A member of the radical vegan group known as the “Zizians” has insisted she and her friends are “not a murder cult” — and said she is “innocent” of all charges.
Michelle “Jamie” Zajko, 32, is currently imprisoned in Maryland on misdemeanor charges and is considered a person of interest in the murder of her parents on New Year’s Eve 2022. She is also believed to be linked to a shootout with federal agents in Vermont early this year.
Yet, in a 20-page handwritten letter from jail, provided to The Independent by her lawyer, Zajko denied murdering her parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, and sought to counter what she called “sensationalized lies” about the group’s actions and motives.
“My friends and I aren’t a murder cult and haven’t murdered six people,” she maintained.
Even if she were “pressured to make a false confession, or to lie about my friends … I will refuse, and I will plead innocent in spite of the odds, because I am innocent … I will fight this every step of the way,” she wrote.
Zajko was arrested in Maryland this February alongside the group’s namesake and co-founder, Ziz LaSota, 34, and a younger disciple, Daniel Blank.
Prosecutors allege that guns bought by Zajko were used in the Inauguration Day shootout with federal agents in Vermont, which killed U.S. border cop David Maland and young financial trader Ophelia Bauckholt.
Two other associates of LaSota are awaiting trial in California for the attempted murder of their landlord Curtis Lind in 2022, which instead resulted in the death of a young woman. Lind was later stabbed to death this January — allegedly by a young man inspired by Ziz’s philosophy.
Neither Zajko nor LaSota, however, have been charged in connection with any deaths.
Zajko’s missive, which was first reported by the Associated Press, did not answer key questions about these incidents. Her letter offered no theories about who might have killed her parents, did not address the claims about her guns and the Vermont shootout, nor did it explain her relationship to alleged shooter Milo Youngblut.
Nevertheless, it charts Zajko’s journey from an apparent enemy of LaSota to a true believer who credits LaSota for “saving [her] life.”
Zajko alleged in the letter that she is “slowly starving” in jail because she is not being given enough verifiably vegan food, and said that LaSota is currently on a “hunger strike” and in poor health.
She also made detailed allegations of sexual abuse against multiple people in the San Francisco Bay Area’s cultish “rationalist” community, claiming that LaSota and her friends have been smeared by “a conspiracy of stalkers and abusers.”
“Ziz is not my leader, and I am not hers,” Zajko wrote. “What we have is called friendship, and I love her infinitely more than I could ever express.”
She added: “I’ve never met anyone like her, and I am honored to be able to consider myself among her friends … I’ve never seen her do an evil thing.”
‘A conspiracy of stalkers and abusers’
According to Wired, Zajko grew up in an affluent neighborhood outside Philadelphia, studied bioinformatics at Temple University, and interned at NASA.
In 2019 she moved to the Bay Area and got involved with the rationalist community, which aspires to apply rigorous logic to the world’s toughest problems and prevent artificial intelligence from destroying humanity.
Zajko’s letter picks up around that point, saying she originally hoped to infiltrate Bay Area rationalist institutions that she believed to be covering up sexual abuse allegations against prominent community members.
“The Bay Area rationalist community had and has a strong culture of silence around abuse. When victims speak out, they’re treated badly. It’s a bit like Hollywood in that regard,” she wrote.
The Independent is not printing the specifics of the allegations because it has not been able to independently corroborate them.
Initially, Zajko said, she heard negative things about the so-called Zizians, a vegan splinter group of largely transgender rationalists with anarchist ideals and an uncompromising attitude to good and evil.
But she later came to believe that this was a smear campaign by people on “team cover-up” who were scared of Ziz’s uncompromising opposition to abuse.
She alleged that the pseudonymous website Zizians.info, which appears to have coined the term “Zizians” and described them as a “cult” led by Ziz LaSota, was a “hoax” concocted by “our various stalkers and abusers … in order to discredit us.”
That partly echoes the account of Octavia Nouzen, a Seattle-based rationalist and former opponent of LaSota who later declared herself a “Zizian.” She told The Independent that she had helped edit Zizians.info, and that it was a misleading “smear site” borne out of an obsessive grudge.
Zajko further alleged that she herself had been abused by one of her own former partners, who beat her with bamboo sticks without consent and gave her a concussion. Zajko credited LaSota with “saving [her] life” by getting her away from her ex-partner, saying Ziz had “rescued multiple abuse victims” and “stopp[ed] a terrorist attack”.
Some of Zajko’s statements in the letter appear conspiratorial. She sees the hidden hand of the group’s enemies in a wide range of setbacks, and suggests that they may have sent a “literal assassin” to find her.
She claimed to have spent the last two years in “homebrewed witness protection” because she feared for her safety, and said she needed to carry guns “to defend [her]self against murderous conspirators.”
According to Wired, Pennsylvania police officers investigating the death of Zajko’s parents believed one of her guns might have been the murder weapon, and that Zajko had turned off her phone in the hours before the shooting.
Zajko did not address how her guns might have ended up with Youngblut and Bauckholt, though she said Youngblut was “living in terror” of an ex-partner.
“If I weren’t in jail, I could provide chatlogs, screenshots, audio confessions, video footage, tax filings, statements made under oath, and other records,” Zajko wrote.
‘If you wish for more tyrants, then submit to tyranny’
Zajko’s letter casts her as something of a political prisoner, unjustly detained based on a “false narrative” by shadowy conspirators, and urges outsiders to investigate her allegations.
She extensively criticized the U.S. justice system and the FBI, describing it as a tyrannical “superorganism” willing to force confessions and fabricate evidence.
She advocated refusing to cooperate with this system “no matter the cost,” based on a complicated rationalist concept known as “functional decision theory” (or “timeless decision theory”).
“Do not reward tyrants, blackmailers, etc. for using evil strategies by giving them what they want. If you wish for more tyrants, then submit to tyranny; if you want more blackmailers, then pay out to blackmail; if you don’t, then don’t,” Zajko wrote. “Your fate is the self-fulfilling prophecy you write for yourself.”
Zajko complained that conditions are poor in her jail in Allegany County, Maryland, and that she had been subjected to “torture lite” — a reference to the U.S. treatment of War on Terror detainees under President George W. Bush.
She alleged that she had seen evidence of prisoners’ medical issues going untreated, and said: “I place a significant probability on our captors murdering Ms LaSota through medical neglect.”
A spokesperson for Allegany County told the Vermont news site VTDigger that Zajko had reported no injuries to jail staff.
“Allegany County Detention Center takes all medical concerns seriously and has established procedures for timely evaluation and treatment by qualified healthcare personnel,” the spokesperson said.
“While we were not required to provide vegan meals to this individual, a vegan option was in fact offered. If found to be unsatisfactory, they had the option to choose the meal being offered to other incarcerated individuals.”
Zajko’s letter said that she could not eat much of the food offered to her because it was covered in butter or margarine, and that staff had refused to disclose the latter’s ingredients.
While Zajko did not answer authorities’ allegations in much detail, she did disclaim any connection with 22-year-old data Seattle-area data scientist Maximilian Snyder, who is charged with murdering Lind in Vallejo, California on January 17.
“The newspapers do not seem to realize that there are multiple groups, and that my friends and I are not with Snyder,” she said, denouncing him as a “creep.”
