Hey /Pizzagate,

I became aware of the Pizzagate theory several weeks ago, not long before the election. I'll admit I didn't pay a ton of attention to the controversy at the outset. I was pretty shocked when, a few days ago, a friend e-mailed me a photo of Rachel Chandler posing with Bill Clinton that was being circulated by Pizzagate theorists. The photo I'm talking about is this one: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CwhYDVHVEAAIpe4.jpg

I know Rachel IRL and have some information that I think ya'll might find interesting.

Rachel graduated in June 2005 from Brentwood School, a pretty elite prep school on the Westside of LA. I attended the school with her. There were/are a lot of kids from prominent Hollywood/media families in attendance there. Jordan McGraw, Dr. Phil's son, was also Class of '05. Jimmy Iovine's son was Class of '06 (Jimmy is the founder of Interscope Records, hebrought Eminem and 50 Cent to prominence and is the brains behind the Beats headphones empire that Dr. Dre is the public face of). Arnold Schwarzenegger's kids were there too (can't remember which year, they were several years younger than Rachel). Andrew Breitbart, the now-deceased founder of the Breitbart news site, was a graduate (not sure when ... 80s? 90s? way before my time).

Rachel herself comes from a very prominent, elite family. She's one of many descendants of the Chandler family, which owned the Los Angeles Times for decades. Look up Otis Chandler on Wikipedia. The family is divested of the paper today and not as powerful/prominent in LA high society today as they used to be, but up through the 80s they were super powerful.

So, Rachel is definitely a part of the LA-based Hollywood/media elite. She's not some runaway or kidnapped kid or anything like that like some have theorized. She's probably the most powerful scion of one of the most powerful families in Southern California.

Let me start off by saying that I know absolutely nothing about the photo with Bill Clinton. It seems like Gawker posted that photo way back in 2006 (http://gawker.com/166540/air-burkle-something-special-in-the-air)) but I saw it for the first time yesterday.

However, some of you have found photos of her with P. Diddy and Paris Hilton. I know more about those. Rachel has been a friend of Paris Hilton for a LONG time. I think they've been friends since Rachel was about 13 or 14. When we were all high-school aged, Rachel was known for frequently going clubbing with Paris, hitting up movie/TV "industry parties", going to fashion events, and presented herself as an aspiring model. I have no idea what was going on during those events, but people alternatively admired/resented her for frequently partying with famous celebrities and rolling everywhere with Paris and Nicky Hilton. She was rumored to be a big drinker/drug user and struggled academically. During high school (2001-2005), there was an incident where Paris Hilton's phone was hacked and her contacts were posted online. It was one of the first major "celebrity hackings" that I remember ever becoming a big news story. Rachel was, I dunno, 15 or 16 at the time (?), and her phone number was one of the ones that was leaked because she was in Paris's contacts list. I have no idea if all the crazy stuff you guys are pegging her (being a "child handler") with has any validity, but I can tell you that during her teenage years she knew A LOT of celebrities, media industry insiders, and was going to a lot of parties that most kids at her school and in our social circles (who were pretty well-connected and very wealthy themselves) could never gain access to. She's definitely someone who "matured quickly", if you will. I know that at age 18 she had a boyfriend who was considerably older than her (late 20s or early 30s, I believe) but, to be fair, she was 18 by then.

There's a tangential Rothschilds connection here, by the way, because Nicky Hilton ended up marrying James Rothschild and Rachel used to party with all of them.

One thing you guys have missed is that she has a much deeper connection to the occult artist Marina Abramovic than I've seen documented so far.

Some links you might find interesting:

• Rachel is the primary photographer for an artist named Terence Koh, who frequently collaborates with Abramovic. Here, he's in a death pose on a piece of hers: http://purple.fr/diary/terence-kohon-a-work-by-marina-abramovic-at-a-collectors-house-east/ Another photo of the same set: http://purple.fr/diary/terence-kohon-a-work-by-marina-abramovic-at-the-collectors-house-east/

• A video from a MoMA party: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPPKj99ZV60 List of attendees: "Those in attendance included Madonna, Mary-Kate Olsen, Yoko Ono, James Franco, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Chloe Sevigny, Penn Badgely, Padma Lakshmi, Rose Byrne, Kim Cattrall, Lucy Liu, Marina Abramovic, Daphne Guinness, Terence Koh, Andrej Pejic, Leelee Sobieski, Cindy Sherman, Agnes Gund, Katharina Sieverding, Rachel Chandler, Michelle Harper, David Rockefeller, Jr., MoMA's Director Glenn Lowry, Volkswagen's Martin Winterkorn, and Director of MoMA PS1 and MoMA's Chief Curator at Large Klaus Biesenbach."

• Rachel was a photographer/attendee at Marina Abramovic's 2010 "The Artist is Present" performance at the MoMA http://www.patrickmcmullan.com/site/event_detail.aspx?eid=32454 (look for her name on the left-hand list of Featured People and use the filter function)

• This is the one I think you might find the most interesting, and I'm surprised this hasn't been delved into before. Abramovic gave a very controversial performance at the LA MoCA that involved a kind of pseudo/ritualized cannibalism of a female body, and Rachel was present as well. https://www.artforum.com/diary/id=29517

The prospect of this “grotesque spectacle,” the outraged Rainer wrote, reminded her not of Abramović’s The Artist Is Present, the performance empress’s three-month-long sit at the Museum of Modern Art last year, or of her Nude with Skeleton from 2002, but of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film Salò, where fascist sadists sexually abuse beautiful youths. “Subjecting her performers to public humiliation at the hands of a bunch of frolicking donors is yet another example of the Museum’s callousness and greed, and Ms Abramović’s obliviousness to differences in context and to some of the implications of transposing her own powerful performances to the bodies of others,” Rainer wrote, suggesting that MoCA rename itself “MODFR, or the Museum of Degenerate Fund Raising.”

Inside, all thought of exploitation quickly faded, as the 769 guests, who included California governor Jerry Brown and Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa as well as Beecroft, took their seats before the rotating heads and nudes-with-skeletons and dug into their food unfazed. (It was delicious.) Some people did hold the gaze of the heads; others winked and elicited forbidden giggles.

John Baldessari and Meg Cranston seemed pleased to be seated ringside, where half-naked and very buff pallbearers periodically mounted the catwalk-like stage carrying** a shrouded body **on a bier. After her final number, two more shrouded bodies were brought onstage. Under them was dessert: two eerily lifelike cakes fashioned to look like Abramović and Harry by LA’s Rosebud Cakes and Raphael Castoriano’s Kreëmart organization. Wielding lethal-looking knives, Abramović joined Harry to cut out the hearts of each of their cakes to a shouting, astonished crowd.

Chaos followed, as guests fought over pieces cut by the bare-chested pallbearers. “I want the breast! Give me the vagina!” they screamed, hardly noticing that Tilda Swinton had arrived for photo ops, looking very much like David Bowie in his Thin White Duke phase. When it was all over, the cut-up cakes resembled mutilated bodies that made for a ghoulish sight.

A man I didn’t know accosted me. “Is it me or was this all about violence against women?” he asked. “It’s you,” I said. “Look at that cake!” he exclaimed. “It’s a horribly mutilated woman with knives in her chest. Doesn’t that bother you?” “It’s a cake,” I said. “It represents all the indignities women have suffered at the hands of men. It is women telling their own history.” Apparently, the point was lost on him. “It’s disgusting,” he replied. I asked his name, which he declined to give. “I’m in the social register!” he growled, brushing past me to let Deitch know that this violence against women would result in the withdrawal of funding from the museum.

-- Abramovic cutting the fake female dead body: https://www.artforum.com/uploads/upload.000/id29517/article07.jpg -- A Black woman's head lying in front of dinner eaters: https://www.artforum.com/uploads/upload.000/id29517/article08.jpg -- A body being eaten: https://www.artforum.com/uploads/upload.000/id29517/article16.jpg -- Body after many parts being eaten: https://www.artforum.com/uploads/upload.000/id29517/article05.jpg -- Rachel Chandler posing at the party with Dasha Zhukova, who is the wife of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich: https://www.artforum.com/uploads/upload.000/id29517/article13.jpg

There's a lot more of a connection between these two (Chandler and Abramovic) but that's all I could find with Google. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more photos of her with celebs while she was a teenager, cause she used to circulate in those celeb circles a lot. Also, I think that photo with Clinton is not from Jeffrey Epstein's Lolita Express but rather from Ron Burkle's private jet. You may want to look into the connections between the Chandler family and Burkle. At one point, Burkle and the Chandlers were in competition to buy out the Tribune Media Co. that owned the Times: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/news/burkle-and-broad-join-chandlers-in-making-tribune-bid/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/18/AR2007011800684_pf.html

edit: fixed spacing