Plan B Forum

Wealthy financier charged with molesting dozens of girls

NEW YORK (AP) — In a startling reversal of fortune, billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein was charged Monday with sexually abusing dozens of underage girls in a case brought more than a decade after he secretly cut a deal with federal prosecutors to dispose of nearly identical allegations.

The 66-year-old hedge fund manager who once socialized with some of the world’s most powerful people was charged in a newly unsealed federal indictment with sex trafficking and conspiracy during the early 2000s. He could get up to 45 years in prison if convicted.

The case sets the stage for another #MeToo-era trial fraught with questions of wealth and influence. Epstein’s powerful friends over the years have included President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton and Britain’s Prince Andrew.

Prosecutors said the evidence against Epstein included a “vast trove” of hundreds or even thousands of lewd photographs of young women or girls, discovered in a weekend search of his New York City mansion. Authorities also found papers and phone records corroborating the alleged crimes, and a massage room still set up the way accusers said it appeared, prosecutors said.

Epstein, who was arrested Saturday as he arrived in the U.S. from Paris aboard his private jet, was brought into court Monday in a blue jail uniform, his hair disheveled, and pleaded not guilty. He was jailed for a bail hearing next Monday, when prosecutors plan to argue that the rich world traveler might flee if released.

His lawyers argued that the sex-crime allegations had been settled in 2008 with a plea agreement in Florida that was overseen by Alexander Acosta, who was the U.S. attorney in Miami at the time and is now Trump’s labor secretary.

“This is ancient stuff,” Epstein attorney Reid Weingarten said in court, calling the case essentially a “redo” by the government.

But U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman of New York said that the non-prosecution agreement that spared Epstein from a heavy prison sentence a decade ago is binding only on federal prosecutors in Florida, not on authorities in New York.

The alleged victims “deserve their day in court,” Berman said. “We are proud to be standing up for them by bringing this indictment.”

Epstein was accused in the indictment of paying underage girls hundreds of dollars in cash for massages and then molesting them at his homes in Palm Beach, Florida, and New York from 2002 through 2005.

He “intentionally sought out minors and knew that many of his victims were in fact under the age of 18,” prosecutors said. He also paid some of his victims to recruit additional girls, creating “a vast network of underage victims for him to sexually exploit,” prosecutors said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Alex Rossmiller said that while there is some overlap between the Florida and New York cases, one of the counts is based entirely on New York victims.

Federal authorities said new accusers have come forward since Epstein’s arrest, and they urged other possible victims to contact the FBI.

Some of Epstein’s accusers welcomed the indictment.

“The news of my abuser’s arrest today is a step in the right direction to finally hold Epstein accountable for his crimes and restore my faith that power and money can’t triumph over justice,” Sarah Ransome said through her lawyer.

Prosecutors in New York are seeking the forfeiture of Epstein’s mansion, a seven-story, 21,000-square-foot townhouse less than a block from Central Park. The home, formerly a prep school, is across the street from a home owned by Bill Cosby and has been valued at approximately $77 million.

Epstein’s arrest came amid increased #MeToo-era scrutiny of the 2008 non-prosecution agreement, which caused a furor in recent years as the details came to light, many of them exposed in a series of stories by The Miami Herald.

Under the deal, Epstein was allowed to plead guilty to state charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution. He avoided a possible life sentence and served 13 months in jail, during which he was allowed out to go to his office during the day. The deal also required that he reach financial settlements with dozens of his alleged victims and register as a sex offender.

“The last couple of years have helped build this environment where the public isn’t willing to see these cases swept under the rug anymore,” said Scott Berkowitz, president of RAINN, the anti-sexual violence organization.

“I also think there was such outrage over the sentence that he got and what seemed like a very special deal that he got the first time. So I think similar to the first attempt to prosecute Cosby, I think there was a lot of public outrage at justice not being done. And so that helped lead the drive.”

Acosta has defended the agreement as appropriate, though the White House said in February that it was looking into his handling of the case.

The new charges were brought by the public corruption unit within the U.S. attorney’s office in New York, which normally handles cases against politicians. Berman would not say why that was done. Attorney General William Barr declined to comment on Epstein’s case, saying he has recused himself from the matter.

Former federal prosecutor David Weinstein agreed that the non-prosecution deal applies only to federal prosecutors in the Florida, not those in New York.

Authorities in Florida have said at least 40 underage girls were brought into Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion for sexual purposes after being recruited around the world.

Some of the alleged victims have accused Prince Andrew and former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz of taking part in Epstein’s sex ring. Buckingham Palace has vehemently denied any involvement by Andrew, and Dershowitz has accused the victims of lying about him.

The non-prosecution agreement is being challenged in court in Florida. A federal judge ruled earlier this year that Epstein’s victims should have been consulted under the law about the agreement, and he is now weighing whether to throw it out.

Federal prosecutors recently filed court papers in the Florida case contending the deal must stand. “The past cannot be undone; the government committed itself to the NPA, and the parties have not disputed that Epstein complied with its provisions,” prosecutors wrote.

Prosecutors said they would oppose Epstein’s release on bail. The defendant owns airplanes as well as homes in Paris and on a Caribbean island.

“He has enormous wealth. The charges are very serious and carry with them a maximum sentence of 45 years, which to someone of Epstein’s age is basically a life sentence,” Berman said, “so we think he has every incentive to try and flee the jurisdiction.”

b]Trump: 'I feel very badly' for Acosta[/b]

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he feels “very badly” for Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, as the embattled Cabinet official faces an onslaught of calls by Democratic lawmakers to resign for his role in brokering financier Jeffrey Epstein’s 2008 plea deal on sex abuse charges.

“I feel very badly, actually, for Secretary Acosta because I've known him as being somebody that works so hard and has done such a good job. I feel very badly about that whole situation,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, adding that the White House will be reviewing Acosta’s handling of the case.

“We're going to be looking at that and looking at it very closely,” Trump said. But last year, former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the White House was reviewing the situation in the wake of a Miami Herald report that detailed the scope of Epstein's abuse and the deal he was granted. The White House didn't answer questions on whether they conducted an inquiry then.

The president also sought to downplay the relevance of Acosta's involvement in the Epstein case, and suggested public officials frequently come to regret choices made years earlier in their careers.

“You know, if you go back and look at everybody else's decisions, whether it's a U.S. attorney or an assistant U.S. attorney or a judge, you go back 12 or 15 years ago or 20 years ago and look at their past decisions," Trump said. "I would think you'd probably find that they would wish they maybe did it a different way. I do hear that there were a lot of people involved in that decision, not just him."

Less than an hour before the president’s remarks, Acosta took to Twitter to defend his approval of the Epstein non-prosecution agreement he helped negotiate more than a decade ago as a U.S. attorney in Miami, which resulted in a lenient 18-month sentence.

“The crimes committed by Epstein are horrific, and I am pleased that NY prosecutors are moving forward with a case based on new evidence,” Acosta wrote online, referring to the federal sex trafficking indictment brought Monday by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.

“With the evidence available more than a decade ago, federal prosecutors insisted that Epstein go to jail, register as a sex offender and put the world on notice that he was a sexual predator,” Acosta continued. “Now that new evidence and additional testimony is available, the NY prosecution offers an important opportunity to more fully bring him to justice.”

I was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein; here's what I know

Epstein's lawyers are signaling his most powerful friends' secrets are safe with him, will that keep them close?

Jesse Kornbluth
Jeffrey Epstein didn’t abuse underage girls in a vacuum. He had enablers. And friends. For a few years in the ‘80s, I was one of his friends — in the transactional, Manhattan meaning of that word — and I got a preview of his sickness.

When we met in 1986, Epstein’s double identity intrigued me — he said he didn’t just manage money for clients with mega-fortunes, he was also a high-level bounty hunter. Sometimes, he told me, he worked for governments to recover money looted by African dictators. Other times those dictators hired him to help them hide their stolen money.

Epstein was pleased that I was interested in writing about him. Not a profile. A book. That prospect convinced him that I should see a sample of his craft, so we met in the lobby of an office building on Park Avenue South and took an elevator to a law firm, where he intended to serve a subpoena. He didn’t get past the receptionist.

I thought this episode . . . odd. A major financial figure trying to serve a subpoena? Don’t you hire someone to do that? My interest lapsed.

My wife-to-be was then a military historian, with a book about to be published. Interview Magazine photographed her in a buttoned-up military shirt, with a taut khaki tie. A witty photo of an attractive woman. But not a sexy look. Jeffrey Epstein had chatted her up at a few parties. The military look fooled him not at all.

The night before our marriage, Epstein called. “It’s your last free night,” he told my wife-to-be. “Why don’t you come over and fuck me?”

That was how, in June of 1987, Jeffrey Epstein became dead to me.

Over the years, I heard the stories making the rounds about him: how Leslie Wexner either gave him the biggest townhouse in Manhattan or sold it to him for a dollar, how he worked out of Bennett Cerf’s old office and had no computer, how his friends included Donald Trump and Bill Clinton and the Duchess of York. And more. Should I rethink a book about Epstein? I wavered.

In the early ‘90s, at a Joan Rivers dinner party, my wife and I encountered Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of disgraced British publishing mogul Robert Maxwell and Epstein’s girlfriend for a brief period in the '90s. She has been accused of recruiting and grooming girls and women for Epstein; she denies this. I’d met her several times with Epstein; we were also “friends,” in that transactional Manhattan way. And might now become better friends. “If you lose 10 pounds, I’ll fuck you,” she said, with my wife standing next to me. And she too became dead to me.

As his legend grew, many others were fascinated or amused or impressed by Epstein or simply delighted that he wrote checks to their charities. His interest in young women was no secret; Donald Trump famously applauded it in 2002. Vicky Ward, who published a long profile of Epstein in Vanity Fair in 2003, recently revisited transcripts of her interviews: “What is so amazing to me is how his entire social circle knew about this and just blithely overlooked it . . . all mentioned the girls, as an aside.”

In 2008, everybody knew: Epstein was arrested in Florida for soliciting underage girls for sex. He pleaded guilty to felony solicitation of prostitution and procuring a person under the age of 18 for prostitution. He served 13 months in a Palm Beach jail — a sweetheart deal allowed him to leave a private wing of the jail every day to work in his office — and a year of house arrest. And then the level three sex offender — that is, a sex offender with a high risk of re-offense — returned to New York.

In 2011, in the Daily Beast, Alexandra Wolfe chronicled what happened next:

The conventional wisdom among his friends was that Epstein has been victimized by greedy, morally dubious teenage girls and unscrupulous lawyers. "I've never condoned paying for sex, but if the young lady lied about her age it's her own fault," explained one socialite, who along with Wilbur Ross and Leon Black hobnobbed with Epstein at a Southampton movie screening just two months after his release from "community control" in Florida.

And then, because children were involved, this shocker:

Just a few months after leaving Florida, Epstein, with the help of uber-publicist Peggy Siegal, hosted a post-Yom Kippur buffet at his mansion in Manhattan — and not only did more than a hundred friends come, some brought their children. A few months later, Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, Woody Allen and other celebrities showed up at Epstein’s mansion for a dinner in honor of Britain’s Prince Andrew.

Why was Epstein so easily rehabilitated? He was smart. Attractive. Rich. And that is a potent combination. As David Patrick Columbia, editor of New York Social Diary, explained it for the Times: “A jail sentence doesn't matter anymore. The only thing that gets you shunned in New York society is poverty.”

So here’s an Epstein friend for 35 years who visited him in prison and attended the post-Yom Kippur dinner: “The side I've been reading about is a side I don't know. Unless I've seen it, I don't focus on it."

And here’s a woman who was at that dinner and several others: “I and many others that know him describe him as brilliant. His unique mind is what attracts the world's smartest people to his home."

And here’s a woman who’s a fixture on the Manhattan and Hamptons circuit: "From a cerebral and business side he's worshipped. He's incredibly charming and handsome. He's an extraordinary package, so I can see why people don't want to believe what they hear. If people come out of jail and are still successful, people are very forgiving, shockingly so."

And here’s a distinguished scientist: “I always judge things on empirical evidence. He always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I've never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people."

No doubt these Epstein friends have an updated opinion today.

It is rumored that Epstein's lawyer has made a proffer to the prosecutors: Epstein will agree to cooperate with the investigation, including giving up the names of individuals that paid for activities with underage girls in exchange for a maximum sentence not to exceed 5 years.

If true, that proffer sounds like good news. Ironic good news: what a friend Jeffrey Epstein turned out to be! Then I grasped the wiggle phrase: “individuals that paid.” That would not be Donald Trump or Bill Clinton or a great many other bold-facers who flew on Epstein’s plane — it was known as the “Lolita Express” — or visited his homes.

If true, another round of great lawyering may mean that no one in New York society will be publicly shamed. Because the friends of Jeffrey Epstein are rich. And the rich are famously cheap. Pay for sex in a friend’s house? They’d never. And their host would never ask. The girls were just a perk.

In the commentary and in the conversations I’ve had since his arrest, the main topic is the fascinating monster who is now, to everyone’s delight, caged in a cell: Let him live there for the rest of his life. I’m the father of a teenage daughter, I can’t help but add my agreement. And then I catch myself and remember all the girls, now women, walking around exploited and tossed aside, with nothing to show for their humiliation but a few hundred long-spent dollars. Who knows their names? Who wonders if anything can be done, all these years later, to help them heal? And who, after the second cocktail, really cares?

Jesse Kornbluth, a former Contributing Editor for Vanity Fair and New York, is the author of “Highly Confident: The Crime & Punishment of Michael Milken.” He edits a cultural concierge site, HeadButler.com.

The night before our marriage, Epstein called. “It’s your last free night,” he told my wife-to-be. “Why don’t you come over and fuck me?”...

... I encountered Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of disgraced British publishing mogul Robert Maxwell and Epstein’s girlfriend for a brief period in the '90s. She has been accused of recruiting and grooming girls and women for Epstein; she denies this. I’d met her several times with Epstein; we were also “friends,” in that transactional Manhattan way. And might now become better friends. “If you lose 10 pounds, I’ll fuck you,” she said, with my wife standing next to me.

BoSoxGal wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 29, 2021 10:41 pm

It’s nice to resurrect a thread started by LJ, to celebrate the conviction on five of six charges today of that notorious cunt and sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. As a sister who loathes sisters who throw other sisters under the bus, I could not be happier to hear the news. I hope she enjoys the digs at Club Fed as she enters her elder years and lives out her life remembering her lavish and lascivious past while sleeping on cement and eating institutional slop. Her only shot at redemption now is if she names all the names of all the scum who joined her in raping teenaged girls over the years.

Lately I’m so impressed with juries!! Here’s hoping our fellow citizens deliberating the fate of that cunt fraudster (and killer) Elizabeth Holmes get it right, too!

ex-khobar Andy wrote: ↑

Fri Dec 31, 2021 12:13 am

No I see no need for her to atone for the sins of her father: but if she is rich off inherited ill gotten gains she should do her best to return some of them - whatever is in her power to do.

ex-khobar Andy wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 01, 2022 2:01 pm

I am in complete agreement with your larger point - she was damaged first by Maxwell then by Epstein. But I do not believe that Maxwell left her penniless - she was a wealthy society girl long before she met Epstein.