by Benjamin Smith
Edited by John Anderson

ON 11 MARCH 2025, Mary Phagan-Kean — great-niece of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who was brutally murdered by Jewish B’nai B’rith official Leo Frank in 1913 — was interviewed on the Stew Peters television program. You can watch that interview by clicking the video link above.

The trial, conviction, and execution of Frank was the major motivation behind the founding of today’s powerful “Anti-Defamation League” (ADL¹), which works to censor and punish those who speak out about Jewish abuses of power. Today, the ADL — along with their allies in the media, academia, and government — maintain that Leo Frank was an “innocent victim of anti-Semitism,” and deliberately ignore and downplay the huge mountain of evidence (the Brief of Evidence alone is well over three hundred pages long and Leo Frank’s appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court and United States Supreme Court are several thousands of pages) proving his guilt, and ignoring the fact that every court from the Grand Jury, the Georgia Court of Appeals, up to and including the Supreme Court of the United States — and every court in between — affirmed his guilt (even though he was defended by a team of the most skillful, famous, and expensive lawyers of his time²).

Mrs. Phagan-Kean recounts the emotionally powerful story of how she first discovered that she was related to the girl who is probably the most well-known American murder victim of her generation, and how, after seeing how the vast monetary and political resources of the ADL and other organized Jewish groups were being used to confuse and trick the public into believing that the killer, Leo Frank, was actually the victim in this case, she decided to devote her life to bringing the truth to light.

In this program she discusses how, after Mary’s sex murder, Frank’s team and allies:

• Planted fake evidence to frame two innocent Black men for the crime: When the first frame, of night watchman New Lee, failed (they planted a fake bloody shirt at his home as well as altered his time card for that night³), they tried to frame janitor Jim Conley (with a fake planted bloody club and pay stub) and are still trying to frame him in 2025. Are these the acts of an innocent man?
• Created out of whole cloth, years later, a fake story of how the killer left “bite marks” on Mary Phagan’s body, marks which supposedly didn’t match Leo Frank’s dental X-rays (the autopsy report indicated no such marks whatever, and dental X-rays were not used in any Georgia case until decades after Frank’s trial)
• Tried to falsely imply that 13-year-old Mary Phagan, whose reputation was absolutely unimpeachable, was of low moral character and some kind of “seductress” — again, totally inverting the victim and perpetrator roles in the case.
• Created a false story, months after the trial, that a screaming and seething “anti-Semitic mob” dominated the trial for weeks, shouting “Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you” and similar epithets within hearing of the judge and jury. Contemporary pictures and newspaper reports prove that no such mob ever existed.
• Had the audacity to change — in the dead of night and without informing the Phagan family — the historical marker at Mary Phagan’s grave site, so its text reflected the Jewish narrative of Frank’s “innocence.” (See below for further details)
• Have consistently, right up to 2025, held secret meetings with Georgia and Fulton County officials — meetings from which the Phagan family, the press, and the public at large were purposely excluded — in an attempt to get Leo Frank officially exonerated. The meeting minutes also seemingly disappear or are not taken. Mary Phagan-Kean has asked to see these and has been prevented from doing so.
• And much more!

You’ll learn that Mrs. Phagan-Kean’s book about the case — The Murder of Little Mary Phagan — is about to be released this year in a brand-new, much-expanded edition.

Make sure and share this interview with everyone you know. You can’t understand what is happening in the world today without understanding the powerful forces that tried — and are still trying — to exonerate this vile rapist and child-murderer.

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1. Leo Frank was president of the Atlanta B’nai B’rith twice and was even re-elected after his conviction for the rape and strangulation of Mary Phagan. B’nai B’rith founded the ADL, originally called the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith before being shortened to just the Anti-Defamation League. The indictment, trial, and conviction of Leo Frank are what led to the founding of the ADL, not his execution, as the first announcement of its creation was on September 16th, 1913. Leo Frank was hanged in 1915.
2. An interesting thing to note here is that Georgia Governor John Slaton was a partner at the same law firm as Luther Z. Rosser, Leo Frank’s defense attorney.
3. Below is Defendant’s Exhibit 1, from the Brief of Evidence, showing where Leo Frank erased Newt Lee’s time stamps of 10:00 pm, 11:30 pm, 12:30 am, and 2:30 am to make it appear that he had been too busy with Mary Phagan to punch his time card:

* * *

Below is the original inscription on the historical marker at Mary Phagan’s grave site where it did not hide the fact that Frank’s pardon did not officially exonerate him from the crime of murder. The newer historical marker does not provide this specific fact and implies that the pardon absolved him of the crime which is not true:

Below is what it was then changed to with no vote and no media present, in 1995. Most people, who are not well-researched in the case, would assume that “he was issued a pardon,” means that he was absolved of the crime:

The Marietta Daily Journal published an article describing what happened and why the Phagan family was outraged by this (transcribed below):

“Family of Mary Phagan protests marker change

“Without a formal vote and with the press absent, Marietta City Council has changed the inscription on the city’s historic marker at the grave of rape-murder victim Mary Phagan in the Marietta City Cemetery. The Phagan family is blaming Councilman Philip Goldstein.

“The descendants of Miss Phagan are upset because the family was not notified before or after the change, and only learned of it on a cemetery-cleaning visit. The family says the newly-placed marker – which sits on a city-maintained path near the grave and is not to be confused with Miss Phagan’s ornate tombstone, which makes no mention of the circumstances of her death – omits the reason for the 1986 posthumous pardon given Leo Frank.

“Frank – Miss Phagan’s boss – was convicted in 1913 by a Fulton Superior Court jury of the 13-year-old girl’s murder in an Atlanta pencil factory and sentenced to hang. When Gov. John Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence to life in 1915, a group of Marietta men abducted Frank from the state prison near Milledgeville and lynched him near what is now the Big Chicken on Frey’s Gin Road in Marietta.

[Years later someone vandalized the elegant white marble flowerpot situated at the footer of the epitaph slab and stole the broken piece of it.]

“The Phagan family initially opposed placing a marker at their ancestor’s grave, fearing there would be increased damage to the cemetery plot and curiosity seekers would leave graffiti. That hasn’t happened. Late Mayor Joe Mack Wilson told east Cobb resident and Cherokee County special education teacher Mary Phagan Keen, a great-niece of Mary Phagan, that the grave was the most sought by visitors to Marietta and should have a marker, along with several other notable graves in the cemetery.

[Newly Concealing the fact that Leo M. Frank was not officially exonerated]

“Mayor Wilson told the Phagan family the city would let them approve the text of the marker. The family insisted the unusual conditions of Frank’s 1986 pardon be explained. That was done. Now controversy has arisen because that portion of the marker has been changed.

“The Georgia Pardons and Parole Board in 1983 turned down a request for a pardon based on Frank’s alleged innocence. [Leo] Frank’s former office boy, Alonzo Mann, told two Nashville Tennessean newsmen he saw black janitor Jim Conley holding a limp body in his arms the day of the murder. In its 1983 denial of a pardon for Frank, the board said after Mann’s testimony it “did not find conclusive evidence proving beyond any doubt that Frank was innocent.”

“A new parole board then granted Frank a pardon in 1986 on the grounds the state did not protect him in prison, thereby allowing him to be lynched and thus ending any further court appeals. Frank’s conviction was appealed unsuccessfully by his lawyers three times to the Georgia Supreme Court and twice to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The 1986 pardon said: “Without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence, and in recognition of the state’s failure to protect the person of Leo M. Frank and thereby preserve his opportunity for continued legal appeal of his conviction, and in recognition of the state’s failure to bring his killers to justice, and as an effort to heal old wounds…the board hereby grants to Leo M. Frank a pardon.” The family opposed the 1986 pardon, and now is irked at the council and [Philip] Goldstein.

[The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles failed to mention the fact that Leo Frank had fully exhausted all of his trial appeals at the Georgia and Federal Supreme Court in April of 1915.]

“”We are as much a victim as the family of Leo Frank,” said Ms. Keen. For 80 years, we have been the object of the curiosity-seekers and subjected to unfair and untrue books and TV docudramas. The current council didn’t show the same respect to us as did Mayor Wilson and a previous council.” Ms. Keen’s father, James Phagan, said the action was “extremely insensitive of the council” and “disingenuous of Councilman [Philip] Goldstein. How can you separate Mary Phagan and Leo Frank?” he asked. “Can you mention the Holocaust and not mention Hitler? It’s simply pandering by Councilman [Philip] Goldstein to a segment of the community. It’s another effort to change history.”

“The inscription change was made by the Parks and Tourism Committee chaired by Councilman Dan Cox. Members are Councilwoman Betty Hunter and Goldstein. The full council OK’d the action. Cox admitted the committee had yielded to “political pressure” by [Philip] Goldstein and the Jewish community. Calling the change “a no-win situation,” Cox said he reluctantly consented to the change “because it offended a part of the community.”

[August 17, 1995. Leo Frank’s Lynching Site, 1200 Roswell Road, Marietta, Cobb County, Georgia]

“On the 80th anniversary of Frank’s lynching on Aug. 17, [1995] a group of Jewish leaders led by Rabbi Steven Lebow of Temple Kol Emeth in East Cobb said the historic marker at Mary Phagan’s grave should be removed. The group placed a small plaque in the side of the VPI Corp. building owned by Roy Varner at 1200 Roswell St., near the site of Frank’s lynching. The plaque reads: “Wrongly Accused, Falsely Convicted and Wantonly Murdered.” Attending the ceremony were Marietta Councilmen Goldstein and James Dodd, who told Jewish leaders they would look into removing the line of the marker that refers to the pardon conditions.

“”This is a plaque that marks the grave of Mary Phagan,” said [Philip] Goldstein. “The last two lines deal with information on Leo Frank, and it’s not his grave.” Goldstein was quoted in the Jewish Times as saying: “The wording is factually correct. The mention of Frank [not getting officially exonerated] on Phagan’s marker should be deleted because it is irrelevant, not because it upsets the Jewish community.”

“It was Dodd who brought the matter before council, supported by [Philip] Goldstein. “This is a lose-lose situation for me,” [Philip] Goldstein said. The marker referring to the condition of Frank’s pardon has been removed and replaced with a marker the Phagan family had objected to.”

A letter to the editor regarding the incident (transcribed below):