A Burning Banksy, the Epstein Files, and a Brooklyn Shelter the Trump Administration Defunded

How a Forbes 30 Under 30 crypto founder and a former UN Women leader found each other in the middle of the world's most uncomfortable news cycle.

Dania Darwish was working at the highest levels of international women's rights when she discovered something that should not have been possible. In New York City, one of the richest places on the planet, Muslim women and women of color fleeing domestic violence had nowhere to go. Not nowhere good. Nowhere at all, at least nowhere they felt safe. Some were sleeping in mosques to avoid shelters where they were turned away for wearing hijab, or served food that violated their faith, or simply made to feel that their culture was a problem to be managed.

She left her career in global advocacy and built Asiyah from scratch.

That was 2018. Today, Asiyah is the only emergency shelter in New York City built from the ground up to provide culturally competent care to survivors of domestic violence and trafficking. All-female staff. Halal food. Space for prayer. Legal advocacy. Trauma counseling. Economic support. No woman turned away because of how she looks, what she wears, or where she comes from.

In seven years, Asiyah has housed over 1,000 women and children. Thousands more have come through its doors for crisis support, legal help, and the kind of care that actually meets them where they are.

This year, the federal government cut their funding.

Here is where the story takes a turn.

“Asiyah lost federal funding during the Trump administration because we refused to compromise our advocacy for sexual assault and human trafficking survivors. But survivors don’t get to pause their escape from violence when politics shift,” Darsish said. 

“We stayed unwavering in delivering trauma-informed, survivor-centered care - and we always will. Campaigns like this ensure that no administration or bureaucracy determines whether a woman finds safety. Every dollar raised goes directly to emergency shelter, specialized trafficking support, trauma therapy, and long-term stability for women rebuilding their lives,” she added.

Burnt Banksy is not the obvious person to ride to the rescue. He is a pseudonymous crypto founder in his twenties, best known for burning a $95,000 Banksy painting in 2021 to make a point about digital art and NFTs. The stunt worked. It made global headlines, broke records, and raised $36 million to build XION, a blockchain infrastructure company now used by nearly 100 global brands to verify user data privately and securely.

He is also, as of this year, on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Finance.

When 3.5 million Epstein files were released to the public in 2026, Burnt Banksy watched the internet do what the internet does: spiral into obsession. Who was named? Who was connected? Who got emails?

Most people were asking those questions for the obvious reasons. He was asking a different one. What if you could flip that obsession into something useful?

The result is TheRedactedFile.com. The concept is simple and genuinely funny. Visit the site, use XION's zero-knowledge cryptographic verification technology, and in under 60 seconds you can prove you did not receive an email from Jeffrey Epstein, without handing over any personal data, without anyone seeing your inbox, without anything being stored. The math confirms the fact. That is it.

If you pass, you can buy a shirt. It reads:

"I wasn't in the Epstein files and all I got was this lousy shirt."

One hundred percent of net proceeds go to Asiyah.

The campaign is deliberately ridiculous. That is the point.

We are living through a news cycle that has broken most people's capacity for sustained outrage. The statistics around human trafficking are staggering, and most people have heard them enough times that they have stopped landing. Fifty million people in modern slavery. Women and girls making up 71% of all trafficking victims. One in four victims a child. A 25% global surge in detected trafficking cases since before the pandemic, with child victims up 31%. Nearly 17,000 potential victims reported to the US National Human Trafficking Hotline in 2023 alone. Two out of five countries on earth have never recorded a single trafficking conviction.

Those numbers should stop traffic. Mostly they get scrolled past.

So Burnt Banksy went a different way. Make it funny. Make it personal. Make it slightly absurd that a person would need to cryptographically verify their innocence via a blockchain app just to buy a novelty T-shirt. Make people feel something that isn't dread, and then connect that feeling to the women in Brooklyn who need a bed tonight.

"Humor has always been one of the most powerful ways to get people to engage with things they'd otherwise scroll past," he said. "If a lousy shirt gets money to trafficking survivors, the joke did its job."

Connecting the campaign to Asiyah was where Anthony Anzalone came in. An Italian Jew, Anzalone has worked across communities most people assume cannot find common cause, and he saw immediately what Darwish had built and why it mattered. In a year when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has made headlines every single day, an Italian Jew and a Syrian American woman deciding to work together is not a small gesture. It is a deliberate one.

They are not pretending the world is simple. They are doing the work anyway.

Darwish has been direct about what happened. "Asiyah has lost federal funding because we refused to compromise our advocacy for sexual assault and human trafficking survivors," she said. "But survivors cannot pause their healing when funding priorities shift."

The women arriving at Asiyah's door right now, some of them retraumatized by the very public discourse around exploitation and power that the Epstein files have reignited, need housing and therapy and legal help, not a news cycle that moves on without them.

The campaign is asking the internet to not move on. Buy a shirt. Prove you're clean. Help keep a shelter open. It is the strangest fundraising pitch of 2026. It might also be the most honest one.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.