The Guardian has published an investigation revealing that Brendan Carr, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, was a member for approximately nine years of a rogue Alcoholics Anonymous group called Midtown, based in the Washington DC area. The group, led by Vietnam veteran Michael Quinones until his death in 2007, attracted teenagers and young adults ostensibly seeking help with addiction. Former members describe an organization that controlled where people lived, worked, and went to school — and where teenage girls were routinely pressured into sexual relationships with men decades older. The investigation, based on interviews with 14 former members, contemporaneous recordings, and photographs, places Carr in the group from approximately 1996, when he was 17, through at least 2005. A recorded Midtown speech from that year captures Carr discussing his sobriety journey. A 2006 group photograph shows him standing rows behind Quinones at a men's retreat. Through a spokesperson, Carr denied membership "up to and through 2006" and denied knowledge of any illegal or abusive conduct. Multiple former members told the Guardian that Carr was not among the group's predators. A woman he dated inside Midtown, who joined as a teenager, described him as "safe" — someone who once smuggled french fries to her because she was being kept on a punishingly strict diet, an act he could have been punished for. Another former member called him a "victim" of the group. He was described as sensitive and desperate for approval within an environment where, as one source put it, "teenage girls sleeping with older men was just the way things worked." The Midtown group's abuses were not entirely unknown before this investigation. Newsweek reported in May 2007 that former members considered it "cultlike." A Washington Post article two months later described "a rigidly insular world of group homes and socializing, in which older men had sex with teenage girls." Montgomery County police at the time said they could not bring charges because the girls were 16 or 17, making the conduct technically legal. At least one former member now says what happened to her could be described as sex trafficking. At the center of Midtown was Quinones, whom one former member called "the Epstein of AA." Sources describe a belief system in which deviating from Quinones' prescribed path to sobriety would lead to death, prison, or institutionalization — a framework that kept members trapped even when they sensed something was wrong. Carr's former roommate, who lived with him in Silver Spring during college, acknowledged that members had "drunk the Kool-Aid" but pushed back on calling it a "sex cult," while conceding: "What Mike Quinones was able to pull together was more like a cult than an AA group." The story's relevance to Carr's current role is direct. As FCC chair, Carr has threatened to revoke broadcasters' licenses over coverage he deems unfair to the Trump administration — a significant departure from the traditional independence of the office. Former Midtown members told the Guardian they believe the public should understand the background of someone who now wields regulatory power over media. Carr's spokesperson framed the investigation as an attempt to "embarrass or pressure him into doing his job differently." The structural question is not whether Carr was a perpetrator — the reporting indicates he was not — but what a decade inside a coercive organization tells us about the judgment and independence of someone now exercising extraordinary power over the American information ecosystem. Former members describe years of trauma therapy and the complex guilt of having remained in a system they eventually recognized as abusive. The investigation lands at a moment when Carr's FCC is actively reshaping the relationship between government power and press freedom.
