As the HSBC whistleblower, I need to say something about whistleblower Simon Andriesz. @SAndriesz raised concerns at BGC Partners and was fired. He reported to the FBI in 2020 and 2021 that he believed Howard Lutnick had undeclared business ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Nothing happened. He took it to Congress. He spent years trying to get anyone to listen. He took his own life. He was 57. I spoke with Simon through Whistleblowers of America @WhistleP2P. He was serious and careful and worn down from being ignored. Now his case is in every headline, covered with an intensity he never saw while he was alive. That is the pattern, and I want to name it. We marginalize whistleblowers while they are breathing and discover them when they are dead. I know what Simon was carrying, because I carried it too. In 2012 I found out that HSBC would pay a fine and not one banker would go to prison. I had lost my job, my savings, and every door in my industry. I was living in a 300 square foot apartment with a Flemish Giant rabbit who had the run of the place. I had decided I was done. Right as I was about to do it, she hopped over to me. I thought: who is going to feed the rabbit? That question stopped me. Years later I named my company Tactical Rabbit. People think it is a clever brand. It is the reason I am alive. Here is what I want people to understand about how whistleblowers die. Simon's death was a suicide. I am not saying otherwise. But I have lived through what gets aimed at a person who exposes the powerful, and I will not pretend it is a coincidence when one of us does not make it. After HSBC I faced external threats from the same cartels and terrorist networks whose money I had reported. On top of that came the harassment, the bullying, the targeting, the psychological warfare that is designed to isolate you and make you doubt your own mind. It is not a side effect. It is the strategy. Its purpose is to break the person so the facts never matter. Sometimes it works. A lot of whistleblowers do not survive it. I nearly did not. So when I say the campaigns against whistleblowers are a kind of killing, I do not mean it literally, but I mean it. The people who run them know exactly what they are doing to a human being, and it should be treated as the crime it is. This is why I serve on the board of Whistleblowers of America. Everyone else focuses on the case. Whistleblowers of America on the person: the trauma, the mental pain, the years after the headline when the phone stops ringing. If you are a whistleblower reading this, or you are sitting on something and deciding whether to speak, hear me clearly. It gets dark. It also gets better. There are people who care about you and will stand beside you, and I am one of them. Reach out to me. Reach out to Whistleblowers of America. Reach out to anyone. Do not carry it alone. Simon, I am sorry the world listened too late. Rest in peace.