- The claim that Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr was a member of a “child sex trafficking cult” is still under investigation.
- The allegation stemmed from an investigation The Guardian published on Sept. 22, 2026. According to it, for about 10 years Carr was a member of a Washington, D.C., Alcoholics Anonymous group that former members described as a cult. Some former members claimed the group’s leaders, all older men, sexually exploited them when they were teenage girls.
- Snopes found no indication that The Guardian’s reporting was inaccurate or misleading, but cannot rate the claim without independently confirming the reporting. We contacted multiple former Midtown AA members and are actively working to confirm the account of a woman who said she dated Carr while they were both members. We also reached out to the FCC to give Carr the opportunity to comment, but had not heard back.
- Former members of the Midtown AA group told The Guardian that Carr wasn’t involved in sexual misconduct, describing him as a “victim” of the group and “a safe respite” from the abuse. They also said that the older group leaders’ sexual exploitation of teenage girls was an open secret and normalized within the group.
In September 2026, The Guardian published an investigation revealing that Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, was once a member of a Washington, D.C., Alcoholics Anonymous group that some have described as a “cult.” The Guardian also spoke to several former members of the Midtown AA group who claimed they were sexually exploited by older members while they were involved.
The claim quickly spread online, where some questioned why the reporting that Carr spent roughly a decade in a “child sex trafficking cult,” was not making headlines. Snopes readers wrote in asking for more information about the claim.
The Guardian is generally a trustworthy source of information, and we found no indication that the claims made in the article were untrue. However, because we have been unable to independently verify those findings, we are unable to rate the claim.
Snopes contacted multiple former Midtown members who have spoken publicly about their experiences as part of reporting this story, including Mandi Pagliarini, who posted a video on her Instagram page saying she was one of The Guardian’s anonymous sources and that she had dated Carr while both were members. We asked Pagliarini to provide primary evidence corroborating her past relationship with Carr and will update this story if we learn more. We also contacted the FCC to ask about Carr’s involvement at Midtown, but had not received a reply at time of publication.
There is one crucial thing to note that many social media posts neglected to mention — former members did say Carr was a member of Washington, D.C.’s Midtown AA group, but we found no evidence that anybody had directly accused him of misconduct. In fact, multiple former members suggested the opposite. One former member told The Guardian that Carr was a “victim” who was “‘never among’ the predators.” In her Instagram video, Pagliarini, who said she dated Carr for a time, described him as a “warm, sensitive person who was a safe place for me in a horribly abuse, exploitative, imprisoning situation.”
According to The Guardian, Carr joined the Midtown AA group in 1996 and left sometime around 2005 or 2006, though exactly when was not clear. The group, led by a former Vietnam veteran named “Mike Q,” real name Edward Orlando Quinones, had a reputation as a safe space for teenagers and young adults, not all of whom reported having drinking problems.
But the group was a “rigidly insular world” under Quinones’ leadership, according to a 2007 story from The Washington Post that was some of the earliest public reporting on the allegations of sexual misconduct. “Ties to family and friends were severed or strained, and the most vulnerable of alcoholics, some suffering from emotional problems, were encouraged to stop taking prescribed medications,” the story said.
A former member told The Washington Post that she was “passed around” from Midtown leader to Midtown leader and that her sponsor encouraged her to have sex with Quinones. A different former member described Quinones to The Guardian as the “Epstein of AA,” and said shortly before he died, Quinones confessed to her that he had sex with a 15-year-old.
However, Quinones never faced charges
Alcoholics Anonymous is a decentralized organization that does not oversee individual groups. It maintains a list of strongly recommended practices, but former members said Midtown operated differently.
As examples: AA suggests that new members are paired with older sponsors of the same gender to help them through the recovery process. At Midtown, young teenage girls were often paired with men decades older than them. AA also suggests that new members remain single for a year. Former Midtown members told The Washington Post and Guardian that they were encouraged to date within weeks.
According to The Guardian, one former member recalled Carr as “sensitive and desperate for the approval of others.” A former roommate, also a member of Midtown, said both he and Carr had “drunk the Kool-Aid.” A third said he felt the misconduct happening was evident to group members.
“He knew the deal and he hung around there … I did the same thing. But I should not be the chair of the FCC, either,” one said.
