The sun shone brightly and waves lapped the shore, but the police weren’t looking for rays. It was March 2005, and the Palm Beach Police had just opened a criminal investigation into a rich financier who’d paid a 14-year-old girl for a massage at his waterfront compound on one of the fanciest streets in town.
Soon, more high school girls came forward with similar stories involving the financier. The local cops, seeing this could turn into a larger investigation, referred the case to the FBI. Ultimately, an assistant U.S. attorney submitted a draft indictment with 60 criminal counts.
On June 30, 2008, the financier, Jeffrey Edward Epstein, stood before a Palm Beach County judge and pleaded guilty to two state charges: solicitation of prostitution and solicitation of prostitution with a minor. Inexplicably, he no longer faced federal investigation, and he would serve time only in the county jail, where he could come and go to conduct his big-money business, almost as if nothing had happened at all.
Nearly two decades later, that case and everything that followed before Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 still looms large. Epstein’s sexual proclivities; his connections to famous and influential people, including President Donald Trump; and lingering questions about his life and death mystify a wide swath of America, fueling conspiracy theories and distrust of the U.S. justice system.
For some, the Epstein case is a proxy in a class war in which elites pay little or no price for bad behavior. For others, it exposes a culture in which sexual misconduct by formidable men is barely acknowledged, if at all.
This case may have the potential to bring down a presidency. Or perhaps it will quickly fade into history. For now, though, this Byzantine story of money, power, sex and politics occupies an outsize place in the American consciousness.
The secret plea deal
Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t always rich.
Born in Brooklyn in 1953, Epstein worked as a high school math teacher in 1970s New York City. He built his wealth after becoming the money manager for, among others, billionaires Leon Black of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management and Leslie Wexner, the chief executive of Victoria’s Secret, for whom he assumed the unusual and commanding position of power-of-attorney.
Epstein eventually bought two private islands in the Caribbean, lavish homes and a fleet of private jets, including one dubbed by island locals “the Lolita Express.”
But by the time most Americans had heard Epstein’s name, something legally extraordinary had already taken place.
Before pleading guilty to the state prostitution charges in Florida, Epstein’s lawyers clinched a plea deal with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida. At the time, the office was run by Miami’s top federal prosecutor, Alex Acosta, who would become the labor secretary in Trump’s first administration.
The deal allowed Epstein to plead guilty to the state’s charges in exchange for a sealed federal non-prosecution agreement, tucked away from public sight.
Epstein registered as a sex offender and served 13 months for the state charges in a local jail. He came and went from his sometimes unlocked cell.
Under the plea deal, federal prosecutors agreed to not pursue any further investigation related to Epstein — others who may have been involved in illicit activities, including his former girlfriend, the British media heiress Ghislaine Maxwell.
The prosecutors also agreed not to tell Epstein’s victims about this deal, violating a victims’ rights law.
More rumors and lawsuits
Over the next decade, Epstein quietly settled with many other young females who filed civil suits that linked him to politicians, tech tycoons, royalty and Hollywood movie stars. His friends, according to court records, included Trump, former President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore, Prince Andrew, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the actor Kevin Spacey, among many more.
One of Epstein’s main accusers, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, said Epstein and his confidante and girlfriend, Maxwell, groomed her to have sex with men, including Britain’s Prince Andrew, when she was a minor. When Maxwell denied the allegation, Giuffree sued Maxwell for defamation and settled out of court.
Rumors swirled around Epstein’s 70-acre private island in the Caribbean, Little St. James, which he reportedly bought in 1998.
“On multiple occasions I saw Epstein exit his helicopter, stand on the tarmac in full view of my tower, and board his private jet with children — female children,” a former air traffic controller told Vanity Fair. “One incident in particular really stands out in my mind, because the girls were just so young. They couldn’t have been over 16.”
In 2017, investigative reporter Julie Brown of The Miami Herald wrote a stream of exposés about Epstein’s non-prosecution deal, stoking public interest in his illicit activities and his avoidance of significant penalties.
Brown wrote that Epstein was suspected of trafficking underage girls, many of them from other countries, for sex parties at his homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and the Caribbean. But the non-prosecution agreement, she wrote, “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.”
It was nearly 10 years after Epstein’s release from the local jail in Florida. He was now worth over $500 million.
The arrest
On a hot Saturday in July 2019, Epstein, then 66, flew on one of his private jets from Paris to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, 12 miles from midtown Manhattan. On the ground, federal agents awaited his arrival.
Cuffing Epstein, they took him into custody on federal charges of sex trafficking minors and conspiracy related to his alleged abuse of dozens of underage girls. Federal prosecutors said some of his victims were as young as 14.
“Epstein allegedly worked with several employees and associates to ensure that he had a steady supply of minor victims to abuse, and paid several of those victims themselves to recruit other underage girls to engage in similar sex acts for money,” the Department of Justice announced in a press release on July 8, 2019.
This time, Epstein didn’t go to a local jail. Agents locked him up in a federal holding facility in downtown Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, known for holding such notorious men as El Chapo Guzman, Bernie Madoff, John Gotti and close associates of Osama bin Laden.
Days later, public outcry over Epstein’s 2008 federal plea deal prompted former U.S. Attorney Acosta to resign as Trump’s labor secretary. In a civil case filed by a victim identified only as Jane Doe, a federal judge had ruled that the secrecy surrounding the non-prosecution agreement violated the federal Crime Victims’ Rights Act.
Epstein’s death
From his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, Epstein waited for his day in court. He faced as much as 45 years in prison.
But on Aug. 10, 2019, 35 days after his arrest, Epstein’s body was discovered in his cell. A medical examiner declared his death a suicide.
Investigations into Epstein’s death revealed numerous problems at the jail. The Justice Department’s inspector general found that Epstein had been placed on suicide watch and was supposed to be checked every 30 minutes by correction officers. The guards later pleaded guilty to falsifying documents purporting to have checked on him routinely.
The officers also left Epstein without a cellmate, despite jail regulations requiring prisoners who had attempted suicide to not be left alone.
And, the inspector general said, security footage was limited to nonexistent. The jail’s video system had malfunctioned days before Epstein’s death, and only one camera was operating.
Suspicions and conspiracy theories swirled. Despite the findings that Epstein took his own life, some speculated he was murdered to forever silence him about people involved in his sex ring.
“I spent seven months on that tier and in those cells,” Epstein’s former cellmate, mob boss Michael Franzese, told NewsNation in a July interview. “And the first thing I have to say, there’s just, you — there’s no way you are able to commit suicide. There’s just no way. There’s no way to hang yourself. There’s nothing from the ceiling, there’s nothing from the bed.”
More horrors revealed
Unbiased. Straight Facts.TM
Financier Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to two state charges in Florida: solicitation of prostitution and solicitation of prostitution with a minor. In exchange, federal authorities agreed not to prosecute Epstein.
After Epstein’s death, a trove of names of people connected with Epstein surfaced. Most denied any wrongdoing or any knowledge of Epstein’s sex ring.
Victims, meanwhile, went to court, suing Epstein’s estate, financial institutions that allegedly facilitated his activities, and celebrities who they say participated in sex trafficking.
In August 2021, victim Virginia Giuffre sued Prince Andrew, claiming he had sexually abused her as a girl. Prince Andrew settled this suit while admitting no wrongdoing. But Buckingham Palace announced the removal of his royal and military titles, saying he would no longer be addressed as “His Royal Highness.”
Giuffre died by suicide in April at age 41.
In bringing charges against Ghislaine Maxwell, prosecutors argued that she was central to Epstein’s sex trafficking ring. A jury convicted her in December 2021 on multiple counts involving sex trafficking of minors.
“A unanimous jury has found Ghislaine Maxwell guilty of one of the worst crimes imaginable – facilitating and participating in the sexual abuse of children,” then-U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement on December 29, 2021. “Crimes that she committed with her long-time partner and co-conspirator, Jeffrey Epstein.”
Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence. She recently spoke with a top Justice Department official before being moved to a minimum security prison. She is appealing her conviction, and Republican lawmakers have cautioned Trump against pardoning her.
The Epstein files
Among those facing questions about his relationship with Epstein is Trump. They were photographed together numerous times between the late 1980s and the early 2000s, often at parties at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
The Wall Street Journal reported in July that Trump contributed to a collection of letters marking Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003 with a note that bore the outline of a naked woman. “Happy birthday,” the note said, “and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Trump denied writing the note. But his administration faces mounting pressure to reveal all secrets in the government’s files on Epstein — including references to well-known people who may have been involved in sex trafficking.
Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly told Trump in May that his name appeared in those files.
Bondi angered both sides of the political aisle when she announced that the Epstein files contain no “client list” of potential co-conspirators. She also confirmed that Epstein’s death was a suicide and said the Justice Department would release no further information on the case.
At Trump’s direction, Bondi later asked two federal judges to release transcripts of grand jury testimony about Epstein and Maxwell. The judges have not yet ruled on the request.
Trump has repeatedly tried to divert attention from Epstein, claiming that his political enemies have manufactured a scandal. “Look, the whole thing is a hoax,” he said Wednesday. “It’s put on by the Democrats.” Reporting on the matter, he said, is a “way of trying to divert attention to something that is total bulls—.”
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Author: Ally Heath
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