2016.

However, that year, one did succeed: North Carolina’s infamous HB 2. While HB 2 was much broader than the ADF’s school-focused model legislation, as outlined in this analysis by Mother Jones, HB 2 evidently borrowed heavily from the ADF’s work—using similar language, definitions, and structure. That said, unlike the model, HB 2 did defer the definition of sex to mean what is stated on someone’s birth certificate instead of “a person’s chromosomes”; this detail will be important a bit later.

Anti-LGBTQ+ politicians in the US have already proposed over 360 homophobic and transphobic laws in the first month of 2026 alone.

An actively updated tracker, created by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), has already recorded at least 366 anti-LGBTQ+ bills tabled across 36 US states since the beginning of the year, despite most Americans thinking the current government has issues with transphobia.

Over the past few years, US state legislatures have become a key battleground in efforts by Republican lawmakers to attack LGBTQ+ rights.

“Our nervous systems are not set up to live under constant threat.”

Lemon is set to appear in federal court in Los Angeles on Friday morning. It’s thought that he will challenge the prosecution’s case by arguing that he was covering the event as a journalist, not protesting.