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FBI surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during his lifetime
A highly publicized allegation that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. watched and encouraged the rape of a woman in a Washington hotel room originates from notes and summaries in FBI files and was publicized...
No—Martin Luther King Jr. was never criminally charged with or convicted of rape; the most explosive claims about him stem from FBI surveillance memos and a 2019 essay by David Garrow that cite sealed...
Official, multi-decade inquiries concluded there is no convincing evidence that any U.S. government agency participated in a plot to kill , and was identified as the shooter and convicted; nevertheles...
The FBI surveillance files on Martin Luther King Jr. comprise decades of bureau paperwork — internal memos, informant reports, investigative leads, and transcript excerpts — assembled during COINTELPR...
The FBI files portray Martin Luther King Jr. as a serial adulterer and catalogue a range of sexual allegations — from numerous affairs to salacious episodes recorded in hotel rooms — based on the Bure...
David J. Garrow published a controversial essay drawing on newly released FBI files that alleges extensive sexual misconduct by Martin Luther King Jr. — including numerous extramarital affairs, solici...
A long-standing judicial order sealed a body of FBI audio tapes and related materials about Martin Luther King Jr. for 50 years and placed them in the National Archives, but recent executive actions a...
No definitive government culpability has been legally confirmed: multiple official U.S. investigations concluded there is no reliable evidence that federal, state, or local government agencies orchest...
The released King–Levison wiretap materials consist primarily of verbatim and paraphrased telephone transcripts from FBI surveillance of Stanley Levison’s phones that record strategic planning, fundra...
The FBI files contain extensive surveillance material — wiretap transcripts, memos and an anonymous “blackmail” package — that the bureau compiled and circulated in efforts to document and exploit Mar...
David Garrow’s excavation of declassified FBI surveillance files on Martin Luther King Jr. reignited a split among historians: some praise his detailed documentary mining of Bureau records and previou...
Allegations of Martin Luther King Jr.’s infidelity were used by the FBI as part of a deliberate campaign to discredit him, and those files later fueled public controversy—but during the height of the ...
The declassified FBI files and later reporting contain salacious allegations that Martin Luther King Jr. participated in orgies and solicited prostitutes, but those claims originate in FBI dossiers, t...
The sealed FBI wiretap transcripts of Martin Luther King Jr. most likely contain extensive telephone and room-surveillance material documenting his private conversations, including both politically re...
A large cache of and documents about was posted by the on July 21, 2025 after a January 23, 2025 executive order, but the specific surveillance tapes and transcripts created by FBI electronic monitori...
The FBI’s COINTELPRO targeted Martin Luther King Jr. with an explicit mission to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” him and other civil‑rights leaders, and Bureau records...
Ralph Abernathy’s 1989 memoir, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, which detailed Martin Luther King Jr.’s alleged extramarital affairs, provoked sharp public condemnation from civil‑rights leaders and ...
The archived memos and later reporting by contain explicit allegations that participated in group sex events described as “,” including a February 1968 workshop and a January 1964 , encounter, and cla...
The available reporting shows multiple sources alleging that Martin Luther King Jr. engaged in extramarital sexual relationships, with much of the documentary “evidence” coming from FBI wiretaps and r...
New reporting and declassified files document that Martin Luther King Jr. engaged in extramarital sexual relationships and that the FBI collected and publicized material about those relationships as p...