Dear Patriot,

Last week I stood in front of a room full of people and asked them the same question I ask myself almost every single morning.

What are we actually afraid of?

Not the polished answer everybody gives in public, but the real one underneath it: losing the job, losing the house, losing the reputation you spent twenty years building, or losing the organization you founded with your own hands.

The moment you are afraid of losing any of it, you can be controlled, and my opponents understand that principle better than anybody. They do not have to beat the reporting. They only have to identify the one thing I cannot afford to lose and then apply pressure to it until I decide the reporting is not worth continuing.

If your price is not your life, then you are for sale.

I have earned the right to say that sentence, and here is exactly why.

In September 2016, my team went undercover inside a Democratic consulting firm in Washington, and in June 2017 that firm sued us over the footage we published. The litigation that followed lasted nine years, and in 2022 a jury handed down a judgment against us for $130,000.

Here is the part of the story that never made the news: the organization I founded did not want to appeal that verdict, and it would not pay the attorneys required to keep the fight going. So I paid the legal fees myself, out of my own pocket, and my name went on that appeal alone.

Let that sink in. I had already lost my job at the company I founded doing this work, and I still wrote the check to defend the work.

On August 21, 2026, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals threw the entire judgment out.

The court held that our undercover reporter was never a fiduciary, because she performed clerical tasks and was never given authority to act on behalf of the firm, and the wiretapping claim collapsed along with it. The judges then held that damages cannot stand when protected speech is the predominant cause of the injury somebody is complaining about, and they concluded that the "vast share" of the video had been lawfully obtained.

One hundred thirty thousand dollars, erased. Nine years, finished.

I am undefeated, but I want you to look honestly at what winning that case actually cost me: nine years of my life, attorneys I financed personally, and a judgment hanging over my head the entire time over a story I published back in 2016.

That is the entire strategy, Patriot. They do not need a verdict, because what they actually need is my calendar, my bank account, and my attention, and they need me sitting in a deposition instead of standing in a parking lot with a camera and a source who is frightened to talk.

That is precisely why the O'Keefe Defense Fund exists. When the next lawsuit lands, and another one always does, I should not have to choose between paying an attorney and paying the people who work for me.

I am not asking you to be brave. I am asking you to make it less expensive for me to be.

Whatever you are able to give today goes straight to the legal bills that would otherwise pull me off the street and park me in a conference room for another decade.

P.S. Somebody asked me recently what the worst thing that could possibly happen to me really was, and I have thought about it a great deal since then. Maybe the worst thing is not the worst thing. Maybe it turns out to be the best thing. They can stop me, and one day they probably will, but they cannot stop me and you and a couple hundred other people who have already decided that we are not for sale.