It sounds, of course, like an outrageous scam, and perhaps it is. But Vashukevich, who goes by the alias Nastya Rybka, has a documented link to Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch who figures prominently in one of the scandals surrounding the Trump campaign. Indeed, that link may be why she’s locked up in the first place. Whether you believe her or not, her bizarre, sordid story offers real clues to the chain connecting Trump’s circle to the highest level of the Russian government.

Vashukevich first came to the attention of close watchers of the Trump-Russia story last month, thanks to a 25-minute video by Aleksei Navalny, a Russian dissident famed for exposing corruption in his country. Like many domestic opponents of Russian president Vladimir Putin, Navalny had regarded the American uproar over Trump’s Russia ties skeptically. But his investigation — which he said led to the “most scandalous findings in the history of our work,” according to the video’s English-language subtitles — appears to have altered his thinking.

It began last September, when a group of women in scanty bondage gear walked into the Moscow office of Navalny’s organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation. At that very moment, journalists from a pro-Putin media outlet just happened to be passing by, and recorded their presence.

Navalny wanted to find out who the women were and who had sent them. He discovered that they were, as he put it in the video, a “mildly insane” squad of activist sex workers who specialize in weird pranks, like picketing the American Embassy naked in support of Harvey Weinstein. And one of them, Vashukevich, had lots of photographs of herself and the politically powerful Deripaska on her Instagram account.

Deripaska, remember, is the oligarch that the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort offered to brief privately on the American presidential campaign. He’s been connected to Russian organized crime, and Manafort appeared to owe him a lot of money. (A court filing in the Cayman Islands said Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, couldn’t account for nearly $19 million that they were supposed to invest for a business controlled by Deripaska.) After joining the Trump campaign, Manafort emailed an intermediary, asking, apparently in reference to Deripaska, “How do we use to get whole?”