Alex Acosta was the U.S. attorney for
Southern Florida when he negotiated an end to the federal investigation of
Jeffrey Epstein
How a future Trump
Cabinet member
gave a serial sex
abuser the deal of a lifetime
BY
JULIE K. BROWN
NOV. 28, 2018 | The
Miami Herald
On a muggy October morning in 2007,
Miami’s top federal prosecutor, Alexander Acosta, had a breakfast appointment
with a former colleague, Washington, D.C., attorney Jay Lefkowitz.
It was an unusual meeting for the
then-38-year-old prosecutor, a rising Republican star who had served in several
White House posts before being named U.S. attorney in Miami by President George
W. Bush.
Instead of meeting at the prosecutor’s
Miami headquarters, the two men — both with professional roots in the
prestigious Washington law firm of Kirkland & Ellis — convened at the
Marriott in West Palm Beach, about 70 miles away. For Lefkowitz, 44, a U.S.
special envoy to North Korea and corporate lawyer, the meeting was critical.
His client, Palm Beach multimillionaire
Jeffrey Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of
underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into
having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as
often as three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.
The eccentric hedge fund manager,
whose friends included former President Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and
Prince Andrew, was also suspected of trafficking minor girls, often from
overseas, for sex parties at his other homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and the
Caribbean, FBI and court records show.
Facing a 53-page federal indictment,
Epstein could have ended up in federal prison for the rest of his life.
But on the morning of the breakfast
meeting, a deal was struck — an extraordinary plea agreement that would
conceal the full extent of Epstein’s crimes and the number of people involved.
Not only would Epstein serve just 13
months in the county jail, but the deal — called a non-prosecution agreement —
essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims
and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a
Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI
records.
The pact required Epstein to plead
guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. Epstein and four of his
accomplices named in the agreement received immunity from all federal criminal
charges. But even more unusual, the deal included wording that granted immunity
to “any potential co-conspirators’’ who were also involved in Epstein’s crimes.
These accomplices or participants were not identified in the agreement, leaving
it open to interpretation whether it possibly referred to other influential
people who were having sex with underage girls at Epstein’s various homes or on
his plane.
As part of the arrangement, Acosta
agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept
from the victims. As a result, the non-prosecution agreement was sealed until
after it was approved by the judge, thereby averting any chance that the girls
— or anyone else — might show up in court and try to derail it.
This is the story of how Epstein,
bolstered by unlimited funds and represented by a powerhouse legal team, was
able to manipulate the criminal justice system, and how his accusers, still
traumatized by their pasts, believe they were betrayed by the very prosecutors
who pledged to protect them.
“I don’t think anyone has been told the
truth about what Jeffrey Epstein did,’’ said one of Epstein’s victims, Michelle
Licata, now 30. “He ruined my life and a lot of girls’ lives. People need to
know what he did and why he wasn’t prosecuted so it never happens again.”
Now President Trump’s secretary of
labor, Acosta, 49, oversees a massive federal agency that provides oversight of
the country’s labor laws, including human trafficking. Until he was reported to
be eliminated on Thursday, a day after this story posted online, Acosta also
had been included on lists of possible replacements for former Attorney General
Jeff Sessions, who resigned under pressure earlier this month.
Acosta did not respond to numerous
requests for an interview or answer queries through email.
But court records reveal details of the
negotiations and the role that Acosta would play in arranging the deal, which
scuttled the federal probe into a possible international sex trafficking
operation. Among other things, Acosta allowed Epstein’s lawyers unusual
freedoms in dictating the terms of the non-prosecution agreement.
“The damage that happened in this case
is unconscionable,” said Bradley Edwards, a former state prosecutor who
represents some of Epstein’s victims. “How in the world, do you, the U.S.
attorney, engage in a negotiation with a criminal defendant, basically allowing
that criminal defendant to write up the agreement?”
As a result, neither the victims — nor
even the judge — would know how many girls Epstein allegedly sexually abused
between 2001 and 2005, when his underage sex activities were first uncovered by
police. Police referred the case to the FBI a year later, when they began to
suspect that their investigation was being undermined by the Palm Beach State
Attorney’s Office.
NOT A ‘HE SAID, SHE
SAID’
“This was not a ‘he said, she said’
situation. This was 50-something ‘shes’ and one ‘he’ — and the ‘shes’ all
basically told the same story,’’ said retired Palm Beach Police Chief Michael
Reiter, who supervised the police probe.
More than a decade later, at a time
when Olympic gymnasts and Hollywood actresses have become a catalyst for a
cultural reckoning about sexual abuse, Epstein’s victims have all but been
forgotten.
The women — now in their late 20s and
early 30s — are still fighting for an elusive justice that even the passage of
time has not made right.
Like other victims of sexual abuse,
they believe they’ve been silenced by a criminal justice system that stubbornly
fails to hold Epstein and other wealthy and powerful men accountable.
“Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a
bad way, girls who were basically homeless. He went after girls who he thought
no one would listen to and he was right,’’ said Courtney Wild, who was 14 when
she met Epstein.
Over the past year, the Miami Herald
examined a decade’s worth of court documents, lawsuits, witness depositions and
newly released FBI documents. Key people involved in the investigation — most
of whom have never spoken before — were also interviewed. The Herald also obtained
new records, including the full unredacted copy of the Palm Beach police
investigation and witness statements that had been kept under seal.
The Herald learned that, as part of the
plea deal, Epstein provided what the government called “valuable consideration”
for unspecified information he supplied to federal investigators. While the
documents obtained by the Herald don’t detail what the information was,
Epstein’s sex crime case happened just as the country’s subprime mortgage
market collapsed, ushering in the 2008 global financial crisis.
Records show that Epstein was a key
federal witness in the criminal prosecution of two prominent executives with
Bear Stearns, the global investment brokerage that failed in 2008, who were
accused of corporate securities fraud. Epstein was one of the largest investors
in the hedge fund managed by the executives, who were later acquitted. It is
not known what role, if any, the case played in Epstein’s plea negotiations.
The Herald also identified about 80
women who say they were molested or otherwise sexually abused by Epstein from
2001 to 2006. About 60 of them were located — now scattered around the country
and abroad. Eight of them agreed to be interviewed, on or off the record. Four
of them were willing to speak on video.
The women are now mothers, wives,
nurses, bartenders, Realtors, hairdressers and teachers. One is a Hollywood
actress. Several have grappled with trauma, depression and addiction. Some have
served time in prison.
A few did not survive. One young woman
was found dead last year in a rundown motel in West Palm Beach. She overdosed
on heroin and left behind a young son.
As part of Epstein’s agreement, he was
required to register as a sex offender, and pay restitution to the three dozen
victims identified by the FBI. In many cases, the confidential financial
settlements came only after Epstein’s attorneys exposed every dark corner of
their lives in a scorched-earth effort to portray the girls as gold diggers.
“You beat yourself up mentally and physically,’’
said Jena-Lisa Jones, 30, who said Epstein molested her when she was 14. “You
can’t ever stop your thoughts. A word can trigger something. For me, it is the
word ‘pure’ because he called me ‘pure’ in that room and then I remember what
he did to me in that room.’’
Now, more than a decade later, two
unrelated civil lawsuits — one set for trial on Dec. 4 — could reveal more
about Epstein’s crimes. The Dec. 4 case, in Palm Beach County state court,
involves Epstein and Edwards, whom Epstein had accused of legal misdeeds in
representing several victims. The case is noteworthy because it will mark the
first time that Epstein’s victims will have their day in court, and several of
them are scheduled to testify.
A second lawsuit, known as the federal
Crime Victims’ Rights suit, is still pending in South Florida after a decade of
legal jousting. It seeks to invalidate the non-prosecution agreement in hopes
of sending Epstein to federal prison. Wild, who has never spoken publicly until
now, is Jane Doe No. 1 in “Jane Doe No. 1 and Jane Doe No. 2 vs. the United
States of America,” a federal lawsuit that alleges Epstein’s federal
non-prosecution agreement was illegal.
Federal prosecutors, including Acosta,
not only broke the law, the women contend in court documents, but they
conspired with Epstein and his lawyers to circumvent public scrutiny and
deceive his victims in violation of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. The law
assigns victims a series of rights, including the right of notice of any court
proceedings and the opportunity to appear at sentencing.
“As soon as that deal was signed, they
silenced my voice and the voices of all of Jeffrey Epstein’s other victims,’’
said Wild, now 31. “This case is about justice, not just for us, but for other
victims who aren’t Olympic stars or Hollywood stars.’’
In court papers, federal prosecutors
have argued that they did not violate the Crime Victims’ Rights Act because no
federal charges were ever filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern
District of Florida, an argument that was later dismissed by the judge.
Despite substantial physical evidence
and multiple witnesses backing up the girls’ stories, the secret deal allowed
Epstein to enter guilty pleas to two felony prostitution charges. Epstein admitted
to committing only one offense against one underage girl, who was labeled a
prostitute, even though she was 14, which is well under the age of consent — 18
in Florida.
“She was taken advantage of twice —
first by Epstein, and then by the criminal justice system that labeled a
14-year-old girl as a prostitute,’’ said Spencer Kuvin, the lawyer who
represented the girl.
“It’s just outrageous how they
minimized his crimes and devalued his victims by calling them prostitutes,’’
said Yasmin Vafa, a human rights attorney and executive director of
Rights4Girls, which is working to end the sexual exploitation of girls and
young women.
“There is no such thing as a child
prostitute. Under federal law, it’s called child sex trafficking — whether
Epstein pimped them out to others or not. It’s still a commercial sex act — and
he could have been jailed for the rest of his life under federal law,” she
said.
It would be easy to dismiss the Epstein
case as another example of how there are two systems of justice in America, one
for the rich and one for the poor. But a thorough analysis of the case tells a
far more troubling story.
A close look at the trove of letters
and emails contained in court records provides a window into the plea
negotiations, revealing an unusual level of collaboration between federal
prosecutors and Epstein’s legal team that even government lawyers, in recent
court documents, admitted was unorthodox.
Acosta, in 2011, would explain that he
was unduly pressured by Epstein’s heavy-hitting lawyers — Lefkowitz, Harvard
professor Alan Dershowitz, Jack Goldberger, Roy Black, former U.S. Attorney Guy
Lewis, Gerald Lefcourt, and Kenneth Starr, the former Whitewater special
prosecutor who investigated Bill Clinton’s sexual liaisons with Monica Lewinsky.
‘AVOID THE PRESS’
PLAN
That included keeping the deal from
Epstein’s victims, emails show.
“Thank you for the commitment you made
to me during our Oct. 12 meeting,’’ Lefkowitz wrote in a letter to Acosta after
their breakfast meeting in West Palm Beach. He added that he was hopeful that
Acosta would abide by a promise to keep the deal confidential.
“You ... assured me that your office
would not ... contact any of the identified individuals, potential witnesses or
potential civil claimants and the respective counsel in this matter,’’
Lefkowitz wrote.
In email after email, Acosta and the
lead federal prosecutor, A. Marie Villafaña, acquiesced to Epstein’s legal
team’s demands, which often focused on ways to limit the scandal by shutting
out his victims and the media, including suggesting that the charges be filed
in Miami, instead of Palm Beach, where Epstein’s victims lived.
“On an ‘avoid the press’ note ... I can
file the charge in district court in Miami which will hopefully cut the press
coverage significantly. Do you want to check that out?’’ Villafaña wrote to
Lefkowitz in a September 2007 email.
Federal prosecutors identified 36
underage victims, but none of those victims appeared at his sentencing on June
30, 2008, in state court in Palm Beach County. Most of them heard about it on
the news — and even then they didn’t understand what had happened to the
federal probe that they’d been assured was ongoing.
Edwards filed an emergency motion in
federal court to block the non-prosecution agreement, but by the time the
agreement was unsealed — over a year later — Epstein had already served his sentence
and been released from jail.
“The conspiracy between the
government and Epstein was really ‘let’s figure out a way to make the whole
thing go away as quietly as possible,’ ’’ said Edwards, who represents Wild and
Jane Doe No. 2, who declined to comment for this story.
“In never consulting with the victims,
and keeping it secret, it showed that someone with money can buy his way out of
anything.’’
It was far from the last time Epstein
would receive VIP handling. Unlike other convicted sex offenders, Epstein
didn’t face the kind of rough justice that child sex offenders do in Florida
state prisons. Instead of being sent to state prison, Epstein was housed in a
private wing of the Palm Beach County jail. And rather than having him sit in a
cell most of the day, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office allowed Epstein
work release privileges, which enabled him to leave the jail six days a week,
for 12 hours a day, to go to a comfortable office that Epstein had set up in
West Palm Beach. This was granted despite explicit sheriff’s department rules
stating that sex offenders don’t qualify for work release.
The sheriff, Ric Bradshaw, would not
answer questions, submitted by the Miami Herald, about Epstein’s work release.
Neither Epstein nor his lead attorney,
Jack Goldberger, responded to multiple requests for comment for this story.
During depositions taken as part of two dozen lawsuits filed against him by his
victims, Epstein has invoked his Fifth Amendment right against
self-incrimination, in one instance doing so more than 200 times.
In the past, his lawyers have said that
the girls lied about their ages, that their stories were exaggerated or untrue
and that they were unreliable witnesses prone to drug use.
In 2011, Epstein petitioned to have his
sex offender status reduced in New York, where he has a home and is required to
register every 90 days. In New York, he is classified as a level 3 offender —
the highest safety risk because of his likelihood to re-offend.
A prosecutor under New York County
District Attorney Cyrus Vance argued on Epstein’s behalf, telling New York
Supreme Court Judge Ruth Pickholtz that the Florida case never led to an
indictment and that his underage victims failed to cooperate in the case.
Pickholtz, however, denied the petition, expressing astonishment that a New
York prosecutor would make such a request on behalf of a serial sex offender
accused of molesting so many girls.
“I have to tell you, I’m a little
overwhelmed because I have never seen a prosecutor’s office do anything like
this. I have done so many [sex offender registration hearings] much less
troubling than this one where the [prosecutor] would never make a downward
argument like this,’’ she said.
THE HOUSE ON EL
BRILLO
The women who went to Jeffrey Epstein’s
mansion as girls tend to divide their lives into two parts: life before Jeffrey
and life after Jeffrey.
Before she met Epstein, Courtney Wild
was captain of the cheerleading squad, first trumpet in the band and an
A-student at Lake Worth Middle School.
After she met Epstein, she was a
stripper, a drug addict and an inmate at Gadsden Correctional Institution in
Florida’s Panhandle.
Wild still had braces on her teeth when
she was introduced to him in 2002 at the age of 14.
She was fair, petite and slender,
blonde and blue-eyed. Wild, who later helped recruit other girls, said Epstein
preferred girls who were white, appeared prepubescent and those who were easy
to manipulate into going further each time.
“By the time I was 16, I had probably
brought him 70 to 80 girls who were all 14 and 15 years old. He was involved in
my life for years,” said Wild, who was released from prison in October after
serving three years on drug charges.
The girls — mostly 13 to 16 — were
lured to his pink waterfront mansion by Wild and other girls, who went to
malls, house parties and other places where girls congregated, and told
recruits that they could earn $200 to $300 to give a man — Epstein — a massage,
according to an unredacted copy of the Palm Beach police investigation obtained
by the Herald.
The lead Palm Beach police detective on
the case, Joseph Recarey, said Epstein’s operation worked like a sexual pyramid
scheme.
“The common interview with a girl went
like this: ‘I was brought there by so and so. I didn’t feel comfortable with
what happened, but I got paid well, so I was told if I didn’t feel comfortable,
I could bring someone else and still get paid,’ ’’ Recarey said.
During the massage sessions, Recarey
said Epstein would molest the girls, paying them premiums for engaging in oral
sex and intercourse, and offering them a further bounty to find him more girls.
Recarey, in his first interview about
the case, said the evidence the department collected to support the girls’
stories was overwhelming, including phone call records, copies of written phone
messages from the girls found in Epstein’s trash and Epstein’s flight logs,
which showed his private plane in Palm Beach on the days the girls were
scheduled to give him massages.
Epstein could be a generous benefactor,
Recarey said, buying his favored girls gifts. He might rent a car for a young
girl to make it more convenient for her to stop by and cater to him. Once, he
sent a bucket of roses to the local high school after one of his girls starred
in a stage production. The floral-delivery instructions and a report card for
one of the girls were discovered in a search of his mansion and trash. Police
also obtained receipts for the rental cars and gifts, Recarey said.
Epstein counseled the girls about their
schooling, and told them he would help them get into college, modeling school,
fashion design or acting. At least two of Epstein’s victims told police that
they were in love with him, according to the police report.
The police report shows how uncannily
consistent the girls’ stories were — right down to their detailed descriptions
of Epstein’s genitalia.
“We had victims who didn’t know each
other, never met each other and they all basically independently told the same
story,’’ said Reiter, the retired Palm Beach police chief.
Reiter, also speaking for the first
time, said detectives were astonished by the sheer volume of young girls coming
and going from his house, the frequency — sometimes several in the same day —
and the young ages of the girls.
“It started out to give a man a back
rub, but in many cases it turned into something far worse than that, elevated
to a serious crime, in some cases sexual batteries,’’ he said.
Most of the girls said they arrived by
car or taxi, and entered the side door, where they were led into a kitchen by a
female staff assistant named Sarah Kellen, the report said. A chef might
prepare them a meal or offer them cereal. The girls — most from local schools —
would then ascend a staircase off the kitchen, up to a large master bedroom and
bath.
They were met by Epstein, clad in a
towel. He would select a lotion from an array lined up on a table, then lie
facedown on a massage table, instruct the girl to strip partially or fully, and
direct them to massage his feet and backside. Then he would turn over and have
them massage his chest, often instructing them to pinch his nipples, while he
masturbated, according to the police report.
At times, if emboldened, he would try
to penetrate them with his fingers or use a vibrator on them. He would go as
far as the girls were willing to let him, including intercourse, according to
police documents. Sometimes he would instruct a young woman he described as his
Yugoslavian sex slave, Nadia Marcinkova, who was over 18, to join in, the girls
told Recarey. Epstein often took photographs of the girls having sex and
displayed them around the house, the detective said.
Once sexually gratified, Epstein
would take a shower in his massive bathroom, which the girls described as
having a large shower and a hot pink and mint green sofa.
Kellen (now Vickers) and Marcinkova,
through their attorneys, declined to comment for this story.
NEVER ENOUGH
One girl told police that she was
approached by an Epstein recruiter when she was 16, and was working at the
Wellington mall. Over the course of more than a year, she went to Epstein’s
house hundreds of times, she said. The girl tearfully told Recarey that she
often had sex with Marcinkova — who employed strap-on dildos and other toys —
while Epstein watched and choreographed her moves to please himself, according
to the police report. Often times, she said, she was so sore after the
encounters that she could barely walk, the police report said.
But she said she was firm about not
wanting to have intercourse with Epstein. One day, however, the girl said that
Epstein, unable to control himself, held her down on a massage table and
penetrated her, the police report said. The girl, who was 16 or 17 at the time,
said that Epstein apologized and paid her $1,000, the police report said.
Most of the girls came from
disadvantaged families, single-parent homes or foster care. Some had
experienced troubles that belied their ages: They had parents and friends who
committed suicide; mothers abused by husbands and boyfriends; fathers who
molested and beat them. One girl had watched her stepfather strangle her
8-year-old stepbrother, according to court records obtained by the Herald.
Many of the girls were one step away
from homelessness.
“We were stupid, poor children,’’ said
one woman, who did not want to be named because she never told anyone about
Epstein. At the time, she said, she was 14 and a high school freshman.
“We just wanted money for school
clothes, for shoes. I remember wearing shoes too tight for three years in a
row. We had no family and no guidance, and we were told that we were going to
just have to sit in a room topless and he was going to just look at us. It
sounded so simple, and was going to be easy money for just sitting there.”
The woman, who went to Epstein’s home
multiple times, said Epstein didn’t like her because her breasts were too big.
The last time she went, she said, one girl came out crying and they were
instructed to leave the house and had to pay for their own cab home.
Some girls told police they were
coached by their peer recruiters to lie to Epstein about their ages and say
they were 18. Epstein’s legal team would later claim that even if the girls
were under 18, there was no way he could have known. However, under Florida
law, ignorance of a sex partner’s age is not a defense for having sex with a
minor.
Wild said he was well aware of their
tender ages — because he demanded they be young.
“He told me he wanted them as young as
I could find them,’’ she said, explaining that as she grew older and had less
access to young girls, Epstein got increasingly angry with her inability to
find him the young girls he desired.
“If I had a girl to bring him at
breakfast, lunch and dinner, then that’s how many times I would go a day. He
wanted as many girls as I could get him. It was never enough.’’
THE PYRAMID CRUMBLES
Epstein’s scheme first began to unravel
in March 2005, when the parents of a 14-year-old girl told Palm Beach police that
she had been molested by Epstein at his mansion. The girl reluctantly confessed
that she had been brought there by two other girls, and those girls pointed to
two more girls who had been there.
By the time detectives tracked down one
victim, there were two and three more to find. Soon there were dozens.
“We didn’t know where the victims would
ever end,” Reiter said.
Eventually, the girls told them about
still other girls and young women they had seen at Epstein’s house, many of
whom didn’t speak English, Recarey said. That led Recarey to suspect that
Epstein’s exploits weren’t just confined to Palm Beach. Police obtained the
flight logs for his private plane, and found female names and initials among
the list of people who flew on the aircraft — including the names of some
famous and powerful people who had also been passengers, Recarey said.
A newly released FBI report shows that
at the time the non-prosecution deal was executed, the agency was interviewing
witnesses and victims “from across the United States.” The probe stretched from
Florida to New York and New Mexico, records show. The report was released by
the FBI in response to a lawsuit filed by Radar Online and was made available
on the bureau’s website after the Miami Herald and other news organizations
submitted requests, said Daniel Novack, the lawyer who filed the Freedom of Information
Act case pro bono.
One lawsuit, still pending in New York,
alleges that Epstein used an international modeling agency to recruit girls as
young as 13 from Europe, Ecuador and Brazil. The girls lived in a New York
building owned by Epstein, who paid for their visas, according to the sworn
statement of Maritza Vasquez, the one-time bookkeeper for Mc2, the modeling
agency.
Mike Fisten, a former Miami-Dade police
sergeant who was also a homicide investigator and a member of the FBI Organized
Crime Task Force, said the FBI had enough evidence to put Epstein away for a
long time but was overruled by Acosta. Some of the agents involved in the case
were disappointed by Acosta’s bowing to pressure from Epstein’s lawyers, he
said.
“The day that a sitting U.S. attorney
is afraid of a lawyer or afraid of a defendant is a very sad day in this
country,’’ said Fisten, now a private investigator for Edwards.
SUIT/COUNTERSUIT
Now, a complex web of litigation could
reveal more about Epstein’s crimes. A lawsuit, set for trial Dec. 4 in Palm
Beach County, involves the notorious convicted Ponzi schemer Scott Rothstein,
in whose law firm Edwards once worked.
In 2009, Epstein sued Edwards, alleging
that Edwards was involved with Rothstein and was using the girls’ civil
lawsuits to perpetuate Rothstein’s massive Ponzi operation. But Rothstein said
Edwards didn’t know about the scheme, and Epstein dropped the lawsuit.
Edwards countersued for malicious
prosecution, arguing that Epstein sued him to retaliate for his aggressive
representation of Epstein’s victims.
Several women who went to Epstein’s
home as underage girls are scheduled to testify against him for the first time.
Florida state Sen. Lauren Book, a child
sex abuse survivor who has lobbied for tough sex offender laws, said Epstein’s
case should serve as a tipping point for criminal cases involving sex crimes
against children.
“Where is the righteous indignation for
these women? Where are the protectors? Who is banging down the doors of the
secretary of labor, or the judge or the sheriff’s office in Palm Beach County,
demanding justice and demanding the right to be heard?’’ Book asked.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Villafaña, in
court papers, said that prosecutors used their “best efforts’’ to comply with
the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, but exercised their “prosecutorial discretion’’
when they chose not to notify the victims. The reasoning went like this: The
non-prosecution deal had a restitution clause that provided the girls a chance
to seek compensation from Epstein. Had the deal fallen through, necessitating a
trial, Epstein’s lawyers might have used the prior restitution clause to
undermine the girls’ credibility as witnesses, by claiming they had exaggerated
Epstein’s behavior in hopes of cashing in.
Acosta has never fully explained why he
felt it was in the best interests of the underage girls — and their parents —
for him to keep the agreement sealed. Or why the FBI investigation was closed
even as, recently released documents show, the case was yielding more victims
and evidence of a possible sex-trafficking conspiracy beyond Palm Beach.
Upon his nomination by Trump as labor
secretary in 2017, Acosta was questioned about the Epstein case during a Senate
confirmation hearing.
“At the end of the day, based on the
evidence, professionals within a prosecutor’s office decided that a plea that
guarantees someone goes to jail, that guarantees he register [as a sex
offender] generally and guarantees other outcomes, is a good thing,’’ Acosta
said of his decision to not prosecute Epstein federally.
California Democratic Sen. Dianne
Feinstein, in opposing Acosta for labor secretary, noted that “his handling of
a case involving sex trafficking of underage girls when he was a U.S. attorney
suggests he won’t put the interests of workers and everyday people ahead of the
powerful and well-connected.’’
Marci Hamilton, a University of
Pennsylvania law professor who is one of the nation’s leading advocates for
reforming laws involving sex crimes against children, said what Acosta and
other prosecutors did is similar to what the Catholic Church did to protect
pedophile priests.
“The real crime with the Catholic
priests was the way they covered it up and shielded the priests,’’ Hamilton
said. “The orchestration of power by men only is protected as long as everybody
agrees to keep it secret. This is a story the world needs to hear.’’
This article has been updated to acknowledge
Radar Online’s role in securing the release of FBI documents on Jeffrey Epstein
and to eliminate a reference to Courtney Wild’s age when she stopped recruiting
for Epstein. Wild now says she is not sure how old she was, but her lawyer says
she would have been younger than 21, the age she had stated in an interview.
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